ECHO! Echo… echo…
Echo chambers, nymphs rendered speechless, bats and whales trading sounds, echoes of the past…
As the leaves hide their summer clothes, the air grows more clipped and crisp, caught smack dab in the middle of small concert season, identify the sounds that surround you. Consider the architectural particularities of acoustic spaces, booming speakers, agonizing amplifiers. Trace the histories of samples in your favorite modern songs, follow etymology trees to their Nordic roots. Reflect on why Echo’s fruitless yearning for Narcissus still resonates with us, and what it means for imitation and vanity to be so closely intertwined. Investigate what Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence,” the battle within poets to pay homage to their predecessors without producing some derivative, inferior work. In the same vein, continue the conversation against remakes in film and literature, a mounting frustration with every live action debut. Explain the mechanisms behind the doppler effect, your friend’s voice fading as they step ahead of you, or the echoes of past memories that haunt you yet still. If, with childlike mischief, you shout down hollow tunnels just to hear your distorted voice bouncing off the walls… what sorts of echoes do you hope to hear?
Feel free to review the pitches from each of our sections, and claim any you’re interested in by emailing the attached section editor. Go to our How to Pitch guide to learn how to submit pitches!
Our pitch list is meant to be guiding and generative, not prohibitive; if you have an idea not listed, feel free to reach out to the section editor or email [email protected] with any questions.
Pitches are open to all students regardless of any level of experience, confidence, and access (or lack thereof). The Masthead and Section Editors will readily and enthusiastically help contributors in reaching out for interviews, guiding their article structure, finding resources, and solving any other relevant issues!
When emailing a section editor to claim a pitch, make sure to include:
- HED (the main title)
- DEK (the subtitle)
- Description (let them know what you want to write / the angle you will take with the article)
- Visual Request (what photo or illustration you would like attached to the article)
- Word Count (how many words you plan to write)
Pitches are due Monday, October 13th.
News & Politics
- Ford government corruption and the Ontario Skills Development Fund
- Analyse the SDF audit report
- Explore Ford’s history/accusations of corruption
- The politics of ignoring the climate crisis
- Discuss the extension of Toronto summer into October from a political perspective
- Why is it so easy to collectively dismiss an existential threat? What makes a threat threatening?
- How is the climate crisis related to the affordability crisis?
- How can climate activists capitalize on anti-Trump sentiment to harness support within Canada?
- Ryerson Portrait and Vic’s approach to Indigenous rights
- Interview Vic administrators about the planned restoration of Egerton Ryerson’s portrait in Old Vic
- Discuss Indigenous rights and inclusion within the university institution. Does UofT/Vic’s engagement with Indigenous rights contribute to meaningful change, or is it largely symbolic? How do institutional equity mandates dilute movements and mitigate calls for systemic change?
- How can the contributions of problematic figures be recognized without condoning the harm they caused to vulnerable communities? How does the memorialization of these figures support historical preservation efforts? Conversely, how does it reinforce historic inequities and how is potential harm to affected communities addressed?
Send your pitches to Sijil and Zindziswa at [email protected]
Opinions
- Echo Chambers
- Are political discussions really productive if we are only consulting the same opinions over and over again? In a time of extreme social and political divide, is it possible to employ diplomatic practices while housing differing perspectives? Discuss the enlarging “echo” chambers that exist in the media, their dangers, and the harm of a single point of view.
- Family Trees, and Echoed Stories
- Discuss the beauty, and importance of carrying on familial legacy, story and conversation through “echoed” generations. How can these echoes be disrupted through the loss of language, land or through the process of colonialization and cultural assimilation?
Claim a pitch or send your own to Romina at [email protected]
Features
- Sound Waves
- From sweaty techno basements to DIY clubs, music was once a shared, spatial experience. In two decades, it’s shifted to streaming, algorithms, and solitary playlists. While some cities protect venues as cultural heritage sites, others bulldoze them for condos. What echoes linger in closed clubs, shuttered radios, and your local dying “scene”? What memories are preserved, what’s erased, and what comes next?
- Poptimism
- Reflect or write a review! Critics can be snobs, gatekeepers, kill-joys. Yet Pauline Kael once argued that critics protect the public from advertisers. Judgments of good versus bad art shape which stories get told. Today, as newsrooms slash arts desks and reviewers face parasocial fans, how do we reimagine the critic’s role? Has the echo of their authority faded—should it? Who should be our tastemakers and why?
- Megaphones
- From jazz to punk, music has always echoed protest and resistance. Backlash and censorship still police who “belongs” in genres or award categories. Even labels like “recession pop” or “indie sleaze” reveal the politics of their zeitgeist. How do soundscapes, past and present, reflect the political and economic contexts of their listeners/creators? Do songs still echo social change, or has music’s edge been muted?
