With 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.
Happy 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.
Common 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.
Last 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.
Every 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.
In 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.
Last 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.
College 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.
Welcome 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.
Fining student athletes for breaking "rules" is unfathomable, and should be illegal.
When 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.
The New York Mets are the most exciting team in Major League Baseball.
A 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.
While most people in the U.S. are patiently awaiting the start of both college football and the NFL season, there’s another type of "football" currently being played around the world.
I 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.
Happy Hump Day fellow Gators!
When Florida announced on Friday that it had suspended three players for the season opener, there wasn’t much cause for concern.
Football is back, and with it comes the culmination of an offseason filled with controversy.
In recent weeks, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’, I-Vt., relationship with black voters has been subject to tremendous scrutiny. Thus far, two of Sanders’ appearances on the campaign trail have been hijacked by activists who self-identify as part of Black Lives Matter, a movement dedicated to raising awareness and effecting substantial change to institutional racism and the subpar treatment of black citizens in the U.S.
Happy Tuesday to all my Random Randys and Anonymous Amys, and welcome to Mediocre Advice. This article is a reboot of Ariel Barnes’ own Mediocre Advice column, which was last published during my freshman year back in the salad days of 2012. Like the triumphant phoenix rising from its own ashes, your weekly inquiries will once again be answered with extremely average and somewhat distorted advice; you might even say the advice offered here could be considered prosaic, middling or any other acceptable synonym for mediocre.
Solutions by The State News
