Activists walk down Constitution Ave, in Washington during last weekend’s anti-war protest (DP)

The only moment I felt like a protester was in 30th Street Station, protesting my decision to take the obscenely early 4:55am train to D.C. When I boarded the train and took a seat, a quick glance at the overhead compartments confirmed my expectations: makeshift signs, protruding pickets, the arsenal of an angry citizenry.

Saturday, January 27th was a surprisingly warm winter day in Washington — the perfect day for a protest. Union Station, with its views of the US Capitol, served as the staging ground for an energized congregation — geriatrics draped in anti-war regalia, school groups straight off the bus, a couple toting an image of a Bush-Hitler hybrid. Destination: the National Mall. Goal: convince a newly elected Democratic Congress to end the war in Iraq.

The protest, organized by United for Peace and Justice , drew somewhere between ABC’s claim of “tens of thousands” and United for Peace and Justice’s estimate of “500,000″ people. But the numbers weren’t as important as the message: 64% of Americans think Congress has not been assertive enough in challenging the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war. It was time to force Congress to perform.

I found myself amongst the crowd, one of the uncountable, completely fascinated and perplexed by the madness. In front of me, four haunting words in block letters: “Bush lies. Who dies?” Haunting not because of the apparent message — but because of its simplicity, the omission of the process that transformed lies into dead bodies. Do these people actually blame Bush for our current situation? Chants of “Impeach Bush!” ended the suspense.

With the intimidating facade of the Capitol in the background, a series of speakers addressed the masses — including infamous and outspoken anti-war figures Jane Fonda and Sean Penn; House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Reverend Jesse Jackson, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA); veterans of both the Vietnam and the Iraq War; and parents of soldiers fighting in Iraq.

The speeches were laced with urgency, with anger, with repetition of indictments, with demand for change. The energy of the crowd was undeniable, but I couldn’t bring myself to clap with each point, to cry for impeachment. I only responded to claims of Constitutional transgressions, to claims of denials of habeas corpus. One thought flooded my mind: what have we gotten ourselves into?

I felt as if the protestors took the answer for granted: obviously we’re at war. We were lied to. “A Nation Betrayed,” as a hand painted sign so elegantly put it. Betrayed indeed, by ourselves and each other. The government hasn’t been stealing our freedom. Bush hasn’t been trampling our rights. We’ve handed over our freedom — delicately placed our rights at the feet of the president.

We’ve settled for mediocre representation — a Congress interested in its own self preservation. A cowardly establishment unfit to live up to the standards of our Constitution. This is the group “representing” our interests — this is the group to which the protest appealed.
It missed the point. At the inception of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine advised that, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

This war won’t end with an act of Congress — the tyranny of this administration, by Vice President Cheney’s own acknowledgment , will not subside. We’ve become accustomed to the illusion of democracy, the exaltation of American values as universally good. And at the same time, we’ve allowed the corrosion of our democracy and the negation of our values. An appeal to Congress is a superficial effort. What we need is an appeal to each other.

Even in its final days, the Philadelphia Bulletin still tried not to hang its head.

By the early 1980s, circulation was falling rapidly (sound familiar?). But for a while, it seemed like the Gray Old Lady of Market Street might just make it.

That fall the newspaper was still selling 404,481 copies on the average weekday, a number today’s Philadelphia Inquirer would scream for joy at. And the Bulletin had history on its side, having published continually for 134 years. More important, the newspaper had just secured $5 million in employee contract concessions.

The front page of the Evening Bulletin in 1918, during World War I. The paper would continue to publish until 1982. (cstone.net/~rgamble/users/Newspaper.gif)

So writers and editors continued, optimistically, to pump out editions–every afternoon. See, the Bulletin wasn’t just an essential part of Philadelphia’s daily life, it was one of the great, if not the greatest, evening dailies in the country.

A Philadelphia Magazine article in 1967 “described the Bulletin as ‘a paper that’s willing to spend money to cover news anywhere in the world.’ By contrast, it noted that Walter Annenberg’s Inquirer rarely sent staffers on national or international assignments.”

