In other words, we’ve been learning to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules. We’ve been learning to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to one another better. We’ve been learning to write not for power, but for love.
The heart starts up its thrup-thrup-thrup, a tripping percussion in a chest that now fills with breath. Breathe, breathe. I close my eyes and try to keep hold of that sleepiness, whose call is still there behind the heart’s syncopation. The heart a tough lump of meat, flooded with fear. Fifty minutes pass; it’s almost one. Usually if sleep is going to come it would have come by now; and if it hasn’t come by now, the probability is no sleep at all.
Lying on one side, cradling my head. Sleepiness vanishes, like the picture when you turned off an old TV screen; it recedes to a dot. Then there’s blankness and blackness; the yawning expanse of a night awake.
“We were always coming up with ideas — they’d just pop into our head and we’d scribble them down — but we’d never do anything about them,” Sclafani tells me. “We’d somehow gotten onto drawing novelty glasses and had ideas sketched out. Pete drew the number 2000 and put a couple of eyeballs inside the zeros. I took one look at it and had this vision of the year 2000 in Times Square, and all the people wearing these glasses. It was really a vision.”
Sclafani and Cicero immediately knew they had something, but the year 2000 was still a decade away. “Then Pete draws the year 1991, and we realize, ‘Gee, you could use that too! There’s a circle for the eyes!’ That’s when we really got excited and started dancing around the room,” Sclafani laughs. “I don’t think either of us slept for at least a few days after that.”
“When you classify yourself as vegan, you’re now being watched,” said Mr. Jordan, who posts vegan recipes for dishes such as Cajun seaweed gumbo and raw beet balls along with photos of the vegetarian meals he orders on trips. “In my DMs, I’d get all these messages from activists for protests. I’m just not that guy — I did this for the purpose of eating better.”
Mr. Jordan is one of a growing number of health-conscious consumers embracing a plant-based lifestyle. Unlike many vegans who adhere to a philosophy of animal rights, those going plant-based tend to be inspired by research showing the health benefits of a diet made up of largely fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, grains and nuts. Free from specific ethical constraints, plant-based eaters often have no qualms buying or wearing items made with or tested on animals.
Since I got Daisy in May, she’s given me all the things I hoped to find in a dog: love, companionship, a friend to go on long walks with during the day and snuggle with on the couch at night. She wakes me up in the morning with licks and a wagging tail. At night, she sleeps curled up in the crook of my legs, right behind my knees. As an emotional support dog, she makes me feel comfortable and safe.
At the same time, as a rescue dog who needs a fair bit of emotional support herself, she’s made me more cognizant of the everyday presence of fear, trauma, and stress—and the importance of accepting the dark and needy parts of ourselves rather than trying to deny them. Which is to say that she’s given me a lesson in how to be vulnerable, and how to see vulnerability in others in a new way.
The title of Kiley Reid's debut, Such a Fun Age, works on so many levels it makes me giddy — and, what's better, the title's plurality of meaning is echoed all over the place within the novel, where both plot and dialogue are layered with history, prejudice, expectations, and assumptions. The title's "fun age" might refer to one of the two main characters, Emira Tucker, a 25-year-old black woman who keenly feels that working part-time as a babysitter and part-time as a typist doesn't count as true adulting. It might refer to her charge, Briar, a white three-year-old whose imagination and speech patterns are so charmingly true to a particular kind of kid that she's both instantly recognizable and entirely her own person.
More broadly, the "fun age" might be our own, prior to the 2016 election — an age that was considered by some to be magically post-racist and post-sexist because it was impolite to be these things in public; an age of performative white feminism; an age of social media and virality and armchair activism and virtue-signaling that ironically requires certain people — often, those already more vulnerable — to exist in specific politically correct ways while allowing others — usually, those with power and privilege — off the hook. Don't let all these layers put you off — the wonder of Such a Fun Age is that it is also a page-turner with beautifully drawn characters and a riveting plot.
Liz Phair's 1993 debut full-length album, Exile in Guyville, didn’t ask permission to rock; she just kicked out a space for herself among all the young dudes. She arrived fully formed and fully feminine: topless on the cover, coming at you snarling, laying bare male-female relationships with unapologetically sexual songs like “Flower” and painfully honest ones like “Divorce Song.”
Her powerful new memoir, Horror Stories, turns the full-frontal rock ’n’ roll life inside out. In beautifully crafted episodes, she trains her brutal honesty on herself and on American culture to look at what lurks beneath a life. It’s a book that side-steps the triumph of her music career in order to squarely confront shadow, and to own the darkness that is hers.