Wise Monkey News is here to provide young people an opportunity to discuss the issues that affect their lives. We hope that, through your participation, this website serves as a forum for the development, exchange, and expression of ideas that will prepare us to assume our positions as the leaders of tomorrow's world. Have something to say?

Ice shelves fall; the heat is on

by: Sarah Dempsey - printed on 03-27-2002

Last week the world saw first-hand the disturbing effects of global warming. Part of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, made up of 720 billion tons of ice (roughly the size of Rhode Island), collapsed into the ocean after a month of rapid melting and disintegration. This was not a prediction, not some scientist's dreadful warning, this was real life. This was the result of five decades of sharp temperature increases of as much as 4.

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Getting in touch with your world

by: Meghan Molenda - printed on 09-12-2001

It was 9:15 on Friday morning and I was on my way to logic. I was traveling by foot on one of the many cement pathways that lead the majority of us to our places of thought, learning, confusion, or whatever one would classify exactly how we spend our days on the bluff. Since I was getting closer and closer to being late for the first class of the day I decided to veer off from the normal flow of traffic and blaze a trail of my own through the freshly manicured grass that lies between Mago and Franz.

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Foriegn policy goes fishing

by: Ryan O'Connor - printed on 04-25-2001

If ever the United States of America has needed a clear set of foreign policy objectives, it is now. As the world witnessed in Quebec last week, many citizens of the world are not sold on the benefits of free trade. Conversely, we also saw that most oft he Western Hemisphere’s political leaders are. In many respects, there seems to be little doubt than an integrated hemispheric (and eventually world) economy with few trade barriers will be the result of the increasing power and prevalence of multi-national corporations, non-governmental organizations, and inter-governmental organizations.

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When dealt death and tragedy: How do we play our hand?

by: Ryan O'Connor - printed on 10-24-2001

My brother has been in El Salvador since last June. A friend of his from Santa Clara University, where he is a junior, was one of the victims of the attacks on September 11. She died, valiantly so it seems, aboard the flight that went down in rural Pennsylvania.

She had volunteered with my brother once a week, for an entire year at a San Jose-area school, tutoring children. She was the girlfriend of his co-editor on the Santa Clara student newspaper.

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Finding the Columbia River

by: Dr. Frank Fromherz - printed on 01-23-2002

"I've known rivers, ancient, dusky rivers, my soul has grown deep like the rivers." The great Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes wrote these lines while aboard a train. He was on his way to Mexico to visit his dad. The poet, who had just finished high school, "grew deep like the rivers" as he crossed the Mississippi, and thought about a people whose memories stretched across the Nile, the Congo, and the Euphrates.

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Monologues help women

by: Sruthi Mathews - printed on 09-25-2002

It was on a whim really. I had no idea. I wasn’t prepared for the depth of experience and truth which would resonate the theater walls on the day of auditions. Some of the women recalled the basic and occasionally humorous frustrations of simply belonging to the female gender— PAP smears, tampons, etc.—

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