The Believer

“In the recordings of the Voice-O-Graph, two collectors discover an intimate sonic history.”

The stray thoughts of a scattered reader.

Amanda Fortini suggests that Las Vegas is deep and interesting, and a pretty decent place to live, if you care to meet people and look closely, beyond the glittering lure of unbridled debauchery on the Vegas strip.

“Who do we become when we inhabit another language?”

Ash Sanders considers the heavy psychological cost of climate change and society-at-large’s strangely dismissive view of those who routinely make personal sacrifices in order to help the planet survive.

Who do we become when we inhabit another language?

Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant in Laredo, Texas, is a debutante ball featuring teenagers in multi-thousand-dollar Martha Washington cosplay. Mostly Mexican teenagers. But it wasn’t always that way — towns shift, and so do identities.

“Houstonians call I-610 the Loop. It divides the city into two parts: inside the Loop and outside the Loop. The city circumference is marked by Beltway 8, the last buffer before you hit the suburbs. When I was a kid, I lived a neighborhood cluster beyond Beltway 8, west of the city. If you want to picture what that looked like, imagine absolutely nothing at all. Then add some rice fields and some football fields and an H-E-B. Your typical Southern suburban Americana. Still, this was Houston, so there was some semblance of diversity. Even a few decades ago, my family could find just about everything we were looking for (beef patties, black barbers, family friends) outside the city’s inner core.”

The Chinese government denies the mass internment of the Xinjiang region’s Turkic and Muslim peoples, but this forty-page collection of oral histories offers evidence of an enormous humanitarian crisis, with abuses ranging from brainwashing and forced labor to torture.

An examination of beauty, objectivity, and disability.