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(04/14/16 5:10pm)
“Mom, why are all these street lights so tiny and why are all of these houses connected?” asked my freshman self as my family drove me up Calvert Street for the first time. Yes, I was 18 years old when I saw my first rowhouse, and I was 20 when I moved into one. Not going to lie, I still think rowhouses are weird. It’s like an apartment and a normal, free-standing house had an awkward lovechild. The funny thing is that I’ve come to love them. Nothing beats firing up the grill on your second story front porch and grilling a bunch of steaks with your friends on a breezy summer day in Baltimore. Plus, I was always jealous of my elementary school friend Bryce whose house was three stories and had a laundry chute. Now after having both of these things, I worry I’ve peaked too soon. My relationship with rowhouses is a microcosm for my relationship with Baltimore as a whole.
(04/07/16 5:52pm)
When my friends heard that I was going back home after college, they were shocked. When they learned that it was a conscious choice I had planned and accounted for, they were mystified. Oh yes, my first big boy job happens to be in my home town of Austin, and you better believe I’m moving back in with mom.
(02/25/16 8:41pm)
In the early 1950s, a former Korean War tank commando had a dream. His name was Walter Criddle, but his friends knew him as “the Fat Flying Squirrel” because he was apparently a spirited dancer despite his weight. As a recovering alcoholic, Criddle built himself a happy life as the owner of a successful Baltimore tire store. After a few stable years, Criddle began to look past his dream of owning a Corvette as the endemic alcoholism of his community began to weigh upon him. Walter Criddle wanted to do something about it. He wanted to start a halfway house and, with the help of a motorcycle-riding, chain smoking, spitfire of a preacher named Harry Shelley, succeeded in the venture. This is a highly condensed origin story of the Tuerk House, which was my favorite non-profit organization I worked with last summer. This group is still in operation as a halfway house for any kind of Baltimore addict and does beautiful work in our city.
(02/18/16 4:23pm)
Deadpool is an important film not just because it is a neoclassical example of American entertainment at its finest, but because it broke the record for highest grossing movie ever released in the month of February — and it was R-rated. Trust me this movie is a game-changer. Here’s why:
(04/23/15 4:30pm)
Street homelessness is ludicrously expensive. The harsh conditions that these people contend with can and often do lead to a host of medical problems that rapidly deteriorate into medical emergencies. The ensuing ambulance trips and emergency treatment combined with the per-person cost of homeless shelters all coalesce into a $20,000 government price tag for every homeless person who lives on the street. It makes absolutely no financial sense to keep homeless people homeless. Thankfully, logic has not fallen on deaf ears — an ever-increasing number of states and municipalities are starting to put housing first.
(04/16/15 2:51pm)
Finally, Barack Obama is about to thaw the 35-year diplomatic freeze with Iran. Yes, the crown jewel of Obama's foreign policy initiatives, the Iranian nuclear deal, has just about been finalized. Several months ago, I wrote an Opinions piece through which I expressed my dissatisfaction at the earlier draft of the nuclear deal. I even went so far as to claim that Israel's extreme right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's impassioned speech before Congress was factually justified, albeit extremely inappropriate and undiplomatic. Now I sing a different, cautiously optimistic tune that the deal is moving in the right direction. The new draft of the deal is significantly tougher.
(04/09/15 5:23pm)
I can think of no better person to spend a gloomy, rainy Saturday afternoon with than Bruce Willis. I love watching Tom Cruise sprint on camera almost as much as he enjoys watching it himself. I love action movies — always have, always will. As much as I would like to write a short piece about why I love action movies, doing so would be criminal in light of recent events.
(04/02/15 10:26pm)
I am no snob. I happily drink any coffee black, I wear comfortable clothes that fit and I acknowledge that a good $10 screw-top bottle of wine tastes just as good to me as any of the more expensive options. I firmly believe a hearty bowl of lentil stew produced over an open campfire in the backcountry trumps any aged steak from a swanky steak house. Yet I still can't seem to get over my recent pivot to musical snobbery.
(03/26/15 2:45pm)
When I was a baby, my mother used to take me down the driveway to the side of Pacific Coast Highway almost every night. Watching the occasional car blur by with that unmistakable whoosh of air consistently put me to sleep with a smile on my face. While I don't usually fall asleep on the sides of highways anymore, machines of all shapes and sizes still captivate me. Whether it’s whipping around the yard with the weed whacker, sitting in the passenger seat on the way to school or even brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush, my childhood was replete with indirect appreciation of human ingenuity. This is why it was a terrible idea for my parents to give me that little $300 100 cc dirt bike on my 13th birthday. I was hooked the first time I swung my leg over the saddle.
(03/05/15 7:44pm)
Let me begin this piece by saying that I support Israel. I'd like to think that this support comes from more objective reasons than my ethno-religious background, but it still probably plays a far larger role than I think. However, this piece is not about exactly why I support Israel, because last night while watching Netanyahu address Congress on Fox, I actually felt that he gravely overstepped. Any time a foreign leader attempts to influence the foreign policy of another country is not a good thing. This is exactly what Benjamin Natanyahu is doing by claiming to be "a representative of all the Jewish people" and with his aim to discourage congress from supporting Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.
