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Becoming Animal
Image by Simmons Buntin. Years ago, in a dark noisy pub, the man I was talking to reached over and put his fingertips to my cheeks. He was saying something about intimacy and the many ways of it. We’d...
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The New Troy
Photographs by Jesse Lee Kercheval 1. From my living room window in Montevideo, Uruguay, at sunset, I see a young couple on the roof of the tall apartment building across the street. Now that we are...
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Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib
Photograph courtesy of Sonal Gadhia Dubey In the books I read growing up, there were always words I couldn’t quite imagine. I remember, with a specificity that surprises me, the foreignness of certain...
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The Problem of White Efficacy
Fellow white people: this is a message for you. I was recently texting with a friend, the writer Jeff Holmes, and he described to me his exhaustion with what he calls “digi-rage.” George Floyd had...
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The Season of Children
Image: ZackHughesPhotography via Flickr. When the hurricanes hit that summer, the three of us were kids in the sense that we were violently hopeful. We walked to the flooded basketball court. We...
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The Loneliest City
Nature Self-Portrait #14 (1996) by Laura Aguilar. © Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016. Today, we are all lonely in Los Angeles, separated in our social isolation. But this is a condition that most Angelenos...
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Growing Up Sansei in LA
Photograph courtesy of Yamashita Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz; McHenry Library Special Collections My sister and I grew up in a series of Japanese American bubbles in the 1950s...
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The Art of Stillness
Credit: National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue. —Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary The first time I modeled nude, I was...
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The Bloody Unicorn
Detail from The Unicorn Crosses a Stream (from the Unicorn Tapestries). In late February, when public places were still open and it might have been considered not just reasonable but admirable to take...
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Between the Lines
Anthology of Persian Poetry, 17th Century. “I wouldn’t wish being Iranian on my worst enemy,” my friend Marjan posted on Instagram in mid-January. Like many Iranians, Marjan is stuck in visa limbo. An...
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Alone in the Wilderness, Again and Again
Dick Proenneke at his cabin in 1985. Photograph by Richard Proenneke and donated by Raymond Proenneke, U.S. National Parks Service A middle-aged man wearing a plaid shirt, denim overalls, and a white...
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Sirens
FALL 2018 It’s well past magic hour and I have to violate my unspoken rule against driving at night. I don’t have a vision problem, but the lack of light makes it harder to evade any cop cars lying...
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Up Against the Wall
Image by Sam Cox, via Flickr. There is a bat that lives in my bedroom wall. Every couple of weeks, the bat chirps so loud and long that I cannot sleep. I pound my fists in the place where I hear it...
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The Poetry of Female Fighters
Tamil Tiger parade in in Killinochchi, 2002. Wikimedia commons Read the poems here. Seven years ago, on a chilly fall weekend in London, I wandered into an Oxfam second-hand bookshop in Walthamstow...
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Movie Scores and the Pleasures of Replay
Photo by Benjamin Dehli via Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 . Every morning, after my laptop boots itself awake—gearing up at an easy, breezy 2010 pace—I find myself returning to music I...
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At the Drive-In
John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. In front of us, a July wind rippled the screen. Its blank canvas shimmered in the...
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Fitness: How the Climate Killed My Children
A wildfire rages out of control in Australia's Orroral Valley, January 2020. Nick-D, Wikimedia Commons My grandfather shot himself in the head with a handgun. He’d been an addict for years: booze,...
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Fever in the Woods
Thro' the woods, Edward S. Curtis. I was two years old in 1979 when my single mother moved us into a cabin we called The Little House on top of a mountain in Vermont. There was no electricity or phone...
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Elsie Conick: A Biography in Fragments
Illustration by Kat Morgan A portrait of Mrs. James Conick appears on the cover of the October 1918 edition of a Harlem-based magazine called The Crusader. A single caption inside the issue describes...
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Certification of Righteousness
Creative Commons When I am twelve years old, my mother asks if I have ever been molested by a relative. Yes, I say. She begins to ask who it was, then stops herself. Just tell me, she says, if he’s...
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