It’s the way some men say, I’m not the problem or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exas...
In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or...
On the crowded subway car back to Brooklyn afterwards, the youngest of my three female companions had her bottom groped by a man about Strauss-Kahn’s age. At first, she thought he had simply bumped in...
What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.
I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us commun...
Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in al...
Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victorie...
Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer commun...
This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a cu...
There is no money in what is aptly called free association: we are instead encouraged by media and advertising to fear each other and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured...
I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It want...
In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got.
Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: the face of the beloved blurs or fractures as one draws near for a kiss, the smooth cone of Mount Fuji be...
If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity an...
Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have va...
If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.
One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante’s Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi’s despair and his deh...
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