Word: assignation
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...welfare bill before resigning because he could not stomach it. He was acting out of principled thinking. But whatever one's reasons, total constancy to the ideal is unrealistic. A Few Good Men was about the potential inhumanity of too much Semper Fi. Even dogs, to whom we assign unswerving devotion, will, because they are dogs, bite the hands that feed them. (Semper Fido...
...even now, as the spring semester begins, the question still lingers. As I flip through syllabi and browse reading lists, I question the professors of this fine school. What are my professors thinking when they assign such overwhelming amounts of reading? Do they honestly think it feasible to read, understand and appreciate 150 pages of dense reading each week? Are they not aware that Harvard students are enrolled in other courses, that students also have a life outside of academia? Since when did more become synonymous with better when it comes to education...
Some might say that in my support for less reading, I am endorsing the easy, short route. This is not my intention. I am merely suggesting the application of Occam's Razor to our reading list--assign as much as necessary and as little as possible. It is time our teachers start favoring quality over quantity...
...Earth was slammed 65 million years ago by a massive rock formation that created an enormous crater in the Yucatan Peninsula and probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Everyone recognizes the devastating effect of the dino-death asteroid, Jaroff points out, but many people are still hesitant to assign any real significance to asteroid studies. "The scientists who began looking for information back in the 1970s were hamstrung by a general lack of funding. They were greeted in Congress by giggles...
What draws us close are accidents--catastrophes to which we attempt to assign blame or affix explanations but which we know intuitively to be inexplicable. In the past year, a teacher and 12 schoolchildren were shot down by schoolchildren in Colorado; 12 people died building a bonfire in Texas; six fire fighters died fighting a blaze in a warehouse in Massachusetts; six Marines and a Navy man fell to their death in a helicopter exercise off the coast of San Diego. Our insistently enlightened minds leap to "solve" such things, but their effect on our spirits has more...