If you are outdoorsy, get bored easily, or simply want to break away from the traditional educational procedure, then I have the tip for you. Go for walks, explore the city, and get homework done on your phone along the way! From outlines to first drafts, type it in an email to yourself while you roam around.

There are many benefits, making this at least worth the try. It gets you out of Hagerty and in the fresh air where you can see the beautiful autumn colors before winter. Or, use it during quarter three to enjoy the new warm sunny days of spring. Jump-start the creative juices and stop your doctor from nagging, because your legs, heart, and mind are all getting a healthy workout. Lastly, break the monotony. Get away from the boring routine of listening to lectures, tactfully perusing the texts, and carefully overcoming the coursework. Go explore! You can get all of these benefits while still completing your work! It’s a win-win!

I suppose not all students can benefit from this tip. Sorry, engineers, I don’t know if your MATLAB homework can be completed on your phone as you walk about the city. Though, I don’t doubt you folks are already cooking up a solution for that if you haven’t figured it out already. No, but all of you humanities and social science majors out there can surely take advantage of this. I know you have frequent papers due. So give it a shot, I promise it won’t disappoint. In fact, I think this little tip will change your whole outlook on writing papers. Hell, how do you think I wrote this?

The post Stop. Take time to look around and enjoy. appeared first on The Triangle.

It’s official (if you ever doubted it):America is a plutocracy, which means, in Lewis Lapham’s paraphrase of Lincoln, government of the rich, by the rich, and and for the rich. Everything about the country bespeaks the fact: the size of its McMansions and the poverty of its public education; the immunity of banks from the bankruptcies they cause and the millions driven from their homes who pay the price; the tax dollars and service overpayment extorted from the poor and diverted to the rich. One simple statistic, though, sums it all up. Ten percent of the country’s population owns 76 percent of its wealth.That leads 90 percent to divide the remaining 24 percent; and, of those, the bottom half has a negative net worth—it owns, minus its indebtedness, nothing at all.

This isn’t a phenomenon limited to the United States.Worldwide, one percent of the world’s population owns as much as the rest of it combined.Among developed nations, however, the U.S. ranks almost dead last (or, if you prefer, dead first) in income disparity.It’s been getting worse, and at an accelerating rate, for the past forty or more years.That giant sucking sound you hear is the last dollar being sucked out of the American consumer’s wallet.And then what?So what?

Yes, I’m asking the question:why, precisely, should we care?Or, more precisely, who should care?

The answer is, all of us.Including the rich.

All economies, down to the most primitive level, are built on markets. All markets are built on exchange. One-way transactions—in which value is offered but none received in return—are charities. These aren’t markets.In a market, if you don’t have something to give, you simply won’t get. The most basic level of exchange is labor. But labor must be compensated, that is, given the wherewithal for survival, if it is to be sustained.The lower the level of sustenance, the lower the quantity (and quality) of output. American slavery died because it was desperately inefficient compared to free labor markets. Forty percent of the pre-Civil War South’s population was enslaved; this population had no market access whatever. A small planter aristocracy had flourished, to that point, owing to direct labor appropriation, and to the market in slaves themselves.But the reality for most white Southerners without substantial slave labor was poverty, and this legacy that has continued. Our Southern states, with few exceptions, are our poorest.

In the long run, large-scale markets can neither be created nor maintained without widespread distribution of assets among potential buyers.The principal such asset is money. Where more and more of it is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, markets contract.To some extent they can be propped up by luxury consumption, but, as wealth concentration increases, this market too will reach saturation.There are just so many private planes you can fly.

Capitalism is a creator of markets, but a far more efficient killer of them. To put it another way, it is far better at concentrating than producing wealth.This causes overall wealth to shrink. Progresssive taxation, minimum wage and price supports, and various redistributive schemes are a means to combat the effects of this wealth trap. All of these things require legal scaffolding and governmental administration. Rich people generally oppose them, and where they control governments—which is effectively all the time, except in cases of dire crisis or revolution—they attempt to freeze or reverse them.Their preferred means of oxygenating markets is through consumer credit, which takes profit in the form of interest as well as from expanded sales. Since the deficit in purchasing power makes such financing necessary, it creates the classic boom and bust cycles of capitalism that regularly lead to collapse and depression.Without exception, every economic crisis of the past three hundred years—that is, since the creation of modern banking—has been a credit crisis, whose twin roots have been desperation (the desire to restart failed or stalled markets) and greed (the desire to exploit them as quickly and thoroughly as possible before they collapse again). Governments by and for the rich, meanwhile, have facilitated this process by currency manipulation and the systematic creation of credit bubbles. Much if not most of the popular resentment directed at governments has arisen from the sense that they operate a swindle.This resentment is not misplaced, even as it is diverted against the few programs that limit rather than spread the damage inflicted by wealth concentration.

