During my Junior year at Penn, I wrote a weekly column entitled “Southern Comfort” for The Daily Pennsylvanian. I’ve collected links to those columns, titles of which were penned by my editor, here for anyone who might be interested.
Bonus: The Daily Pennsylvanian ran an article on me after I begin ‘publishing’ ShrinkWrapped, a literary magazine I was insprired to create the summer before my partially aborted senior year.
December 4th: Meeting the Potential of Diversity. Last column.
November 20th: What Fight Though Yonder Window Breaks. A paean to professional Wrestling.
November 13th: The UA Should Read Out.
October 30th: Guns Don’t Defend People– The Law Does.
October 23th: A vote for Nader won’t be wasted. This is a little embarrassing in light of the past eight years, but then again hindsight is 20/20.
October 9th: Alcoholism research not a case of monkey business.
The segment began with video footage of the original alcoholic monkey. After consuming his fill, he tried to walk, stumbled, fell on his back and then lay there, scratching his tummy and genitals simultaneously until he fell asleep — basically a Quad freshman on a typical Friday night.
October 2nd: Malls, walls, dividing Penn and the community. When doing the research for this piece about Penn’s real estate development (read: gentrification) plans, I spent an hour or so interviewing their top real estate official; I always found it funny how having a voice in the school’s paper gave you immediate relevance. None of the material from the interview ended up being usable because he kept simply espousing Penn’s stated position of allowing community businesses to remain. Depsite this, from where I was sitting I could see this huge map, replete with 3-D renderings, showing alternative retail plans for the local, adjacent corridor I was writing about. Before the interview had begn though, I had been told that everything in the office was convenienty off the record. I couldn’t comprehend how he could sit there and lie to my face for an hour.
September 25th: Hypersensitity Alert
While reading through old articles, I found a comment by Martin Dias, a former head of the Black Student League, to be quite poignant: “People are spending all this time trying to figure out whether ‘water buffalo’ is racial slur. Black students have a lot of problems at this school. If someone calls me a water buffalo, I give them the finger and walk.”
September 18th: Too Costly at Any Price. An examination of sports in The Ivy League. This column generated more hate mail (here, here, and here) than any other column that year. One of my best written and researched articles. The metaphor that made me famous, however, briefly:
Ultimately, what do varsity sports do for Penn beside provide some entertainment and distribute degrees to unqualified students? If we wanted to watch some ball games, we could just hire some trained seals from Barnum and Bailey’s and save some cash in the process.
September 13th: Forget Wall St, This Job’s For Me. My very first column; lacks the polish of subsequent entries. Makes me a cringe a bit when I re-read it.
I often hear social and political commentary lamenting the demise of the family structure in America, but I’m all for it. Family is not some rigidly built patriarchal structure upon which this country stands. Family is whatever we make of it.
