Author / Sonya Schoenberger
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![Illustration by Savannah Bustillo]()
Regulating the Race to the Bottom
On November 24, 2012, a fire broke out in the Tazreen Fashions factory near Dhaka, Bangladesh. Managers ordered workers to stay in their seats, thinking the alarm was a drill. 123 workers died as the fire spread throughout the building. Workers trapped inside were incinerated; others jumped to their deaths out of upper-story windows. Five…
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Students on the Margin
Senior Trinidy Combs would like to be more involved on campus, but she finds it hard to be engaged in the Washington University community while working 22 hours a week at an off-campus job. On top of taking out $17,500 in student loans annually, Trinidy works two 11-hour waitressing shifts each weekend to make ends…
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License to Destroy
BY SONYA SCHOENBERGER In 1863, President Lincoln’s critics denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as a barbaric violation of the laws of civilized warfare. By emancipating slaves behind Confederate lines, they argued, the Union had utterly dispensed with the restraints of enlightened military conduct. Northerners and Southerners alike viewed the proclamation as nothing more than the incitement…
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Complicity in Genocide: Pascal Simbikangwa in Paris
BY SONYA SCHOENBERGER In a 100-day period between April and mid-July 1994, members Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic majority slaughtered nearly a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu with clubs and machetes. Twenty years later, one of the alleged orchestrators of the genocide is on trial in Paris. Pascal Simikangwa, former intelligence chief of the Rwandan National Forces, faces…
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Survey Reveals Divide in Student Priorities Along Class Lines
BY SONYA SCHOENBERGER In January 2013, Washington University United for Socioeconomic Diversity (WU/FUSED) surveyed the Wash U student body to gauge levels and perceptions of socioeconomic diversity on campus. The survey, which received 275 undergraduate responses (about 5% of the student body), revealed that Wash U students acknowledge the lack of socioeconomic diversity on campus,…
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A Strike Will Not Help the People of Syria
BY SONYA SCHOENBERGER Over the past week, media outlets have been glutted with experts delivering cogent, informed, and completely divergent policy advice about the benefits and risks of a US strike on Syria. There seems to be a significant risk that the US is on the verge of entering into yet another long, messy war…
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Dangerous Territory: Race, IQ, and Power
BY SONYA SCHOENBERGER In the 19th century, whites anxious to preserve societal order and hierarchy fought to entrench racial distinctions not just in social institutions but in the very the laws of nature. Theories of the day claimed that people of African blood were not simply biologically inferior—they were of an entirely distinct species, more…
