Macalester’s investment committee will discuss implementing a policy of socially responsible investment of the Macalester endowment at the committee’s next meeting in May, according to Chief Investment Officer Craig Aase.
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For the first time, room draw, which took place the week before Spring Break, combined juniors and seniors into one lottery group. Before this year, seniors had priority over juniors.
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World Trade Organization (WTO) senior advisor John Hancock spoke in the John B. Davis Lecture Hall to a crowd of approximately 40 students on March 11.
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Sharon Day, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force, kicked off Macalester’s celebration of Women’s History Month on March 4 with a speech in the Weyerhaeuser Memorial Chapel about the connections among culture, individual activism and the environment.
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After watching the provocative “Diaspora Flow” performance March 6 and after attending the Tim Wise lecture March 9, I was initially quite pleased to see so many people in the audiences; their presence signified an interest in multicultural life and a willingness to create change. In briefly talking to a number of acquaintances after both events, many of them told me how these events were “so amazing,” their eyes wide as if to suggest their understanding of the shows’ immense societal importance. However, it soon occurred to me that while many of these people attend the performance-oriented activities that cultural organizations sponsor, I do not see people continuing their initial interest in multicultural issues around the Macalester community. That is, I hear a lot of talk, but I do not see any action. This is puzzling, especially when recalling the extreme popularity (at least by Macalester standards) of big cultural activities.
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On March 20, the Prime Minister of India warned a certain “foreign author” to refrain from “playing with our national pride.” Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee referred, of course, to our own beloved Professor James Laine, who is currently persona non grata in the World’s Largest Democracy for his heterodox writings. This is a rare and beautiful event, and we should all take pause to savor it: in this historical moment, we glimpse the one instant in which Farce and Tragedy, transmuting from one to the other, appear momentarily indistinguishable. In this column, I concentrate on the role of nationalism and history in the development of a situation that today excites both laughter and tears.
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With the buzz around campus growing, and with The Mac Weekly publishing both an article and a letter to the editor dealing with the issue, as a former RA (and again one next year), I thought that it was time to examine this issue from a different perspective.
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I was once a party RA. On a floor with residents my own age, I hosted small gatherings in my room that may have featured cocktails, watched The Family Guy in rooms where my residents may have been smoking pot and attended parties where boxed wine was perhaps the guest of honor. I also think I had one of the most cohesive floors, and in the case of the sophomore experience—one characterized by its proverbial “slump”— that’s saying a lot.
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By CHRIS JANDRO, AARON MALONE, ELLIE MORRIS, and DANIEL UNGIER
Ever heard of Ordway? Chances are, if you haven’t taken an ecology class, you probably haven’t. Most students think of Macalester as two city blocks surrounded by urban neighborhoods—and practically speaking, it is. Actually, most of Macalester’s land lies along the Mississippi River, in the form of a little-known 285-acre nature preserve of prairie, forest and wetlands. The Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area is one of Macalester’s best resources, but most of the community hasn’t had a chance to enjoy it.
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Macalester can now add a NCAA Division III men’s basketball first team All-America to its list of student achievements, thanks to www.D3Hoops.com. Ben Van Thorre ’04, along with four other players chosen among 390 Division III schools nationally, was selected for this honor. Van Thorre joins players from perennial Division III powerhouses such as Williams College and Wheaton College. Van Thorre has also been named MIAC MVP for this season.
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Unemployed workers, John Kerry and the press have been up in arms over the increasingly popular business trend of outsourcing. If more college basketball players watched CNBC instead of ESPN, they might be inclined to hop on the bandwagon, because college b-ball is fast losing its status as the primary recruiting ground for the NBA and other professional basketball leagues.
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You’ve seen her dancing, both on the stage and on the sidewalk. You probably haven’t seen her designing and building sets, but she does that too. In between swigs of chocolate milk, that is.
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Deserving des(s)ert
Being interested in word origins and language in general definitely has pros and cons. It’s good, for example, when you’re reading something boring—then you can entertain yourself once in a while by ruminating on interesting words in the text. It’s bad, on the other hand, when you’re doing this when you actually need to be focusing on the boring stuff, e.g. the exam material. Recently, this has been happening a bit too often to me during my reading for a philosophy class—not that it’s boring, it just tends to become really looooong and tiring. In one of these episodes, I had a 5-minute pause or so reflecting on a title of a chapter in one of my books: “Desert, Entitlement, and Property Rights.” The excursus was just caused by an innocent misunderstanding, namely me connecting “desert” to, say, a chocolate truffle or Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. I couldn’t quite figure out what that had to do with entitlement and property rights. Of course it’s just a matter of spelling—as you probably know (but I didn’t), the chocolate truffle would be a dessert with two s’s. Even though these words have origins in different verbs in French and ultimately Latin (desert from Old French deservir and dessert from Middle French desservir), they certainly seem very related to me: I always feel like I deserve a dessert...
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Growing up in a no-nonsense town, going to a no-nonsense school, it didn’t much prepare me for the real world. But meeting Jackie, the town’s wildest pumpkin, surely did. You see, I’ve gone to a Catholic Cantaloupe school my whole life, I’m talking K through 12 here, and my mother always told me that good Christian Canta-girls don’t fill themselves with cottage cheese, don’t let the handsome chefs down the street roll them into melon-balls, Lord knows they don’t hollow out their innards and carve faces on their epidermal surfaces. Jackie didn’t care about the rules. Whether it was Halloween or Christmas, she always had a bright, toothy smile on her face and the look of sheer seduction in her eyes. That vacant noggin of hers drove all of the fellas crazy.
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It’s a damn shame a preview for a cheesy period piece, The Alamo, opens for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (coincidentally, in the original screenplay a character shouts “Remember the Alamo!”). That’s all right though. The feature film was so splendid that I forgot all about the opening act until now.
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In one week, the 22nd annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival begins its marathon screening of over 100 films in 15 days at a mere five venues. What makes this year’s fest of particular interest is that one of the five venues is Macalester’s own John B. Davis Lecture Hall.
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Brian Burton, better known as DJ Danger Mouse, was a virtual unknown in the music world until he remixed The Beatles’ The White Album with the a cappella tracks of Jay-Z’s The Black Album to form his homemade and illegal The Grey Album. Initially, Burton only distributed the CD-R to friends without charge but through word-of-mouth, eBay and peer-to-peer file sharing programs, The Grey Album made Burton a small-time celebrity but a large problem. The Los Angeles-based DJ is now something of controversial figure as he is a chance icon for the underground music community and evil to the corporate music industry.
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The Feelies’ debut album Crazy Rhythms (1980) was the album that I had been waiting to hear, even if I had no idea before I heard it. The first listen was like meeting a soulmate—sparks flew, and I tattooed a flaming heart with “The Feelies” on my breast. The tattoo part may or may not be true. More to the point, The Feelies take the irreverence, hyperactivity and underproduction of punk as building blocks for an unparalleled brand of manic pop songs. The guitars tear out tight, nervous melodies against a hypnotic rhythm section that never pauses long enough to allow moments of gooey pop sensitivity to bubble up. It’s the music that the Velvet Underground might have made if they were dorky boys from Des Moines, strung out on trucker’s speed and blue raspberry icees from the Kum & Go. —L.C.
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The Mac Weekly is an entirely student-produced publication. The opinions expressed in this document are those of its authors and editors, not of Macalester College.
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