essays
Most Recent
Room for Error: On Printmaking and the Limits of the Body
At a printmaking studio in Miami, Florida, I lay out dozens of CT scans across my workstation. I’ve enlarged them to a life-size representation of an adult torso, and the pixelated boundary between mass and cavity blurs. I measure the lung nodules, each one unique,...
Anne Boleyn in the Manosphere: What Ava Pickett’s hot new period piece can teach us about misogyny’s past and present
On April 26, 2025, just over one week before Ava Pickett’s 1536 premiered for its sold-out run at the Almeida Theatre in London, 38-year-old Owen Lawrence attacked the popular Otley Run pub crawl in Leeds, England, seriously injuring two women. In January of that...
Andrea Long Chu’s Females, Revised
IN THE 2025 reissue of Females, first published in 2019, Andrea Long Chu revises her former self. Chu observes in the newly added afterword that most books published by trans authors, then and now, are memoirs. Empirically, it seems that all marginalized groups in the...
Echoes of the Fourth Person: A Dilemma of Sociality in Electronic Music
ONE PERSON is never enough. Buzzing away on my bassoon in a practice room or listening to The Strokes through a dime-sized speaker lodged in my ear are not typically lauded as the pinnacle of musical experience. One of the platitudes of music is that sound is social:...
Monogamy is Dead, Long Live Monogamy!
When I was a teenager, my mother died. A few years later, my father remarried. I now have the language to describe grief as an encounter with what could have been and cannot be, one in which we negotiate with imagined futures after loss. At that time, however, I found...
On Body Horror
I WALK INTO a job interview with my mind divided between answering the questions and keeping my tics at bay. I tell my body to sit still and relax my face into a soft, hirable smile. In response, my knee bounces, my hands flex, and my brow furrows. I beg my mouth to...
“No suelte’ la bandera ni olvide’ el lelolai”: (Re)Imagining Lo Jíbaro From Manuel Alonso to Bad Bunny
When I first saw the NFL and Apple Music’s announcement that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, professionally known as Bad Bunny, would be the sole headliner for the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, my knee-jerk reaction to the post was: “Is this an AI fake?” The image...
Enter the Pyrocene…Through Sebald: How W. G. Sebald Anticipated a World Full of Fire
IN TROUBLED TIMES, works of fiction blaze a path between bygone eras and the present. The best stand the test of time and offer a cogent perspective on our present world. Readers looking for insight into our twenty-first-century world and some of its foremost...
I Get So Hungry When You Say You Love Me: Feminist Cannibalism
TWO UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS about Mimi Cave’s 2022 horror-romance Fresh: One, the meatball of human flesh, resting heavy and crimson atop a bed of pasta, is mouthwatering. Two, Sebastian Stan, playing an entrepreneur and chef specializing in human flesh, is hotter than...
Writing Herself Into the Frame: Jenna Ortega and the Aesthetics of Latina Self-Authorship
"Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill," (1628), Pieter Claesz. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.IN THE NETFLIX series Wednesday (2022–), writing is not just a habit—it’s a means of survival. For the titular character, it serves as both a narrative...
Is Your Outfit Saying More than You Are?
NEW YORK, NEW YORK. Manhattan. The Fashion District. Wednesday, February 15, 2023. Breaths hang heavy in the winter evening air as the final day of New York Fashion Week draws to a close. The streets buzz with the residual energy of runway shows and after-parties. The...
On Infamous Crimes Against Nature
What began as unremarkable arrests in the quiet suburbs of Boise, Idaho, quickly escalated into a scandal that gripped the nation. On Halloween night in 1955, three men—Ralph Cooper, Charles Brokaw, and...