Columns

LIEBERMAN | Modern Love — A Different Type of DM

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At around one o’clock in the morning, I wrap my comforter around me and tap the folded, paper-plane icon in the top right corner of the Instagram home page. I begin to scroll through my inbox — one hand holding the phone above my face and the other hand shoveling Trader Joe’s cookie butter into my mouth. I lie in bed like this, searching for the username “modernageboy” every Friday night. After the various bars close and the house party speakers shut off, when the lines at the taco truck are longest, I am in my creaky, Collegetown apartment searching for a particular thread of Instagram direct messages. I got the idea for this Friday night ritual from a girl I met at group therapy.

Opinion

LIEBERMAN | Tender Points of Contact

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My senior year of college has been a whole lot of “lasts” that happened without me even realizing them. I slammed down my pencil and released a big sigh as I submitted my last prelim without noting it was my last. My last Ithaca snow — dreadfully late into spring — fell onto my unsuspecting head without any consideration for how this would never happen again. When would be my last time crying in office hours? My last all-nighter, making ramen and a soft-boiled egg at 3:00 a.m.?

Opinion

LIEBERMAN | Move to the Midwest

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If there’s one thing I hate, it’s getting ripped off. And yet, I feel like I’m diving headfirst into one big, overpriced scam. In the past couple of weeks, after accepting a job offer in New York City, I have turned browsing Craigslist apartments into a hobby. Everyone has told me it’s too early to even browse, but I come from a family that leafs through listings in the newspaper and attends open houses without any intention of moving. I am obsessed with real estate, and I am obsessed with getting good deals.

Opinion

LIEBERMAN | Breathing Life Into Screen Time

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I spend most of Sunday on Twitter. It’s easy enough to convince myself that I’ll find a story idea there and that the column will pour out of it so quickly that it’ll make up for itself in time lost scrolling. Maybe it’s because the news tastes less bitter when I only see it in small parts, or maybe it’s because the targeted advertisements aren’t quite as terrifying, but it’s about the only social media I can bear lately. I’m definitely using the term “bear” loosely. There are certain Sundays when, already sunken deep in the couch, I really don’t want to get online.

Columns

LIEBERMAN | Opinionated Women

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The last year and a half (or so) have been marked by some uncharacteristic interpersonal drama, mostly in the form of internet harassment and (at least) half in response to columns that I’ve written. My Greek life column was met with the most serious antagonism, but I can’t deny that basically any piece of writing that I’ve put out in the world has resulted in angry emails, internet comments and some uncomfortable conversations. Recently, I’ve resorted to less controversial subjects, sinking my teeth into the heart-warming and uplifting spectrum of opinion writing. A few weeks ago, I read Mary Beard’s essay “The Public Voice of Women,” and there was a special type of familiarity in the pages. Beard details a history of women being told to stop talking.

Opinion

LIEBERMAN | In Defense of Planned Parenthood

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This was not the column I was expecting to write this week, but in a way, I’ve been ready to write this column my whole college career. I’m the daughter of two scientists, a feminist, a liberal and I’m pro-choice. However, there a lot of other things about me that you might not expect. For example, I also weep and pray at the thought of dead babies. Where the pro-life — or, more accurately, anti-choice — crowd and I differ is I don’t equate abortions with dead babies, and I certainly don’t equate Planned Parenthood with murder either.

Columns

LIEBERMAN | Get Dumped: Become a Better Person

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The Cornell academic calendar, with its first day of classes (and therefore, my first scheduled column) desperately far from the start of the New Year, tested my ability to write about New Year’s resolutions. I’m doing it anyway because I love fresh starts. In 2018, I resolved to Not Get Broken Up With, Not Even Once. I got dumped, on January 21st, by a boy who taught me how to roll cigarettes that I, less officially, have resolved to never smoke. So, the gig was up, and the resolution was broken, but I was surprisingly okay with it.

Columns

LIEBERMAN | Platonic Love Is a Lifeboat

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This is my last column of my last fall semester at Cornell. I went home for break, where my parents, and my friends’ parents and my parents’ friends all wanted to hear how I was doing and if I was ready to be done. My answers were always “good,” and “kind of.” I’m ready to be done only in the sense that I’m going to pass astronomy, and I’m finishing my creative writing concentration, and I paid all my parking tickets and I returned all my library books. In all the less explainable — but more serious— ways, I’m petrified and clumsy in trying to prove my own preparedness. I cried over a cover letter last week, I still haven’t memorized my student I.D. number, I can’t decide if I’m writing a thesis and I was lying when I said I returned all of my library books.

Columns

LIEBERMAN | An Ode to Kansas: Don’t Give Up on Red States

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For most of my Cornell career, being from Kansas has been not much more than a nuisance. Maybe, sometimes, I can squeeze a conversation piece out of it, but that’s about it. I was confused by this, and surprised by this, because I did and I do consider this a big — maybe the biggest — part of my identity. I don’t know if many people think of their home state in this way, but I do. I never had a very solid religious identity nor a very solid ethnic identity, but I grew up in Kansas, and that was something I couldn’t second guess or underplay.

Columns

LIEBERMAN | White Perpetrators Shouldn’t Be Protected

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There are columns that I sit down to write that I know aren’t ready. They aren’t cooked yet. They are still angry, or tearful, or unfolding before us. But it is the current state of the world, and in two weeks, when I sit down to write my next column, there will be something completely new to mull or suffer over — something new to struggle to write. This is hard to say because I don’t even want to look straight at it.