CRIT
ANNE GROSS
Do You Know How to Read

I was fed up. I had been close reading since my sophomore year of high school, and I couldn’t seem to stop. I agonized over the construction of sentences. I coaxed secrets from ambiguous words. Then, I combined these minutiae into a larger observation about the text, which would inevitably yield a vaguely potent conclusion. 

February 28, 2023

AWUOR ONGURU
CULTURE: What’s So Black About Black TV?

On Boxing Day, after packaging various leftovers and saying goodbye to family friends and neighbours, I sat down to watch the finale of “Insecure.” The […]

February 24, 2022

Sophie Henry
ORIANA TANG
On Shrinking

My room felt smaller with Kevin in it. We were watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I couldn’t focus because Kevin’s nearness scrambled […]

January 24, 2016

catherineyang
AARON BERMAN & MARISSA MEDANSKY
A company of twitters, a society of friends

It was spring, and the weather was beautiful. Last Saturday, we were sitting under a tree on Old Campus, admiring the newly warm weather and […]

April 22, 2015

MAISIE MATTIA
A History of Petals

1. In Japanese, “petal” is a unit of measurement referring to (i) pages in a book (ii) clouds, or (iii) flowers.

March 31, 2015

YI-LING LIU
Treading clouds and shelling peas

“Mrs. Bell says nothing. Mrs. Bell is as silent as the grave.” This was how Virginia Woolf described the works of her sister, Vanessa Bell, […]

February 3, 2015

ANYA GRENIER
Cold Peace

About a year ago, I was required to give an oral presentation to my Dostoevsky section. I talked about Dostoevsky’s ideas about America. They were […]

November 20, 2014

YI-LING LIU
Carnival

We all knew about Koh Samui. At the beginning of every summer, the graduating seniors of the Chinese International School, all ninety-something of them, would […]

October 10, 2014

MADELEINE WITT
Undocumented

Click to enlarge.    

March 22, 2014

AARON LEWIS
The Body Politic

I spent October break in a darkened basement of the medical school, peering through a microscope at butterfly scales. Each scale is a few microns […]

December 1, 2013

YI-LING LIU
Tiptoeing around the Great Firewall of China

I remember the first passage they deleted. A smattering of sentences in the middle of the second page, describing Wenceslas Square, Prague, as the site […]

November 7, 2013