essays

When I was a kid, “internet” was still written with a capital “I,” the Internet, like a first-person pronoun, a discrete selfhood. And I was on it. Before Lev Manovich situated algorithms as organized expressions of culture, a kind of spell for transmuting reality...

Originally an act of defiance, I began riding bikes religiously in fall 2012, when I enrolled in courses at Mission, Pierce, and Valley College so I wouldn’t have to commute by bus. I was (and still am) undocumented, and President Obama’s executive order, Deferred...

Eight years after their first tour in 2015, Dead & Company are calling it quits this summer. Their final shows are scheduled for July 14, 15, and 16 at San Francisco’s Oracle Park. The John Mayer–fronted reunion act, which includes all surviving permanent members,...

You have the same face. It’s as if she never left, says Tío Jorge as he pulls me in for an embrace in front of the El Salvador International Airport. His verbose laugh echoes my mother’s in Los Angeles. This familiarity in a stranger helps me lean into his embrace....

The snails were in different places. I knelt on Mrs. V.’s living room couch watching the tetras school around blue-finned guppies and yellow mollies in the fish tank. I frowned—there were more snails today. I tried to look through the fish tank to next Tuesday, but...

I was six years old when I got an insulin pump. My body was so small that we used a pink dog collar to secure the pump to my waist. I remember how heavy the piece of machinery felt hanging from the collar. I did a show-and-tell in my kindergarten class, even though I...

Hours before the New Year, a blackout fell upon the neighborhood. Electricity outages, of course, are expected in Karachi. With the ongoing gas shortage, electricity was even more coveted. If “the light” went, so would the electric stovetop, the fan, the air...

Cleanse, tone, apply serum, moisturizer, rosehip oil—these were the five steps of my mother’s skincare routine. If you do this every day, you’ll look good as you age, she said.One, then two wrinkles bloomed between her eyebrows, like deep furrows farmers plow in the...

“Industry Baby,” the third single off of Lil Nas X’s 2021 album, Montero, alongside its music video, constitutes a queering of the prisoner escape narrative, a form often recognized and even heralded for its masculinity. When I mention prisoner escape narratives here,...

H. P. Lovecraft is everywhere these days, a multimedia star in death that he never became in life. His influence, perceptible in everything from recent noir (True Detective) to ’80s nostalgia (Stranger Things), speaks to a legacy of monster-making that has shaped the...

Beautiful women. Expensive cars. And groups of men standing around enjoying both. These are some of the key images associated with hip-hop. As a product of a culture that is deeply intertwined with American patriarchal ideals, Chicano hip-hop is no different. Since...

Circle and Star Motif via Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumEvery day I was excited to enter my first-grade classroom. Finally, free from the shadows of my cousins and the chaos of our mothers seemingly building the parenthood plane as they flew it. That...