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Wednesday April 12, 2017 vol. CXLI no. 41
{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } U . A F FA I R S
ON CAMPUS
Anderson offers a defense Guggenheim of traditional marriage Q&A: Professor Mark Beissinger By Emily Spalding staff writer
Mark Beissinger, the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics, is one of the recipients of the 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Beissinger received the award in the field of Political Science for his work on social movements and imperialism in Russia and the post-Soviet states. The Daily Princetonian sat down with Professor Beissinger to learn more about his research interests and his view on Russia today. The Daily Princetonian: Your work has primarily focused on topics concerning the Soviet Union. What sparked your interest in this field of work? Where has it led you, particularly as it relates to “A Revolutionary World: The Growth and Urbanization of Global Mass Revolt,” for which you received the Guggenheim Fellowship? Prof. Mark Beissinger: My work up until maybe about six or seven years ago primarily focused on the Soviet Union, but more and more I’ve been engaged in global study of revolutions around the world. That’s been sparked in part by events in the region of the former Soviet Union, particularly the revolutions in Ukraine. So I was asked a number of years ago to speak at a conference of historians at
Yale about the relationship between violence and revolution. I had written something about the spread of nonviolent resistance movements … I had a hunch that revolutions were becoming less violent over time, but there was no data to be able to show that. So I went out and tried to collect some data about deaths and revolutions over the course of the last century. That kind of sparked my interest in a broader study about how revolution has changed over the last century. And I put together a data set of revolutionary episodes from 1900 to the present, about 350 of them, and I’m using that to look at trends and topics like violence and revolution and the success rate of revolution, the incidence of revolution, what happens after revolution, and so on. So that’s the nature of the Guggenheim project. It emerged out of my work in the Eurasian region, but it’s much more global … Now I do have another dimension of that project, which is at the individual level. So when I was in Ukraine I was able to get a very unusual survey that allowed one to identify not only who participated in the Orange Revolution, but who supported the Orange Revolution and didn’t participate, who opposed the Orange Revolution, who mobilized as a counter-revolutionary, and who See BEISSINGER page 2
COURTESY OF THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
Dr. Ryan Anderson gave a talk Tuesday called “Marriage: What It Is, Why It Matters, and the Consequences of Redefining It”
By Nouran Ibrahim Contributor
“Let me start, as any a good conservative should start, by turning back the clock 50 years,” Dr. Ryan Anderson ’04 said. Anderson is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, editor of “Public Discourse,” the online journal for The Witherspoon Institute, and co-author of “What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense.” He graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in music and holds a doctoral degree in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.
50 years ago, according to Anderson, births to single mothers were in the single digits across the general American population. They have now reached about 40 percent. “Gays and lesbians are not to blame” for this rise, stated Anderson. Rather, it was the rise of a “sexual revolution” and a redefinition of marriage that has resulted in family fragmentation, and it was the revolutionary idea that love makes a family which has allowed for the emergence and permanence of this redefinition of marriage. Anderson attempted to exchange this definition for another he, politics professor Robert George, and Sher-
if Girgis argue for in their book, “What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense.” “Marriage is a comprehensive unity…. It is comprehensive in the action spouses engage in, it is comprehensive in the good that spouses are ordered towards, and it is comprehensive in the commitment that spouses make to each other,” Anderson argued. He further illustrates the difference between the completeness of our own functional bodies and the incompleteness of our roles as creators of new human life. The same way in which academic institutions are ordered towards the good of truth-seeking, marital institutions are ordered toward the good of creating and raising children that we as individuals cannot do alone. Marriage, according to this definition, becomes a “civic project” that requires commitments from individuals most other ordinary relationships do not. It is when these commitments are not made that there are social costs, such as those of single-parent households, according to Anderson. “Marriage as a public policy matter exists to unite a man and a woman permanently and exclusively as husband and wife to then become mother and father to any children that that union might produce,” Anderson said. See ANSCOMBE page 3
ON CAMPUS
