Author / Megan Orlanski
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A Crocheted Kaleidoscope: Local Artist Kacey Cowdery’s “Traffic”
A Crocheted Kaleidoscope: Local Artist Kacey Cowdery's "Traffic" By Megan Orlanski, Editor-in-Chief Photographs by Carl Valle, used with permission from Kacey Cowdery Only the edges of a torn map remain legible. The map is intervened by embroidered roads and paths lined with seed beads that lead to a knotted center, where embroidery thread fills… -
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Points on a larger trajectory: Pruitt-Igoe and the Coronavirus pandemic
According to theorist Charles Jencks, the death of modern architecture can be traced to a specific date in time: July 15, 1972. On this day, Pruitt-Igoe, a public housing development in the Desoto-Carr neighborhood of St. Louis, was publicly broadcast as three of its 33 buildings were razed to the ground. The remainder of the…
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The Phenomena of Gender Reveal Parties: Moving Beyond the Bounds of Pink and Blue
A family waits expectantly as a knife is held over a supposedly unassuming cake. What secrets does the buttercream hold? What sweet confection will spill out from the inner depths of the layered dessert? But as everyone peers in to see what color emerges, blue or pink, a bigger question is at hand; will the…
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Flames in the Face of Loss
As the school year began, I found myself consistently reaching for my phone to call my grandmother on my way to class, text her a picture of my new room, or listen to the usual voice message she would send me every afternoon to ask about my day. But this year, that integral part of…
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AOC: From Resolutions To Red Lipstick
A few weeks ago, I was sitting at the counter of a small kitchen in the Bronx while Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made black bean soup in an Instant Pot and told me about her transition into office. Well, it didn’t exactly happen like that. But Rep. Ocasio-Cortez did go on Instagram Live to talk…
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What We Keep And What We Leave Behind
As I sat against the rigid wall of my dorm the other night and read “Peron: A New Cultural History” for a Latin American history course, I read the phrase “Las penas son de nosotros, las vaquitas son ajenas.” “The sorrows our ours, the little cows are stranger’s.” The Peronist regime of Argentina was a…
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International Institute Of St. Louis
“It is like it is so hard to be stateless. You have no rights, you have nothing. You know you are kind of like, the status of an animal…it’s that bad to be stateless.” This is how Suk Sapopka recounted his experience as a Bhutanese refugee to an intern at the International Institute of St.…
