“There is no wall that can withstand the power of ideas,” Axel Springer wrote in 1966. He had just built a 20-stories tall headquarters for his publishing company right beside the Berlin Wall in West Berlin, and he took out ads in newspapers to explain why. The building was a “symbol to the people of …
There is something very special about traveling to somewhere you’ve only visited before in books. Anne Fadiman has an essay about it in Ex Libris called “You Are There”; you can read some of the essay here. I don’t have a vivid imagination when I read, but there are places that capture your heart when you …
When I was an undergrad, I spent six weeks one summer studying in London. It was a small program of students, a dozen or so in each session. One night, a few of us went out for drinks at a pub called the Bree Louise. It was a nice night, so we sat outside at …
After I read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, I wanted to write like her. I wanted to emulate her lyrical and yet concise language, to follow her twisting train of thought through the labyrinth to its surprising and yet inevitable conclusion. I went on to read Men Explain Things to Me and …
I went back to New York City for a weekend recently, timed to coincide with a best friend’s visit from London. With temperatures over ninety degrees I spent much of the weekend searching with friends for someplace to stay cool. Except on Saturday, when we marched.
It’s been more than two years since I went to the gym regularly but sometimes when I’m anxious I still think about running, my legs pumping with my feet in sneakers as my arms swish back and forth. I only ever ran on the elliptical. I didn’t like how the treadmill made my knees feel and …
One day in January, I was washing a pair of mugs my friends gave me as a “leaving NYC” gift last spring. The mugs have a sketch of the Brooklyn skyline and are from Fishs Eddy, a quirky dishware store in Manhattan that I love. I’ve used these mugs many times since moving but that day …
Ten years ago, I took a course called Daily Themes in college. For one semester, I wrote five short pieces a week. Some of them were funny (there was one about my suite’s pet goldfish) and most were forgettable. But there are a few I still think about, including this one about growing up and …
August 20, 2017 All summer, while I slept in my adolescent bedroom and sorted through everything I left behind when I went to college and when I moved to New York, I was thinking about memory. Memory, and nostalgia, and belonging, and though the whole summer through I meant to sit and write something about …
I have never believed in signs. I enjoy reading my horoscope, and a friend recently got me into reading Tarot, but those are all about narrative lenses: How do these arbitrary but supposedly specific sets of insights wrap around and reveal parts of my story that are obvious and parts that are hidden? But signs? The …