Kate Murray

Despite growing popularity, progressive candidates don’t win

Despite growing popularity, progressive candidates don’t win

Medicare for all! Taxing the rich! Green New Deal! Student debt relief! These values are among those heard in the rallying cries of progressive politicians and voters in the 2020 election cycle. However, candidates who espouse these values are vastly underperforming on the national stage.

Why aren’t there more women in politics? It’s not about lack of ambition

It is widely recognized and accepted that there is a severe deficit of female political leadership in the United States. Despite comprising over half of the American population, the most recent figures put women’s representation in state and local governments at roughly 25 percent, on average.

Early childhood nutrition education is just diet culture in disguise

Early childhood nutrition education is just diet culture in disguise

American children are bombarded with messages from every angle telling them that there is an ideal way to eat and that being thin is both healthy and desirable. The education that children receive about nutrition from parents, schools and the media involves policing food choices, regulating exercise and monitoring weight, often via the inaccurate and misleading body mass index measurement. These practices place moral judgments on what children eat and what their bodies look like. While efforts from adults to teach the youth about nutrition are well-intentioned, they often end up laying the foundation for children to develop unhealthy relationships with food and their bodies.

A year of COVID-19: Practicing resilience in and resistance to the attention economy

This month marks one year since I, along with most members of the Mount Holyoke community, packed up my dorm and left campus due to COVID-19. Like most people, I have experienced grief, frustration, anger and instability since then. There have been countless days where I wake up with an acute, dull ache in my chest for no obvious reason until I remember, “Oh, right. Your life has been turned upside down because of a pandemic.”