Soap and Bones

Pennsylvania’s frontier in the decade after both the Seven Years War and Pontiac’s fearsome Indian rebellion was a paranoid place...

by M. Munro Blackness is the nonexcluded middle with a right to (refuse) philosophy. —Fred Moten All Fred Moten’s books – from his first monograph, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, up to and including the final volume of the trilogy consent not to be...

When the American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York in 1929 after nearly a decade away in Paris, she came back to a city transformed...

The error that Appiah denounces is “essentialism”: the theory that members of the same group share some inner essence that explains what they have in common.

I am standing beside a small male cop. It’s four days before the Kavanaugh vote, and we still have a kind of hope or momentum ...

One month into their marriage, my parents leave Turkey for good. It’s my mom’s first time on a plane. They fly from Ankara to Brisbane, an Australian city where they don’t know anyone.

Cicadas might be a pest, but they’re special in a few respects. For one, these droning insects have a habit of emerging after a prime number of years...

People often said that he finished sentences for me. Well, he did. He was between me and the world. He not only answered the telephone; he finished my sentences.

In the prologue to Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora, Chandra D. Bhimull begins with two narratives about death.

by Eli S. Evans During the weekdays in the summer of 1982 … I spent much of my time working, working out, lifting weights, playing basketball, or hanging out and having some beers with friends as we talked about life, and football, and school and girls. —Brett Kavanaugh, Senate...

Merve Emre strikesa rare off-note in her crackling new book, The Personality Brokers, when she briefly purports not to understand the appeal of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Buddhist monks follow a lot of rules – 253 in one tradition, 200 in another. As the story goes, all of these rules were made by the Buddha himself...

In March of this year, 18-year-old South Floridian Emma Gonzalez announced that she was “Cuban and bisexual” in the midst of her battle...

I am haunted by an image I first saw many years ago of a ‘cortical homunculus’: a figure of a sort of man, whose bodily parts are variously shrunken...

The audience sat in front of a screen heard ssssssssssssssssss in the darkness. Light flashed. A train appeared on the screen. The train was coming, increasing in size.

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a modernist novel decidedly unconcerned with modern questions. It seems impossible to describe the book in terms of plot or structure. Even the basic operations of character and perspective are not straightforward.

‘God, but life is loneliness,’ declared the writer Sylvia Plath in her private journals. Despite all the grins and smiles we exchange, she says ...