What We’re Loving (The Love Edition)
Photo: Seyed Mostafa Zamani, via Flickr “As usual, the love plot is the least convincing aspect of the book,” said my friend, handing me a crumbling, loved-to-death copy of Barbara Pym’s last novel, A...
View ArticleStaff Picks: Pop, Rock, and Bear Hock
From Barry Guy’s Witch Gong Game ll/l0 (1993). John Swartzwelder has written more Simpsons episodes than any other writer (fifty-nine in total). He’s also one of the most eccentric writers in the...
View ArticleYou Are on Display: An Interview with Morgan Parker
Photo by Kwesi Abbensetts. Morgan Parker has a long résumé—she teaches and edits—that somehow hasn’t precluded a prolific career as a poet. Her first collection, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at...
View ArticleThe Ballad of Justin Bobby
In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Recently, an article I had read in an Israeli women’s magazine when I was maybe eleven popped into my...
View ArticleHow to Be Authentic, and Other News
Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918. With Obama’s last presidential speech behind him—and with churlish inarticulacy personified prepared to take his place—Christian Lorentzen wonders how the...
View ArticleWhite-Lady Tears
This is the last entry in a series about domestic thrillers. Still from Obsessed. Obsessed, as they are, with both the trappings and traps of the middle class, most domestic thrillers are invested in...
View ArticleWho the Fuck Knows
Covering music in Drumpfjahr II. From the cover of YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT.” Whatever else you were doing the last three weeks of November, chances are you weren’t sleeping enough. Chances are...
View ArticleWhat’s Wrong with Us: An Interview with J. M. Holmes
Photo by Julie Keresztes. J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” appears in our Summer issue (no. 221); it’s Holmes’s first published story. Next year, it will be included in...
View ArticleIncarnadine, the Bloody Red of Fashionable Cosmetics and Shakespearean Poetics
Janelle Monáe at the 2018 Vanity Fair Oscar party. Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images When looking up the word incarnadine in Merriam Webster I found some truly discomforting writing. After a brief...
View ArticleDon’t Hate Us ’Cause We Fabulous
“Excuse me … are you Prince?” the hotel concierge asked me. At first, I thought he was joking, the kind of slightly homophobic jab I’ve grown used to hearing over the years, so I laughed as I said,...
View ArticleOn Beyoncé, Beychella, and Hairography
Hair is a large part of the wonderment—and objection—Beyoncé courts each time she holds a mic. As the critic madison moore writes of her “haircrobatics” in 2014, hairography is “the special genius...
View ArticleJoan Morgan, Hip-Hop Feminism, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill. One recent midsummer afternoon, I trekked from Central Brooklyn to the South Bronx to meet the pioneering hip-hop journalist and feminist writer Joan Morgan, author of the new book She...
View ArticleYou Are on Display: An Interview with Morgan Parker
Photo by Kwesi Abbensetts. Morgan Parker has a long résumé—she teaches and edits—that somehow hasn’t precluded a prolific career as a poet. Her first collection, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at...
View ArticleThe Ballad of Justin Bobby
In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Recently, an article I had read in an Israeli women’s magazine when I was maybe eleven popped into my...
View ArticleHow to Be Authentic, and Other News
Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918. With Obama’s last presidential speech behind him—and with churlish inarticulacy personified prepared to take his place—Christian Lorentzen wonders how the...
View ArticleWhite-Lady Tears
This is the last entry in a series about domestic thrillers. Still from Obsessed. Obsessed, as they are, with both the trappings and traps of the middle class, most domestic thrillers are invested in...
View ArticleWho the Fuck Knows
Covering music in Drumpfjahr II. From the cover of YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT.” Whatever else you were doing the last three weeks of November, chances are you weren’t sleeping enough. Chances are...
View ArticleWhat’s Wrong with Us: An Interview with J. M. Holmes
Photo by Julie Keresztes. J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” appears in our Summer issue (no. 221); it’s Holmes’s first published story. Next year, it will be included in...
View ArticleIncarnadine, the Bloody Red of Fashionable Cosmetics and Shakespearean Poetics
Janelle Monáe at the 2018 Vanity Fair Oscar party. Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images When looking up the word incarnadine in Merriam Webster I found some truly discomforting writing. After a brief...
View ArticleDon’t Hate Us ’Cause We Fabulous
“Excuse me … are you Prince?” the hotel concierge asked me. At first, I thought he was joking, the kind of slightly homophobic jab I’ve grown used to hearing over the years, so I laughed as I said,...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....