essays

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...

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...