Essay

Remembering in Russian

Extraordinary as it may seem, Stalin’s 21st-century comeback is so ordinary it’s almost on time—and it reveals the complicated legacy of Russia’s relationship with history, authority, and the USSR.

Beautiful Losses

Leonard Cohen's decision to pursue music as a career certainly proved a good one—for him and for us—but I'm still curious about what we lost when he gave up writing fiction.

The End of Progress

As I watched my childhood friend under arrest on the evening news, the hopeful narratives of racial advancement that had sustained and motivated me began to collapse.

Green To Me

Like anything I love, I mistrust the color green down to the fingernail-edges of all the feelings it engenders in me.

On Falling in Love with David

Is it possible to decolonize and police a thing as subconscious and primal as desire?

Like a Real Cowgirl

Is donning cowboy boots a symbol of independence for women, or an attempt to fit in with a culture that does not seem to recognize—or respect—our autonomy?

Growing Up Emo

Why am I loath to confess to the role these bands played in allowing me a measure of catharsis when I was a teenager facing down extraordinary grief?

The Legion Lonely

Over the past few decades, loneliness has reached almost epidemic levels, with men uniquely suffering its effects. How and why has isolation become such a threat?

India's Imagined Worlds

To be haunted by nostalgia is probably to be writing. Seventy years after Partition, India becomes, in our sentimental imaginations, both sweepingly general and intensely personal.

Queering the Rural

What happens when we return to the places we once thought were suspicious of us, to the places we kept secrets from?