It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: “It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.” “A Christmas Memory,” Truman Capote ’Tis the season! A time for awkwardly posed […]
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Posted inEssays & Criticism, Quotes
‘My Name Is Emily, and I’m a White Supremacist.’
“The very foundations of my way of life are in white supremacy, and the list of microaggressions I have committed, and will no doubt continue to commit in spite of my “good intentions” for as long as I’m alive, is virtually endless.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
An Uncomfortable Truth
Nikole Hannah-Jones explores the rhetoric of Donald Trumps’s appeals to black voters and calls on the Democratic Party to stop taking Black support for granted.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Who’s to Blame for Trump? Media’s Socioeconomic Blind Spots
It wasn’t poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the “war on drugs.” Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black “welfare queen.” These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Duality of ‘Home,’ or, a Life Both Lived and On Display
In The New York Times Magazine, Rachel Cusk meditates on the ways our homes are simultaneously the places we live, and set pieces that we art-direct.
Posted inDiscussions, Nonfiction, Quotes, Reading List
On Being Fat
Sara Benincasa’s essay “Why Am I So Fat?” was one of our top five reads last week, and with good reason — it was honest and cutting in all the right ways. It was brash and unapologetic and funny as hell (and also suggests that perhaps Fader was slightly premature in declaring, earlier this year, that […]
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quotes
‘Booze Is the Oil in Our Motors’
Is it really that hard, being a First World woman? Is it really so tough to have the career and the spouse and the pets and the herb garden and the core strengthening and the oh-I-just-woke-up-like-this makeup and the face injections and the Uber driver who might possibly be a rapist? Is it so hard […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Obama’s Aesthetic of Cool
Charles Pierce, writing in Esquire, on President Obama’s Democratic National Convention Speech and uniquely American brand of “cool.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
God the Gorilla
Not everyone buys into a sky-god with a long white beard, a serious and all-knowing mien, capable of rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad. But it doesn’t take much imagination to recognise that God, as worshipped in most of the world, is remarkably humanoid, widely perceived as a great, big, scary, wilful, yet nourishing and […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Conversation in the Margins
What they don’t tell you about death—or what you don’t really understand until it happens close to you—is how permanent it is. In the months afterward I kept thinking to myself, all right, I get it. This is too painful. Let’s just take a little break from the loss. Let’s have a weekend off. A […]