Come Nov. 10, one lucky student will stand on stage with seven to eight of the Amherst community’s most disruptive innovators — alumni, faculty and staff — and give a TEDx talk on a topic of their choice in front of an audience of 350 people. Students competed for the coveted spot this Sunday in front of the TEDxAmherstCollege team and a panel of judges.
Five speaker candidates and two MC candidates showed up to display their verbal talent, although organizer John He ’16 stated that a few more students had initially applied.
I’ll admit when I first listened to “Swing Lo Magellan” that I was disappointed. While I could hear the effort that Dave Longstreth, the frontman and main vocalist, and the others had put into the album, I just didn’t find it enjoyable. The melodies didn’t seem coherent enough: maybe it was that I had become too used to the commercially-produced, predictable tunes of today, but the album simply didn’t feel accessible.
This weekend saw Amherst host its most famous presenter for the semester. (Spring Concert doesn’t count). Rachel Maddow, as everybody knows as the host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, gave a book talk about “Drift”, some non-fiction piece about something military, something blah. Or at least, that’s what everybody was expecting right? It turns out, her critique of our country’s recent approach to war was quite fascinating, and, for the average student, revelatory.
It was tempting for me to skip Voices for the Voiceless: it was on a busy weekend, and the thought of sitting through poetry sounded a little too much like schoolwork. By the grace of whatever Deity granted us poetry, however, I’m glad I did. To anyone who didn’t go: boo to you.
