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Pluralism in action?

ROB HURTEKANT SFS ‘08 “It seems silly to even use the word ‘challenges,’” Rob Hurtekant (SFS ’08) said of his experiences in a wheelchair at Georgetown. Hurtekant, an African Studies... Read more

By the January 24, 2008

Sports

The Sports Sermon

With the second semester in full swing, the Georgetown football team is back into the off-season early-morning workouts. Getting up at the break of dawn is hard enough, but the facts the Hoyas must face every morning as they trek up to the varsity gym must hurt even more.

By January 24, 2008

Sports

Fear the ‘neers

With more than a third of the Big East Conference season behind us, it’s time to reflect on preseason expectations. Georgetown is right where they were expected to be at the top of the conference, but just below the Hoyas in the Big East standings sits what many would call a surprise team: the West Virginia Mountaineers.

By January 24, 2008

Sports

Kieraah Marlow

A positve outcome of the women’s basketball team’s 20-point loss to 17th-ranked Notre Dame last Saturday was the play of senior forward Kieraah Marlow. Marlow went 13-22 from the field and sank 8 of 9 free throws to amass 34 points in all, a career best and team best this season. Although such an outstanding performance failed to propel GU to a much-needed first Big East victory, it did emphatically exorcise a personal demon. Marlow, who entered the season as Georgetown’s thirteenth all-time career scoring leader board, followed the worst scoring performance of her career with her best.

By January 24, 2008

Sports

Yatesians

We’re now three weeks into the New Year, which means, for most of us, that we’re two weeks removed from breaking our New Year’s resolutions. It’s no fault of our own. It takes a special kind of person to stave off the cravings induced by Little Debby or L.C. from Laguna Beach—both evil temptresses in their own right.

By January 24, 2008

Sports

Hoyas tip off tennis season

With the basketball team receiving most of the hype on the Hilltop these days, the Georgetown tennis program is quietly getting into the swing of its spring season. The men got off to a quick start last Friday taking down East Carolina 3-1 and Longwood 3-0 at the VCU Men’s 4×1 Invitational in Richmond, Va.

By January 24, 2008

Sports

Women get first Big East win

Having dropped their last four contests going into Tuesday’s game, the Georgetown women’s basketball team was in a funk. In those four games, though, the team showed true determination and signs of life—most notably in their mere 10 point loss to the fifth ranked Scarlet Knights of Rutgers and senior forward Kieraah Marlow’s 34 point and 17 rebound tear against 16th-ranked Notre Dame. But Tuesday’s game against Seton Hall was a different story.

By January 24, 2008

Leisure

He’s Not There

By the time you read this Heath Ledger will have been dead for at least about 48 hours. Yet his death and his life have already been discussed, examined and analyzed, the analysis analyzed, a thousand theories raised and discarded and made into cover stories.

By January 24, 2008

Leisure

The Mars Volta, The Bedlam in Goliath

The Mars Volta, led by former At the Drive-In members Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, have long been divisive in the critical world. Their spastic progressive rock has won them as many detractors as fans, and that’s not likely to change with their fourth album, The Bedlam in Goliath. Still, the album is an exciting development for the band’s sound, which is faster and more focused than on their previous albums.

By January 24, 2008

Leisure

One too many dresses?

As you would expect from the writer of The Devil Wears Prada and the director of Step Up, 27 Dresses is a romantic comedy we’ve all seen before: within the first few minutes, you’ll recognize the formula and be able to predict most of the plot. The clichés are numerous—the unrequited love, the beautiful and bratty sister, the sharp-tongued best friend and the irksome acquaintance turned love interest. Original, this movie is not. But enjoyable? Surprisingly, yes.

By January 24, 2008

Leisure

Diary of a Bad Year: Not so bad for marginalia

Imagine reading an essay on political theory that has a note scrawled along the bottom of the page in the author’s handwriting. It describes a young woman he has just seen walk into a laundromat wearing a “tomato-red shift … startling in its brevity.” Notes continue on pages throughout the essay, bit-by-bit, developing into a suspenseful tale of the relationship between the writer and the woman, while interacting with the philosophical work with which it shares the page. This is the basic format of J.M. Coetzee’s inventive new novel, Diary of a Bad Year.

By January 24, 2008

Leisure

It’s alive! The yuppies … not so much

Pack the Dramamine, kids, because Cloverfield—the newest creation from Lost/Alias wunderkind J.J. Abrams—is a visceral thrill ride with a few new twists on the classic monster-destroys-New York trope.

By January 24, 2008

Voices

On playing the game and being played

Last week, my life was fantastic. I had just moved into one of Georgetown’s finest townhouses. I was finishing all of my work and getting plenty of sleep every night. Sure, it was only the first full week of the semester, but I was still feeling pretty accomplished.

