Zoe Mercer-Golden
Zoe Mercer-Golden
Recent Stories
MERCER-GOLDEN: A grown-up summer
Parenthetically
I’m in the process of redefining what summer means to me.
MERCER-GOLDEN: Outing anxiety
Meditations
A friend asked me a question the other day: “Do you think other people are as anxious as we are?”
MERCER-GOLDEN: Iron ladies
Meditations
Over break, I visited the National Portrait Gallery in London, which is full of paintings of England's most famous citizens, including many women. I was struck by how many strong female leaders England has produced, not least Elizabeth I.
MERCER-GOLDEN: Remembering solitude
This past week, I stopped to read the inscriptions on the walls of Memorial Hall for the first time since I arrived at Yale. I was returning from a run at East Rock and was cold, sweaty and tired, though elated that I had taken an hour to be away from Yale and all the voices that echo when I walk around campus. For once, I found myself alone in the strange and beautiful hall-room between Commons and Woolsey; with my footsteps echoing, I paused to read — really read — what the walls had to say.
MERCER-GOLDEN: Gratitude this winter
Parenthetically
My mother, who is a wise woman, sent me a column a week ago that she had cut out of the newspaper. The column had been written by a grief counselor, someone who works closely with the dying and their loved ones in the face of terminal diagnoses. While she identified five lessons that she had learned from the dying in the column, I want to draw on the last one, particularly because it was just Valentine’s Day and it’s still winter.
MERCER-GOLDEN: The right questions
Parenthetically
As I look at the recent headlines in national newspapers and in the Yale Daily News, two words come to mind: sex and responsibility. The two are, of course, profoundly connected, and each is devastating in its own way.
MERCER-GOLDEN: Accounting for ourselves
To continue the theme of being the world’s worst meta English and History of Art major, this column will be highly self-referential and will refer to my two previous columns for the News, one of which was, unsurprisingly, about comments on other articles.
MERCER-GOLDEN: Imagining Shakespearean authorship
At the beginning of Shakespeare at Yale (SaY), a semester-long program designed to showcase the Shakespearean riches we have at Yale (and oh, what riches!), I thought I’d write something about the question I enjoy being asked least as an English major: Did Shakespeare write his own plays?
MERCER-GOLDEN: Opinions run amok
I prefer to read the News in print, always. Not just because the News goes well with breakfast — though it does — but also because I can read the articles without reading the comments that inevitably accumulate on the online versions.