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The literal opposite of missing would probably be present, but in my mind it’s free, the radical opportunity to be present. This brings me back to Walden, which honestly, I despise now, for its naive arguments about what is necessary for life. Thoreau never asks a basic question: What is a li…

Death, of course, is the ultimate containment; other, less final containments are conversely strategies toward genocide. Perfect chiasmus.

[...] It was the 1970s and no charges were pressed, boys being boys. That night, my father beat my brother mercilessly with a washing machine hose in the dank basement of our house. The chaos of a violence like that is astonishing. The cacophonous screaming. The inability of anyone to stop it. The …

MUST HISTORY have losers? The record suggests yes. Redistribution is a tricky business. Even simple metaphors for making the world more equitable — leveling a playing field, shifting the balance — can correspond to complex or labor-intensive processes. What freedoms might one have to surrender in o…

Leftist men celebrated the fall of liberal male hypocrites, liberals the fall of conservative ones, conservatives and alt-rightists the fall of the liberals and leftists. [...] It seemed not to occur to them — or maybe just not to matter? — that any person, any woman, had suffered. [...] As the ada…