Clips

The push and pull between past and present is the great drama of Washington, D.C. Once you know to look, you’ll see it everywhere. The newly renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza — its great yellow block letters both immediately recognizable and extremely photogenic — abuts Lafayette Square, in front of the White House, which once was an open-air slave market. The Smithsonian Institution marks its 175th anniversary with its first national Latino gallery on the National Mall: a new exhibition space to open inside the National Museum of American History. The new Kimpton Banneker Hotel, just north of Scott Circle, is named after the city’s great polymath, Benjamin, the 18th-century free black writer and astronomer who surveyed the District’s boundaries. And making his debut at the National Zoo is Xiao Qi Ji (“Little Miracle”), a panda cub whose presence can be traced back to Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. But the pandemic-age inauguration of a new president in January will doubtless be the city’s biggest milestone — unless this is the year D.C. finally becomes a state.

Roundtable interview, APIs at scale - Increment

Roundtable interview, Frontend at scale - Increment

Roundtable interview, Software architecture at scale - Increment

2019

Article, It List 2019: Our Editors’ Picks of the Best New Hotels in the World - Travel + Leisure

Eaton DC — Washington, D.C.

The flagship location of Katherine Lo’s (daughter of Langham hotel founder Lo Kah-shui) new brand of activism-themed hotels, Eaton DC is a lush oasis of green on an otherwise barren stretch of K Street — DC’s famous, if drab, lobbying corridor. It’s a paragon of millennial chic: warm brass, leather, and wood-filled interiors feature more plants than you can shake a watering can at. A staff of veteran community organizers and abundant physical spaces — coworking offices, meeting rooms, a movie theater, and even a digital radio studio — built to accommodate the work of local and visiting activists help establish the hotel’s progressive cred, as does its self-described “radical library,” with books from Jacqueline Woodson and bell hooks. Homey, Instagram-ready rooms have mini bars with tarot decks on the menu and the UN Declaration of Human Rights where a Bible might be. Don’t expect a view, but the hotel’s superb (if pricey) coffee shop, Kintsugi, is the perfect perch from which to people watch.

Roundtable interview, Engineering teams at scale - Increment

Roundtable interview, Testing at scale - Increment

Interview, The QA Q&A - Increment

Roundtable interview, Open source at scale - Increment

2018

Article, State of the Nation - Suitcase

As world capitals go, however, few are as overshadowed by their governments as DC. It’s not that people don’t go – indeed, most Americans visit Washington DC on school or family trips – but their focus is usually federal. Think government buildings, national monuments and the city’s enviable array of free museums. It’s easy to get lost in this marble-clad core and forget the existence of the surrounding neighborhoods, much less venture into them. But those who neglect the rest of DC are missing out on a great American city – one that hides in plain sight.

Review, The Piranhas by Roberto Saviano - Bookforum

Nicolas calculates, Nicolas inflicts, Nicolas kills. Readers are meant to admire this clever, handsome boy who quotes Machiavelli off the top of his head. “Just and unjust, good and bad. They’re all the same,” he contemplates early in the novel. (The Piranhas often slips into a close third person perspective.) “On his Facebook wall Nicolas had lined them up: the Duce shouting out a window, the king of the Gauls bowing down to Caesar, Muhammad Ali barking at his adversary flat on his back. The strong and the weak. That’s the only real distinction. And Nicolas knew which side he was on.”

Article, Dylan Sprouse is Bringing Mead to a New Generation - The National

Manifesto, Why We Need a Magazine of the Future - How We Get to Next

Article, This Bowl of Dan Dan Noodles Just Might Be the Best Airport Food in the World - Food & Wine

Article, The Best Breakfast at 35,000 Feet - Extra Crispy

Interview, Tracy K. Smith on the Politics of Poetry - Nylon

Article, How South Africa’s ‘Cradle of Humankind’ Got the Title - Popular Science

Article, Noshes From Underground - Rhapsody

Monique Fiso is reintroducing New Zealand to Maori cuisine, and reinventing fine dining along the way.

Essay, Starbucks Changed My Hometown. Not Necessarily For The Better. - BuzzFeed

For at least a little while, the 13th and U Starbucks was the kind of place Magic Johnson said he wanted. Homework was finished, gossip traded, numbers exchanged. Every day we kept the bathroom unlocked and the chairs out. We filled cups of water for the man, John, who slept on the street nearby and who’d bring us, raven-like, flowers and doodads he collected, telling stories of his childhood on a farm in Virginia. We served espresso — strong and hot — to the East African drivers who stopped for a quick pick-me-up. We traded Frappuccinos for chili cheese fries with the girls who worked at Ben’s across the street. We played music on our tinny, tiny flip phones and taught ourselves the steps to Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” when the store was quiet. We picked up orders (extra mumbo sauce) for one another from the carry-out while on break. We gave one another rides home. We made free drinks for our friends who came to visit. We made even more for ourselves. We scrimped and saved and spent. We signed up for health insurance. We filled the calendar with shifts.

Article, Is Masdar City a Ghost Town or a Green Lab? - Popular Science

Designed for pedestrians, roads are narrow and shady—angled in a way to catch the wind that moves between the Gulf and the desert. As a result, it’s a streetscape that needs neither cars nor air conditioning.

While this feels innovative, it’s based on the plans of old Arabic cities such as Aleppo, in Syria, and Shibam, in Yemen. “This is pure sustainability without any high-tech device,” says Cugurullo. “Just traditional urbanism dating back to many centuries ago.”

Article, What It Means for a Restaurant to Get a Michelin Star - Travel + Leisure

Restaurants in areas without Michelin Guides — no matter how good they are — will never receive Michelin stars. And a Venn diagram of four-dollar sign restaurants and three-Michelin star restaurants would show a Michelin island surrounded by a very costly sea. Which is to say: not all expensive restaurants have three Michelin stars, but all restaurants with three Michelin stars are expensive.

“It is all about the food,” Rebecca Burr, the editor of the Michelin Guide, insisted in a 2014 interview with The Telegraph. But when she cited the qualities that elevate restaurants through the rankings, she described — in addition to “technical strength” and “signature dishes" — a quality of “refinement, something that sets them apart” and a restaurant’s ability to provide the “ultimate culinary experience.” These qualities tend to cost a lot, even if they relate back to food.

