I’d received the news by phone. I was in Atlanta at the time, away from my family, when Mom called to let me know I’d received some massive blue box in the mail. It wasn’t a slim envelope, so we both immediately knew the thing’s import. I’d barely hung up the phone when I’d started getting questions from friends, acquaintances, family of friends, friends of family, family of acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances, varied in wording, but all carrying the same DNA: “Do you think I should go to law school?” Some of these people have already […]

Illustrated by Minji Reem The place where I watched my first sunset of the New…

The whine of a 56k modem signals for me the beginning of an age. An awkward, rocky beginning of single landlines and “Get off the Internet; I’m tryna make a call!” Geocities webpages. Neon font. Crudely embedded images in Metallica tribute pages. At that point, DSL and cable modems belonged to households outside our tax bracket, so time spent on the Internet was precious, sometimes transgressive. The whine of a 56k modem will always be attached to an obsession with Dragonball Z, music videos with the aerial acrobatics of snowboarders set to Korn and Limp Bizkit, […]

Suspension. Expulsion. Leave of absence. Time off. Or a simple evaporation. As the rhythm of classes resumes, as the vacuity left by the student’s disappearance refills, a certainty niggles: he couldn’t hack it. She was weak, and their weakness was some failure of personal constitution. Soon after Adam Lanza’s name appeared in the news during the fall of 1L, mental illness was dragged once again into the spotlight. Less a dialogue than folks on both sides of the church aisle screaming their own right-ness. We were supposed to have a vocabulary for discussing these things. Where […]

In a recent conversation with the Girl, I remarked on all the errands I’d been…