The Believers
Out here, no one knows who we are.
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...moreI had another cab dream last night. I have them a lot.
...moreMusic was noise, and noise was music, and George Antheil was on his way.
...moreI’m struck by a horrifying thought: they’ll stop only if I crash.
...moreThree summers ago, I did nothing but drive around Middlebury, Vermont, blasting Lana Del Rey and chain-smoking cigarettes. It was—and I will be dramatic, because that is how it felt—an act of survival. That summer I was in an academic program where we were only allowed to speak or be spoken to in French. But […]
...moreUnwittingly, my mother teaches me in this conversation her generation’s word for gay: 同性恋. I look it up in an online dictionary, three characters in my mother’s tongue. Same, sex, and love.
...moreHe only knew that the Blazer, like the green card, was something he wanted my brother and me to have, so that we knew we deserved things, things like America.
...moreAt The Toast, Katrina Otuonye discusses the inner pain and conflict of being unjustly stopped by the police as a black woman: My rule-abiding politeness, my inner drive to keep the peace, my outwardly even temper, none of these things will necessarily save me. I won’t get to hide behind my Master’s degree in a […]
...moreMaybe my faith that the profoundest feeling we’re offered by art that really hits us deep in is a setting free, a series of screens or horizons obliterated somehow lovingly.
...moreAmerica is a beautiful country and it was beautiful before we got here. I’m not sure yet if we, the ancestral echo of colonizers, are a beautiful people. I often have doubts.
...moreDistance always seduced me—distance from whatever was most familiar, especially myself—but the difficulties in achieving such remove vexed me.
...moreA car is a way of being in the same body—four heartbeats speeding towards a common destination.
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