“Lovable neighborhoods don’t get built anymore, only appearing when our social fabric breaks down. But it’s not because we don’t know how to build them anymore,” Nicholas Steinman CMC ’28 writes. “If we reform our byzantine municipal regulations to make it cost-effective for more people to build more varied buildings again, and if we move past our misguided aspiration to create ‘efficient’ urban areas, we can once again build the progress we need in our cities without closing them off to humanity.”
Opinions
OPINION: What Fred Hampton can teach us about coalition-building
“If we are to challenge the elites, organization starts at the smallest scale,” Rafael Hernandez Guerrero PZ ’29 writes. “In reaction to a mistrust of the democratic process at the federal level, we must involve ourselves in a politics in which we can have immediate impact — i.e. the politics at the local level.”
OPINION: It’s your civic responsibility to find empowerment in political grief
“We have no reason to trust anything above our individuality, no reason to hear any organization out or trust that any institution has good faith,” writes Celeste Cariker PZ ‘28. “But still, we have a responsibility to ourselves and the progress we want to see in this nation to be resilient in the face of disappointment, to compose ourselves for the sake of organization and lead lives of joy as a mode of resistance.”
OPINION: Media illiteracy kills trans people
“When people struggle to spot hateful tropes, especially in seemingly good-faith contexts or popular media sources, they also fail to connect these narratives to broader implications such as the risk of genocide or state-sponsored violence,” writes Aria Wang PO ’27. “This inability or unwillingness to recognize far-right dogwhistles leaves people primed to accept repackaged rhetoric as fact.”
OPINION: In Iran, bombs are democracy’s death sentence
“Because the state has enlisted itself to regulate morality and behavior, any deviation from the imposed social order is an inherent form of dissent,” writes Leili Kamali PO ’29. “As the war goes on, the biggest setback of all goes unrecognized – by bombing Iran, Trump is destroying and devaluing a decades-long movement of defiance that Iranians have been building all by themselves.”
OPINION: We must fight
“The Iranian regime’s success relies on Americans becoming too guilty to defend others, too comfortable to sacrifice and too confused to tell the difference between oppressor and oppressed,” writes Ryan Kossarian PO’27. “We must recover our will to confront the burdens ahead of us.”
OPINION: Gun rights are women’s rights
“Ultimately, guns provide women with a practical and immediate means of self-defense against physically stronger male attackers,” Grace Rutherford PO ’28 writes. “The defensive use of firearms can deter crime, interrupt attacks and reduce the likelihood of victimization.”
OPINION: With no end in sight, intervention is devastating
How can we claim to have succeeded in our military interventions across the globe when no metric for this success has been outlined by our government? Without a plan and definitely no end in sight, intervention will surely lead to devastation on the ground and the continuation of forever-conflicts.
OPINION: Feminism does not start and end in the West
“In our classes, women from the Global South get read and sympathized with; then, when the conversation begins, left behind,” Catarina Shi SC ’29 writes. “Without genuinely engaging with the lived experiences of women different from us, campus feminist discourse risks becoming something that celebrates empowerment in the abstract.”
OPINION: The war on trans rights is more than a “culture war”
“Trans people are facing abuse right now as a litmus test to what our society will accept,” Alex Benach PO ’28 writes. “The American right seeks to rid our society of pluralism, with trans people acting as one of the first victims of this horrific, white, Christian, cis-hetero, ethnonationalist crusade.”