Category: Reflections

It Could Happen Here

How do I explain to my Chilean family that I come from a place where prison statistics, police records, and newspaper headlines all fervently declare that I am not wanted? How do I explain to them what I tell my mother— that I never want to have children, because I know that their skin will be as black as mine?

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Sober on the Street

Maybe there were blue lights crawling up the wall that night like a drunken bro running his hands up a woman’s skirt.

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Bowl Theory

A writer teaches the Nass how to let go, to hold on, and to be held.

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Color War

Our guns were semi-automatic, which means you could shoot as fast as you pulled the trigger, and even an amateur like myself found myself reeling off three or four paintballs a second. I could feel every individual shot through its reverberations—no real recoil to speak of, but a satisfying pneumatic thwunk as the ball hurtled through the barrel.

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Scars

I am rolling down my aunt’s driveway in Colorado on a razor scooter.

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Mr. Sanders Goes to Washington

Searching for idealism in a cynical time.

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St. Louis, Missouri

When asked where I would like to work when I join the movement dubbed “education reform” in order to insure that students in urban areas have access to a quality education, I asked myself if I would, should, consider working … Read More

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Things So Obvious They Almost Make No Sense: Defamiliarization and the Default in Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From

“I couldn’t discern an agenda, political, spiritual, or otherwise, and yet the novel felt anything but aimless. Primarily, it read and resonated like poetry.”

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Malik, Not Samuel L.

On Monday, February 10, the Daily Princetonian published an article about senior football captain Caraun Reid’s accomplishments and his opportunity to play in the NFL. The article relayed that Caraun is a special talent, but the photograph accompanying the article was not of Caraun from this fall’s victory over Yale, but of me jumping in the air.

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Twentieth Summer

I like hard work, but I just stare at my computer screen. I like to run, but I move like my joints are poured concrete. I want to cook biryani but I keep buying granola…

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Head & Shoulders

“We agree about everything; our dependence on Nyquil, the tragedy of internalized misogyny, and the exact punctuation to use when texting fuckboys.”

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In the Waiting Room of His Holiness

Although we are excited beyond comprehension, we are silent. The wings of a fan turn with purpose; we breathe in this moment while attempting to wrap our heads around the magnitude of a man who commands a room without words, commands a nation without recognition, commands respect without force.

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