How Trump Has Encouraged the Witches

Once you have done everything else you can think to do to shift the “molecular weight,” you have only three choices: resign yourself to the unbearable, lose your mind, or cast a spell.

Everyday Saints

The morning that I woke—grateful all over again for the new ease in life, the new job, the reprieve from what I had expected to be a year of anguish and mourning—and decided my mother was a saint, an absurd and delightful thought came to me: I, the long-fallen-away Catholic, could pray to her!

Dropping Clues to Your Socioeconomic Class

It is obnoxious, ridiculous, and a waste of breath and semiotics. But we live in an invisible hierarchy of, if not class in the British sense, advantages, privileges, access, or the lack thereof. And they have shaped us.

How a Dog Would Want a Politician to Behave

Willie is part of our family, and we know he hates us to be gone, and leaving without acknowledging that feels as though we are brushing those feelings aside. I would rather he know that we know, plus give him a treat so he gets something that acknowledges his suffering. That feels more like a family: All of us aware that we treasure one another’s company, tender when we part, and thrilled when we return.

Undoing the Colonial World that Whites Made

In Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Adom Getachew returns to the sunrise of African and Caribbean decolonization in the twentieth century. Far from portraying the neoliberal African state as the fulfillment of the freedom dreams of the Black Atlantic’s architects of decolonization, Getachew excavates a vibrant set of histories that show us that those visions were quite different.

Pretend You Are Doing Research in Antarctica

Antarctica suits my mood; it is, psychologically, what I fear this winter will be for all of us. No burble of conversation on outdoor patios, no meeting for wine with neighbors, just quick shuddery nods and a dash back inside. However will we find the patience? How do researchers in Antarctica endure it?

The Zoo of Human Quarantine Behavior

The zoo was open again. How had those guys managed?I imagined them all breathing a huge sigh of relief. Puttering around in their habitats with no watching eyes, no screaming children. And then, reopening? Was it a shock to their nervous systems?The next day, I called to check.

Playing Possum

I always find marsupials endearing, that cozy tucking of the baby into the pouch. Even more endearing: Opossums gobble up what we revile—snails, slugs, spiders, cockroaches, rats, mice, and snakes, not to mention about 5,000 ticks, many of them disease-laden, every season.

Why Ted Kennedy Never Became President and Why Jimmy Carter Served Only One Term

Camelot’s End is not a scholarly book. But it is a solid, journalistic account of an important moment in the history of the Democratic Party and the United States.

Yard Sign Politics

Respect does not mean staying silent about injustice in order to keep a fragile peace. But are yard signs meaningful speech, or just a lazy, self-indulgent shortcut that will only piss people off?

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