no pomp due to circumstance

To the second-semester senior who has been unceremoniously dispatched home by the coronavirus, just when you were about to depart on your victory lap…More

creeping crud

I used to joke that I would regret all of the postapocalyptic novels I read in my twenties and here I am, regretting all of the postapocalyptic novels I read in my twenties. More

all-day dining at the homesick restaurant

(With gratitude and apologies to the inimitable Anne Tyler.) I was in Palo Alto this past week for work. Now that I live in Europe, my once- or twice-yearly visits to the California office are a jet-lagged flurry of hugging people I thought had been fired long ago. (To be fair, they obviously think the…More

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i’ll scratch your back…

As I start thinking about how to eventually market myself as an author, I’ve set myself to actually participating in social media. In case you’re wondering how that’s going for me, a misanthrope, here is an actual excerpt from my diary this morning: “It’s nice to see how engaging on social media begets engagement on…More

swallowing the world

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” — Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children Where you were when When September 11th happened, I was twelve, a couple weeks into seventh grade. The footage on television was terrifying, but my classmates and I had never been to New York, and it felt consequential but…More

woo-woo girls

I approach anything that’s not, e.g., reading Proust with a keening sense of shame and thus never learn to do it properly. The trouble is that I’ve also never read Proust, either, putting me in this liminal space where I have neither Instagram followers nor highfalutin lit-bro cred.More

michigan seems like a dream to me now

I could write a solemn thesis about how my travels are shaping my view of my homeland, but my worst nightmare is accidentally becoming a sanctimonious travel blogger, so instead let me leave you with a brief list of probably-awful American things that I miss in spite of knowing better.More

an office of one’s own

On reading in the 21st century: “God help me if I have to wade through another gratuitous description of the hysterical wife of a put-upon man chafing at the bonds of corporate servitude and his milquetoast children. Give me Eileen and her constipation any day.”More

try the grey stuff; it’s delicious

I lived with four of my best friends when we were seniors in college. Our chore strategy was that we lived in filth until someone got fed up and rage-cleaned, and then they got to passive-aggressively sulk everyone else for the rest of the week as a reward.More