Molly has written for venues including CNN, Vice, Rhizome, The Paris Review, and Punk Planet.

VICE: The Fight to Save America’s Best Free College
Since 1859, Cooper Union has been free. Cooper’s original endowment is supplemented by donors, alumni, and, most crucially, rent from the land under the Chrysler Building, located 39 blocks away. Growing up in New York, I viewed Cooper Union through the filter of legend. Because it was free, it took only the best.

VICE: Talking About My Abortion
When some defenders of choice talk about abortion, they often focus on edge cases: rape victims, life-threatening pregnancies, or teens who don’t know how babies are made. That kind of dialogue sometimes makes it seem like abortion is reserved for “other” women. Women who aren’t like them. Which, despite all delusions of enlightenment, is exactly what I thought when at 20, I realized I had an embryo growing inside of me.

VICE: Lulz and Leg Irons: In the Courtroom with Weev
On the morning of March 18, I was sitting with friends at the Federal Courthouse in Newark, waiting to hear how long Weev would spend in jail. I didn’t go there to write an article. I went because his conviction was wrong, and my friends and I cared for him. I meant to be another body filling the courtroom, to provide whatever support that’s good for.

Jacobin Magazine: Art After Occupy
I’m an artist. My job is to apply colored mud onto a surface. Just like the construction workers on the mural job, I’d be covered in toxic dust, freezing and wobbling on a rickety platform. I have dirty nails and rough hands….Art is carpentry as much as metaphysics. We’re blue collar workers with pretenses at the sublime.

CNN: My Arrest at Occupy Wall Street
“Occupy Wall Street taught many middle-class white people what poor people and people of color had already known. The law is often a hostile and arbitrary thing. Speak too loudly, stand in the wrong place, and you’re on the wrong side of it.”

Paris Review: Diego, Frida, and Me
Of course, concepts are best cast in stark terms, as abstract representations of truth. People, not so much. Diego made his own ass the focal point of his mural at the San Francisco Art Institute. Frida’s communism was so fervent that one of her last paintings, done in a morphine haze after her leg was amputated, bears the title Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick. But history reads them along gender lines. Diego is masculine, intellectual, universal. Frida is feminine, emotional, personal.

VICE: Shooter Boys and At-Risk Girls
The right way for a white girl to be angry is to turn her anger inwards. She should be a victim, like the patients in Reviving Ophelia, a psychiatrist’s late-90s textbook on broken girlhood. She should starve or cut or blow boys who treat her badly. A crusading shrink should scoop her up, and return her to good grades, tasteful clothes, and happiness–heart and hymen intact.

VICE: Seville’s Squatters: No Light, No Water, No Fear
The squatters I’d known in the US had been stoned crustpunks or dedicated activists, but most of them squatted by choice. In crisis-crushed Seville, squatting was necessity. Blue collar moms in neat lace collars acted like the most hardcore radicals. Because they have no money, they could do nothing else.

VICE: The World of a Professional Naked Girl
“A woman’s beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We’re meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we’re fat. Beauty is Zeno’s paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it’s not socially acceptable to admit we’re there. We can’t perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming “nice tits.”

VICE: Rubber Bullets in the Streets of Madrid
“The night smelled like fireworks and spray paint. Riot cops guarded TGI Fridays. A security guard with a kerchief over his face saw a boy spray painting his building. The guard shoved him, hard, to the sidewalk, then ran under an onslaught of cellphone cameras.”

Rhizome: Medici is the Crowd
“Why did we get into art in the first place? It wasn’t to churn out increasingly polished versions of our most salable pieces until we die.”