Essay

Elevator Music

I’ve started writing this as I wait for my morning lift at the Willis Tower in Chicago. I’m the first one in the waiting area–ahead of the 7:55 wave of train people–and I pressed the touch screen indicating I wanted to go

Can Party School Rankings Benefit Colleges?

College administrators live and die by Princeton Review and US News rankings. What used to be just an overall leaderboard is now seen as the definition of value and success in diverse areas. There are so many categories. Not only is the

A History of Greek Life at Lehigh University

I graduated from Lehigh University in 2016. I was a member of a fraternity there and currently serve on that organization’s advisory board. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with fraternities and secret societies. I am not willing

I tried to do some honest research for this article, but nearly every person I surveyed was hesitant to admit whether they’d stayed at a motel. The motel has a bad reputation because the lodges are commonly located in seedy, desolate areas frequented

In recent months, the proliferation of tipping has been getting a lot of attention. Most recently, there has been debate regarding flight attendants having to compete for tips. It spurred this opinion piece. As I sit here two hours after placing my Grubhub order

About 8 years ago, there was a proliferation of websites featuring short anecdotes punctuated by an acronym. You may remember TFLN and FML. It turns out that the popularity of these sites is what inspired the first iteration of TFM–Total Frat

Is Forced Redirection of New Tabs Ethical?

Whenever I eat lunch near a computer, which usually happens every day, I open a new browser window with all of my favorite news sites pre-loaded. During a short lunch period, I cram in as much information and as much food

I spend a lot of time online shopping. I’ve encountered a bevy of payment systems, each with its own quirks. By now, though, payment and checkout processes are overwhelmingly fluid and user-friendly. For more than a year, I’ve been involved with

Twenty years ago, I started preschool at Prescott Elementary School in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was a classic upbringing in a blue-collar neighborhood. It was simpler. Math was math, kids were kids, there was no air conditioning, and corporal punishment was

Recently, I found myself on the Wikipedia page for Memcached, a popular distributed object caching system. It turns out that the open-source project was developed by the guy who created LiveJournal. LiveJournal is a blogging site that started in 1999,