Juan David Giraldo Mendoza, 19, He/Him and Alejandro Lotero Cedeño, 18, He/Him

Climate justice activists, Fridays for Future Colombia

Jamie: What is your story — how did you become activists?

Juan: I started working as an activist in 2018 because of a crisis due to the underfunding of Colombian public education. The Colombian state did not want to help fund public schools and I thought to myself, My God, what is happening? So I joined the entire university community and went on strike until the education program was funded. …

Here are things I do: Every morning, I shower, exfoliate, shave, and use between two and six various lotions, moisturizers, and products in order to make myself smooth and presentable. I blow out my hair, which is dyed, using a leave-in conditioner, a blow-dry serum, a blow-dry spray, and an “all in one” product, which I use despite its failure as an all-in-one product because it is the only thing I’ve ever used which stops my hair from reacting to even the slightest drop of humidity in the air by turning into a Party City clown wig. I put rosehip…

Originally published 9/1/2016.

In Equity, the new woman-centric Wall Street potboiler from director Meera Menon and production company Broad Street, shot after shot and cut after cut line up to reinforce a feeling of suffocating isolation. This is by design, according to editor Andrew Hafitz. The film, which follows investment banker Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) through a scandal-plagued tech IPO, is shot and cut with a cold, nearly clinical eye. From the first frames, the entire film seems intent on distancing the audience — when we sneak up on Naomi for the first time, her back is turned; her defenses…

In 2011, when I was 19, I moved from Southern California to New York, and shortly thereafter, Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem became one of my favorite books. Didion’s first essay collection, an exploration of time spent with hippies in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, captured a specific moment in time, written in a style that mimicked the laid-back style of hippie-speak in the 1960s, and followed an aimless host of lost souls, poseurs and wannabe rebels in search of drugs and God only knew what else. In 2012, Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die was released, a baroque…

I’m Liz.

Here are some links to things I’ve published, in the event that you might be interested.

New Essay by NCAC’s Director of Programs Sheds More Light on the ‘Culture of Outrage’ Debate In the case of Durant’s Scaffold, by declaring any other group’s trauma off-limits, protesters have essentially nullified the artists’ liberty to create empathy across identity lines. Indeed, the Mankato Massacre gallows make up only one of the seven executions depicted in the sculpture. This piece engages with the use of capital punishment across race and gender lines — no one given artist could have created it…

Originally published 11/9/2016.

In July, I watched the Democratic National Convention and felt as full of hope as I’ve ever been about the future of the United States. As a young woman with a full-time office job, no health insurance, and a moderate amount of college debt, I consider myself a fairly average, informed millennial voter — concerned about the economy and domestic policy, perhaps more moderate on foreign policy than some of my friends, but overall not far removed from the picture of the millennial base the Clinton campaign hoped to galvanize. I watched the DNC far more intently than I had…

(A/N: This was, obviously, written very much pre-Trump and pre-2016 — I originally wrote this in the spring of 2015. It’s one of my favorite essays I’ve ever written on comedy and satire, but, well, it hasn’t really aged too well.)

Since the day it debuted in 1945, Saturday Night Live has been known as a cornerstone of American political satire. Over the past forty years, it has weathered the ups and downs of seven presidential administrations, and some of the impressions of those presidents — from Chevy Chase’s bumbling Gerald Ford to Darrell Hammond’s burger-chewing Bill Clinton — have…

Some people believe that you can’t wring humor out of sexual trauma, under any circumstances. “Don’t make rape jokes” is basically the first thing you learn when you start reading about feminism on the internet. And, in general, I think these people often have a point; if I never hear another comment that makes a survivor the unequivocal butt of the joke or negates the psychological impact that rape and sexual trauma can have, it’ll be too soon. …