Claim a pitch or send your own to Lia at [email protected]
Arts & Culture
- What sounds are echoing through U of T
- As cold settles into Toronto, what songs are students using to keep themselves warm? What songs best soundtrack the city at this time of year? What can be heard reverberating through Vic’s campus?
- Echo and Narcissus
- In the wake of prominent artists’ deaths, like David Lynch (1946–2025) and Ozzy Osbourne (1948–2025), do you think it’s ever possible to break from repeating the echoes of artistic pasts to forge your own; or is all art as T. S. Eliot said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”?
- The voices in U of T’s walls
- What is unique about attending an old university like the University of Toronto? Where on campus do the echoes of history sound the loudest and where do you feel most haunted?
- Echolocation
- Sometimes, although echoes “repeat” what has been said, they seem to come from different directions and voices: How does action and speech invoke unexpected interpretation, and at what point does putting ourselves into the world no longer belong to us, but become an echo of ourselves?
Claim a pitch or send your own to Bosko at [email protected]
Science
- All about spectroscopy
- Tell us about your favourite phenomenon related to the reflection, refraction, scattering, and transmission of light.
- How is spectroscopy used in different branches of science? What about in our daily life?
- Factually wrong but (once) popular ideas in science
- Times and times again we let loud, popular, but ultimately factually incorrect ideas mislead us in science. Tell a story of when this happens.
- How can we avoid publication bias? How to escape this echo chamber in science?
- Ears
- How does hearing work in humans? What are the necessary components and how do they work?
- How can we protect our hearing? Is our hearing health at risk living in a big and loud city like Toronto?
- Echoing Silence: Science of the Bystander Effect
- Complicity and a general lack of action in the face of injustice has become increasingly normalized in today’s society. What is the science behind the bystander effect and how has it impacted our world?
- Psychology of empathy vs. apathy
- All Things Echolocation
- How do bats, dolphins, and other animals detect the locations of objects using reflected sound (“see with sound”) and what are the different types of echolocation (search, approach, terminal)?
- How has echolocation inspired the detection of sound waves by modern technology?
Claim a pitch or send your own to Yaocheng at [email protected]
Poetry
- Ripple Effect
- If you place a finger on a still body of water, watch as the ripples flow out from the place it was touched, watch as your reflection warps and fades. How does your world remind you that you are living in it? What are the little things that remind you, you are known?
- Tinnitus
- Memory can be our greatest treasure or torment. Sylvia Plath wrote: “Love is a shadow./ How you lie and cry after it/ Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse./ All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,/ Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,/ Echoing, echoing.” Is it possible to stop remembering? Can you recall a time before the ringing in your ears began?
Claim a pitch or send your own to Zoe at [email protected]
Stranded (Humour)
- What’s With All These Sequels and Remakes?
- Due to the film and television industry’s subsumption into the slavering maw of infinite-growth capitalism, an increasing share of the projects getting made are lazy, uncreative sequels and remakes of established properties. Break down why this tendency is so irritating, give us some notable and funny lowlights, and think of what we can do in the future to save art from forever being an echo of its past.
- Things Not to Ask Your Amazon Echo
- Give us some of the things you probably shouldn’t ask Amazon’s cute little piece of in-home spyware, from basic math questions you shouldn’t have forgotten since grade school to information on local Amazon unionization efforts. It’s currently thought impossible to weird out a robot, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try your best!
- U of T’s Echoes of Grade School
- People make a great deal of the monumental transition period that is a young person’s entry into postsecondary education, but in many ways, the social world of university is more similar to grade school than you might think. Catalogue some of your university experience’s most ridiculous and juvenile social foibles, which could fit just as easily on a grade school playground as they do in the Harvard of the North.
- The Joys of the Echo Chamber
- “Echo chambers,” spaces of limited ideological disagreement, are often criticized as antithetical to healthy debate and the diversity of human opinion. Take the other stance, and write about how, believe it or not, it’s actually nice to hang out with people who almost always agree with you. Sometimes an echo can be a very sweet sound.
- How to be Echo-Friendly
- That’s right, not “eco-friendly,” “echo-friendly.” Instead of protecting the environment with renewable energy and reforesting, write about how we should alter the environment to more easily facilitate echoes. Expound on the virtues of digging thousands of gigantic echoey canyons, utterly destroying countless ecosystems but making it far easier for tourists to yell at each other from long distances. Seems easy enough to defend.
Claim a pitch or send your own to Max at [email protected]