Article, Trailblazing Luxury - Rhapsody

Article, This Is the Luxury Airport Lounge We All Want Access To - Travel + Leisure

Article, Where Travelers Can Find Delta Air Lines Hubs - Travel + Leisure

Article, How to Have a Perfect Lake Vacation at Lake Ouachita - Travel + Leisure

Article, How to Pick the Best Chase Ultimate Rewards Credit Card For You - Travel + Leisure

Article, How to Get Access to Delta’s Sky Club Lounges - Travel + Leisure

Article, The Best Cash-back Credit Cards for Travelers - Travel + Leisure

Article, Why the American Express Platinum Card Is One of the Best for Frequent Fliers - Travel + Leisure

Article, Should You Buy That Cheap WOW Air Ticket? - Travel + Leisure

Article, A Guide to Enjoying In-flight Entertainment on Delta Air Lines - Travel + Leisure

Article, When to Visit Ireland for the Most Sunshine (and the Best Deals) - Travel + Leisure

Article, 5 Tricks for Getting Discounted Uber Rides - Travel + Leisure

Article, Watch What Happens When a ‘Glory Hole’ Opens in Lake Berryessa - Travel + Leisure

Essay, Far Flung: Salzburg - Rhapsody

We are 31 going on 32, cousins born 10 months apart. Nora and I board a tour bus in rainy Salzburg, a Baroque gem at the foot of the Alps, all green patina church domes and hourly choruses of church bells. Her mother and mine are sisters, and the two of us are sisterlike, our lives as linked as kids in matching playclothes. The bus is a small United Nations, carrying passengers from Portugal, Indonesia, Brazil, China, Wisconsin, Bahrain, Kansas, Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea, Canada, and England who—like us—have come to Salzburg on a very particular pilgrimage. We look through the bus’s rain-streaked windows up to the Nonnberg Abbey, the oldest convent in the German-speaking world, as our tour guide explains that it’s where our real-life protagonist was a postulant. She raises the volume on the onboard TV, switching to a scene set in the abbey’s interior (though it was actually filmed on a soundstage). Like so (la ti do), our bus is alive with The Sound of Music.

2017

Article, How to Spend a Perfect Weekend at Lake Cushman - Travel + Leisure

Article, A Guide to Visiting Florida’s Largest Lake - Travel + Leisure

Article, Why the Autobahn Isn’t as Fast and Furious as You Think - GQ

Article, This Tiki Bar on a Cliff Will Get You All the Likes -GQ

Article, The Best Lake Erie Beaches for a Relaxing Getaway Any Time of Year - Travel + Leisure

Article, Lake Superior Is the Northern Destination You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Visit - Travel + Leisure

Travel tips, Travel + Leisure

● How to Get Your Passport Photos Taken at Walgreens

● How to Get Your Passport Photos Taken at CVS

● How to Use Your Costco Membership to Get Amazing Vacation Deals

● How to Find Cheap Flights to Miami

● How to Find Cheap Flights to Chicago

● How to Find Cheap Flights to New York City

● How to Find Cheap Flights to Paris

● How to Maximize Your Delta Frequent Flier Miles and Get Elite Status

● A Guide to Mastering Amtrak’s Guest Rewards Program

● How to Use This Secret Tool to Find Amazing Flight Deals

Interview, How Gabriel Tallent Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Paul Yoon Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Celeste Ng Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Victor LaValle Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Jenny Zhang Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Inflight Wifi, Travel + Leisure

● How Delta Became One of the World’s Top Airlines for Inflight Wi-Fi

● How to Get Wi-Fi for Less on Alaska Airlines

● How to Get Wi-Fi on Your JetBlue Flight

● Will Spirit Airlines Ever Get Inflight Wi-Fi?

● Will Frontier Airlines Ever Offer Inflight Wi-Fi?

● Everything You Need to Know About Using Wi-Fi on American Airlines

“A Brief Interview with Molly McArdle” by Ryan Sarter - “Brief Interviews with Cool People”

Interview, How Riley Sager Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Julie Klam Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Gabe Habash Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Matthew Klam Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Edwidge Danticat Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Howard Markel Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Points of interest articles, Travel + Leisure

● 8 Can’t-Miss Points of Interest in North Carolina

● 8 Can’t-Miss Points of Interest in Asheville, North Carolina

● 9 Can’t-Miss Points of Interest in Wilmington, North Carolina

● 8 Can’t-Miss Points of Interest in Charleston, South Carolina

● 8 Can’t-Miss Points of Interest in Vancouver

● 8 Incredible Points of Interest You Can Visit in Thailand

● The Best Points of Interest in France for a Whirlwind Tour

● Free Things to Do in San Diego

● Free Things to Do in Dallas

Travel tip articles, Travel + Leisure

● Everything You Need to Know About the NEXUS Pass

● Everything You Need to Know About TSA Approved Carry-on Luggage

● How to Avoid Blood Clots When Flying

● How to Relieve Bloating After Flying

Name articles, Travel + Leisure

● 7 Beautiful Japanese Names and Meanings

● 14 Beautiful Italian Names and Their Meanings

● 17 Beautiful Irish Names and Meanings

● 16 Beautiful Spanish Names and Meanings

● 28 Beautiful German Names and Their Meanings

● Beautiful Hawaiian Names and Their Meanings

● 21 Beautiful French Names and Their Meanings

Feature, A Disappearing Pile of Sand - Oxford American

Beach sky is different than prairie sky: it bleeds into the water, without boundary. Often on the Outer Banks, especially down on Hatteras Island, where the beach has worn so thin that ocean and sound are barely two hundred yards apart, I feel like I am on some other planet, an outer space of air and water. Though I have traveled farther from my home in the Northeast, and to places more remote, none feels quite so distant—foreign and far away—as this shifting, ancient pile of sand off the coast of North Carolina, twenty-five miles from the mainland.

Article, Incredible Tropical Rainforest Animals to See on Your Next Vacation - Travel + Leisure

Article, Incredible Tropical Rainforest Plants to See on Your Next Vacation - Travel + Leisure

Interview, How Joyce Carol Oates Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Catherine Lacey Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Alexander McCall Smith Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Interview, How Joshua Ferris Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Science articles, Travel + Leisure

● Why the Ocean Is Blue

● Why the Sky Is Blue

● Why We Have Seasons

● Why Do Stars Twinkle

Interview, How Rakesh Satyal Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Article, Your Travel Guide to Old Havana, The Can’t-Miss Neighborhood of Cuba’s Capital - GQ

Visa articles, Travel + Leisure

● Everything You Need to Know about Applying for Visas

● Do You Need a Visa to Visit Canada?

