The Opinionist

Mrs. Carlson called him Henry. The problem here is that English requires names be capitalized; you can’t tell that capital-H Henry is meant to be a proper noun on its own and not simply, the grammatically correct way to write a name. Try other language manipulations; a Henry, the Henry, doesn’t work either—there is no plural, no species. Just plain Henry. Just the one. Marketing YouTubers mark the rise of a pop star with how recognizable their hair is; I guess it’s true to a certain extent because it’s all I can think about right now, in this second paragraph in which I feel obligated perhaps by writing convention to describe him. Frazzled orange-gray, like it’s charged with static from the follicles, from the root, like the detonating cords of dynamite sticks. No one in Newspaper particularly looks like a mad scientist but if there were one it would be him. I am trying to find examples for the whole show-not-tell shtick but from memory it’s just an ink smudge out-of-focus; when you zo...

I searched up David Foster Wallace’s speech “This Is Water” on YouTube the day it was assigned to us, because it was a speech with audio and thus I was fairly certain we would use it somehow in class the next day. After that my YouTube recommendations have been consistently flooded with David Foster Wallace snippets—other speeches and radio interviews and analyses by YouTubers with English degrees.       Given the two other blog posts I wrote this week about his “This Is Water” speech, one with an admittedly clickbait title about his character, it might seem like I deeply dislike him or that I am certain on where I stand about him. On the contrary, not at all. Even while my first impression of “This is Water” was decidedly negative, it is a different brand of writer that you may criticize and forget than one you disagree with, but cannot stop thinking about for days afterward. Such was my case with David Foster Wallace—I re-read “This Is Water” every day after it was assi...

Gentlemen, ladies, aspiring actors, directors and producers at Hollywood, let me put you onto the next billion-dollar idea, unveil the curtain over a simmering untapped market of potential—the Asian horror movie. Forget zombies, forget fake blood and CGI, jumpscares and severed limbs—all you need is a Singapore math book, a terrified child actor who has gotten a rabbit-and-chicken-leg problem wrong for the eighth time, pan to the mother smiling crazily and frothing at the mouth, fingers twitching, while the sounds of her sister’s soccer game roar in the background.   But the climax, and stay with me here, the last bone-chilling scream comes at the family reunion scene. Cut to a montage of well-meaning relatives you’ve never seen before, smiling uncannily as they grip deathly onto your wrist and tell you how tall and too skinny you are now. First-person POV, squeezed between two great-aunt or second-cousins that keep piling food onto your plate and asking how your grades have been d...

I went into Monday’s reading of David Foster Wallace’s speech “This Is Water” with high expectations. Having spent the best two weeks of my summer at a writing camp in Kenyon College just months before, where every evening we would sit in the same auditorium Wallace had spoken, listening to visiting writers speak on writing and their own work, this speech felt particularly personal. I was not expecting, however, what I described to my friend only half-jokingly as a “20-minute crash-out about the supermarket” posing as a college commencement speech. He had me at first—the opening anecdote about the two fish was funny, and its metaphor for the ubiquitous realities we often forget to notice thought-provoking. And upon rereading it I realized it held up much better; most of what he was saying was, truly, deeply honest and thought-provoking, and I appreciated the message of questioning and fighting what we unconsciously accept and the detrimental mindsets we cling to complicitly. But the wh...

Wednesday, September 10th in my teenaged, high-school life was a day marked by teenaged, high school things. A quiz in Spanish, a cross country meet, a new episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty; and upon opening my Instagram feed, first whiplash, then disbelief, then the sudden urge to text everyone within the acquaintance-to-friend-spectrum radius that Charlie Kirk, the Republican leader of Turning Point that debated college students and admitted he wouldn’t allow his nine-year-old daughter to get an abortion if she was pregnant by rape, was dead. Shot fatally to the neck at a Utah campus event, after answering a question about U.S. mass shooters and gun violence. At the time I Googled it, Charlie Kirk’s Wikipedia page was updated five minutes before to complete the en-dash that was in parentheses next to his name—the date of death, unbelievably, September 10th, 2025. Social media was quick to the buzz—I clicked through several of my friends’ Instagram stories all referencing what hap...

My problem with memorials is that they are inherently biased. This in itself is not a problem, as without it a memorial could not exist; but without balance it can make memorials into focal points for propaganda and misinformation rather than commemoration and reflection. Let me explain—when Maya Lin’s chosen design for the Vietnam War memorial was released to the public, she received immediate backlash for its simplicity. It did not seem to reflect the scope of the war that had spanned decades and an unprecedented number of presidential terms. This may have been influenced by the public’s perception of the Vietnam War as a blunder in U.S. history, a black hole of money and manpower whose protests regarding it were perhaps more notable than the war events themselves. You might argue that these details are more suitable for a museum. But without them, a memorial just looks like a piece of history taken out of context. To prevent this, many memorials have informational signs or tour guid...