When Lovers Die
...indefinitely, is society’s implied ideal, from the birth certificate to the obituary announcement. Little kids chant the story of social reproduction like a mantra: first comes love, then comes marriage,...
California
...heavily invested in how the state appears, its lucrative fantasy coming to dominate and determine conditions on the ground. But the best real estate scams are the ones that work...
“Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric”: Trans Assimilation and Cringe
When the right deploys cringe to control trans assimilation, trans people cringe at each other.
The New Inquiry Vol. 55: Testing
...the university system as both constantly struggling and in competition with the private universities which are taken as the benchmark of academia against which all others must be evaluated. “We...
Nice to Meat You
...and for a brief, uncanny moment, they were honest about it. I am not the first commentator to be drawn almost involuntarily into the territory of creepiness. Most notably,...
Sunday Reading
...been closed." "The next morning my aunt called a doctor. A bit pointless, I thought, I will kill myself soon." "Putting on an awkward rhinoceros horn is more comfortable than...
Variations on a Theme: Forgotten Terrorisms
...The anarchist belief in violent direct action, formulated in the policy of 'propaganda by the deed' (rather than by the word), reflected the particular bitterness of these struggles....
Simple and Plain
...him completely. His friends, no matter how much they loved and respected him, remained a paid entourage whom he could never completely believe actually loved him for real. "He constructed...
Feinting Spells
...“magical realism” came into vogue in the late 60s and 70s, when the West’s monopoly on the literary started facing serious competition, around the time a Colombian writer named Gabriel...
The Eaten World
...up my results online. As a gastroenterology fellow, I hear a fair bit about the microbiome--a term referring to the aggregate genetic material of the microorganisms that colonize our bodies’...
The Art of the Rebuttal: Katherine Dunn
...if you're being fouled, foul in return. Much of the commentary assumes that Tyson often commits fouls and that the bites are merely an extreme version of his usual unsportsmanlike...
Ramadan Diaries, Day Eighteen
...Chaïm Soutine, Still Life with Rayfish. c. 1924. The Met. Back from traveling—several days of not fasting—to menstruation. Not fasting today either. It feels a bit strange to...
Martin Scorsese Started the Fire: Hugo and The Bad Thing
...the Bad Thing is arbitrary and senseless is not beside the point; it is the point. As Event, it signifies “arbitrariness.” And while it’s a clumsy bit of writing –...
Beauty Blogosphere Summer Solstice
...my entire world of "sellouts" vs. "non-sellouts" upside-down and I began to realize that the whole thing was a bit more complicated and that maybe I shouldn't be all Judge...
The Unfuckables
...before. —"Take a Girl Like You," Kingsley Amis I love to play strippers and to imitate them. I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going...
What Does a Woman Know?
...turned out to be a Nazi and died a horrible death. The Mummy presents women a little bit differently. The one main female character, Evelyn Carnahan, is a scholar herself,...