Essay

The Bloody Unicorn

By Amanda Parrish Morgan June 30, 2020

Reading frightening stories with my children in turbulent times.

Arts & CultureFamily & Relationships

Essay

The Art of Stillness

By Ayden LeRoux June 25, 2020

The first time I saw a mammogram of mine, I was stunned by the beauty of the image—just as I had been enthralled by sketches of my own body.

Arts & CultureHealth

Essay

Growing Up Sansei in LA

By Karen Tei Yamashita June 23, 2020

As we moved through different neighborhoods, my family stayed in a Japanese American bubble.

Family & Relationships

Essay

The Loneliest City

By Rosa Boshier June 18, 2020

Laura Aguilar’s Southern California photography reveals the intimacy and the isolation that have always been part of the fabric of Los Angeles.

Arts & CultureBodies & NatureUSA

Essay

The Season of Children

By Emilio Carrero June 11, 2020

After a series of hurricanes ravages one Central Florida neighborhood, three kids consider home, change, and the efficacy of destruction.

Climate & EnvironmentRaceUSA

Essay

The Problem of White Efficacy

By Rebekah Frumkin June 4, 2020

Striving for goodness is antithetical to reckoning with whiteness.

JusticeRace

Essay

Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib

By Sejal Shah May 22, 2020

Remembering an American girlhood.

Family & Relationships

Essay

The New Troy

By Jesse Lee Kercheval May 11, 2020

Reflections on closing borders, and the propensity of the world to change.

AmericasHealthTravel & Adventure

Essay

Becoming Animal

By Kimi Eisele May 6, 2020

All of us touching our faces, touching habitats, dislodging species.

Bodies & NatureHealth

Essay

The Pandemic Novelist Has Regrets

By Thea Lim April 26, 2020

In books and movies we've imagined it would take a gruesome virus to push working people to the edge. In reality, late capitalism is enough.

Bodies & NatureHealth

Essay

Astrophotography and the Zeitgeist

By Alessandro Tersigni April 22, 2020

Photos of Earth taken from space can teach us about how we think—about our home planet, and its place in the universe.

Climate & Environment

Essay

Ordinary Insanity

By Sarah Menkedick April 7, 2020

America’s fetishization of reproductive risk is driving mothers mad.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Essay

Notes from a Hypochondriac

By Matthew Lansburgh April 2, 2020

The age of COVID-19 has a way of heightening our anxieties, though that doesn't mean they're new.

Health

Essay

A Country on the Cusp of Change

By Tara Cheesman March 31, 2020

Hwang Sok-yong's fictions delve into Korean class dynamics.

Asia & Oceania

Essay

The Optimist’s Apocalypse

By Rebekah Frumkin March 30, 2020

What if the world can “end,” as your life has many times—and then begin again?

Climate & EnvironmentHealthPolitics

Essay

Medusa and the Invention of Spells

By Kathryn Nuernberger March 25, 2020

A spell is most effective when you want something and can remember a time it already existed.

Arts & CultureBodies & Nature

Essay

From Environmental Crisis to Pandemic, Waging a War with Nature

By John Kaag March 17, 2020

What the 19th century American pragmatist William James can teach us in the age of coronavirus.

Climate & EnvironmentPolitics

Essay

The Terrarium

By Brice Particelli March 5, 2020

The flat earth community has been on a fast, upward climb.

Bodies & NaturePolitics

Essay

Beasts of the Fields

By Aimée Baker February 19, 2020

Family heartache on the northern New York border, and the creatures that bore witness to it.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Essay

Can’t Win

By Andres Begue February 3, 2020

Loyalty, loss, and local fandom, from New Orleans to New York City.

Sports

Essay

World Without End

By Martha Park January 20, 2020

Lately, I’ve found the language of apocalypse creeping up in my own life for the first time, and with increasing frequency.

Climate & EnvironmentReligion

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