A Queasy Selling of the Family Heirlooms
I am not sure which would appall my mother more: “dip chiller” to name her receptacle for delicate, extravagant shrimp, or me asking an artificial intelligence to remind me what she taught me.
Dispatches
The Asian Erasure Trap, or How Being the “Model Minority” Makes Everyone Feel Safer
The air shifted. Some smiled with relief, others looked away. In that moment, I realized what the “model minority” concept protects is not me, but the comfort of those around me. Politeness asks us to trade particularity for harmony, difference for calm.
Fugitive Kindness and the Joy of the Migrants
For a moment, I caught myself thinking: this dancefloor is the happiest place on earth. Not in the saccharine way Disney markets happiness, but in the way fugitive joy exists—imperfect, defiant, and fleeting. The kind of happiness that knows how precarious it is and yet insists on itself anyway.
Why We Surrender to Logos
Should we not be grateful that companies care enough to hire skilled graphic designers educated in the ways of soft-selling via design and color, and not the bark of street hawkers?
Hire Vitrivius to Do Your Interior Design
Cicero: “An enormous house is often a discredit to the owner, if there is an emptiness about the place.”
Do You Have to Like the Main Character?
When I defended likability, I sounded, even to my own ears, naïve.
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.