“Sex, Power, and Pleasure” workshop discusses inclusive sex ed By Samvida Venkatesh staff writer
There is no safe online space for people to ask questions about sex and pleasure without attracting vicious internet trolls, Andrea Barrica, Founder and CEO of O.school, said in a workshop on Tuesday titled ‘Sex, Power and Pleasure: The Sex Ed you Deserve.’ O.school is a shame-free online platform for pleasure education that is intersectional, trauma-informed, and entirely LGBTQ+ inclusive, Barrica explained. She said, “The de facto sex ed all over the world is porn, which is usually made by and for men, and we wanted
to change that – you don’t want to learn how to drive from a NASCAR race.” Barrica explained that 35 of the best sex educators in the country, and some from around the world, were brought onto the O.school platform, which is currently under beta-testing and can be accessed only by invite. “We don’t want to be exclusive, but we do have to ensure a safe space for people to ask questions and keep out the trolls that are rampant on other platforms,” Barrica explained. The O.school model has classes on various topics live-streamed to users, who will be able to ask instructors questions in a live chat,
Barrica said. The level of classes is usually aimed at beginners and those who want to try things out, she added. “When I went to my first kink meetup I was absolutely overwhelmed, I freaked because I was in a dungeon,” Barrica said, explaining the need for a safe platform for users to ask questions and explore interests. There are six main categories under which videos are streamed, Barrica explained. #unlearn helps people overcome the shame around their bodies, instructs on how not to slut-shame others, and works to remove the religious and cultural stigma See PLEASURE page 4
IMAGE BY JAMIE O’LEARY
Princeton Students for Gender Equality and the Women*s Center hosted the founder and CEO of O.school.
NEWS & NOTES
Three U. alumni named most intelligent people in the world associate news editor
Three alumni have been named to Gazette Review’s “Top 10 Most Intelligent People in the World” list, which was published on April 8. The list includes Terence Tao GS ’96, who was named the world’s most intelligent person, along with Christopher Hirata GS ’05 and Akshay Venkatesh GS ’02. All three are professors based in the United States. Tao is currently the James and Carol Collins Chair of the Mathematics Department at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degree from Flinders University in Australia at the age of 16. He received his Ph.D. from the University at the age of 21, where he worked under Professor of Mathematics Elias Stein. Tao was named a full professor at UCLA and holds the distinction of being the youngest person to achieve this rank at UCLA, at the age of 24. In 2006, Tao was named a co-recipient of the Fields Medal, often described as the “Mathematics Nobel Prize,” and in 2014 he received the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He was named as a finalist for Australian of the Year
in 2007, and received a $500,000 grant for winning the Alan T. Waterman Award in 2008. He is well-known for his proof of the Green-Tao Theorem, which states that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers, as well as Tao’s Inequality. His current research focuses on harmonic analysis and analytic number theory. Hirata, who was named the third most intelligent person in the world, is a professor of physics at The Ohio State University. He received his bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology in 2001 at the age of 18 and was the youngest Ameri-
can to win a gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad at the age of 13. At the age of 16, Hirata worked with NASA to help with their mission to colonize Mars, and at the age of 18 he published a paper titled “The Physics of Relationships.” In 2005, Hirata received a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, and worked at the California Institute of Technology until moving to Ohio State in 2012. Hirata’s IQ has been stated to be around 225, which is one of the highest in the world. Venkatesh, who was named the seventh most intelligent person in the world, is a Professor of Mathematics at Stanford Univer-
In Opinion
Today on Campus
Senior Columnist Marni Morse criticizes the lack of reporting on sexual assault cases and Contributing Columnist Emily Erdos encourages students to learn more practical skills. PAGE 6
4:30 p.m.: Gérard Araud, ambassador of France to the United States, will give a talk, “French Foreign Policy in an Unstable World” at 4:30 p.m. in Robertson Hall, Bowl 16.
sity. He entered the University of Western Australia at the age of 13 as the youngest ever student, and received First Class Honours in Pure Mathematics in 1997. He also received the J.A. Woods Memorial Prize for being the leading graduating student. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics under Professor of Mathematics Peter Sarnak in 2002 and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 2005 to 2006. He has received the Salem Prize, the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, and the Infosys Prize in Mathematical Sciences. His research focuses on representation theory and ergodic theory.
WEATHER
By Abhiram Karuppur
HIGH
74˚
LOW
44˚
Scattered showers. chance of rain:
40 percent