Essays
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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…
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Transubstantiations
I study artworks made for the cells and dining spaces in nunneries, paintings whose colors have lost their pigment, faded with age and decay, the gold leaf flecked with brown stains. A problem distracts, however: I haven’t stopped bleeding in…
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Be Clean, Be Loved
Recently, I asked my mother what she would purchase with the prize money if she won the lottery: new dishwasher, she said, or facelift. When she reminds me they do not make them the way they used to, it is…
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Books That Made Me Gay: “Summer Sisters” by Judy Blume
Having swiped my mother’s mass market paperback from her bedside, I read it while our babysitter smoked weed with her boyfriend outside.
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Your Body Is Everywhere
The first time I believed “I am in danger” was when I woke up in an ambulance to EMTs sliding cold scissors up my body.
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At My House, We Don’t Bleach
After my punishment, I dusted my knees, returned to my friends, and continued the crime of noise-making. To make up for lost time, I invented an over-exaggerated story of the drunk bus conductor and orange hawker who left their wares…
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Traveling My Way Forward: Carrie R. Moore’s “Make Your Way Home”
This story made me think of a mystery that shrouds my patriarchal bloodline—a sort of family malediction passed down like a flawed hand of cards in a high-stakes poker game: a mind that plays tricks on you, daring you to…
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Unwriting the Great American Novel: Helen DeWitt’s “Your Name Here”
The myth of the PDF is this: it is an unpublishable novel, circulated online after DeWitt despaired of getting it out by conventional channels. When I talked to my old coworker, it seemed shrouded in mystery. He didn’t even refer…
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White Tongue
It was senior year of high school, and a statistics study session slowly devolved into a friend and I commiserating about the shortcomings of Duolingo: there was no Tagalog course for English learners. She was the only Filipino person I…
