I have to admit I was quite nervous when I came here. It was new, I came right out of high school, and I obviously didn’t know anyone. I have never been particularly good at adapting to social situations. But it has been amazing, to be honest, I never expected it to be so good….
What Salmon Teaches Us about Connection
By Friederike Uebel Another week of pondering on the impermanence of life and the interconnectedness of all things goes by. Through life’s up and down’s I find peace in this knowing. Trusting that there still are more interwoven relationships keeping another in check, than we are collectively destroying. I am thinking of how silly…
Grades are Dumb
By Arya Mehta I know this is quite a cliché/cheesy opinion column article in college magazines or even high school publications but I think in Week 11, when we’re all struggling to get to the finish line, this serves as an important reminder that our grades don’t define our worth or predict our future. I…
The Facade of Diversity at UCR
By Junghyun Song UCR is an international honors college of Utrecht University. That is what it says on UCR’s website and on the Internet if you look it up. Besides all the other reasons, this purported international community boasted by UCR was a determining factor that made me want to come here. However, my anticipation…
Mothers Or Not
By Lucia Bertoldini Controversial topic alert! The other day, in the midst of my -rather desperate!!- research for an anthropology paper, I came across an interesting article by The Guardian. The author was talking about the implications of the USA abortion legislation, in which the States recently had signed a document known as the Geneva Consensus…
Fairy Tale contest: Beatrice
LitRA, in collaboration with Culture Co, held a fiction contest a couple of weeks ago. The theme was ‘fairy tales’ and submissions focused on retelling fairy tales from the writers’ home country. The winner of the Fairy Tale contest, exclusively revealed here, was Boudica Gast. She won with her retelling “The Beatrijs”, a medieval Dutch…
Whilst Online Shopping Sites Are Doing Well in This Season, Local Businesses Are Not Exactly Thriving.
By Marije Huging I must say, writing about Arts & Culture whilst the government has just shut down the entire sector is not the easiest thing. As I was about to write something about the opening of the smallest cinema in the Netherlands located in Middelburg (!!!), the cinemas closed, so an opening is not…
What’s Up With Poland? – A Report From The Front
By Anna Szczełkun Poland is experiencing the largest protest since the fall of communism in 1989. Tens of thousands of Poles are on the streets, and not only in the major cities, but across the whole country, and they are furious. As a person born and raised in Poland I can’t stop thinking: how did…
Racism in the Netherlands – Through Gloria Wekker’s “On White Innocence”
By Arya Mehta The Netherlands is often portrayed as this safe, liberal haven with its egalitarian ideals and ‘colorblind’ values. But, as Gloria Wekker, inspired by Toni Morrison, points out in her lecture on “White Innocence” (linked in the bibliography, fantastic read), this colorblind outlook does not translate into non-racism. In fact, it does more…
The Solution is Mushrooms
By Friederike Uebel Seriously my thought 20% of the day and hey, I confess, it spilled out more often than I wanted throughout the last 6 weeks of the Engineering Project 1. When I reveal my love for mushrooms, I am used to encountering some ignorance and stereotyping at least 4 out of 10 times….