Essays

My love for Star Wars was only lukewarm in the years I watched it as a kid growing up in the 80s. There were Star Wars lunch boxes discarded in the corners of my cousin’s bedroom. Light Sabers in the…

My maternal grandmother, born & raised in Mississippi, birthed at least two of my aunts & two of my uncles within the state, but I have never lived there myself, so my understandings of place are limited by what I…

Poverty is like being inside a black hole, or what I imagine a black hole to be. Like swimming through a thick dark that reaches up to your neck, and all you feel is the slimy cold, clenching your throat…

Give us a movie with a good fight, a wild spectacle of flying fists and stylized blood, and we were in heaven. Looking back, it wasn’t just about the action. It was a psychological displacement, a two-hour escape from a…

I expected Wells to launch into an inspirational speech about the nomadic life, one that—like his many YouTube monologues or his appearance in Nomadland—affirmed our collective decision to abandon the rat race for a more fulfilling life on the road.…

I’d grown up internalizing the big-city maxim that strangers didn’t interact for no reason, unless mental illness was involved. You kept your eyes down and your pace brisk; life was a serious business. But that day, I glimpsed an alternate…

“The ubiquity of the bystander video in contemporary protest culture has brought videos of police executions into the mainstream. Despite the fact that it’s possible to use generative AI to create videos of basically anything now, these witness videos remain…

I sometimes wonder if this very search to understand my family’s history, the context out of which I emerged, only feeds into this false sense of separateness. Perhaps it only doubles down on this “us vs. them” way of looking…

The film director chose to shoot the interview with Paul in the living room. Behind Paul: three deer mounts, one pheasant with outstretched wings, and a largemouth bass, interspersed with family portraits. They’d lit him well; Paul looked good in…

Before I fell in love with my name, my biggest reservation was that it gave people an impression of my father I knew to be inexact. These days, because of how much I love my name, it is easy to…

Love exposes the so-called “truth” of the world to be a fabrication and asks us to imagine what freedom might look like. No wonder philosophers like Alain Badiou and Mari Ruti champion love so fiercely in their work. Love unsettles…

When Novak ran past shouting, “Incoming!” I tumbled out of my GI hammock and scrambled to a sandbagged culvert hooch, waiting out the attack with squad leader Lloyd Edge. At the all clear signal we emerged to shouts that a…