They Say / I Blog

Spring broke: Anthony Abraham Jack on food insecurity on campus

Spring break, yay!!! *Cough*—not so fast. Spring break is a nonstop party for some, but for others, it’s lonely and hungry. When campus food service shuts down, when there are no cooking facilities available, things can get very grim. In this March 2018 New York Times essay, Harvard sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack reports on a serious situation for many students who stay on campus while those with resources scatter for vacations.

Read it here: Jack, “It’s hard to be hungry on spring break”

Bubble scrubbing: Joan Blades and John Gable on the power of conversation

Oh, those famous ‘three little words’! No, not “I love you,” although they’re important, too, of course. The ‘three little words’ of our era are “I hear you,” and don’t underestimate their power. But here’s the thing: it’s easy to hear the voices and ideas that we already agree with. How well do we hear other ideas? How well do we listen? Two friends—self-defined progressive Joan Blades and self-defined conservative John Gable—talk about what happened when they learned to listen to each other in this November 2017 TED talk hosted on the website AllSides.

Read it here: Blades & Gable, “Breaking through filter bubbles with technology and civil discourse”