An unfortunate chain of events began one morning when Matt Gordon woke up with intense abdominal pain. In his senior year of high school and enrolled in mostly AP classes, this already presented an issue, though a manageable one. “You miss a few days of AP class and you’re already in for a few issues,” he explains, though he was in enough pain to warrant this setback for a day or two.

The pain didn’t pass as he hoped it would, and by the next morning was accompanied by nausea. At roughly 5 AM on a Tuesday night, Matt was in an Emergency Room at a local hospital, where he was diagnosed with kidney stones.

This was nothing too unusual, especially for a teenager who drank around two cups of coffee a day and had a history of calcium deposit kidney stones in his family, so the usual treatment was offered to him. He was given some medication to help and told to wait a few days for the stones to pass.

The next few days were excruciating. “It felt like someone was just stabbing my stomach area,” Matt describes, his voice conveying the memory of intense pain, and after no apparent progress was made another trip to the ER became necessary.

After another examination, it was quickly found out that the situation was more serious than previously thought. Matt’s kidney stones were stuck in his ureters, and showed no signs of passing on their own. To make matters worse, the hospital’s surgeon refused to operate on patients under the age of 18, so Matt was taken to a hospital in Tampa via ambulance.

Though the situation might seem distressing from an outside perspective, it wasn’t all bad. As Matt describes it, “I was on some kickass painkillers. That was fun.” A day later ultrasound tests were conducted and he was scheduled for surgery. The surgery process involved no incisions, and instead relied on breaking the kidney stones apart with lasers, “like a laser light show.”

After the surgery, stents were placed in Matt’s ureters to prevent further complications. This is where the real trouble starts. Despite the fact that everyone has slightly different sizes of ureters, the stents that are made for them are one size fits all. Because of this, and because Matt is a fairly small guy, the stents which should have been unobtrusive ended up poking into his bladder and kidneys and causing him constant pain which rendered him essentially bedridden for several months until his recovery completed.

“I felt like I was 90 years old,” Matt recalls, “I was on a different planet because of the meds. The muscle relaxers they gave me made me feel like a zombie.”

As his senior year went on, he found himself unable to keep up with his demanding classes. “I couldn’t do anything,” he says, explaining that even after the stents were out he had to wean himself off the heavy painkillers he had been taking. “I didn’t feel like a person. I was weak, I was drained, I had issues focusing. It was not a fun time.”

Though he tried to catch up on what he had missed once he was capable of returning to school, he had missed the fundamentals of several classes and was unable to participate in the senior theater production his school was presenting. “I kinda lost out on a lot of my senior year stuff.”

Through hard work he managed to recover most of this, though one class in particular stood out as nearly impossible for him to catch up in: AP Microeconomics, a required credit in his school. The course was very lecture heavy and the teacher was infamous throughout the school for not repeating information and only teaching as he went along. “I was sinking, and he was not there to even try teaching me,” Matt says, “and in the end I failed the course.”

In order to graduate on time with the rest of his class he was presented with an ultimatum from his high school. He had to complete an online course in Microeconomics in under a week or do summer school, which just wasn’t an option for him.

In the end he managed to complete the online course in two days, working from 5 AM until midnight with very few interruptions. “It was amazing,” he says, reaching the punchline to a dark joke, “It was like I actually had instruction.”

With an updated B in the class he had failed just weeks before, Matt managed to graduate on time with the rest of his class despite all that had happened that year. As he describes it, he “lost the lottery,” though through all the pain and suffering and bizarre coincidences of his senior year, “It at least kind of somewhat worked out in the end.”

Welcome to the Morningside Minute, bringing you all the news you need in 3 minutes or less.

In political news, a federal judge on Monday permanently blocked President Trump’s sanctuary cities order. Judge William Orrick argued that Trump cannot set new conditions on spending approved by Congress. The Judge recently made the same argument when placing a temporary hold on the order.

Ethan Brown said “This seems pretty standard for what Trump’s been trying to do for his administration even though it’s pretty fractured and not really been doing much.”

San Francisco Attorney Dennis Herrera called the ruling a “victory for the American people” and stated that the President “might be able to tweet whatever comes to mind, but he can’t grant himself new authority because he feels like it”.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary on Monday. To recognize the longest marriage in the royal family, a collection of photographs was released to commemorate the occasion. Many of the photographs dated back to their marriage ceremony in 1947, and are available as first class British postage stamps for those interested.

Garion Adams, a British citizen, had the following to say: “I must say I’m quite biased in favor of the royal family. She seems to bring a lot to the country in general as far as tourism goes as well as more importantly and less known is her diplomatic impact. Being with each other forever I think it’s a testament to how good they are together I suppose because it must be a lot of stress.”

Is young American political culture dying? Historian Jon Grinspan seems to believe so. In his recent book, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, And Voting Popular, he shows that it was not always the case for young voters to be on the sidelines as they were in the recent election.

Matt Gordon had this to comment: “The issue with the younger people’s vote, the problem there is that a lot of what we’ve seen is disenfranchisement, on both sides of the line. It’s the fact that we’ve been going down a spiral of not really listening and understanding, and when we haven’t been seeing that in our leaders for quite a while that has then bled into the populace.”

Stories on the sanctuary cities ban and the royal family were based on articles by the New York Times. Information about Grinspan’s book can be found in a Big Idea article at Vox.com

For some marching band is just a way to pass time in high school, a way to make friends and learn to play music. This was not the case with Mason Knaub.

Mason went to a high school with a competitive marching band program, but still managed to be ahead of his peers. He pushed himself to get on the drum line during his Sophomore year, training from February to August over hundreds of hours and countless drills.

This practice paid off, as the drum line went on to set a state record, winning all but one state competition and securing their reputation as one of the top schools in the state.

