A new play centers on a Black woman who stops “accommodating white people” and, instead, asks them “about their love affair with my death.”
Essays
Watching “Go Fish” with My Queer 15-Year-Old
“You can wear something to be cool,” you told me, “or because another person likes it. You don’t have to be truly ‘yourself,’ or whatever.”
B-Sides: Jesmyn Ward’s “Where the Line Bleeds”
Novelist Jesmyn Ward is known for historical grandiosity, but her long-overlooked book “Sing, Unburied, Sing” turns away from realism into the realm of generic strangeness.
Cuba & the US: Necessary Mirrors
Exponentially more enslaved Africans were forced to the lands that now make up Latin America rather than the United States. Where is their story?
A Statue Gives Romans a Voice: 2021, Rome, Italy
The people of Rome have been leaving notes on the Pasquino statue for over 500 years. And this practice continued in the pandemic, fortunately.
COVID: The Pandemic Without Honor?
“I don’t believe there was any conspiracy inside government to kill people off,” a health official explains. “From what I saw there was no plan.”
Putting French Literary History on Trial
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-winning novel confronts the racist history of France’s literary prizes.
Can We Repair the Past?
For the righting of historical wrongs, to simply transfer property continues to perpetuate violence. True reparations require far more work.
Toxic Masculinity, Spectral Homosexuality
The secret of the Western—as Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog” shows—is that its mythology nurtures a queer fantasy, hiding in plain sight.
Queer Ever After?
If queer today often looks rather like heteronormativity’s “sick and boring life,” how can we cultivate queerer worlds, or other possibilities?
Apocalypse and Anticlimax: The Petrified Forest, Calistoga, CA
Unlike us today, the Victorians who discovered this stone forest were less afraid of the future than they were of forgetting the past.
Is “Regulation from Below” Possible?
A powerful grassroots movement campaigned in the ’70s and ’80s for banks to reinvest equitably in red-lined urban communities. It failed—but why?
The Healing Power of Virtual Cuteness
Violence underlies the whimsical colonizing of an island in “Animal Crossing.” But perhaps it holds promise for political repair, too.
How to Be a Prophet?
The US Religious Right wins elections, but advances nationalism and white supremacy. Why, then, should the Religious Left seek to emulate them?
The Stories Women Tell of Loneliness
“I have an appetite for silence,” Emily Dickinson wrote, for “silence is infinity.” But are women today relishing in their solitude?
Walking Among the University’s Ruins
Some wager that the end is not inevitable: that universities can reassert their centrality to the American liberal democratic project.
Ahmed’s Good Grief
Institutions separate complainers from one another and from their own support networks. But what if we complained as a collective?
McCarthy’s Perpetual Motion Scam
Tom McCarthy hasn’t evaded the literary brand: if you continually say nothing, “saying nothing” becomes what you, the novelist, say.
The US Arrested Her—Then She Changed Chicago
In the 1960s, Chicago’s white neighborhoods didn’t want Mexican Americans moving in. But one determined real estate broker changed everything.
Why Does France Think Migration Is Growing?
Teach the history of colonization and decolonization—for this is the best antidote to the venom of exclusion and racism that threatens France.