OPINION

We all share a memory apart from our individual recollections of the past. The kind of memory I am referring to cannot exist alone. It needs to be communicated since it is the product of historical, sociological, psychological, and political processes. Remember how your grandparents talked about past events?

Have you ever thought about being immortal? Having endless life in a universe that offers endless information sounds thrilling. Even if it sounds like a magical trait that can only be achieved in stories, it might be the technology of a different era.

Politics or any kind of decision-making position in a government body needs an upper age limit. Voting already has a worldwide age restriction, the most common legal age for voting is 18 around the world. Only nine countries around the world have 16 as the legal age for voting, whereas, only six countries have 17 as the voting age.

Popular culture is the set of practices, beliefs, and objects that are prevalent in a society. In our age, we live in a society where popular culture constantly and very quickly changes. Out of this constant change, microtrends emerge. People collectively decide on what the "next thing” is, and what is not cool anymore.

In the year 2018, Elon Musk’s The Boring Company released a merchandise item called “Notaflamethrower”. This product was hyped online as a flamethrower by many and sold for $500 per piece. The product’s name indeed did its credit, as it was not a flamethrower, but a roofing torch dressed and marketed

We cannot deny the impact of religious beliefs in shaping the modern description of marriage, however, the foundation of the institution goes way back before any of the religions with current believers. In fact, the earliest evidence of a man and a woman uniting is nearly 4500 years old. (1) Of course, defining the concept of marriage as “uniting a man and a woman” is fairly inadequate in the year 2022

Self-driving car technology is a new technology considering the age of traditional car technology. Many companies are working on self-driving. But Tesla Motors company has apparent domination on the market. Recently Tesla Motors company was criticized as they called thousands of cars back to repair a malfunction of the self-driving feature.

The 94th edition of the academy awards will be held on March 27 in its traditional home, Dolby Theater. Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, and Wanda Sykes will host the show. Producer Will Parker said, "This year's show is all about uniting movie lovers. It's apropos that we've lined up three of the most dynamic, hilarious women with very different comedic styles".

The Metaverse has been a hot topic of conversation recently, with Facebook and Microsoft both scrambling to take part. However, do we know what the Metaverse is? Are we ready for this massive change in our lives? There is no specific answer to these questions, but there are so many different hypotheses about how this process will be like for sure.

Concerns about the influence of financial matters on football have been a mainstream debate topic at least since the formation of the English Premier League back in 1992.[i] The Premier League brought about a new system in which the top clubs in English football were more isolated from the rest of the football pyramid and did not have to share their profits as much as before.

It seems that ever since the covid pandemic, video streaming platforms such as Netflix and Hulu have entered their glory age. With the shutdown of cinemas and cancellation of most cultural events, most of us shifted our focus to video-streaming platforms. But have we ever stopped for once and thought about the impact binge-watching might have on our planet?

Have you ever thought about titles of internet articles? Do you believe that sometimes they do not exactly refer to what they say they do? It seems you are not wrong and alone at all. Just like the title of this article, as readers, we encounter clickbait very frequently. But why are such titles chosen? Actually what is clickbait, why do authors and editors prefer to put it, and most importantly; is it ethical? Does it not manipulate us? Let’s try to give an answer.

‘’It is mandatory to wear a mask inside. There will be no face-to-face education until 2021, and we should get used to online learning. We cannot turn back to the pre-pandemic version of life unless the majority of the people in the world are vaccinated.’’ We are all accustomed to hearing these sentences due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is true and well-known that the big names of philosophy, whether ancient or modern, consist primarily of men. When we think of the word “philosopher,” the names that come to mind are usually Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Freud, etc. However ground-breaking their theories were, and although their arguments paved the way for advancing science, medicine, psychology, and many other fields, most people were misogynists.

We have gathered some questions about university life and Boğaziçi University that you have submitted through our Instagram Stories (@bogazicimun). Do not forget to follow and turn on the notifications to catch up on our following Q&A during the University Selecting Period to ask more of your questions! Let’s move on to the answers to your questions!

The 2020 Olympic Games are scheduled to be held between 23 July to 8 August in Tokyo, Japan. The Games were intended to be held in 2020, as their name suggests, but were delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight years in the IOC’s (International Olympic Committee) 2013 session in Buenos Aires, Turkey, Japan, and Spain fought to host the event. However, Istanbul lost to Tokyo in the last round of voting.

US President Joe Biden has made many promises during his campaign run in the days leading up to his election in November last year. Although he has not yet accomplished everything he said he would accomplish, he moved fast since his inauguration in January and still issued more executive orders than his three predecessors during his first 100 days.

