Essays
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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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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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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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Lux Nightmare Is Not A Porn Star
Just a year and a half prior to finding Shalit’s email in my inbox, I was the proprietor of my very own porn site, That Strange Girl, which I’d started right before my senior year of college. It was a…
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Looking for You at the Red Lobster on Tatooine
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…
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On the Question of My Typographical Intentions Running across a White Page or A Brief Undercurrent, if You Will, on Messaging within US-American Popular Culture: A Haibun
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…
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What Forced My Father to Buy Our First TV?
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…
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Vanlife at the End of the World
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.…
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Physics, Fractals and A Zumba Playlist
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…
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The Spectacle
“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…
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A Map of Languages, Dead and Dying
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…
