“In part, the devastation of Conversations with Friends lies in its ability to pinpoint the impurities that taint how we care for one another, without offering a clear or optimistic way out.”
Recently I went to a reading by the Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart at Labyrinth. He was reading from his new novel Super Sad True Love Story, a widely praised satirical novel about the very near future. Shteyngart is a young … Read More
“I miss the bonding that can only result from that mutual suffering, the singing in the shower, the conversations in the ballroom while we stretched our exhausted limbs, the sprint up the hill to dinner before our hair froze into icicles.”
The lemon was precious, as was every morsel of food that entered one’s house. I was raised to shudder at the mere thought of throwing away anything on my plate, encouraged to catch all the stray grains of kasha and watching my dad soak up every last bit of soup in his plate with the bread my mum baked like clockwork every few days.
Things I collected during freshman year: friends (best, close, good, former), extracurricular activities, hook-ups, enough books to confidently shelve a small library, a GPA much lower than the one I had in high school, a battered but resilient sense of self-worth, a battered but resilient liver, and maybe some small amount of knowledge. All of this was great, except for one thing: I had no free time whatsoever.
We have known each other for a long time, since we were four years old and living on the same block of brownstones in Brooklyn, going to ballet lessons at the Albee School of Dance, where our teacher Nana made … Read More
A recent editorial in Princeton University’s most conservative publication, the Daily Princetonian, predictably dismisses all of the demands made by the Black Justice League during the recent protests against racism on campus. But what is surprising, not to mention embarrassing for the University, is the anti-intellectualism expressed by the editorial board members.
