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Byline: Emily Lever

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Food Diary

The dining hall lurches with athletes. You sit down next to your friend’s maybe-roommate and she looks down at her own plate. “Wow,” she says, “you’re eating so little.”

by Emily Lever, Rachel Stone on March 30, 2014April 6, 2014

J-Biebz as Jay Gatz

Late one Friday night, buzzed and carrying packs of sour candy from the Wa, I wandered to a room in Whitman. As my host and I sat on her bed, alternating handfuls of Sour Patch and some other Technicolor monstrosity, her roommate decided to show me a video for “Beauty and a Beat,” performed and directed by everyone’s favorite cultural punching bag: Justin Bieber.

by Emily Lever on March 1, 2013March 22, 2013

M[]ss[]ss[]pp[] R[]ver

My hands that snatch and swat go numb.

by Emily Lever on February 14, 2015February 16, 2015

The Plague: A Double Translation

The following passage is adapted from the opening of Albert Camus’ The Plague, which is a description of Oran, a city in French Algeria, in the 1940s. I have translated it into English and into the setting of Princeton in 2013 (office jobs become classwork, going to the movies is replaced by the more common pastime of the Internet and so on), but those are the only changes I believe I have made.

by Emily Lever on November 30, 2013November 30, 2013

Primal Scene

Rorschach tests and free-association exercises seem to me too well known, too expected to be useful for psychoanalysis. But I have found a new test to capture the shallower motions of our subconscious: the words of students childishly bumbling and … Read More

by Emily Lever on March 1, 2013September 7, 2013

Spray It, Don’t Say It

The first graffiti I ever saw were unremarkable messages etched into my middle school’s peeling wooden desks: people’s initials conjoined inside hearts, a mysterious pointy S shape, and invitations to “put an x if youre bored.”

by Emily Lever on December 6, 2014February 7, 2015

The Unexpected Bodies

It was 9 a.m. Awakened, as I often am, by sunlight, I opened my door to go to the bathroom downstairs. Supine, to the side of my door, was a male form, blonde and muscular and naked. His hands were cupped over his genitals, his underwear crumpled by his head. His eyes were closed. I froze in surprise, but I had to pee, and out of some ingrained politeness didn’t want to disturb him. I stepped over him quietly and went downstairs.

by Emily Lever, Hannah Hirsh, Megan Tung, Nick Sexton, Olivia Lloyd, Susannah Sharpless on October 11, 2014October 12, 2014

Grammar and Power

The politics of slang, from Nabokov to Twitter

by Emily Lever on April 12, 2015April 12, 2015

Cock Blocking

A justification for the unglamorous, unpopular, but all too necessary role of the cock blocker.

by Emily Lever on March 8, 2014March 11, 2014

Neighbors with Nazis

Fernand Lépinay is a friend of my grandparents who lives outside of the small town of Laigle in the rainy Orne department of Lower Normandy.

by Emily Lever on May 4, 2015August 11, 2015

Gros-Câlin

If you ask me who my favorite writer is, I’ll probably say Albert Camus, because I love his writing and his ideas and also because his name is recognizable and thus me liking him helps construct a certain image of me. But I am less moved by Camus and the Nobel-prize-crowned glory of his rhetoric than by one more obscure author, whose ideas boil down to little more than a grammar of unhappiness: my favorite novelist, Romain Gary.

by Emily Lever on May 2, 2013May 6, 2013

Notary Phone

Like any child of the millennium I’ve moved through several cell phones. Each served as a safety blanket, a confidant, a sort of external hard drive for my social life.

by Emily Lever on October 12, 2013October 12, 2013


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