● Do You Need a Visa to Visit Thailand?

● Do You Need a Visa to Visit Vietnam?

● Do You Need a Visa to Visit Australia?

● Do You Need a Visa to Visit India?

Interview, How Neil Degrasse Tyson Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

Article, Everything You Need to Know About How to Travel to Cuba - GQ

Interview, How Patricia Lockwood Does Breakfast - Extra Crispy

List, Seven Books for Spring - Brooklyn Magazine

List, 21 Places to Take Your Mom to Brunch This Mother’s Day - Travel + Leisure

List, 6 Glenlivet Cocktail Recipes That’ll Have You Planning a Vacation in Scotland - Travel + Leisure

Interview, The Work of Translation: Talking to Valeria Luiselli about Tell Me How It Ends, Immigration, and Why She Lives in the United States - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, The United Thots of America: Talking with Tommy Pico, Fran Tirado, Dennis Norris II, and Joe Osmundson about Their New Podcast - Brooklyn Magazine

Review, Long and Pointless and in Love: on Elif Batuman’s The Idiot - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, What It Means to Be All Grown Up: An Interview with Jami Attenberg - Brooklyn Magazine

List, 8 Fantastic Cultural Criticism Reads - Brooklyn Magazine

Interviews, “The Brooklyn 100” - Brooklyn Magazine

● Alice Sola Kim, fiction writer

● Angela Flournoy, novelist

● Glory Edim, book club founder

● Gregory Pardlo, poet

● Jacqueline Woodson, author

● Kashana Cauley, tv writer

● Nicole Taylor, cookbook author and food podcaster

● Nikole Hannah Jones, journalist

● Penina Roth, reading organizer

● Shani O. Hilton, editor

● Tony Tulathimutte, novelist

Review, On ‘Bad Dads’ and the New Jonathan Baumbach - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, Hella Hella Serious Dire Truth Telling with Poet Morgan Parker - Brooklyn Magazine

Profile, The Rise of Roxane Gay - Brooklyn Magazine

On the phone, Saeed Jones and I talk about Difficult Women, and the kind of female characters Gay writes about. “In almost every story,” he observes, “there’s a silent kind of gazing between women in different contexts.” Sisters, the wives of brothers, a man’s two partners, a fitness instructor and the new woman in class—the list is easy to populate—and “often men don’t know what’s even going on.” He distinguishes this gaze from the way men look at women—with the power of the sun—direct, intense, nonreciprocal. Gay’s women, Jones argues, look back at each other, at us. It’s an exchange. “They’re aware,” he says. “It changes the dynamic.”

I recognize that same quiet, collaborative, destabilizing gaze from the Center for Fiction reading in 2012; from Gay’s work as an editor; from the writing itself. In fiction and in real life, Gay creates spaces for us to look at each other, to create trust, to take risks. “To read Roxane Gay’s work is to be read by Roxane Gay,” Jones says. And what a gift it is.

Article, How to Make a Proper Mint Julep - Travel + Leisure

Article, The Best Outdoor Happy Hours in New York City - Travel + Leisure

Article, Everything You Need to Know About the NEXUS Pass - Travel + Leisure

Profile, A Life’s Work: On Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1 - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, “A Place That’s Built on Reading”: Talking with Isaac Fitzgerald on the City’s “One Book, One New York” Initiative - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview - Celebrating Frederick Douglass on Martin Luther King Day with Ted Hamm - Brooklyn Magazine

2016

List, The Best Christmas Tree in Every State - Travel + Leisure

Photo essay, Behind the Scenes at BAM’s The Hard Nut - Brooklyn Magazine

Profile, Lou Nasti and His Wonderful World - Brooklyn Magazine

“I’m not good talking with this,” the Nasti of today says, miming typing on a keyboard. “I’m good talking like this”—and his hands go broadly gestural. “I’m Italian,” he explains (unnecessarily). Later he puts on his half-moon spectacles and squints through them, grabbing one end of his voluminous, storybook mustache for emphasis. “Don’t I look like Geppetto?”

Article - When Will We Eradicate HIV/AIDS—Or Will We Ever? - Esquire

Feature - Behind the Scenes with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Spectacular - Travel + Leisure

Outside, after the show, there’s snow on 6th Avenue: soap bubbles shoot over the sidewalk and street from above the famous neon marquee. Children and adults hold out their hands to catch the wet bits of white as they float down. One little girl collects enough of the faux-snow to build herself a white beard and slick down her hair. Surprise, delight, flit across people’s faces—only now, unlike in the darkened theater, it’s visible.

Interview - Searching for Jason Diamond: Talking John Hughes and Home with Debut Author and Vol. 1 Brooklyn Founder - Brooklyn Magazine

Article - How to Tour the Amalfi Coast Like Beyoncé - Travel + Leisure

Interview - The Revolutionaries Try Again: Mauro Javier Cardenas on His First Novel’s New Relevance under Trump - Brooklyn Magazine

List - Art in the Wake of Trump - Brooklyn Magazine

Introduction - For a Less Bad Present: Poetry from Brooklyn Magazine - Brooklyn Magazine

Article - “Central to the Story of America”: Jade Chang on Immigration and Her Debut Novel Wangs vs the World - Brooklyn Magazine

Review, A Swing and a Miss: On Zadie Smith’s Swing Time - Brooklyn Magazine

Profile, “This Is Just What Success Looks Like”: The Illuminating Work of Saeed Jones - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, To Boldly Read: Star Trek Nonfiction - Google Play Books

Review, The Mothers: The Debut Novel You Should Be Reading - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, Marking Time: Wendy MacNaughton and Isaac Fitzgerald on the Secret Behind All Tattoos and Their New Book Knives & Ink - Brooklyn Magazine

Profile, Glory Edim is the Future of Reading - Brooklyn Magazine

Essay, Musical Map of the USA: Washington D.C.— Parliament - Brooklyn Magazine

More and more coming home is like the bewildering space funk of “Mothership Connection” rather than the buoyant, brassy utopianism of “Chocolate City.”

