Columns
-
The Spurious Glamor of Certain Voids
Don’t we all love looking, Diane Seuss wondered, at dead things?
-
JOYRIDE: A Conversation with Susan Orlean
Taking stock of her own life, she writes about what hurt, what thrilled, and what shaped her. The result is a rare behind-the-curtain view of the golden age of journalism, interwoven with glimpses of Orlean’s childhood, her evolution as a…
-
Joining the World: A Conversation with Patricia Lockwood
“A lot of pandemic novels were about a place where everyone could get away from it and not directly have to deal. I totally understand that, but as a person who was writing about it from the very beginning, probably…
-
Irregular Heart
When she was pregnant with me, my mother said she could see her future like a train, coming to run her down.
-
Mythmaking and a Codependent Sisterhood: A Conversation with I.S. Jones
I.S. Jones’ Bloodmercy reimagines the fable of Cain and Abel. In this book, they are sisters who seldom know each other apart from themselves. They are mirrors, but also opposing forces who test one another’s boundaries, devotion, shame, and girlhood.…
-
Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign and the Radical Idea that Muslims are Human
It is against this background of a country that has reduced Muslims into a dark, foreign, terrorist “other,” that Mamdani ran a campaign that centers the affordability of the city for all who live within it.
-
Avenging Aaliyah and the Non-Event of Dead Girls: A Conversation with m. mick powell
“ I’ve been saying that I wrote this book to avenge her [Aaliyah]. In my mind, even in childhood, I was like, “I have to do something, whatever I can do with whatever power I have.” It just happens that…
-
What To Read When It’s Dangerous To Be A Girl
Fairy tales and myths are one of the oldest ways to say what’s true. When the news (the world) (the woods) is overwhelming, I reach for stories that seek to tap into that history
-
Human Error Is the Point: On Teaching College During the Rise of AI
My syllabus is a mess of half-remembered intentions. I re-use icebreakers that I know don’t work. I forget to grade the first assignment until Week Four. I write emails that begin with “So sorry for the delay!” and I mean…
-
Let there / be night: A Conversation with Kevin Young about “Night Watch”
The book as a whole is interested in the finding as much as the knowing and the discoveries of grief, but also of survival, and ends with a kind of paradise. I guess it’s interested in not just the underworld,…
-
Labor and Trauma in the American Workplace: A Conversation with Elaine Castillo
“A lot of people think financial ruin looks like Dickensian destitution. But for many Americans, what it looks like is a never-ending credit card debt. Financial illiteracy can look very luxurious. But the way American fiction describes material possessions, and…
