Volume 16 Issue 2
Erik Beserra
Lockdowniversary

A year ago I stared at the numbers rising on the New York Times website. Every day I found myself feeling more inept as 10,000 became 20,000 became 40,000 became 80,000. I stared at the numbers like a moth at lights. Inept and discouraged. I still feel inept. I now have a tab with the New York Times vaccine distribution map. It is weird staring at this good news. Some part of me doesn’t feel hopeful since this is just what needs to be done. We failed and are now picking up the pieces.

Lockdowniversary
Volume 15 Issue 3
Lauren Mondroski
Dying to Get Outside? A Grave History of Hiking ...

This was before the establishment of large public parks, meaning that if you were a Victorian-era urban American, you most likely spent your time outdoors strolling and picnicking with family, friends, and lovers, all amidst the dead.

Dying to Get Outside? A Grave History of Hiking and Cemeteries
Volume 15 Issue 2
Allison Wallace
A list of good: a good list to make

· Arriving
· The first song you listen to through headphones
· When a good bakery has good tea (the complete experience)
· The crisp, blue outlines of the hills here in Western Oregon

A list of good: a good list to make
Volume 15 Issue 2
Nerissa Wright
Seek Discomfort

Portland is a peculiar white haven, and I come from a melting pot that smells like urine year-round. Both are good, but very different.

Seek Discomfort
Volume 14 Issue 1
Lauren Mondroski
Spoiler Alert: There Is No Coming of Age

Released on August 25, 2020, Haley Blais’ Below the Salt is an album I wish I had during my first year of college. Coincidentally, that’s when I first started listening to Blais, a Vancouver-based singer-songwriter and vlogger whose wacky sense of humor and DIY bedroom-pop bangers resonated with me, a freshman living on her own for the very first time and trying to make sense of the world and herself. That unsure first-year is a senior now, but no less unsure, and I think that’s the point of Blais’ debut album: her label writes, “Below the Salt is a coming of age story that recognizes that there is no real ‘coming of age.’”

Spoiler Alert: There Is No Coming of Age

Volume 10 Issue 1

Revisionism

Revisionism

If you go to Vilnius and walk down Pylimo Gatve, there stands, only a few blocks away from the last remaining synagogue, a rather unassuming structure. Vilnius—a city that has particular fondness for the baroque churches of the Counter-Reformation—has on its streets a rather unassuming neo-classical reform church. Like most buildings in the city, it is mainly a brick structure, given it’s grandiose appearance from a thick layer of plaster that coats the entire surface—plaster that is slowly being chipped away by the elements. The stairs that lead up to the church are uniformly rectangular ranging in color from grey to a muted red. Here the question can be asked: why the difference in color if all of these stones ideally should have been extracted from the same quarry? Indeed these stones were all extracted from the same quarry—a quarry of the dead. Look closer at the stones themselves and it will become apparent that despite the perpetual precipitation that coats the southeast Baltic, horizontal demarcations can be made out—demarcations that are read from right to left. If this has not already become apparent, the stones here are not normal stones, but rather gravestones from a Jewish cemetery.

Dimensions of a Man

Dimensions of a Man

In a letter from 1967, kept carefully preserved in Reed College’s Special Collections, Gary Snyder writes to a fellow student Charles Leong of “the state of things in Poetland (I actually was intending to write Portland).” Snyder, a student at Reed College from 1947 to 1951, went on in life to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet commonly associated with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, the Black Mountain Poets, and Beat Poetry, an essayist, an environmental activist, and an avid calligrapher. Starting in his time at Reed, he became interested in Buddhist spirituality and would go on to study Buddhism in Kyoto, Japan for much of his life.

First Years's First Weeks

First Years's First Weeks

The second to last week of August 2018 saw blazing red skies as the setting sun's rays fought through thick clouds of wildfire smoke. First-years starting this year at Reed will likely remember these smoldering hot days for the rest of their lives as Orientation Week 2018. O-Week is memorable for most matriculated students here, if not fondly, then at least as a chaotic crash course in Reed culture. Orientation Week has changed greatly throughout Reed’s history, with the biggest and most recent change being the switch from House Advisors working as staff during Orientation to the hiring of an entire Orientation Team to develop and lead events. Lauren, Grail writer and Orientation 2018 Team Member, caught up with Hayfa Anchour, one half of the dynamic duo of amazing Orientation Coordinators, to discuss these and other new changes, and also to uncover both the distant and more recent past of Reed Orientation along the way.