A friend, upon recently visiting Paris, remarked that everyone there dressed like Emily in Paris, that thanks to the algorithm, the dominant look had developed into a grotesque camp version of “French Girl Style,” an aesthetic already endlessly packaged and reified for American audiences. My first couple of days there,

OUT: destroying yourself for grad school IN: destroying yourself for art

OUT: Himbos IN: Litbros OUT: rotting in bed IN: bringing wine to parties OUT: millennial vs gen z fashion discourse IN: the all-ages appeal of dressing like a Miami coke dealer circa 1980 OUT: perfectionism IN: the "good enough" job OUT: obsessive punctuality IN: publishing an ins and

I’ve noticed something strange about myself over the past few months, which I can only attribute (wholly non-scientifically) to a springtime bout with COVID: my sense of smell has gotten significantly better. I have always had a middling sense of smell. It has never been the primary way in

I wrote and then abandoned a version of this post where I talked a lot about gamification and self-tracking (further revisions might have yielded additional discussion about the neoliberal encroachments on life, the anxiety that even a newsletter I started for my own amusement has become a source of neurosis

Back in undergrad, my friends used to play a game. Whenever the party was winding down and we were sitting hunched over our last dregs of alcohol, swirling hideous concoctions around in red plastic cups, not quite ready to go to bed; or when we were bored and waiting in

Two weeks ago, I was sitting on the Thomson House terrasse, drinking iced coffees and pretending to work on my dissertation. There was a sense of gleeful energy: the end of the semester before the comedown of grades, the start of warm weather but not yet the lazy hot days

I ran 15km last weekend, partly by accident. I did it again this weekend, deliberately. This probably marks the point where I can no longer credibly claim to be “reinventing myself as a jock” as a bit, although I’d hoped I could keep up with the pretense until I’

I had the misfortune this week of coming down with a second bout of COVID. Its effects have generally been quite mild, except that I’ve almost completely lost my sense of taste. This has turned out to be surprisingly unsettling for me, not least because “regularly enjoying food that

Content note: Mind the links, some of them involve people engaged in potentially unsettling bodily practices. Over the past year, I have been getting increasingly tattooed, and have also been thinking about a framework for how I understand this way of engaging with my body. People have discussed their own