essays

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...

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...

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...

This past year, writer’s block hit me more acutely than ever. Time I had blocked off to write became day-long reading sprees and, when that felt too mentally taxing, hours of binge watching. Clearly, I needed help. That’s why I picked up Imagine: How Creativity...

“The moment you’ve been waiting for!” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Aaron Burr announces in Act I of Hamilton. “The pride of Mount Vernon: George Washington,” who stomps, stern and capable, onto the stage. (Thanks, Disney+.)There’s little new left to observe about the...