Opinion
OPINION
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EDITORIALS
Editorial: McDonald’s 24/7 breakfast menu brings about exciting changes
Sep. 2, 2015McDonald’s: glorious American institution or Exhibit A in capitalism run amok? Regardless of one’s personal views on the fast-food giant, it is impossible to deny it does two things exceptionally well: tasty, grease-filled breakfast foods and late-night drunken snacks. Since the company’s announcement of a 24/7 breakfast menu Tuesday, those two beautiful things no longer have to be mutually exclusive.
OPINION
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letter to the Editor 09/03/2015
Sep. 2, 2015In response to Tuesday's column, "Greek life is more than just its stereotypes"
OPINION
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EDITORIALS
Editorial: Gator Growl has a talent problem
Sep. 1, 2015“The year is 2007. After debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with his album “T.I. vs. T.I.P.,” southern hip-hop star T.I. performs a triumphant set as the headlining artist at UF’s annual Gator Growl event. Backed by a strong setlist consisting of Atlanta trap classics such as “Big Things Poppin’ (Do It),” “Rubber Band Man” and “Bring Em Out,” the overwhelmingly positive response to the show not only cements T.I.’s self-proclaimed status as the “King of the South” but reaffirms Gator Growl as a top-notch event that brings consistently exciting, relevant artists to The Swamp.”
OPINION
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COLUMNS
The Perils of the Corporatization of Education
Sep. 1, 2015Last week I discovered that my alma mater, Florida State University, had blocked me from commenting on any of its social media websites. This meant anything posted by its official Facebook page, writing on its wall or commenting on photos posted by the school’s official Instagram account. As far as I understand it, this occurred because I had exercised my rights and been critical of the school and the image it attempts to maintain in social media.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
The MTV Video Music Awards: Do they even really matter?
Sep. 1, 2015So, the MTV Video Music Awards happened.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Guest Column: Access Party calls on students to join party in Fall 2015 Student Government elections
Sep. 1, 2015My name is Kalyani Hawaldar, and I am your Access Party President. The beginning of September means the start of football season, but it also means the beginning of another Student Government election cycle.
OPINION
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EDITORIALS
Editorial: College classrooms are no place for clowning around
Aug. 31, 2015In K-12 education, the trope of the class clown was an all-too-real one. Students, whether due to crippling insecurity or a genuine need to have their (misguided) voice heard, would interrupt the teacher and shove their sense of humor down the throats of the rest of the class. Everyone has done it at one point or another, but it was the egregious offenders who were dubbed the "class clown."
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Greek life is more than just its stereotypes
Aug. 31, 2015With the beginning of the Fall semester comes a myriad of UF activities, but perhaps the most discussed is rush. Whether it’s news coverage, Snapchat stories or traffic halting hordes of impeccably dressed girls, you simply can’t escape it. Consequently, the criticisms of Greek life seem to reach a fever pitch this time of the year.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Mediocre Advice: Balling on the court and in bed
Aug. 31, 2015Happy Tuesday, gang! What a week it’s been. After last week’s column, some of you may have wondered: "Why mediocre advice? Why would anybody listen to you?" Well, in a world where people still religiously eat Olive Garden, listen to Fall Out Boy, watch MTV and read Buzzfeed to find out if their boyfriend is cheating on them, it seems as though mediocrity is still in.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
The ideals of the Confederacy remain lost cause
Aug. 31, 2015Common wisdom holds for one to be true to thy self. If you’re a self-described Southerner, odds are good you might still be licking your wounds from the flogging the north dished out 150 years ago.
OPINION
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EDITORIALS
No winners in the aftermath of Ashley Madison leaks
Aug. 30, 2015Last Friday, Noel Biderman, CEO of Avid Life Media Inc. — the parent company of Ashley Madison — stepped down from his position. Biderman’s resignation arrived in the wake of the third wave of leaks from the extramarital-affairs website.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Online privacy needs to become top priority
Aug. 30, 2015Every once in a while, a website or service finds a new creepy way of gathering data online, and it seems earth-shattering until the next stalkerish way of data collection emerges. In an ideal world, none of this would come as a surprise, as everyone would actually read the terms and conditions when they agree to things — or at least those pesky updates sent out ahead of major changes to a site.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Reflecting on the Iran nuclear deal as a young Marine veteran
Aug. 30, 2015In the summer of 2015, following my first year of law school at IU-Bloomington, I was fortunate enough to be selected for an internship in Israel with Shurat HaDin, Israel Law Center. As a Marine Corps veteran, my unit confronted terrorists in Afghanistan, and when I returned home, I learned about groups that fight terrorism in different ways. Shurat HaDin is a nongovernmental Israeli organization with the stated mission of bankrupting terror — one lawsuit at a time.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Don’t reduce tragedy to a Facebook post
Aug. 27, 2015Last week, I logged onto Facebook after a summer of neglect. I was greeted with a familiar but troubling sight: Someone had posted an article about a scorned boyfriend throwing acid in his girlfriend’s face. While that was the first I had heard of that particular story, I have seen similar stories posted on Facebook many times before. The Texas mother who drowned her children in a pool; the Massachusetts teacher who was murdered by a student; the Tennessee couple who were raped and beaten; all were equally tragic stories that had found their way into my life because of a shared Facebook post.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Educational entitlement: dumb, lazy and problematic
Aug. 27, 2015College can be a pretty weird place. Jam any number of young adults with raging libidos into a high-stress environment, and all kinds of crazy stuff will go down. But hand those same high-strung and impassioned people a whopping sense of entitlement and unshakable certainty in their own morals? Things will get surreal.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
College: Time to discover your sexual identity
Aug. 27, 2015Welcome back for the Fall semester, Gators! I hope that everyone had a good first week back and is re-acclimating to the humidity, the homework and The Gator Nation.
OPINION
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EDITORIALS
Yet another shooting leaves more questions than answers
Aug. 26, 2015When we began brainstorming today’s editorial, there was every intention of writing a pleasant little column on the inability of Florida lawmakers to rectify the blatant gerrymandering that plagues Florida. But, as with so many American mornings, tragedy made it all but impossible to write anything that even remotely resembled a "pleasant" demeanor.
OPINION
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EDITORIALS
Editorial: Get a good night’s sleep and put your phones down
Aug. 25, 2015A professor once told me that young men and women are biologically inclined to stay awake late into the night because we’re young, fertile and it’s our biological imperative to attempt to reproduce. It only makes sense that we would stay awake into the wee hours for reasons we can’t fully comprehend.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
How to fall off the face of the Earth and like it
Aug. 25, 2015I can recall my social media ‘firsts’ as easily as I could my major life events: first cryptically spelled Facebook status, first grotesquely filtered Instagram, first angsty song lyric quoted on Twitter. It becomes almost nostalgic, recalling a time when social media was new and each post brought me one step closer to perfecting my skillfully crafted online persona. Yet my most profound ‘first’ was when I gave it all up.