Article, This Is How Star Trek Invented Fandom - GQ

After five days without sunlight or fresh air, alongside a small army of uniforms and aliens and uniformed aliens, I wonder if this is what it’s like to live on a starship. In an area called Quark’s Bar, Data picks through a bean salad. Cell phones, when they go off, chirp like TOS communicators or intone the theme song to TNG. Klingons hold open doors. From behind, or even the side, employees on the casino floor—at both the Rio and my own hotel—start to look like Starfleet officers: their uniforms have the same solid color palette, the same black collars. And outside, in Vegas proper? It’s just one giant holodeck. Choose your program: Perhaps fin-de-siècle Paris? Maybe Venice during the Renaissance? How about ancient Egypt? I’m halfway between delirium and bliss.

Article, At Home with “Brownstone”: the Metropolis Ensemble Celebrates Ten Years - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, Can’t Get Tickets to Hamilton? Go Visit the Founding Father’s Manhattan Home - Travel + Leisure

Article, The 9/11 Novel That Wasn’t: Talking with Kathleen Donohoe about Ashes of Fiery Weather - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, Cross River with Rion Amilcar Scott: Talking Fiction and Geography with the author of Insurrections - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, Street Meet: Star Trek Convention, Las Vegas - Extra Crispy

“We actually met because of Star Trek. It was Halloween and we both went to the club wearing our Starfleet uniforms. We wouldn’t have met otherwise.”

Essay, Harry Potter and the Story That Did Not End: On The Cursed Child and J.K. Rowling’s Ever-Expanding Universe - Brooklyn Magazine

As Harry Potter grows, its power weakens: with each new expansion, a constriction; with each new detail, an impoverishment; with each new revelation, a falsehood. The revisions Rowling now imposes on her series do not make sense. They are lazy and dumb and actually straight-up racist. It’s the racism of your well-meaning rich and liberal aunt, but it’s still racism.

Article, My Star Trek Makeover - Nylon Magazine

“I was putting lipstick on a Klingon earlier, it was kind of epic.”

Winter articles, Travel + Leisure

● The Best Finds at the Bryant Park Christmas Market

● The Best Winter Break Destinations

● Romantic Christmas Getaways

● The Best German Christmas Markets

● What to Do on New Year’s Eve in New York

● Posh New Year’s Eve Dinners to Add to Your Bucket List

● The Best Bars Open on Christmas Day

Essay, There Will Be Blood Sausage - Extra Crispy

The sometimes-taboo inclusion of blood somehow makes sausage even more to the point. Why clean up something that is at its core a mess, a compromise, a comingling? In this way blood sausage is perhaps the ultimate sausage, the most sausage sausage, the “real America” to bloodless sausage’s fake America. Blood sausage does not fuck around. It is made of blood. Blood sausage knows what its job is and does it. It will feed you. It will waste nothing.

Interview, Talking to the Woman Behind New York Magazine’s Ask Polly Column, Author Heather Havrilesky - Brooklyn Magazine

List, 100 Books to Read for the Rest of 2016 - Brooklyn Magazine

Profile, How to Eat Breakfast After the Apocalypse - Extra Crispy

Moore isn’t preparing for a future she fears. She’s preparing for one in which she emerges triumphant—her years of preparation suddenly validated, an “I told you so” on a global scale.

Autumn articles, Travel + Leisure

● The Very Best Pumpkin Beers for Fall

● America’s Best Pumpkin Farms

● Where to Go Pumpkin Picking in New Jersey

● The 12 Best Places to See Fall Foliage in Maine

● The 12 Best Places to See Fall Foliage in Vermont

● The Best Places to See Fall Foliage in New Hampshire

● What to Pack for Your Next Fall Getaway

Interview, Anna North Talks about Sophie Stark, Bisexuality, and the Human Cost of Art - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, How Queens Became a Bookstore Desert, and How That Can Change - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, No One’s Hands Are Clean: With Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi Writes the Perfect Novel - Brooklyn Magazine

I cannot remember the last time I read a novel that made me want to use the adjective perfect. Perfection is usually the domain of short stories, of poems. Novels are messy, epic. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is a feat rarely achieved: a book with the scope of world history and the craft of something much smaller.

Essay, In Praise of Black Pudding, the Bloodiest Breakfast Food - Extra Crispy

Black pudding is the culinary embodiment of waste not, want not; its economy is both remarkable and obvious. And though it’s sometimes framed as a desperate, last-resort food for the most poor, black pudding put in frequent appearances on the table of that asshole Henry VIII—but maybe he already had a taste for blood?

Essay, Live Long and Caffeinate: Why Star Trek Is Obsessed with Coffee - Extra Crispy

Members of Starfleet guzzle caffeine like long-haul truckers: unbound from diurnal rhythm, fighting to stay awake in an unchanging now, an eternal night.

Profile, Meet Penina Roth, the Unassuming Heart of Literary Brooklyn - Brooklyn Magazine

When failure is both expected and it’s cost so high, pulling off a genuinely fun reading is all the more impressive. But running what has been—for years—the best reading series in New York City? That’s a tremendous achievement.

Feature, A Marvelous Order: A Gentrification Opera for Our Times - Brooklyn Magazine

The opera addresses “what it means to be a citizen and a neighbor. What we are and aren’t watching for. What we think about the people we live among and what we are willing to do to them or for them.”

List, Required Reading: The 50 Fictional Women We’re Obsessed With - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, Summer of the Cicadas: How Cole Lavalais Wrote the Ultimate Intersectional Novel - Brooklyn Magazine

Profile, Electric Feels: Halimah Marcus Has a New Story to Tell with Electric Literature - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, Filling in the Blanks of Jane Jacobs’ Missing Chapter - Next City

Review, 400 Years and Counting: Why We Keep Coming Back to Shakespeare - Brooklyn Magazine

Profile, This Transportation Engineer Won’t Give Up on Moving New York City - Next City

Steely White recalls a metaphor the engineer once used: Expecting to drive for free in the busiest parts of Manhattan is like demanding your own elevator. “It’s a classic Sam Schwartz insight, and not just the insight but the ability to communicate it,” says Steely White, who waxed rhapsodic to me on a particularly compelling slide Schwartz once presented.

Interview, Bird Brains: They’re More Complicated Than You Think - Audubon Magazine

Article, Inside Berl’s, Brooklyn’s Unlikeliest Bookstore - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, All Roads Lead to Mary Beard - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, 35 Years! 35 Years! 35 Years!: Celebrating 35 Years of BOMB Magazine - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, To Cave Canem on Its 20th Birthday - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, What Author Darryl Pinckney Has to Say about Nazis - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, Skyping with Feminist Poet Caroline Crew - Brooklyn Magazine

Essay, My Favorite Part of Easter? Satan, and the Harrowing of Hell - Pacific Standard

Sometimes Satan is a snake, sometimes he is a dragon, sometimes he is a proliferation of lizards all joined up into one Power Rangers-like Megazord body.

