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Race
Is This Desire?
Clarissa Smith on the Intersection of Human Sexuality and Pornography
Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.
February 2024Tangled Avenues
Wade Graham on the Interlocking Challenges of the Modern City
Cities are social, so they have the same problems we do. The mistake we always make in our culture is thinking that cities are somehow separate from us and that if we conceive of the right design for them, they will magically relieve us of our problems. By investing this theoretical power in cities, we can avoid confronting the flaws in the way we have built the world: with inequality and oppression and systems that make some people’s lives miserable while other people’s lives are good.
January 2024Speak, Memory
Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia
Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?
Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.
November 2023The Nail Salon
Some people remember childhood bike rides and ice-cream sundaes; I remember acetone and moon-slivers of nails.
October 2023The American Dream
An Indian immigrant, an oil-company man, a bicycle-riding nomad
October 2023A Face In Judgment
A young man stands at the lectern: nineteen years old, athletic, thick black hair down to his shoulders. I’ll call him Marco. Today my job is to decide whether to send him to prison.
August 2023Portrait Of US
Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher have been traveling the U.S. in their “nomadic photo ark” . . . . attempting to find evidence of what we share by making large-format portraits of Americans from different states and recording short audio interviews with them.
June 2023Footprints In Alabama
My mama’s family is Alabama for at least four generations. Though I grew up in Illinois, my soul is rooted here. So whenever anyone narrows their eyes and cocks their head to question how I — a Black woman — could possibly love this place, my answer has been: “Because generations of my people’s blood and footprints are in this soil.”
June 2023Open Ears
Kelefa Sanneh On What Popular Music Can Teach Us About Each Other
It wouldn’t surprise me if people looked back in twenty or thirty years and said, “This was the Bad Bunny era” — that those Spanish-language musicians have the same kind of influence today as the hip-hop pioneers and the punk pioneers did in the 1970s.
June 2023Some Thoughts On Mercy
When we have mercy, deep and abiding change might happen.
May 2023