The political discussion of the past two hundred years has essentially involved the question of whether a regulated capitalism is tolerable, or whether its wholesale replacement is necessary. This is the debate between liberalism and socialism. The failure or ill effects of statocratic markets in the twentieth century (misnomered “socialism”) has not settled this question; democratic market socialism is not an impossible construct. Liberalism, for its part, has fallen flat on its face. Its ‘finest’ achievement, Keynesian economics, has accomplished nothing more than to provide the shovel brigade for capitalist crises, and, in the current one, its principal function has been to facilitate the further growth of structural inequality by bailing out banks and conglomerates.Paul Krugman and Joseph Stieglitz, our Keynesian Nobel laureates, can’t figure this out, but Wall Street has:let central banks print only as much money as the rich require to recoup their most destabilizing losses, and the Devil take the hindmost; namely, the rest of us. Thus it is that Americans continue to be thrown out of their homes and banks reclaim them on the cheap; thus it is that Europe, the bastion of so-called social democracy, totters along in depression after nearly a decade and drives states like Greece into terminal penury.

As politics, this is soak-the-poor tyranny; as economics, it is ultimately unsustainable. It’s not socialists who want to ignore the laws of the market, but capitalists. A world that lives on sham markets, created only to be destroyed, can’t last. It shouldn’t, either, but that’s another matter.And when it crashes for good, there’ll be hell to pay.The Devil has arranged this, too.

Robert Zaller is Professor of History at Drexel University.

The post Rich or poor, inequality should be a major concern appeared first on The Triangle.

Halloween is this weekend and I’m excited for all the festivities that come with it. However, I’m also kind of nervous about what I’ll see across not only our college campus, but the nation as a whole. Halloween is prime time for cultural appropriation. Over the past several years, but especially of late, cultural appropriation has become one of those buzzwords featured on blogs, tweets and the like that many people see but often don’t understand.

If you google cultural appropriation this is what will come up: “Cultural appropriation is a sociological concept which views the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture as a largely negative phenomenon”. Nice try Google, but you’re missing a key point.

Cultural appropriation involves a power dynamic as a key part of its definition. It’s not a cultural exchange in which cultures borrow from one another as a form of honoring one another: that requires even footing. It’s an issue of a dominant culture or group adopting or using the culture of a less dominant, usually oppressed culture or group. In other words, the argument that others can appropriate American culture is void because Caucasian American culture is the dominant culture and most Caucasian Americans as perpetuators (actively or passively) of the so-called “system” have not been systematically oppressed.

Cultural appropriation has a lot to do with striping away the experience of a people or group. I remember a couple of years ago when I saw my friend’s mom tweeting about the Washington Redskins and how they needed to change their name. At the time, I didn’t get it. The football team was named after the Native Americans, it was to honor them….right? WRONG. Later, I learned the word was derived from the term to refer to the red skins of dead Native Americans. Someone along the way decided that they should take that horrific moment in history and use it to name a bunch of men running around in sweaty pads playing a sport watched for leisure. By doing so, it lessened the value of the experience that so many Native Americans experienced when white colonialists appeared. In a way, to the oppressor, it was genius. Now when you say “redskins,” people think of the team. How many people can even remember what it meant, other than those for whom it meant the loss of life for their people? It is a constant reminder of their underprivileged place in society. It wasn’t the Native Americans donning red skins jerseys, it was the later generations of the colonialists who coined the name that they would cheer every Sunday, unknowingly disempowering the struggle that so many had faced all in the name of a pig skin.

But wait, you’re just wearing that native American princess/geisha/sexy seniorita/saari costume cause you think it’s cool, not because you’re trying oppress or strip away anyone’s culture. It’s all in the name of fun right? But it isn’t. For most of the costumes that are usually appropriated on Halloween night, those who wore them in their proper context, wore them knowing that by embracing their culture or religion through clothing, language, etc., they would face prejudice, injustice and cruelty. So no you cannot take their pain and turn it into your laughter and thinking you can is just a testament to how privileged you feel. And that privilege, the same privilege that allowed so many religions and ethnic groups to be persecuted along the way, is the same privilege that divides us today. And if we are making any strides toward equality, we need to start with small things like this.

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The issue of French-Muslim violence has increased to dangerous levels in correlation with the escalating immigrant population, evidenced first the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. Ultimately, people have become more suspicious, if not afraid, of what Muslim immigrants could do in France. This has forced major political parties to adopt a sharper take on not only how to solve the problem of immigration, but also of its present Muslim population.

