It was a sunny September afternoon, so hot that I could see heat waves simmering on the turf and blurring my sight like smoke on the water. It was also the first day of Mr. Sweeney’s conditioning. “TWEET!” He blew the whistle and I hit the deck for twenty burpees. “TWEET!” We did pushups and skiers for five minutes. “TWEET!” He sent us on three full field suicides. When the tweeting finally ended, I hobbled back to the locker...

Harvard's open-ended essay “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club.” – Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk On the surface, the narrator of Fight Club seems content. He has a middle-class job and a nice apartment. In reality, he doesn’t feel alive. Disillusioned with the mundane triviality of his life, fed up with the banal “IKEA materialism” of the world, he finds solace in the gospel of Tyler Durden: “It’s only after you’ve lost...