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We at Recess are pretty convinced that our readership spikes drastically come finals week, when students campus-wide desperately search for distractions from studying for their Econ 428—“Investment Banking in Sub-Saharan Africa”—final.

How does readership get higher than 100 percent, you ask? Leave the numbers to those Econ majors, we say, and read on.

Finals are an anti-art. Are they fascist? Maybe. Do they suppress the proletariat? Ask a Marxist. There aren’t any Marxists on staff here currently, though there have been in the past and, considering our M.O., probably will be in the future. Duke does have a dandy Marxist Studies Department. Of course, you graduate with that certificate on your resume—might make finding a job in this challenging economy a little more complicated.

But again, Recess doesn’t endorse finals. Or finals week. There are so many worthier events to dedicate an entire week to. Kanye week, for one. Somehow the administration overlooked that as a possible means of bettering Duke’s reputation. Let’s face it: Kanye West is the only figure more phoenix-like than Duke will have to be to recover from this semester.

What even is final about finals? Especially for seniors, who are about to confront their seventh—and still only penultimate—bout with the week? Seems sort of like false advertising—or, better yet, the hubris of every class to claim that their “finals” are truly “final” when in reality, you’ve still got to take a test on investment banking in sub-Saharan Africa, and wait, you just realized that Egypt isn’t sub-Saharan. So much for that term paper topic.

So instead, Recess is proposing a full-on boycott of finals. Instead, do something more worthwhile: Learn to use Auto-tune, teach yourself Farsi, cultivate a healthy potted plant of a species indigenous to North Carolina.

If all else fails, we hear Gawker’s looking for a few more scandals.

—Kevin Lincoln