Diego Rios died on Nov. 28 after Claremont Police officer Benjamin Alba put his knee on Rios’s neck, holding him in an illegal carotid chokehold for almost two minutes. “The violence demonstrated by Claremont Police and the resulting failure of the city to bring this incident to justice with transparency should be a wake-up call for everyone who calls this city home. State-sanctioned violence is not confined to the streets of Minneapolis; it’s happening in our backyard,” Macy Puckett SC ’28 wrote.
Opinions
OPINION: Everyone is dialoguing, but who is actually listening?
“While the administration and the board of trustees promote dialogue and free exchange of ideas as the best thing in the world, their actual actions are out of touch and completely unaligned with the needs and opinions expressed by the student body,” writes Alex Benach PO ‘28. “If we are to foster a relationship between student body and administration in which various input is actually welcome, said discourse must be followed by responsive, concrete action.”
OPINION: Progressives need to take advantage of white working class anti-elite sentiment
“The white working-class, however, is not a monolith; they are a heterogeneous group with varying levels of class consciousness and prejudice,” writes Hernandez Guerrero PZ ‘29. “While progressive factions seek to mobilize the American working-class, they fail to meaningfully engage the bulk of the white working class, instead painting a harmful caricature of an imagined racist and uneducated underclass not even worth engaging with.”
OPINION: Pomona’s Café 47 is Ready to Brew Something Better than Starbucks & Nestlé
“Since January of 2025, union baristas have filed more than 125 unfair labor practice charges, documenting retaliatory firings, bad-faith bargaining, and a pattern of intimidation,” wrote Lina McRoberts PO ‘27 on behalf of the Claremont Student Worker Alliance. “We refuse to subsidize a corporation built on union suppression, retaliatory discipline and a transnational labor regime that exploits workers from Buffalo to Chiapas to Yunnan… Until Pomona turns its course, we are calling on students to withhold purchases from Café 47 and redirect patronage elsewhere.”
OPINION: Opinions make journalism complicated. Indifference makes it impossible
TSL has recently had serious charges leveled against them. In a scathing letter to the editor, they were called jealous, biased and irrelevant, and on the surface, these accusations seemed fair. In TSL’s coverage of the Claremont Independent (CI), critics noted that they appeared to hold a view that the CI’s conservative viewpoints were enabled by outside politics. Journalism is no stranger to ideological coverage, but did TSL go too far?
OPINION: Don’t fill up your calendar, do nothing instead
Welcome to college, where students often map out their every waking moment on their Google Calendars for the sake of “maximum efficiency.” Have you ever wondered what benefit might come from taking the time to do nothing every once in a while?
OPINION: Goyard doesn’t make you hot
After being told that her backpack was perhaps too boyish, Ansley Kang SC ‘29 realized that the Claremont Colleges overemphasize the importance of looking good.
OPINION: Why are we so obsessed with memorializing horrible people?
As the media works through the death of Dick Cheney, we must not let mourning get in the way of the collective condemnation of immoral acts committed by the deceased, though grief is a necessary process in the midst of the death of prominent public figures.
OPINION: Life is a fedora: why I wear fedoras, and why you should too
The 5Cs, despite being radically epistemologically free, contain a hard core of constrained expression. Nicholas Steinman CM ’28 is more aware of this than anyone. He wears fedoras. Constraint may get us some things. But at what cost to our identity are we willing to pay to furnish our professional success, and do our sacrifices pay off how we expect them to?
OPINION: It’s time to start enjoying your coffee without a side of homework
5C students think that the quintessential café accouterments include a laptop, a triple shot dirty chai, noise canceling headphones, enough papers to comfortably cover the four-top table that they plan to monopolize and the locked in attitude of a future management consultant. Ansley Kang SC ‘29 disagrees. The café used to be a nexus of social vibrancy and discourse, so its post-COVID mutation into a bookless library hurts to watch. However, café culture is not beyond saving.