Tag Archives: Nonfiction

“The Vietnam War took place between November 1, 1955 and April 30, 1975. This war cost 2 million Vietnamese civilian lives, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, 250,000-250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 58,220 American fighters, and 173 billion dollars.”

“The establishment of a border that clearly demarcates where your hand ends and your phone begins may seem easy at first. As technology worms it’s way further into our lives, however, the hand and the phone fuse, and the weight of humanity becomes more and more reliant on the crutch sweetly proffered by our mechanical aides.”

“Since the beginning of recorded history, humankind has maintained a strong fascination with its own demise. From its eschatological roots to the nuclear age and beyond, apocalyptic thought has permeated mass culture. However, the thematics of apocalyptic thought and therefore of its representation in culture have shifted, although certain consistencies have survived.”

“Sigmund Freud once theorized that all instincts can be categorized as life instincts (Eros) or death instincts (Thanatos). Life instincts, most commonly referred to as sexual instincts, are the need for humans to survive, feel pleasure, and reproduce. Death instincts create a thrill-seeking energy that is expressed as self-destructive behavior.”

“Two years ago, I sat in social studies class on a rainy Friday morning counting the hours until I could go home. As I typed out a text to an equally bored friend across the room, my male teacher, responding to an inquiry about his weekend plans, made a casual remark about his husband.”

“What would you do to win? How far would you go to get what you want? This is a question I often ask myself, mostly because of the sport of debate, which I have been taking in school for a year so far.”

“‘We’re going to die here. We’re going to die,’ Carmen Algeria thought as she dodged gunshots raining down on her while witnessing people drop left and right.”

“Thirty seconds. That is all the time it takes for thirteen underage girls to be sold into a marriage, turned into a breeder of sons and unwanted daughters, and imprisoned in a lifetime of anguish and abuse. This is the fate that awaits many women in third-world countries.”

“In 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, Leo Frank, the Jewish superintendent of the National Pencil Factory, was tried and convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old female worker in his factory. Local newspapers documented the court proceedings in great detail, framing Frank as a corrupt factory owner and a pervert.”

“Toll scans replace tollbooth operators, ATM and pay sharing apps replace bank tellers, drones replace pilots and delivery workers, and robots replace factory workers at manufacturing assembly plants.”

“We usually think of our hands as fairly physical things — almost distant things; we don’t regularly consider what they are doing or how we control them. Not so much for Macbeth. In William Shakespeare’s classic Macbeth, power-hungry Macbeth murders many for the Scottish throne, which witches tell him he will gain.”

“The night is alive, and similar to a human, it may be allied with. It has a peaceful side and a dark one. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the night takes on the darker role, but in his comedies, such as The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it takes on the lighter, more peaceful one.”

“Many critics — specifically literary critic Patricia Cadwell — now praise Bradstreet for her efforts for being “the founder of American literature” and her role in exposing the evils of patriarchal tradition (Cadwell 138). In truth, various works of American literature emphasize the female figure’s thirst for equality through the continuation of restrictive, outmoded ideologies pertaining to gender rights.”

“This practice of casting white actors as non-white characters, known as whitewashing, has become all too common in Hollywood. Whitewashing, however, is not a new phenomenon; it has endured for centuries.”

“Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist, and William Godwin, a progressive and an anarchist who raised her with values which advocated social justice and reform. One might thus expect Shelley’s writing to be alive with strong female personalities and feminist ideas.”

“So, a quick recap for all of you who have zoned out for the last thirty minutes, Dinah’s story goes like this. Once upon a time, Dinah, the only named daughter of Ya’akov and Leah, went walking in search of other girls in the land of Chamor. Shechem, Chamor’s son, “vayikach Dina” — or “takes” her. What happens after she has been taken, is debated.”