Orthodox Jew (translating Latin): Castus, the act of abstaining from sensual pleasures for religious reasons. Literally, what is my life?
Overheard in text study
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Because We Were Girls Together
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? (from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) Because We Were Girls Together (a golden shovel) …
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No machine
In lieu of goodbye I send a tiny house in the mail, flimsy porcelain talisman a weak barricade. Like Joni I become cellophane, no personal defenses, the wrapper on a pack of cigarettes, the dirt on the road of your espresso cup — in sand in bone you will learn to drink it. I let…
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Liquidation
“That could be anyone, I think. The beach, the cliffs, the moon, just something with a voice that sounds like Margaret. The ocean could have picked up her accent and dissolved it, carried what I know as Margaret—black hair, sports bra, raspy voice—and released its latent sound into the cold wind, back to me. A…
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houston texas
after a letter about a friend houston is warm and smooth and deep and dark and red. It is the feeling of holding a mug in two hands, of wrapping my hands around a lover’s lower rib cage and knowing this is…
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To Be Black Here
In the first weeks of the academic year, many Black Princeton students noticed that what little presence they expected from their demographic was even lower than they had imagined. Those students looked around and asked each other… “Where are all the Black people at?!” Their observations were accurate. The Black student population decreased from…
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When blood is nipped and ways be foul
“She stood there, shuddering in place. She shook from the cold, from the fear, from the pain. She shook for what she had lost — something she knew could not be put back. For she now understood that Fear was not something lodged in her chest like shrapnel, but rather something that was taken away.”
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wash your hands
“I missed the opportunity to stay. And you missed the opportunity to ask me to stay. I am now in a foreign land. You actually have become fashionable.”
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DEAD at 21: The fixation of Tabloids and Death
A Nass writer reflects on the morbid relationship between readers, editors, and the dead.
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The Revolution Will be Televised: A Review of One Battle After Another
I left the theater after seeing One Battle After Another struggling to catch my breath. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson advances the plot at breakneck speed, collapsing the film’s nearly three-hour runtime into what feels like one long action sequence. I watched former revolutionary Bob Ferguson’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) journey to save his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti)…