
Month: April 2014


Some Freedom for Lupita
Whether Lupita Nyong’o has permanently, or like past cultural phenomena, merely briefly, expanded conceptions of beauty is still to be played out. But her arrangement with Lancôme means that she will never have to accept Hollywood drivel as her next project, should that notorious industry do, again, what it has done in the past, with such outside the box wonders. * * * It goes without saying that when you’re handed the part of a lifetime, you play it to the hilt. In the case of Lupita Nyong’o, the 31-year old Oscar winner — born in Mexico, raised in Kenya, … Continue reading Some Freedom for Lupita

Café Girls: The Book Club, Shoreditch, London
She was . . . very British. Full English breakfast. Not the vegetarian one for her. Doc Martins. Dark green, black and brown floral tights. And that accent, oh, that accent. Well, I didn’t hear it, but I can imagine . . . Continue reading Café Girls: The Book Club, Shoreditch, London

Café Girl: The Quintessential
The café seemed to just part when she walked in. In that way that happens when everyone seems to look up at once. Or inhale at the same time. I noticed from a balcony at the back of the place, in between glimpses at The Economist, and thoughts about American democracy. She sat next to me and did not look up for the next two hours. I did. It was as if . . . she were posing. Quintessential Café Girl: Café Babe. Continue reading Café Girl: The Quintessential

National Geographic: The Changing Face of America

Taking Your Medicine, November to April

24 Years a Slave
Jimmy, this time with the Super Talented Ms. Hathaway

All Gone to Her Head?

Then She’s Gone
What can explain this obsession with Lacey Holsworth? Not the first terminally ill child to request audience with a famous athlete. Not the first athlete to heed the call. But this time seems particularly special. And I can’t help thinking it tells us more about ourselves than the little girl or the star athlete. Continue reading Then She’s Gone

What Umpires Still Get Right When They Get It Wrong
We act as if we tell ourselves enough times that it doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t. That if we tell ourselves that something crazy and unfair didn’t happen for that reason but some other, then we are right and it’s all good. But the truth is, in infinite, infinite ways, there is a difference. There are tiny (and not so tiny) pinpricks. The race of the pitcher, we found, also mattered, but not as much as other factors. Umpires were 10 percent less likely to expand the strike zone for African-American pitchers than for Caucasian pitchers, but race did not … Continue reading What Umpires Still Get Right When They Get It Wrong

Marina Keegan: The Opposite of Loneliness
University | 3:10 am | May 27, 2012 | By Marina Keegan Marina Keegan ’12. Photo by Joy Shan. The piece below was written by Marina Keegan ’12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012′s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22. We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up … Continue reading Marina Keegan: The Opposite of Loneliness

The Lupita Effect
New York Times, Sunday Styles, April 6. 2014, Full-Page Ad Continue reading The Lupita Effect

“I Love You, I Love You”
At one time, maybe still, you could have read everywhere about “The Secret” and “Law of Attraction,” and this ubiquity, and the mystical panacea they promised, resulted in an understandable, predictable backlash. But if you get beyond this, you will see that their essential principles merely recast basic tenets of various religions, philosophers and self-help books. Akhil Sharma himself recasts these tenets quite nicely in The Trick of Life in this week’s NYT Sunday Review. Lost in depression, inertia and the fear driving them, Sharma found the way out simply to “be outside myself” because “[m]y mind had become uninhabitable.” … Continue reading “I Love You, I Love You”