By Wenbo Bai '16
What would you like?
I am headed to the Black Diamond Royal Library, but when I see a lighted booth in the middle of the usually grey and empty Nytorv plaza, I feel the irresistible, gravitational pull of curiosity. The booth looks more like a fancy trailer home—a strange, anachronistic structure among the cobblestones, complete with lights and a billboard that reads “Få en gratis hårstyling.”
Read MoreBy Anonymous
I was born in what is widely considered the most powerful country in the world. I have brown skin, not white, and dark hair, not blonde, and I call my god Allah and bow to pray to Him five times a day, instead of going to church one day a week.
Read MoreBy Laura Mayron '16
Content warning: this article contains descriptions of digestive illness, chronic pain, injections, weight loss, and body image problems.
Last October I sat on the doctor’s examination table in Newton-Wellesley Hospital, swinging my legs against the paper covering to help distract me from my nerves, as my doctor told me what I had been fearing: I most likely had Crohn’s disease.
Read MoreBy Rachele Byrd '18
To an “Open-Minded” Wellesley Student,
When I decided to come to Wellesley, it was because of a desire for an environment where women empowered other women, where we could thrive in our womanhood, and where I wouldn’t have to be self-conscious about myself and my passions. Like many other students, I wasn’t aware of how vast the sphere of womanhood could be, and until Wellesley, wasn’t aware of how little I knew of so many women’s issues.
Read MoreBy Megan Locatis '16
This year, Kim Bottomly’s speech at Convocation was met with lukewarm applause. The tension between the face of the college’s administration and the student body saturated the air, cutting through what had been a moment of nostalgic joy and emotion for seniors such as myself. The chosen topic? Civility. But when you address a group of highly intelligent, capable students on the importance of controlled debate and the willingness to entertain and consider all ideas, regardless of how ill-conceived or outright offensive they may be at face value, your words come off as a rebuke more than anything. And I believe that it is only human nature that, feeling rebuked, we close our ears and tell ourselves that these words are poorly-chosen and irrelevant, that we are being dismissed as temperamental children who have yet to learn to control ourselves and engage in adult conversations.
Read MoreI thought I was prepared. I really, really did. I knew what it was like to have your identity invalidated—being bisexual, I’ve been told for years that I’m just confused. But coming out as nonbinary was a whole new breed of shitshow: one without the glitter and rainbows I’ve used to make my sexual orientation as palatable as possible to those around me.
Read MoreBy Katelyn Campbell '17
When I returned to campus this fall after a summer at home in West Virginia, I was surprised to be greeted by an all-too-familiar vista. A miniature version of a mountaintop removal site has taken the place of the once-hilly path between the Academic Quad and the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center, marking the landscape with what can only be branded as an eyesore. At first, I joked morbidly about the resemblance between the two subjects with friends before moving on. Although my initial jokes have gone out of vogue from overuse, I still think about my friends and family back home whenever I walk past the scene.
Read MoreBy Anonymous
Content warning: self-harm, suicidal ideation, mentions of eating disorders
At the urging of friends, I halfheartedly started seeing one of the Stone Center’s therapists regularly. She didn’t get me. At all. After three appointments punctuated by awkward silences—not the kind of silence therapists are trained to dish out, but silence because this woman just did not understand what I meant, nor did she have any idea what to tell me—I stopped going.
Read MoreBy Ali Lanier '15
Of course superheroines have had the stage in the past: there were 2005’s sex- heavy Elektra and Halle Barry’s atrocious 2004 attempt at Catwoman, both female- led movies that stumbled and flopped on lackluster scripts and frankly poor plots.
Read MoreBy Danni Ondraskova '18
In the end, I applied. I poured my soul into my application, penning my own struggles and linking them to my vision of Agora as an organization that breaks taboos about racial, political, and economic inequality.
Read MoreBy Allyson Larcom '17
The debate over the validity of the young adult genre of fiction—typically termed YA—often feels to me like a debate over the validity of my own future, because I write YA.
Read MoreBy Emma Stelter '16
There’s a psychological distance between the computer screen and the humans on the other side that makes it easy to go from zero to sixty on the outrage scale in no time at all (This American Life: “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS”). We have so much anger and a limitless platform to share it immediately and publicly.
Read MoreBy Olivia Funderburg '18
Let’s talk about race. Race is a hot topic right now, because of recent attention on police brutality and potential racial profiling. Race is also an important topic, always. Whether we realize it or not, race, and associations that come with it, affect our daily lives.
Read MoreBy Alison Lanier '15
In case you by some wonder missed it: the book follows stunningly blonde Amy Dunne, who vanishes from her housewife life, leaving behind a trail of masterfully incriminating clues to frame—and ultimately, murder—her despised self-indulgent husband, Nick. And there you have it, the first of many twists that yank and shock the reader through Gillian Flynn’s revelation-heavy psychological thriller.
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