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
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
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
It’s not so easy to talk about identity. First of all, the concept itself is an abstract one. What does it mean for something to be something else, anyway? And even beyond the discomfort that can result from talking about… Continue Reading
Some writing is born of a dogged faith in the undiminishing power of language. Still more is nursed in the dark, alone, alternately answering and conceding to that most crippling of writerly skepticisms: that words are only ever themselves; that… Continue Reading
When I was a kid, video games meant watching as much as they meant playing. It’s not that I didn’t love to play—and didn’t play plenty—but that, as a youngest brother whose closest friends wereyoungerbrothers,
Occupy Wall Street occurred as I was laid up, recovering from a shoulder surgery in my parents’ house in suburban New Jersey. From there, across the river, the movement appeared a chimera of ideals, naiveté, and anger. Media accounts emphasized… Continue Reading
At first, I wanted to write a response that would be a pastiche of Mariev Finnegan, but I simply haven’t smoked enough “saliva.” One suspects that her fictional world is a little too complete (right down to the consistent linguistic… Continue Reading