My favorite dessert is ras malai. For those of you who haven’t had it, it’s spongey little cakes of Indian dessert cheese that are served in a bowl of saffron and pistachio-flavored milk cream. They’re light on your tongue and dissolve almost instantly, more air than anything else. The last time my family went to …
You always say, “I’m sad,” and I know you are, with good reason. You were diagnosed with high-functioning autism late, after fifteen years of everyone wondering why you talked a little too slow, processed things a little too late. You still haven’t accepted your diagnosis, even though you’re twenty years old now. You don’t want …
It’s Halloween, 2019, and Asiya Huda Ahmed is not going to her friend’s party in costume – though to the world, it certainly does not look that way. She looks nothing like herself. She’s wearing something different, something that makes her look… well, she’s not sure what it makes her look like yet. She still …
Dear Shurah, I’ve run for shurah every single year of undergrad. I served three years on the board – one as Faith Chair, two as Outreach. Now I’m watching elections roll around one more time, and it’s just starting to hit me that I’m not running again. I’m not going to block out my Tuesday …
Congratulations, Democratic party. You’ve invented a new kind of stupid. The kind of stupid where you take your loyal, excited, diverse demographic and sideline them. The kind of stupid where you take one of your freshman Congresswomen, Ilhan Omar, and take turns slamming her in a way that reeks of hypocrisy. But she’s more than …
I get it. You see the headline and you balk. You get uncomfortable and you back away, steering towards safer topics that we can all agree on – like how Trump sucks, or how Captain Marvel was a truly epic movie. Because really, in an America that is fiercely defensive of Israel, how do we …
New York is taking its strongest stance on abortion in history. Its latest reproductive health law, Senate Bill S2796, sends a clear message to all of America: no matter what the White House has to say on abortion, the right to choice will always be guaranteed in the Empire State. And this new precedent has …
What’s that on your head? Veiled women get a bad rep. The vast majority of Muslim women who do wear the headscarf – known in Arabic as the hijab – are not, in fact, oppressed. Yet few people realize this, because mass media often portrays an opposite version of a hijabi (i.e. hijab-wearing) woman’s reality. …
It happened in the dead of the night. August, 2018. Ropes were pulled, bronze groaned and folded, and Silent Sam face-planted into the Carolina dirt, looking every bit like a Tar Heel dead. It was exactly where he belonged, as do all symbols of racism, hatred, and oppression. Fast forward to the following semester. The …
Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The King is two hours long, but it doesn’t feel long enough for the amount of stuff it tries to stitch all together. The best way to describe it is as a patchwork quilt of ideas. Poor people working their way to the top. Cultural appropriation. The civil rights movement. Self-destruction. Money, …