I can’t tell you what I wished you would be doing. I can’t redefine masculinity. I can’t redefine Black masculinity certainly. I am in the business of redefining Black womanness. You are in the business of redefining Black masculinity…I don’t… Continue Reading
This fall is never-ending. It has been sweater weather for months, and despite knowing this will not change I wait for a frigid wind to blow through. I’ve called home for winter coats and boots, had them shipped out West… Continue Reading
“The last few years have witnessed many great changes in the commercial life of the Argentine Republic, and none more remarkable then the growth of the American community both in numbers and importance…American progress in the River Plate has reached… Continue Reading
Paul calls one snowy evening to extend an invitation to me. I met him a few weeks ago, in front of the NYU library, where he was distributing copies of the newspaper Workers’ Vanguard. Ever since, he and I have… Continue Reading
The American university is facing a dual crisis. First, students can’t pay off the debts they’re running up from their tuition. Second, they’re being taught by an underclass of radically over-educated adjuncts who are subsisting, with PhDs in hand, at… Continue Reading
The young man, wearing a black dress clasped tight against his ankles by the wind and silver stilettos that expose his unpainted toes to the same, complains as we walk of his uncertainly tucked junk, which is slowly and softly… Continue Reading
In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.” —Benjamin Boretz I. I found my record player on a spring afternoon, the day after my apartment was burglarized. The night before,I had come home to… Continue Reading
I was barely north of Waterville when my car started making the sort of desperate, wheezing noises that old, poorly-maintained vehicles tend to make when you ask way too much of them.We’d been going for hours, and the clattering old… Continue Reading
I distinctly remember the first time I saw Portlandia. Not Portlandia the TV show, or even “Portlandia,” the fantasy land that increasingly passes for my hometown of Portland, Oregon. I’m talking about the statue. Located atop the entrance to an… Continue Reading
Ben and his reluctant automobile set out toward a frontier, a place off the map of what we know but still within the boundaries of these United States. He goes seeking what difference that distance makes.In so doing, he tries… Continue Reading
“With Your Shield or On It” is an audacious poem. The poet is reckless, irreverent; he waits on the street corner to be struck down for calling Iggy Pop and Jesus into the same line. The speaker claimsomnipotence,to see everything,… Continue Reading
I went to a reading recently in the West Village, by mostly middle-aged poets. Several of them, men and women, stood and read poems about their dead or dying parents. These parents had lived long, competent lives the poets seemed… Continue Reading
I read Teddy’s essay on the tiny screen of an iPhone, in a Starbucks in New York, half of it while waiting to use the bathroom, half of it while sitting at a small round table next to a beautiful… Continue Reading
“Lan knew he was right and could not argue with him. These days, she had not been able to respond to her son at all. He was magnanimous in the way he dealt with his less educated mother. She couldn’t… Continue Reading
In this piece, Jake addresses “more than one way to read a town.” He points out the dangers of one-dimensional narratives, like the caricature of “Portlandia” or the condescending portrait in the pages of the New York Times. But he… Continue Reading