Voices

Biloxi, three years later

Biloxi is the cultural center of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a region that has always been more New Orleans gumbo than Mississippi catfish. In fact, it was the original New Orleans, founded around twenty years before the Big Easy ever came into existence. It is a city settled by French, Croatians, Cajuns, and Vietnamese, a city that is proud of its Catholic heritage and cannot live without its Mardi Gras, a city where a po-boy is always lunch and no dinner is complete without French bread.

Three years ago, it was all swept from under my feet.

By Dylan Richmond August 28, 2008

Page 13 Cartoons

Dispatches from the Obama campaign

With deepening gloom, I had continued to call people, hoping I’d strike gold and find a volunteer. The next day passed uneventfully. I paced the room, talking eagerly to whoever picked up their telephone. Occasionally, pedestrians would slow down or stop when they saw that someone was walking around inside the office, but they’d soon move on again, and my hopes for a walk-in volunteer would dissipate into the sweltering August air.

By Nick Wertsch August 28, 2008

Editorials

DPS needs to regain students’ trust

It will take a vast overhaul, one which DPS seems to be committed to making, for the University to regain students’ trust and make them once again feel safe on campus.

By the Editorial Board August 22, 2008

Editorials

Down with the national drinking age

Georgetown demonstrated a commitment to addressing the problem of binge drinking on campus last year when it enacted the one-keg-per-party limit, the party registration rules, and harsher penalties for alcohol infractions. It’s time for Georgetown to reaffirm that commitment by signing onto the Amethyst Initiative.

By the Editorial Board August 22, 2008

Editorials

Baby steps for GUSA and its fellows

Dowd managed to get the GUSA Summer Fellows program up and running by the start of the summer, giving five students with unpaid internships free Georgetown housing for the summer. It’s an encouraging sign from the usually ineffective GUSA.

By the Editorial Board August 22, 2008

Voices

Chernobyl’s concrete ghost town

Several miles, two passport checks and one release form later, I stood 500 feet from the reactor—known as The Sarcophagus—that released uranium dioxide into the bodies of 50,000 people in fewer than 36 hours.

By Chelsea Paige August 22, 2008

Voices

Carrying On: Plumage Pilgrimage

I didn’t know it before I took the job, but the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge where I worked sees 325 different species of birds throughout the year. As a result, it’s a world-famous birding site, drawing visitors from allover the globe. Late spring though August is the prime time for migratory birds, and the number of birders following them made it feel similar to what I imagine it must be like to work in Mecca during the Hajj (that is, if Mecca were visited primarily by upper-middle-class, middle-aged white couples).

By Dan Newman August 22, 2008

Voices

Pride of the People’s

In the last two weeks I have heard the Chinese national anthem more times than I have in the rest of my life put together. Although I’m sure any avid Olympics viewer is starting to become familiar with the song, being in Beijing this summer means that those notes follow you everywhere. Not only is every television in the city tuned into the Olympics, but the new buses, subway stations, and subway cars are all equipped with TV screens so you won’t miss a single moment. Montages of gold medal moments air in between all programming, so in a given day I could see the same flag rise at least twenty times. It’s gotten to the point where I saw a group of inebriated Germans singing the Chinese national anthem on the Olympic Green and wasn’t surprised that they hit all the right notes.

By Vivian Chen August 22, 2008

Voices

This Georgetown Life: First days of school

On the last day of summer before the start of second grade, I sat at the pool with some friends playing with a bee sting remover. The device is like a plastic syringe and uses suction to pull the sting out of the flesh. Who knew that suctioning the thing to your chin could be so outrageously fun? Prancing around in my little Speedo, I exclaimed, “look, I’m a Pharaoh!” as it dangled from my chin, or “now I’m a unicorn!” when stuck to my forehead. What I should have anticipated is that I’d be showing up on the first day of school with perfectly round purple dots about one inch in diameter all over my face.

By the Voice Staff August 22, 2008

Page 13 Cartoons

Play honest, not nice

It would be much more helpful for all of us if our papers left those classrooms in shards. Instead, it seems like the barrier to raising your hand is having some point of praise to help the criticism go down easier. At twenty-one, I’d rather leave this Mary Poppins treatment behind; in a writing class for upperclassmen, criticism is neither rude nor unnecessary. Even good writers sweat out bad pieces, and I hope they’d like to know it when they do. The decision we make everyday in those classrooms is to value politeness over honesty, and it leaves us victims as much as perpetrators.

