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THE LATEST
Keeping the Faith (New York Times Magazine)
The youngest Shaker in the world is 67 years old, and his name is Arnold. He lives alongside Sister June, 86, in a magnificent brick building designed to sleep about 70 — the dwelling house of the last active Shaker village in the world, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. Together they constitute one of the longest-running utopian experiments in America.
It’s a triumph, as utopian experiments aren’t known for their durability, though the impulse — to start afresh apart from the mess of mainstream society, to reinvent society with like-minded people — has always been strong here. Out of the many that America has fostered, this is one of the most abiding. Out of the tens of thousands of Shakers who have lived out their faith in the last quarter-millennium, these two remain.
SOME FAVORITES
vanitas (the paris review)
He loves poppies and lavender and Alexander and burdock and samphire and bugloss. With each passing month, as more of his friends die, he devotes page after page to recording what he did in his garden, how each flower is doing in the harsh, salty climate and soil of Dungeness.
frances mcdormand’s difficult women (nyt magazine)
Shortly after returning from Paris, I received an email from her with the subject line “My head shot.” It contained a photograph of her floating naked in a lake.
jesus raves (n+1)
5pm at the Sloppy Tuna and the Christians are party-ready. The house music started bumping around 11 AM—because it is Saturday in Montauk, and summertime—but five o’clock is the golden hour, when everyone is sundrunk and loose and beautiful.
saying yes to the dress (the believer)
I noted this as the first time I was “not Mexican enough” to be recognizable. I also understood it as a story about the deepest form of intergenerational betrayal: a daughter who doesn’t resemble her mother.
the western rides again (the atlantic)
Maybe this is what disposed me to feel that the Western as a film genre was trite and foolish, dangerously sentimental about horizons and stoicism and men shooting each other for no good reason. I know these are fighting words.
man versus rat (the guardian long read)
First, the myths. There are no “super rats”. They do not, as was reported in 1969 regarding an island in Indonesia, fall from the sky. Consider this the good news.
SELECTED WORK (by genre)
profiles
frances mcdormand (new york times magazine)
silvia federici (new york times magazine)
jessie buckley (new york times magazine)
jane campion (new york times magazine)
cate blanchett (new york times magazine)
jodie foster (the atlantic)
raina telgemeier (the atlantic)
kate mckinnon (glamour)
reviews
miranda july + menopause as genre (the atlantic)
susan taubes, am i dead? (london review of books)
zadie smith + the amorality of fiction (the atlantic)
hanya yanigahara + chaos theory (the atlantic)
rachel aviv + the diagnosis trap (the atlantic)
the madness of method acting (the atlantic)
patricia lockwood + the extremely online novel (the atlantic)
marilynne robinson + the prodigal son (the atlantic)
valeria luiselli + the death of the pioneer (the atlantic)
lucia berlin’s disintegrating women (the atlantic)
against the nude (n+1)
ben lerner + the boy uninterrupted (the atlantic)
odds & ends
a conversation with tune-yards (gq)
isabel toledo, in memoriam (new york times magazine)
essays
on obsession, neurosurgery, and the self (n+1)
death and the western (the atlantic)
on being hit (the yale review)
borderlands + the economies of the edge (n+1)
that’s just like white noise (the atlantic)
on self-care (newyorker.com)
ring of fire (harper’s magazine)
the largest living thing (the american scholar)
can a woman's voice ever be right? (new york magazine)
new york i love you but you're bringing me down (the new republic)
on the female diary (the new republic)
reported features
beach party conversions, jesus raves (n+1)
martha washington debutantes, saying yes to the dress (the believer)
are the faculty all right? not really, no. (new york times magazine)
the death investigators (new york times magazine)
who decides about the ventilators? on medical ethicists (the atlantic)
the longest war: man vs. rat (the guardian long-read)
the art of noise (the guardian long-read)
reiki and the medicine of the immaterial (the atlantic)
the swedish chef (the guardian long-read)
mastering + death magnetic (pitchfork)
prayer and protest (california sunday)
roofie city (new york magazine)
corpus (paris review column)
the archive
cantilever
vanitas
oranges
INTERVIEWS (with me)
The Creative Independent (2022)
Rain Taxi (2022)
BOMB Magazine (2021)
Thresholds (2021)
Open Form (2021)
Call Your Girlfriend (2020)
Poets & Writers (2020)
Publishers’ Weekly (2019)