"Covers the campus like the magnolias"

Old Gold & Black

'Covers the campus like the magnolias'
"Covers the campus like the magnolias"

Old Gold & Black

"Covers the campus like the magnolias"

Old Gold & Black

Befriend Your Professors, And Life Improves

Befriend Your Professors, And Life Improves

Kyle Ferrer August 23, 2019

He knew I played tennis, that old professor of mine, who asked if I had ever read David Foster Wallace’s essay “Tennis, Trigonometry and Tornadoes,” about the author’s Midwestern boyhood mostly...

A Laymans Guide To Curing A Hangover

A Layman’s Guide To Curing A Hangover

Kyle Ferrer August 23, 2019

Each hangover varies in tone and texture; each alcohol provides a specific netherworld, one that has distinct qualities while sharing a general blueprint of misery. To cure a hangover is difficult, especially...

Anna Pasekova: Russian

Anna Pasekova: Russian

Kyle Ferrer May 3, 2019

Anna Pasekova took what some might call an unconventional path to Wake Forest. Growing up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and initially planning to continue study in Austria, where her relatives live, Pasekova...

Shelby Halliman: Communications

Shelby Halliman: Communications

Kyle Ferrer May 3, 2019

Telling someone you will be attending the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television is like telling someone you will be studying creative writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, acting in Steppenwolf...

Digital Community Dilutes The Potency Of Memory

Digital Community Dilutes The Potency Of Memory

Kyle Ferrer April 25, 2019

I have commented before on our culture’s instantaneity and its weakening of artistic memory. On-demand art, via Spotify stream, Amazon order or online publication, allows us to consume more (while also...

Hollywood Has Slipped Us A New Form Of Nothingness

Hollywood Has Slipped Us A New Form Of Nothingness

Kyle Ferrer April 18, 2019

Hollywood is always in search of new and dependable genres. It needs formulaic pictures to crank out and count on, like noirs in the ‘40s and romantic comedies in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Even those, though,...

Gloria Bell Is A Triumph Of The Spirit

“Gloria Bell” Is A Triumph Of The Spirit

Kyle Ferrer April 11, 2019

Death is beginning to creep in at the edges for Gloria Bell (Julianne Moore), the fifty-something divorcée whose life co-writer and director Sebastian Lelio’s eponymous film follows. At home, a hairless...

Literature Remains The Highest Form Of Art

Literature Remains The Highest Form Of Art

Kyle Ferrer April 11, 2019

I’ve long thought, yet never tried to explain in depth, why I think literature, meaning the words on the page, constructed and organized at some length, is the highest form of art. There are, of course,...

The Beach Bum Ends Up Just Blowing Smoke

“The Beach Bum” Ends Up Just Blowing Smoke

Kyle Ferrer April 4, 2019

Moondog, the besotted writer-radical at the center of The Beach Bum, is the spiritual sibling of many men before him. Played with a sort of inevitable alacrity by Matthew McConaughey, Moondog’s hedonistic...

Donald Trump Humanizes Our Post-Literate Culture

Donald Trump Humanizes Our Post-Literate Culture

Kyle Ferrer April 4, 2019

The harangue from Trump supporters listing the laudable qualities of our celebrity president are myriad and borderline mystical. To wit: Trump is an outsider who cuts through the political pablum, speaking...

Us Creates New, Non-Traditional Nightmares

“Us” Creates New, Non-Traditional Nightmares

Kyle Ferrer March 28, 2019

After a deluge of repellent trailers convinced me cinema had gone dormant in 2019, the film I went to see began, and I was soon smiling as the smithereens cleared to reveal Jordan Peele’s Us, a film...

Self-Branding Abstracts The Self Into A Set Of Values

Self-Branding Abstracts The Self Into A Set Of Values

Kyle Ferrer March 28, 2019

In a recent New York Times article entitled “What Happens When People and Companies Are Both Just Brands?” Amanda Hess points out that “brand, in fact, is such a ubiquitous organizing principle for...

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