backpage [s26]
03/18/26
Overheard@Brown
“2030—that’s a year? That’s a real year?”
“You look like a character in a Jane Austen novel—not the main character, but one of the ones who gets sold into marriage.”
Hot post- time machine
“Words, once familiar friends but now complete strangers, taunted me as they swam in a whirlpool of lines and characters, confusing sound for sound until they all lost meaning. My native language, the first words I ever spoke—omma—my mother tongue, now a foreign entity, an unwelcome invader.”
— Jeanine Kim, “making words out of nothing” 03.21.24
“I notice some other folks basking in the snow, passing around a cigarette. Their attire: either little-shirt-big-pants or big-shirt-little-pants—slightly androgynous vibes but not enough to bring their gender identity into question. I begin to converse with them.”
— Ivy Rockmore, “on ‘bi non-practicing’” 03.21.25
Top 10 Springs
- The Rite of
- and All (by William Carlos Williams)
- Weekend
- The first movement of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”
- Hot
- Into action
- Silent
- Cleaning
- Bruce [ ]steen
- Rum[ ]a
03/11/26
Overheard@Brown
“The eight-year-olds yearn for the gorges.”
“You brought a knife to a black hole fight.”
Hot post- time machine
“We’re entering our twenties now, which means internships, boyfriends, darker shades of lipstick, reading books other than young adult romance novels. But I still think about third grade—noisy recorders, dirt in our hair from the playground, and after-school crafts—with a warm familiarity.”
— Ana Vissicchio, “spooled” 03.14.24
“Fish don’t exist. It’s quite a simple concept, though I suppose I should elaborate. ”
— Ishan Khurana, “everything is everything” 03.14.25
Top 10 Signs
- Now Entering Rhode Island
- “I saw the—”
- The one that is both the signifier and the signified
- Goose crossing
- Those vultures circling overhead
- This one—send that text!
- Auld Lang
- On the dotted line
- Count Olaf’s ankle eye tattoo
- Now Leaving Rhode Island
03/04/26
Overheard@Brown
“I think there’s a cosmic force behind it.” “Yeah, it’s called procrastination.”
“It brings out my motherly instincts.”
Hot post- time machine
“Emails make a relationship feel tangible. It’s time I dedicated to that person. It isn’t just a text that I sent while I was making breakfast. It’s an hour of picking the right things to say, the right poem to send, the right place to split paragraphs.”
— Eleanor Dushin, “i’m trying to tell you” 03.07.24
“There's truly one thing in the world that frustrates me more than the current state of American politics: Roblox's viral multiplayer dress-up simulator, Dress to Impress. Whether during a particularly monotonous period of lecture or a restful moment of Mock Trial practice, I find myself consistently returning to the Roblox app to torture myself once again with a round of this infuriating game. ”
— Ann Gray Golpira, “battle of the pre-teens” 03.07.25
Top 10 Brown Students
- The entire post- staff
- You <3
- Distant relative of John Carter Brown
- Daveed Diggs
- Clippy
- My roommate, Katie
- Underground baristas
- Brown Band members
- Bruno
- The person who politely looked away when you slipped this week
2/25/26
Overheard@Brown
“Being hetero-erotic about it.”
“Really insane question, but have you ever read Karl Marx?”
Hot post- time machine
“If one had to summarize all of menswear—its ups and downs, bell bottoms, shin huggers, and oxford bags—into an essential fabric, it would have to be tweed.”
— Sean Toomery, “tweed and me” 02.29.24
“I have always cried on my birthday, maybe because it reminds me of my asymmetrical origins. Or maybe because it always feels like I’m standing in two places at once.”
— Ellyse Givens, “on equilibria” 2.28.25
Top 10 Olympic Events
- Doubles luge
- Getting to class right now
- Triathlon (skiing, rifle shooting, and admitting to cheating on your girlfriend on TV)
- Alternate Triathlon (skiing, rifle shooting, and stealing your teammate’s credit card)
- Prometheus Triathlon (stealing fire, delivering it to humans, and getting your liver eaten by an eagle)
- The one Alysa Liu did
- Curling, but only if you cheat
- Kung Fu Panda triple toe loop
- Keeping the cardboard bed quiet
- Winning speed skating because everyone faster than you falls
2/18/26
Overheard@Brown
“I should’ve gotten, like…frickin’ a rose from you.”
“Do you guys fuck with lemonades?”
Hot post- time machine
“In the beginning, Delta Airlines created a 10 a.m. flight to Los Angeles. And I arrived early at my gate, enveloped in a net of peace, anticipating a night in my childhood bed back home, and the sun rose over Providence. But then the intercom said, Let there be a $1,500 airline voucher for any travelers willing to transfer to the 5 p.m. to Los Angeles through Detroit, and I awoke.”
— Elsa Eastwood, “paranoid in detroit” 02.24.24
“Her naked, injured form is not that of a monster or animal but simply a girl without a towel. The blood on Carrie’s hands is not from any act of violence or injury but a sign of healthy puberty. Carrie’s form is reduced to something disgusting and animalistic.”
— Isa Marquez, “a bloody good scare” 2.22.25
Top 10 Cats
- The Musical
- The movie version of the musical
- Garfield
- Cool
- Catapult!
- -apillar
- Cheshire
- in the Hat
- The Aristocats
- The fog when it comes on little feet
2/11/26
Overheard@Brown
“I love to pontificate.”
“The world is a wide, wide oyster and I’m the sexiest pearl.”
Hot post- time machine
“When I imagine the experience of caring, I imagine it as a keyhole to two universes: to one’s external world and to one’s interiority. Similarly, reading a text can act as an opening to learn both about the universal and the deeply personal.”
— Alaire Kanes, “a new nervous system” 02.15.24
“Nowadays, I still stop to watch the geese soar across the blue every time I see them, navigating on the basis of nothing but a feeling, and that feeling is everything. The migrations we choose, the people we cross the skies for. We love with abandon. We leave our houses to come home.”
— Michelle Bi, “what guides the geese” 2.14.25
Top 10 Pacts
- Blood
- Pinky swear
- Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education
- Christina Pactson
- Pact-Man
- Between Faust and the devil
- Boots and pacts and boots and pacts and—
- Magna Carta
- Pactelbel’s Canon
- Sharpe Repactory
2/4/26
Overheard@Brown
“Me and babies got beef.”
“We’re in different IQ brackets.”
Hot post- time machine
“It is freshman year and every day I feel as though I am stranded in a whiteout, the world empty save for the roar of the wind and voices too dim to distinguish. It’s that particular brand of loneliness exacerbated by the cold, and when a blizzard rolls around, heaping buildings in mounds of snow and dulling the afternoon sun to twilight, what else is there to do but go outside?”
— Sydney Pearson, “treasure under our feet” 02.08.24
“The prospect of that, the expectation of it all, excited me as a child. It’s sickening that the same feeling that once inspired me today weighs on me, crushes me under the pressure of what it means to leave a legacy—to leave and have people know that you were once there, that your name means something, that you are carrying on all that it meant before.”
— Joe Maffa, “maffa way” 2.07.25
Top 10 Frigid Rivalries
- Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan
- Me vs. the patch of ice I slipped on
- Snow Miser vs. Heat Miser
- Elsa vs. Anna
- Elsa vs. her country’s history of colonialism #Frozen2
- Scrat vs. his acorn
- Kevin McCallister vs. the wet bandits
- The man from “Baby It’s Cold Outside” vs. the woman from “Baby It’s Cold Outside”
- Frozone from The Incredibles vs. his wife
- Literally everyone vs. ICE
