INSIDE BENNINGTON’S DARK WAR AGAINST TEENAGERS [feature]
By Sasha Gordon | April 1Abstract
Abstract
Trad-wives, looksmaxxing men: A lot has changed since I wrote my article on bi non-practicing people at Brown exactly a year ago.
My memories of the years my family spent in the Midwest are blurry. What I do remember is a sense of sameness: the childish assurance that the wet, slippery snow that fell in December to block our front door in dense heaps was the same snow everyone else on Earth was wading through. That the tongue ...
Chip Clarke looked like a dream. Frankly, he was a dream to me. In 2012, he was practically identical to Justin Bieber—same honey-brown, gravity-defying swoop and soft, cherubic face—except he was eight. I would fantasize about him being my boyfriend, about him noticing me in the ways that counted, ...
Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City once said that when she was broke, she would buy Vogue instead of dinner because it fed her more. I’ve been there too. Late at night and not a single crumb in my room, not even a shabby, mushy apple, the only viable option was to get my dopamine from a more ...
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion says. But I don’t like Joan Didion, and I wish she’d never said that. I am looking in the mirror, and I am upset, rehearsing for an interview, a date, or the dreaded “tell me about yourself”—generally getting my narrative together. ...
IN: Keeping an ins and outs list. It’s more of a set of commandments really, like a religion. I took the RIPTA to the Salvation Army in spring of 2025 so I could buy a Bible. They only had the New Testament, but God is pretty mean in the Old Testament, so I figured I could make do. I had an unshakeable ...
Rush is an endurance event.
I know the path to the beach by heart.
After a deep snowfall, the streets, the cars, the neighborhoods, the trees—really everything—is completely buried. Schools are closed. Time itself is forced into a pause, and by the simple fact of the fall, we are forced into stasis. Snow plows groan awake, narrowing our world to our homes, our ...
Unathleticism has a way of creeping into your identity. Growing up, I was surrounded by athletes, most notably my mother, who ran D1 in college and then stumbled into a marathon addiction in post-grad life. Both of my younger brothers are gym rats, with the youngest having run his first marathon at ...
Lands of opportunity are frequently co-inhabited by lesser-known creatures: decisions. Opportunities gambol and frolic around, but if you look closely, tailing each opportunity is a little decision or two, nipping at its heels, encumbering it just a tiny bit. This ecosystem is more complex than we may ...
As 22-year-olds, we take ourselves pretty seriously. We’re convinced that our two romantic decisions (anything before tenth grade is negligible) indicate a lifelong pattern to which we are bound, irrevocably so. We’re sure that, despite results of an allergy test that say otherwise, we are allergic ...
My mother gestures me into the room. As I walk in, I look around—it’s vastly different from the last time I was here. I used to spend multiple days a week here, where we had our movie nights, where I had my band practices, where my parents forced me to go with my friends because my dad didn’t ...
In another life, I never moved away from Illinois. I spend summers laying out picnic blankets in the fenceless backyard that we share with eight of our neighbors. We drink iced tea out of plastic cups and run after fireflies, watching the yellow lights weave through our fingers.
It took seeing one friend repeatedly reassure another that nothing was wrong and then, in their absence, proceed to describe everything that was, in fact, wrong for me to realize that I’m a very direct person. Obviously, I’ve told half-truths and stalled a confrontation for another day, but in a ...
What does it mean to learn from preservation and reimagination?
content warnings: description of mass suicide, mentions of rape
For the past three years, my family has upheld the same end-of-summer tradition: On a Saturday in mid-August, we drive four hours north of San Francisco until we hit Eureka. On Sunday, we run the Humboldt Bay Marathon.