Article, The Best Dive Bars in New York City - Travel + Leisure

Review, Helen Oyeyemi Is a Miracle You’d Better Appreciate - Brooklyn Magazine

There is no other fiction writer working in English, save Toni Morrison, whose books I look forward to more, whose words I gulp down like someone famished. She is, for me, the real thing.

Interview, “Shame to Pride”: How One Artist Transformed the World Around Her - Brooklyn Magazine

Q: What was the strangest thing that you found?

A: I found quite a few envelopes of old haircuts, different haircuts she labels. Like my brother’s first haircut, I literally found an envelope labeled “Brian’s first haircut” with the date on it. So a lot of bags of hair.

Article, A Sneak Peek at the Most Beautiful Tarot Cards We’ve Seen - Brooklyn Magazine

“Each card has to be carefully considered,” Crispin says. They try to find associations from mythology, astrology, as well as places, colors, herbs. “Scorpio’s associated place is like ‘a dark alley where criminals gather.’” She laughs. “It gives you more to work with.”

List, At Least There’s Good Stuff to Read: 24 Books to Pick Up This Spring - Brooklyn Magazine

Feature, Against the Odds, A 40-Year Old West African Village in South Carolina Has Thrived - Atlas Obscura

At its founding in 1970, Oyotunji African Village never promised its residents a perfect way of life. But it did offer them an idea equally radical: a world without Europe, a space outside white supremacy.

Interviews, “The Brooklyn 100” - Brooklyn Magazine

● Ashley Ford, writer

● J Wortham, writer at the New York Times Magazine

● Michele Filgate, writer

● Rachel Fershleiser, executive director of audience development for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

● Daniel José Older, writer

● Michelle Legro, culture editor at The New Republic

● Lincoln Michel, writer and editor at Electric Literature

● Jason Diamond, writer and editor at Rolling Stone

● Kevin Nguyen, writer and editor at GQ

● Anthony Ha, reporter at Tech Crunch and fiction writer

● Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation

● Rita Meade, librarian and children’s book author

● Doreen St. Felix, writer at MTV News

● Lindsay Zoladz, writer at The Ringer

● Ken Chen, poet and executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop

Interview, Self-Care: Talking to Tony Tulathimutte about Private Citizens - Brooklyn Magazine

Series, “Diversity in Publishing” - Brooklyn Magazine

● Part 1, a collection of lived experiences: “You Will Be Tokenized”: Speaking Out About the State of Diversity in Publishing

But if people in publishing genuinely believe that books save people’s lives, their output shows they believe only certain lives to be worth the trouble.

● Part 2, a history of the conversation: “We’ve Been Out Here Working”: Diversity in Publishing, a Partial Reading List

This conversation’s roots are centuries deep and impossibly broad and this is a good thing: It’s a very important subject.

● Part 3, a picture of the industry’s structure: So You Want to Write a Book…

● Part 4, a list of things to do: What Comes Next?: 23 Steps Toward Ending Publishing’s Diversity Problem

If you are an agent, an editor, a critic, a bookseller, a librarian—it is YOUR JOB to find a diverse array of writers and books. If you find yourself only representing, editing, reviewing, buying, or displaying one kind of book from one kind of author—you have failed. It is your responsibility, and yours alone, to fix it.

Interview, Ecstasy Through Agony: Talking with Mark Beyer - Brooklyn Magazine

List, 24 Ways to Visit New York Like a Celebrity - Travel + Leisure

Interview, Talking with German Author Christopher Kloeble about the Perils of Poetry Translation, World War I Jokes, and the Festival Neue Literatur - Brooklyn Magazine

Review, Lost in Translation: Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words Fails to Translate - Brooklyn Magazine

List, 10 Places for Mermaid-Spotting in America - Travel + Leisure

Mermaids—half human, half fish—have surfaced throughout the globe in different folkloric traditions: ancient Greece’s sirens, Scheherazade’s tale of “Djullanar the Sea-girl,” Scotland’s selkies, Thailand’s Suvannamaccha, the African diaspora’s Mami Wata, Indonesia’s Nyai Roro Kidul, Brazil’s Iara, the Slavic rusalki, and Hans Christian Andersen’s (and, by extension, Walt Disney’s) “Little Mermaid.“

List, 17 Amazing Meals in NYC for Two People for Less Than $50 - Travel + Leisure

Article, Notes I Took Listening to Toni Morrison - Brooklyn Magazine

1,200 people had arrived to see America’s only living Nobel Laureate for literature, and arguably (I will fight you) the greatest writer in the world today: Toni Morrison.

Interview, “It’s Definitely a Meditation on Power”: Talking with Alexander Chee about The Queen of the Night - Brooklyn Magazine

List, 8 Books to Read for Black History Month - Brooklyn Magazine

The eleven grueling and terrible months of white history are finally over.

Article, Literary Twitter Is People: The Faces Behind Your Favorite Literary Twitter Accounts - Brooklyn Magazine

When Sheila Heti asked Shephard if he had “an imaginary person that you’re being when you’re tweeting” as @MelvilleHouse, he answered: “I imagine that I am a bald, 50-year-old man who lives in Seattle and is worth roughly $30 billion. Or, if there are enough candles and chalk in the office, I summon the actual spirit of Herman Melville and let him tweet through me.”

Article, Best Winter Weekend Getaways Near New York - Travel + Leisure

Essay, The Last “Last Noel”: Going to Anonymous 4’s Final Concert at the Met - Brooklyn Magazine

I sat and felt like something from inside my head was pouring out of it, a private beauty had been made public sublime.

2015

List, The Best of the Bests: Ranking the 2015 Best Books Lists - Brooklyn Magazine

There is something about a numbered list that drives people crazy. Lists alone are bad but numbers, especially, push a person over the edge. (Especially if they are ranked.)

