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The Most Alive Dead Band of All
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,...
Still
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....
More Than Just Words and Numbers
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...
Queering the Prisoner Escape Narrative: Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby”
“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,...
Lovecraft’s Nameless Things: Understanding Racial Ecologies in “Dagon”
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...
Colonization and the Construction of Patriarchal Ideals in Chicano* Hip-Hop
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...
Anything, Everything and Nothing
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...
Contemporary Queer Brazilian Literature You Can Read in English Translation
As a Brazilian translator living in the United States, I often find myself speaking of contemporary writers from my home country and their work. However, their literary production is rarely translated into English. Sadly, the situation is even grimmer when we speak of...
Coming Full Circle: Appreciating Black Educators
Key Blue, Joseph Schillinger My fractured Jamaican and Caribbean identity has long been both an open wound and an inspiration. So, when my 10th-grade AP Global History teacher assigned us a research paper to write on the topic of our choosing, I focused on the figure...