Essay

The Ways We Take Ourselves Apart

By Cameron Dezen Hammon December 17, 2019

While I am texting the man who is not my husband, bacteria is growing inside the bodies of my daughter and her best friend.

Family & Relationships

Essay

I and Thou: A Bigfoot Encounter

By Renée Branum December 16, 2019

It’s possible, even likely, that somehow all of us, even those among us who pay close attention, have missed something.

Religion

Essay

What the Doctor Ordered

By Margaret Wardlaw December 9, 2019

Caring for a dying patient, a pediatrician wrestles with questions of suffering and salvation.

Bodies & NatureHealth

Essay

Coming into Bloom

By DJ Cashmere November 26, 2019

Finding love and making peace with impermanence, with a little help from some sunflowers.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Essay

Artist in Residence

By Lawrence Levi November 19, 2019

What I learned—and didn’t—from living with a jazz legend.

Arts & Culture

Essay

Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through

By Ellen Wayland-Smith November 14, 2019

“Past their prime,” my mother says, shaking her head at pears forgotten on the kitchen counter, turning to rot.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Essay

No Country

By Andre Perry November 11, 2019

In an excerpt from his new book of essays, Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now, Andre Perry discusses race, identity, moving around the US, and the Midwest.

Family & RelationshipsRaceUSA

Essay

Lust for Science

By Cassie Donish November 1, 2019

What could gender, sex toys, rodents, and climate change possibly have in common?

Family & Relationships

Essay

After the Storm

By Mary Heglar October 22, 2019

How Hurricane Katrina and the murder of Emmett Till shaped one woman’s commitment to climate justice

Climate & Environment

Essay

The Space Between Us

By Emily James October 9, 2019

My daughter was five days old when I realized the love I had for her would fall short.

Family & Relationships

Essay

Why We Cry When We’re Angry

By Marissa Korbel October 8, 2019

I feel like an electric line, snapped from the pole by the wind. A live wire. I spark against the ground.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Out of the Maze

By Sandy Allen September 26, 2019

Searching for meaning in madness at London's Bethlem Museum of the Mind.

Arts & CultureFamily & Relationships

Essay

I Am Telling You What Happened To Me

By Susannah Nevison September 18, 2019

I keep coming back to the violence before the violence, the moment of narrative rupture.

Bodies & NatureConflict

Essay

Starshift

By Gabrielle Bellot September 9, 2019

In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home.

Climate & Environment

Essay

Everything We Do Not Know

By Aaron Gilbreath September 4, 2019

Environmental and personal fallout from the Fukushima disaster continues nearly a decade later.

Climate & Environment

Essay

Anthems for the Anthropocene

By Mario Reinaldo Machado August 26, 2019

Eco-hardcore music, with its aggressive lyrics and antisocial performances, upended stereotypes of hippie environmentalists—today those visceral live performances match the sense of panic around environmental concerns.

Climate & Environment

EssayLives

Jasmine Fingers

By Lubna Safi August 22, 2019

How does the poem keep us there? in memory? in the traces? keep us coming back?

Arts & CultureConflict

Essay

Bint el-Balad

By Nour Malas August 6, 2019

A journalist reflects on the difficulty of maintaining professional boundaries while covering the Syrian refugee crisis

ConflictMENAPolitics

Essay

Kidnapped, Tortured, and Navigating an Indifferent Court System

By Jen Ross July 31, 2019

After narrowly escaping a violent abduction, Linda Loaiza López has become an activist against gender-based violence.

Justice

Essay

Small Problem

By Helen Benedict July 23, 2019

An encounter with refugees and the legal system of Greece

EuropeGovernmentJustice

Essay

Before the Shaking Starts

By Trevor Quirk July 10, 2019

Living in the shadow of Utah’s next big earthquake.

Climate & Environment

Essay

An Infrastructure of Innocence

By DJ Cashmere June 25, 2019

On a trip to Alabama, reckoning with monuments, myths, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Arts & CultureRace

Essay

How I Wrote Certain of My (Fake) Poems

By Lucy Ives June 14, 2019

The author of Loudermilk reflects on “the weirdest form of history writing” she's ever done.

Lit World

Essay

Bead, Bed, and Alley

By T Fleischmann May 30, 2019

On a trip to Berlin, the spin of the moon, and the generosity of the artist

Family & Relationships

Essay

Nugrybauti

By Joel Mowdy April 24, 2019

In Lithuania, going astray while picking mushrooms is a common experience, with its own word. The same word is used to describe veering from the plot of a story—like my father did when he talked about his time in Vietnam.

Family & Relationships

EssayLives

Dancing Alvin Ailey’s Revelations in Black and Brown

By Jamila Wilkinson March 15, 2019

How can I perform a story that isn’t mine to tell?

