The Brown University Spectator» The Brown Spectator: A Journal of Conservative and Libertarian Thought

Killing Capital Punishment

Alan Silverman — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:59:39 +0000

Beneficence… is less essential to the existence of society than justice…. [M]ercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.—Adam Smith It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.—Thomas Paine The modern debate over the death penalty in America seems to be a contest less of [...]

Economic Collapse 2008

Frank Rinaldi — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:58 +0000

In the month of September, the federal government passed a bill that called for spending over $700 billion of public money in order to take over failed assets from Wall Street firms. This plan was supposed stop the bleeding and enable the financial markets to start their path to recovery. It is important to note [...]

Of the aristocrats, for the aristocrats, by the aristocrats

Sean Quigley — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:57 +0000

Though I wish that I could write, “We are all elitists now,” the string of letters and columns which reacted negatively to Anish Mitra ’10’s recent column (The Brown Daily Herald, “A little elitism goes a long way,” Feb. 27) confirms that populism is still in vogue. It seems, in fact, that the Sirens of democracy, [...]

Obama’s Foreign Policy

Kristina Kelleher — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:50 +0000

President Barack Obama has said that he wants to be a transformational leader. During the primary, Obama said that he wanted to be more like President Reagan than President Clinton because Reagan fundamentally changed government and left an impact on the world. Considering the momentous change that Obama has promised, it is ironic that he [...]

To Whom Do We Owe Our Allegiance?

Susannah Kroeber — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:41 +0000

Creating an appropriate topic for an article in any publication is the most daunting part of writing. Inevitably, it takes some degree of invention especially when your focus is not on news, and even if you are simply trying to report the facts, a good reporter learns to write between the lines. This prelude is [...]

The Libertarian Brown

Kevin Kay — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:40 +0000

Esquire magazine recently called Brown “That Maoist collective in Rhode Island.” Bill O’Reilly lambasted both the institution and the administration as “pinheads” and “liberals.” The Princeton Review ranked us as #18 on their list of “Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians.” Yet as I spend more and more time at Brown, the question for me is not [...]

Rosenthal’s “No on Yes on Prop 8” column full of misconstrued Bible facts

Keith Dellagrotta — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:19 +0000

Madam – On November 13, The Brown Daily Herald published an opinions article written by Sarah Rosenthal ’11, titled “No on Yes on Prop 8.” The piece presented a weak, and very misleading, argument that attempted to characterize the Christian church as following teachings full of contradictions, vice, and hate. In response, I wrote to the [...]

Hardball at Brown

Brian Bishop — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:18 +0000

Lest anyone imagine this a paean to the spring ritual of Brown’s varsity baseball season, we’re speaking here of an intellectual squeeze play. We’ll leave for another day the question of whether our vernal worship in the ‘house that Ruth [Babe not Simmons] built’ is but another of Marx or Sade’s opiates of the masses. Still, [...]

Twilight Book Review

Christina Cozzetto — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:17 +0000

I finally broke down and read Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, over winter break this year. Curiosity was my entire reason for reading it, but that curiosity came from several different sources. One was how the series as a whole has been touted as the next Harry Potter, and how there seemed to be a significant [...]

The Independent Study

Hari Tyagi — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:07 +0000

Last semester, I went to a dean to petition for two independent studies which I wanted to add to my schedule. One was a Russian Literature class about the influence of the KGB in modern Russia, with Professor Claude Carey. The other independent study was about opening an Indian restaurant in Providence that my two [...]