Category: Reflections

Paradise Burning, from Two Points of View

About cutting trees, in theory and in practice.

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Do You Know Him?

“The college world of connections, in my experience, warrants a different type of hassle though. You don’t lick cafeteria floors or have to humiliate yourself to get what you want. It’s more of making the effort of putting yourself out there, of making friends, meeting people, joining clubs.”

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My Clouds

A writer finds comfort in movement.

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Escaping the Werewolf: Alex G, Deep Ecology, and Our Increasingly Hostile World

“There are a million wolves hiding in the environmental substrate I’ve called speargrass. The reality is that they’re not even wolves. When they get home in the evening, they take off the wolfskin and look just like us.”

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Corecore and the Logic of Montage

“This genre’s title, corecore, makes a totalizing claim on the thousands of balkanized subgenres and subaesthetics that fleet past the user: only a certain set of objects and clips can be dazecore or college dormcore, but corecore encompasses all such ‘cores,’ all these oddly particular aesthetics.”

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A Sprawling Smallness

“She wanted to relive the memories, the ephemeral emotions of happiness she felt when she was younger – unmolded. She did not account for the fact that she was a different person hoping to feel the sentiments of years ago.”

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Loosening the Mother Tongue

“When I learned about the darker history of Zionism, I needed to reverse so much of what I thought to be true while undoing my deepest personal and communal language. Like leaving a cult, my whole world was turned upside down as I tried to gather the pieces of what was once a coherent story.”

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Failing With Flying Colors

“While an expert knows what is coming next, a beginner tangoes, babbles and belays into the unknown, giddy and relishing in the awkwardness and delight of the unfamiliar. The experience of trying something new and risking failure is both titillating and terrifying. It’s a lot like getting lost.”

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Sally Rooney and the New Amorous World

“In part, the devastation of Conversations with Friends lies in its ability to pinpoint the impurities that taint how we care for one another, without offering a clear or optimistic way out.”

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All the Things You and I Sea

“You look Right into the mirror and recognize what you’d drawn, part by part. Then you blink and completely forget what you’d seen, where you’d been –– or rather, you can’t really tell whether you had ever seen anything in the first place.”

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A Beginner’s Guide to Unrequited Love

A writer’s encounter with the tantalizing, bewildering phenomenon of the Princeton Partner.

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A Merienda with Sappho

“The dialogue below [..] is one of those instances in which my participation was peripheral, but the conversation was still exhilarating, confusing, and verging on scandalous.”

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