We could not have imagined the reality that was coming. Forget escalating: In a few months, even the little our crew had done before falling apart — the cold emails and messages to weapons workers; the community outreach with our masks lowered, for trust…
One day there is a serious earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — “Noah” — issues a tsunami warning for Alaska, which the National Weather Service overrules within an hour.…
Martha Stewart, Walter White, and Rodney Dangerfield walk into a bar. The bartender looks at Dangerfield, asks what he’s having. “Vodka soda,” he replies. The bartender starts shoveling ice. “Double?” he checks. “Course I am,” says Dangerfield.…
Years after defending his dissertation, perhaps unable to adapt or evolve, he appeared stuck in an eternal limbo that would give any student the night sweats. On the other hand, John seemed an extreme version of a kind of intellectual ideal.…
The more experienced attendees explain that here, one’s individual experience is seen as a symptom of the group’s dynamics. If someone is physically ill, it is because the system needs to eject someone; if someone feels rejected, it is because the group…
The problem came on slowly, like delayed-onset tinnitus: one day I notice the whole world’s pitch is off, and in the moment of noticing I realize it’s been like that for a long time.…
“Don’t write about me. Write about Korea, about the issues,” Mom has told me multiple times. Dad: “You seem to write about our family when you run out of topics.” I am embarrassed by memoir and simultaneously drawn to the form.…
Young recruits make ideal pupils: their minds are curious, their bodies likely tireless (and later, strong, for armed struggle), and their pasts, by definition, brief: no one needs to worry that much about a 12-year-old’s commitment to her bourgeois life,…
I saw the outline of the Americas from space. North America was belching out strands of fat pearls, diamonds, gold and silver coins, swimming pools, cars, high-end watches, like the whole landmass was a slot machine with thousands of volcano-size…
What scares them is something else: the realization spreading across Los Angeles that the private housing market isn’t just failing wildfire victims—it’s failing by design.…
The homies call it mobbin’. Mom shuttles us to and from Walmart, Taco Bell, Circle K, Blockbuster, the mall, while Sisqó—who previously lived in an abandoned car—rides shotgun in our silver minivan and slaps 2Pac and Biggie and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony songs…
On our lunch breaks we planned a union-organizing drive for the office. We would go to this café that was small enough that we could see everyone in there (no eavesdroppers), far enough away that it didn’t really make sense to walk there and back (no one…
Nowhere did I witness the guardsmen at the gates of the mind — those responsible for self-consciousness and self-doubt — more swiftly outsmarted, pacified, or outright killed than in that room.…
George Floyd’s murder made being black at the university significantly worse. When I try to understand how, I can’t help but look back on the chancellor’s words, ostensibly full of hope that the “national crisis” could “catalyze powerful change” — and how…
The dual messages felt scrambled by that dialectic of trauma—the pain of remembering, the need to move on; the need to have it remembered, the pain of others forgetting. And what about the name?…
In media and popular culture, Newark has long appeared as irredeemably unsexy, violent, destitute. “Queer Newark reclaims Newark,” Strub declares defiantly, “as a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.” The book snuffs out the…
