Last September I was assigned a new identity. I became la Miss.

In 2013, Sandra Korn, then a senior at Harvard and a contributor to the student newspaper The Crimson, wrote an article telling her peers “Don’t Teach For America.”. The Huffington Post republished her article. Korn claims that Teach For America (TFA) undermines the American education system with “a neoliberal model of interchangeable educators and standardized testing” that is “working directly against the interests of teachers, students, and communities.”.

Summer in Walla Walla, Dixie Cups melted their nectar into us. It was hot hot but we were getting in our miles. We talked about getting up early to run before the heat, but we never did. Mornings were slow and the sun leaked in. Evenings we’d do wheat fields, gold and stubby, weaving the line between road and gravel.

Twelve percent of girls in Cameroon undergo "breast ironing." Mothers and other female caretakers use hot objects to rub girls' breasts in an effort to delay development. The primary reason for the practice is to protect young girls from men. Meet Agnes, whose grandmother ironed her breasts when she was 14, and three local activists who are working to eradicate the practice. Photo from womensnetwork.net

In Gus Van Sant’s iconic 1991 Portland film My Own Private Idaho, tribes of homeless kids camped out in boarded-up downtown buildings, and Chinatown’s sidewalks gleamed with broken glass. Now, 25 years later, New Seasons holds empire and doughnuts cost $4. Jonathan Walters, founder of Portland’s Hand2Mouth Theatre company and the director of the first-ever stage production of Van Sant’s Idaho, wonders: “Have we lost our underground?

Libby Arnosti ’13 and Bella, a 1976 green Volkswagen bus, met online. It wasn’t your typical crash and burn Tinder thing; no, these two will grow old together. Arnosti, who described herself as a “Volkswagen creeper,” first noticed the ’76 bus sitting in an empty lot across from the Rose Street Safeway in 2008 when she visited Whitman as a high school junior.

Dalliance. Converse with the ants of the sidewalk mounds and midnight sounds that moan through firefly famished evenings.

Over my Thanksgiving break from college I discovered “Lulu: the First Ever App for Girls,” a new website on which girls rate boys anonymously. Boys with Facebook profiles have Lulu profiles (except for those few with extreme privacy settings), and all their female Facebook friends can rate them. First, the site asks the reviewer a series of questions like, “If an old lady were crossing the street, he’d a) body slam her b) shuffle past her, or c) help her across and take her grocery shopping.”.