Indeed, France has come to a point where its present Muslim population is clearly becoming a more prominent ethnicity and culture: According to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies’ figures, the birth rate in French-Muslim women exceeds the one of any other French women. Those children often grow up with a more conservative and religious education (excluding pork from their diets, young girls covering their heads, legs and arms), which creates a power struggle between the culture of their parents and that of their schoolmates as they grow up. As a result, the French-Muslim population is often marginalized in ghettos and does not fit in due to a lack of means, education and cultural integrity. I feel that one main source of conflict is the problem of “laicite” which “prohibits the display of conspicuous religious symbols in public places”. This principle was largely ignored, however, to the extent that in 2004 the French parliament adopted a law prohibiting female students from wearing headscarves in public schools and another in 2010 that prohibits women from wearing face-covering veils in public places. Therefore, we already see a confrontational attitude from immigrants who do not want to compromise.

Apart from the cultural clash, there is also a discrepancy in higher education and employment opportunities between French-Muslims and non-immigrants as a result of their unwillingness follow the laicite law. For example, according to the Huffington Post, “the levels of academic performance of the children of immigrants are below those of other French schoolchildren. Ethnic minorities also suffer from employment discrimination,” which includes discrimination on family names. An employer will more likely hire someone like Jean Christophe Dumas than a Mohammed Ben Ali, regardless of the level of studies or qualifications. As a result, Muslim youth of second or third generation living in France have adopted a dedication to their religion as a way to demonstrate that they, too, belong to a specific culture. Some even leave France and are lured to join terrorists groups in Syria or Pakistan, or remain in France and recruit secretly other men in similar situations. According to the New York Times, “Islam has become more than a religion, to many French youths of immigrants origin, it now provides a culture that France itself has not managed to instill,” which I feel is not the solution to express their frustration toward the system.

To top it all off, France has to deal with an increasing flux of immigrants from countries of the Maghreb desperately trying to get into the closest European countries and flee the precarious conditions of their country of origin, be they terrorism or dictatorships. “Illegal migrants desperate to get in to Britain have exploited the closing of Calais and travel chaos on both sides of the Channel,” as written in an article in The Telegraph UK. For example, there were thousands of migrants who have massed at the French port used a wildcat strike by French ferry workers to try and clamber on to Britain-bound lorries that were left queuing for hours. French police has become more violent at borders as migrants get more determined to enter illegally and through different loopholes. Many have to be saved at sea near the Italian border as well and then sent back to their country. So we see where this is going, France cannot tackle the rebellious Muslim teenagers in land and at the same time shelter more immigrants who will more likely not integrate the society and end up as frustrated as if they never left. The main issue is that, with the increase of Arabic rebellions and terrorists attacks, French people start to resent their unwillingness to cooperate as a sign of disrespect and even, of possible danger or threat. Therefore what decision should France take on immigration and its Muslim population who do not respect French laws? What future can we predict for France? A clear distinction has been established between those who are ready for change and accept the new identity of France and those who decisively want to get rid of “suspicious” immigrants.

On one hand, some people such as Michel Houellebecq and his book “Suomission,” have pessimistically accepted the idea that the French identity and the significance of being French has been fundamentally altered by Islam disapora and that they have to “yield” to this change. Hooellebecq foresees French government run by Muslim people in 2022. According to Eric Zemmour, a television debater and a polemicist, “today, our elites think it’s France that needs to change to suit Islam, and not the other way around […] with this system, we’re headed toward civil war […] Sooner or later, civil war between Muslims and the rest of the population is inevitable.” It’s unfortunate to admit that if the French people remain passive to this cultural change, this could potentially happen.

A counter example, to which I partially agree with, is the political party, National Front, which is determined to instill their convictions that France will remain French and keep its culture, making those of immigrants secondary. As written in OnIslam.net, “74 percent of the French said that Islam ‘is not compatible with French society.’” The National Front also argue that those immigrants take advantage of France financial benefits and welfare with social security, public education and financial coverage and therefore they should close all borders. In August 2015, the first secretary of the socialist parti, Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, accused the National Front of saying “n’importe quoi” (which translates as “nonsense”) and argued that their plan will not succeed since it would mean sending back at least four million French-Muslims. So, from a pragmatic stand point, it is impossible to send back all the immigrants that are considered a “threat”, yet it becomes important to impose our own culture as the one they chose to move into and that they need to respect that even if we are accommodating and tolerant, they are not in the Middle East anymore.

