Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

46° Evanston, IL
Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Here they are! Say hello to our Winter Quarter columnists

Eric Metelka

Monday columnist

I have a trait that winter and Jewishness brings out in spades: inherent cynicism.

Expect some pot-shots, but most of it will be clever quips that only daily readers of The New York Times will have the intellectual capacity to understand.

I’ll do satire. I’ll make you chuckle. I’ll ask for your spare change outside of Burger King. But most of all, I’ll make a point.

Too often we get lost in the power of our own voice that we’ll just talk. I can’t promise that I won’t ramble and make up words, but I will vow to make my stance known.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a preview of what’s to come in my first column: cheeky shenanigans and soft-core nudity.

Eric Metelka is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at

[email protected].

Henry M. Bowles III

Tuesday columnist

I tend to believe Oscar Wilde’s advice that “only the shallow know themselves.” So as I prepare to write my second set of Daily columns in just over a year, Wilde’s maxim, smartly hinting at the impossibility of identity, seems apt.

No, I am not troubled in the least by people’s difficulty in categorizing me. That is the point.

Yes, I am a walking satire of political and sexual identity. Having a coherent identity, like towing the party line, is incompatible with creativity and intellectual integrity. Those who claim that I have wildly evolved from president of the College Republicans to all-purpose iconoclast are only partially correct.

The truth is that my attitude has changed very little over the past four, even the past eight, years.

Rooted in my defiant blending of megalomania and gender dysphoria, I have always been an outsider, a dissident. I have always been about trashing social mores and challenging the collective wisdom. I promise nothing less from my columns.

Henry M. Bowles III is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected].

Mike Platt

Wednesday columnist

My name is Mike Platt, and I’m a Weinberg senior. I’m a chemistry major and a pre-med, but I don’t enjoy eating fellow students’ brains out for an “A” in every class I take.

I’m originally from Connecticut, but I don’t live in a quaint, anachronistic and inaccurately representative small town like on “Gilmore Girls.” And as you might guess, I watch way too much television. In fact, I make it my life’s work to compare every little daily occurrence to an episode of “Seinfeld,” “Family Guy,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or “The Office.”

In my spare time, I like to borrow celebrity catch-phrases and use them to conclude conversations (current favorite: “That’s hot.”). This hobby has led me to the realization that my subtle social awkwardness is more of a skill than a character flaw.

I am also the Senior Community Assistant of the Foster-Walker Complex. No punchline here.

Mike Platt is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at

[email protected].

Lindsay Shadrick

Thursday columnist

Lindsay Shadrick finds writing a biography rather daunting because she is not terribly clever. This might be bad news for readers, but she’s convinced she can string together 500 interesting words each week.

Fortunately, she has more free time than ever. She used to be the co-director of College Feminists and served on the Conference on Human Rights executive board. Now she reads a lot of Nancy Drew.

She is researching lesbian erotica parodies of the series for her senior thesis in American Studies and Gender Studies.

She is also a bartender. Her only marketable skill upon graduation is making a pretty good martini.

As the only female columnist, Lindsay makes about seventy cents to her fellow columnists’ dollar. All jokes aside, Lindsay is not being paid for this. It is merely a last ditch effort to achieve minor campus celebrity status. Undoubtedly, she will piss off quite a few people with this column. She looks forward to reading your angry letters.

Lindsay Shadrick is a Weinberg senior. She can be reached at [email protected].

Prajwal Ciryam

Friday columnist

In my younger days, I made speeches on buildings, slept on couches in Tech and played with liquid nitrogen in labs. But I’m a senior now – a has-been, an old man, cranky and senile.

I’m writing this column for the kids out there: Freshmen, listen to my advice this quarter. If you do, you’ll become a captain of industry, marry a movie star, vacation in Turks and Caicos and retire by 40. If you don’t, you’ll get a dead-end job pushing paper for the State Board of Education, run for president three times and lose like every other politician from Northwestern, and die miserable and hungry from the favorite disease of all great Russian authors: consumption. But if you’re a theatre major, all bets are off; I can’t predict the future of people who croak like frogs in Burger King at 2 a.m.

So what makes me qualified to tell you what to do? Nothing, really. But here’s what you should know about me. I don’t feel sorry for pre-meds – I am one, get over yourselves. I like big, fat juicy social programs – tax cuts are welfare for rich people. I don’t pop my collar – I neither went to private school nor am I rapper.

And I did the whole Associated Student Government thing -but to the Executive Board, if you screw up, I will rip your face off in this column.

And that’s what it really comes down to, giving advice and ripping faces off. I could promise you a broad, enlightened and careful look at the issues of the day. But that sounds awfully boring. I’d much rather entertain you. But if I can say something not entirely worthless along the way, then I’m up for that, too.

Like SAT Prep software and softcore porn, it’s edutainment!

Prajwal Ciryam is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881
Here they are! Say hello to our Winter Quarter columnists