The Believer

“Can we fall in love completely without completely losing ourselves?”

“I don’t want my part to get skipped over, but I still don’t know how to write directly about what went down between me and M. All I can do is worry a detail like an R&B singer worries a line…For years I’ve cherished a clip of Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin singing on Soul Train.”

“So much of my work as a writer and editor is to make sure that Black people have the ability to write about more than just moments like the one we’re in right now, and a big disheartening thing for me has been to live through this moment and again see editors scrambling to get Black writers to write and then undoubtedly those same editors will vanish when those Black writers want to write about, I don’t know, ice cream or whatever the fuck”

“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.