On that note, improvements are being attempted, but yet again not from the immigrants’ side. The New York Times has issued an article in January 2015, explaining how the French government takes responsibility that it hasn’t paid enough attention to these marginalized groups of the society which explains recruitments to serve in Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan or Lybia. Furthermore, The president of the French Republic Francois Hollande has declared in December 2014 that French will pride itself to remain a country welcoming foreigners and even launch the opening of the National Museum of the history of immigration. France welcomes since 10 years more than 200,000 immigrants and 60,000 of them are students others are families, refugees or economic immigrants. Holland emphasized the fact that foreigners are necessary in order to ensure an economic ascension of France and inclusion in globalization.

All in all, I believe France has to find the right balance between tackling the issue if integrity for its Muslim population inland before accepting more immigrants. It has to reinforce immigration quotas and reforms to prevent violence and trafficking at the borders keeping in mind that most of these people are only seeking for a better life. In other words, France should remain a welcoming country to foreigners yet preserve its French identity and culture without yielding to the Muslim culture out of fear.

The post Are Muslims becoming the invasive species of French culture? appeared first on The Triangle.

When logging in Facebook does it ever occur to you that you’re consistently being watched for marketing purposes and your advantageous “social capital”? No, of course not. You think about that cute girl you just added and wonder if she accepted you, whether the group you’re following has posted new activities for this coming week, or if someone you absolutely don’t know has added you as a friend in order to expand the “Yeah-I have-friends” Facebook list. What seems obvious is that most people are aware that their data is being watched yet they simply do not care of the consequences as long as it doesn’t affect their day-to-day lives. It doesn’t matter if “those people” know one is a sex maniac as long as his identity isn’t publically revealed to his entourage. That being said, I believe we should be more aware of our “social exploitation”.
We know that some employers look at our background history through social media as a crucial step of the hiring ritual. If someone’s boss asked him for his password that would be a direct affront to his privacy. However, when companies collect data without knowledge of their employee they can avoid all the hassle while simultaneously making their company rise. Mark Andrejevic, author of A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites,discusses in great depth the contemporary meaning of “privacy” and “exploitation”. Andrejevic argues that our “creative activity” is taken away from us. In the sense that, to a certain extent, the leisure time we spend on social media produces valuable data and this productivity can be associated with a form of labor (“immaterial labor”). The core message is that we are being exploited and deprived from our rights to privacy.

In order to make it clearer, let’s take a look at Facebook’s privacy policy: if you notice closely the privacy policy only tackles questions to which they are willing to answer such as who can see my posts, who can have access to information and this solely includes the people I’m friends with. It does not involve, in any circumstances, the corporations who find their way into my profile and track my every move. If you go on the section controlling who can find you” it merely explains how people you might not know can or cannot find you in order to “friend” you. But, tracking devices will not “friend” you in order to get the data they want. Therefore, we can say there’s only partial privacy on Facebook which we think is sufficient even though it’s
purely ornamental.

In the same idea, I’d like to draw attention to the software Disconnect.me which can show how many people are looking at your activity while you are on a particular site and then “route all your Internet activity through our encrypted tunnel, which prevents wireless eavesdropping, secures your connections and protects against other online threats.”

By way of illustration, with dating sites, we give out personal information in order to build the most accurate representation of us in order to find our “significant other” and smartphones become mini-tracking devices. Corporations like to pick up on what their buyers might be interested in such as do they drink, are they vegan or vegetarian? If you are using a particular application people can know where you are and track your activity. There are things called “data brokers” where the people track your data and can then sell it to companies. Most of those brokers are invited by our computers “and most computers or browsers allow them in by default is the way to think about it”.

Facebook and other networking websites are “digital enclosure” which allows companies to make us participants of “ongoing controlled experiments”, target their advertisement and therefore the demand without having our consent. We facilitate their work and avoid them to go through the procedure of asking for our consent which is a waste of time, resources, budget. The problem is that people do not feel direct affected by the issue because they do not have the same sensitivity or concern for the meaning of privacy. As long as this “so-called exploitation” will not be a concrete threat to their personal lives they will continue not caring. I believe it is important to show already now our discontentment since we do not know the extent of damage those tracking software’s can do to us in the next 50 years. Can the situation change profoundly? “Only with mass action”

Claire Davis is an international area studies major. She can be contacted at op-ed@thetriangle.org

The post Giving up our rights to privacy appeared first on The Triangle.

Dear Editors of The Triangle,

Robert Zaller’s opinion article Oct. 2 on Pope Francis’ visit to Philadelphia is an incoherent mess. He relies time and again on hyperbole, histrionics and misdirection. Mr. Zaller views the pope’s reception as somehow conferring upon Catholicism the status of official state religion. To my knowledge, none of our political leaders have sworn allegiance to the Holy See or introduced any legislation to this end. He further claims the national media “engaged in a collective act of genuflection.” Perhaps the coverage was excessive, but when has the media ever exercised restraint? Was the media supposed to pretend the leader of an estimated 1.2 billion Catholics was not coming?

