The Big Cats, Part III
On fever dreams and wounds to lick
A wounded animal conceals itself
to hide from death and to seek it....
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When the Penis Is Property
Why we can’t talk about the sexuality of enslaved African American men
In Joseph Lavallée's novel, The Negro Equalled By Few Europeans, an enslaved African man named Itanoko describes being raped by a white slaver named Urban. The white man was "struck with my comeliness,” Itanoko says, which "made him violate, what is most sacred among men.’” According to Thomas Foster’s Rethinking ...
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The Big Cats, Part II
On sleeping dangers, grocery runs, and hiding out in the wilderness
Last night I dreamed there was a tiger sleeping / in the bosom of the family, the same light canary / color as the dog. ...
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The Big Cats, Part I
On tigers, Richard Brautigan, and six feet of distance
In the Bronx the tigers have come down / with a dry cough and febrile dreams...
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Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic
Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague
We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase.
Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...
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The Urn
How I Stopped Loving Design
Despite the disappointment, something very valuable was salvaged from our conversations. We had been sharing our enthusiasm for the writers Jerzy Pilch and Olga Tokarczuk when Pawel introduced me to the work of Marcin Wicha. Wicha is as sardonic as Pilch and Tokarczuk, and like them, he writes about politics. ...
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Void Bitches
To be trans is to be already left out of the design of the world.
If trans writers have an affinity for the disaster of the world, maybe it’s because our bodies are a disaster already. Now that the whole planet has some kind of dysphoria, maybe it’s our time to shine.
It’s a ludicrous idea, I know, but one reads in these times with a ...
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Whose Home? Whose Rule?
Nandita Sharma’s Home Rule and the politics of autochthony
Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press: 2020)
In February 2002, five months after Narendra Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, an anti-Muslim pogrom erupted in his state. In three months of violence, Hindu nationalist rioters raped and murdered hundreds of Muslim ...
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Hope, Revolution, and Survival
An interview with Morgan Parker
Masha Shollar [MS]: You’ve said that you trick yourself into writing by making yourself laugh. This collection is so intense and not one I would automatically think of as humorous, even though poems like “Matt” and “Brooklyn” for instance are, in ways, very funny. But they still had these dark ...
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Killing It
TV’s Killing Eve as fashion epiphany
Eve, whose sense of style borders on grunge, is the foil to Villanelle’s haute couture. The government agent’s closet is a study in neutrals, while her counterpart’s is as highly keyed as her sociopathic personality. Villanelle fears nothing, certainly not color. Her wardrobe is as eclectic as Eve’s is predictable. But ...
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5 Charts that Explain COVID-19 Impacts in NYC
Social Vulnerability Indicators Predict Inequity in NYC COVID-19 Cases
Once again frontline, low income and communities of color are most impacted. At the time of this writing, there have been 147,297 confirmed cases and 15,869 deaths in New York City, with the City on mandatory “P.A.U.S.E” until May 15, 2020. In early March, the Urban Systems Lab team asked the question, ...
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The World Is Absolutely Full of Wonder
An interview with Mary Ruefle
In
Dunce, Mary Ruefle
examines death, endings, and our relationship to the everyday objects and
rituals that remind us, even while they provide comfort and solace, of the
fundamental frailty and uncertainty of life. We spoke recently by phone (the
“Contact” section of Ruefle’s website states, wonderfully, that she does not
own a computer and that ...
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