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Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Opinion: Columns

Florida Alligator
Opinion

The ideals of the Confederacy remain lost cause

Common wisdom holds for one to be true to thy self. If you’re a self-described Southerner, odds are good you might still be licking your wounds from the flogging the north dished out 150 years ago.


Florida Alligator
Opinion

Online privacy needs to become top priority

Every once in a while, a website or service finds a new creepy way of gathering data online, and it seems earth-shattering until the next stalkerish way of data collection emerges. In an ideal world, none of this would come as a surprise, as everyone would actually read the terms and conditions when they agree to things — or at least those pesky updates sent out ahead of major changes to a site.


Florida Alligator
Opinion

Reflecting on the Iran nuclear deal as a young Marine veteran

In the summer of 2015, following my first year of law school at IU-Bloomington, I was fortunate enough to be selected for an internship in Israel with Shurat HaDin, Israel Law Center. As a Marine Corps veteran, my unit confronted terrorists in Afghanistan, and when I returned home, I learned about groups that fight terrorism in different ways. Shurat HaDin is a nongovernmental Israeli organization with the stated mission of bankrupting terror — one lawsuit at a time.


Florida Alligator
Opinion

Don’t reduce tragedy to a Facebook post

Last week, I logged onto Facebook after a summer of neglect. I was greeted with a familiar but troubling sight: Someone had posted an article about a scorned boyfriend throwing acid in his girlfriend’s face. While that was the first I had heard of that particular story, I have seen similar stories posted on Facebook many times before. The Texas mother who drowned her children in a pool; the Massachusetts teacher who was murdered by a student; the Tennessee couple who were raped and beaten; all were equally tragic stories that had found their way into my life because of a shared Facebook post.


Florida Alligator
Opinion

Educational entitlement: dumb, lazy and problematic

College can be a pretty weird place. Jam any number of young adults with raging libidos into a high-stress environment, and all kinds of crazy stuff will go down. But hand those same high-strung and impassioned people a whopping sense of entitlement and unshakable certainty in their own morals? Things will get surreal.


Florida Alligator
Opinion

How to fall off the face of the Earth and like it

I can recall my social media ‘firsts’ as easily as I could my major life events: first cryptically spelled Facebook status, first grotesquely filtered Instagram, first angsty song lyric quoted on Twitter. It becomes almost nostalgic, recalling a time when social media was new and each post brought me one step closer to perfecting my skillfully crafted online persona. Yet my most profound ‘first’ was when I gave it all up.


Florida Alligator
Opinion

Mediocre Advice: Finding love in college

Happy Tuesday to all my Random Randys and Anonymous Amys, and welcome to Mediocre Advice. This article is a reboot of Ariel Barnes’ own Mediocre Advice column, which was last published during my freshman year back in the salad days of 2012. Like the triumphant phoenix rising from its own ashes, your weekly inquiries will once again be answered with extremely average and somewhat distorted advice; you might even say the advice offered here could be considered prosaic, middling or any other acceptable synonym for mediocre.


Vernon Hargreaves III runs to catch a ball during practice at Donald R. Dizney Stadium.
Sports

Column: What defensive back unit is the best in the country?

There was a lot of debate over who the real DBU (Defensive Back University) was during the offseason, most notably some Twitter trash talk between the Florida and LSU secondaries. The debate probably won’t be settled until the two teams play each other in October, but here’s an early stab at the top five:


Florida Alligator
Opinion

The media’s coverage of Trump is detrimental

Thus far, the 2016 presidential election has been the most opulent and luxurious race for the White House in recent memory. The primary reason for this has been the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. The billionaire’s no-holds-barred sound bites and — oddly enough — every-man attitude have rallied many in both the middle and the right to his cause.


Florida Alligator
Opinion

A Farewell to Summer and Some Last Pieces of Advice

So we’ve hit a lot of topics here. This was a new endeavor for me and I am glad to have had some of you along for the ride. Since this is my last column I thought I would do a little recap of some of the highlights from this summer. It was my intention with this column to provide automotive advice for college students. I may have missed the mark at some points, but I would like to leave you with a few nuggets that may at least get you through the rest of your college career.



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