Lists, The Seven Most Overrated Things to Do in New York, The Seven Most Overrated Things to Do in Washington, DC, The Nine Most Underrated Things to Do in New York, The 11 Most Underrated Things to Do in Washington, DC, The Nine Most Underrated Things to Do in Rome, How to Spend Christmas Day in Washington, DC, 11 Free Things to Do in Key West on New Year’s Eve - Travel + Leisure

List, The Year in Great Sentences - Brooklyn Magazine

List, At Least There Was Good Stuff to Read: The Best Things We Read Online in 2015 - Brooklyn Magazine

Interview, Bookslut in Exile: Jessa Crispin on Travel Writing and The Dead Ladies Project - Travel + Leisure

Article, Ferrante’s Italy: Six Locations to Visit from the Neapolitan Novels - Travel + Leisure

Profile, The Rachel Connection: Why Rachel Fershleiser Is a Wizard of New York’s Literary Community - Brooklyn Magazine

“Well Rachel’s the ultimate literary advocate, isn’t she?” novelist Jami Attenberg tells me in an email. “Although sometimes I think that what she does is indefinable. She moves people and books and ideas through the air. She’s a wizard of community.”

Feature, Where TV and Literature Collide: Talking to Maris Kreizman about Slaughterhouse 90210 - Brooklyn Magazine

There’s just something more there, a seriousness and poignancy that Kreizman’s juxtapositions often achieve, a mutual understanding that illuminates both the book she quotes from and the television show she pictures. Slaughterhouse 90210 can be genuinely moving.

Article, Montreal’s Largest Basilica Has the Heart of a Saint (in a Jar) - Travel + Leisure

So sacred (and thus valuable) an object, the heart was stolen and held for ransom in 1973. The Oratoire refused to pay, and after two years an anonymous call placed to a prominent Montréal lawyer revealed the location: in the original container, in a seal box, inside another box, inside a storage locker, in an apartment building. Police never found the thieves.

Article, Spending Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts - Travel + Leisure

Article, Can’t Miss Breakfasts Near the Berkshires - Travel + Leisure

Feature, Goodbye Cars, Hello Future - Brooklyn Magazine

It’s intoxicating to look at a city with urban planner’s eyes. Anyone who has built a place with blocks or pixels has felt something similar. Buildings can be lifted up and set down again, roads pulled wide or narrow, bridges raised, tunnels dug. If you don’t like something, you can change it. Demolish, build, rinse, repeat. Few individuals have had the carte blanche to shape cities in this way, a kind of power for everyone else only imagined in play. Robert Moses was one, Janette Sadik-Khan—commissioner of New York City’s Department of Transportation from 2007-2013—is arguably another. (You can thank her for most bike lanes in New York City, among other things.) The enterprise of urban planning, however, is one that focuses on the big picture. You begin to see things, places, as malleable.

Article, 7 Antique Stores You Can’t Miss in Troy, NY - Travel + Leisure

Interview, People in Your Neighborhood: Isaac Fitzgerald - Brooklyn Magazine

Article, Now in London: Never-Before-Seen Artifacts From the Russian Space Program - Travel + Leisure

Article, A Glutton’s Guide to Portland, Maine - Travel + Leisure

Essay, The Story of the Lost Author - Brooklyn Magazine

Nearly all of Ferrante’s men grow redder and more swollen with time, like terrible boils.

Profile, “I Believe in Brooklyn”: At Home with Jacqueline Woodson - Brooklyn Magazine

There’s something actually nourishing about these facts, presented in the context of this beautiful, homey home. Of course Jacqueline Woodson has written so much, won so much, and lives so well. “Of course.” Also, of course, no lives are static or uncomplicated, but for this one afternoon in this one place the world seems as if it makes sense, as if it is just.

Feature, A Night at the Latex Ball, the Best Party in New York - Brooklyn Magazine

Omari frequently doubles back, reconsiders, holds two equally true and contradictory concepts together in one thought. This is entirely intentional: it’s a testament both to his intellectual honesty and the complexity of the world he describes. Ballroom itself makes these same acrobatic, counter-balaced moves: its insistence on the malleability of identity, but also the rigidness of categories; its subversion of mainstream aesthetic ideals (the celebration of queer bodies of color), but also its occasional reaffirmation of them (rewarding traditional standards of white-aligned beauty); the community’s underground status, but also its now-omnipresent cultural influence.

Review, “Your Body Can be Destroyed”: On Ta-Nehisi Coates and Between the World and Me - Brooklyn Magazine

Where the early days of his blog had all the delightful sparkle and satisfying pop of a good fireworks display, his current work is a precise and powerful distillation of that light and heat and sound. Illuminating, painful, and urgent—Between the World and Me has all the fantastic power of a light saber, a magic missile, a ray gun.

Essay, A Life Well Reread - The Oyster Review

I remembered the me that loved these books, but I wasn’t precisely that me anymore.

Article, Loved ones mourn Amber Monroe, the 12th trans woman of color killed this year - Fusion

“Amber was a firework,” Dawson said. “She was young, full of life, like all the young girls are. Fearless. She was a cool person. She cared for everybody.”

Article, Why these foreign students hit American beaches with J-1 visas - Fusion

Like many of the other students Fusion spoke to, Lupu lives in a crowded apartment: 10 people in four bedrooms. Her shifts are 10-12 hours long, and she gets one day off a week plus an additional evening or morning. She’s paid $8.25, Delaware’s minimum wage, but her employers don’t have to put in for social security.

Article, The 4-H Show Will Go On (Minus the Chickens) - Audubon Magazine

Interview, “I Arrived at the Revolution Via Poetry”: An Interview with the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo - Brooklyn Magazine

MCAG proves the post-human is not white. The internet is not white. Get the fuck used to it.

Review, What Does It Mean to Love a Video Game?: Talking to Matt Bell about Baldur’s Gate II - Brooklyn Magazine

Even in this alternative space, where—thrillingly—the powerless became empowered, we were bound by the limitations we carried with us.

Podcast / Fiction, Excerpt from Geography - The Catapult

These were the maps he made: first crude outlines of the city, then street maps of DC—though none of the paper he used was large enough to accommodate the level of detail he desired. The east-west streets: letters. The north-south streets: numbers, then two-syllable names (alphabetical), then three, then the names for flowers. Favorite names: Quankebos, Jonquil, Aberfoyle, Quesada (it reminded him of quesadilla), Ingomar, Fessenden, Brandywine, Klingle, Call, Prout, Brothers, Golden Raintree, Xenia.

