Author Archives: Jason O'Bryan

If you want to run for president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council without being a member of Bruins United or Students First!, you had better be either as rich as Ross Perot, or as crazy.

I have always considered theft the most circumstantial of the major sins. I remember a spring break in high school that I spent at Walt Disney World. I was 17 and had reached the age where I would’ve much rather been slurring out drink orders in some third-world country, where kids go shot-for-shot with topless […]

When I was at home recently, there was an anti-abortion rally outside the local Starbucks, complete with pictures of dead babies and slogans about murder. The abortion-rights people got wind of this rally ahead of time and posted themselves on the other side of the street with slogans of their own, chanting and screaming to […]

Over 208,000 students just got screwed over all at once. And they probably didn’t even realize it. At the UC Board of Regents’ May 18 meeting, which addressed the recent compensation scandal and the possible culpability of University of California President Robert Dynes, the regents decided to give Dynes their support. In a press release, […]

How many times have you seen a recipe for a cake that called for two cups of high-fructose corn syrup? Or been sitting at the dinner table with your parents and asked your father to pass the sodium-lactate? Who has ever had a craving for Yellow #40 or partially hydrogenated soybean oil? The obvious answer […]

At 3:37 a.m., a guttural yell from outside makes its way through the brick and mortar of the otherwise silent chambers of Powell Library. I have been there for four straight hours and, feeling entitled to a break, quickly step out to investigate. Outside, I meet David Wootton, first-year undeclared student, and ask him if […]

If I hear one more reference to “Bushisms,†or one more person called a “flip-flopper,†I am going to lose it. Haunted memories from the 2004 presidential election — memories I would rather forget — will not go away because every time I turn my head, I hear politicians complaining about and bickering with each […]