By January 24, 2008

Voices

Students don’t mess about with careers

Like so many Hoyas, I recently braved the mad post-game rush from the Verizon Center, through the Metro and back to Georgetown with a friend from Beantown. We made it to campus in record time, arriving safe and sound at Rosslyn not twenty-five minutes after Roy made that three in the last five seconds of the game. We didn’t make that kind of time by making nice with the other six hundred Hoyas in Metro Center. But when I balked at cutting off a row of students to be one of the last people to board a train, my friend would have none of it. “In Boston,” she explained tersely, “we don’t play.”

By January 24, 2008

Page 13 Cartoons

The Bush Administration changes course

President Bush’s poor planning and lack of intelligent responses to many issues have spawned anti-Bush blocs in America and around the world. From gay-marriage to Guantánamo, his neo-con positions have drawn criticism from personalities as varied as Tim Kaine and Tim McGraw. But recently, Bush seems to have realized that he does not have to do everything wrong. The administration has careened backwards for six years, but it has accomplished enough in the last year to prove that a turnaround, though it may have come too late in this case, is not impossible. Between election coverage and the press’ prejudice against the administration, most of these accomplishments have been overlooked.

By January 24, 2008

Voices

The necessity of idealism

Though it is hard to imagine, I’m sure I’m not the only person who enjoys the Hoya’s bi-weekly exegesis of the ancient philosophers, penned by the legendary Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. Each edition of the aging Jesuit’s Aristoletian discourse is a treat—like intellectual antiquing—but I can’t help but take issue with the latest dispatch from the Hoya’s correspondent in the 1920s, entitled by their editors “Idealism Root of Political Problems.” (Hopefully, next week Fr. Maher will come back with “Open Minds Lead to Strife.”)

By January 24, 2008

Editorials

Losing liberty for better lawns

A proposed protest zone on the National Mall threatens to sanitize demonstrations and curtail freedom of assembly—all to protect some worn-down grass.

By the January 24, 2008

Editorials

D.C.’s struggle for rights not over

University President Jack DeGioia went two for two on Martin Luther King Day when he presented this year’s John Thompson, Jr. “Legacy of a Dream” award.

By the January 24, 2008

Editorials

More Diversity Progress Needed

Ask whether Georgetown is a diverse university and you’ll get a plethora of opinions, ranging from the University’s official stance—“a leader in promoting diversity among the most selective universities in the country,” according to the fact sheet —to the sense of self-segregation expressed by many students in a 2004 Diversity Action Council report.

By the January 24, 2008

Leisure

Not cool

It’s January. In January, wearing a sundress when the thermometer hits sixty degrees is the fashion equivalent of wetting your pants with excitement: overzealous, and (eventually) uncomfortably cold.

By January 17, 2008

Leisure

Leave the “House,” ASAP

“House of Blue Leaves” wants to say something, and touches on a lot of grand themes—fame and media in society, the individual in our saturated world, the tension between dreams and reality. Unfortunately, it just ends up a mess, so nothing much comes through. One leaves feeling battered, rather than contemplative.

By January 17, 2008

Leisure

Patrician food at plebeian prices

If you find yourself forgetting how to use utensils because your diet consists entirely of finger-food favorites like bagels and pizza, you’re in luck. There are only three days left of D.C.’s Restaurant Week (extended at some places like Farrah Olivia), when the best restaurants in the city offer top-quality cuisine for a fixed price of $20.08 for lunch and $30.08 for dinner in honor of the new year.

By January 17, 2008

Leisure

2007’s best?

For me, the best album of 2007 was Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam. Despite the critical gravitation toward frontrunners such as Radiohead’s In Rainbows and LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, Jam provided the most exciting batch of songs last year, effortlessly progressive in execution and more cohesive than the band’s earlier releases. I read the year-end, “best-of” lists like anyone else and compared my thoughts to other critics, but I’m a big boy—I can make my own opinions.

By January 17, 2008

Leisure

She’s all that… jazz

Crandall hopes to introduce new music to her peers. “The two artists I admire most are Ellen Fitzgerald and Sara Vaughan,” she said. “Too often, I hear that jazz is for old people. I want to enlarge that age range. There are so many styles and ways you can approach [jazz] that I hope [people our age] will open up to it.”

By January 17, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend began their career like most college bands: toiling away in the relative obscurity of bars around campus. Eventually, though, the indie press noticed their clever mixture of well-crafted melodic pop, African rhythms and New York rock sensibilities, prompting XL Recordings to sign them and put out their very good eponymous first album. Its youthful energy, more than its oft-touted world influence, makes it a compelling and involving listen.

By January 17, 2008