On Quitting
Most often when I talk about building a life, I have meant something closer to saying that I cannot imagine—or desire—a life here.
How Contempt Became a Genre
On Kevin Young’s Bunk and America’s seething tendencies
Cruel Poptimism
Ariana Grande’s hit single “No Tears Left to Cry” might be the late-summer cipher for living in a lost future
The Cochlear Implant at the End of the World
Staging disability in an apocalyptic future, the film A Quiet Place insists that we think beyond a logic of functionality if we want to survive environmental crisis
Staging an Epidemic
What is AIDS to you?
Pop at the End
This is what the end of the world sounds like
Work, Supermodel
madison moore’s new book, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, centers the present history of black and brown queer ballroom culture
A World More Beautiful and Alive: A Review of The Extractive Zone
From Ecuador, Perú, Chile, Colombia, and Bolivia, Macarena Gómez-Barris describes “submerged perspectives,” the decolonial ways of knowing that unsettle colonial relationships to land and the forms of violence they reproduce.
Abolish the ICE Prison Complex
A recent Supreme Court decision reminds us that the law has no interest in lifting the veil that covers immigration prisons
The Diasporist of Drohobycz
A new translation of Bruno Schulz’s stories reveals the local in vitalist understandings of diaspora that do not need to claim a Jewish state to flourish
Some Blues but Not the Kind That’s Blue
In music and literature, Jay-Z and Percival Everett meditate on maturity, black masculinity, and the confessional drive of the artist’s life
Black Mirrors
Queer ways of seeing can be tools of decolonization for the African diaspora
Like a Dog
Despite what Shakespeare thought of dogs, they are like heroes who risk betrayal and harm by their own nature.
Polar Amplifications
In the Arctic, climate change and plastic pollution produce tangled damage for the people, plants, and animals that live there
Hurt People
The state cannot destroy us the way we destroy each other
The Body in Painlessness
The subversive potential of pain set into motion the forces that created the opioid crisis