“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.” –Oscar Wilde
Brute Reason is my response to a world that frustrates me.
I’ve always been what one might call a cynic or a malcontent. I don’t believe in smiling and nodding when what you really want to do is open your mouth and tell the truth.
I don’t mince words, and I’m not here to make you comfortable.
Me
I always find it hard to write about myself in complete sentences, so here’s a list of things I am:
- 21 years old
- a senior at Northwestern University
- a psychology major
- a bibliophile
- a Russian Israeli
- a Humanistic Jew (so basically an atheist)
- a New Yorker at heart
- politically progressive, or something like that
- a proud feminist
- a depression survivor
- an amateur writer and photographer
- a future therapist
This Blog
This is my space for trying to understand the world and the ways in which I think it should change. I mostly write about politics, psychology, and social justice, but just about anything is fair game. I sometimes write about my own life and how it is impacted by these things.
The title of the blog comes from a quote by Oscar Wilde that I’ve placed at the top of this page. It gives the blog direction. For most of my life, I’ve found myself deeply troubled when things “don’t make sense.” Sometimes I feel like my ability to reason is the only thing that makes life worth living for me. I also love destroying bad ideas with, well, brute reason.
My friend, future roommate, and fellow blogger Michael accidentally came up with what would make a great tagline for this blog: “There is nothing so offensive to me as stupidity mixed with malevolence.”
I hope you enjoy the blog. Don’t take it too seriously.
-M
Brute Reason 
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Thanks for a great Marissa Mayer post. I had to go to your About page because of your reference to Northwestern in that post — I graduated from there in 1997, and when I was an undergrad we had a “feminist” performance troupe called Spare Rib (I wrote about it in my “Can a Feminist’s Daughters Have a Pink Bedroom?” piece). Does that group even still exist 15 years later? I hope so. Anyway, glad to see someone of your generation carrying the torch for these still burning issues. Keep up the good work.
Nooooo I’ve never heard of that! I guess we don’t have it anymore. 😦
We do, though, have a College Feminists, a group called Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators (SHAPE), and an annual Sex Week. Hopefully we’ve done you proud. 😀