To witness such a dramatic cultural shift in my short twenty-four years of life is, predictably, quite jarring. As a teenager, I begged for parental permission to get on Instagram–I longed for the opportunity to curate the way my peers saw me with precision. My hair was long, frizzy, and the black winged eyeliner I painted on daily was often messy and uneven. Any chance to prove to my classmates that I wasn’t annoying and undesirable was an important one–the weight of th

There’s nothing more that infuriates the soul of an already stressed, one-hell-to-the-next appointed Pratt student than finally finding an hour or two gap in their schedule to visit the ARC yoga studio (which, by no means is a comfortable space to begin with), only to find the space being occupied, unannounced, by photoshoot equipment for the pampered basketball team, or a group exercise quietly added to the studio schedule without a timely update to the calendar— leaving no

Ever since I moved to New York City for Pratt, I had dreams of exploring the city with friends, hitting every museum/gallery, watching a play, maybe even pretending I understood a foreign film without subtitles. I made some friends and tried to make plans, but their responses were always “too busy, work,” or “that’s kinda far.” After a while, I realized it probably wasn’t just disinterest. Between Pratt’s workload and the overwhelming energy of New York itself, everyone alrea

There, cold-sweating my way up the single-file line of dresses the price of my once in a blue moon dinner bill, I stand riding my skirt up my legs just enough to be revealing, but not enough to look desperate. Every time I’ve experienced this exact moment, without fail, I ask myself “Am I the only one who feels out of place?” After a painful $30 cash cover-charge, I’ll wind up haunting the club floor to not-that-popular pop hits and wondering why anyone in this room goes out

She casts long shadows over me as I rest To love her is torture Alive and desperate, she builds castles from thread White towers, cocoons, endless stairs that lead to nowhere My creator, she bears me everything On this planet only we inhabit She hums as she dances so beautifully She spins spiderwebs in her sleep If she weren’t mine I would let them swallow her whole The delirium of power makes her fragile and angry One wrong twist in her plié and the facade will crack Sh

Growing up Liberian-American the terms gossip and storytelling were synonymous colloquially. This connection between the way we tell stories and the way we talk about each other and ourselves is something I’ve been grappling with in my own creative practice. It’s possible that the impulse we have to gossip and the impulse we have to tell stories are born from the same place: the desire to express our personal subjective truths. In my last three years as a writing student at P

As anthropologist Anna Tsing says, grains domesticated us. The development of sedimentary agriculture roughly 10000 years ago ushered in the establishment of new social hierarchies, reinforcing what we now refer to as classism and “othering”. Cultivation has allowed the exercising of power over others, more commonly known as “feudalism”. This system enabled the creation of a food surplus, increasing the size of society manyfold. Conventional evolutionary theory has explained

I read an article that estimated it would take about 23 years to eat at every restaurant in New York City. The discovery of this instantly led me to feel pure pity for anyone who hasn't started planning their birthday. Unlike these common idiots I’ve had my birthday, coming up next July, planned since last August. Thankfully for my forward thinking and superior planning skills, I decided as a profound act of service for all the Scorpios of New York City it only made sense t

Artwork by Vasu Arora A few years have passed since my grandmother died, but her house in Whitestone, Queens, still feels alive with her routines. The faint smell of espresso lingers in the kitchen, and her large wooden rosary beads hang from the portico, just where she left them. On my last visit, while opening the junk drawer to find Werther's Originals, I came across a stack of old restaurant menus. They were soft at the edges, creased from years of use, and marked with he