Raccoons are animals native to the North American forests. They are very intelligent and skilled, which makes them a versatile species. They are famous for their beautiful furs and masked faces, which gave them the reputation of being thieves. Still, this reputation is not wrong at all. Thanks to their intelligence and speed, they can often be found sneaking food from people or houses. Although they have adapted to urban life, they remain as wild animals which can carry many diseases, including rabies.

We, as students, have been getting our education under extraordinary circumstances for over a year now because of the pandemic. When we say it is a different experience from what we are used to, and it is hard to adapt to what is necessary when it comes to online school, it can be applicable to students of all ages, from kindergarten to university. Everyone knows we should keep on studying, as we still do not know how long this pandemic will last, and we cannot press pause on life altogether. However, this does not mean that this progress is easy to adapt to. It is time we finally talk about not all, but some of our teachers’ and professors’ lack of empathy at this time, which comes with mental and psychological difficulties on the students’ side.

It's June this month, which means we're officially celebrating Pride around the world in the face of phobia, bias, prejudice, persecution and prosecution. Every year during Pride we tend to focus on the dire situation of LGBTI+ people around the world and the work that is ahead of us to achieve full and unconditional equality for Queer people around the world.

The Suez Canal is a sea-level waterway that connects the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. It is located between mainland Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, separating the African continent from Asia. It provides the shortest maritime route between Europe and the lands lying around the Indian and western Pacific oceans. As of today, it is one of the world’s most heavily used shipping lanes.

"Enough." So were the words of one queer person who responded to my question on what they thought of cishet white men. They were, in fact, the only person to respond to my question, which was not surprising considering I spent a grand total of 45 seconds looking for queer people to answer my question. Despite the apparent lack of depth of my study group, I believe I have produced a good approximation of the opinions of most queer people.

It seems like politics is the only topic we can have a conversation on these days because of how salient the political agenda is and how infiltrative and effective it is to an average person’s life. However, the question is, how do we have a conversation about politics? If you are just simply commenting on an objective change in your life resulting from some political action, does that qualify as being political? Do we have to be activists to call ourselves political?

You wake up, put on your clothes, your shoes, you walk out of your house and walk along your clean street to take the bus to school with your breakfast in your hand. In this simple routine alone, you benefit from hundreds of workers’ hard work. The house you live in, the clothes on your back, the shoes on and the pavement under your feet, the cleanliness of your environment, the bus that drives to your doorstep, the food in your hand, all brought to you by workers.

40 years ago, in 1981, the first signs of a deadly epidemic were observed in the United States of America. Caused by HIV, which was just starting to gain prominence at that time, AIDS was first detected by American health officials in the summer of 1981. The severity of the disease was obvious, yet the American response to the increasing proliferation of the disease amongst the American people was underwhelming, to say the least.

Unlike fairytales, 21st-century lives are unfortunately not that simple nor amusing. Besides our individual problems, there are so many external issues that occupy our minds all day long: Economy, politics, never-ending wars, violence, chaotic debates… As we are living in an age of the Internet and super technology, it is nearly impossible to stay away from the harsh realities completely; however, within the development of our modern world, have we totally lost our exit to a free space where we can clear our minds and calm ourselves?

For those of our readers who are not familiar with the term pluralist and absolute democracy; pluralist democracy is a political system where organized groups compete with each other to influence the policy instead of one single group dominating the politics(1) , whereas absolute democracy is a hypothetical form of government where the needs and wants of the majority are prioritized, and the minorities are neglected(2) . As the protests continue in Boğaziçi University as well as in other parts of Turkey, we witness the lack of plurality in Turkish democracy.

Religion is held in high regard and is a touchy topic in the eyes of many people. Over the course of history, many wars have been waged in its name, many empires built, and many destroyed. While religion is a personal and individual experience for some people, religion in history has not been that way for a long time.

Cultures, traditions, moral values… Varying from society to society, being shaped by totally distinct concepts, however sharing an exact same core: Religion. Throughout history, religion has always been at the center of human life, no matter which part of the world you dwell in. States had established laws based on common notions, people judged each other whether their lifestyles fitted the holy sayings or not…

Thomas Hobbes is one of the most renowned philosophers of all time. He is especially known for the concept of social contract theory which he developed in his book the Leviathan. In its simplest terms, Hobbes’ version of social contract theory states that individuals were in a state of war before the establishment of states. In this “natural state”, there were no rules governing who owned what, so fighting and killing each other was the only option left for people to survive and get what they want.

Every year 8th of March is celebrated as International Women’s day. What this day represents is a call for action for women’s rights and gender equality besides a celebration of the social and political rights achievements of women. This day is a perfect opportunity for us to remember and think about all the issues that women still face globally.