Article, Keeping Peregrines Safe From Their Fan Club - Audubon Magazine

“In the early 1990s you would have thought we were closing Maine down,” Connery says, remembering the initial reaction to the park’s decision. “Okay, Maine’s closed, you can’t come anymore.”

Feature, “It’s a Home, Not a Band”: Hanging Out with Shirley House - Brooklyn Magazine

Set against the spooky background of a white void, a laser jungle gym, a Red Hook empty of people, the video looks culty, but it’s the sort of cult you’d want to join.

Essay, Which War Was the Most American War? - Pacific Standard

It was a low blow, mentioning the War of 1812, one of America’s most confusing and boring wars, up there with the Spanish-American and Mexican-American wars. (All notably wars of imperial expansion!) For instance: What did I know about the War of 1812 that didn’t involve Francis Scott Key or the White House on fire?

Essay, Welcome to the Secret Society of Garth Nix Fans, the Best-Selling Author Whose Name You Might Not Know Yet - Brooklyn Magazine

It has periods, a penis, a discussion of whether or not that penis is circumcised, some kissing, some kissing with blood (mouth blood, it’s still YA), a totally competent (if inexperienced) young woman who is accorded respect automatically and without reference to her gender. It’s a book that astonished me when I first read it around age ten, and it’s a book I continue to read almost every year.

Feature, Mazie’s New York: A Bowery Walking Tour with Jami Attenberg - Brooklyn Magazine

“She’s completely a feminist role model,” she said, and the novel, an “origin story for a super hero.”

Feature, The Exile of Ed Champion - Brooklyn Magazine

Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed concern and shock, or (helpful but alarming) encouraged me to call the police if ever I felt threatened. I sort of knew what I was getting into when I began, and I believe I have as good an understanding now as I can have now that I’ve finished, but this fear is palpable. I know Champion will read this and I cannot imagine how it will feel for him. I would not want such a piece to be written about me, but I also hope never do to the kinds of things Champion has done. And I think that if I ever do them, I will deserve a story like this.

Essay, Both/And: Finding Grace in Flannery O'Connor - Brooklyn Magazine

In one-on-one meetings with our CCD teacher, each student had to explain which gift of the Holy Spirit we had chosen and why. Though it’s certainly a serious question—for the options, if you believed in their reality, were substantial—the conversation had the gravitas of picking through a Whitman sampler.

Essay, Leonard Nimoy Has Died, But His Beloved ‘Star Trek’ Character Will Live Forever - Flavorwire

And what does Spock represent if not humanity, or more specifically, the ideals of the Star Trek universe: hybridity and diversity, logic and compassion, duty and friendship, great hair and makeup.

2014

Fiction, Ornithology - Barnstorm Journal

Bobby dropped his bag on the threshold. “You put a raw turkey in the bathtub?”

Fiction, A Warm Winter - Midnight Breakfast

Dentures always reminded Caroline of her old mouth guards, which her mother used to boil to softness in their old kitchen, back when they lived in a house. There was something so satisfying about biting down into the warm plastic, forcing it to mold to her teeth, her gums, her jaw. But there was nothing about these two pink and white slabs that felt like the gummy sheath she had worn, infrequently, for soccer. They looked animal, like they had been extracted fresh from some luckless skull, but also unnaturally dry.

Essay, Blood Soup: The End of True Blood - LA Review of Books

Is True Blood good? Probably the answer to this question is no. Is True Blood good TV? Yes, a million times yes.

Interview, Q&A: Ruben Castaneda, Author of S Street Rising - Library Journal

Review, Repetition, Repetition, Repetition - LA Review of Books

It’s useful, then, to look at Red or Dead as less a fictional biography (please no one ever say “faction”) and more as a work of hagiography, if one written by an Oulipo-sympathizer. And so Shankly here remains rather flat, but flat in the way of a Byzantine icon: his is a magnetic simplicity, where a repeated gesture becomes meaning, and, as if haloed in gold leaf, he glows crimson. But where Peace eschews complexity in Shankly’s character — he is clearly a good man, a good husband, a good manager — he finds it in the novel’s structure, in its brutal and beautiful repetition.

Essay, How to Get Back to Narnia - BuzzFeed

I write as someone who was left behind, as anyone who has read and loved a magical book is, marooned in the world we tried so hard to escape.

Interview, Something Just Beyond Words: An Interview with Helen Oyeyemi - The Believer

BLVR: You’ve talked a little bit about your Catholicism, in particular your attraction to the mystics. As an adult nonbeliever who was raised Catholic, I find myself really intensely (if only intellectually) drawn to the early and medieval church. Reading Perpetua and Angela of Foligno and Pseudo-Dionysus—it’s heady but also exciting, in a particular way. I feel like I have my finger on the core of something to do with the mess that is western society. Not so much an original sin as an original weirdness. What about Catholic mysticism interests or attracts you?

HO: The language of mysticism—its repeated attempts to lay consciousness itself bare and speak all the intensely opposing yet interconnected parts of it that cannot be spoken. In these writings we’re offered a nutshell or a rose or spear and each image is part allusion to something just beyond words and part utter misdirection. So yes, original weirdness is right. And it crosses traditions—I love Kabir and Hafez too, and Rumi’s sweet oblivion: Whoever brought me here/Will have to take me home…

Review, Listening to the Revolution - LA Review of Books

Distraction is part and parcel of any experience of reading — a teakettle whistles, a cellphone buzzes, a line of dialog reminds you of yesterday’s conversation, you forget which character that particular name belongs to — but in print, if you wander, the story stays put. With an audiobook, the story goes on without you.

Essay, Where Do Books Go After They End? - The Toast

J.K. Rowling’s codas to her work—embroidering onto the novels details of Dumbledore’s sexuality, McGonagall’s backstory, and now this alternate timeline: a series where Hermoine has a relationship with Harry instead of Ron—are themselves a kind of fan fiction, at least in their insistence that these books are not self-contained, that the truth of a story can be bigger than what’s printed on the page.

2013

Essay, This Black Ribbon - The Believer

Messy and old and chintzy, too-Christian and not-Christian-enough, saccharine and mindless and capitalist, cheesy and beautiful and lit within and dark and dark and dark—Christmas is a holiday of extremes. We have eaten too much, or not at all. We are so happy that it hurts, or we just hurt. We are ribald, or we are solemn. We are alive, we will die.

