Visitors unfamiliar with Rice University’s Common Reading program may want to learn more here before reading this article.

Dear Common Reading, this is for you. I think you should ponder this candid review. You’re hogwash, you’re toothless, you’re gonna be great. I believe in you truly, but first I berate. A text is a means, not an end to pursue. An author’s deficient with one point of view. To your book-centric past please now say adieu for a transfiguration I here beg of you. Oh Common Reading, I must beat you blue but I’ll do it with love; I’ll do it for you.

Your name, to be frank, is an earful of sigh. No import, no fanfare, no reason to fly. This gift with a spine is just one I don’t want. It’s pressure; it’s hazing; a high school haunt. This shared ID is a humorous plea. I’m Hanszen! I’m MechE! I’m Three Cups of Tea! This dialogue’s missing a who, where and how. Professor Plum in the library by the candlestick now? Your issues are passive, enslaved by a book. What’s cheaper? What’s easy? Where shouldn’t we look? You’re present at orientation each year. Those freshmen, those suckers! Upperclassmen drink beer. And most sorry yet, you’re still thinking small. We’re Rice and we’re hedged, but we can be tall.

You salute our new presence by having us read or sit in a theater to hear of a need. But what of our talents, our minds and our hearts? We’re not just some sponges; we’ve got moving parts! How ’bout motive and fervor, a year to muse and a name for the headlines, a name for the news? How ’bout movies to watch, a speech to peruse, books (yes, that’s plural!), whatever we choose? How ’bout action in numbers, a movement by us? How ’bout journals and papers as forums for fuss? How ’bout courses and theses and projects galore in theme with the subject that’s set at the fore?

Give us voices, not welcomes, and loudly we’ll call; give us people who listen, together we’ll squall; give us events so large that as armies we’ll brawl; give us meat for consumption, to interest, enthrall. Give us reason for ruckus, not discussion in lieu; give us cause to create a big hullabaloo. A reading, you see, is a sob and a snore. Give us something to fight, give us something much more.

Try energy, healthcare or freedoms abroad; try happiness, weed or political fraud; try telecom, Darfur or sex ed that’s flawed; try warfare, religion, a claim we should laud. It’s issues and causes that spawn unity, not sitting in circles with Three Cups of Tea. Let Rice summon change; let students be free. Together we’re something, now don’t you agree?

Want vision? Want thunder? Want influence? Speed? Want the public’s attention to a critical need? Want the weight of a hippo, the strength of a steed? Then do us a favor; don’t have us just read. Oh Common Reading, I rhyme to you here in hopes that you’ll open a listening ear. Ahead is our future, a frightening frontier. Let’s go make a difference; let’s go pioneer.

Dear Common Reading, this is your cue. And Dean Robert Forman, for you I write too. Have the strength of an owl smothered in blue. To let us take flight, you know what to do.

Visit ricethresher.org for the original published article.

To egregiously misquote AbortionFacts.com, if it “feels so good, why do I feel so bad?” Such is life in the Facebook universe. By way of bells, whistles, graffiti, tags and pokes, the mammoth social network has become our choice method of social intercourse. According to its About page, Facebook yields “the power to…[make] the world more open and connected,” and it does. But Trojan knows that some things are better left unshared.

Mark Zuckerberg, self-acknowledged computer geek and—according to the June 26, 2008, Rolling Stone article “The Battle for Facebook“—mathlete, science Olympian, Latin honors society participant and band member, possesses the endearing nerdish quality we’ve all come to know, love and live at Rice. But the blue-hued child he spawned in early 2004 has torn away at our social motivations, our dialog skills, our yearnings for close relationships and—dare I say—our happiness. Ironic it is that a Harvard colleague of Zuckerberg’s claimed they had “a lack of time…to do social networking.” Now we instant-friend that kid from GenChem to whom we’ve never said three consecutive words; that’s “networking.” And we eschew asking out that nice girl down the hall because she’s not “Looking for: Dating.” In his crusade to obliterate social barriers, Zuckerberg realized quite the opposite. Today’s Facebook universe is but a tour of expediency, of shallow interaction.

We have been socially diluted, stupefied and consumerified. Most unfortunate of all, we are learning not to care. We have stamped our “statuses,” our most intimate feelings, front-and-center on our very own virtual billboards; we have made peace with two typed words and a smiley as an annual happy birthday wish in its totality, a spectacle made possible courtesy of Facebook date reminders; we have come to accept, even if in jest, that no relationship is official “until it’s on Facebook;” we have become “fans” of colossal corporations; we have read the News Feed and we have liked it; we have lost the motivation to be interested, to inquire, to earn the trust of those who matter most; we have replaced chocolate boxes and teddy bears and cupcakes with their sterilized digital impostors; we have consumed photographs as we do gum, briefly and with little thought; we have associated ourselves with events and groups and global causes not by participation and attendance and thorough involvement but by the flick of a petty finger, and our actions we have disowned just as swiftly with a simple delete or de-tag. Of these offenses I am personally guilty, and maybe you are too. So like smokers now addicted, slaves of the body and mind, we can either accept the jarring reality of our condition or we can fight it. Fight, I say. Fight.

As Carl Schurz, the first German-born American senator, once declared, “If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.” So let’s do something. Together. (And let’s not organize it on Facebook.)

Let’s have not a day, not a week, but a month without Facebook. This is no humorless joke, no Backpage plot, no cunning ploy to let me collect more virtual friends than you. If you are anything like Matt Feaga, Martel College senior, my suitemate and self-described “dancer extraordinaire,” you have probably already jumped up and exclaimed with absolute vehemence, “Hell no! I won’t give up Facebook!” But sit back down and breathe through your nose. In. Out. Good.

On Monday, join me in a campus-wide Facebook blackout. Say your goodbyes, deactivate your account and cite The Facebook Pledge as your reason to The Big Z himself. Start using your voice, your legs and (gasp!) even the mail for your event invitations. Talk to your friends on their birthdays. (Hint: Write down when they are!) Ask that guy if he’s single, ask how your floormates are doing, ask which party is planned for next weekend. Print out your favorite photos and put them on your (real) wall. Give someone a gift he can hold. Know your friends and know you do not have 672 plus five pending. Meet people in person and ask them, “How is life?” No joke, no plot, no cunning ploy.

Open? Connected? I hope you will think twice. On Monday it starts. Or really, it ends.

Visit ricethresher.org for the original published article.