A year ago I was a recent college grad living in Toulouse, in southern France. My generous host family ...
Tag: Identity
Michelle Obama’s Embrace
I told Michelle Obama that I admired Becoming for its courage, honesty, risk taking, and optimism. But my admiration went further, because in her story I had seen myself, and not just in the book’s main character ...
Citizens to Come: Building Beyond the 14th Amendment
On the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment we are called upon ...
Free the Most Oppressed First
Do we still need to talk about identity politics? In the wake of the 2016 election and amid the ongoing parody that is the Trump administration, the subject has ...
Adoption Anxieties
Given the overall paucity of novels about interracial adoption, it is striking that no fewer than three were published in 2017. In general, reviewers warmly received Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy, Lisa ...
Staging Disability: An Interview with Martyna Majok
Martyna Majok just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her original play Cost of ...
Chaucer and Humanitarian Activism
Refugee Tales, a recent adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is more than a retelling of one of our “great books” of English literature ...
Indian Queer Futures
The landmark Delhi High Court verdict in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the section criminalizing homosexual sex—heralded a significant shift in queer activism and queer ...
The Misfit Resistance
What is a misfit? In Lidia Yuknavitch’s definition, the term refers to those of us who “do life weird or wrong,” who literally miss fitting in with normative models of linear progress. Childhood ...
Let’s Not Call Them Neo-Nazis
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest of its kind in the world, in recent years boasting more than 275,000 visitors, around 10,000 accredited journalists ...
The Big Picture: The Right Type of Citizenship
“The prime problem of our nation,” explained Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 Osawatomie, Kansas, speech on economic nationalism, “is to get the right type of good citizenship.” It still is. Working ...
The Big Picture: Defending Society
Why, today, are many of the most antidemocratic voices in the United States not merely protected by Constitutional freedoms but draping themselves in them? Neoliberal political culture, now almost 40 ...
Aslant to the Flâneur: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin
Early on in Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse the author offers up an imaginary definition ...
The Book That Made Me: A Girl
When I was four, I would only respond to the name Dorothy. My grandpa had given me a new hardcover edition of The Wizard of Oz, lushly illustrated by …
Join the Mutant Resistance!
The real world just got a lot more like a superhero comic, and not in a good way. I write on November 13, 2016; one of the many things that came up in my panicked, angry, sometimes despairing social …
Shadow-Dancing with Zadie Smith
There is a scene in Swing Time, the 1936 George Stevens musical that gives Zadie Smith her new novel’s title, in which Fred Astaire, through a series of comic mishaps, enrolls in a dance lesson with ...
Code-Switching: An Interview with James Hannaham
Might a stand-up comedian discuss slavery in America with considerable doses of humor? Happens all the time. A contemporary novelist? Not so much. It is the rare writer who is willing to approach the ...
We Didn’t Have Politicians Up to the Task: A Conversation with Kanan Makiya
As the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, supported by US airstrikes, enter the third week of a campaign ...
All About My Mother
In her canonical 1939 essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf wonders how a coherent past may be reconstructed from countless angles, styles, and past selves. How do we choose from so many ...
Workplace Romances
Do what you love. Most American 20- or 30-somethings have heard this helpful tidbit of career counseling at one time or another in the course of our lives. Like many adages, this one is dangerous: it ...