Brexit, which is a portmanteau of “British” and “exit” is the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) and European Atomic Energy Community on 31 December 2020 with the power from Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. This withdrawal is the first case in the European Union’s history. Apart from the EU’s history, the United Kingdom is the first country that leaves an economic union willingly.

The term generation X comes from the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland. Generation X refers to the generation born between the early-to-mid 1960s and early 1980s and is also called the ‘latchkey’ generation because gen X was left in the house by their working parents.

“I wish I was born in one of the Nordic countries, everything would be much easier.”, “Is this even a ‘life’ when compared to the lives of the Nordic people?”, “They do not have any problems up in the North, they live in an amazingly comfortable environment.”. These are just some example sentences that most of us hear in our lives.

If you have paid some attention to North American politics in recent times, you might have noticed some talk of Black History Month. This usually confuses the uninformed reader, as it might seem kind of “overkill” to dedicate the entire month of February to a seemingly small subset of society’s nigh-infinite problems. Additionally, people freshly encountering Black History Month have a great tendency to ask some version of “Well then, why don’t we have History Months for all our minorities? Are African-Americans somehow special?”.

1 January 2021, midnight. Turkish President appointed Melih Bulu as the rector (who is generally referred to as the “kayyum”) of Boğaziçi University. A “professor” (frankly, naming a person a “professor” who owes his rise in academia to plagiarism does not sound appropriate) becoming the head of the university was witnessed for the first time since the 1980's military coup.

Unlike anti-vaxxers, anti-mask protests have emerged only during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the public health regulations put into place globally. While neither of these trends shares a common cause, both of them became a thing thanks to misinformation and fallacies.

The reason why economic contractions happen has been one of the most important and fundamental questions of macroeconomics. There have been several different approaches to explaining these phenomena.

Economics may seem all about calculations and money, however, forecasting the global economic climate and using those calculations to foresee the possible crises form the majority of economics. The methods and models are used in this process, and to develop these methods and models, data from the past economic activities are used.

The first Humanity vs Capitalism article was published in May 2020, during the early stages of the lockdown. As the article suggested, the long duration of the lockdown and the still-not-fully-implemented vaccines damaged the world both socially and economically. More than 83 million people have been affected and more than 1.8 million people have died from COVID-19 since then.

Activism is defined as the practice of vigorous action or involvement as a means of achieving political or other kinds of goals. The said vigorous acts can take many forms such as protests, demonstrations, public speech; in shorter words, they can be any act that is done with the intention to make a change.

Voting to elect the leaders who will govern us for an established time is one of the greatest and longest steps we ever took as a species. This mindset took an incredibly long time to settle and it took an even longer time for us to realize this process was only ethical if we allowed anyone older than 18 to participate in it.

Free speech has undeniably become one of the chief virtues of western democracies as the last few centuries progressed. Historically, it was not a very feasible policy in general because of various factors, but as democratic processes and human rights developed, free speech became an increasingly valid constituent of the overall status of development of any given country.

A natural disaster is a terrifying event for everybody. The chaos during and afterward an earthquake, the sadness of the atmosphere, and the instant primitivization of the people are unforgettable scenes. However, the ability to move on and to adapt to new situations are two strengths of humans.

Can we separate someone’s profession from their personality and life views, especially when they work in education? If those opinions are about denying someone else’s basic human or educational rights, such as homophobia, racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism; and these opinions cause discrimination during education, those opinions cannot be categorized as a personal view. After all, people mark their contributions to the fields with their names as we see when we talk about Newton physics or Aristotelian logic.

Since the dawn of time humanities ability to tame animals had been one of its core abilities. We domesticated animals to eat them, ride them, and to put them on to work. The domestication of our canine and feline friends was a different story though what started as just a mutually benefiting relationship turned wolves and wildcats into our fluffy friends over the years. Although this seems like a really positive outcome there are still some questions we need to ask ourselves.

When we hear another country is somehow intervening in the internal affairs of another country, we are generally inclined to perceive this as a big problem. Foreign intervention is seen as a concept that is always problematic which disrupts the natural set of events. In this article, I want to question whether there can be some instances and conditions that make foreign intervention legitimate.

We are only a day away from the 2020 US Elections, so we assumed that it would be an ideal opportunity to look back to the last four years of US politics and the effects of the Trump presidency on the country. We divided the article into nine main titles in order to mention the significant events efficiently, since you are probably aware like the rest of the world, the days in Trump presidency were full to the brim.

