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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The Waiting Is the Point: Time, Suffering, and Medicaid
“To be poor and sick in America is to live in delay. The Medicaid system does not just reflect that reality—it enforces it.”
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They Would Not Dream of Flowers: Translating Through the Tehran Blackout
As the entire country was plunged into a digital blackout, the only light remaining in my room was the cold, clinical glow of my disconnected laptop. There, in that forced isolation, I sat translating a story about death.
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AI=B+
“The essays ChatGPT produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate.”
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“No Future” Lexicon: Nothingness
Beyond the existential and metaphysical anxiety it provokes, nothingness also constitutes an ontological opening: it compels societies to produce symbolic and cultural responses to ward off the fear of chaos.
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Style and Politics: On “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.
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The Misuses of the University
Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars at the nation’s first research university have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?
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XOXO, Ricardo Ortiz (1961–2025)
To hear him speak was to feel how literature can still shape a life; how beauty, thought, and feeling can move us forward together.
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Eisenstein’s Unrealized Worlds
Can a film that was never finished reveal the possibility of an alternative social system?
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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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Displacement as Method
I left Gaza in 2014. My family stayed. I’ve lived in Algeria, now Taiwan… We move. This is not background information. This is method.
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The Once and Future Deportation Flight?
78 years ago today, a US plane deporting 28 Mexican nationals crashed into California’s Los Gatos Canyon, killing all aboard.
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B-Sides: Lydia Millet’s “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart”
What if you wanted something a bit more from the giants of the past: to force them to look at what they’ve done, to hold them accountable for the world we now inhabit, thanks to them?
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Extracting Blackness, from the Middle Ages to Today
I could not look at the dismembered Ethiopian leg without feeling the weight of a racial history that has never quite let up.
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Will Cuban Americans Choose Trumpism, or Solidarity?
Voting overwhelmingly for Trump, Cuban Americans are now mostly silent as the new administration cracks down on all migrants, including Cubans.
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Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education
We are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education.
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“Paris Latino”: How Latin America Migrated to Europe
“Paris est la capitale de l’Amérique latine,” said Mexican essayist Carlos Fuentes.
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The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction
When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself.
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Cool Enchantment
The ad is seductive but transparent. We don’t believe the copy but appreciate its innocence.
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B-Sides: J. L. Carr’s “A Month in the Country”
The impact of the novel’s silences and enigmas is amplified by the enigma that is Carr himself.
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China’s Imagined Pasts and Futures: On YouTuber Li Ziqi
She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities.