Essay, A Time-Lapse Detective: 25 Years of Agatha Christie’s “Poirot” - LA Review of Books

If you were to imagine these detectives at a party, Sherlock Holmes — tall, hawklike, thin as a razor (appropriate considering all that cocaine) — would stand by the window, looking haunted and mean. Poirot, meanwhile, would be by the buffet, a crisp white napkin tucked into his precision-fit collar and draped over his significant front. While Holmes might consume himself with ashtrays or the quality of dirt on a guest’s shoe, Poirot — tiny plate of hors d’oeuvre in hand — watches the way a dancing couple looks at each other, the huffy departure of an angered man, and slips in and out of pleasant small talk.

Review, New Marisha Pessl Pulp “Night Film” Tries to Print the Internet - Bitch Magazine

Danger lies in the insertion of any technology in fiction, whether it is misunderstood, clumsily included, or over-relied upon. It dates a work, but it also helps indicate how well a novel lives in that date: whether something has been captured, or something lost.

Review, White Girls by Hilton Als - Library Journal

Only Als (theater critic, The New Yorker; The Women) could write about ringworm—”my cruddy friend,” “a dark flower,” “an erotic ‘pain’ I could not wait to get my hands on”—and make it sound good.

Article, The Library Is Open: A Look at Librarians and Tumblr - Library Journal

Review, One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling by Hanan al-Shaykh - Library Journal

Gone are Aladdin, Ali Baba, and even much of Sinbad, but what remains is a haunting collection of stories about women who, if not always heroic, are resilient, funny, sexual, and, above all, smart. Anchored by two central framing narratives, the tales lead into one another like a set of matryoshka dolls. The beautiful language is deceptively simple: readers are in danger of being lulled into marathon reading sessions. It’s no wonder al-Shaykh identifies with Shahrazad; they are very much the same.

Interview, Q&A: Hanan al-Shaykh, Author of One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling - Library Journal

Interview, The Lightning Room with Molly McArdle - PANK Blog

[Renaming is] also a profound expression of power, a way for a new group of people to claim ownership. The erosion of the name of the place I write about in the story, which here I’ll call Nacotchtank, is a testament to this effect. Even though the village was a very important trading center in its day, no firm or authoritative version of its name exists today, just various Anglicizations. But just as (re)naming is an enormously powerful tool for any kind of encroaching force, its also a potent instrument for fighting back against that encroachment. It is a way to say this is who I am; know me.

Essay, Hester Prynne is a Puritan Super Babe - Bitch Magazine

Not knowing Chillingsworth’s true identity or purpose (which is—guess what—revenge!), Dimmesdale has let the shrunken older man become his roommate (bad idea), resulting in the longest and most effective guilt trip in all of literature. Dimmesdale, eaten away by Chillingsworth’s bullying and his own remorse, is very ill, and Hester offers him a way out: flee crappy Puritan New England with her. What a great idea—why didn’t they think of it earlier?

Article, “The story is our escort”: Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013 - Library Journal

Review, I Would Die 4 U: How Prince Became an Icon by Touré - Library Journal

Review, A Different Kind of Literacy: Art Show “Cliteracy” Hits NYC This Weekend - Bitch Magazine

Review, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell - Library Journal

Interview, Q&A: Matt Bell, Author of In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods - Library Journal

Essay, Reading the Original Vampire Novel - Bitch Magazine

You know this story. You’ve seen, at least, that snarling image of Bela Lugosi, his paper-white hands curled, talon-like, before him. Let’s set aside, for now, that picture: the high collared cape, the patent leather shoes, the w’s sliding into v’s. In fact, so much of the chilling delight of this book is that no such picture exists in the minds of our protagonists.

2012

Fiction, The Wearied Cords - PANK

I imagined all of the fish nibbling away at her and hated myself. I imagined what she would become after a few days soak. I lost my footing and regained it, fighting down the sickness that had settled into my stomach, that now tried to move into my throat. It didn’t matter how she rejoined the world, through firewood or fish mouths. I trudged back towards the shore, my clothes feeling like stone. Just to the north I could see them, the Three Sisters, in the barest moonlight. I hoped we all became islands.

Blog post, I Did the Math: Towards a More Diverse NYT Notable Book List - Library Journal

Blog post, The Dursleys Talk Dirty: the Top 10 Most Memorable “Adult” Moments in The Casual Vacancy - Library Journal

It’s akin to hearing your grandmother (or, for that matter, Dumbledore) talk dirty: it’s not that you didn’t think J.K. Rowling was capable of writing about sex, it just existed in a space beyond your imagination.

Essay, The Measure of What Is Possible - The Rumpus

Even in this alternate world, one shaped by desire, I was not the hardiest of characters. Strength was frequently my lowest ability score, my constitution not much better. (I poured all my points into intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.) I was able to make do because there, in that world, I had magic, and when you have magic, you barely need a body.

Review, This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz - Library Journal

Through the lens of the women that Yunior, his older brother Rafa (who dies of cancer while Yunior is in high school), and their mostly absent father love, leave, and are left by, Díaz maps out a painful, aching geography of desire.

Reviews, The Mansion Of Happiness by Jill Lepore & Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed - Library Journal

Interview, Q&A: Cheryl Strayed, Author of Tiny Beautiful Things - Library Journal

Essay, The Last Book I Loved: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - The Rumpus

When I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I read about my grandparents, born in New York to Irish immigrants just a year after the book closes. I read about myself, a girl from a city who loved to look at trees from her apartment window and read as if her life depended on it. I read about the Williamsburg streets that I walk down today, then populated with pickle barrels and rag pickers. I read about women who have sexual lives, whose sexuality affects every aspect of their experience, whether they feel plain desire or mere curiosity, the fear of pregnancy or a longing for children, a weary awareness of unwanted attention or the terrifying reality of violence. I read about shame and class and loving people who hurt you as well as themselves.

Blog post, A Memory of Adrienne Rich - Library Journal

2011

Review, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page by Matt Kish - Library Journal

Blog post, Preferring Protest: A Reading of “Bartleby” on Wall Street - Library Journal

Bartleby’s protest (if we are to see it as such) is communicable, contagious. This ultimately is where Occupy Wall Street and the scrivener’s efforts best mesh. While the Occupy movement has avoided naming specific goals, and Bartleby speaks more about what he would rather not do than do, both have changed the conversation and indeed the very language we use to participate in it.

Review, Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan - Library Journal

Review, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - Library Journal

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