Arts & CultureRace

EssayLives

An Apex of Babble

By John Sperry March 6, 2019

I grew up in a community where the phenomenon of speaking in tongues (called glossolalia by linguists) is more than just some loaves-and-fishes Sunday School curiosity.

Religion

Essay

What Remains

By Jacqueline Alnes February 21, 2019

How can I write a history of myself without remembering? And why am I compelled to?

AmericasBodies & Nature

Essay

New Series: Rewriting the West

By Adriana Gallardo, Michelle García, Fernanda Santos, Raúl Ramos, and Carolina A. Miranda February 19, 2019

Reconsidering the origin stories and mythologies of Los Angeles, Texas, Arizona, the Alamo, and a family.

Rewriting the West

Essay

Death of a Dream

By Michelle García February 19, 2019

As demographics shift, Latinos in Texas are claiming the majority and seeing themselves in the center of the national story.

Rewriting the West AmericasHistoryPolitics

Essay

The Alamo is a Rupture

By Raúl Ramos February 19, 2019

It’s time to reckon with the true history of the mythologized Texas landmark—and the racism and imperialism it represents.

Rewriting the West AmericasGovernmentHistoryPolitics

Essay

Remapping LA

By Carolina A. Miranda February 19, 2019

Before California was West, it was North and it was East: the uppermost periphery of the Mexican Empire, and the arrival point for Chinese immigrants making the perilous journey from Guangdong.

Rewriting the West AmericasHistoryRace

Essay

“The Best Kind of People”: Shifting Definitions of Citizenship and the Making of Arizona

By Fernanda Santos February 19, 2019

For a century, Anglos from cold corners of the country have been lured here by the promise that this was a place where they could live among their own, in communities with nary a brown person in sight.

Rewriting the West AmericasHistoryPolitics

Essay

The Lucky Ones

By Adriana Gallardo February 19, 2019

I told her we were brought over the Rio Grande on a raft. I never called it a smuggling.

Rewriting the West AmericasFamily & RelationshipsPolitics

Essay

White Witchery

By Elissa Washuta February 14, 2019

I just want a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excise the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left.

Bodies & Nature

EssayPhotography

To Smolder, Burn Slow

By Harrison Dietzman February 5, 2019

In this photoessay, a Washington State firefighter recounts how suppressing wildfires involves bleeding hands, burning lungs, and rare moments of freedom.

Climate & Environment

EssayLives

The History Before Us

By Jessica Jacobs January 21, 2019

How can we be sure the atrocities of the past will stay in the past?

ConflictHistory

Essay

V-2 and Saturn V: A Tale of Two Rockets

By Patrick Hicks January 11, 2019

What does it mean that the same men who built a deadly rocket for the Nazis helped get America to the moon?

HistoryUSA

Essay

In the Ruins of Paradise

By Tiffany Higgins December 17, 2018

I begin coughing uncontrollably, a wave of it crests, and then stops. I touch the tape on the windows.

Climate & EnvironmentUSA

EssayLives

Our Last Days in Country

By Curtis J. Graham November 29, 2018

A young Marine on being eighteen and deployed a few miles from the D.M.Z., meeting girls and waiting for ghosts.

Asia & OceaniaConflictTravel & AdventureUSA

Essay

How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

By Molly McGinnis November 23, 2018

I wrote this down in my notebook, beside the drawings. Life underground = too loud.

Family & Relationships

EssayPhotography

A Visit to the Border

By Francine Prose, with photographs by Judy Linn November 19, 2018

A trip to the border—and the bridge that connects Brownsville, Texas with Matamoros, Mexico—remembered in words in images.

AmericasPoliticsUSA

Essay

Listening for Ghost-Voices

By Anita Roy November 9, 2018

A novel borne out of an earthquake, a departed friend, and a translation from which lost voices rise.

Arts & CultureGenderSex

Essay

In Lagos, Space For My Thoughts To Fly

By Allyn Gaestel November 2, 2018

On nomadism, toxicity, and the question of home.

AfricaTravel & Adventure

Essay

When a Scar Is a Choice

By Charlee Dyroff October 12, 2018

A former athlete reflects on the physical reminders of her years on the court.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

The Franz Kafka Marriage Manual for Young Ladies

By Rebecca Schuman September 25, 2018

What to do with the art of a man more monstrous than the monster he created?

Arts & CultureLit World

Essay

The Uneasy Yoke

By Blair Hurley September 11, 2018

Would the world be better off, as my father sometimes wondered, completely free from religion? Would I be?

Religion

Essay

Russian Reversal: Performing Class and Power on Victory Day

By Roy Scranton July 16, 2018

The ways that Moscow commemorates victory over Nazi Germany bear a striking resemblance to the U.S.

ConflictHistory

Essay

At the County Fair, a Fantasy of Whiteness

By Benjamin Tausig June 11, 2018

In Ohio, efforts to wipe the Confederate flag from local fairs have been met with a powerful silence.