A recent article by the New York Times focused on a single question surrounding the recent shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas: whether or not video footage of the attack should be released to the public.

While some advocate that the footage should be released immediately to inform the public of the terrible reality of such attacks, others argue that the footage serves no real purpose and should be locked away forever or even destroyed. Most occupy a middle ground between these two extremes, including the Rev. Stephen Curry, who likened the footage to that of the Kennedy assassination, but described the situation as being “too raw” for immediate release. Still others oppose the footage’s release for legal reasons, including a former Texas Ranger who suggested that it is still technically evidence in an investigation that might take years, and releasing it to the public might harm that investigation.

Overall, the article seems to suggest that while there are obvious issues with releasing the footage there is some journalistic and historical value to such evidence. While the families of victims in these attacks might be negatively affected by publishing explicit details, these details can also serve to make people angry or disgusted by the attack and subsequently take action to prevent future incidents. The fundamental question for journalists in situations like this is whether photographic or video evidence of such crimes adds anything to the story or is merely there to court controversy and attract viewers.

Emma Watson, renowned actress and social activist, recently reflected at One Young World in Ottawa on the difficulties involved with becoming a public figure in the “cause for equality”.

She addressed the audience, consisting of influential young adults from a variety of fields and countries, saying that she never thought she would call herself an activist. “The truth is,” she explained, “it had never been about being an activist; it was about the choice to make myself visible”.

Watson recalled numerous threats after first addressing the issue of gender equality, describing the period afterwards as a “baptism of fire”. Despite this, she did not retract her statements or step out of the spotlight, citing her belief that gender equality is as important or more important than other issues because it intersects with such a wide range of topics.

The New York Times recently reported on an eleven minute blackout of President Trump’s Twitter account. Just before 7pm the Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump appeared to no longer exist. Eleven minutes later the account re-appeared and only an hour later the President was tweeting again as if nothing had happened.

While the New York Times provides a fair analysis of the situation, showing tweets that are clearly critical of the account and also voicing opposite opinions that suggest that this is an attack on the President and free speech, it also sensationalizes the story somewhat. While the account was only down for eleven minutes, and Twitter released a statement three hours after its conclusion announcing that it was the action of a rogue employee, the story as presented by the Times sounds much more dire than the facts suggest.

While this is probably satire, it does raise the point that never before has a nation as large as the United States been so affected by a single social media account as now. Regardless of whether this is for better or worse, it is something that has a major effect on the way media is perceived, and poses a potential threat to established media outlets like the Times. If, as suggested by one of the tweets cited in the story, Twitter is a way for the President (and presumably other politicians) to circumvent the “mainstream media” and target their audience directly, this could explain the Times’ dismissive and somewhat exaggerated coverage of the story.

Stanford researchers claim to have taught a machine to detect sexual orientation.

The controversial study, authored by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, works by analyzing photos from dating profiles and detecting key facial features.

When analyzing five clear photos of a person’s face, the machine had an 83% accuracy for women and 91% for men in the study.

Though the intention of the study was to bring awareness to privacy risks and the danger of facial recognition software, according to the New York Times the authors of the study have received several death threats for their publication. Critics have called the study “racism by algorithm” and suggested that the theory behind it “is a mess”.

Vandalism at Morningside College

First impressions are as important for places as they are people, and depending on how you approach Morningside College the first impression you get is “under construction”.

After several letters were stolen from a sign showing the name of the college in front of the Eppley Parking Lot, the school decided to remove the rest of the letters preemptively to prevent further theft and prepare the sign for possible renovation so that letters cannot be easily stolen in the future, a step that has already been taken with other signs around campus.

According to Brett Lyon, Director of Safety and Security at Morningside College, vandalism is something that happens at every college campus. “People feel the need to take letters off signs,” he explained, which can cost the college thousands of dollars to replace. That’s thousands of dollars that could be spent improving the campus, but instead goes into replacing things that are broken or stolen by vandals who are sometimes not even students at the college.

Lyon concluded by stating that, with so many students living on campus for so many months out of the year, Morningside College is like a second home. “No one destroys their home,” he said wishing that everyone took pride in their campus and made an effort to make it a nicer place.

While the college will eventually replace the sign, budgetary concerns are an obvious limiting factor, and for now the blank sign stands in mute testimony to the damage that vandals can cause to the image of a college.

As the Q&A session started, Alex Watters began pacing back and forth across the front of the classroom in his motorized wheelchair. A few questions in to the interview he noted the humor in the situation, “I always find it ironic that I’m paralyzed but I can’t sit still.”

Watters is a first year advisor at Morningside College, a position that he takes some amount of pride in. “I’m living the dream,” he said, “just not the dream I ever envisioned.”

He sought the position at Morningside in part because of how the school accommodated him after a diving accident that left him paralyzed during his Freshman year. He noted that, while many buildings were not accessible by wheelchair, when he returned the school relocated all his classes to the buildings that were.

Although he appreciates the position he currently has at the college, particularly the fact that it allows him to help students adjust to college and watch them overcome obstacles that he knows they struggle with, he doesn’t intend to be an advisor forever. He explained that he feels one of the best ways to be useful in an organization is to constantly evolve, and joked that before long he’ll be president of the college.

While perhaps not something he plans in the immediate future, Watters explained that he could see himself occupying the position someday. He believes that Morningside has a lot of improvements to make when it comes to accessibility. While he understands that budget can get in the way of many of these projects, he noted the example of an automatic door that leads to the Mustang Grill, which is only accessible by traversing two sets of stairs. He contrasted this with the fact that there is no automatic door at the Lincoln Center, which is frequently used for public events, and explained that it would surely save money and help the community a great deal to simply relocate the equipment to a more sensible location.