Nassau Weekly

  • The Source of Us

    The Source of Us

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    My sister started her coming-out process in eighth grade. My brother and I were in seventh. She entered her final year of middle school feeling alienated and afraid, so when the girl next to her in homeroom showed up with a print-out of Sid Vicious taped to her binder, Steph seized the opportunity to make…

  • Visualizing God

    Visualizing God

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    There is a debate among medieval Jewish philosophers about the permissibility of conceiving of God in physical form. Maimonides, heavily influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, lists the non-corporeality of God as one of the thirteen core principles of faith, and writes in his legal code that anyone who says that God has a body is a…

  • Reborn in the USA

    Reborn in the USA

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    Campaigning for re-election in 1984, Ronald Reagan riled up a crowd in New Jersey by blasting Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song which sounds like a latter-day national anthem but which actually takes a critical stance on the Vietnam War and the state of American society left in its wake.

  • Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards

    Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards

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    Those first few minutes in a murmuring, expectant theater are always slightly awkward ones…

  • Work Song

    Work Song

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    Take a horse to water / Lead it by the teat / Take a cow to slaughter / Choke it as it drinks

  • Observing FIFA

    Observing FIFA

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    1:01 AM: After a long, productive night of studying, I decide to retire to my suite in an attempt to unwind and, eventually, fall asleep. Somehow, I know even before I enter my room that the nightly ritual has begun. I steel myself as I approach the front door.

  • The Correct Way to Harvest Carrots

    The Correct Way to Harvest Carrots

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    First, bleach your thumbs white. When you reach your hands inside the dark, ancient soil they will glow like night worms.

  • Grammar and Power

    Grammar and Power

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    The politics of slang, from Nabokov to Twitter

  • Hacking a Lung

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    Marlboro Reds. The choice cigarette of cowboys and cattle ranchers, of healthy corn-fed Westerners with tanned skin and rugged faces who dexterously smoke with their thumb and forefinger. In the October of my senior year in high school, this was the first cigarette I ever tasted. Instead of putting hair on my chest like muscled…

  • Radio Killed the Hockey Star

    Radio Killed the Hockey Star

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    Flanked by two shaven-headed handlers, Martin Brodeur sat at a rickety wooden table that looked slightly too small to be comfortable in a bookstore that has long since been put out business. Outside the store, devoted fans lined up for yards, standing in concentric loops in an adjacent strip mall, chattering excitedly or fidgeting with…

  • Nasstrology: Valentine’s Day Edition

    Nasstrology: Valentine’s Day Edition

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    The Nass gives its lovelorn readers guidance for the greeting card industry’s favorite holiday.

  • Eyes on the Skies

    Eyes on the Skies

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    To telescope is to slide concentric components within themselves, to shrink sequentially, to densen. It is also a means of interstellar discovery, of flooding, of applying pressure. In the succeeding entries, we telescope the weather by precipitating and saturating our memories. Each succeeding memory of a series is composed in exactly half the number of…