Culture & Criticism
What Happens When the Police Misidentify You as the Dallas Shooter
Texas is a great place to be a gun owner. Unless, as Mark Hughes discovered, you are black.
Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper
Just once I would have loved to get an applicant who called out a stupid, predictable question for being what it is instead of dutifully reciting an impossibly trite, hand-wavingly general answer that cannot apply to all that many people. Someone who didn't sound like Mitt Romney when trying to relate to the challenges faced by people without blue blood.
Instead, I've seen a boringly predictable, on-trend parade of general excellence, like eating a dozen cronuts for dinner.
A Dropout’s Tale
In May of 2010, I dropped out of grad school. On a stormy spring morning, I left a Separation from the University form in my departmental administrator’s mailbox, said goodbye to the University of Notre Dame one last time, and drove my battered Ford Focus westward on I-90, Seattle-bound.
I had no job prospects and not much of an idea what I was going to do when I got there. But for the last eight years, I had an abundance of certainty: an idea where I wanted to go over the next thirty years, how I was going to get there, and what I was going to do along the way. Maybe I needed the exact opposite to get things right again.
Who Needs Cooking Lessons?
Everything about Asian food is officially upside down. It has finally broken free of the takeout box but maybe it’s swung too far in the other direction, to a point where people are most likely to learn to make it from non-Asian chefs and television personalities. Just as Asian food is winning converts outside of Asian America, it is losing young Asian Americans who lack the time, interest or confidence to cook traditional foods.
Billy Mays: Quintessentially American
He became a strange hybrid – half reality television star, half professional huckster. On the one hand, he depended on us for our silent validation, for his own celebrity status, without which he would just be some random salesman. On the other, he promised that acquiring superfluous junk could be a ticket to a better life, even at a time when that life seems to be slipping further and further out of reach for so many of us.