Readings

The Three-Headed Magic of Merchant Ivory

In their decades of collaboration, the company created films tethered in a new language for what it means to be a human of multiple descriptions.

'A Way to Overwrite the Ableist Narrative': An Interview with Nicola Griffith

Talking with the author of So Lucky about the beginner-ish qualities of coming-out stories, how doing a PhD affected writing fiction, and learning to write characters with disabilities.

'A Destructive Form of Strength': An Interview with Daemon Fairless

Talking with the author of Mad Blood Stirring about getting into fights, the anxiety-based roots of violence, and the co-opting of masculinity by "public intellectuals."

All of Our Names

My parents' mysterious aliases were linked to a Jamaican culture I adored. Once I asked after their origins, I learned that every nickname in my family comes with a story.

Slow Pan

When people ask if we need more queer movies, I think of a boy in a trailer in Kentucky watching two men on screen touch, just for a moment, deciding this is what love looks like.

The Women Who Speak For the Gods

Despite decades of persecution and discrimination, shamanism, Korea's oldest belief system, still maintains its hold on the national psyche.

‘All Jobs Are Odd in Their Own Way’: An Interview with Rita Bullwinkel

The author of Belly Up on gender-neutral narrators, working in an allegorical mode, and interrogating the label of literary fiction.

Unfound Islands

Phantom islands—mapped but nonexistent land masses—can persist for centuries. But their removal from the record conjures a sense of loss for something that was never there. 

What Do We Do With Violent Art?

America’s mass shooting epoch is new, but the specific arguments about the role of video games in generating real violence are an escalation of old, cyclical debates.

Barbra Streisand's Singular Women

In her fifty years on screen, her palpable desperation to be liked has moved audiences or grated on them. But she projects something constant and knowable—the marker of a true star.