à la carte spirit by ilona fried
Authenticity
An Impromptu Feldenkrais Guide for the Holidays
The holidays can be complicated. Perhaps there is too much to do, purchase, cook, bake, eat, drink, decorate, wrap or prepare. Perhaps you’d rather do very few or even none of those things, yet opting out of the cultural whirl feels awkward and isolating when there are no satisfying substitutes. Perhaps you would like to … Continue reading
When Ambition Renders Others, and the Truth, Invisible
The SCOTUS hearings dragged the country through a new low and in the process, dredged up memories from my hippocampus. What follows is not salacious or violent. A very long time ago I dated a smart and ambitious colleague. On one of our first dates, if not the very first, he bought tickets to a … Continue reading
Why I’m Obsessed with the Ronell Case
There is no reason other than prurience that I should be obsessed with the case of Avital Ronell. She’s a comparative literature professor at NYU who has been suspended for a year for sexually harassing one of her graduate students, a man, who filed a complaint under Title IX. Granted, the tale has many bizarre … Continue reading
#MeToo: Thoughts on Vulnerability, Victimhood, Secrets and Privacy
During my freshman orientation at Bryn Mawr College, the resident advisor invited us into her dorm room to sit on the floor in a circle and get know each other. To break the ice and build connection, she wanted each of us to share something we were either bad at or nervous about (so I … Continue reading
It’s Possible to Drown Out Marching Nazis. What About the Ones in Our Heads?
That 40,000 people marched peacefully in Boston on Saturday against hate groups, including Nazis, gave me hope that civilization would survive, at least for the weekend. While it’s important to starkly delineate what is, and what is not, acceptable in a modern democratic nation, it would be a foolish mistake to believe that everyone on … Continue reading
à la carte spirit by ilona fried 
Recent comments