However, the paper simply couldn’t stave off the rising tide of television news. Evening newspapers were losing readers quickly to television–and they were going extinct even faster.

So 25 years ago yesterday, the Bulletin put out its last issue, and our great city lost a giant (1,743 of them to be exact). The DP also became the largest newspaper based in West Philadelphia.

Other cities lost their dailies as well: There were still 11 evening dailies in cities of 1 million or more in 1980, by 2000 there was one. But the Bulletin, especially in its hayday, was a special paper. It was a newspaper not just for the average Philadelphian, but by the average Philadelphian, as former editor and later columnist Peter Binzen described years later in an essay:

The staffs of metropolitan dailies included many reporters who went to work right out of high school. their blue-collar backgrounds matched those of the subscribers and, as a result, there was an affinity between reporters and readers. Whereas many of today’s college-educated journalists grew up in relative affluence somewhere else and are strangers in the cities they work.

It may seem hard to believe for a paper that folded so early, but the Bulletin was–for decades–Philadelphia’s favorite paper and the largest afternoon daily in the nation. In 1947, the Bulletin reached a circulation of 773,924, its peak readership. In comparison, the Philadelphia Inquirer (now Philly’s largest daily) has a circulation of less than 400,000. But in the middle of the century, when Philadelphia’s star shone brightest, the Bulletin was the city’s darling and any journalist’s heaven.

“If two chairs matched, it was an accident. Beside most desks were spittons for tobacco-chewing reporters. Nearly everybody smoked and stamped out their butts on the floor,” wrote Robert Williams, who started with the newspaper as a receptionist in 1929 and finished as its amusements editor.

The Bulletin, unlike many papers today just out to make a buck, cared about Philadelphia, and it showed in its coverage. The newspaper rarely overreached, often choosing to be prude rather than sensationalistic. The newspaper was so intense in its devotion that it refused to cover the Kinsey Report and often airbrushed scantily-clad cartoon characters.

But its actions weren’t out of a desire for censorship, it was because the Bulletin loved its city. It slowly began to take on a more corporate, clean culture, as the days of everyman journalism began to fade. Reporter and columnist Adrian Lee wrote later,

What fascinated me was the rising tide of noise, the increasing tempo of the typewriters, the sense of urgency that permeated the room. Over the years, typewriters would give way to computers, and the racket would give way to a genteel quietude. Raising your voice in a latter-day newsroom is like shouting in church.

And, as Philadelphia’s fortunes fell and its readers began to flee to the suburbs, so too did the Bulletin’s future begin to descend into bankruptcy. In its last years, it competed furiously with the Inquirer, driving the Inky to win a decade’s worth of Pulitzer prizes. But with the Bulletin only a memory, that spirit has died, and Inquirer reporters are too busy worrying about layoffs to even think about the kind of investigative reporting that made our cities’ newspapers great.

With the Bulletin and its scrappy sense of urgency gone, Philadelphia has been left with two lazy, sterile news sources. And 25 years later, this city is still mourning its Evening Bulletin.

College junior Betsy Harbison hands out information packages to students who attend the Relay for Life kickoff in December. (Alexandra Milin/DP)

Intravenous tubes, catheters, radiation treatment and scalpels.

We’re not about to page McDreamy in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy — this is a slice of reality. Take a minute to imagine simultaneously tackling rigors of an Ivy League education and debilitating effects of cancer.

In September 2005, Engineering sophomore Kevin Rakszawski was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma which forced him to take a leave of absence from Penn for an entire year. He has been in remission since July and resumed his studies this past fall.

“The hardest part was leaving — moving out,” Rakszawski said. “It was such a change of pace, going from the college life to being a patient.”

Fortunately, Penn students are very aware of cancer’s widespread impact and are eager to support research for future cures. A particularly dedicated group of student leaders brought Relay for Life, a national fundraiser for cancer research, to Penn.