RaceUSA

Essay

Some Other I Before Me

By Joseph Osmundson May 21, 2018

On books as mentors for those of us who grew up in the wake of HIV/AIDS.

Lit World

Essay

Heaven Lake

By Nancy Jooyoun Kim May 15, 2018

On Korean reunification and my father’s death.

Family & RelationshipsPolitics

Essay

Morbidity & the Miniature

By Elizabeth Metzger May 11, 2018

I don’t want my child to be my miniature—I like discovering each day how much of a stranger he is.

Essay

White Girls at the Table

By Lynn Steger Strong May 8, 2018

On the privilege of disappearing.

Arts & CultureRace

Essay

A Long Hot Walk to the Mormon Promised Land

By Miles Fuller May 7, 2018

Sexually frustrated teens in period costumes undertake a Mormon pioneer trek. The worst part isn't the heat. It's the singing.

Deserts AmericasReligionSex

Essay

Words Disappear Here: My Journey from Somalia to Sweden

By Abdi Elmi and Linn Bursell, and translated from the Swedish by Gabriella Ekman May 7, 2018

As a teenager, Abdi Elmi fled the violence of Mogadishu, not knowing that what he would encounter in the Sahara would be as harrowing as the failed state he was leaving behind.

Deserts AfricaConflict

Essay

The Mirage: Writing and Upheaval in the Chihuahuan Desert

By Anna Badkhen May 7, 2018

The northern Chihuahuan Desert was drowned, kneaded, jabbed, choked with ash for half a billion years of geologic tumult. Now it's being throttled for oil.

Deserts AmericasClimate & Environment

Essay

Naked in Death Valley

By Claire Vaye Watkins May 7, 2018

Some facts, notes, data, information, statistics, and statements on the hot spring at Lake Tecopa.

Deserts AmericasBodies & Nature

Essay

In Egypt, the Drying Up of Dissent

By Basma Abdel Aziz, translated from the Arabic by Henry Peck May 7, 2018

Recounting the past of the Eastern Desert is my only refuge given the dire constraints of the present.

Deserts ConflictMENA

Essay

The Barbecue

By Sofija Stefanovic May 3, 2018

Kissing and kissing at the barbecue.

The Kiss Bodies & Nature

Essay

Is the US Border Patrol Committing Crimes Against Humanity?

Essay by John Washington May 2, 2018

What would it take you, personally, to deny water to someone dying of thirst?

AmericasJustice

Essay

Journey in Blue: Myths of the Mediterranean

By Aysegul Savas April 24, 2018

The boat voyages that shaped a family’s identity.

Family & RelationshipsMENA

Essay

The “Real” DMZ

By Jennifer Hope Choi April 24, 2018

Entering Korea’s Demilitarized Zone, in the unlikely town of Nottingham.

Asia & OceaniaConflictEurope

Essay

What Sharp Teeth You Have

By Lauren McCain April 23, 2018

I know how to stay safe among lions in the wild. Around men of my own species, things feel more complicated.

Bodies & NatureGender

Essay

John Chiara, and California’s Beauty and Terror

By Sophie Haigney April 18, 2018

As wildfires raged across California, the photographer’s surreal landscapes put my new home in perspective.

Climate & Environment

Essay

The Cleric and I

By Salar Abdoh April 9, 2018

Trailing a religious fighter in an Iraqi province where ISIS is an existential threat, looking to learn what drives men and women to take bullets for one another.

ConflictMENA

Essay

Looking for Katalin Street

By Rebecca Chace March 26, 2018

A real-life exploration of Magda Szabo's novel.

Arts & CultureLit World

Essay

Ghost Tigers: Climate Change and the Escalation of Extinction

By Sean P. Smith March 21, 2018

As the climate crisis intensifies, try this simple exercise: count how many animals you can’t see.

Climate & EnvironmentHistory

Essay

Burma Travelogue (Jet Lag Edition)

By Madhu H. Kaza March 20, 2018

On a trip to Yangon, genocide lurks just out of view.

Asia & OceaniaConflict

Essay

How Much Easier to Hate

By Michael Fischer March 15, 2018

A formerly incarcerated writer reflects on what prison can do to a person.

Bodies & NatureJustice

Essay

Kissing Paris Good-Bye

By Michael Croley March 7, 2018

We could have been embarking on a future instead of closing out the past.

Family & Relationships

Essay

Where Lost Luggage Goes to Be Found

By Susan Harlan March 5, 2018

A trip to Alabama's unclaimed baggage center, where objects lost in transit get a second chance at life.

Travel & Adventure

Essay

Churning the Days

By Hunter Braithwaite March 1, 2018

A collection of James Salter’s magazine writing often disappoints, because he’s only human.

Lit World

Essay

Journal Entry 1940

By Patricia Kramer February 28, 2018

For thirty years I had wanted a baby and now, by my own hand, she was gone.  

