The NBA playoffs will begin in mid-April, and participating in the 16-team tournament are the best eight teams from each conference. Notice that I did not say that the best 16 teams in the league are competing. That is because the Pelicans and Suns, who currently sit in the ninth and 10th positions, ...
I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy á la Mean Girls (2004). I wish I could bake any sort of cake, really, to help me get through this week. Actually, I wish I could bake, period, since my lack of talent in the kitchen is so nonexistent it’s ...
Spring Semester Senior Year: the most fun and relaxing semester of college ... not.Chances are, SWUGs all over Somerville are doing some serious stressing and sobbing. We’ve got less than 50 days left of school, and about 49 things left on our SWUG-et lists. For those SWUGs with jobs -- congrats. ...
A few weekends ago (...as most of my columns begin, I am aware), I went with several friends to a free organ concert at Notre Dame cathedral. The very idea of it wowed me, even before the music started -- as I sat at the end of a neat row of chairs looking up at the high, vaulted ceiling, the concurrence ...
The Kingdom Animalia may never surpass Disney’s paradisiacal Animal Kingdom on the lists of young and spoiled adventurers, but it is a magnificent place, full of mix-ups and oddities even stranger than what you might find in a Disney World custodial closet. Unless, of course, what you find in said ...
My 10-team AL/NL head-to-head league had its draft last week, and I was picking fifth. The 6x6 league has BBs and QSs as the final two categories, and you play nine pitchers (it could be nine SPs and zero RPs, four SPs and five RPs, etc.). The first four picks went as expected with Mike Trout going ...
I’ve been watching you from high above. That’s right, up in the clouds, through the heavens -- of Cohen Auditorium. This week, I spent my time running back and forth between the stage as an assistant sound designer for Tufts’ spring musical, Into the Woods. The soundboard was located just above ...
Throughout my years at Tufts, I’ve consumed approximately 1,750 meals in the dining hall. My average dining hall visit lasts about 25 minutes, which means I’ve spent roughly 730 hours, or about 30 full days, eating in Dewick or Carmichael.Spending all that time has allowed me to gain some insight ...
Had Chris Borland been a marquee player, his retirement -- premature, perhaps, at 24 -- would have been a thunderclap. Parents would have unenrolled their children in Pop Warner in legion, desiccating collegiate pipelines and thereby bringing the NFL to its knees. But Chris Borland, though dependable ...
I’ve had a strange fascination with death for as long as I can remember. It was never tied with an obsession with heavy metal music or a desire to dress in all black, not that those tendencies always go hand in hand. It has seemed to stem from a more scientific standpoint, and my interests expanded ...
As a journalist, this one really hurts.Major sponsors notwithstanding, the media, by lavishing airtime and newspaper space on college sports, is arguably most complicit in this grand farce. Erstwhile scourge of the greedy and powerful, it has since kowtowed to those whose vested interests it once ...
Sometimes the universe likes to play cruel tricks on you, and I was its most recent victim. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column called “Odyssey,” comparing venturing across campus in a Boston winter to Homer’s epic poem about a 20-year return home. Little did I know I would soon be experiencing ...
My dearest Tufts students (and Nana),I am SWUGging out over here!!! Apparently there are only five weeks left of school, meaning that for one-quarter of the Tufts population, there are only five weeks left of college. BRB while I go curl up with my body pillow and cry to the sweet sound of Joni Mitchell ...
Pooja: The week back after spring break is not a pretty one. People are either coughed up on infection, homesick or making snarly faces at the minority few that came back with beautiful tans. While most people are preoccupied with such issues, I seem to have a slightly more pressing problem. Over my ...
Sam Presti announced last week that Kevin Durant, the 2014 MVP award winner, has been “removed from basketball activities.” On Feb. 22 Durant had surgery on his foot, which had been nagging him since a screw was inserted in October as part of an operation to repair a Jones fracture. Long story ...
Less than two months removed from winning Super Bowl XLIX, the New England Patriots are already a much worse team. Free agency has not been kind to the Pats, stripping their defense of its most important players.Gone is Pro-Bowl cornerback Darrelle Revis, who returned to the New York Jets on a five-year, ...
Desiring to aesthetically render the allure of human flesh, artists have sought innovative ways to represent the human body -- both over-sexualizing and muting its carnal nature. The nude in the classical period, while often devoid of clothing, carefully concealed the nakedness of its form, replacing ...
I find it disturbingly funny when I hear people talk about rape culture like it’s this new phenomenon. As if rape didn’t happen 50 years ago, as if something about today’s youth culture (and their “hook-up culture”? Their “feminist culture”?) is conducive to rapes on college campuses, ...
As war rages on in Eastern Ukraine, the territory that caught western attention in 2014 remains turbulent. Despite Russian President Putin’s promise to protect citizens of the Crimean peninsula post-annexation, Crimean Tatars are being “treated … as if they are the second-class people,” says ...
If you've been a reader of my column for a while now, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of out-of-the-ordinary and unconventional books. They’re an enjoyable break from cookie-cutter stories that can flood the bestseller lists, and the hackneyed tales some authors can churn out in just a few months. ...
