Jason D. Rowley

Category: The Halcyon Days

  • Best of The Halcyon Days

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in ,

    It’s been over two years since I published something to this blog, to which I published assiduously when I was in college at The University of Chicago, but began to neglect when I left to work on Mergenote, a startup of mine. As I figure out what I want to do with my personal homepage,…

  • On Overcoming Writer’s Block

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in

    I’ve been battling writer’s block. I haven’t posted anything since early August and nothing decent since June 5. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened. It’s not like I’ve been lacking in topics to write and opine about. A lot has happened since early summer: revolutions and social movements at home and abroad, the…

  • To The Child Sleeping On The Bus,

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in

    You will grow up and do unspeakable things, will perpetrate countless tiny acts of evil on your fellow humans being, and you will become an adult and develop callouses on the soles of your feet because the path to the grave gets increasingly rocky and jagged the farther one walks toward its terminus some ways…

  • On Breaking Radio Silence

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in

    After a long hiatus from writing on my blog, I feel this surprising emptiness. One would think that taking almost two months off from writing anything personal would leave one bursting with ideas and stories and hundreds of observations gathered while doing something other than sitting behind a computer screen, tapping away on a keyboard.…

  • Watch This.

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in ,

    This is why I want John Stewart to run for president. John Stewart on Fox News Sunday.

  • Soaker

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in

    Standing in the garden, quenching young tomatoes’ roots, I shot a bee out of the air. I followed it, in jet mode, full bore. Death in the mud by waterfall, not drowned but bludgeoned and crushed.

  • An Open Letter to the Higher Education System

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in

    Dear All, I think what’s going on here is a confusion of ends and means. Guys, I believe very deeply in your end goal. I believe in the individual, and I believe every individual can and should be an expert in something, and that that person should be held individually accountable for her or his…

  • On The Importance of Losing Oneself

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in

    A friend of mine who is currently devoting all her time into getting in a reputed university in Australia, as the Australian gamsat needs prep sent me and a couple other friends an email. Attached was a link to a David Brooks piece in the New York Times, which articulated quite well one of the…

  • How (Some of) Us College Kids Feel About Facebook

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in

    I subscribe to a very, very heavily-trafficed LISTSERV mailing list called Wallace-l. While the primary subject is David Foster Wallace, there are often discussions about topics tangentially related to him, such as, in this case, a commencement address by contemporary writer Jonathan Franzen at Kenyon College, where David Foster Wallace delivered his famous address which…

  • What I Learned in College, in 372 Words

    —

    by

    Jason D. Rowley
    in

    In college I majored in Victorian novels and travel writing and cold unfeeling minimal house. I dated and fell in love with delicate abstractions of my own thoughts, many of them. I learned that structures based on recounting the tales of old truths is what academia is. That in spite of the putatively groundbreaking research…