latest
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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.…
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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.
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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…
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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
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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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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,…
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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…
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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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Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, on his Debut Short Story Collection, “An Oral History of Atlantis”
Pale Fire in particular I find genuinely hilarious, and thinking about “Note” now, it reads like a minor variation on that novel’s schema, with the original creator getting in the last word
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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.
