essays

When and how do we talk about the attitudes of an entire field? These conversations often occur in office hours, not in articles, emerging over drinks at conferences or in fights in closed Facebook groups. In my field of expertise, medieval studies, I’ve noticed an...

Life lessons have the tendency to sneak up on us. Often, we’re going about our business, doing what we do, and a message from the universe smacks us upside the head without warning. If we are paying attention, the impact can be life-altering. Our perceptions of...

For years, we had cats. Gigantic rescue cats, retrieved from a Philadelphia parking lot when they were only a pair of gray and black kittens, as benign and rambunctious as the cubs in Tiger King. But they grew into the sort of cats who fantasized all day long about...

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 strongman who rules by force and a cult of...

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 longer constricted by the inherent...

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 a type of manifesto...

Throughout my adulthood, curanderas have said that my grandmother watches over me. I knew this was true when my mother came back from a visit to Mexico five years ago. She opened her suitcase and handed me a white plastic rosary and a black shawl. These items belonged...

Euphoria debuted on HBO in 2019, meeting with almost universal critical acclaim. The show is a teen drama that explicitly confronts controversial subjects like drug addiction, abusive relationships, and mental illness. At the show’s center is its narrator and...

Algiers are, unmistakably, a band well-acquainted with late capitalism’s structure of feeling. Journalists who dubbed their sound “dystopian groove” summed them up accurately. Their distinct, post-punk mélange of electro, gospel, and old school R&B is wrapped in a...

Literary study offers an opportunity to suspend disbelief, to imagine the world not as it is, but as it could be. This is the line I write on the syllabus for every undergraduate English course I teach. I want to make the case to my students, most of whom are not...

Cambodia is the land of Angkor Wat, a World Heritage Site more widely known than the country itself. “City of the Gods” and “Kingdom of Wonder;” these are some of the ways in which the temple complex has been described. I remember first seeing pictures of it at a...

The virtual archival exhibit Wise and Valiant: Women and Writing in the Spanish Golden Age, curated by Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute and the National Library of Spain, acknowledges that women writers of the Spanish Golden Age...