For as long as women feel weird talking about their periods, The Vagina Monologues will still be relevant. I hope it won’t continue to be. For as long as there is violence against women, the Vagina Monologues will still be relevant.
If you’ve been on Facebook recently, you may have at some point stumbled across the page called Humans of New York. The page is insanely popular, with 1,424,016 likes and thousands of comments and shares on each post. The premise is relatively simple: every couple of days, photographer Brandon Stanton posts portraits of and quotes from interviews with random New Yorkers he approaches on the street.
The beach is at once a confusing and wonderful thing to behold. Like a sandbox for man children, the beach is full of all the earthly pleasures one would expect of such a place–one metric ton of white sand, an inflatable treasure chest cooler filled with Coronas, a leafy green palm tree and a speaker from which the country stylings of the Zac Brown Band can regularly be heard.
This week, Andrew likes the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His parents are relieved that his Bieber phase seems to have ended; last week, every time they got in the car, Andrew would say, “De-spa-ci-to.” And so they would listen to “Despacito” on repeat.
Chris Hedges, Pultizer Prize-winner, teaches a creative writing class comprised half of Princeton students and half of inmates at a women’s prison nearby. He and Boris Franklin, a former student of his, spoke to me about the role of education in prisons, the standing of women, and the necessity of divestment from private prisons.
I’m sitting on one of the loveseats in the Starbucks on Nassau Street, weirdly conscious of my calves sticking to the cold leather seat covers, experiencing what I imagine only certain paparazzi have felt at the peaks of their careers. The strangeness of spending years seeing someone in two dimensions, only to have them sitting across from you, alive and fidgeting. Lorena Grundy gestures at my coffee cup.
Roads, public libraries, and a respectful and helpful police force are all key, helpful features of a healthy state–and this is generally how the middle class experiences things. The government, however, has a more invasive, regulatory presence in the lives of people who lack power.
