Recently, there has been a curious, serendipitous pattern in my media space. In a week, I encountered three works united by a common idea—the Law of Talion, which may be more familiar to you as the principle: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” These pieces included the Spanish story “Ley ...
After yet another late arrival, I wrote this in my notebook:
My childhood in California can be memorialized as a hodgepodge of rainbow pool towels, water guns, cherry popsicles, plastic cups, and sticky fingers: a pandemonium of juvenile chaos that could only be found at a pool party. Speakers blasted my dad’s encyclopedic Shazam playlist while I splashed my ...
“Where are you guys from? Oh yeah, our rail system’s shit.”
This summer, I reread Sally Rooney’s sophomore novel, Normal People, for the first time in four years. The first time I read it, I finished it in one sitting and fell in love, but didn’t completely understand why. Was I supposed to love the main characters? Hate them? Root for them? I reread the ...
Fall enters Providence with a quiet gravity. The city’s color palette shifts as the trees along Benefit Street turn. While the foliage may be beautiful, these warm colors are the manifestation of a fleeting moment. As chlorophyll drains from each leaf, other pigments—anthocyanins and carotenoids—creep ...
I rarely speak my native language at Brown. When I come back to my dorm and think in English—out of habit—I feel pathetic. It’s not because I don’t enjoy speaking it—it's this shift that reminds me of the performativity that underlies daily conversations. I sit on the floor and catch myself ...
In 2018, my mother was cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick,” one user wrote. Others called her “human scum,” a “ghoul,” and a “harridan.” Enraged by the hypothetical contents of her not-yet-published Harper’s Magazine article, they preemptively took to their ...
Evening breeze winding through my small, soft hands. Tall grass tickling my ankles as I passed. It was just after sundown in the summer, and I was sprinting through a field, and I was still young enough to be unafraid of stumbling.
In the car with my brother over winter break one year, I tried to inconspicuously Shazam the song he was playing. That move has seldom led me astray, and in this instance, it brought me to “Situations” by Robert Lester Folsom. I was struck by the song because of its last verse, one that spoke to ...
When I was in middle school, my friends and I loved to bullet journal. Each of us bought our own personal dotted notebooks that we carried around to class like little trophies, paired with pencil cases filled to the brim with felt-tip brush pens and mildliners and Zebra Sarasa pens. Taking inspiration ...
I’ll be twenty-two before you know it, and my final year of college starts in three days. I am watching the sun slip through the openings in the fence and gilding the honeysuckle. I am pressing my palms against the pavement, still warmed by the final day of August. I am listening to the cicadas. They ...
If you’re in my life, you’ve likely heard about A. I hate A. Well, hate is a strong word. I deeply dislike A, to the extent that I’m still having imaginary arguments with her in my head despite the fact that it’s been two months since I last saw her.
You came to outrun last semester. The slacking, the smoke, the classes you let tip into a soft, resinous fog. You blamed Donnie Hazel. Hazel of midnight joints, floor-creak monologues, and the art of drifting out of the abstract world of collegiate commitment. So you hit I-95 and called it reform. New ...
As my feet, clad in an obnoxious blue and orange sneaker combo, hit the pavement again and again and again, I can’t help but feel guilty.
Solutions by The State News
