My senior year of college, the student newspaper announced that a new Web site called “thefacebook.com” was open to our campus community.
With a few clicks of a mouse, I became part of the first 50,000 users — now only a small drop in the 400 million-person networking tsunami that exists today.
In 1982, Scott Brown, a 22-year-old law student from Boston College, posed nude in a Cosmopolitan Magazine centerfold. He described himself as “a bit of a patriot,” but with a well-placed arm, he kept any bits of his patriot shielded from the camera.
When asked to return for a second semester of column writing for The Daily Tar Heel, I considered whether the campus still needed a voice on women and gender issues.
Had everything already been said? Was it time for different voices and different issues?
Everything I know about diet and exercise I learned from magazines.
From years of casual research and exposure, I can tell you with little pause how many calories are in certain foods and what activities will burn them off.
I recently went out on Franklin Street celebrating a Marine’s safe return home from Iraq. I did not know him well, but as I saw him greet old friends in the parking lot on Rosemary Street, my heart ached with how momentous this day was for him.
But this conclusive victory had not brought everyone out into the streets.
In an article in The Daily Tar Heel last week, N.C. Pride spokesman Keith Hayes said, “Now the (N.C. Gay Pride) parade is really about celebrating what we have accomplished for gay civil rights — free from fear.”
But even with gay marriage legal in four states and Gay-Straight Alliances at hundreds of schools, many people still adopt the quasi-tolerant stance of NIMBY: Not in My Backyard.
