Section
Lives & Histories
-
Can Centuries-Old Nuns Really Save Us from Ourselves?
“Can looking to women beholden to God help us escape a society so fixated on itself? Or does it simply package those devout lives as the latest content for a culture industry desperate for the next trending topic?”
-
Resistance Disguised as a History Lesson: Fascism and the University
Her student—a former Nazi stormtrooper—was proof that no one was lost to the new regime, that every person might choose to refuse.
-
“Wrapped in the Spiral”: Natalia Lassalle-Morillo on Creation and Collaboration
Passage of the Spiral (2024) is a film with hazy and indistinct parameters, earning its designation of “pseudo-documentary.” Who is acting, and who is “real”? Which of the many stories being told or represented is true? The film shirks the rigidity of borders—between reality and fiction, between geographies, and between who is permitted to be…
-
“To Over-Be, To Over-Exist”: Russia’s War in Ukraine and the Grammar of Survival
Even in that moment of the catastrophe, for Liudmyla, it is “we” that will over-be. And that “we” included us, on this other anonymous end of the screen.
-
This Too Is Gaza
“In Gaza, life unfurls as a treasury of daily surprises that many Westerners miss in their hurry to get through their days,” says a Palestinian journalist. How we are treated, he insists, does not define who we are.
-
At the Edge of Erasure: An Interview with Anouche Kunth, Historian of Exile
In the basement of a French administration office there was a mass of 12,000 documents related to the refugees of the Armenian genocide, telling a terse story of loss.
-
“Paris Latino”: How Latin America Migrated to Europe
“Paris est la capitale de l’Amérique latine,” said Mexican essayist Carlos Fuentes.
-
China’s Imagined Pasts and Futures: On YouTuber Li Ziqi
She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities.
-
“Origine Asiatique”: The Anticolonial and Communist Chinese That Flocked to Paris
Asian migration has been kept out of most official histories of Paris, but walking in the quartiers chics and populaires/mixtes uncovers a portrait of the lives and history.
-
A Brief Queer History of Going to Bed with Your Hot Friends
I worried that, in obscure but consequential ways, I had already begun to fail her.
-
In Search of Logged Time
When we leave the work of remembering to digital tools, we risk the loss of our histories to technological obsolescence.
-
“Parallel Tracks”: Sophie Ratcliffe on Academia, Memoirs, and Motherhood
“I used to want to experience everything. I don’t anymore.”
-
Breaking the Cycle: Laurence Ralph on “Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him”
“My experience with the criminal justice system is wanting to scream, but realizing that you could also find yourself in a more precarious situation if you do that.”
-
“I Am the Face of AIDS”: Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS
Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the 1980s–1990s AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced artificial and arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.
-
“She Really Wanted Nothing to Do with It”: Gabriel Brownstein on the Ongoing Question of “Hysteria”
“I really became interested in the part of Freud that we don’t know much about, Freud before he became Freud.”
-
“How a Fire Builds”: Talking with Nina St. Pierre about Mental Illness, Art, and Survival
“In grad school, I’d had this wacky drunken idea that the book had to be meta to be proper.”
-
The Author and the Eulogist: On Love and Death in Nonfiction
Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions.
-
Rethinking Holocaust Memory after October 7
“Why continue to teach the Holocaust? Why continue to build and visit Holocaust memorials and museums?”
-
Infiltrating the Family
For decades in the UK, police infiltrated the radical social movements by insinuating themselves into the intimate, romantic, familial, and comradely spaces of those on whom they spied.
-
“We Were Not That Band”—But What Was Sonic Youth?
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore’s memoir may tell us about his life. But he doesn’t give us much insight into the band they were.
-
A Hole at the Bottom of the Book
For the writers Annie Ernaux and Hilary Plum, a paradox emerges with each new book: writing attempts “carry to completion” something lived, but also changes the original experience.
