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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

El Caimán

Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Under the fig tree: Not knowing what you want in life is normal

Sep. 28, 2017

I’m going to sound like a very stereotypical college-age young woman (college-age English major specifically) and talk about the scene in  Sylvia Plath's “The Bell Jar” where Esther is lying beneath a fig tree. Here, she imagines that each fig represents an imagined future — she sees a famous editor, a poet, a housewife — and she cannot make up her mind as to which fig to pluck, since choosing one means losing the rest, and then they all begin to shrivel up, and it is simply too late.

Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

It's time to stop kneeling during the national anthem

Sep. 28, 2017

Baseball may be the American pastime, but it is no secret our football players are the ones who are treated like the real heroes. Seriously, more than 30 million viewers tune in every week to worship by screen and watch their favorite teams play on Sundays.

Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

The 80/20 rule is a fact of life

Sep. 28, 2017

In the late 19th century, economist Vilfredo Pareto demonstrated in his first academic paper that, in his native country of Italy, 20 percent of the population owned about 80 percent of all the land. Pareto then noticed the same pattern of distribution in his garden, where he found that 20 percent of the pods contained 80 percent of the total peas. Named after Vilfredo himself, the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule or the law of the vital few, is one of the most widely seen statistical phenomena in the world, seemingly evident on both the largest of macro levels (entire country wealth distributions) to the smallest of micro levels (amount of peas in a peapod).

Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  DARTS LAURELS

Darts & Laurels

Sep. 28, 2017

You finally make it back to your apartment after what feels like the longest day of your life. Between classes, meetings and your third Study Edge review of the week, you want nothing more than to plop down on the couch with a glass of wine and the fuzziest of fuzzy blankets.

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