Zaller conflates deference and hospitality with endorsement. Members of our government were seen with Pope Francis, and Zaller would have us believe that now everyone from the President to the washroom attendant at the Supreme Court is a card-carrying Catholic. Pope Francis visited with Raul and Fidel Castro while in Cuba. Are we to assume the Castro brothers now endorse Catholicism after more than half a century denouncing it? Of course not, but Zaller relies heavily on this kind of magical thinking to make his point. It is the stuff of conspiracy theories.

So, what kind of reception should the pope have received instead? Zaller doesn’t say. Instead, he devotes a large portion of his article whining about the attention paid to the pope. He says it was “tedious and offensive,” likening the experience to a “trip back to the Middle Ages.” Nothing more than exaggeration and pettiness. Hurt feelings do not a compelling argument make.

Zaller also took umbrage at Archbishop Chaput’s comments about the American character tied to belief in God. Zaller interprets the Archbishop as imputing him—a non-believer—as being un-American and possessing no character. How he arrived at this particular inference he does not say. Magical thinking again?

Next, Zaller objected to the use of Independence Hall as a site for the Catholic Church’s rhetoric. This is ironic considering earlier in the piece, Zaller wrote, “Our Constitution says that the practice of religion is a right, but that no laws respecting its establishment may be made.” Zaller refers of course to the first amendment, an amendment that in addition to freedom of religion also protects freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Archbishop Chaput and Pope Francis exercised exactly those rights when they spoke at Independence Hall, home of the Liberty Bell—which coincidentally bears an inscription from Leviticus.
On one hand, Zaller praises the United States as “the world’s most amazing experiment in diversity,” and on the other argues that “public life should espouse no creed but that of democracy itself. It is the one creed that binds us together.” Such a monolithic conception of public life goes against the very principles the first amendment represents.

We are a pluralistic society, and it’s true that in order to function we must have a minimal consensus on shared values such as mutual respect and tolerance. But to say there can be only one creed in public life is the antithesis of a pluralistic society. The Catholics who met in Philadelphia did not assert their faith at the expense of anyone else. They did not coerce anyone. They merely exercised their constitutional rights.
Faith unites nearly 70 million American Catholics in ways perhaps stronger than secular virtues ever will. One need only turn on the nightly news to see the state of disarray of the American electorate. The World Meeting of Families served as a counterpoint to all that. It was a peaceful expression of faith, diversity and goodwill. And what better venue than Philadelphia, a city whose name literally translates as “brotherly love.”

The thousands of people who came to Philadelphia to see Pope Francis, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, engaged in something bigger than themselves. Our city was given the opportunity to shine on the national and international stage, and we succeeded. Had we left it to Zaller, it might never have happened.

Sincerely,

Spencer Hayes

The post Letter to the Editor appeared first on The Triangle.

ROAR for Good, a young start-up company working out of Drexel University’s ExCITe Center, opened pre-orders for their new smart defense jewelry called Athena on Oct. 20. Founders Yasmine Mustafa and Anthony Gold created the company to market fashionable jewelry that helps deter attackers.

Shaped like a circular pendant, the piece can be worn as a necklace, or clipped on a bag or belt. After purchasing Athena, users can create an account on their phones that is then connected to the piece. If the wearer ever feels that they are in danger, they can press and hold the pendant for three seconds. Athena then emits a loud alarm and sends a distress signal to all of the listed emergency contacts with the user’s location. The piece comes in different colors and designs to match various styles.

Photo courtesy: Orly Margulis

Mustafa was inspired to create the product after traveling throughout South America and encountering many women who had been attacked. Coming back to the U.S., she discovered that someone had been raped a block away from her apartment. While looking for a way to protect herself, Mustafa noticed that self-defense options for women were very limited.

Although many would argue that women can carry safety products such as mace, some of these products are unsafe and even illegal in certain states. That fact, as well as the staggering statistics that one in four women will be assaulted on college campuses and one in five women have been a victim of rape or attempted rape, showed Mustafa that there was a gap in the market for practical safety mechanisms for women. She soon partnered with Anthony Gold, and together came up with the idea for self-defense jewelry.

“Our tagline is ‘Live your life boldly and without fear.’ We want everyone to be able to live their lives with that sense of enablement,” Mustafa wrote in an email.

It was with this thought in mind that they named the jewelry after the Greek goddess Athena.