The Kiss Family & Relationships

Essay

Time’s Up for Me, Too

By Karolyn Gehrig February 22, 2018

Where are disabled people in the Time's Up movement?

Bodies & NatureGender

Essay

In Our House, We Speak in Hybrid Tongues

By Jenessa Abrams February 20, 2018

Communing with the author of the new short-story collection Hybrid Creatures.

Lit WorldTechnology & the Future

Essay

Mind the Gap

By Maggie O'Farrell February 13, 2018

Fertility challenges after a successful first child often go unspoken.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Hollywood, Ending

By John Schafer February 13, 2018

Three kisses in the City of Angels.

The Kiss Family & Relationships

Essay

Splash

By Shelley Salamensky February 9, 2018

Remembering a #MeToo moment in Franco’s Spain.

EuropeGender

Essay

Shawn Walker, Cultural Anthropologist

By Roslyn Bernstein February 7, 2018

A visit with the photographer and activist, whose first solo retrospective is now on exhibit at Steven Kasher Gallery.

Arts & Culture

Essay

A Partnership with God

By Shiva Rahbaran February 2, 2018

The novelist Nicholas Mosley saw humanity’s salvation at the confluence of love, faith, and technology.

Lit World

Essay

My Mother’s Secret Ballot

By Rachel Parsons January 29, 2018

She and I both grew up near Detroit. How could she vote for Trump?

Family & RelationshipsPoliticsUSA

Essay

The Summons

By Mark Doty January 18, 2018

The kiss you really want to talk about.

The Kiss Family & Relationships

Essay

The Consequences of El Salvador’s Abortion Ban

By Michelle Oberman January 11, 2018

A cautionary tale of how criminalization impacts women across class lines.

GenderPolitics

Essay

Underneath the Pavement, A Swelling of Grief

By John Vincler January 9, 2018

Seeing Dubuffet in St. Louis, then Kahlil Robert Irving in New York.

Arts & Culture

EssayPhotography

The Incendiary Photography of Jill Freedman

By Roslyn Bernstein December 6, 2017

Irreverent and incisive photographs of a 1968 camp on the National Mall evoke the power of protest.

Arts & Culture

EssayLives

Black Girl Going Mad

By Rivers Solomon December 4, 2017

Mental health, race, and trauma in the city of Good Christian Bitches.

HealthRace

Essay

Too Much Seinfeld

By Svetlana Kitto November 30, 2017

Being gay and moving east.

Family & Relationships

Essay

Blood and Power: Investigating a Ritual Murder in Liberia

By Ashoka Mukpo November 28, 2017

While a teenager is convicted of a gruesome killing, questions linger about occult violence among the power elite.

AfricaConflict

Essay

Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics

By Terese Svoboda November 17, 2017

Jacqueline Lamba, the scandalously beautiful artist and aquatic burlesque performer who enchanted Frida Kahlo, meets Suzanne Cesaire, known as the Black Panther of Négritude.

Arts & CultureLit World

Essay

Black American Princess in Training

By Glynn Pogue November 16, 2017

How a work of satire helped me embrace the stereotype.

ClassRace

Essay

When Silence is a Plea Bargain

By Parker Carroll October 31, 2017

On life as a stutterer.

Essay

Not That Story

By Nalini Jones October 28, 2017

This is a story about what girls must learn and how dangerous it can feel to learn it.

Bodies & NatureGender

Essay

Search and Destroy

By Susannah Felts October 24, 2017

My daughter has bugs living in her hair. It is my job to kill them.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Essay

Seeing White

By Susan Briante October 9, 2017

The painful ways the world teaches race and color.

AmericasRace

Essay

Jew-in-the-Box

By Julia Bosson October 1, 2017

What Americans can learn from Germany’s confrontation with the past.

ConflictHistory

Essay

Drain the Swamp

By Hunter Braithwaite September 28, 2017

Over fifty years ago, author J.G. Ballard was giving us words for today's hurricanes.

Climate & EnvironmentLit World

EssayLives

Writer-in-Residence at a Homeless Shelter

By John Cotter September 25, 2017

A teacher chronicles his month in a Colorado facility, where charmers and conmen offer advice and trauma is tallied by number.

Americas

EssayReview

Semiotics Has Never Been More Thrilling

By Jordan A. Rothacker September 14, 2017

Laurent Binet’s latest novel is a great big joke, and a crash course in literary theory.

Lit World

Essay

Aughts

By Jasmine Dreame Wagner September 11, 2017

Recalling art, sex, and personal politics in the twenty-first century.

Arts & CultureUSA

Essay

An Inconvenient Movement

By Mimi Bluestone August 30, 2017

The problem with Al Gore’s latest documentary about the climate crisis is Al Gore himself.

Climate & Environment