“What I am qualified to say—what I am saying: what links the evils of the modern Olympics to literary criticism, to literary prizes and to A-to-F classroom grades—is that I’m tired of losing and tired of winning, and that we all lose when we focus so often on prizes, grades, and final scores.”
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What Neko Case taught me about curation and the week’s Top 5
“When the media covered women in the grunge and alternative scene, it treated them like a genre unto itself. This genre, though, received almost no in-depth profiles or features.” Books are one of the great joys in my life. The other is music. I’ve been following singer songwriter Neko Case since 1997, after picking up […]
Victoria Amelina: Ukraine and the Meaning of Home
“Hopefully, I will have turned out to be one of the worst investments the Russian Federation ever made.”
The Incredible Story of Finding My Brother in My 60s
“We were born a week apart, in the same hospital, to different mothers.”
Hungry Ghosts
“I think of all the hurts she can never outlive — the ghosts that can never be satisfied, no matter how much of herself she feeds to them.”
When a Houseplant Obsession Becomes a Nightmare
“Some of us just can’t resist the allure of the carnivorous Nepenthes. They’re beautiful, rare, and in every way life-consuming.”
A Year in Reading: Power to the People
Incorrigible, insightful, inspiring: the incredible people of 2024.
Gun Person
“The walls in our classrooms are so thin. This training has not trained us. The lesson I take away is that I’m not ready.”
The Best Four Years of Your Life?
“My future — the vague, all-consuming ideal we’re taught to live for — felt like a more dominant force in my life than my present.”
The Genocide the World Ignored
Ayder Comprehensive Medical Hospital was the second largest in Ethiopia and the jewel of the Tigrayan health system—and for two horrific years, it became a war zone.