“Athena is a Greek goddess who epitomizes that bottom line and represents a great many virtues, all of which we hope to embody within both our company and our products. Strength, law and justice, courage, inspiration—these are essential elements of both ROAR for Good and the Athena device,” Mustafa continued.

But for some, the product doesn’t inspire as much strength as other safety alternatives. Although they think Athena is a good idea in theory, freshmen Kayla Maoani and Camila Delgado, who carries mace in her backpack, felt that the physical defense gave them a better of security.

Photo courtesy: Orly Margulis

“It’s a way of feeling a bit more comfortable rather than being on edge at all times,” Delgado explained as she pulled out the small bottle of mace she had attached to her key chain.

“It really is the responsible thing to do, and I should get some,” Maoni agreed.

Jennifer Gallup, a chemical engineering pre-junior, commented that although she couldn’t see herself using the product at Drexel, she saw where it could be helpful.

“It would be something effective if people are maybe new in town or just intimidated by the city. However, it might also become more of an issue than anything else if people abuse it,” she noted.

The company hopes to impact the community with more than just their product, “Additionally, a percent of the profit will be donated to charities dedicated to reducing violence against women by teaching empathy, respect, and equality to young boys to help decrease aggression and get to the root cause of the assault,” she explained.

As with most start-ups, resources were scarce in the beginning, however, ROAR was able to build partnerships with other non-profits as well as investors such as Dreamit, Ben Franklin Technology Partners and Untours Foundation to produce Athena.

ROAR for Good hopes to continue developing materials like the Athena. Currently, they are working to engineer a solution so that Athena will have the function to make direct calls to 911. As for now, they’re ready to launch.

Pre-orders began Oct. 20.

The post ROAR for good: accessorizing against assault appeared first on The Triangle.

As a barista at Starbucks, I get to see and meet a lot of people. Between orders of pumpkin spice lattes (which although considered a basic white girl drink, I’ve seen more guys order than girls), I sometimes get the opportunity to look out at the customers. What I usually see is a really long line, which, as boring as it is for you, is daunting for me. I also see phones. Phones everywhere. People texting, snapchatting, headphones in, headphones out, iPhone, Samsung, so many freaking phones. I can’t help but wonder how many people have missed out on making new friends or even just having nice conversations due to the glass screen in front of them.

We no longer know how to have small talk. Instead of saying “hello,” or “how are you,” we are content with substituting human interaction for online affirmation. It happens even among friends: you’ve probably experienced it. That moment when you’re hanging out with a group only to look around and see that everyone is on their phones. Sure, you’ll have a short conversation that’ll provide a good tweet, maybe take a snap together, and one of you can put it on your story and the other can Instagram it. Either way, the focus of the time spent together moves from being about quality of time to quantity of likes. Are you really having fun if Facebook doesn’t know about it? Maybe this stems from our inability to endure silence. We feel that we must constantly fill up quiet space, so instead of letting the silence fall until new ideas are brought out, we whip out our phones and a domino effect ensues as one by one other people pull out their devices. Our discomfort with silence extends insofar that we are unable to be alone. Even when we are away from others, we still have the ever-present dings of notifications, emails and texts that let technology begin to overrun our lives.

Maybe we’re afraid to talk because when we do, we can never quite say what we want. We are told that talking about politics or religion is impolite, so we are left with TV shows and shallow topics to discuss. Instead of challenging one another’s beliefs and conferring about the future our nation, we talk about the game last night or how good Scandal is or was or will forever be. Our society tells us that we need to do our best never to offend, never step on toes, but many a great idea has been born through conversation. It used to be that critical thinkers would sit and talk and wrestle with ideas about the human experience, about politics, about everything and anything beneath and beyond the stars. We can barely even discuss the upcoming election let alone philosophize. Actually no. It’s that we lack the ability. It’s just that we don’t prioritize. We can discuss things in the classroom, but outside, our thoughts are elsewhere.

People are starting to recognize the problems though. They even have games now to inspire discourse in which people put their phones down and the first to pick up their phone has to pick up the tab instead. But really, how sad is it that we have incentivize conversation? When your phone seems more alive than you do, it might be time to unplug.

The post Losing the art of conversation one tweet at a time appeared first on The Triangle.

Last week, I saw the President of the United States greeting Pope Francis on his arrival in Washington, D.C. A day later, the Pope was addressing Congress. A couple of days after that, I watched him deliver a speech in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
What’s wrong with this picture?

Technically, the Pope is a head of state. Courtesy of the Lateran Treaty, which the papacy signed with Benito Mussolini in 1929, the Vatican—all 108.7 acres of it—is an independent, self-governing entity. It does not, however, maintain state-to-state relations with other countries, nor does it have accredited ambassadors. It’s the site of a building complex, a bureaucracy that administers the affairs of a worldwide religion and the residence of the Pope. Supposedly, it maintains open channels to the deity who occupies the universe but has no earthly headquarters.

