When Studio Music and Jazz department chair John Daversa asked me to photograph his “American Dreamers” recording session last March, I thought I was signing up for a fly-on-the-wall kind of job.
Columnists, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
How kids teach us the meaning of mindfulness
Lately I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to reconcile childishness and adulthood.
Columnists, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
Expect, accept discomfort in a society of differing perspectives
This summer, I spent a month working as the office coordinator at a music camp I attended as a child. I was excited to learn that we were presenting a class called Social Justice in Jazz, in which students discussed stereotypes in the context of jazz music (women don’t like long solos; white people over-intellectualize…
Columnists, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
Twenty years of wisdom on the small things, the big ideas and everything in between
Last weekend was my 20th birthday. It also happened to be my deadline for this article. So while crouching over my laptop and getting an intellectual hard-on for politics is still one of my favorite pastimes, I wasn’t about to make that the highlight of my weekend. Instead, here’s a list of some of the…
Columnists, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
The rise of modern sophism in the Trump era
Update, March 6, 2017: The conclusion of this column has been updated to reflect a more recent draft of the version published in the March 2 issue. In ancient Athens, there were two prominent schools of intellectual thought. Philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, made up one school characterized by a devotion to serving justice and…
Columnists, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
Sí se Puede? Where the Women’s March movement falls short
When I returned home from the Women’s March in Miami I felt invincible. I carried my optimism in feet aching from hours of marching and in a raspy voice from hollering dozens of liberal aphorisms through the downtown streets. My exuberance lasted until the next day when my ears stopped ringing and I was again…
Columnists, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
Left employs identity politics in same divisive way as the right
The result of the 2016 presidential election has, among many things, underscored the necessity of self-reflection among Americans, especially liberals. Perhaps President-elect Trump’s boisterous and unprecedented campaign served as a distraction from that process – after all, it is easy to justify one’s opinions when the opposition appears to be shamelessly bigoted. Donald Trump holds…
Columnists, Election 2016, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
Retain empathy after divisive year
The rhetoric that has surfaced over the course of the 2016 presidential race, primarily due to the vile, widely incoherent assertions made by Republican nominee Donald Trump, has integrated seamlessly into national discourse. The effects of his language can be seen within our communities everyday, in the form of third graders threatening their non-white classmates…
Columnists, Election 2016, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
Decisive win for Hillary, but continued uphill battle for women
Sept. 26 was a critical evening for the seemingly interminable 2016 presidential race, which, to the delight of world leaders and the American public alike, appears to be inching toward a cease-fire. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stood before the American people and provided illuminating insights into complex topics such as race relations, macroeconomics, foreign…
Columnists, Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
The Supreme Court, Roger Ailes and the decline of bipartisanship in America
Involving young people in politics has been a major theme in the 2016 presidential race, likely due to the fact that so many young people are disillusioned with the political process. Their apathy is justified — the presidential debates revealed a brand of shameless debauchery that is worthy of a time slot on TLC. Corruption…
Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
War on Drugs exploits fear instead of truth
America has undergone a great deal of change since the 1970s, but one thing that has been slow to evolve is our perception of drug use. In 1971, Richard Nixon declared that drug abuse was “public enemy number one,” and since then, billions of dollars and millions of Americans have wasted away in the senseless,…
Here's That Rainy Day, Opinion
Blind party politics will run country into ground
We live in a strange era of American politics when one’s ideological leanings are thought to reveal more about that person than any other singular characteristic. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” has all but become an overused and unhelpful axiom. Rather, the increasingly divided halves of American politics instead opt for the thrill…