Category: Reflections

Lover of Mine

“I always loved her. I just didn’t always think highly enough of myself to justify this love.”

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Barry

Barry (whose name has been changed for this article) is a gangly kid who looks to be somewhere in that stretch of late adolescence characterized by patchy moustaches. In another world, Barry, gregarious and talkative, would be captain of his school’s debate team, or maybe a theater major. He is funny and he knows it.

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Reading Salinger on the Train

The link above the rest of the page was fresh and in red. It was urgent, it seemed. “J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of _The Catcher in the Rye_, dies at 91.” A few weeks ago, coming back from winter break, … Read More

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Life Lessons from Mahler and Fungi

Two Nass writers reflect on the nature of beauty through myriad lenses.

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My Grandma, Sex Psychiatrist

“The madame will be joining us soon. Her horse sprained his ankle on the journey down Second Avenue,” my grandpa said in a mock British accent. My grandpa is a writer, and jumps at opportunities to knit fantasy into everyday experience, be it with affected accents or outrageously butchered attempts at Mandarin.

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8 Vignettes on Emotion

Trying to put the background noise on mute.

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Chicago

It is October in Chicago and somewhere in the Susquehanna River a salmon is preparing to die. It has spent the last few years in perpetual transit, wandering the yawning expanse of the Atlantic and its arctic abyssal plains, upstream through currents and wave crests and darkness of unimaginable depth.

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Despite Everything

“I had resorted to music to help deal with the hopeless
passivity I had subconsciously nurtured, so it was music that shook me awake.”

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Telescoping Faith

In the succeeding entries, we telescope “faith,” a word with a variety of connotations. Join us in considering “faith,” its soaring capacities, and its particular and personal ones.

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Canal

The doctor began to probe the inside of my ear with a stiff stick-shaped ear cleaner made of slender surgical steel.

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The Car Bomb Story: On Scaring the Rich, “Maria,” and the Near-Impossibility of Nuanced Storytelling

A reflection in three parts.

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Giri Nathan

An inability to pronounce one’s name can meddle with one’s self-esteem. Child psychologists might study this some day: take a roomful of first-generation American children and ask them to introduce themselves to one another, then watch them struggle to eke out the syllables on loan from the lands their parents left behind.

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