A conversation that I had with a friend while traveling back from NYC to school in Ithaca really struck me. We talked about assimilation, the process that immigrants go through when they come to America. Assimilation is a word that I’m sure that most have heard of. It refers to the slow but inevitable homogenization that mainstream American culture imposes on immigrants. My friend and I are both Asian-American, stuck between the culture of America...
In recent times, there have been clear instances of the infringement of freedom of speech in corporations and businesses where first amendment rights aren’t applicable as they are within private settings. For example, in 2017, James Damore wrote a memo that detailed his reservations to the diversity programs that are held within the Google workplace, asserting that while discrimination does exist, it doesn’t exist solely due to the oppression of the powerful (usually white men)...
Introduction I finished a history book, Mao’s Great Famine, which details the consequences of the Great Leap Forward in the infancy of Communist China. It was written after the author, Frank Dikötter, studied in the newly opened Chinese provincial, city and county archives, which were previously inaccessible due to government policy. He was one of the few historians granted access to those archives, meaning that he is one of the few foreigners to be able to...
