Category: Reflections

A Taste for Iron & Wine

When Samuel Beam, better known by his stage name Iron & Wine, sidled his way onto the Peter J. Sharp stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the crowd of New Yorkers in the auditorium took in a collective breath and began to applaud.

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Growing Up Ninja

The life and legacy of Naruto.

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A Bug’s Death

I am nine years old, give or take a couple years, and I have learned rage. Like a clumsy Hulk, I crush and I smash and I murder what must be dozens, if not billions, of ants.

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A Trip to the Orangerie

“In many ways my trip thus far had been haunted by Benjamin; every glimpse of the underground Metro lights, the carefully planned streets, the dimly lit bookstores brought some passage, some fragment of prose from his works to mind.”

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Notebook of a Departure from an Adopted Home

“For two years I’ve liked to think that my Bolivian ID is more than just a conversation starter, that it grounds my daily life in my relationship to a country I for a time called my home.”

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An Interview with Nass Co-Founder, Robert Faggen ‘82

Learning about the origins of the Nassau Weekly and how its first writers carved out a new journalistic space on campus in 1979.

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Speaker of Many, Master of None

I slammed my 12-year-old fists onto the shiny Yamaha piano keys, the polyphonic dissonance echoing my frustration. “Would you please stop speaking Cantonese to me?” I yelled. “From now on, I only want you to teach me in Mandarin or English.” My piano teacher looked at me, her eyes scintillating with disbelief and something else I couldn’t quite grasp at that age.

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Clouds

A blushing cloud: 縉雲 (jìn yún). Every time I explain to someone that my name essentially means “a red cloud,” I am reminded of a line from a poem by the 9th century Chinese poet Li Shang Yin.

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Starseeds

I first met AJ over Honey-Nut Cheerios in the cluttered kitchen of my aunt’s So-Cal home.

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Nasturtiums

“They were like glass eyes, not really looking at me but looking beyond me. And that was the moment the cold sweat washed over me. This wasn’t Max. He wasn’t here.”

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Only Curling, After All

“There are three types of curlers: the competitive, the prepubescent, and the beer-drinking. I have played with all three types in roughly equal measures.”

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For Yan Pei-Ming, One Portrait Size Fits All

“As I sat on the bench in the center of the exhibition room, dwarfed by the mammoth panels of the tryptic, I considered my reaction.”

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