Category
Essays
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The Shape of Ménage à Trois to Come
“However much desire there is for the threesome to maintain its stability, the cultural force of homogenous marriage is strong.”
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In the Führerbunker with Carlyle and Yarvin
Curtis Yarvin—and, through him, arguably, Thomas Carlyle—has now emerged as a significant source of ideas for the present administration.
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Time Interpolated
Disruptive and restorative, interpolation is the paradoxical form of life, literature, and time itself.
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Making Migrant Spaces: 34th Avenue, Queens
Thirty-Fourth Avenue is a reminder that displacement from one location, perhaps at a far remove, can instantiate emplacement elsewhere.
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“Lying in Politics”: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair
Four months in, the new Trump administration is already moving from self-deception and deception on to “image making” and “ideologizing”; it is fast approaching complete “defactualization.”
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Triumph of the Undead: The Public Domain as Horror Hero
Both “Nosferatu” and “Night of the Living Dead” provide key examples of how vital the public domain is for horror.
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It’s About Time We Fail: A Puerto Rican Poetics of Exhaustion
The term “resilience” originated in ecology. But its shift from the natural to the social has normalized human-made structures of inequality.
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“Poetry City”: Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City is the place where contemporary English literature matters more than anywhere else on earth.
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“A Safe Haven”: Huguenots, Jews, and Bangladeshis in Brick Lane, London
Jamme Masjid, the famed mosque at 59 Brick Lane, used to be a Jewish synagogue; before that, a Methodist church; and even before that, a Huguenot chapel.
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How to Forget Alvin Ailey
Even as “Edges of Ailey” gathers such intimate documents, it does not make them legible to its visitors.
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“Origine Asiatique”: The Anticolonial and Communist Chinese That Flocked to Paris
Asian migration has been kept out of most official histories of Paris, but walking in the quartiers chics and populaires/mixtes uncovers a portrait of the lives and history.
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Care Work is Necessary for Anti-Imperialist Struggle
As a means of disrupting the university’s predominant ways of being and relating, the encampment’s ethic of care was not extinguished by the raid.
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A Brief Queer History of Going to Bed with Your Hot Friends
I worried that, in obscure but consequential ways, I had already begun to fail her.
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B-Sides: Menander’s “Dyskolos”
The arc of any romantic comedy remains incomplete until the misanthrope is brought into the fold of society.
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Speak, Mario?
If video games work generally as showcases of players’ ability, then why has the ability to speak fluently been relatively unnecessary for the medium’s icons?
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In Search of Logged Time
When we leave the work of remembering to digital tools, we risk the loss of our histories to technological obsolescence.
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Archives of the Surveilled
Arthur Huff Fauset’s elision from literary history was not merely a scholarly oversight but a reality constructed in advance by powerful forces.
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Bad Beef
Rap beef is form of capitalist accumulation that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels.
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A Heaven Reflected on Earth: The Golden Temple, Amritsar
Gleaming turrets reflect in the still water, just as, according to the Sikh faith, heaven is reflected on earth.
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A Public Art College in Crisis: Art, Activism, and Solidarity After October 7
SERCs serve as both artistic gestures and practical solutions, aiming to balance the two while addressing critical questions such as: How will we feed people—and their hunger for justice?
