Five Poems of Home and Heart
OXFORD'S COMMA,
• Learn to speak English the way I speak it,
• Let the letters dance on your tongue, in tune,
• Cleanse your palette of your language borne,
• Submit, My English wants to see no trace of you,
• Crash land your courage on these jagged rocks,
Anti-Democratic Practices in Protection of Free Speech Online in the United States and the European Union: Survey and Analysis
Introduction
Deluges of invasively targeted advertiser content, democracy-challenging misinformation, and vitriolic hate speech fill the social networking platforms that have become a public square for the globalized era. Consumer content moderation is not a conversation between merely the citizen and the state; intermediaries-the companies that host the platforms that consumers access and use-exist between the two, uniquely positioned both to shape regulation and to be shaped by it. Meta, Twitter, and Alphabet, the corporations behind the world’s largest social media platforms, enjoyed vastly unchecked freedom to develop through the past twenty years1. Now, foreign election interference, the rise of alt-right rhetoric, and increasingly narrow options for consumers aged these companies out of this unregulated playground. As the largest economic bloc in the world, it leverages a unique effect to shape regulation around the world, known as the “Brussels effect.”2 When companies adapt their product to comply with EU policies, consumers in other countries where that product is available are thus also affected by this regulatory action. In the content moderation sphere, the “Brussels effect” creates both a standard of compliance for companies and an exemplar for countries the world over to follow. America, long the leader in ideological and technological innovation, seems to have ceded any claim to power as the global referee for Big Tech. But is the European model durable? Does the United States’ neoliberal wait-and-see strategy hold water in the face of growing concerns of platforms limiting freedom of expression?
But the Forehead Said So: Sympathy and Phrenology in Jane Eyre
Introduction
The results of personality tests, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Enneagram, find their way into casual conversations, job applications, and dating profiles. Once these assessments analyze a subject’s “type,” the opportunity to scrutinize that subject’s relationships with other types arises. For example, the Myers & Briggs Foundation recommends using the system in premarital counseling “to identify areas of difference that may cause conflict.”1 More radically, the most popular website for this test, “16Personalities,” has an entire category dedicated to relationships, including a “Romantic Fulfillment” quiz for “what makes someone a good match for you.”2 The Enneagram Institutewebsite also has a page for learning about type combinations in relationships. Although this website assures its readers that “no pairing of types is particularly blessed and no pairing is particularly doomed,” the analyses still delve into the pros and cons of different matches.3 These evaluations can stimulate appraisal of a relationship before it even begins.
Red for Resuscitation Needed
Dr. Flores first accompanied us to the private hospital run by Univalle Ayacucho, a private university in Cochabamba, Bolivia. We were greeted by a well-dressed man whose name I did not catch. He quickly embarked with us on a tour, initially taking us to the top floor and subsequently venturing down to each one below. My preliminary reaction was one of extraordinary awe; the facility was cleaner than most hospitals I have visited in the United States. The employees were uniformly dressed in quality scrubs and shoes, impressive enough for me to make a note in my written observations. I imagine you could see your reflection in the floors and windows, maybe even hear a pin drop in some of the corridors.
Learning Genotyping and Cell Culture Techniques to Perform Experiments to Study Cardiovascular Calcification
Abstract
The St. Hilaire Lab studies important cardiovascular diseases such as Calcific Aortic Valve Disease (CAVD), Arterial Calcification due to Deficiency of CD73 (ACDC) and Medial Arterial Calcification (MAC). The similarity between all of these conditions is the calcification of cells, which leads to the main research question of the lab: how and why does a healthy cell transition into an osteogenic cell? In order to determine why a healthy cell becomes calcified, we perform experiments using both in vivo and in vitro environments. However, in order to begin in vitro experiments that involve valuable human cells, basic techniques in cell culture such as plating and splitting are needed, and in vivo experiments require knowing the genotype of the animals used. With these fundamental techniques, biochemical analysis such as quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), western blots, and staining can be performed in order to help answer research questions that pertain to the lab.
An Echo is Heard
As I frolicked through the freshly flowering forest on that warm June afternoon, my gaze happened upon a silhouette beyond the bushy brush ahead. Though this was not an unusual sight to me, I still heard my heartbeat hasten. The birds above began to chatter, an erosion to my individual rhythm. Streams of heavy ivory hairs flooded my face like a waterfall, entirely submerging the majority of my vision, making it difficult to identify even the simplest of things. A branch? Or maybe a fox? A deer? As I attempted to distinguish what this figure was, I quietly hoped to myself that this dim outline would shift into an illuminated form of a human as I came closer. More specifically, one of the male variety. Something about them compelled me. Like the syrupy sap that seeps from the tree that you know doesn’t taste good because you’ve tried it. But you can’t help yourself to taste again.
The Evolutions of the Perception of the "Right of Return" of Palestinian Refugees from 1948 to Today
During a television address in 2012, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, declared, before reconsidering his words a few days later, that he did not want to return to live in his childhood home, in Safed, now in Israeli territory.1 These words triggered strong reactions, particularly from the Palestinian people, as they were seen as an abandonment of the “right of return.” The following comes from Article 11 of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, adopted on 11 December 1948, which states:
"Matches Struck Unexpectedly in the Dark": What Modernist Fragmentation Offers Contemporary Christian Culture
Abstract
This paper draws on Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse to suggest alternative methods of viewing religion and secularism in Christian culture today. I address issues of binary and dogmatism in Christian culture by connecting current issues with those that Woolf’s Modernist style pushed against. A review of scholarship reveals Woolf’s connection to religion, feminism, and rhetorical modes that contrasted with those of the earlier Victorian period. I contribute an analysis of Woolf’s work with these themes in mind, suggesting productive ways forward from the supposed conflict between Christianity and secularism today.
Meditations on Blackness and Being
Abstract
This essay is a meditation on the ontological contours of Blackness and being. The essay examines, in large part, Calvin Warren’s Ontological Terror. The concept broaches the topics of the humanity inherent in Heidegger’s Dasein and its ontological opposition towards Black being as such. When referring to Black being, I refer to the ontology of being in opposition to humanness as constructed by 20th-century Western existential philosophy (specifically Heidegger’s) and the Western notion of humanness that simultaneously constructs Blackness as an ontology, degrades Blackness and relies upon this very same ontology as an ontological prerequisite for the conceptual birth of whiteness. I import Frantz Fanon’s Double Reference in his text Black Skins, White Masks and Albert Memmi’s dual subjects of The Colonizer and the Colonized and through the onto-psychological prisms of both writers, I attempt to trace a philosophical genealogy of Black being as non-being or Black being as opposition to Dasein. This essay aims to clarify the distinct and paradoxical truth of Blackness as a mode of being that is nullified as used by white being; in other words, Black being as non-being.
Sleeping, Slipping, and Snipping
Responding to a Creepy Drawing From a Dream.
One open-minded night, my once closed but now bead-ified eyes witnessed my doll-like twins:
One blonde-locked Another ink-haired