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“My guests!” said the host, now standing once more. There was another empty chair to his right. Who had been there? A man with a mustache or a woman with a braid. Someone with a gleaming emerald ring. I drank more wine. “You are far too polite!” the host said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of song…

I’ll start my story again, this time with family. Call it filial piety. I am the daughter of a capitalist; that is to say, my mother needed money to feel safe. I don’t hold this against her. She was raised Chinese in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1950s. I don’t intend to explain this further; if yo…

Enlightened was billed by HBO as a comedy, and at times it can be very funny—especially in the scenes set at Abaddonn, which unspool in the deadpan register of The Office or Office Space. But White has ultimately lit his world with a different kind of light. Consistent with the show’s emphasis on t…

As I say, it was a relief to my sister and me that my parents still loved each other. But one way of seeing the problem is that their loves no longer had to do with each other in the right way. My dad didn’t have the strength to conceal from us for long that he hadn’t wanted the divorce. One mornin…

But although my devotion drives me to do this—my sense that I am a husband and husbands do this—my devotion is also something I want her to feel. It is, in fact, something to be returned in kind, erotically, devotion for devotion. And the real sense of satisfaction of this work is to do it not for …