Butts in a Name?
My name is Austin deButts, and although my surname is not all that complicated, living with it for the past 20 years has been.
by Austin DeButts on
Getting Lucky
It’s 5:37 a.m. and I’m straggling through the slums in neon orange short-shorts I reserve for nights like these, nights like last night, along with the first shirt I saw on the ground which I couldn’t really see in the dark of his room but it’s large and now the sunrise has revealed it to be a tee shirt from some leadership conference or some shit and I think This is ironic because I was totally leading last night if you know what I mean and then I’m like is that even irony or am I just awesome?
by Jared Garland on
The Wolf Speaks
The genealogy of nominative determinism begins with my ambivalent attitude toward this series of articles. Whenever the Nassau Weekly name column would come up in casual conversation, I would exclaim that there could be nothing potentially interesting in a piece truly about the writer’s name. After all, I thought, what would have to be true for an article about your name to be interesting?
by Ben Jubas on
I Think Therefore I Am Tolerant
Recently, a friend was telling me how a certain musical artist had entranced him with her talent—until he found out she was very religious and thanks God for her success. My friend considers himself liberal and advocates for the rights of women, racial minorities, and the LGBT community—yet, for him, religion elicits a “bad taste in [his] mouth.”
by Nick Sexton on
Shades of Grades
In my pompous English private high school, the importance of excelling in yearly exams was impressed upon us from age 13. I remember on my first day of physics class in the equivalent of freshman year, the teacher stood gravely in front of us and uttered the words: “Last year, all 23 of my students received A*s. Do not be my first A.” A* was the equivalent of an A+—the highest grade you could get.
by Lucia Perasso on
Fears, Beers, and Freshman Year
“Excuse me, do you have an extra cigarette?” I asked a woman outside New York Penn Station on my way home from Reunions in June. As I inhaled, the previous nine months began to transform from life to memory, things that were happening to things that had happened, becoming things that had happened to me rather than things I had made happen.
by Anonymous on
Fear Itself
I never sleep well when I am home. This is usually due to physical—not mental—distress: in eighth grade I inherited a three-quarter sized bedframe from the eighteenth century, a Sharpless heirloom that my grandparents wanted to get rid of. Rare is the vendor in this century that sells a mattress fit to its arcane proportions, so my parents threw two futons on it and told me it was temporary.
by Susannah Sharpless on
Bridge Year, Abridged
It’s been over a year since I got back from my Bridge Year in Ghana, and I still don’t know how to answer that question. How do I condense an entire year’s worth of experiences into one or two sentences? My frustration is with the question itself—it doesn’t lend itself to complex or thoughtful answers.
by Yoni Kirsch on
In Yellowstone
As far as I can tell it is impossible to be fewer than 6,000 feet above sea level when visiting Yellowstone National Park. The altitude yields legendarily bitter winters. Snowfall for much of the year is drastic and unrelenting; many of YNP’s larger resident mammals (those not asleep) migrate down and out of the park during winter’s most pitiless stretch in order to survive.
by Alex Moss on
Mother Tongue
My ears picked up on it the moment I walked through the entryway. As I walked up the staircase to the lecture hall, I could clearly make out sentences of the conversation being had behind me. It felt out of place to me, belonging to a different time and place.
by Catalina Trigo on
Pedaling Danger in Phnom Penh
I’d just been hit by a car, and I had the urge to go ballistic, to scream and curse at the idiot behind the wheel while banging dents into his hood. It seemed like a natural and reasonable reaction for me to have given the circumstances. But instead I just looked at him, wide-eyed, and tried to remain calm as I steered my bike towards the side of the road.
by Rachel Bergman on
Who in the Pinke
Twenty-two years and some number between one and 365 days before this article was published, I, William Pinke, bungee-jumped out my mother’s womb and into the world, a mindless, hairless, obese blank slate. I was given only four things that day: my name, my brain, my body, and a blanket. Since then, I have carried each through every stage of my development, but of the four only my name has remained unchanged.
by Will Pinke on