Category: The Halcyon Days
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How to Get In to College: Steal This
Steal this essay. It might take a while before you “get it”, but you’ll get it. Use it as skeleton or in it’s unadulterated entirety for a meta-critique that indicates your blistering intellect. ———— Broad, overreaching commentary about society. Witty backpedaling revealing hypercritical skepticism of aforesaid broad, overreaching commentary. Snide comment about believers in the…
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An Appeal to “Halcyon Days” Readers
John Updike, in one of his personal essays collected in the back of More Matter, said that he likes writing because it reminded him of his college days—which, at Harvard in the ’50s, were probably worthy of his approbation—where, assigned a prompt, he could essay an essay for submission. In an effort to create variation…
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In Defense of Fiction: On Nuance
It is in that moment where muscles twitch slightly and a pang of synaptic excitement and that initial ineffable fraction of a fraction of a second before one articulates the “huh, I never noticed that before” that one experiences nuance.
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My Favorite Books of the Summer Thus Far, pt. 1
For some, summer is a time to take on an internship, to travel, to spend time with friends and (if so inclined) family. For me, summer is about reading the books that the University of Chicago’s rather absurdly demanding curriculum precludes me from reading during the year. This is not to say that I don’t…
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On The Joys of Bookcases & Cleaning Thereof
I judge people based on their bookcases. Because I’m moving into student housing this academic year, I’ve had the unique pleasure of hauling a couple hundred books from my apartment to my home in the Chicago suburbs in the heat of late June and carrying them up to my room a month later. They (i.e.…
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On The Hating of Haters
This is a co-blogging effort with a couple of friends in response to negative feedback some of us received on our recent posts. Check out Patrick Ip and Ted Gonder‘s response to the following question, phrased so eloquently by Ted: As young guns rise to the archetypal “top”, they are often discouraged, doubted, and “hated…
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Initial Thoughts on New Haven
I fly back from New Haven, CT today. My cab comes in 6 hours. I’ve been doing a lot of contemplative wandering around Yale’s campus (particularly Old Campus, which I find the most charming) over the past two days. In the past week, I’ve danced without pants, attended a fraternity party in a house that…
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On Naked Parties
Last night I had the pleasure of dining with a friend of mine from high school and his eight housemates. The food was very good, the conversation witty and at times acerbic, and the people there could only be described as a group of unpretentious hipsters. To wit: they were to what hipsters aspired: artistic,…
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On Hobnobbing with High School Students, a Faction
Faction: The result of conflation of fact and fiction. A (95% factual, if slightly embellished) account of this afternoon’s observations from on the quad.