Dorian Blue

As I begin the final term of my first year in Eugene and am starting my first full term with The Student Insurgent, I feel a good deal of reflection is in order. As I flew away from my life in rural upstate New York, I expected to feel the world open up to me and to be engulfed by an array of new experiences reaching out for me, but the romantic projections of my life after high school were met with the reality of the mundanity of the life I have always lived.

He tapped his fingers against the soft leather of the armchair, staring at his feet. The woman across from him scratched her pen vigorously across the pages of her notebook, enraptured. Her black hair was slicked into an immaculate bun, her eyes dark, yet open. Holly Dao, M.D. “Do you need a moment?” he asked her. She lifted her pen, her gaze and smile flashing back to him. “No, we can move on.

On February 3rd, at around 9pm, a 50-car Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic materials derailed. Tons of vinyl chloride and other harmful chemicals involved in the making of plastics, spilled into the area surrounding the town of East Palestine and the Ohio River. The residents of the town were then evacuated and the EPA and local government began evaluating what kind of cleanup measures needed to be taken. It is an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions, yet all guilty parties have begun the effort to minimize it and deny that such a thing happening was inevitable.

The Interview With The Vampire TV show, an adaption of the 1976 book of the same name, debuted its first season on Oct 2nd. It dives into the fraught relationship between the two leads, Lestat and Louis, and their time living together in the jazz age of New Orleans. It is twisted and devastatingly beautiful, bringing the gothic genre back in full swing. Louis sits in a penthouse in the modern day, recounting the events of the past in a poetic and melancholic narration to a cynical journalist named Daniel Molloy, who had originally interviewed him fifty years before.

On January 17th, the ASUO meeting for NASU’s budget was packed to the gills. The tension was palpable; more and more people squeezed in and the ASUO committee members sat aligned at their table and firmly asked no one in the room to stand behind them, even as space dwindled. As the meeting convened, the NASU members sat across from the ASUO budget leadership. The ASUO Chair outlined that the meeting was closed to public comment and any filming.

Make sure to check out our Rogues Gallery! On February 28th, President Schill sent a campus-wide email, sharing that he had “exciting news to share about the future of the University of Oregon.” Many speculated what it could be about, though most rightly assumed it was hinting at a large donation. The next day, as promised, it was revealed that Steve and Connie Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft and UO trustee respectively, gave around half a billion dollars to start the Ballmer Institute.

“I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said ‘drawn towards her’ but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging.” Twenty-six years before Dracula was published, there was Carmilla. The novella, written by French author Sheridan Le Fanu, chronicles the story of a noblewoman named Laura living in Germany who receives a mysterious yet beautiful countess named Carmilla as her guest.

A regular Wednesday guest lecture on campus became an anti-logging protest when a group of activists shut down a talk given by Tyler Freres of Freres Lumber. Freres, a third-generation logger, came to the University of Oregon law school to talk about his company and the benefits of the post-fire logging practices his company employs. Freres and his company hope to salvage the land that was burnt following the 2020 Summer Oregon wildfires, particularly the Holiday Farm Fire.