When I say I have a crush on you, what I’m saying is that I’m in love with the distance between us. I’m not in love with you: I don’t even know you. I’m in love with the escape that fantasizing about you promises. Poisoned, stung, bitten and bridled. The promise of being ground down until I disappear.
Love, loss, and growing up in the Utah desert
Fred Rogers wasn’t just a brilliant educator and a profoundly moral person. He was an uncompromising artist.
“When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.”
Will the literature of the suburbs be written on TikTok?
The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.
When people ask what I like so much about being from the Midwest, I get to tell them: I know the architecture of the wind. I know the violence it blows in and out. I like to keep my survival as simple as I can.
“This disconnect between culturally mandated politics and the actual demonstrated preferences of most Americans has created an enormous reserve of unmet needs—and a generational opportunity.”
On Black nonchalance.
Gold and diamond grills. Stilettos you can’t walk in. Grandly arching fingernails, lovingly adorned. Such flouting of functionality is an obvious fuck-you to the days of scrutinized teeth at auctions and picking cotton on plantations.
The stories that sprung up around if not quite about Trump were as brutal and lazy as the man himself; they teased themselves endlessly from one episode to the next, building toward a brutal grand finale in which America’s heroes would murder its villains, on TV, at some time to-be-determined.
An argument for working less.
The author’s chance encounter with Tom Hanks leads to a dear and lasting friendship with his assistant.
Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair.
How John, a father of 14, lost Christmas.
The writer, deaf since birth, on the intricacies of reading lips.
A couple, a caregiver, and a promise.
No house is private. It may be purchased, and thus legally private property, but it doesn’t stand alone. Through its extending wires, pipes, inputs and outputs, the house (with few off-grid exceptions) is tied up in the cyborg systems of the city and the supply chains and logistical inputs that extend around the globe.
In staying, I was not only denying myself the chance at true happiness, but I was keeping him from having it, too. It was that realization—that I was preventing my husband from having the life he deserved—that ultimately outweighed the fears I had about leaving.
Many people dream of building their own home in the country, but one family finds more of a struggle than they bargained for.
Las Vegas is both stranger and more normal than you might imagine, and for some reason, people don’t think anyone lives there.
Narratively, how sweet it would be to describe in words that she learned to roast a chicken, she never took another pill again, she now takes care of me through cooking. But that’s not the truth.
“Uncertainty, it has been shown, is more painful than certain physical pain.”
During the pandemic, people from the author’s hometown got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement.
The author visits the 9/11 Memorial Museum, 13 years after his sister’s death.
The author, on book tour when the pandemic set in, reflects on what could have been worse—and what could be better.
