When I was sixteen years old and on vacation at my uncle’s home in western India, my summer friend copied for me the entirety of Lord Byron’s “All for Love” and gave me the sheet, torn from a schoolbook, to keep as a remembrance. It was one of those brief friendships, lasting just one summer, […]
Two Poems
An Ode to Broken Hammers [Erasure of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time] Two Decades Before His Arrest, Ezra Pound Said, “Go in Fear of Abstractions” Take this image and pry it apart, Stretch out its contents and study its form. Ask it to dance on the head of a pin, and turn it over in […]
I Don’t Read (The Right Books)
I used to have this image in my head of the perfect English major. This person had somehow managed to cobble together enough time, energy, and mental aptitude to spend all of their time reading Great Works of Literature. They appreciated the aesthetics of the nineteenth century. Their bookshelves were full of poets and writers […]
Reading Together
About a year ago, my twin sister moved to Pennsylvania to pursue her PhD in Physics. For twenty-two years, she and I either lived together or within walking distance of each other. Now, for the first time in our lives, we’ve been living genuinely apart, which is an especially odd thing when you’re a twin. […]
A Scarlett Letter
On April 11, 2019, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed Bill No. 23, The Human Rights and Heartbeat Protection Act amidst applause and laughter and a propaganda baby poised for a photo-op on her mother’s hip. If passed, this bill, like many others being proposed around the country, will essentially ban abortion after detection of a […]
Ye Olde Enthusiasm
One of the many items of contention in my parents’ long custody battle was my overdue library books. It’s true: I had a lot of them. I regularly maxed out the 50-book limit and agonized over which volumes to leave behind, and, although I loved their weight, their promise of another world, the books, well—they […]
How the Sciences Hurt
Ever since I was a child, I knew I wanted to spend my life helping others. When I was little, I wanted to be a marine biologist. Next—when my mother told me I should be a professional arguer—I thought I would become a prosecuting attorney. Finally, after my grandfather passed away after a massive heart […]
Do What You Love! (Or, Don’t)
At the end of my undergraduate degree, I faced a lot of choices as to which graduate programs I wanted to pursue after earning my BA in English. I had many academic passions: English literature, composition, theory, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and, for a brief moment, I even considered pursuing graduate study in computer science. Confronted […]
Trumpstram Shandy: The Inhumanity of Celebrity
It’s startling to run into a celebrity. My wife and I were walking around Central Park one afternoon when she nudged me and stared flabbergasted at the man walking toward us. The man was Hank Azaria, who is probably best known for voicing a range of characters on The Simpsons. Azaria passed us in jogger […]