Columns
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A Postcard From Dolly
One of those last weeks before school started again, Grandma took my brother and me down to Lubbock to visit our cousins. I don’t know what the boys did that week. I know my cousin and I spend the entire…
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Drag as Storytelling: A Conversation with Hieu Minh Nguyen
One thing I love about drag is the opportunity to become someone else. I’ve never been especially good at pouring energy into myself. A lot of my writing comes from the position of a witness or observer. Poetry was my…
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Singing History, Speaking Liberation: BlackStar Film Festival at 15
What does it mean to claim and maintain liberatory independence in a cultural landscape cloaked in the murk of careening fascisms and punitive censorship?
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God of My Father
You tell yourself this is an act of decolonization but really, you’re here because the health care system has failed. This kind of stepping outside of capitalism isn’t so much an act of radical liberation as it is a way…
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Their Clear Unobstructed View
We lived in a place for people who did not matter. No one considered it a town—just an overpass above the freeway, dry fields to the east, overgrown hills to the west, a place cars passed under without stopping. We…
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Heaven, Hell, and Nowhere: Gregg Araki’s Changing Los Angeles
Lights pulse in nightclubs, shadows expand in the middle of the night, and beautiful young people dream and experiment, seeking transcendence through drugs, alcohol, sex. Where his earlier films make cheap motels and marginal spaces feel charged with possibility, I…
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The Missing Word
The problem is not simply what Israelis know about 1948. Israel needs a new story about itself. The old one has become a trap. It knows how to tell Jewish stories of exile and return, but not Palestinian ones. It…
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Why Widow’s Bay Is Truly Peak Television
Like David Lynch and Mark Frost’s masterpiece, Widow’s Bay gives us a look at the chilling darkness of small-town life, the rot on the inside of the white picket fence.
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Three Poems
Why on a school bus returning from a field trip? Why the back of my head as I sat in the row ahead of you? Did you both spit or only one? Who followed whose cruel idea?
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Environmental Disaster, Erosion of Home: A Conversation with Stephanie Soileau
My favorite fiction asks questions and doesn’t necessarily provide answers. It gives the full equation and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from that equation. The calculus is often complicated.