The event spans from 8pm on March 30th until 8am on March 31st and will be held on Franklin Field. Relay for Life is the yearly event sponsored by Colleges Against Cancer, a subdivision of the American Cancer Society.

Rakszawski agreed to speak at last year’s relay, toward the end of his treatment for lymphoma. He will participate again this year.

“Everyone has a personal story and a reason for being there,” Rakszawski said. “There’s a huge feeling of hope for the future.

Team participants agree — the twelve-hour event stands for so much more than simply raising money.

“People feel like you’re sacrificing something,” Engineering junior Becca Goldman who participated last year said. “It’s a really moving experience.”

Wharton senior Corey Hulse is one of two event chairs this year. The son of a breast cancer survivor, he has been involved in similar events since high school and helped organize Penn’s first relay three years ago. 57 teams are already signed up for this years’s relay. The teams have raised $15,000 to date.

“We feel that it’s more about survivors sharing their stories with the community,” Hulse said. “We’re trying to make a big push this year to get more faculty and staff involvement.”

Cancer is a universal enemy that attacks without discrimination, and I truly admire the students who organize this annual event. For Penn students, faculty and staff: it isn’t too late to sign up and join a team–I did just yesterday.

Although Penn sits squarely in the heart of University City, it manages to boast an increasingly cosmopolitan campus. Stroll down Locust Walk any given day and you’ll hear conversations in Korean, Portuguese, or Dutch.
Embracing global diversity has even become the dogma of official policy. President Amy Guttmann has advocated the goal of “engaging globally” in the Penn Compact . And in fact, more than 8.5% of the Class of 2010 hails from outside the borders of the United States.

And while the university prides itself in its internationalism, overseas admissions is still skewed toward the wealthier end of the spectrum. The situation is partly due to admissions policies that focus on channeling rich international kids who can boost Penn’s diversity stats while boosting university coffers.

But here’s the big whammy: Admission for students outside of the U.S., Canada, or Mexico is not need-blind . As a result, exceptionally bright candidates might sometimes lose out to exceptionally wealthy ones in the admissions game.
Remember when you applied to Penn? On that application, you had to check a box if you wanted to be considered for financial aid. And if you weren’t from the U.S., Canada, or Mexico, checking that box hurt your chances of admission.

In fact, of all our Ivy peers, Harvard is the only university to offer need-blind admissions to overseas students. This means that everyone has equal access to the financial aid pot — and applying for aid won’t compromise the success of your application.
Why does this matter if I’m part of the 92.5% of the student body that doesn’t hail from
overseas? Ostensibly, it seems like Penn should focus on getting aid to Americans (Canadians and Mexicans included) first. Yet why shoot someone down before they even have a chance to prove their merit? If a candidate applies, her admissions application should be solely judged on her qualifications. Likewise, her financial aid application should be judged separately based on whether she merits aid — and the student and her family can decide from there.Admissions is admissions. Financial aid is financial aid.

This measure would boost the caliber of the students who do apply, are admitted, and accept offers of admission to Penn. Moreover, everyone could benefit from a wider range of viewpoints — in classes and around campus. I’d like to hear the voices of both blacks and Afrikaners from South Africans — or the voices of both mulattoes and whites from Brazil. In creating a diverse campus, Penn shouldn’t settle for recruiting an elite potpourri of students from abroad but aim to create a representative sample of the world.

So many parking facilities, so few spaces. (http://www.business-services.upenn.edu/parking/)

Both Penn and Philadelphia are plagued by a problem any populous and booming city faces –parking. Penn provides few safe and reasonably priced facilities for student parking. Instead, students must pay the $1,159/year fee at University-owned lots or hope to find a random spot on the streets of West Philly.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that kind of cash on hand.

We live in a city, so cars–and therefore parking spaces–don’t seem essential at a first glance. However, the sheer unreliability and limitations of mass transit routes make driving both convenient and desirable to students.

It’s far from true that kids who have cars on campus are always rich — many students purchased their own secondhand car during high school and are lucky the cars are still running today. But even if a student has an expensive Mercedes purchased by Daddy, does he not have the right to vehicular safety at an affordable cost?

