This article is a part of a series of articles on the laureates of the Four Freedom Awards, which will be held in Middelburg on April 14. Want to be present and ask questions at the public meet up after the ceremony? We will keep you posted about sign ups! – Elise Renkema, section editor Current…
Let’s Talk About Periods
By Elise Renkema As you are reading this right now, around 800 million people are on their periods. With so many people experiencing this on a monthly basis, one would expect it to be normalised by now. Yet, there still seem to be taboos surrounding menstruating. This taboo and shame surrounding menstruation has, among other…
The Bubble of Personalised News Feeds and the Politicisation of Facts
By Elise Renkema Twitter CEO Jack Dorsley recently announced that Twitter will be banning political ads on its platform. The ban is not only for individual candidates, but also for advertisements on politicised issues. In practice, this means that political candidates can still tweet, but that these tweets cannot be promoted through advertisements. This…
Dutch-led Climate Change Denial Coalition on the Offense
By Joost Gerretschen While UCR students were learning how to contribute to the energy transition and the mitigation of the ongoing climate breakdown, a denial campaign led by a Dutch foundation leaked. DeSmogBlog, a UK NGO that reports on fossil fuel public relations efforts, came upon on a self-proclaimed “European Declaration” which will feature three…
Shell vs. Milieudefensie: How To Sue an Oil Giant
by Liam McClain and Jedidja van Boven As climate change becomes a more and more common topic in everyday news, its presence in the legal sphere is also growing. With climate litigation quickly on the rise, certain routes that have never been taken before in courtrooms across the world are being considered. The Netherlands in…
Anti-Vaxxers, Autism, and Social Media
by Mathilde Eon As the daughter of an anesthetist, I grew up with my vaccines being done by my dad, after dinner, in the kitchen (it was totally sanitary, don’t worry). Most of you probably went to the doctor’s practice and got a nice bandage with your favorite cartoon character on it once the injection…
Do You Want to Earn Money for Participating in Democracy?
by Margje Camps I am not going to lie to you, this slogan sounds very appealing and more than a bit deceiving at the same time. Yet I must ensure you, this job advertisement could very well exist. In the last few weeks, a central theme in newspapers, television programmes, and on the internet has…
The Hanoi Summit
by Jedidja van Boven On the 27thand 28thof February, the DPRK–USA Hanoi Summit Vietnam took place in the Vietnamese capital. Commonly known as the Hanoi Summit, the thoroughly documented meeting between Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump marks the second meeting in which the denuclearization of North Korea was on the agenda. Whereas the 2018 meeting…
Drag Queen Fairytales: A Media Phenomenon
by Jedidja van Boven Promoting reading through story time hour and introducing more inclusive programming in American public schools- how to combine the two? The answer is the phenomenon known as Drag Queen Story Hour, an initiative launched in San Francisco in 2015. It invites drag performers to read children’s books in local libraries and…
Navigating the Brexit-fog: An Insider’s Experience
by Jedidja van Boven & Charlotte Daemen Now that British Prime Minister Theresa May is working on a revised deal while attempting to make last-minute changes, Brexit has faded slightly from the spotlight in current world news. A new deal on various Brexit options needs to be finished by the end of the month as…
#Pelosiclap: White-clad Women and the Shutdown
By Jedidja van Boven A Polar Vortex bringing a cold so extreme that it has claimed 21 lives, the crumbling of the benchmark INF treaty on missiles with Russia, and new aspiring presidential candidates left and right… With all these dramatic headlines coming our way from the United States, it’s easy to brush over the…
The Brainless Soldier
By Amée Zoutberg Looking back on 2018, I feel that one of my greatest lessons learnt came about a month after receiving my UCR diploma. Which was great. Really. I painfully discovered that in three years of sacrifice and voluntary enslavement to the academic system (for that sweet, sweet 3.5 GPA), I had in no way…
Ikumen: Normalizing Stay-at-Home Dads
by Jedidja van Boven Because the last two weeks of the semester are upon us, I was wasting some hours on YouTube, as you do. I stumbled across this video titled ‘’How To Put a Baby To Sleep’’, and despite the fact that I am in no way responsible enough to have a child, I…
California: Camp Fire and Cannery Row
by Jedidja van Boven The end of 2018 is fast approaching, and it feels like every year gets more intense, with crazier headlines, angrier politicians, and biggerhashtags. 2018, too, was already a record year in many ways- and not always in the good sense of the word. For example: a record total surface area burnt…
The Craziest Lawsuits EVER Filed (You Won’t Believe No. 3!)
by Jedidja van Boven The field of law seems to be dealing with some sort of image problem. It’s usually depicted as a stuffy, boring discipline where old people in ill-fitting blazers discuss fraud and tax evasion. Sometimes, however, exceptions pop up in the international news scene. There have been weird lawsuits all over the…
Pittsburgh and the Polish Sun
by Jedidja van Boven The American daily newspapers were still being flooded with stories on migrant caravans and Saudi journalists when a new report came in on 27 October: The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had been the site of a hate crime that cost 11 lives. Classified as the worst anti-Semitic attack…
Cold Cases: The Law of Winter and The 1974 Disappearances
by Jedidja van Boven The Bellingshausen station, a Russian outpost on King George Island, Antarctica, doesn’t exactly make headlines often. However, when researcher Sergey Savitsky, stationed at the isolated facility, was charged with attempted murder of a colleague last week, the media started paying attention to the most remote location where crime reports could possibly…
When Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian Collide
By Judith Brouwer I will admit that I am a sucker for bad reality TV. However, if I ever imagined an episode starring Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian, I would have thought that it would be a vastly different arrangement than them discussing prison reform in the Oval Office. Tracing back Trump’s road to the…
The Silent Crisis Across Indian Country: The Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women
By Roos Saat Disclaimer: First Nations is the official term used to refer to Indigenous people from Canada, while Native American refers to Indigenous people from the United States. The first time I noticed the small poster on a bathroom door at a gas station a few kilometers outside of Vancouver, I didn’t think much…
‘’Amoral and Idiotic’’: Republican Heroism or Strategic Ploy?
by Jedidja van Boven In the words of a former White House official: it’s open season on the president. A sudden op-ed letter, written by an anonymous senior administration official working for the Trump administration, was published by the New York Times last Wednesday in a frantic government-press clash that is “unprecedented’’, as stated by…