Author: Graham Bishop

When Lena Dunham’s HBO show Girls first premiered, critics challenged the Oberlin College alumna’s choice of subject: four white, 20-something women who, according to many reviewers, epitomized a new strain of privileged, affluent millennials. These critics often alluded to what they regarded as an emerging sociological phenomenon, the trustafarian: a

I first learned of the Boston Marathon bombings while eating at Frank Dining Hall, when someone at a nearby table answered her phone and let out a gasp of shock. Until I returned to my room 10 minutes later, my initial understanding of the situation depended entirely on what she

Last week, the Dean of Students and Vice Provost for Student Enrollment at Claremont Graduate University, Fred Siegel, wrote a defense of graduate education. After wondering whether TSL received sufficient payment for publishing what was essentially an advertisement, I began to consider how my own attitudes toward graduate school, along

More than a week has passed since Oscar night, but Hollywood is still trying to pick up the pieces. Despite all the glamour on the red carpet and celebration for the medium of film, people still found time to tell us where everything went wrong. The Oscars were a disaster,

During my time at Pomona College, I have learned a lot about privilege. Despite thinking of myself as somewhat informed on the subject, I continue to discover ways in which my race, gender, and other elements of my identity have conferred privilege on countless aspects of my life. Three semesters

Welcome back. We hope that you enjoyed the break. Now, please proceed to plan the rest of your life within the next two weeks. Such was the suffocating urgency I felt upon returning to campus when, despite a month to prepare, I was still alarmingly unsure of the classes I

As you may have heard, the world is going to end in fourteen days. The Maya said so. On Dec. 21, something calamitous—nobody is quite certain what—will happen. Perhaps Planet X will collide with our pitiful perambulating space rock, or perhaps an electromagnetic pulse will strike, and that terrible J.J.

For eight days earlier this month, tensions flared anew in the Middle East as 158 Palestinians and five Israelis died in hostilities associated with Israel’s Operation Pillar of Cloud. The controversy and ambiguity inherent in the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict resurfaced as the Netanyahu administration and Hamas blamed each other for

I imagine the reader’s immediate response to yet another Opinions section headline wheeling out the discursive carcass of political correctness, regardless of context, was one of eye-rolling and perhaps loud sighing. I also imagine the reader is aware that this week’s issue of TSL is the fourth in the last

Pomona College’s most historically esteemed dropout, avant-garde visionary John Cage, wrote in a 1991 autobiographical piece that he “was shocked at college to see one hundred of [his] classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book.” Always the iconoclast, Cage responded by opting instead for “the first