Raphael Ranola

I used to live at the end of West Nevada Street in the brutal square building across the way from Caffe Paradiso and the adjacent Jimmy John’s. This was during my sophomore year, when, for a multitude of reasons, I was spending more time alone. I was working on myself, and that meant spending a...

At the risk of making this political — or maybe just hopeful — I’ve been thinking about Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral primary. Not because he’s the face of party culture or anything, but because I’ve been making fun comparisons in my head. Older millennials came of age, politically and socially,...

The process of moving into my house for my final year of college was pretty seamless. My friend’s three roommates were moving on, and he needed to find folks to live with, lest he give up a beautiful house — a regular changing of the guard. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to live in...

If you’ve seen me on the street, I was probably in an Oxford-cloth button-down and chino pants. Make no mistake, cosplaying as an academic is a hobby I take very seriously. To maintain appearances, I make the rounds at many conferences, symposiums and seminars in the climate, energy and environment space.  I met Matt Soener,...

For the sake of this column, I thought it was worth unpacking the value of the essay in general — the staple tool in developing skills in evaluating, arguing and employing rhetoric to show you understand what you’re learning.  Why? My X feed has been abuzz with thoughtful discourse about one of the most thoughtless...

“Dating is hard” — that’s how a lot of great columns start. But this isn’t “Sex and the CU,” this is me, which means we’re going to have to talk about economics. I’ll relent and say that, vibes-wise, dating sucks. Structurally, it’s an imperfect market. There isn’t necessarily a match for everyone, and your odds...

Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t really write a war novel in “Slaughterhouse-Five” so much as he writes a novel about war — specifically how war distorts time and the moral trap of trying to make slaughter mean something. He spends the prologue admitting that he couldn’t write the book for years. The horror of living through Dresden...

I relish the fact that I’m a product of Illinois public schooling. My education has been built almost entirely in institutions meant to serve the public. That’s what a land-grant university like ours is supposed to do: provide accessible education and the opportunity that comes with it. But I’m not the bright-eyed freshman I once...

As graduation quickly approaches, many of my recent musings start with the sentence stem, “In another life.” For example, in another life, I would have studied English. Or classics, or philosophy — something that asked me to sit with ambiguity and think deeply. I can picture that version of myself pretty clearly: someone who’s better-read...

In early March, with a decision I hadn’t fully processed yet sitting in my inbox, I stopped by Jim Hinterlong’s office on a whim. Jim is the Executive Director of the University YMCA, and over the years he’d become one of those rare older figures on campus you could actually talk to, so I went...