I logged on to Facebook to check it out. Her sister was fourteen, a freshman in high school. She had about a thousand friends and did not have 113 likes—it was up to 115 now, in the thirty minutes that elapsed since Allie’s text.
Earl Sweatshirt looks so young. His baby face bears a sparse mustache I associate with high school boys trying to prove they’ve hit puberty, and he’s swallowed by an oversize Yankees jersey. Maybe it’s just because I’m so close to the stage, and to other people he seems older than his nineteen years.
There are always eggs at my house. Well, I’ll clarify that—there are always eggs somewhere around my house. Usually the hens are obedient and lay in their nest boxes, but they love to hide their work from us. Occasionally we’ll pull hay bales from the barn to find a cache of eggs tucked in a corner, like the work of a lazy Easter bunny. Sometimes they have been there for years; when we were younger, my siblings and I would throw them against trees deep in the woods, where their sulfur was overwhelmed by the smell of pine.
The way it came to me was in a letter. I think a lot of people got them, but I don’t know. It was from Dean Rapelye or maybe Malkiel, and it said something like “you are one of the particularly outstanding students admitted” and to “please consider coming to Princeton.”
People start asking some time around kindergarten. It’s the fault of those LL Bean monogrammed backpacks, so ubiquitous to the elementary school experience. “What does the E stand for?” I asked a friend as she set down her Nacho Cheese … Read More
David Foster Wallace is not here. In the absence of a physical body there is an idea, that of two Davids. It’s brought to life by biographer D.T. Max and author Jeffrey Eugenides, sitting in front of a rapt audience in the James Stewart Theater. The concept of two Davids—the sincere, troubled one and the manipulative, self-aggrandizing one—is one that the real men onstage constantly return to.
From Cambridge’s brick halls to the neo-Gothic spires of New Haven, the Ivy League universities have become a symbol of success, a name brand that conveys a sense of security and ability. They’re also bastions of wealth, built and attended by the nation’s chosen sons.
It was my first night drinking since February. I’d decided to take a break from alcohol for all of March—now that I have the freedom to buy my own alcohol legally, I don’t feel as compelled to jump at it when offered. But mostly, I just wanted to see if I could make it for a whole month.
