Healing Through Art: Chloe Burns Discusses Writing and Producing New Web Series “Trauma Bonded”
Raised in Kansas, Chloe Burns originally didn’t see the film industry as a viable career option. While she has always appreciated the craft, she felt discouraged by the Midwestern culture and belief that considered going into the arts as straying from the norm. Burns ended up trying out a plethora of careers, like studying anthropology, […]
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Planning the new year doesn’t have to be so exhausting
Featured Image: Abbey Lossing I’ve always loved celebrating the New Year. On December 31st, we’d feast as we waited for the clock to strike midnight, and I’d look up to the sky to admire the fireworks, despite harboring deep resentment for loud noises. In pre-pandemic times, my village hosted dinner parties, which were the only […]
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High School Burnout and How the Gifted Kids Do It
You know those kids in your class. The ones who take the hardest courses, do a million extracurriculars, always seem to be studying or working, usually aren’t free to hang out, and you once saw them tearing up over a B on their last assignment? I want to talk about them. To call myself one […]
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How my South Asian parents unknowingly created a gender-neutral household
Featured Image: Nusha Ashjaee for NBC News The idea of the “typical” family has changed over the past decade, yet insight into immigrant families has only begun to enter the spotlight. Growing up, it was these insights that bonded me to many of my first-generation American friends as we laughed and complained about the shared […]
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DONDA: Kanye’s Search for an Integrated Self
Featured Image: BFA/Yeezy via Vogue In the full light of hindsight, seeing the past with grown conscience is a painful discovery. The only direction is tomorrow, with an offensively unfixable yesterday. “We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold,” Kundera paints this unbearable life. The nadirs of life’s course […]
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Why Making Your Own Work is the Most Empowering Road Forward
In summer 2019, I was co-writing a made-for-TV thriller in my apartment in Greenpoint, bartending in the East Village, and freelance post-production coordinating at an ad agency on Wall Street. Occasionally, I’d audition for an Off (or Off-Off-Off-Off-Broadway play), losing a part of my soul with every “thank you so much”, uttered between clenched teeth […]
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“It’s Been a Pilgrimage”: In Conversation with Poet and Artist Mashnun Munir
Mashnun Munir is a lot of things; a poet, a podcast cohost, a Muslim boy from Orlando. Having discovered himself through art and his faith, he has just finished his first book of poetry, ‘headspun’ which is now forthcoming. After a quick succession of emails, I was fortunate enough to interview Mashnun and learn more […]
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Revisiting “Faces” by Mac Miller
“Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life and you’ll see Death at work, like bees in a hive of glass.” The 1950 French film Orpheus portrayed the mirror as the place to watch death’s course; perhaps a less macabre interpretation is of the […]
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The Duality of Visiting Your Motherland
Featured Image: Amanda Etemad The first time I went to Iran I was only 16, still in high school, traveling with a parent, and naive to so much of the world but eager to learn more about my roots. Growing up as one of the only Iranian-Americans in my tiny, majority-white suburb left me with […]
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