Past midnight, or at 2 a.m. on the weekends, our fast-food place closes its doors and we use the next hour to clean up and put everything back in its place. Recently, we got an additional task, sorting through the trash to meet new recycling requirements: plastic in the yellow…
Welcome to the You and I Need to Read This series, in which I take a book on my bookshelf that I still haven’t read, and explain through a bit of meandering why I, and consequently you, should read it right now. My goal with this series is to foster…
Dear [insert most book titles],
I talk about you the way a 12-year-old talks about their new girlfriend who goes to a different school — a lot, in both great detail and impressive vagueness. I know what you’re about. I judge you by your cover and I do it well…
I reinstalled Twitter on my phone and now my search history on this godforsaken app only consists of “Medium buyout.” Every day I check back in to see who else will be leaving Medium next week as a result of Ev Williams’ bombshell of an email. …
I might have gotten a little too interested in the stock market since this whole Gamestop thing started in late January. I guess I dig deeper into something I know nothing about only when it hits the Twitter trends. (I’m basic like that.) Anyway.
Reading Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” in COVID times is a split-screen exercise. On one side, roughly a century ago, a few years after the Spanish flu pandemic, there is very little literature on the subject of illness; but on the other side, today amid the Covid-19 pandemic, illness…
In Sisterhood and Squatting in the 1970s, Christine Hall gives a dystopian yet accurate description of some boroughs in London. “To walk through Islington, Camden, and Hackney in the early 1970s was to walk along street after street of soot-blackened, late Georgian and Victorian terraces and villas boarded up and…
I learned the word ‘empathy’ in the third grade when my White teacher told us, “Do not waste food! Think about the poor little kids in Africa who don’t have any.” All of my classmates, who were all white, thought I was from there. I guess I fit the profile…
In the early years of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Black lives didn’t exist. When they did, they were only used as props and disposable objects to further the ideologies of “universal” (read: white) feminism. Hazel V. Carby, scholar and pioneer of Black feminism, reflects this idea in an article appropriately…
“Why is the African collection on the lowest floor?” I ask a security guard at the British Museum. Every other collection gets sunlight, but Africa is buried underground, hidden beneath the fire exits, accessible only if you want to look for it. …
English graduate student and freelance writer based in France. Words at Level, Elemental, Gen, Human Parts, etc. Email: abderemane.m.assad@gmail.com
