Essays & Articles:

When You Give A Tree An Email Address

Even Without A Home, We Always Had A Family Meal

The "Intolerably Putrid" Making of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The Travel Edit

Zombie Worms Crave Bone

What Happens After A Whale Dies?

The New Frontier of Fashion Criticism Lives On Black Twitter

Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End? (I originally read this last year but it's always worth a re-read)

Peter Gudrunas Has Been Blowing Glass Since the 1970s. Now His Daughter is Helping to Bring Their Practice Into the 21st Century

The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki

‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe

This Artemisia Gentileschi Painting Spent Centuries Hidden From Public View

Jenna Gibbon on Neon Nipples and Wrestling Women

A Conversation with Curator Tam Gryn Unpacks the Innovative Mix of Art and Retail Behind SHOWFIELDS

Robin Williams and Why Funny People Kill Themselves

How to Save Yourself Another Pointless Guilt Trip

Social Ecology: An Ecological Humanism

Mystery Tree Beast Turns Out To Be Croissant

How To Cook Onions: Why Do Recipe Writers Lie and Lie About How Long It Takes For Them To Caramelize?

Breaking Myths About Black Fatherhood

A Sociologist Explains Why Wealthy Women Are Doomed To Be Miserable

Henrietta Lacks: A Doctor's Immortal Legacy

"Drop It like It's Hot": Culture Industry Laborers and Their Perspectives on Rap Music Video Production

Cairo, Illinois Was Once A Booming City — Until Racist Violence Destroyed The Entire Town

Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

Trial By Trauma

Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts

Dead Man Laughing

Poetry:

Dudes, We Did Not Go Through The Hassle Of Getting These Fake IDs For This Jukebox To Not Have Any Springsteen by Hanif Abdurraqib

Parkinson's Disease: Autumn by Andrés Cerpa

Preparing the Body for A Reopened World by Ada Limón

Hypochondria Fights With Poseidon by Emily Paige Wilson

Whales Weep Not! by D. H. Lawrence

Ardana II by Kyriakos Charalambides translated by A.K. Petrides

This Is A Photograph of Me by Margaret Atwood

One or Two Things by Mary Oliver

One Sister I Have in Our House by Emily Dickinson

I Have Not Had One Word From Her by Sappho

Books:

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Persephone in A Motel Room by Lana Rafaela Cindric

Disaster in My Skin by Colleen Dunlap

Losaida by Dan Chordokoff

the format of tiktok is inherently at odds with the kind of reflectivity and depth that political thought demands. neil postman critiqued this same tendency—but in 1985, in reference to television—in amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business, which i return to often because

i hate TV (and also my parents didn't want to pay for it so i never really had it growing up!!)

new technologies and new forms of communication rarely escape the norms and values of older ones, but build on top of them, and i find 20th cent. critiques of TV to be incredibly valuable for understanding the new forms of video production/consumption that we have now.

postman writes:

[O]n television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.

one of the most influential ideas from the book is postman's critique of the now…this! tendency in TV (and intensified by instagram stories/tiktok):

["Now…this"]: the phenomenon whereby the reporting of a horrific event—a rape or a five-alarm fire or global warming—is followed immediately by the anchor’s cheerfully exclaiming “Now ... this,” which segues into a story about Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple or a commercial for lite beer, creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic.

what does it do to our sense of scale and urgency if a 3-minute video about a human-rights catastrophe is followed with a 1-minute thrift flip video?

of course tiktok (and instagram, and twitter, and essentially every new medium we have today) can also a site of consciousness-raising, of disseminating social justice theories etc…i mean, i learned about intersectional feminism from…jezebel!!! but:

[E]very technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.

or, as the historian melvin kranzberg has said: "technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral." technology can be subversive; it can be conservative. always, always, always it gravitates towards the existing power structures and fissures in our society.

this is getting vv long so i will close with a quote from amusing ourselves to death that @wildersage's post immediately reminded me of:

• it took me out of my brain for the one second needed to get back onto the planet • it shot out a spark into the distance that I could then build a path toward • it opened something up in my imagination. 

