by Olivia Joyce | May 20, 2025 | Essays, Essays 2020, Uncategorized
REVELATIONS in Isolation In late March, faced with the new shelter-in-place order and only a faint understanding of the damage COVID-19 was to bring, I turned to my mother’s bookcase for a chance to escape. Luckily, I live with a parent who is a writer, poet, and...
by Madison Felman-Panagotacos | May 20, 2025 | Essays, Essays 2020
Sacrificial Motherhood and Bodily Autonomy Deolinda Correa trudged across the arid Cuyo Valley in search of her husband, her infant son in tow. While her initial goal was the pursuit of her husband, who had been forcibly conscripted by a regional caudillo — a...
by Ksenia Firsova | May 20, 2025 | Essays, Essays 2020
Science Fiction as an Abolitionist Tool While accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin called for science-fiction writers to use their power of imagination to envision a world no...
by Jacob Soule | May 20, 2025 | Essays, Essays 2020
The Limits of Urbanism Some books are published at the wrong time. Richard Sennett’s and Pablo Sendra’s Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruption in the City is one such book. Published by Verso during the early peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in April, the work is...
by Mary Huber | May 20, 2025 | Essays, Essays 2020
To Feel Them Full: Reading Empathy in Keats When you read a lot of poetry, people tend to assume that you have grasped something ineffable. They might remark that you are a sensitive and empathetic person because you have spent so much of your life in the minds of...
by Mackenzie Weeks Mahoney | May 20, 2025 | Essays, Essays 2020
Who Do You Serve When You Serve Yourself? Consumer Labor, Automation, and a Century of Self-Service We rarely need to ask what “self-service” means. When you fill up your gas tank on the way to work, or surreptitiously mix Coke with horchata at the soda fountain, or...
