Whenever a child walking along a four-lane exurban road is killed by a driver who swerves into the shoulder, whenever someone can get away with driving 98 miles per hour in a 55 zone, whenever a family of seven in an ostensibly safe minivan is killed despite the self-evident technological ability to limit speeds, redesign roads, and enforce existing regulations, it seems reasonable to infer that car culture isn’t really about sexy concept cars or futuristic taillights. Car culture is really...| n+1
Out last night with Deja for a drink at a new bar near campus. The bar is nice but cannot decide who it is for. Drinks too sweet. After two my head was heavy. Hers too perhaps. I feel so grateful to have met you, she said. It’s when she says things like that.| n+1
The girls accepted me as one of their own. We often turned into a single many-armed, many-legged creature, jubilant, all-powerful, devastating. In those moments, I no longer felt my own powerlessness or the weakness in my knees.| n+1
I was embarrassed. To be grieving incorrectly, to be doing it publicly, to be preoccupied with whether I was doing it well. Dissonance was everywhere. The blunted, abject language of bereavement, and the responsibility I had, which I had worked for and wanted, to speak clearly about my own sentences.| n+1
The carceral system is vastly larger and more pervasive now than it was a half century ago. When the revolt began, the United States incarcerated approximately two hundred thousand people; today it imprisons almost two million. This expansion in turn presents contemporary abolitionists with different challenges.| n+1
The pope consumes three grams of psychedelic mushrooms, and as he does not speak, the therapist also remains quiet. Two hours into the session the therapist plays Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka’s 2012 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations at a low volume, causing the pope to weep and wonder why he didn’t listen to music more often during the many years prior to the visitor’s arrival.| n+1
Pinocchio turns into a real boy at the story’s end not because he has absorbed some Kantian sense of duty, but because his slow-growing love for the blue-haired fairy and Geppetto compels him to care for them in their sickness and old age. In other words, he learns to obey them because his love for them singles them out as people worth listening to. This is Collodi’s answer to an inescapably human dilemma: to whom do you listen when you are surrounded by warring factions and have not yet ...| n+1
This is the state of American immigration politics: a destructive competition over who can do border better. But, as the unholy linking of foreign military aid to domestic border defense attests, this gross spectacle distracts from a far wider web of issues. Who has a right to migrate to the US and make their home here? Who gets to drop US-made bombs, and who is expected to silently suffer them? Because a Democratic President is punishing refugees at the US-Mexico border while also sponsoring...| n+1
