The University must adapt to China’s rise

By Dan Michaeli / April 11, 2006

“Remember this year’s protests against Japan? China will go to war with Japan within the next two decades,” a young Chinese graphic designer told me confidently over dinner in Beijing this summer. “China is rising—and soon we will become as powerful as the United States.” This comment provoked a great deal of discussion and disagreement...

Go synthesized: It’s cheap, and I’d buy it

By Leila Sales / April 11, 2006

Many musical artists make extremely poor business decisions. Now, I’m not claiming that I would make a good musician—I don’t have “talent” or whatever—but I do have an eye for not losing money, and that takes you far in any industry. Take, for example, rappers. You might believe that rappers make wise economic decisions because...

The real New Orleans isn’t the one on TV

By Jenny Fisher / April 11, 2006

Everyone had a story to tell. Garbage truck drivers stopped and rolled down their windows. Waiting for the bus, a woman talked about losing her job and the rising cost of living in the city. Neighbors driving by would stop and ask whom we were working for, then tell us how their houses had been...

Confessions of an AIPAC trained liberal Israeli

By Talia Gorodness / April 11, 2006

I got a call from my mother the other day. She asked me anxiously: “Your school! I have been reading the weekend newspaper, and noticed an article about some paper one of your professors has written…maybe finally I will not have to explain to my friends here [in Israel] that my daughter in fact attends...

Bon Appétit

By Maroon Editorial Staff / April 7, 2006

Anyone who has taken an economics class here, or even knows an economics major is well aware of the intellectual respect given to free markets. It is just too bad that the University is utterly unwilling to make any aspect of the freshman meal plans operate in a market. This goes a long way toward...

Listen to the French? On immigration?

By Ryan Vass / April 6, 2006

Don’t look now, but we are beginning to resemble the French. Though smoking is down and body odor forecasts show only modest gains, Americans, like our stuffy European acquaintances have begun to openly question immigration. Though the anti-immigration crusade has taken many forms, most notably as opposition to the “guest worker” proposal now floating around...

U.S. needs engagement not partisanship

By Andrew Hammond / April 6, 2006

In 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by the Federalist-controlled Congress and signed by President John Adams to, among other things, suppress the political activities of the opposition Republican Party. The Sedition Act, which made it illegal to criticize the government, was used to imprison a few editors and politicians and scare more...

AMA’s junk science gets debunked

By Laura Hamilton / April 6, 2006

The liberal intelligentsia decided years ago that it knew what was best for John Q. Public. On March 17, 2006, the Associated Press published an authoritative-sounding news article (“Girls warned not to ‘go wild’ on Spring Break”) about an American Medical Association (AMA) survey which “all but [confirmed] what goes on in those Girls Gone...

Bringing up the rear

By The Maroon Staff / April 4, 2006

While the chairs in the library might seem like an insignificant topic, student comfort is essential to the intellectual experience at the U of C. This may be the place for the Life of the Mind, but our asses have rights too. The chairs haven’t been replaced since any of us have been at the...

“Israel Lobby” paper laced with half-truths

By Feliks Pleszczynski / April 4, 2006

Following in the tradition of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf, last March we were given “The Israel Lobby,” a paper by Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago’s own John Mearsheimer. For all of their attention paid to presenting an argument free of anti-Semitism, perhaps anticipating the obvious...

Lessons from Paris on U.S. public transit

By Samuel Rosenberg / April 4, 2006

As some of you may know, I spent the last quarter studying in Paris. Have no fear; Chicago is still the city I love, yet spending time in one of the great cultural centers of the world truly opened my eyes to certain aspects of my home city that I had not noticed previously. It...

Finally, an approach to organ donation better than complete apathy

By Alec Brandon / April 4, 2006

The state of organ donation is simply devastating in the United States. The present system, in which individuals are assumed not to be organ donors unless they denote otherwise, ends in the needless death of thousands simply because many are too lazy to go through the miniscule effort of becoming an organ donor (it is...