essays

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…

This is the difference I am trying to name. The pomegranate on the shelf and the pomegranate on the newspaper. The fruit polished for display, and the fruit cracked open in a living room. The version of a place that…

After all that foreplay, I’m brooding—my feathers, ruffled. Then, the me who wants me takes me to bed, undresses me slowly, covers me in kisses. I’ve always had a way with me: I know what I want and how to…

A nurse stood at the door—scrubs, clipboard, the whole nine yards. “We’re ready for you,” she said. I followed her down a hall and behind a curtain, where I changed into the robe, laid back in the wheelie-bed, and sexted…

For years, she only talked about how lucky we were to pull through as a family. It was luck for my father and me, I think, to be the survivors of 0.01 percent. But what was it for her, when…