Because suicide is the result of the death of the imagination. You forget how to dream up other possible futures. You can’t picture new maneuvers, new ways around. Everything is just the catastrophic present and there will never be a time this is not so. That is what kills you. What saves you is a new story to tell yourself about how things could be. »

i’m so, so sorry you’re going through this, anon. i know how awful and hopeless it can feel... please remember—even when it feels like everything you try goes to nothing—that everything we do, no matter how small it may seem to us in the moment, does amount to something. maybe it’s not the finished project or product we were hoping for, but it’s something. and it matters. the first words on a page, a few pages of a book, a few minutes of music practice—it does amount to something. i hope you can feel the sunlight on your face wherever you are, and that this feeling passes soon. ♡ a few poems and excerpts:

— mary oliver, from “for example”

“what can we do? wait for spring, even if a tentative one, to arrive.”

— etel adnan, paris, when it’s naked

— alice notley, from ‘the voices’ in certain magical acts 

— joanna newsom, from esme

“if you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. if you love the sky and the water so much that you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. if you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

— clarissa pinkola estés, from women who run with the wolves

— rebecca solnit, from hope in the dark

“…you feel that you are always in a state of waiting, expecting some event, not on the outside, but inside you, in your guts. it is a condition that could be called cloudiness. you do not know if you are in rain or in sunshine. and darkness no longer becomes darkness, but a climb toward the threshold of an internal light that is just about to glow. this is when it becomes possible to speak of the light of darkness as it would be possible to speak of the darkness of light.”

— adonis, from selected poems; “candlelight” (tr. khaled mattawa)

“we talk so much of  light, please let me speak on behalf of  the good dark. let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is.”

— maggie smith, from “how dark the beginning”

— joanna klink, from “winter field”

“we are readers before we are writers. i find myself picking up audre lorde, again; her words again, guide me through.  i think of audre lorde and i think of those moments when a life-line is thrown out to you. a life line: it can be a fragile rope, worn and tethered from the harshness of weather, but it is enough, just enough, to bear your weight, to pull you out, to help you survive a shattering experience. words can pull us out.”

— sara ahmed, from complaint and survival

— rebecca solnit, from the faraway nearby

“you have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link. / this is but half the truth. you are also as strong as your strongest link. / to measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the ocean by the frailty of its foam. / to judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.”

— kahlil gibran, from the prophet

— forough farrokhzad, from “another birth”

“the important thing is to hold on. holding on is a victory in itself.”

— mahmoud darwish, from memory for forgetfulness: august, beirut, 1982 (tr. ibrahim muhawi)

Orientalism - Edward Said

Postcolonial Love Poem - Natalie Diaz

What Happened to My Sister - Elizabeth Flock

He Forgot to Say Goodbye - Benjamin’s Alire Saenz

Half Bad - Sally Green

I’ll Be There - Holly Goldberg Sloan

The Thirty Names of the Night - Zeyn Joukhadar

Birthright - George Abraham

Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

Emotional Intelligence - Daniel Goleman

We the Animals - Justin Torres

A Drowned Maiden’s Hair - Laura Amy Schiltz

of course! 💌 all of these pieces were written by disabled people :-) 

Carnal Acts, Nancy Mairs

The Undying, Anne Boyer

The Letters of Frida Kahlo

Sick Woman Theory, Johanna Hedva

Movements of the Uncontrollable Body: Part One & Part Two, Bronwyn Valentine

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

Mirrorings, Lucy Grealy

Masks, Lucy Grealy

The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde

Growing to God, Nancy Mairs

Women with Disabilities: Making Things Different (interview), Connie Panzarino

Don’t Call Me Inspirational, Harilyn Rousso

Veil and Burn, Laurie Clements Lambeth 

An Insider's Guide on How to be Sick, Andrea Gibson 

The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked: The Fiction of Disability: An Anthology

Tender Points, Amy Berkowitz

To be a Monster,  Bei Jie Si

Numb is a Feeling: Embodying a Body of Pain, Jennie Duguay

Wonder Woman, Ada Limón

Ode to the Chronically Ill Body, Camisha Jones

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System, Sonya Huber

unknown poses — taxidermied bird skins mounted in glass