Reading Time: < 1 minute As Editor-in-Chief of Touchstones, UVSC’s literary journal, I would like to comment on last week’s article concerning the launch of this semester’s issue. The article makes assertions espoused neither by myself nor the current Touchstones staff. My hope is to correct any misconceptions this article may have created.

Reading Time: 3 minutes So you’re in your family room playing Wii with your highly political friends, and one of them, the one with the goatee, of course, asks whom you’re going to vote for. You freeze and put your Wii remote down and scratch your head. Sure, your friend’s out-of-the-blue question threw you off guard, but still, you hadn’t pondered about this, so what now?

Reading Time: 3 minutes Any time China hits the headlines, I get the distinct feeling that our perception of that country is stalled somewhere around the time of Tiananmen Square or thereabouts. The old saying goes that if it bleeds, it leads. With that filter in hand, you’d be hard-pressed to find media coverage that let the Chinese appear for what they are: a flawed country, for sure, but one that’s also richly textured by a lot of the same things we go through in our country.

Reading Time: 2 minutes I am one of those self-proclaimed health nuts who scours the news every day for stories about the benefits of vitamins, exercise, what foods to eat for what effects, etc. It’s a confusing hobby. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, they throw another curveball. One day, green tea is a panacea, the next day, the results of all these studies were “compelling, but not conclusive,” according to health guru Tom Venuto.