Getting Over Heathcliff Young Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights was my first crush. He had this hot, mysterious, bad boy vibe, kind of Joel Madden-y in like, an 1840s way. Eleven-year-old me absolutely swooned over that little prince of the moors. When I found out he was also Heath Ledger’s namesake…well…

An ode to the meditative power of train travel — After one horrific Megabus experience in 2012, I began taking the Amtrak everywhere instead. What’s better than staring longingly out of a train window, Sufjan in your earbuds, a vast landscape stretched before you? It never mattered where I was going, Lollapalooza 2015 or a wholesome coastal town — I…

To my fifteen-year anniversary with internet misogyny I used to log on to AIM on my family’s basement desktop to see what boys really thought of me. I’d stack phone books on the chair because I was too small to see the screen, and wait for the pings that told…

A few weeks ago, I watched a friend scroll Instagram until she settled on a low-gradient image. She stared intently at the photo, eyes wide, one hand over her mouth. “What is it?!” I asked. She passed me the phone. My hand, too, went immediately to my mouth. The image…

Reckoning with Abstinence Education’s Shame Culture It often feels as if I’ve reverted to my high school self this year, minus the feather hair extensions and Death Cab for Cutie obsession. I’d thought I’d grown out of the angsty, insecure phase of…

This week’s been bursting with politicians’ tired takes claiming “this isn’t who we are.” Oh, that cliched phrase of American exceptionalism. It seems to surface monthly at this point, so I wonder: if it must be said so frequently, doesn’t it make the opposite true? This is exactly who we…

I seem to be permanently online lately — I type all day in this hellscape, and I also can not and do not want to abstain from memes. So the past year, I’ve worked on making this a more livable space, one that has actually become a place of refuge…

No spoilers here, just vibes Twenty-nine year old Madison Hamburg is the series’ director, documenting his own investigation of his mother’s gruesome murder in an affluent Connecticut suburb. She was killed when he was 18. The murder went unsolved. This is exactly the kind of thing I wouldn’t watch over…

Life Imitates Art — In 2020, life went virtual: