I want to believe that prince-like things still exist in this age of doomed chivalry and philandering father figures—that terrifying Austrian man who kept his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years being an extreme example.
It is hard to find the right type of romance, that makes your heart beat faster—but not so fast [...]

“Spring Fling.” Such telling words? During the sultry early-summer day I contemplated the issue of virginity. If you are a girl about to graduate from university, and you have not had that first ’struggle between the sheets’ with a mimbo, wanker, pimp, or ever-elusive prince, then should you keep waiting? Should you hold out for [...]

Finally finished with university, a land of prestige-seekers and Type A goons, I have been dropped in the most undesirable of places: ‘the job market.’ My first irritating duty while residing in this locale is to craft those dreaded documents called ‘cover letters.’
Gauche things to say in a cover letter:
1. “I am writing to [...]

At a video/performance show for the art school’s MFA students, one artist chatted with a plywood box for 20 minutes, and then sat down next to it and drank a juice box. Then a girl danced awkwardly with a cloth-covered phallus/boom-box-on-wheels.
Next thing I knew I was at the Yale undergraduate art exhibit, staring at a [...]

There is a thrill to perusing the internet for a range of opportunities, from career prospects, to temporary housing arrangements, to more intimate social networking. But my virtual obsession has been called into question by the recent atrocity of the “Craigslist Killer.” His story is reminiscent of the classic Bret Easton Ellis novel [...]

I was recently lurking in a corner of Manhattan with a friend from good old New England. In boarding school we played squash together and both wrote the type of short stories typical of teenage girls (that is to say: involving a sexual awakening, an intrigue with a male teacher, an allusion to masochistic behavior, [...]

This morning at the New Haven corner coffee shop a middle-aged woman sat next to me eating her raspberry scone and writing repeatedly on a pad of paper: “Please God give Brendan strength/Please God give Brendan strength…” And just like that for pages and pages. Meanwhile, across the street, there was quite a sizable security [...]

The tradition of love letter writing is dead and gone. Or maybe the inundation of new forms of technological contact is giving the love letter its renaissance. A dashing Argentinean artist has been sending me long, flourishing, and lyrical poem-letter-odes, ever since I met him on my last evening in Buenos Aires. It’s mischievous, to [...]

Easter Sunday is gloomy. Especially all the eggs everywhere. It reminds me of theories on the evolution of human sexuality, and the way that a woman’s finite reserve of eggs can mark her behaviors in love and marriage. It’s the old story: given that men seem to have an endless supply of sperm, each of [...]

The Dostoevsky novella Notes from Underground was adapted into a play that I watched last night at The Yale Rep. It was quite romantic to sit by myself in a packed theatre, mesmerized by the bits of falling snow on the sparse-and-skanky set of the Underground Man’s apartment, with its stacks of filing boxes and [...]