At this year’s Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) celebration at Hillel BC, we were greeting the year 5778 with the traditional apples and honey. I began speaking with a young woman from Israel and I told her how much I wanted to learn Hebrew.
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Every few weeks or so, I’ll see a post on Facebook, hear a guy at a party or read some think-piece bemoaning small talk. It’s a shallow waste of time that stands in the way, apparently, of much deeper, more interesting conversation.
Sin-Birds is UBC’s premier Afrobeats dance troupe. Watching a performance is mesmerizing. The duo takes an obvious delight in dance and perfect synchronization, and they top it all off (literally) with snazzy hats.
On the surface, Buckland’s work is almost austerely minimalist. From the entrance of the gallery, the exhibit looks like little more than a few fake flowers and small shreds of fabric mounted on plain, white walls. A few steps deeper and Cut Flowers Are Already Dead suddenly has a lot going on.
In Canada, when Halloween season ends, the pumpkins are swiftly replaced with Christmas lights. My first year in university, I looked on this transition with abject horror. What about Thanksgiving?
This February, we are publishing our annual — and second ever — magazine and are asking for submissions from all UBC students.
Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976, describing it as an attempt to understand behaviours that make no sense from an evolutionary perspective but are widespread in human culture.
The East-Coast conscious hip-hop duo The Underachievers breezes through a number of topics like the state of hip-hop, weed, social issues and other typical rap subjects — showing off their lyrical strength and stylistic flexibility.
From humorous digs at the stress of student life to corporate marketing tactics to the recent meme-based rivalry between UBC and SFU, memes have become nearly synonymous with internet culture, and can be used and re-used for any purpose under the sun.
If you’re looking for a philosophy that will help you form connections with other people, build understanding and generally live a more empathetic life, Ayn Rand’s is not for you.
We are not particularly good at getting our points across. We have trouble listening to perspectives other than our own. Insults, yelling and sometimes even violence seem to be inevitabilities rather than risks. People's differences seem to be irreconcilable and impossible to challenge.
You get the sense that John Mulaney does these shows as much for himself as he does it for us. At his November 10 show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the 35-year old Chicago comedian whittled whimsical rants into comedic odysseys and he wore his best suit for it too.
My editor has called Buchanan Tower “the barnacle of UBC’s architecture.” He’s far from alone. Buchanan Tower is grey, miserable mass of concrete that looks Stalinist on a good day.
The person who recommended that I read Stephen King’s On Writing was the editor of a website I wrote album reviews for. He responded to a draft I sent over with the book title and a reply appropriating its famous quote: “Have you ever heard the advice, ‘Death to adverbs’?”
“That’s why I love zine culture — there is no balance,” explained Isabelle Guns, a Canzine volunteer who has seen the Vancouver zine scene explode during her 30 years of involvement.