“We actually work very hard to keep those rates competitive,” Director of Communications for Penn Business Services Rhea Lewis said. “Parking in Penn’s garages is a lot cheaper than parking at a meter.”

Lewis calculated that the average permit rate per day would be $6.18, significantly cheaper than a daily space at a parking meter.

Fair enough, but I’d rather be spending that $6.18 on dinner. And besides, most Penn students who park their cars on the streets don’t even use meters — beyond 40th and Walnut Streets, spaces are essentially free.

Yet the streets of West Philly are certainly not the solution to our current parking problem, especially for young women. In view of the recent upsurge in local crime, a student should not risk heading to her car parked on 42nd Street alone at night.

During the future eastward expansion, we can hope for some significant improvements in student parking, although we may all be celebrating the Class of 2007’s 50th Reunion by the time we are able to witness these innovations.

“Parking is very high on the agenda,” Lewis said. “There is a plan.”

And hopefully that plan will encourage student safety at a much more affordable price.

Who needs writing, reading, and ‘rithmetic when you’ve got SpellCheck?

In grade school, I always took home the Best Handwriting award and I was pretty darn proud of it, too. But once they took handwriting off the report cards, working to perfect those loopy “l”s and soldier straight “t”s lost its appeal — when the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association (WIMA) celebrated National Handwriting Day last Tuesday, I didn’t exactly bring out the noisemakers. In anticipation of the big day, fellow skeptic John Tierney, in hisNew York Times column, posed the question, “Why bother with handwriting?” Although plenty of readers responded, lauding the sentimental value of a handwritten love letter or detailing the cognitive benefits of good handwriting, even I have to admit, it’s a lost cause. As much as it pains me to say, the honored art of penmanship is a thing of the past.

And handwriting isn’t the only “traditional” skill that threatens to become obsolete under the shadow of technology. Take spelling, for example. After all, as long as you’re remotely close, SpellCheck will automatically correct your spelling for you. Or if you accidentally type “daily pennsylvanina,” Google will ask, ever so unassumingly, “Did you mean: “daily pennsylvanian?” Should kids bother studying for spelling tests every week when technology says close enough is good enough?

The way I see it, as long as exams continue to feature written components, they really have no choice. Even those of us thankfully done with all the bubbling, at least up to the SAT, aren’t immune to SpellCheck syndrome. I’ve been alarmed to find myself hesitating more and more frequently during in-class essay exams: Is it 4 “s”s in “possess” or 3? Is irresistible spelled with an “i” or an “a”? What the’since when is “supersede” spelled with an “s”?! I’m afraid some skills aren’t quite as dispensable as cursive writing just yet.

Or maybe our dependence on technology doesn’t concern you so much when it’s only a matter of “i before e except after c.” But what about when it comes to writing and thinking skills? With Microsoft Word features like the Thesaurus and shortcuts like Wikipedia, I’ve come to the point where I can’t even write without my laptop. I can’t be expected to sit there picking my brain in search of the perfect word when Word is all too willing to do the work for me, or to read up on a subject when Wikipedia can give me all the main highlights at a glance. And haven’t you ever wished, while giving a presentation in class, that you could hit Shift+F7 and pop open a thesaurus window in your brain?

Pen and paper’s surely in the past–let’s just be wary that as computer brains get faster, ours don’t become more and more sluggish.

The headline’s not hyperbole — if you are studying French, stop. Studying that venerable old tongue may be costing you a job.

sacre bleu! A knee-jerk prognosis? Perhaps — but not by much. You see, inherent in studying French at Penn (or at any school) lay a two-fold problem: You are learning a language that is next to useless in the job market, and forfeiting your opportunity to learn one that is.

Is knowing French really going to get you a job? Well, when even French college graduates are fleeing to England simply to find a job, what is the chance you can succeed in France where the French themselves have failed?

