Chancellor Loftin:
We write to you from the Coalition of Graduate Employees, the labor union representing Oregon State University’s (OSU) Teaching and Research Assistants. We have watched this week as our fellow graduate employees at the University of Missouri have had their health insurance subsidies, and thus their financial and physical well-being, taken from them without notice. We write to you to suggest a simple, affordable, and fair solution to provide Missouri graduate employees with quality health insurance.
In the 1990s, OSU graduate employees had no access to health insurance and came together to form a union which has subsequently won health insurance—and much more—for graduate employees at OSU. We have an employer-sponsored graduate employee group plan that is...
Lifestyle
Dear former idol to whom I started and failed to finish a lot of letters throughout the years,
Hi. Wow. You are every bit as flawless as I’d imagined. And as friendly and witty and just plain charming. Honestly, I wish you were a bitch. It would make it easier not to blurt out ‘when I was 14, I had a shrine to you in my bedroom.’ Because I did. An actual shrine. There was a publicity still, one of your books, a cheap lemongrass-scented candle on a bookshelf, surrounded by pictures torn out of magazines. To this day, the scent of lemongrass makes me feel like a sexually confused adolescent.
Today, there’s no lemongrass. There’s just the smell of expensive coffee from the cafetiere that your hand hovers over, asking me if I want a drink, and the Chanel Allure I borrowed from my...
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Dear Rabbi Zimmerman,
Thank you for your email of 2-27-04 addressed to some of us among the downtown clergy concerning Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ. I read most of your letter to our people on Sunday morning as part of my sermon. We take heart from your expression of a “deep and abiding commitment to understand each other [with] a willingness to discuss difficult issues.” With that in view I thought I would write, for you and for our people, a response to your letter and to the movie from a New Testament perspective.
We believe that the New Testament, as well as the Tanach, are the inspired word of God and provide a progressive revelation of God's dealings with humankind—a revelation that is unified and reliable. Therefore we try, all too imperfectly, to bring our...
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Dear Mr. Zimmerman,
Holy Moses George this country has had ourselves a wild past couple of years but this not guilty verdict of yours has to be the ribbon on top of another “how the hell did we get here?” year. The kind of year that seems to keep screaming WAKE UP!!! in everyone’s faces yet we still stay stuck. A year that featured mass shootings from California to Connecticut, drone strikes that have killed 4 Americans and countless others as well, a status quo still seemingly more obsessed with money and power than looking out for our fellow-man…..
Everywhere I look I see people lost in their own thoughts….struggling to find a new reason to believe they will eventually break through and find enough supply, providence, and security to feel like they’ve ‘made it’…..
but,I have no...
2,661
Dear Jann S. Wenner, et al,
What. The. Fuck.
I was an avid Rolling Stone reader for close to 20 years. I even collected the magazines. You try lugging around 15 years of wrapped magazines…this was a source of much consternation with an ex (who eventually took the liberty of throwing them out in my absence). So, I’m not a casual reader who just feels like ripping on you for no good reason. We have a history together, you and I.
But sometime around 2000 I didn’t renew my subscription. I would find myself not reading anything in your magazine. It read more like Highlights for children than an intelligent counterculture magazine. Frankly, it was as counterculture as a Disney show for tweens.
Over the ensuing years I would pick it up every now and again and find I could blow...
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Dear Tony,
We met in the fall of 2010, when your “Delivering Happiness” book tour stopped by my University of Iowa class. I could never have imagined how dramatically that hot August afternoon would change the course of my life. I have retold the story many times of how the students spontaneously followed you out of the classroom that day. Exactly three years later, I left my home, and position at the university, to follow you as well.
The decision to join the Downtown Project’s $350 million revitalization effort was based on three core beliefs:
1. The project was engaged in a fascinating “social experiment.”
2. The project offered a unique opportunity, to not only make a meaningful difference in Downtown Las Vegas, but also enrich the lives of people living in cities around...
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Dear Colleagues,
I was surprised to see the nominations for Vice President that were put forth by the AAR’s Nominating Committee this year. Both candidates are Christian ethicists/theologians. While colleagues tell me that at least one of them is a “progressive evangelical,” I remain uncomfortable with the choices put before us. According to the bylaws the charge of the Nominations Committee is as follows:
The Nominations Committee presents to the Board at least two candidates to run for each AAR Director position elected by vote of the membership. The criteria for nomination include distinction in scholarship, teaching, and service to the Academy. The Committee selects candidates so as to bring the rich diversity of the AAR membership to the Board of Directors. The Committee may...
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Dear Ray.
It took you just two weeks to complete your due diligence on Naibu before taking on this fraudulent POS as a client from Daniel Stewart on December 12 2014. It took less than a month for Naibu’s FD to resign with immediate effect and for shares in this company to be suspended from the AM Casino pending clarification of its financial position.
I know that you are your team of dedicated baboons round at ZAI Corporate Finance have your hands full dealing with the abject disaster and overpromoted POS that is Mosman Oil...
3,452
Dear xoJane:
I think this is it, for us. I wish I could say that it’s not you, it’s me; but that would be a lie deployed to spare your feelings. I don’t do that anymore, so you’ll be getting the unvarnished truth.
When we first met, there was a lot about you I just didn’t see. In the last few months, though, I’ve come to see how mercenary you are. You present yourself as a fun, real-life forum for women* (and occasionally men*) to share their experiences, tricks for how to get around in the world, and enjoy a good dose of humor. That content comes from your writers, but you select what gets run, what gets publicized, and what happens next.
And what happens next, is this: Sometimes, nothing. The articles run, they get some comments. Some of them are amazing, insightful, and...
2,323
Oh hey,
My name is Lyz, although you may only remember me as Mike's girlfriend, because I anticipate that's the kind of man you are. The kind where the requisite female counterpart exists as a vapid, smiling collection of holes, rather than a person who may actually have more to add to a conversation than you.
You have no idea what I do for a living, what my favorite book is, where I grew up, or anything else. What you may or may not remember (because after multiple shots of Patron, you were pretty intoxicated), was sloppily leaning your body across mine to say that you “accepted me” as a quality partner for Mike, even though I was “obviously not athletic.”
When I asked you to clarify, thinking maybe I was mishearing, or misunderstanding, you told me that “athleticism” was a...
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