The Paris Review

“Today, as AI continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.”

“To Robert May’s generation, Christmas was much more about the adult experience of the world—and it crackled with potential danger.”

“Verdigris is emblematic of that movement. It’s a blue-green, yes. But more importantly, it’s a quality. It is hard to give it a hex code because it’s not flat. It’s a color made from change.”

“But russet means more than red-like, red-adjacent. It also means rustic, homely, rough. It also evokes mottled, textured, coarse. The word describes a quality of being that can affect people as well as vegetables.”

Audre Lorde “recognized that there would never be a perfect time to speak up because ‘while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.'”

Katy Kelleher meditates on mauve, purple, and periwinkle in history, art, and in the beauty of quarantine sunsets.

“What are you carrying dormant in your body that springs up when confronted with Black joy, Black power, Black brilliance, Black Blackness in the world? How can you train your bodies to respond differently when you are triggered, when you’re in fight-or-flight mode? How can I help you stop yourselves from killing us?”

Publishing, promoting, and trying to keep a timely book visible during a pandemic.

“My mother’s absence in my life has always haunted me more than my father’s abuse, which is why I suppose I wrote a novel about a mother leaving a daughter.”

An organized life is not always a productive life.