The fight over same-sex marriage has taken place across the country, in homes, schools, campaigns and bedrooms, an incredible number of times through recent decades. The issue holds a special place in the American political process for the emotions it raises among both its supporters and its detractors.

Nine states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage and one of the two major political parties have embraced it as a part of their platform. Now the debate has taken over Rhode Island. Lawmakers in the R.I. House of Representatives passed a bill in February that would legalize same-sex marriage. If the Senate approves the bill, Rhode Island’s governor Lincoln Chafee’75 P’14 will sign it. The matter, however, is far from settled.

[Read more →]

As The Herald moves further and further into 21st century, we’d like to bring you our next development in online journalism: our incredible, brilliant data science team (aka, the future Nate Silvers of America).

For the first data science project, Herald Data Science Editor Andersen Chen ’14 and Data Science Contributor Marvin Arroz ’14 have created a beautiful interactive graphic that compiles 28 years worth of data from the Brown’s Office of Institutional Research on all the concentrations Brown offers and how they’ve changed over time.

You can use the interactive graphic in two modes:

• “Line” is the default view, which plots the number of concentrators in a particular concentration over time with a solid line.
• “Area” mode stacks the data, allowing you to see more clearly trends involving related concentrations. The thickness of a colored band in a given year is proportional to the number of degrees completed in the concentration that year.

Want to see changes in just your concentration? Select the name of a concentration to see only its data. Click on checkmarks for others to compare multiple concentrations. Once you’re ready to switch back to viewing all of them, click on a highlighted concentration again. [Read more →]

This week, The Herald is running a four-part series examining students’ experiences in introductory science courses at Brown.

This topic is particularly relevant now — nearly 60 percent of the class of students that Brown admitted this year expressed the intent to concentrate in the sciences. The Committee on Educational Innovation, one of the strategic planning committees formed under Christina Paxson this fall, identified science, technology, engineering, and math fields as a key area of focus in the strategic planning process.

Improving undergraduate science education has also been an area of recent national concern, with a growing amount of press devoted to high attrition rates in certain STEM fields. In 2011, the Association of American Universities announced it would undertake a five-year initiative to improve STEM education at its member institutions, including Brown.

Introductory courses enroll significant percentages of the student body each semester. In spring 2011, for example, nearly one-fifth of the freshman class enrolled in BIOL 0200: “The Foundation of Living Systems.” [Read more →]

Many former Keeney residents were shocked when they returned to campus to find that the building received a major facelift. But this summer’s changes hardly end there.

Today’s Herald featured a spread that breaks down all of this and next summer’s housing changes, which aim to create a more uniform progression of housing from freshman to senior year. Since we’ve already given you a photo tour of the new Keeney, we now bring you inside some of the other renovated dorms.

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Oh, puns.

At first listen, Toronto-based crooner LIGHTS didn’t turn me on. Her debut album, The Listening, reminded me more than anything of the saccharine sludge at the bottom of a weak and poorly-stirred cup of coffee. Think breathless Zooey Deschanel laid over Owl City’s insipid beats.

Her sophomore effort, Siberia, released Oct. 4, is something else entirely. The record, featuring Vancouver hip hop artist Shad and electrofunk outfit Holy Fuck, is lyrically adventurous and more raw than her radio-ready premiere.

Lights, née Valerie Poxleitner, was born in Timmins, Ontario, the daughter of missionaries. BlogDH read spoke with the Juno Award-winner about touring, comic books and her beloved keytar, Russell.

LIGHTS plays at The Met Jan 29th (tickets here).

BlogDailyHerald: So you used to be in a metal band. Tell me more!
Lights: The metal band is really funny because it was when I was 17 or 18 and I didn’t sing or anything — I just played guitar. I was playing around in a bunch of different bands … the metal band was called Shovelface.

BDH: Can I find Shovelface’s music online?
L: Thankfully, no. It was on the cusp of anything other than dial-up. [Read more →]

Chubbs the gator hangs out on the bottom shelf of Derrick Duquette 12.5's TV stand.

If you don’t already know all about  the exotic pets some students keep in their dorm rooms, then clearly you didn’t read Wednesday’s Herald.

While the article has all the hilarious stories from students who’ve kept alligators, hedgehogs and bunnies in their rooms — as well as warnings from ResLife about the health and safety problems that pets can cause — newspapers have limited space, and we couldn’t fit in all the photos we got.

Fortunately, BlogDH has got you covered. After the jump, we have EVEN MORE PET PHOTOS! And some of them are really cute. [Read more →]

Hide your kids, hide your wife.

Andrew Rose Gregory is perhaps best known as being one-fourth of the polycephalic pop culture cyborg that is the Gregory Brothers — the family behind Auto-Tune the News, the Double Rainbow Song and the Bed Intruder Song. In short, after Dick Cheney and Keanu Reeves, he’s one of the last people you’d expect to have a (semi-) secret career as a navel-gazing singer-songwriter.

But he does. His newest effort, “Song of Songs,” is a contemporary take on the Old Testament’s song of songs of Solomon. The album, which features the voice of sister-in-law Sarah Gregory, The Color Red Band and input from Sufjan Stevens, is a many-layered, pastoral breath of blue-eyed soul without a hint of irony.

Gregory will play at the Graduate Lounge Saturday, Nov. 12 at 9:30 p.m. The Herald spoke with him about the television pilot he’s filming for Comedy Central, Katie Couric and harpsichords.

So what’s the story behind Auto-Tune the News?
All four of us we for a long time had wanted to be able to watch the news but we found that whenever we did it we’d fall asleep, it was so boring. So we realized if we were able to dance while we were watching the news, we wouldn’t fall asleep … If we added a baseline and a beat and a poppin’ Dr. Luke melody we wouldn’t fall asleep. I mean, I’ve never heard of anyone fall asleep while they were dancing. And it worked! Evan and Michael [Gregory] have degrees in music theory so they do a lot of stuff on the music end … we try to incorporate a lot of complex, interesting musical elements into the videos.  [Read more →]

In the Brown Daily Herald Media Empire, the people are informed by two separate, yet equally important groups (and Post-): the paper, which you grab from the Ratty and the Blog, which you read on your laptop during lectures. Occasionally, a story will be too big and awesome to completely fit into the pages of the Herald, so we’re here to pick it up.  This is their spillover.  DUN DUN!

Gabriel Kahane’s ’03 music is like the love child of Arnold Schoenberg, Andrew Bird, Elliot Smith and Steven Sondheim if that child were raised by drunken Russian crystallographers on a maritime kick. In short: his music is very, very good. Also, he looks like a friendly elf. Best of all: people are noticing. The 31 year-old has been written up in the New York Times more times than I, a humanities concentrator, can count; Pitchfork says fewer bad things him than they do about almost anyone except Kanye West; he was recently named a composer-in-residence of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; he’s collaborated with Sufjan Stevens and Rufus Wainwright, among others and he’s currently writing a musical for the renowned Public Theater. Here are some of the choicest things he said to me — including a recipe for braised pork shoulder ragu — after his concert at Grant Recital Hall last Thursday. [Read more →]