Section
Lives & Histories
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“To Over-Be, To Over-Exist”: Russia’s War in Ukraine and the Grammar of Survival
Even in that moment of the catastrophe, for Liudmyla, it is “we” that will over-be. And that “we” included us, on this other anonymous end of the screen.
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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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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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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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“Parallel Tracks”: Sophie Ratcliffe on Academia, Memoirs, and Motherhood
“I used to want to experience everything. I don’t anymore.”
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Breaking the Cycle: Laurence Ralph on “Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him”
“My experience with the criminal justice system is wanting to scream, but realizing that you could also find yourself in a more precarious situation if you do that.”
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“I Am the Face of AIDS”: Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS
Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the 1980s–1990s AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced artificial and arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.
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“She Really Wanted Nothing to Do with It”: Gabriel Brownstein on the Ongoing Question of “Hysteria”
“I really became interested in the part of Freud that we don’t know much about, Freud before he became Freud.”
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“How a Fire Builds”: Talking with Nina St. Pierre about Mental Illness, Art, and Survival
“In grad school, I’d had this wacky drunken idea that the book had to be meta to be proper.”
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The Author and the Eulogist: On Love and Death in Nonfiction
Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions.
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Rethinking Holocaust Memory after October 7
“Why continue to teach the Holocaust? Why continue to build and visit Holocaust memorials and museums?”
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Infiltrating the Family
For decades in the UK, police infiltrated the radical social movements by insinuating themselves into the intimate, romantic, familial, and comradely spaces of those on whom they spied.
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“We Were Not That Band”—But What Was Sonic Youth?
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore’s memoir may tell us about his life. But he doesn’t give us much insight into the band they were.
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A Hole at the Bottom of the Book
For the writers Annie Ernaux and Hilary Plum, a paradox emerges with each new book: writing attempts “carry to completion” something lived, but also changes the original experience.
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On Not Asking “Should I Insert Myself in the Text?”
“We are obliged to acknowledge what we see and how we organize what we see.”
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Our Siege Is Long
Throughout his life, poet Muin Bseiso narrated the history of Palestinian struggle and criticized Western portrayals of Gaza. Today, Bseiso’s son dodges Israeli bombs to preserve his archives.
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“Finding Other Ways to Flow”: The Once and Future Le Guin
“There’s something very solitary in her writing as well. I almost think of it as solitary solidarity.”
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Symonds’s Facts, Our Future
One Victorian historian realized that if ideas of sexual morality changed across time, then 19th-century Britain could change, too.
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Saying Goodbye to Childhood: An Interview with Javier Zamora
“I hope people will see the heartbreak of a little kid having to grow up and say goodbye to his childhood in order to survive.”
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Ogden & Hardwick’s Everyday Enigmas
“Good afternoon, ma’am. Do you ever feel that it is so hard to know how to be happy?”
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Tender Gossip: Darryl Pinckney’s “Come Back in September”
Is there a writing life than can safely dispense with categories like identity and commitment, which count so much in how we live now?