In 1895, Alfred Nobel decided to leave his fortune of SEK 31 million (1,702 million in today’s value) to pioneering scientists in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine, Literature, and Peace. His will stated that he wanted his income to be “distributed annually in the form of prizes to those who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.” In 1968, Sweden’s central bank established The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Very commonly, throughout almost all the countries in the world, some people think that the government will not work to protect their best interests. It would be nothing special if people thought this way rarely, for some specific cases, yet this is not the case. It is not at all uncommon for people to assume that no action of their own governments will bring benefit to the common folk. Some will even go so far as to claim that the government is inherently harmful to the general populace.

“Ok, Boomer” marks the end of friendly generational relations, says Taylor Lorenz on the New York Times. There is a significant truth to that, as there is a growing negative sentiment against older generations among the late Millennials and Zoomers. This is mainly due to the deepening inequalities, increasing exposure of existing disparities, differences in attitude towards different social groups, and the conflicting views on global climate change.

The year 2020 clearly has a very bad reputation among the people. It started with the Australian Bush Fires, and now continues with wildfires all around the globe. Although wildfires are a natural phenomenon, the 2020 wildfires attracted scientists’ attention for their intensity. For instance, the California Wildfires, which started in August 2020, is already the biggest wildfire in the state’s history.

Recently Ateez, a Kpop band, released a new album, ZERO: FEVER. For this new album, they created a poll for their fans to choose the title track of it. Two songs were the nominees: Thanxx and Inception. In the music video trailers of Thanxx, the lead singer of the band wears cornrows, a hairstyle that is generally associated with African Americans.

Since its outbreak in March 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic has affected our lives in more ways than we have imagined. Unfortunately, it is still going strong and infecting more people as we speak. One of the many ways that the virus halted our lives is the limited traveling. People had to limit, if not cancel most of their traveling plans to stay safe and healthy.

It is safe to say that most of us had different plans for 2020 when the clock turned midnight on January 1st, even those of us who did not have any plans. Perhaps some of us heard a thing or two about the new virus in China but certainly, none of us expected our whole year to be spent holed up in our apartments or going to work full of anxiety.

Today’s day and age have many celebratory elements to it. It consists of humankind’s massive contributions to the world and the universe we live in to learn more about it, as well as to preserve and cherish it. However, these constant positive and uplifting developments do not cover-up the inhumane, unethical, unjust, and unscrupulous acts we, unfortunately, do to each other and to the world.

In an ideal political landscape, politicians represent and serve the public. So, when they fail their mission of providing welfare and peace, the public is supposed to vote them out. This statement assumes the individuals are rational, they are aware of their own benefits, and they act according to their benefits.

As the world faced unseen horror through the hands of the Axis powers in World War 2, disdain towards the far-right ideologies of the Axis became commonplace among both the common populace and influential political actors. At the time the war was nearing its end, countless people on both sides had fostered a newfound disgust for those ideologies.

As COVID-19 ravaged world economies, governments around the world are urgently in need of rejuvenating theirs by reopening businesses after the lockdown period. Turkey, earning 34.5 billion USD from tourism in 2019, according to TurkStat, is especially desperate to reopen its tourism industry.

We are inclined to think that bigger populations cause complicate fast economic growth. However, this kind of approach ignores how dependent our production and consumption is to the size of the population. With decreasing birth rates in the developed nations, our economic system now faces a vast threat. For centuries, we have organized our economies in a way that depends on fast population growth. Statistics show that for the following decades this trend will have to change.

On May 25, George Floyd, a 46 years old African American man, was killed by the police officer Derek Chauvin because of the use of excessive force on Floyd’s neck during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The next day, a 10-minute recording by a bystander and the security camera footage has gained attention from the public and were shared widely on social media.

As of 2020, we had moved to a new decade in which the international community had high hopes for the world's sustainable future. And 2020 was marked as the beginning of a Decade of Action towards the Sustainable (1) Development Goals (SDGs).

As old as human civilization gets we can see Queer footprints in art, literature, and history. “Gayness” was not invented when Hitler started marking gay people with pink triangles, it existed throughout human history, so did oppression.

Online education is a teaching method consisting of computerized lectures and assignments which began to popularize slowly, with the rapid spread of the Covid- 19 pandemic. Now, people are discussing whether this type of education can be used after the pandemic or not.

The first day of may marks International Workers’ Day, as a celebration of labor, those who produce labor, their ever-continuing struggle, and the strides made along the way with organized labor.

As the United States navigates through a long and rather daunting primary process to determine the candidates that will face off in the general elections in November perhaps it is best to focus on one party whose primaries are getting very heated: the Democratic Party.

Understanding the concept of income inequality is essential for understanding the recent political and economic trends throughout the world. It has been argued by scholars that income inequality is one of the leading factors why we observe a trend in the rise of populist leaders.