Can a century-old colonial crisis be solved before a once-in-a-generation opportunity passes the island by?
Gabriela Medina was around 10 years old when she first learned in school that the United States’ president was her president, too. The Congress she’d heard about? The one that met thousands of miles away across the ocean? Well, they made laws that applied to her as well, laws that often superseded the ones enacted by leaders at home in Puerto Rico.
But what really stuck with Gabriela was something so fundamentally unfair, so mind-blowingly unjust, it began shaping her political identity. As a Puerto Rican living in the archipelago, she would never be able to choose who represented her…
The Conversation
Alexander Chee and Cathy Park Hong on how the pandemic has cracked open discrimination against Asian American communities
In the fall of 2019 I received an email from the poet and critic Cathy Park Hong telling me she had written an essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. She asked me to read it and consider it for a blurb. I receive roughly three or four requests like this on most weeks, sometimes as many as three or four a day, but I am a fan of Hong’s, and I remembered her indelible 2014 essay on whiteness and the avant-garde in poetry. If a collection from her meant more of that, I knew I wanted to see…
I live alone. It’s been a very long year.
It has been one year since I’ve been properly hugged. I have never been a casual hugger, and yet it was this fact I kept coming back to as we approached the first anniversary of the pandemic. Or, rather, the fact kept coming back to me, swinging in like a wrecking ball, bringing with it the reality that I have had to survive 12 months of global death and uncertainty without the simple, basic, fundamental comfort of being held.
It is never lost on me that this sort of deprivation is, to some degree, a punishment inflicted on criminals, or…
As long as we focus on deaths and statistics, the bigger story of Covid-19 will go untold
On Tuesday, March 3, 2020, Alex Goldstein, the founder of a Boston strategic-communications company, spent the entire day counting mail-in ballots for the Massachusetts presidential primary. He was locked into an unventilated, 20-by-20-foot room with 30 other volunteers, most of them elderly. They all tore into lukewarm pizzas with their ink-grubby hands, clowned for photos, and gossiped a little about a “foreign crisis” in China and Italy — the novel coronavirus.
Seven Americans had died, but the disease still felt remote. The World Health Organization was declining to call the disease a pandemic. Community spread had not been identified in…
The coronavirus has realigned the pleasure principle as we struggle between the need for desire and safety
Last March, while under New York’s strictest lockdown, I felt overwhelmed by before-times portrayals of lust, sensuality, and unencumbered joy. I’d have fleeting fantasies about flying to parts of the country where they were still having sweat-soaked orgies and raucous dinner parties. I watched movies like Call Me By Your Name, a panorama of landscapes both corporeal and natural, or read Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, a book of speculative history that lovingly reconstructs turn-of-the-century Black women’s pursuit of pleasure and sexual authenticity. I recalled my last few weeks out in the world: A dinner at a crowded restaurant…
The future of journalism is being written at America’s college newspapers
In November 2019, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions came to Northwestern University to make a speech he called “The Real Meaning of the Trump Agenda.” Sessions, who had been invited by the College Republicans, had been out of office for a year. But he was still an infamous figure of the Trump administration, an anti-migrant, anti-asylum, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-marijuana henchman who introduced “kids in cages” to American history.
His presence at a liberal school like Northwestern was bound to be viewed as a provocation. One student Facebook group called for a “Night of Action” protest in a parking lot outside…
For decades, the website’s harsh light of truth rooted out urban legends and conspiracy theories. Does it still work?
Over the past 25 years, the internet has gone from a place of possibility and promise to a dreary slog. Nowhere is this more evident than in the evolution of Snopes.com, a website that once brought a great deal of joy to the internet explorer. Since its founding in 1995 by husband and wife David and Barbara Mikkelson, Snopes’ mission of “debunking” has changed in ways both subtle and inexorable, from targeting urban legends like Bigfoot to unpacking QAnon conspiracy theories. The distinction may seem slight — both are false stories whose appeal lies in their capacity to spread and…
Our conversations could be frustrating, but they also gave me hope. Was I a fool to think we were getting somewhere?
Three days after the 2016 election, I posted an invitation on Facebook. I was looking for Donald Trump voters who wanted to come over for dinner at my house, which is just a short walk from the White House in Washington, D.C. I wanted to understand why over 62 million people voted for someone who I thought was wholly unqualified for the job and entirely lacked the moral character befitting the office. I wanted to ask my own questions without the filter of media or political punditry.
No one accepted my dinner invitation at first. Even though only 4% of…
The young Black mayor of Stockton, California, was a progressive superstar. Then a feisty local blog decided he had to go.
The plot against Michael Tubbs, the first Black mayor of Stockton, California, and the youngest person ever to run a major U.S. city, was conceived even before he took the oath of office, at the age of 26, on January 9, 2017.
The mayorship was not a job for the faint of heart. The former incumbent, Anthony Silva, whose antics included donning medieval-style armor during a state of the city address and giving God a key to the city, had left office under a cloud — accused of everything from financial improprieties to hosting a teenage strip poker game. Meanwhile…
The lie at the heart of the Pham family ‘pass to freedom’
In August, my mother forwarded me an email. “Trump administration taps Vietnam refugee as new ICE chief,” it said. I opened it, and learned that my cousin, Tony Pham, had just been appointed to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Tony’s ascent to this position instilled great pride in my family, especially among the older members who skew politically conservative. I, however, was appalled that my cousin allowed his identity as a refugee to be used as cover for the enforcement of increasingly cruel and dehumanizing immigration policies. …
