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.
Many fine newspapers have recently lamented over the future of our beautiful planet. We are told that polar bears grow hungry in the Arctic, oceans threaten to drown skyscrapers, and that we—poor, frail humans—must swelter as Earth becomes Furnace.
To reach “Itinerant Languages of Photography”—one of the Art Museum’s two new temporary exhibits—one has to pass all that is not itinerant about the Museum. The entrance lies to the right of the Museum’s well-worn European mainstays. Each time I entered, I had to pass Washington’s confident gaze, his portrait serving as a reminder of what is permanent and perhaps most validated in the Museum, and what is not.
It was half past midnight. The snow was soft and crisp from the other side of the glass. The radiator spluttered, rousing from its hour-long slumber. Like adding cotton to an over- stuffed pillow, it seeped a heat into the tired room that stirred our restless desire to descend.
*In the Fall of 1930, Soviet architect Andrei Konstantinovich Burov was part of a team assembled by Moscow to visit Detroit’s state-of-the-art factories and to establish links with America’s leading industrialists. What follows are excerpts from his letters to his wife Irina, in which he describes his American …*
On October 5, 2013, The New York Times published an op-ed by Dr. Gregory Berns, a professor at Emory University who concluded from a neurological experiment on man’s best friend that “dogs are people, too.” To examine dogs’ brains and their responses to emotion and perception, Dr. Berns trained them to sit silently still in an MRI scanner.
Yoga Above feels like a perfect reflection of Princeton’s unique character: the blending of college town taste with the style and exclusivity of affluence. The result is a donation yoga studio with deluxe décor and an amazing location that serves a clientele that is stunningly homogeneous.
Almost four years ago I attended a symposium featuring rapper Talib Kweli that focused on hip-hop’s responsibility to the community at large. What sticks out in my mind is a joke told by Mr. Talib (lyrics stick to your ribs). … Read More
The lemon was precious, as was every morsel of food that entered one’s house. I was raised to shudder at the mere thought of throwing away anything on my plate, encouraged to catch all the stray grains of kasha and watching my dad soak up every last bit of soup in his plate with the bread my mum baked like clockwork every few days.
It stung to realize that I was less than what my family thought, and I began to feel an unbridgeable distance between us. I blamed myself, but I also blamed the God who my family had always promised would help me. I tried my best. Why am I failing?
