One day, Jonathan Safran Foer was eating a burrito, yearning for something to read. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but was actually the beginning of a new idea. Foer, most famous for his bestselling novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, contacted Chipotle CEO Steve Ells, partnered up with the restaurant and made his idea of reading while burrito-eating [...]
I distinctly remember learning to take notes in school, because I hated it. We were introduced to a two-column style of note-taking in fourth grade, which meant writing summaries or important points from readings in one column and questions about the material on the other. It wasn’t until the end of high school that a teacher mentioned the questions didn’t necessarily have to address confusion [...]
Throughout middle school and high school, I was an avid contributor to and reader of numerous social writing websites. My ambition then was mostly to write about my favorite TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and some original short stories—emphasis on short. Whatever I wrote, though, I aimed to write well and make enjoyable for anyone who happened to stumble across it online. That’s [...]
When my siblings and I were younger, we had a huge tub of Legos we’d amassed from birthdays and holidays. We would spread out all the Legos across my brothers’ room, sifting through them for exactly the pieces we needed for our creations—the wheels and chassis were always hotly contested, because even a combination airplane/restaurant/castle could be made infinitely cooler if it could also roll [...]
I remember leaving high school and being completely confused about how to conduct some financial aspects of my life without the help of my parents. How do I file my taxes? What does signing a lease and renting an apartment actually entail? How do I finance a car? All these thoughts and more were running through my head at high speed when I [...]
When I think back to my childhood, I can usually come up with a handful of memories that have stayed with me through the years: spinning on the tire swing in my grandma’s backyard, the time my family and I drove 530 miles to reach Big Bend National Park, or the time my brothers and I were certain our babysitter had unknowingly swallowed [...]
The United Kingdom currently uses the two-hundred-year-old British undergraduate degree classification system as a grading structure for undergraduate degrees. This system consists of degree levels divided into five distinctions: first-class honors; second class, upper level (also known as a 2.1); second class, lower level (2.2); third class; and pass without honors (or an “ordinary degree.”) Though many other countries including Australia, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa [...]
Over the past four years, I’ve spent a large amount of time in poetry workshops. At Emerson College, classes are usually no more than 30 people, and the writing workshops are even smaller. As a Writing, Literature & Publishing major with a focus in poetry, I took full advantage of the writer stereotype. At any given time, I more than likely had a [...]
According to political scientist Robert Putnam, successful democracies rely on strong social networks. In his 1993 book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions In Modern Italy, Putnam analyzes the regional governments of Italy, positing that prosperous institutions have strong social networks, whereas less successful institutions have weak social networks. Strong social networks, he reasons, promote trust between citizens, thus strengthening the democracy. Now, a more recently published [...]
There are only five 20×24-inch Polaroid instant cameras in the world. One of these 5-foot, 235-pound mammoths of a camera is responsible for many of the iconic photos produced by artist William Wegman. And if you haven’t heard of Wegman or his work with the camera, you have probably seen his art in someone’s home, online, or in a museum at one point or another. [...]