Our national currency says that we are under God, but isn’t otherwise specific on the subject. Our Constitution says that the practice of religion is a right, but that no laws respecting its establishment may be made. Church and state, as the saying goes, are separate, once and forever.

It’s never been that simple, of course; and under our last two presidents the dividing line between church and state has been deliberately eroded. Still, no particular religion has been officially favored: until now. The papal procession through Washington, New York and Philadelphia, which shut down the nation’s political and financial capitals as well as the birthplace city of the world’s first secular democracy, was unlike any reception in American history. Our political representatives—president and vice president, cabinet officers, senators and Congressmen, governors and mayors—fell over themselves, bending the knee if not kissing the ring. It could only be compared to an imperial entry in some Old Regime country where divine right was alive and well.
My thought was, well, the Counter-Reformation has won.

Five hundred years ago, Christianity was divided by the Protestant Reformation. Protestants of numerous varieties repudiated the Catholic church and all its works: its popes, its canons, its images, its saints and above all its interpretation of the Bible and the entire worldly edifice of clerical administration and theological presumption built on it. Rome became Babylon, and the pope himself the Antichrist. The church, stunned, was set back on its heels. Over the next century, however, it attempted to regroup, and even to reconquer the territories and populations it had lost to the Protestant heresies. In the early 17th century, it appeared for a time that it might succeed. This didn’t happen, but the church did maintain one advantage over its foes: its internal unity, the product of unyielding dogma, authoritarian control and the figure of the pope, its absolute spiritual head and the unquestioned ruler of its far-flung empire.

The 18th century brought another challenge, the movement of religious skepticism and secular reform known as the Enlightenment. A great nation was born out of this climate: ours. The majority of our Founding Fathers were neither Catholic nor Protestant, but adherents of something called Deism, the century’s halfway house for atheism. When French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, in replying to a critic who asked why God was absent from his cosmos, said that he simply had no need of such a hypothesis, he was speaking with just a little more frankness than usual for the elite leadership that had made the United States. God was still invoked occasionally for rhetorical purposes, for example by Lincoln, and Christian belief was still entertained in the population at large. But the fashion of American presidents parading their religious convictions or professing to be born again is a quite recent innovation. Most of them in our history would have thought such bad manners to be deplorable, not to say profoundly embarrassing. In any case, one rule appeared sacrosanct: no one professing the Catholic faith could be president. The reason for this was simple: a Catholic president would necessarily be under the spiritual tyranny of Rome, taking his orders from the pope. What this meant in turn was that, at bottom, Catholicism and democracy were incompatible. The leader of a free country chosen openly by an electorate of its adult citizens could not simultaneously owe his allegiance to an autocrat chosen in secret by a conclave of a few dozen, and claiming authority not only over law but conscience.

It was only in 1960 that a Catholic president was finally elected, and the kind of suspicions that lingered about John F. Kennedy have been indirectly revived in the persistent belief of the sizable minority who believe that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim today. We now demand regular professions of piety in our leaders, even those who, like Ronald Reagan, have no more faith than Ben Franklin. Still though, the faith we’re most comfortable with is a vaguely ecumenical Protestantism. We don’t want hard-core papists, but we don’t want holly rollers either.

This returns us to Pope Francis. He seems a fairly down to earth guy for the Vicar of Christ, and he says, well, pretty much what all popes say about peace, charity, and respect for our home planet. After Benedict XVI, it’s easy for him to sound liberal, at least in a Vatican context. And he has had great press. Our local paper of record, the Philadelphia Inquirer, turned some months ago into an English-language version of L’Osservatore Romano, and it was an open secret that Comcast, the corporate owner of NBC, had given orders to push the Pope’s visit. The entire national media, though, seemed to be engaged in a collective act of genuflection. If Francis were the Second Coming in person, he couldn’t have had better buzz.

I have personally found this both tedious and offensive. When Archbishop Chaput, also speaking in front of Independence Hall, declared that the American character had been formed by a belief in a merciful God, I felt myself decidedly in need of a Heimlich maneuver. I do not profess any religion, and, if a God should exist, mercy would seem to be among his least apparent attributes. If the Archbishop is correct, this must mean either that I am not an American, or that I have no character. I am pretty sure of the first, and I would respectfully leave the judgment of the second to others.

The Archbishop is perfectly entitled to say such things in one of his churches, but not, as far as I am concerned, in front of Independence Hall. Standing beside him, the bronze statue of George Washington appeared not to turn a hair, though the real George may have been spinning in his grave, along with his friends Ben, Alexander, Tom and James. I didn’t appreciate the trip back to the Middle Ages, and I’m presuming they didn’t either. Nor was I left any sanguine feeling about the Republic. We are a diverse nation: the world’s most amazing experiment in diversity. Even for six days, I did not appreciate being conscripted as an honorary Catholic. Our public life should espouse no creed but that of democracy itself. It is the one creed that holds us together.

I have pondered this very strange, and quite unprecedented week in our country’s history. There are 70 million Catholics in America (not all of them happy with this particular pontiff), but there are also 250 million people who are not. Some, maybe a goodly number, may feel about the papal visit as I do. There were a few rumblings on the Evangelical right about the Antichrist being in town. A front page of the Inquirer devoted entirely to the Pope had an advertisement for the Book of Mormon placed strategically at the bottom of it. Some Native Americans complained about the particularly tone-deaf canonization of Father Junipero Serra, whose mission to California in the eighteenth century spread the Word while drastically reducing the indigenous population.

On the whole, however, Francis’ visit was triumphal. He soared above politics while plunging right into them, as perhaps only a pope can do. In a world without a single admired political figure and no other spiritual one to give him competition, Francis answered, if briefly, to our great hunger for moral leadership. Even a week off Donald Trump, after all is a treasure to be prized.

As for the Catholic church, it has always played the long game, and its long suit is the papacy itself. The supremacy of the Bishop of Rome has periodically been challenged within the church as well as outside it, but it is the institution that both historically defines and practically speaks for it. A splintered, sectarian Protestantism has nothing to compete with it; nor, for that matter, what appears to be an increasingly polarized democratic polity. Yet it is deeply ironic that the leader of the world’s most authoritarian and undemocratic institution should be greeted, even if momentarily, as a near-savior in the world’s oldest functioning republic. You had to see it to believe it.

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I want to personally invite all Drexel students to join me at the Daskalakis Athletic Center for the most exciting week of professional squash. From Oct. 8 through Oct. 17, Drexel University will be hosting the 2015 Men’s and Women’s U.S. Open at the DAC. General admission is free for students with a valid Drexel ID. Qualifying begins on Oct. 8, with Drexel’s head squash coach, John White, former world number one player, trying to battle his way into the main draw, which begins Oct. 10. The finals will be held Oct. 17.
Squash first arrived in the United States in Philadelphia, where the U.S. Squash governing association was founded in 1904. Although the organization later moved to New York, there is still a squash shot named after our city: the wicked “Philadelphia” touches three walls and leaves one’s opponent fit to be tied into a Philly pretzel. Today, more than twenty million play squash worldwide. Of British origin, squash has spread throughout the Commonwealth countries, and the best players in the world now hail from Egypt, Pakistan, India and Australia. Drexel’s varsity squash teams finished last season as the 12th- and 13th-ranked teams in the nation for men and women, respectively.

Professional squash is a feast for the eyes. Squash, at the world-class level, reminds me of a combination between a Cirque du Soleil performance in Montreal and a Garry Kasparov versus Bobby Fisher chess match in Reykjavik. Squash is a tough game with simple rules. Two competitors are confined to a rectangular glass enclosure with the semisoft squash ball traveling at speeds up to 180 mph, and with all walls and angles in play, it is mesmerizing to watch. The athletes perform with a beautiful combination of agility and power. Their footwork is as graceful as ballet, and their stamina rivals that of triathletes. With the struggle for points often lasting 20 to 30 strokes, extreme fitness is the price of admission to world-class squash. The winner, however, is often the player who outfoxes his or her rival. The principal object in squash is the ball. During a match, it becomes the center of attention. How it behaves—its cosmic order of trajectory and velocity—is the basis of all play. It and the athletes who propel it can do astonishing things that defy intuition, all of which you can now see for yourself at the DAC.

It is an honor for Drexel University to join forces with U.S. Squash and serve as the host for this world-class tournament. The Open fits perfectly with Drexel’s mission to celebrate, within an international context, a world-class performance culture at 33rd and Market streets, while being a leader of gender equity on and off the court. The Open has a commitment to gender equity, being the first professional tournament in the world to offer equal prize money and equal draws for both men and women (this year, 32 men and women will each compete in the main draw for a total of $300,000).

So take a time-out between your classes and bring a friend over to the DAC to watch the Open. Adopt one of the many intriguing players from all over world to follow and cheer for. As a neuropsychology professor, I know that it takes up to 75 percent of the brain to follow and watch a moving squash ball. Thus, I also recommend watching squash as good mind therapy from your rigorous class schedule.
See you at the DAC!

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