By Marije Huging During the last week of a UCR semester, my head usually feels strangely detached from my body, like a little homunculus living in an empty shell. This is what exams, presentations, and what seems like an endless array of papers (that I actually wrote in two days) feel like. During this time,…
Your Mind – a Playground
I have put myself behind these metal bars, the keys nowhere to be found. Some labels and social constructs checking in on me on the daily: “I see, you’re still trapped.” I remember putting my mom’s sanitary pads to my knees and sliding down the hallway. Where did that person go? (Actually, probably a good…
What I Have Learned About Belonging Together
By Dana Zoutman I turned off the light. Or -well, in all truth, I never really turned off the light- I waited and waited until the lamp’s last light had simmered out. It first occurred to me that I could have just turned it off about five months after it broke. Instead, I had just…
Critical Sociology at UCR- Why We Should Take at Least One Course at Some Point in Our UCR Life
By Junghyun Song This article is not for me to preach. I merely want to share my experience with a sociology course at UCR. I am not a Sociology major, and I have only taken one course: Modern Sociology 200, so far, so, do take what I am about to say/write with a grain of…
4 Random Good Things That Recently Happened Around the World
By Anna Szczełkun As the semester is coming to an end, and we are all dying from the finals, we do not need any additional depressing or complex things to read (or to write). So I decided to shortly tell you guys about 4 cool things that have recently happened in 4 different parts of the globe….
Red Children on The Sound of Night
By Sithis Yim Samnang [This is a snippet from a larger project “Red Children Empty of New Beginnings”] ✽ A night was only dark because one’s eyes couldn’t see. But eyes weren’t sights when an escape and a life needed to survive. They were mere moons and stars that couldn’t find ways to shine….
Fighting two epidemics at once: Opioid crisis in the US
By Anna Szczełkun Opioids are a class of drugs that comes from poppy plants and affects a specific receptor in the brain. The history of opioids goes way back, and we have evidence of poppy plants used a couple of thousands of years ago. Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Persians used it as a painkiller, but also…
Smallest cinema of the Netherlands!!!!
By Marije Huging When walking drearily on the almost-empty streets of Middelburg after a 16:00-18:00 class, you realize that you forgot to buy food. So you go to the supermarket in the dark to pick up ready-made pasta, a vegetable for nutrition, and some candy, which you can open on the way back for comfort…
Humans of UCR: Fenna Capelle
By Maud Smulders 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…
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….
Through Rolling Landscapes & Acquaintances IV- Tippi Hedren
Through Rolling Landscapes By Fenna Capelle Through rolling landscapes I found a path I needed to pursue It reached out as far as my mind could bear to let it free Like a doubtful sceptic who, in dreaming, knew not where to turn to And I followed it to the last caress of its sheer…