By Mike Stewart April 24, 2008

Voices

Collecting homes in Cairo

In the last nine months, I have shuttled between Cairo, Dublin, Vienna, and Haifa. I’ve climbed Mt. Sinai, danced in an Irish ceilidh, been force-fed schnitzel by my Austrian family, played billiards with Bedouins in Jordan, and wandered through Jerusalem at night.

I haven’t been back to Portland, but somehow home has found me anyway.

By Simone Popperl April 24, 2008

Voices

Primaries a primary lesson

As our plates steadily emptied of their honey-baked ham and sweet potato pudding last Christmas, I suddenly realized my family had nearly exhausted our usual yuletide conversation topics (including plans for escaping the grimy winter months ahead through trips to Pennsylvania’s version of the Riviera—Florida) and was headed directly for that reliably disastrous discussion topic: politics.

By Sara Carothers April 24, 2008

Voices

This Georgetown Life: Crazy little thing called summer love

Elektra always wore a sailor hat on top of her short auburn hair that swayed when she drove home a contention in a debate. She was a year older than me and the hottest thing at debate camp in Cameron, Oklahoma. Best of all, she wanted me. Bad.

By the Voice Staff April 24, 2008

Editorials

Leo’s Diner, wherefore art thou?

A change is gonna come to Leo’s next fall. Or at least, that’s what Georgetown administrators have promised, which is to say, it’s far from certain. A press release from last June promised a vast overhaul to Leo O’Donovan Dining Hall including as many themed mini-restaurants—with names like Barracas Italian Bistro, the Rolling Pin Coffee House, and Leo’s Diner—as could fit in a single building.

By the Editorial Board April 24, 2008

Editorials

Take a SmartBike, leave a SmartBike

D.C. may never be the chic fashion capital that Paris is, but the District will soon adopt one fashionable transportation trend from the city of love. This spring, D.C. will launch the first state-side high-tech public bicycle sharing program, SmartBike, sponsored by Clear Channel Outdoor and the District Department of Transportation. Modeled after similar systems in Paris and other European cities, SmartBike will offer D.C. residents a convenient option for traveling shorter distances and represents a commendable commitment to pollution-free transportation.

By the Editorial Board April 24, 2008

Editorials

The death penalty is dead wrong

For a few sweet months this year, the U.S. stood in solidarity with every other industrialized nation in the world. That all came to an end last week when the Supreme Court ruled in Baze v. Rees that the current method of lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment as a form of cruel and unusual punishment, ending the U.S.’s de facto moratorium on the death penalty that had been in place while the case was tried.

By the Editorial Board April 24, 2008

Voices

A Papal visit without pontification

On the first day—well, Tuesday—the Pope crossed the Atlantic, and he saw that it was good.

By Tim Fernholz April 17, 2008

Voices

It’s the end of the world and we know it, and I feel fine

I recently read a New York Times article about a new particle accelerator in Switzerland. Articles in the Science section don’t normally fill me with a sense of foreboding and doom, but this one succeeded where others failed. With the accelerator, scientists hope to recreate the “Big Bang” on a small scale in order to explain the origins of the universe. It seemed alright until I got to the paragraph which said that two men “think the giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth—and maybe the universe.”

By Dan Newman April 17, 2008

Voices

Geography porn, or: How not to study abroad

My interest in studying abroad was inspired by my first visit to the Epcot World Showcase at age eight. For those of you who weren’t as lucky as I was, Epcot’s World Showcase is Disney’s take on globalization, a mini-park featuring small-scale replicas of eleven countries, centered around a beautiful lagoon. At Disney’s Epcot Center, not only is China walking distance from Belgium, but every “country” serves French fries, accepts VISA and closes at midnight. The fantasy climaxes every evening in a choreographed display of global friendship performed to inspirational music and accompanied by fireworks and lasers. This experience is the reason I thought the entire world spoke English until I was 12.

By Sarah Harman April 17, 2008