I can’t count the times I’ve heard a pop icon or a public figure say, “Just believe in yourself.” A famous person is asked something along the lines of “How did you get to where you are today?” and the response is normally the same: “I believed in myself.” It is said so often that it has become a platitude. But why is it said? And what does it actually mean?
Usually the NBA’s annual MVP race is fairly clear cut.
On Monday night, a small group of UF students carried signs and yelled into megaphones in protest of Ben Shapiro’s appearance on campus. Remarkably outnumbered by students waiting in a snaking line to see the controversial conservative talking head, the protesters stood in the name of morality, for the sake of letting UF know that they wouldn’t stand for Shapiro’s anti-LGBTQ+ stances.
Passion. What a word. As college students, this word probably means a lot to a good number of us. We’re told time and time again to major in something we love and to join organizations centered around ideas we’re passionate about. The funny thing about this is that when we first arrived on campus armed with twin XL sheets and a shower caddy, a lot of us may have thought we knew what we were passionate about, only to change our minds a little further down the road.
The other week in my English theory course, we were talking about sexuality, feminism and the issues of gender. Specifically, we were dissecting works like Michel Foucault’s “The History of Sexuality,” Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” and Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble.” If you know any of the three of these works, then you’d know they all share one thing in common: density. These works are all so dense that it takes a significant amount of poise to parse through them, though even at times, I find the lazier side of myself resorting to calling their arguments “wack” and closing the book.
In case you haven’t heard, Congress recently voted to allow Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to sell your browsing history to corporations. Not that they weren’t doing that already to a degree — anyone who has seen a targeted ad on Facebook will know this — but with the repeal of the 2016 Federal Communications Commission broadband privacy regulations, ISPs won’t need our permission to gather and sell sensitive private information. This includes things we kind of figured they were selling, like browsing history and app downloads, but also things we didn’t really want to think about them selling, like location, financial and medical data.
When a liberal speaker comes to UF, there’s conservative outcry. “How come we never get any conservative speakers?” they say. They claim to be suffocated by safe spaces, when their safety was never actually threatened. Yet when there’s opposition to a conservative speaker, those on the other side of the political spectrum are called snowflakes and crybabies.
I recently read a collection of short essays by Oliver Sacks titled “Gratitude.” These essays, particularly “My Periodic Table,” got me thinking about my own experiences, and this got me writing about my life.
It’s the home stretch, Gators. Graduating seniors are counting off the last few weeks of their college careers. Others are gritting their teeth and trying to make it to summer. With less than a month left of this Spring semester, every responsibility, every deadline, every little grade point is piling up, and now’s the time that makes us or breaks us. If you’re sitting in lecture now, trying to pay attention, but really just thinking of your summer abroad, why not pretend to be doing something more favorable than daydreaming and turn to this week’s...
About two months ago, a man wearing an armband depicting a swastika stood firmly on Turlington Plaza. Jewish professors came to his aid to ensure he was not harmed. Passionate students came forward in art and song to discredit his hate. Well-meaning as his opponents were, he still got the attention he wanted, and a debate sparked on campus about the nature of free speech and how far the public is willing to limit that sacred right for the safety of all.
In a short piece for The New Yorker, Cirocco Dunlap describes the wandering between New York City and Los Angeles that was much of her young adulthood. From within the limits of each city, the other seems much more appealing, yet when she gets there, the culture and habits of the locals only make her long for the place she just left. Back and forth, she wavers between both ends of American culture, eventually ending by stating “halfway between New York and L.A., I imploded. I am so much happier now.”
How often is Florida’s softball team cast under the national spotlight for something that happens after a game?
I’m not a big fan of Tomi Lahren — never have been. The 24-year-old ultra-conservative pundit from TheBlaze has made a career, if only for a few years, by belching her intentionally inflammatory opinions to arouse a like-minded right-wing audience. But last week, she finally said something of interest while appearing as a guest on “The View.”
The top three movies in the box office last weekend were “Beauty and the Beast,” “Power Rangers” and “Kong: Skull Island.” What do they all have in common? They’re all reboots, remakes or sequels, capitalizing on the previous fame and success of their predecessors. Perhaps that’s a very cynical way to view it, but the fact is, Hollywood realized people love familiar things and are nostalgic, and that both these things mean very easy money.
It’s a popular pastime nowadays to rant about how the U.S. is infringing upon freedom of speech. Conservatives specifically will talk about how oppressed their freedom of speech is because they feel like they cannot express their views without people criticizing them. What a lot of people fail to realize is that freedom of speech does not mean freedom to speak without repercussion: It means that the government cannot censor or restrain you. It does not mean people can’t criticize you, that your workplace cannot find your speech or actions inappropriate or that what you say won’t be subject to negative social repercussions. You have the freedom to say what you want, without the government regulating you; other people, press, companies, celebrities and social media, however, have the freedom to react.
When the president of the U.S. uses Twitter to get his message out, it’s safe to say that Twitter has become part of mainstream media consumption. With 140 characters or less, there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation or misrepresentation of the facts.
There has been some debate about the ethics of so-called sanctuary cities. Let’s look at one argument against non-compliance with federal law enforcement and whether it holds up.
Two days before a knife-wielding assailant killed three people and injured 40 in an attack outside the houses of Parliament, a second act of terrorism went largely under the radar — and it happened in the heart of the US.
In my time at this university, I’ve found the college experience often presents a fascinating intersection of tastes. Some of us consider ourselves full-blown adults, while others lean more towards an “adult-lite” classification, resulting in a hilariously wide variety of hedonistic preferences.
I’ve always been an anime fan, and I’ve never been too keen on hiding it. That’s not to say I go around wearing metal head covers or writing names in my black journal, but if anyone asks me, I’m never shy. In fact, it hypes me up. I love talking about new anime or what will happen in the next episodes of unfinished shows. However, what I want to talk about today is not which anime I think are worth watching, but how I got into anime, and why you should, too.
Solutions by The State News
