I started home for Thanksgiving Tuesday afternoon, willingly cutting shorter my half-week of classes to add a full day to my debutante preparations. It hadn’t taken me long to pack and add a few necessary additions to cover every possible situation and temperature that four and a half days in Jackson, Mississippi on a debutante and holiday week could throw at me.
It was 9 a.m. Awakened, as I often am, by sunlight, I opened my door to go to the bathroom downstairs. Supine, to the side of my door, was a male form, blonde and muscular and naked. His hands were cupped over his genitals, his underwear crumpled by his head. His eyes were closed. I froze in surprise, but I had to pee, and out of some ingrained politeness didn’t want to disturb him. I stepped over him quietly and went downstairs.
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.
Rorschach tests and free-association exercises seem to me too well known, too expected to be useful for psychoanalysis. But I have found a new test to capture the shallower motions of our subconscious: the words of students childishly bumbling and … Read More
As I stood outside the door to Frist 212 on the first day of my freshman year, waiting for my Arabic 101 class to start, a bright-eyed boy in a polo shirt bounced up to the door. I smiled at … Read More
Francis Fukuyama, the most thoughtful of the neo-conservatives, announced in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine that he is no longer a neo-con. This turn of events is no opportunistic team-switching on his part, but an inevitable result of the neo-conservatives’ Middle East agenda.
I was eagerly leafing through a recent issue of the Economist magazine when I stumbled upon an article entitled “Presumed Guilty” that brought me to a full stop. The article concerned a new book, Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor … Read More
Tamir Goodman sits at an empty table, waiting for the guests to arrive. Slouched in his chair, Goodman seems like any other Orthodox Jew who would visit Rabbi Eitan and Gitty Webb’s home (the Chabad house on Nassau Street), save … Read More
