The Odor of Things
...mot juste, nor to make sure that the language was neat and tidy, nor that all ugliness that might shock delicate sensibilities had been scrubbed away. He rearranged and polished...
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
Calm Before, Calm After
Since its 1998 release on the original PlayStation, the Japanese role-playing game Xenogears has become a cult favorite distinguished by its intricate 10,000-year backstory and ambitious plot: As players and characters slowly come to realize, the final boss is none other than god itself, and the game ends with its defeat. In the aftermath, the
Miracles and Wonder, Faith and Diaspora: On Tope Folarin's "Miracle"
...a churchgoer whose faith wasn’t strong enough to set him free, who laughed at the pastor’s theatrics even as he wished that they would yield fruitful results, and who in...
We Call It a Dismantling Process
Three South Carolina inmates call attention to egregious conditions ahead of a nationwide prison strike
Who Can You Trust?
...tell you she is not simply a pair of pants. “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in...
Being Damien Hirst
...to their very resistance to commodity status, their rareness, their avant-gardiness. Avant-garde simply means as-yet-unsold (though-we’re-working-on-it); “outsider” art denotes that-for-which-we-can-see-no-buyer. I’m not talking about discrete objects, but about processes and...
The Sweet Smell of Sexcess
...was saying that the right to revel shame-free in sensual pleasure was something feminists had fought for, and I think we settled it by meeting midway at peppermint foot scrub,...
Do Lipstick Feminists Actually Exist?
...It doesn't seem to actually exist. Sure, there’s a handful of Twitter accounts with “lipstick feminist” in the handle or description (some of which seem fab); there’s the odd blog...
Hi Honey, I'm Home: Makeup and Cohabitation
...time. I’m used to time being clearly delineated: Time in public means time out of my home, time in private means time in my home. Sure, there are plenty of...
Strangers in a Strange Land
...which we spent a lot of time describing to each other: Nu, gin, seder; Adam-Ondi-Ahman, divining rod, Kolob. It wasn’t easy, but I was sure we could ride on kindness,...
Mind Games Forever
...Image after Andy Warhol, Eggs, 1982 Eric Berne’s Games People Play offers a blueprint for making passive-aggressive manipulation into compulsive fun We are accustomed to thinking of gamification...
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.
The Princess and the Brain
...self-actualizing, more audibly opinionated. Do we need to pretend that feminism means all women are professionally ambitious? Are all men? And are we even sure she's not ambitious? Her husband...
The Stages of Not Going on T
From Something That May Shock And Discredit You
Personal Ads
...on, among other things, a fiercely commercial-free ethos. Maybe I’m romantically projecting a halo glow onto the unwashed tribes of yesteryear, but whether or not people betrayed the ideals, at...