Category: Reflections

The Myth of the Mason-Dixon Line

“Don’t make deals with the Devil when you don’t know what you have. Check your pockets first. Take inventory.”

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Rebecca Julia Sobel Solomon

The flexibility of the name signifies the countless times I, too, have bent, becoming an altered version of myself that only barely resembled the original.

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Everyone except for the dinosaurs

Samuel Bollen on Dinosaurs.

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Goody Bag

On grandma’s food scraps, preserved with care.

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Keeping Up with the Kashrut-ians

Exodus chapter 34, verse 26: “Thou shalt not boil a kid in his mother’s milk.” Some 5,000 (or 2,000, depending on who you think wrote the Torah) years ago, God told the Jewish people not to mix milk and meat. … Read More

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Ars Poetica with Everything Ending, so Everything Beginning

“Let’s try this again. I am one of many people in love. I am a human of being human. Skin like everyone else and lots of heart. Too much music might kill me. Too little too.”

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Barbed Beauty

“Perhaps we must accept that we are simply watchers of beautiful forms. And if we acknowledge that we are observers, bound by our own frailties and limitations, we may be able to rescue the memory of what was, for an instant, exquisite.”

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The Cheapening of the Left

In the age of online activism, a writer considers how progressivism has become fashionable.

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The Empathetic Potential of Fiction

Examining the relationship between feminist literary theory, authority by experience, and the potential of the human moral imagination.

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The Trials of Princeton

It was the first night without my parents in some hotel on US Route 1. I was alone and somewhere near East Pyne, brimming with the feeling of being lost and alone in a new city, juggling the oversized, color-coded freshman orientation specialty map that a volunteer organizer had gravely slipped into my purse.

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Playdates and Porn

It was a Thursday night, and my best friend Dana and I couldn’t think of anything to do. Our usual evening activities, as is probably true for many people aged nine, were of the destructive nature; we’d erect elaborate blanket … Read More

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The Short, Implanted Grass

The first time I met Leah, she was reading an evolutionary biology textbook in a tree in the Mathey courtyard. As the weather grew warmer in the spring, I began to see her there almost constantly. One day, I decided to overcome my aversion to aerated New Jersey soil and sharp acorns, and joined her reading session.

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