Yale Daily News

Cicadas swarmed my town when I was in seventh grade — one of their mass awakenings every 13 or 17 years, their buzzing brown bodies rising from the earth.

April 1, 2016

In China, they teach you the geography of the country by telling you that it looks like a rooster.

March 11, 2016

Sometime in February, when it was dark and raining and I was upset with myself, I saw a whole unpeeled banana on the ground and hated it immediately.

March 11, 2016

I spoke so few words in D.C. last weekend that I posted a Snapchat story just to prove that I hadn’t died in a ditch. That I was still breathing and walking, even 300 miles away from my friends. Does that make sense? And when I checked Snapchat again, several hours later on the train back to New York, I learned that 14 people had seen the image and I felt quiet relief. I was alive!

February 26, 2016

Last June, I took a trip to Pietrasanta, Tuscany. My friend Elena spent half of her year there, and I finally capitalized on an open invitation. One day, we decided to decamp from the quiet hillside town and enter a guidebook. We packed small backpacks and set off for Cinque Terre, which the ever-helpful Rick Steves describes as “the lowbrow, underappreciated alternative to the French Riviera.”

February 26, 2016

I never even thought to change the radio station. Not once. No, for the whole of my childhood — and I mean, the Long Childhood (0–20) — the radios in my parents’ cars were tuned to either 88.5 or 90.5. Only.

February 19, 2016

When I walked into the meeting room, I knew right away which one of the five people sitting around the table was her.

February 12, 2016

The last stop on our pub crawl was a place called Players, a seedy little joint in the red-light district where the organizers poured vodka straight into our mouths as we filed through the door. The deal was that we’d get a free shot at each new place and could buy more drinks at a discount if we wanted to.

February 12, 2016

At some point in the distant past, my father took a break from the apparently nonstop marathon of windsurfing, lounging on beaches and dating rich Argentines that defined his youth and left Montevideo to visit his rustic relatives in the Uruguayan countryside.

February 5, 2016

Over winter break, I read an article about two Bosnian leftist newspapers, “Slobodna Bosna” and “Dani.” Slobodna Bosna was becoming an exclusively online publication; Dani had long ago abandoned its original political project. The author criticized the state of journalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina: content is mostly controlled by party affiliates, newspapers publish what they get paid to, not what they morally feel obliged to, and sensationalism is the main generator of headlines, as bombastic as they are unfounded.

February 5, 2016

In his 1897 travel novel “Following the Equator,” Mark Twain remarked, “[Varanasi] is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks […]

January 29, 2016