The first time I saw Zero Dark Thirty left me shaken to my core, affected to an extent I rarely experience at the cinema. I was deeply moved by what I saw as a powerful meditation on obsession and revenge … Read More
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 a friend. Her name was Anna. She was thirteen, wore rainbow-banded tights and sometimes smelled like cigarettes. Her screen name was “kind-o-kinky.” She was the first bisexual any of us had ever known.
The following is a message from the Colorado Springs Safety Council, a proud mountain western affiliate of The Nassau Weekly. This is your safety spokesman, Melvin R. McGinnis, speaking.
“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise Oh, Francis. If only I could say the same. This last line from a book I recently pulled from the towering stack on my desk … Read More
Even today, going back to the sites of the 1990s is a blast from the past. The primitive web design is frankly laughable, though it’s like unfairly comparing cave art to Rembrandt. Websites from the 90’s aren’t bad per se, they simply lack the basic modicums of user-friendliness and aesthetics that we’ve grown used to.
I logged on to Facebook to check it out. Her sister was fourteen, a freshman in high school. She had about a thousand friends and did not have 113 likes—it was up to 115 now, in the thirty minutes that elapsed since Allie’s text.
It was just one week before that these same sophomores were sitting in my common room, nervously tugging at their hair and preparing themselves for bickering. Some were discussing which outfits to wear for bicker—in the case of some, this meant strategically picking shoes that could withstand intense moisture, snow, and beer spillage, yet still not appear sloppy. Some girls were flipping through bicker guides prepared for them by upperclassmen friends. I overheard two sophomore boys in Frist struggling to come up with five interests to write down on a pre-bicker survey.
She sits a widowed star beyond the rest, And whispers of the final kiss. Entrances souls who chance to look With promise of eternal bliss. She glared in through the eyes, and saw We lack it in our minds, … Read More
Last night Tahrir Square was a lawless place—masked young men roved, accosted, helped, threatened, fought; buildings loomed, burnt and crumbling, paving stones were absent, having been broken up and used as ammunition against the police a few months ago. But perhaps this experience only applied to Tahrir at 2 a.m. So I returned that afternoon to take photos of ongoing protests and developments. Daylight better illuminated the debris of Tahrir’s damaged past, but also cleared the fog of tension from eleven hours prior.
It was difficult to pay attention to anything but the mass of people that seemed to constantly surround me. Throughout the day, I found fears of terrorist attacks—or disbelief at how a terrorist attack had not yet occurred at the park—infiltrating my mind. I remember being packed into a bus on the way from our hotel to the park, standing with my pale tourist arms and legs rubbing against child limbs and moms’ Bermuda shorts, and thinking how perfect of a target we would be.
My family and I were in Ireland at the time of the zit’s arrival. It was the biggest vacation we’d ever taken. My parents chose Ireland because they had a special connection to it. They were engaged in front of a hotel in Sligo and my mother’s father owned a house in the county of Kerry. My parents wanted us to get a sense of our heritage. I find it ironic that they gave me a name that sounds like it belongs to Ireland’s British oppressors, but I am really quite Irish on both sides.
