Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
We inform. You decide.
Friday, August 01, 2025

Opinion

Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  DARTS LAURELS

Darts & Laurels 10/11/13

Readers, this is not a drill: Fall is finally upon us in Gainesville. The mornings are crisper, the nights are pleasantly cool, and we’re finally switching from iced coffee to hot pumpkin lattes. Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  EDITORIALS

Stop obsessing over "thigh gaps" — it's not healthy

Some people have blue eyes, and some people have green eyes. Some people have innie belly buttons, and some people have outie belly buttons. Some people have narrow hips and legs that touch, and some people have wider hips with thighs that don’t touch. All these particular body parts are affected by the arbitrary genetic hand you’re dealt at birth, yet young girls have chosen to obsess over whether they have a “thigh gap.”


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Stop hating — America’s doing just fine

Haters will always hate. These days, bashing politicians and journalists has become en vogue. Critics forget that our representatives uphold the world’s greatest democracy by toiling night and day to represent a helpless minority: corporate executives. Having a media subservient to the powerful is also vital to our prosperity.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Guest column: Rep. Yoho needs to help end shutdown

The federal government is being held hostage by a small cabal of the Republican Party whose popularity is on the decline. Rep. Ted Yoho is one of the 80 Republicans in the House of Representatives who signed onto Rep. Mark Meadows’ memo to Speaker John Boehner calling for the Affordable Care Act to be defunded through the budget.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Too big to fail? Not in the U.S. government’s case

Amateur hour is on full display in our nation’s capital — or, to be more precise, amateur week. The government remains in shutdown mode while the president refuses to budge on Obamacare, Republicans do not have an endgame in sight and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid name-calls and refuses to negotiate with the House.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  EDITORIALS

Death of the album: Science of hitmaking is ruining the industry

In season five of “Mad Men,” an AMC drama set in the 1960s, there’s a scene where Don Draper — a sexy, suit-wearing ad executive, as portrayed by Jon Hamm — is given a copy of the Beatles’ “Revolver” record. In his sprawling living room overlooking the Manhattan skyline, he puts the record on the player, turns up the stereo and sits in an armchair. The trippy opening bars of “Tomorrow Never Knows” play over the speakers as Draper sips a glass of scotch and listens.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  EDITORIALS

Stevie Nicks and George R. R. Martin connected by storytelling, personal lives

On Tuesday, Stevie Nicks told the Herald Scotland that she turned to the HBO series “Game of Thrones” to cope with the death of her mother and a nasty bout of pneumonia. She was crippled with grief, and she told the Herald she couldn’t leave her house for nearly five months. In that time period, she immersed herself in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world of Westeros and wrote poems about the characters — some of the titles “On Jon Snow,” “On Arya” and “On Cersei and Jaime,” she said.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Guest column: Active citizens effect change

We Americans are in a bad mood about our nation and our public life. Three-quarters say the country is on the wrong track. Some of us may be especially angry at the current Congress, at President Barack Obama — or both — but the roots of our discontent go deeper than that.


Powered by SNworks Solutions by The State News
All Content © 2025 The Independent Florida Alligator and Campus Communications, Inc.