Author: Aidan Orly

For a period of time, I questioned the approaches environmental activists took to promote the environmental movement. My attention turned off when I heard terms like sustainable, eco-friendly and green—meaningless jargon I felt coerced me into taking short showers. Environmentalism was Big Brother’s faceless younger relative, equipped with a mandate

By now, many have read Susan Patton’s (Princeton ’77) controversial letter to the editor in The Daily Princetonian, encouraging Princeton University women to look for qualified husband material before they graduate. Patton argues, “As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a

I had a great Spring Break. I was able to relax, see friends, go to sleep at four, and wake up at noon. I visited one of America’s largest cities, hiked in the mountains, experienced the desert, and jumped in the ocean all in one week. The weather was warm

I once thought it remarkable that some philosophy courses are devoted exclusively to answering questions such as “What can I know?” and “For what can I hope?” I did not understand the significance that such trivial-seeming questions could have for describing large-scale human behavior. But, over the last year, I

Although it may be embarrassing, I want to share a conversation I had with my friend last semester as we sat alone in the Smith Campus Center on a Friday night doing our homework. We mulled over the fact that in high school, it was easy to do one’s homework

My fellow students, December is upon us. May I offer to wager that if this is your first December with temperatures in the 70s, you have remarked about the weather several times already. The reason: Weather shapes our lives. Therefore, those who have great weather (read: 5C students) should embrace

“Thinking without writing is daydreaming.” Those five words were the most memorable of many spoken at a conference I attended two weekends ago. The speaker, Peter Boettke, an economics professor at George Mason University, made me think about why exactly I write in the Opinions section. The answer is partly

Conversations at the 5Cs are really like nothing else.  Words are meticulously chosen, potentially discriminatory second meanings are hastily thrown into the dump and any signs of political incorrectness are—you got it—corrected. Of course, I just made a generalization about a mass of people that cannot possibly be true and

When I first told people I would be taking a gap year, I got more blank faces than when I tell a bad joke. Many did not know how to react. It was not until I told them I was going to spend part of it working on a watermelon