Tag
Interview
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“Our Guns Make the Violence That People Are Fleeing”: Ieva Jusionyte on Guns & Violence in Mexico
“I was already there, and I was already an ethnographer. I was interested in borders as sites of state violence. I became very curious and I thought I would like to follow the guns south.”
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“She Seems So Normal to Me”: Cassandra Neyenesch on Writing a Woman on the Verge
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Adventures Newly Narrated: Jessica Francis Kane on Penelope Fitzgerald’s Lost Adventure
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“If a Woman Commanded Fire”: Talking Historical Stoves and Affordable Energy with Joyce Chaplin
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“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins
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“Endless Bad Infinity”: Noah Kulwin and Brendan James on the Feedback Loop of American Empire
“We are not picking on things that were particularly happy memories for the American war machine.”
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America’s Pernicious Rural Myth: An Interview with Steven Conn
“Narratives about rural crisis seem to trap American discourse in a cycle of crisis and myth.”
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Wings, Angels, Tentacles: Talking with Siddhartha Deb
“What lies outside the weird—the subconscious, our dreams, our fantasies, the monster, the alien—these are possible sources of liberation.”
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“We Are Not Meant to Be Girls Alone in This World”: A Conversation with Gina María Balibrera
“It’s such a heavy and troubling history, but not entirely dismal. Humans laugh all the time.”
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“We’re Losing a Sense That We Made Them”: Webb Keane on AI and Human Morality
“We can’t fully grasp what’s new about it unless we also understand what we’ve seen before.”
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“The Basic Liberal Narrative Is Gone”: Immigrant Rights and Abolition with Silky Shah
“A singular focus on conditions, rather than the violence of immigration detention itself, just lent itself to expansion.”
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Beyond the “Burden of Belief”: Pádraig Ó Tuama on Religious Trauma, Eros, and Poetry as Prayer
“I began to look for other verbs when it comes to my doubt and my rage and my yearning and my sadness.”
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Humor and Fear, Kings and Soldiers: Jason De León on the Untold Story of Human Smugglers
What happens if we start with the assumption that smugglers are, in fact, humans?
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Can You Predict What You’ll Need? Talking Time, Space, and Disability with Margaret Price
“The experience of disability has this curious hard-to-see quality, even while also being weirdly out in the open, garishly apparent.”
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“Who Made These Rules?”: Claire Messud on What’s Distracting from Good Writing
“I believe in the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.”
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Slavery Is Not a Metaphor: Rethinking Mass Incarceration with John Bardes
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, slaveholders in the South were thinking about what a prison should look like for a society that was economically and socially dependent on slavery.
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“The Diva Always Has a Transcendent Virtuosity”: Deborah Paredez on Divas, Tías, and Celebrity
“The diva is so often seen as remote and unattainable and onstage; I wanted to see how divas allow for a connection.”
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Abolish Sheriffs: Talking with Jessica Pishko
“My perspective is that we should abolish the office of the sheriff.”
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“The World Didn’t Give It, but the World Can’t Take It Away”: Talking Black Joy and Black Freedom with Blair LM Kelley
“Joy is a uniquely interesting Black experience. We talk about joy a lot, we sing about joy.”
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The Poetics of Democracy: A Conversation with Devika Rege
“This novel is about a collective, but that collective is not the nation. It can only allude to the nation without becoming it.”
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“Agita”: Talking with Alexander Sammartino
“I feel that way every day of my life: ‘astray in errancy.’ I think that’s about being human.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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Frivolity Is Not Unserious
“When we try to write about trauma, no matter what the trauma we wish to explore, it’s the poet’s job to do their homework.”
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Public Thinker: Jonathan Kramnick on the Craft of Criticism amid Institutional Decline
“Arguments stand or fall to the degree to which the practice is done well.”
