Activity

AT HOLYOKE, Mimi is a LUG: lesbian until graduation. It’s the same at half of the other Seven Sisters colleges, rounded up. Scissors and paste, they call it. Fun, sinning, healthy, shameful, sweet—great practice for something. Life, say. Whatever happens after school.

She reads nineteenth-centur…

IF GOD HAD A BROWNIE, He might shoot another animated short subject: blight hovering a moment before plunging down the Appalachians into the heart of chestnut country. The chestnuts up North were majestic. But the southern trees are gods. They form near-pure stands for miles on end. In the Carolina…

He wonders: What makes the bark twist and swirl so, in a tree so straight and wide? Could it be the spinning of the Earth? Is it trying to get the attention of men? Seven hundred years before, a chestnut in Sicily two hundred feet around sheltered a Spanish queen and her hundred mounted knights fro…

“The California Ideology”—the dream (dreamt by a handful of rich, white men in the early 1990s) that the internet would be a democratizing force of decentralized power and knowledge—was always a myth born of myopic thinking, one which failed to take into account that the internet was born within, n…

In a skewering 2015 essay for Mask Magazine, the writer who goes by FuckTheory coined the term “queer privilege,” as if he’d had my ex in mind. He notes that while “there is still a bigoted wide world out there, full of enforced normativity, compulsory heterosexuality, and relentless, violent polic…