(02/27/15 12:34am)
Hello. My name is Will Marcus and I am a sugar addict. I’ve always been the trouble-maker with his hand in the cookie jar, and Halloween is still my favorite holiday. I’ve likely eaten hundreds of pounds of sickeningly sweet indulgences — from deep fried twinkies at the Texas State Fair to delicate souffles at that swanky steak house. Before I proceed in this article I would like to make one thing abundantly clear: I regret nothing. That stuff was indeed delicious, but now it’s high time to make a change.
(02/20/15 11:53pm)
Yesterday, United States District Judge Andrew Hanen stalled Obama's executive order to shield young illegal immigrants from deportation if they were brought into the country at a sufficiently young age. The order also aimed to extend similar protection to the parents of legal U.S. citizens who have been in the country for some years. Despite having the support of 12 liberal states, the order is not supported by a large coalition of conservative states across the South and Midwest because they believe Obama violated the "Take Care Clause."
(02/20/15 11:53pm)
Yesterday, United States District Judge Andrew Hanen stalled Obama's executive order to shield young illegal immigrants from deportation if they were brought into the country at a sufficiently young age. The order also aimed to extend similar protection to the parents of legal U.S. citizens who have been in the country for some years. Despite having the support of 12 liberal states, the order is not supported by a large coalition of conservative states across the South and Midwest because they believe Obama violated the "Take Care Clause."
(12/04/14 9:30pm)
Our grandparents got their news from the radio, our parents got their news from TV stations and we get our news from BuzzFeed (which is actually a somewhat respectable news source). While this may be a huge oversimplification of how different generations stayed informed, there are some profound changes coming to the political landscape of this country.
(10/16/14 8:04pm)
Our incomprehensibly complex and beautiful brains are the triumph of millions of years of cutthroat natural selection, yet they are horrifically maladapted to the world we live in. For all the millions of years it took to develop us, we developed civilization in a couple thousand. Our ancestors even just 1,000 years ago — let alone hunter-gatherers from 10,000 BC — could never imagine our way of life. We live like Gods. You want unlimited potable water? Turn on the faucet. You want a hot steak dinner? Take it out of the freezer and put it into the microwave. You want an endless torrent of unimaginably engrossing entertainment? Turn on your TV or flip your laptop screen up. Most of us regularly exploit the fact that the development of modern society has surpassed our own biological development by a practically infinite margin. We bombard our ancient, chemical reward centers from the paleolithic era with preposterous amounts of supernormal stimuli for pure pleasure, which unfortunately has some serious consequences.
(09/25/14 10:34pm)
I really love guns, don't get me wrong — I love to look at them, read about them, hold them, shoot them, clean them and then ogle them some more (I do draw the line at talking to them, stroking them or singing them lullabies, so please don't be too alarmed). Obviously, I really like guns, but like most of my favorite things in this crazy world, I realize that mankind would be better off without them. I shudder to imagine what some enlightened space-faring race would include in their galactic field manual about Earth: "Earth is absolutely covered with lethal weapons that any human can use to murder another with a single flex of his or her preferred index finger.” There might be a little "fun fact" box in the corner with a little blurb like: "Parts of Earth actually exist where it’s cheaper to get your hands on an assault rifle than on a quarter-pounder with cheese!" Alien textbook conjecture aside, it blows my mind that almost any American can walk into Walmart, a store that also sells pool noodles and inflatable slip n' slides, and buy a lethal weapon.
(09/04/14 2:00pm)
The technological progression that affects our day-to-day lives is a double-edged sword. One side of it bestows us with unprecedented convenience, while the other side makes the chinks in our armor ever more apparent. In other words, technologies that simplify our lives do so at the cost of privacy. These "chinks in our armor" can best be described as all the stupid stuff we do that we'd never tell Grandma about. These are the same stupid things that our parents did. I hate to say it, but these are also probably the same stupid things that your grandma did too. Your parents didn't have Facebook profiles when they were our age; heck, they didn't even have digital cameras. Your grandma's "Instagram" is the current logo of our Instagram. The older generations were no better or worse than we are; they just didn’t have the means to document their youthful sense of adventure.
(04/22/14 10:55pm)
I don't think I've ever hugged my grandfather, for he has insisted on shaking my hand ever since I was toddler. I use the word "shake" loosely, in the way a Killer Whale might "shake" a seal before swallowing it. Picture an eagle sinking its formidable talons into the soft, furry body of a confused and terrified field mouse. I vividly remember seeing his hand contort into a terrible claw like appendage, my hand feeling like a raw porterhouse steak between the steel-crunching jaws of a massive crocodile. This happened every time I saw him until I was in my late teens.
(03/01/14 9:49pm)
I am an extraordinarily patriotic guy. I own American flag shirts, shorts, socks, shorter shorts, sweat bands, swimsuits, and even boxers. Occasionally, I will wear Ol' Glory on every part of my body at the same time. At major sporting events, you would need Seal Team Six to keep me from joining in on the National Anthem.
(02/14/14 5:49am)
Way back in the day, (~10,000 BC) the only sport on Earth was killing stuff. There really wasn't much to do besides killing people...and making people. Sometimes for better and most of the time for worst, violence is an integral part of what makes us human. I'm here to talk about "the better".