Even in the French stronghold that is the EU, France cannot make its language matter. The de facto language of the EU is English (in one particularly embarrassing/hilarious incident, President Chirac stormed out of a press conference when his own French ministers used English). If French isn’t even necessary in France’s backyard, what are the odds that it is going to matter in New York? Sao Paolo? Tehran? Shanghai?

Penn has one of the most comprehensive foreign language centers in the United States. When you opt to take French, you are not only studying a language that is ornamental at best, but squandering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study a language that is relevant and useful in the 21st century (like Chinese) or genuinely unique (like Pashto).

Even if you don’t feel like learning languages that enhance your attractiveness to an employer, your global competition does–and is. In our wonderful era of quanjiuhua (Chinese for “globalization,” expect to hear more and more of that in the future), you are not merely competing for that Goldman Sachs job with kids from Harvard and Stanford, you are competing with the best and brightest from Seoul National University, Peking University, Oxford University — students every bit as smart as you, and for whom studying two or three languages is the norm.

To those of you with an open mind and desire to succeed, don’t study French. For the sake of your own career, as well as the international competitiveness of America in a world that has long since ceased revolving around Europe, take a language, any language, just not French.

Grannies en route to the slammer in October 2005. (grandmothersforpeace.org)

Civil disobedience isn’t just for the young–it’s also for the young at heart.

Last June, eleven angry grannies were taken into custody by Philadelphia police after the women asked army recruiters to let them enlist in the Iraq War in place of the soldiers. When asked to leave, the women refused and were charged with trespassing.

And just last month, the grannies appeared in court and got those charges repealed–to the delight of geriatric comrades and encouraging anti-war onlookers who bore hand painted banners shouting “Let my grannies go!” and shirts with “We will not be silent” splashed across the front.

All eleven women are part of the Philadelphia chapter of the Grandmothers for Peace Brigade , an organization first launched by New York grannies on behalf of children and grandchildren serving in the Iraq War.

After storming army recruiting offices in Philadelphia, these women knew the consequences they might face. In fact, three of the eleven had already been jailed in 2004 after protesting the Iraq War in front of the Philadelphia federal courthouse.

In particular, Lillian Willoughby — the 91 year-old matriarch of the bunch — has been jailed multiple times for translating her Quaker ideals into peaceful activism. And neither her wheelchair nor her age has stopped her. Willoughby has been instrumental in bringing a spirit of protest to the City of Brotherly Love — ever since 1957 while speaking out against American nuclear might.

Not only have these grannies challenged the age barriers in military service. They’ve also suggested the implicit inequality in a military draft that spares mothers and daughters but takes fathers and sons. And often, it’s the duty of those who stay behind to protest.

At Penn, it’s good to know that we’ve joined the rest of the nation in the push for peace. On campus, faculty and student mobilization against the war has been visually prominent with the memorial markers formerly strewn over College Green. And perhaps, like Lillian Willoughby, who began her activist career half a century ago, we can later become grannies (or grandpas) who rise to the challenge even after our youths.

Barbaro, jockey Edgar Prado up, wins the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., in this May 6, 2006 file photo. Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was euthanized Monday, Jan. 29, 2007, after complications from his breakdown at the Preakness last May. (AP Photo/Al Behrman)

The Associated Press reported this morning that Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was euthanized according to one of the horse’s co-owners.

So you mean the 6957838739409505 news alerts I received every time this horse coughed or had a doctor’s appointment weren’t necessary? Jeeeeeeeez!

As of one hour ago, USA Today reported on the horse’s condition. I think it’s inappropriate that America cares so much about the fate of a horse when people (humans), a much higher form of life (in my opinion) are dying of AIDS, cancer, and at war. Not to mention how many people die in car accidents every day. Yet, the mainstream media has decided it is BREAKING NEWS every time this little horse gets his hoof dressed or needs another pin in his leg. I can only hope that if I ever get sick I’d get 1/1000000th of the coverage.

Priorities people, we must have priorities. And you know what, the health of a single horse shouldn’t be one of them — especially when as ESPN reports — a massive virus is destroying the fishing industry in the Great Lakes, certainly a bigger tragedy for the animal world, not to mention to humanity.