In April 2001, David Brooks published “The Organization Kid,” in which he typified Princeton students as absurdly busy with “self-improvement, résumé-building, and enrichment.” Brooks conceived of the whole process by which the students had become hard-working and career-oriented as organization, but this authoress’s significantly more extensive fieldwork reveals the even more interesting process of subjectification through which Organization Kids become fristified.
All men lusted for the firebrand they called Flaming Tina, famed for the molten fire in her hair — and for the hot temper running fierce through the noble Scblood of Lady Valentina Kennedy. Forced into marriage with the fearsome warrior of an enemy clan, Tina vowed to use her wild beauty to gain mastery over Lord Ramsay Douglas. Women hungered to be pressed against his steely chest … and men feared the brawn and rage of Black Ram Douglas. Ram swore he would make the defiant Valentina a dutiful wife after he had broken her hellion’s pride. But the girl he set out to tame became the woman who taught him what it meant to be ardently, maddeningly, gloriously tempted.”
My favorite movies are always about dreams. As are my favorite books. In my mind, the standard by which all artistic output should be weighed is how successfully the creative mind has tapped into his or her dream-world, and how … Read More
It was a hot Friday night in Berlin, and young people on the narrow streets of Kreuzberg district were just beginning their usual 48-hour clubbing routine with cigarettes, beer, and lines of cocaine. Aware that I stood out as a solitary woman and an obvious foreigner, I tried to shove my way through the throngs of smelly teenagers and drunken old men as efficiently as I could, right shoulder angled toward the crowd to get the maximum force-to-surface area ratio.
Maybe it’s just the New Jersey weather or the tint of the van’s windows but it seems like it’s always foggy when I drive to Garden State, a sprawling correctional complex whose hallways I’ve walked through without ever really managing to glean the building’s external shape. We always drive towards it from the same side. Inside the hallways shoot off from rounded enclosure where the guards sit like identical grayish-beige spokes from a wheel. Sometimes it’s hard to find my way out because everything looks the same.
