Independent Newspaper of Swarthmore College Since 1881
Literary one-liners: in Lydia Davis’s new collection, brevity is the soul of wit
The cover of Lydia Davis’s new collection of (very) short stories is printed simply with an excerpt from the four-line titular story “Can’t and Won’t.” In this story, an author is denied a prize and accused of laziness for using too many
Fiction: Mystery
I sat down on my brother Wolff’s bed. “Wolffie wake up.” I was worried I had cut it too close. Our parents had only gone to bed a half hour ago—I had watched the red numbers on my clock flip, painfully, counting
Editor’s picks
Movie: ‘In a World,’ dir. Lake Bell Lately when I sit down to watch a ‘funny’ movie, I end up turning it off within ten minutes due to my inability to tolerate blatant sexist and racist jokes and stereotypes and propagations of
Parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity: an essay on the liberal arts
What follows is a series of related thoughts, in four different keys, about your lives as students here, in relation to the current questioning of the liberal arts. All four keys circulate around the idea of time. Changing computers I recently upgraded
Fiction: At the party
Open up the longing I am offering you; give me that velvet you wrap around your head with sickening tightness; let me pull on the strands I see you left hanging off, so that you’ll look down at me and rip me
Fiction: Edmund
Every eye in Britain is staring at the same door. It’s not a particularly nice door; it’s really rather drab, with a rusty bronze handle. But everyone’s staring because out of this door, any second now, the new royal baby will say
A finale in violation of a show
Remember when an entire episode of “How I Met Your Mother” centered on a quest to piece together the events of Ted’s blackout, and to figure out how a pineapple ended up on his nightstand? Or when Barney set Ted up on
A tale of two time periods
At first glance, Donna Tartt seems to be the anti-Bret Easton Ellis. The two were friends, and dated briefly, as undergraduates at Bennington College. At school, Ellis and Tartt shared the manuscripts of their debuts-in-progress, manuscripts that would become “Less Than Zero”
When the FBI spied on Swarthmore
On March 8, 1971, a group of activists picked the lock of an FBI office on the second floor of the County Court Apartments in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole more than 1,000 documents. A few weeks later, Swarthmore student Martha Shirk, who
Film review: Nebraska
Remember that one time when your father wanted to walk to Lincoln, Nebraska to pick up the million dollars he won from a magazine subscription company? On the one hand, you desperately want to make up for lost father-son bonding time, because