“On the eve of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday,” tonight’s Yale Center for British Art keynote lecture was accompanied by wine, sausage tartlets, and inordinately opportune people-watching: elderly women in fur, young men in lime green ponchos, tweeds and plaids mixed in combinations both horrifying and delightful, and the usual rarefied debauchery of art world academia.
With [...]

I often convince myself that certain typically un-me life prospects are just what I need in my life. I began last week inspired to do Teach For America. Given my fascination with wankers, pimps, society portraiture, the postwar jet set, and all things Parisian, Teach For America seemed like a natural career move. By [...]

Valentine’s Day is approaching, a reality that is almost as undesirable as the mid-winter weather. In an attempt to distract myself, I hosted a gathering of friends in my charming dorm room overlooking the glowing Harkness Tower and a snow-covered Cross Campus. A crew of underclassmen boys showed up, most of them involved in theatre, [...]

On the surface, Nicholas Ray’s 1956 film Rebel Without A Cause is postwar American conservatism mixed with a typical high school coming of age plot. James Dean is simply beyond: a true boy-man with guts and swagger. Just below the surface, the movie has a terrifying moral: “We all become our parents.” The Oedipal and [...]

How does one get rid of the memory of a lover? There is the inevitable period of apathy and convalescence. Respite is the appropriate word for this phase, as it means “a period of temporary delay” and relates to some Latin word for “looking back.” Personally, “staring back morbidly” would be a more apt description [...]

I recently attended the MIT European Career Fair to interview for a position at a big international insurance company. I was seduced into it by the following facts:
a. They read my résumé (with its use of dreadfully uncorporate phrases like “one act plays,” “au pair,” “beauty assistant,” “Teen Vogue“)… and they were still interested [...]

A useful term for describing men who lack a certain competence and masculine authority is mimbo. It stands for “male bimbo.”
The mimbo is the guy who is unable to navigate his big shiny car through the roads of a familiar small town without using his navigation system (and is then unable to work the navigation [...]

Famous German filmmaker Werner Herzog once said, “It’s not self-destructive to jump into a cactus…it’s just having a little fun.”
I feel as though no matter the volume of interesting and productive work in my life, no matter the number of encounters with exciting people, no matter the proliferation of beautiful settings, at the end of [...]