According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., if there was a Harlem Renaissance, “as surely as it was gay as it was black,” it was also disabled. Steeped in a nascent black disability culture characterized by a rejection of eugenics, medical segregation, and the ableist politics of racial respectability, writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora
from the collection if you love that woman In Chapman’s enthusiasm for Homer, Keats forgetsWho discovered the Pacific Ocean – Not Cortez StrongBalboa with eagle eyes but on a peak in Darien. where he took out his handkerchief and sawDeath warrant drop of arterial blood,Fate is too deep for tears. years, i was scared Someone
We’re raiding the Guardian’s long-read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years gone by, along with new introductions from the writers. From this week, 2021: How Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker became one of the world’s most controversial thinkers By Alex Blaisdell. Read by Christopher Ragland
In conversation with Merv Emre on The Critic and Her Publics Welcome to season four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merv Emre talks to professional interviewers of all types about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good question, how do you
Before the first Molotov cocktail reached us, before the mob arrived with knives, machetes and wooden sticks, it was a big rock that invaded our lunch table. It passed near my left ear and bounced onto our table, scattering food everywhere and hitting the glass window of the restaurant in front of me. It happened
It is difficult to underestimate the enthusiasm of French intellectuals for Marxist theory in the 1950s and 60s. If Sartre was the most important living philosopher, Marx was the most important dead philosopher. And the École Normale, an institution full of youth “overeducated in the art of interpretation”, as Derrida put it, was a central
In August 2021, I could not study. I had just had a miscarriage—my second within six months—and every time I picked up a novel, I would become disoriented, the words jumbled up, almost incomprehensible. I complained about this to a friend of mine. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “It’s like my brain
during a critical moment odysseyCirce sends Odysseus to the kingdom of the dead to find a prophet who can instruct him on how to return home after more than a dozen years. But to travel to the kingdom of the dead, our “complex” (the most appropriate Homeric adjective, introduced only a few years earlier in
Each day, my dog Helgi and I walk about eight miles. We started on Wymore Street, in the middle of Elliott, my neighborhood, and passed by the city workers’ fuel station and dump, with the odd hint of a baseball field, where the same old boats had been parked for months, rained on and loose.
This first appeared in Lit Hub art of writing Newsletter—Sign up here. Article continues after ad My grandmother suffers from dementia. I could say that his sense of reality is unstable, but that would be misleading. What is more, his experience of reality is not bound by time and space. When she looks at me,