Features
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Presidential: a retrospective of the last ten years of Students’ Union presidents
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[siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] 2008 – 2009 Colin Le Fevre Following a messy voting period — one of the presidential candidates was disqualified from the race on the day of the election — Le Fevre ultimately won a vote that only 11.01 per cent of the student body participated in. His term was marked by several features,…
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Degrees for Download: online learning and concerns for the future
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Your professor is linked to a circuitboard. Your professor no longer dresses up in a gaudy shirt and tie, because your professor doesn’t dress up at all. Your professor sits comfortably in the central stream of a database, overflowing with data, ready to project quantifiable trends and employ algorithms that can accurately determine the…
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Defining Hate Speech across Canada
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The discussion of the discernment between free speech and hate speech is a difficult one, with an especially prominent place on the Wilfrid Laurier campus in recent weeks. There are enormous discrepancies between the types of speech deemed appropriate, and they are all subjectively organized to reflect their own community and their own community’s…
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The big debate on campus: new perspectives on the Laurier scandal
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Almost three weeks ago, Lindsay Shepherd, a Laurier graduate student and teaching assistant, was reprimanded for showing a TVO clip of a Jordan Peterson debate within her first year Communications tutorial and then leading a discussion about the use of gendered pronouns, sparking controversy throughout the Wilfrid Laurier University campus and amongst media outlets…
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Strumming a swan song: an obituary for the guitar
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Over the past hundred years, learning to play the guitar has been an important, often defining component in the lives of many adolescents in the Western world. Fragile teenagers across the continent have found buried parts of themselves in the poetry of lyricism and the shifting, emotional, varied tones — both crunchy and smooth…
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Separating fact from fiction: does reading really make us smarter?
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“I wish I read more.” – Everyone I spent the bulk of this past weekend reading through a recent bestseller. Despite being steeped in historical, artistic and architectural facts, it was not what would commonly be considered an enriching, thoughtful novel. It was a vapid, blunt yarn. It was a shallow, derivative adventure story.…
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Crafting a community: the value and importance of drinking local beer
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Craft beer can be a bit of a misnomer. The name connotes a kind of quality that is often a component of the beverage but isn’t an actual requirement of the final result. To say that all craft beer is genuinely ‘crafted’ isn’t entirely true. To qualify under the umbrella of ‘craft beer’, a beer…
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The separation of church and plate: deconstructing Thanksgiving, Canada’s tastiest holiday
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When we celebrate Thanksgiving, to whom are we giving thanks? It’s a question that seems to posit its own questions. Surely, a great deal of that thanks can be given to those we are closest to: our friends and our families. But there have been and always will be things that go far, far beyond…
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Out of service? Investigating service dogs in the classroom
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At Laurier, we seem to be characterized by our love of dogs. Walking across campus is a joy because we get to see all the service dogs in training. In addition to the dogs on campus grounds and common areas, the classroom is a popular place where your friendly canine friends will take a snooze…
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Food for thought: A detailed look at the culture of weight loss and fat shaming
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When I was eight years old, I weighed around 140 pounds. By the time I was 17, I couldn’t weigh myself with an ordinary scale. The digital ones flashed a loaded ‘error’, while the analog ones spun more than a full circle — all the way past 300 and into uncharted, supposedly uninhabited territory.…
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The Tie That Binds WLU Since 1926
Serving the Waterloo campus, The Cord seeks to provide students with relevant, up to date stories. We’re always interested in having more volunteer writers, photographers and graphic designers.