Category: Culture

Back to Basic

The word “basic” was dead by the time Kreayshawn said it in 2011: “Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada / Basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother.” But in the word’s afterlife, “basic” has ceased to apply just to “basic bitches” and now affixes itself to all sorts of actions, objects and people.

by on

Healthy Masculinity

“If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by what we are—we can all be freer.” When Emma Watson made this call for freedom before the United Nations at the launching of a new gender-egalitarian pledge for gender equality, she knew what she was getting into.

by on

Pardon My Deutsch

There’s a particular brand of shame that comes with being a tourist, particularly as an American. Especially in Europe, American tourists are almost universally received with a mixture of annoyance and exasperation, the kind usually reserved for flies buzzing around the ear or children crying on airplanes.

by on

Super Smash and the Bros

I was one of the girls waiting to get to late meal. I was the one sitting on the couch, watching, completely unimpressed, as four boys sat around me fixated on a flat screen TV. They swore left and right, pressing buttons on the game controllers they gripped. My requests for them to please get up so we could leave and beat the crowds at Frist were ignored. Instead, they were busy whacking the shit out of each other in a virtual world.

by on

Literally [Figuratively]

I’m surprised at what people don’t notice when privilege accustoms them to their environment, and what they therefore don’t know. One of the things that falls prey to this accustomedness is our words.

by on

Categorical Culture Shock

Hong Kong is a strange place. I’ve never lived anywhere so obsessed with the categorization of people. What you are defines who you are. Are you white, Indonesian, Chinese, a native Hongkonger? A banker, a lawyer, an engineer, a teacher? Rich, poor, middle class?

by on

A Taste for Iron & Wine

When Samuel Beam, better known by his stage name Iron & Wine, sidled his way onto the Peter J. Sharp stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the crowd of New Yorkers in the auditorium took in a collective breath and began to applaud.

by on

What a Picture Isn’t Worth

Abroad in Ghana this summer, I worried my friends and relatives when I removed myself from social media.

by on

The Burden of Proof

Princeton’s campus is insulated from the dangers of a city. It teems with P-Safe cars. But for much of the community, in the privacy of our dorm rooms and our own mattresses, it is not safe.

by on

Think Before You Speak

It was a hot Friday night in Berlin, and young people on the narrow streets of Kreuzberg district were just beginning their usual 48-hour clubbing routine with cigarettes, beer, and lines of cocaine. Aware that I stood out as a solitary woman and an obvious foreigner, I tried to shove my way through the throngs of smelly teenagers and drunken old men as efficiently as I could, right shoulder angled toward the crowd to get the maximum force-to-surface area ratio.

by on

Competitive Lit

When I was in eighth grade, a girl two grades up from me was writing a novel. I didn’t know much about her aside from her name, the fact that she was my classmate’s older sister, and that she was in the finishing stages of creating a work of fiction, but I wanted to become her, cut my hair short and type importantly on my laptop in my small school’s even smaller library.

by on

Sunday Funday

We tend to moralize casually on the walk to dinner, and we’re all the more biting for it. “There’s something tragic in it, really…” a friend offered, trailing off. She spoke softly to me, but also to them, the “bright and tight,” as they stumbled back to campus on our narrow shared way.

by on