Our Weekly Missive.

Our Weekly Missive.

From Us To You.

Welcome Pre-frosh! Congratulations on your acceptance to [one of ] the most selective college[s] in the Ivy League!

Two-hundred and fifty seven days, folks. Two hundred and fifty-seven. Let it roll of your tongues—257—it won’t be long now.

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We ...

Schmitz’s real purpose is to marginalize 185 Nassau and a group of people who create. And how better to do this than to reduce all their striving to a simple exercise in what Edward Said terms “refinement”—the long, steady, reactionary march toward sameness, marked by a constant re-reading and emulating of a constricted Western canon. Anyone can write a villanelle in a vacuum, but the teaching of creativity, the encouragement of a fresh perspective—these demand an understanding of the physical world and of the writer’s particular circumstances.

At dawn she sneaks blood oranges
From the grange-

To read good poetry is to pull a Band-Aid off a wound. I heard someone say that once.
Not a big wound, maybe just a paper-cut, where the skin puffs pink and new. When we remove the covering we return to our trauma, and the act is pleasurable, despite the ...

On CNN, I think, the election night coverage was titled ‘America Votes.’ I was watching and a friend next to me said, “No, it doesn’t.”
At face value, the descriptive statement ‘America Votes’ is false. America really doesn’t vote, at least not the majority that can. The sentence ...

I know, I know, I haven’t written in a long while, but I wish for Chrissakes you’d stop yammering on about it. I have obligations, obli-fucking-gations, and there’s no getting around them. If you think for one second that I’m going to flake out on an ...

On autumn Sundays my parents would fuck wildly, like children. I remember this vividly. It was November and the air had begun to turn to steel. The turn was final. Pennsylvania does this each year—dies, maybe before Halloween, maybe after, gives way to night as a jack-o-lantern collapses to ...

And what’s more there’d be too much to tell, with his folded-up face and our proximity, the fact that we’d lived so close to each other growing up, that in high school we’d mostly talk to the same girls and dress the same and find the ...

Alpha Dog, Nick Cassavetes’s new guns-‘n’-posses yarn, is predictably bad. That is to say, it fails where one might expect it to fail: cuts are alternately languid and meth-fueled, the dialogue stilted or overly gangish. In case you’re wondering, Justin Timberlake adds little to the production ...

Between Fort Lauderdale and Miami lies the mid-size city of Hollywood, Florida, population 138,412. It’s an unassuming beach-front place in the regional mode. Encompassed are ten or so diners, several miles of coastline, several miles more of T-shirt and puka-shell vendors. Having survived hurricanes and the occasional squabble ...

People - especially dopey, two-months-behind-the-times columnists like the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones - love making sweeping pronouncements about the nature of hip-hop. Music is a manifestation of the human creative spirit; it is born of a whole slew of political and economic circumstances. Duh. In that way it possesses import both ...

Gregg Gillis sits in the library of Terrace Club; a few minutes ago he was eating potatoes. He is of average height and has enormous white teeth. He speaks rapidly and giddily, as though school has just been cancelled.

Or rather, your notion of the face in Baudelaire is evasive.
Poetry’s stock has fallen; that of the novel, the short story—that of prose—has risen. The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books have run articles addressing the former and latter, respectively. But you survey ...

I have written poems
pomes (pennyeach)
like pommes
as in pommes de terre
those roots with eyes—
and now I write
in my eyes, to my eyes
à mes yeux
which means
in another light
‘by my way of thinking’—
and so
to think of you
as something ...

The last few bars
of a big-band tune
exposing themselves
without a hint of self-awareness
and the half-sober apercus of a gaggle
of twenty or so
be-sequined, be-suited
women and men of a certain age
their laughter playing
soft on the southwest wind
that is wrinkling the bay—
everyone saying ...

Beirut played at Terrace this Sunday. You might have heard him. You might even have been there, drinking, doing your thing. The place was crowded.

Jürgen Habermas, born June 19, 1929, in a wood-frame house near the Vorort of Düsseldorf, passed away last Tuesday at the age of 78.

My father did consulting for years. Whenever he—or my uncle, also a consultant—began talking about work, I thought about their offices. They were small, poorly-lit rooms with terrible furniture, located in commercial parks off county roads. They were depressing.
My father’s company was named Source Atlantic, and ...

Instead of the usual how-do-you-do, we’d like to tell a story.
There once were two bears. Both were young and happy; both led pleasant and fulfilling lives.
Or so they thought.

Over a lunch of pizza bagels, a fan of this very paper was asked to explain the Nass 100. "The Nass 100 is this thing that the Nass does every year where they like list one hundred things they never want to see again and like 33.3% of them are super funny." Well, we are pleased to announce a full 67 (round up!) percent of this year's list is top-form humour! Incremental progress, folks.

Ca: I think we need to have a talk.

Cb: What about?

Ca: I didn’t actually call you in here to take a shower. I called you in here for something else.

Cb: What’s that?

Ca: I called you in here because I think you have a drinking problem.

Dear Chris—

We’ve done it!

Or rather, I’ve done it—successfully completed my first debate with Sen. John McCain, whom I refer to as ‘John’ in order to seem familiar and approachable and non-Muslim.

‘Reading,’ as describing a certain activity of eye-sliding-over-page, with eye recognizing ink blobs corresponding (by means of whatever neural calculus) either (1) to something like second-order phonemes, and therefore to certain aural centers and therefore to speech-parts of the brain, which ‘articulate’ meaning to other parts, or (2) to something like second-order morphemes, and therefore to certain visual centers, and therefore to picture-parts of the brains, which ‘project’ meanings to other parts, or (3) to some combination of (1) and (2)[1]—well, ignore that or bracket it, because I have 1,000 words and a little over, say, ten minutes to argue for long and arduous works of literature, their import and glory—and, specifically, for the particularly long and particularly arduous recent novels of Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace.