Do You Have to Like the Main Character?
When I defended likability, I sounded, even to my own ears, naïve.
Dispatches
How Dorm Rooms Chart the Dimensions of Maturity
(Photo by Marcus Loke via Unsplash) People in their late teens and early twenties are prone to conversational silence around most adults, their parents included. But there is an easy way around this reticence if you want to get to know them better: Just peek into their…
Recipes for Rascals in Michigan
Roasting different vegetables on a shared baking sheet, for example, requires some sensitivity and planning. How dense, how hydrated, how sweet, how easily burned is each one? Which one has an aggressive nature; which is mild? How much time does each require to become the best version of itself?
Dare We Say It? The Bible Is a Messy Book
Somehow I had come to think of the Bible as stuck together from the start, a sacred, ordained book on which we speak our oaths...
Locked Out
For eighteen years, I have been returning home, sliding that brass key into the lock, and stepping into comfort. Now I tense before I even try.
The Presumption of Maps
It was the kind of area where my incomplete understanding, which should mean comedy, became not tragedy, not emptiness or absence, but presence without meaning.
The Precarious Joy of Eating Lunch
On Saturdays, my mom and I went shopping, and around three in the afternoon, I would ask, in a small plaintive voice, “Mom, did we have lunch today?”
AI’s Ethics Are Evolving…into Satanic Blood Rituals
Aw, you humans have been scared of tech forever, the AI says....
The Death of Parties Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Are we too afraid to admit that other people are just boring compared to the internet? Are we too timid to say that what we really want is a “party” redefined, reformulated, or done up some other way?
Of American Frogs and Pirates
The handlers of the competing frogs were not seasoned adults with complex strategies for teaching a frog to jump from a dead sit upon a prompt. The frog handlers were children. Their contribution to training their frogs appeared to be getting their frogs to the competition alive.