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…
A Walker’s Guide to Middelburg
We students live the busiest of lives. Continuously running around from place to place, struggling to stay on top of our coursework, and doing our best to upkeep a social life as well; it becomes easy to get into a routine of class-study-eat-sleep, forgetting to take a breather in between. When it gets a bit…
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…
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…
‘’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…
Feminism, Femininity, and Francization: the #BalanceTonPorc Controversy
by Jedidja van Boven When world-famous tennis player Serena Williams was forbidden to wear her black ‘catsuit’, designed to prevent blood clots after her pregnancy, to the French Open in 2019, online comments were quick to defend Williams against tennis federation president Bernard Giudicelli, who argued that “one must respect the game”. Some people were…
Fishermen and Chinese Wisdom
A Galeophobe’s Account of ‘Jaws’ By Jedidja ‘Jay’ van Boven Here’s me, not naked but afraid nevertheless, presented to you in three bite-size tidbits that cover my personality, as well as some inevitable tangents about peanut butter, Sun Tzu, and the odd smattering of small dogs. One: I am scared of nearly everything. Now, I…