By Aoife Gleeson Ah Australia, the ‘Land Down Under’. Home of The Great Barrier Reef, the Gold Coast, Sydney, Blue Mountains, Hamilton Island…the list goes on. However, who first thought of the West Coast when I mentioned ‘Australia’? Aha, caught you there didn’t I! The humble region that is Western Australia is often overlooked…
By Elisha Carey “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” -Thomas Merton Recently I’ve found myself standing in front of some of the world’s most famous paintings. I’m currently on Erasmus in the Netherlands, which is home to some of the greatest paintings ever painted. Here you’ve…
“Every time I change wives, I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.” I was 17 when I found out that…
In the afternoon of the 29th of January 1985, Fumiko Kimura waded into the frigid waves of the Pacific Ocean from a Santa Monica beach with her two children, Kazutaka and Yuri. Hours later, doctors in a nearby hospital would fail to revive four-year-old Kazutaka and six-month-old Yuri, their mother, however, would live on to…
Last summer I was extremely lucky to be accepted onto a 5-week study abroad course in Singapore. The exact, rather long-winded title of the course (for those of you who might be interested next summer) is…deep breath…’Science Biodiversity Summer Study Abroad Programme, National University of Singapore’. This was my first time ever in Asia and wow, what an amazing…
For my J1 a couple of summers ago, I was a camp counselor at an all-girls sleepaway camp in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. I was just after a breakup at the time and craved the support and comfort the ‘all-girls’ environment promised. The experience proved really good for me. The place was kind of like a…
American talk show host Bill Maher came under fire recently for suggesting that body shaming overweight people should make a “comeback” in order to combat obesity. “We have gone to this weird place where fat is good. It’s pointing out that fat is unhealthy, that’s what’s bad” Maher said. “Fat shaming doesn’t need to end. It needs to…
When you think about it, humans are remarkably fragile little beings. In the days before modern medicine, a couple of fleas, rats and germs wiped out over a third of Europe. Infectious diseases, for a very long time, were the largest threat to mankind: the 6th century Plague of Justinian knocked out an estimated 17 percent of…
‘The National Report on Student Mental Health in Third Level’ launched on the 27 th of August in Trinity College by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) has found a third of college students are experiencing “extremely severe levels of anxiety” and have had a formal diagnosis of a mental health difficulty at some…
Hello and welcome to the opinions section. My name is Elisha and I will be your guide. I’ve been opinions editor here at the Express for just a couple weeks now and I think I’m doing just swell so far. I have yet to receive my first piece of hate mail and nothing has spontaneously…