January 1, 2020 Best of 2019 Not Gonna Get Us By Amanda Lee Koe We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Original illustration © Jia Sung. “Don’t eat pigs,” she said. “So I can kiss you, if we meet again.” That was how she said it, in Mandarin. Pigs, not pork. The line went dead. I was out of calling-card credits again. We’d met a year earlier, in 2002, at the Shanghai Municipal Physical Sports School. She was fourteen, I was fifteen. She played soccer, I played softball. She was a Uighur Muslim who’d never heard of metropolitan Singapore, I was a Straits Chinese atheist who didn’t know pastoral Xinjiang existed. Read more >>
January 1, 2020 Best of 2019 Tove Jansson on Writer’s Block By Tove Jansson We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Tove Jansson I’m sitting comfortably parked on a bench in a little park behind Saint-Sulpice and I’m supposed to find something to write about. It’s very quiet here. Pigeons copulate on a patch of grass, some tourists catch their breath on the benches across from me, an organ plays behind my back, far away. A clochard comes every now and then and bothers the tourists—he explains, at length, that he also understands Italian. I just keep quiet, and eventually he goes away. I can’t comprehend why this has to be so hard; one should be able to write just about anything at any time, in a purely professional way. (I wonder how it is for other people.) For the time being I have only written the date on the first page of my notepad but that was yesterday. Read more >>
December 31, 2019 Best of 2019 On Nighttime By Hanif Abdurraqib We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Source: Thinkstock. I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured. Under the wrong circumstances, a hospital room can become a symphony of noises, each of them courting the worst of a person’s anxieties. There might be an incessant but inconsistent beeping, or the sounds of several machines doing the work of keeping a person alive. It is a privilege to be told that someone you love is going to survive. The message comes from some exhausted doctor, eager to give the good news after the tests, or the surgery, or whatever else. I have also been on the other side: knowing that I would be watching a person I love slowly fade until they vanished altogether, and understanding there’s nothing that can be done. There’s something uniquely challenging about the moments in between, when the good news of a person’s continued living is delivered, but they still have to stay in a hospital room for a few more days before they can go home. From far enough away, underneath a wave of monochromatic hospital blankets, it can be hard to tell if someone is still breathing. Particularly if you’ve already imagined a world without them in it. If you’ve spent enough time imagining someone as dead, it can be difficult to visualize them as simply sleeping. I don’t love hearing the beeping and the sonic hiccups of hospital machinery, but it is worse not to hear anything. Read more >>
December 31, 2019 Best of 2019 On Classic Party Fiction By Elisa Gabbert We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Irving Nurick, illustration from the 1920s In her 2008 review of Cecily von Zeigesar’s Gossip Girl novels, Janet Malcolm quotes the eponymous narrator’s “opening volley”: “We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party.” I’ve never read the books myself, but on the CW show, which I was briefly obsessed with, we hear Kristen Bell’s voice-over during the title sequence: “Gossip Girl here! Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite.” The actors playing these trust-fund teens aren’t just good-looking; they seem like genetic impossibilities. Blake Lively is perfectly cast as the, in Malcolm’s words, “incandescently beautiful” Serena van der Woodsen. She’s 5’10” and usually wearing heels. Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan of the blog Go Fug Yourself used to call her “Boobs Legsly.” Serena and her friends and enemies (there is often little distinction between the two) have not only lucked into the 1 percent, they are also having an unfair amount of fun. Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn. When Emma Bovary arrives at La Vaubyessard, the chateau of the marquis, for dinner and a ball, the opulence blows her bourgeois mind: “The red claws of the lobsters overhung the edges of the platters; large fruits were piled on moss in openwork baskets; the quails wore their feathers; coils of steam rose into the air; and, grave as a judge in his silk stockings, knee breeches, white tie, and jabot, the butler conveyed the platters.” Party scenes are full of these lists of foods and drinks and flowers, overloaded sentences that embody abundance, the fulsome displays of affluence. See Nick Carraway’s first party at Jay Gatsby’s: “Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York … On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.” Was Flaubert the first to use this listing trope, appalled by the excess? Jane Austen’s balls are disappointingly devoid of visual detail, as if the evidence of money was just assumed. (Austen’s novels adapt so well into film because the dialogue is all there, and costume and set designers can supply the surrounding lushness.) A truly expensive party should feel otherworldly; the marquis’s ball, by putting her in “contact with wealth,” leaves Emma utterly changed. It makes “a hole in her life, like those great chasms that a storm, in a single night, will sometimes open in the mountains.” Read more >>
December 30, 2019 Best of 2019 Objects of Despair: Fake Meat By Meghan O’Gieblyn We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! The Impossible Burger. Science lifted us out of nature. It tamed the wilderness; it gave us tools to transcend our lousy, fallen bodies; and it shot us to the moon. Now it has produced a hamburger made entirely of vegetables that bleeds like real beef. The packaging of the aptly named Impossible Burger instructs you, as if daring you, to cook the patties medium rare. Three minutes on each side, and the center will remain the fleshly pink color of raw sirloin. This effect is the result of heme, the protein that carries oxygen through our blood and gives it its crimson color, and which food scientists have discovered how to ferment in a lab using genetically engineered yeast. (Pedantic foodies will point out that the red in beef is not blood but myoglobin, but this is beside the point. We call burgers “bloody” to acknowledge a truth that modernity has long tried to obscure: that meat was once, like us, a living thing.) Heme, which is abundant in animal muscle, is also what lends beef its distinctive flavor. The first time I prepared the Impossible Burger at home, the skillet erupted into a fatty sizzle (the patty contains emulsified coconut oil, which melts like tallow), and within seconds the air filled with the iron aroma of singed flesh. But the most uncanny moment arrived when I finished eating and there remained on the plate a stain of pinkish-brown drippings. In that moment, when I should have been marveling at the wonders of food science, I confess I was thinking of the weeping Madonna of Civitavecchia, a wooden statue that was said to shed tears of real blood—the signs of flesh where there is none. Read more >>
December 30, 2019 Best of 2019 One Word: Bitch By Danez Smith We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! I can tell who’s calling me from across the room by the pitch of their bitch. Fati goes up on the i so that it’s almost a shriek. Hieu gets a little gravelly, dark and full, bitch as precursor to some good gossip. Blaire says it flat, matter-of-fact, like a name. Franny says it like a bell, a sweet call to fellowship. I love my bitches. I love being bitched by them. It’s an insult we’ve spun into coin. The femmes and queers I have known have saved my life. The deep wells of care from femmes; the ingenuity of queer love. Bitch is the passport to that nation. Or maybe it’s the national anthem, how we sing our love to each other. Maybe it’s our language. When I am bitched by the homies, there is no threat on my life. There is no car following me as I hightail it home, bitch flung out the window, faggot close behind. There is no accusation like back in high school when bitch was a charge made by a fellow boy who could smell the girl in you, or a boy who loved/hated your girl-body or a boy whose only tongue was violence. I used to be scared of coming off bitch-made. You know: scary, sissy, punk, femme. All those words that I now wear as crowns lurked in the corners of boys’ mouths. I was terrified, trying to exact my walk and perfect a boy-tongue, scared someone would see through my act and spot the bitch in me. Read more >>