When it comes to meal plans, Scripps students pay more for less, but Malott is no Fort Knox: Many choose to resist this perceived injustice by simply not paying for dinner, walking past cashiers with someone else’s plates. As tensions rise between students and staff, Nicole Teh SC ’27 believes that a mutually beneficial solution exists, but only if we learn to empathize with Malott staff.
Opinions
OPINION: We need a serious, caring approach to sexual health
Condoms are not the pinnacle of safe sex practices — sexual wellbeing can be enhanced through a number of different medical tools. “When we achieve our goals of sexual health and wellbeing, we won’t know it because of a statistic telling us how many people are wearing condoms. We’ll know it from the dropping rates of HIV infections, STIs and unwanted pregnancies. We’ll know it because our sex and our relationships will be safer, happier and more pleasurable.”
OPINION: The anonymity epidemic rages on
In Trump’s America, the declining power of the media goes beyond pulled punches and undeserved praise intended to curry favor. Deportations, office raids and First Amendment suppression of journalists and activists is becoming the new norm. The brave response to intimidation, however, is not submission. Madeleine Farr PZ ’27 believes that for those with privilege, which includes most 5C students, our responsibility is to use our First Amendment rights to support the journalistic institutions that can speak truth to power. Therefore, we need to consent to interviews.
OPINION: Before Rebuilding Gaza, the World Must Confront Who Destroyed It
In an AI video posted by President Donald Trump to Truth Social, “Trump Gaza” imagines beaches and skyscrapers rising from ruins.: Trump’s proposed “GREAT” plan recasts Gaza’s destruction as an opportunity for profit, inviting the same powers complicit in its devastation to rebuild it while further displacing Palestinian populations and causing even greater environmental harm beyond that already caused by the war. Leili Kamali PO ‘29 argues that current plans for reconstruction are dangerously colonialist and anti-environmentalist, and must be reimagined in order to make proper reparations for those living in Gaza.
OPINION: AI can take the credit for this new cultural normalization of cheating
Once meant to empower us, AI culture now glamorizes shortcuts and academic dishonesty — turning human creativity into an afterthought. AI startup companies like Cluely have unfortunately transformed AI from a tool of innovation into an inescapable condition of our ever-demanding world whose marketing normalizes and even necessitates cheating on anything and everything. We must work to revalue individualistic traits in our work, for the sake of it being meaningful and formative.
OPINION: What Democrats can learn from Mexico’s governing party
Mexico’s leading party, the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), has shown itself to be the real deal: It has captured a decisive majority of the working class vote in a country known for its role as the factory of the Americas. But unlike the Republican’s successful yet unfounded popularity among workers, Morena is leftist, and pragmatist, as the day is long. The party’s focus on predistributive policies has leapfrogged the ideology of American liberals, stuck on tax reforms that ultimately uphold the neoliberal system that stabs workers in the back, and changed the lives of millions of workers. So why don’t we follow suit?
OPINION: Aesthetic feminism is super anti-feminist
TikTok has developed a culture of promoting trends that seemingly uplift women’s voices. It is hard to find a woman’s post without “#girl____” in the description. Ansley Kang SC ‘29 sees something in common with all these feminine hashtags: Reductiveness. Feminist trends in attempting to make modern womanhood accessible, do more harm than good, flattening women’s experiences and in doing so excluding those voices that true feminism should promote.
OPINION: Trump’s authoritarianism doesn’t listen to your No Kings Day cardboard signs
Trump’s administration has sanctioned a campaign of extrajudicial kidnappings, careless deportation, and general terror. It has forced those it targets to ask the permanent question of will I still be here tomorrow, every day. So why do we only show our dissent if we get a little free time, and nothing good is on TV? In the No Kings protests, Jason Murillo PO ‘28 sees performance, not praxis. Cheerfully bobbing oh-so-clever signs on streetcorners does nothing to practically oppose a regime that has no respect for the Constitution, much less polite dissent.
OPINION: Chosen family is not enough, we must be blood brothers
Gen Z is increasingly isolated, and traditional cures aren’t working. As this unhappiness runs rampant, we of course should keep trying to show up for one another. But our generation, Alex Benach PO ‘28 argues, needs a shot in the arm, one full of blood. Blood oaths, along with any other spiritual or occult community practice, could weld the spirits of the freak generation together against all odds.
OPINION: Why San Quentin’s reform model doesn’t do the trick
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center’s rebrand as a “Scandinavian style” prison, promises transformation through career training programs and improv classes, but after Leili Kamali PO ‘29 visited, she saw a different story.