The voice sometimes shifts drastically between essays, which is an intentional choice—me playing around with this idea of “code-switching,” and also this postmodern aesthetic of schizophrenia, where I don’t just write from a singular voice, but multiple.

I’d like the work I do to matter somehow, which is all the proof I need that it doesn’t.

Because this issue has been overlooked from a political and cultural and intellectual standpoint, partially because of its association with girls, I wanted to give it a really serious treatment.

Writing histories of struggle alongside imagined futures of collective care, there is no isolated subject. Silt’s essays and poems serve as a sprawling manifesto, showcasing the peculiarities of pleasure under capitalism.

In what ways is a manuscript an exhibit? In what ways are these words animate? Maybe you understand these pages as an artifact, sacred words from an NDN; or maybe you read me as a sex worker of language, one who strips and fucks the page and spills himself all over it?

Ernaux’s recent popularity in the US points to our desire for literature that plumbs sexuality without sentimentality. Do away with the crumbs of dissociative sex and give us something raw.

In so many ways, our ability to maintain our way of living relies on our ability to ignore information and tell lies to one another, and especially to ourselves. Ruptures reveal cracks in the surface of our collective agreements.

Your apartment is nice, but not amazing. You’re not struggling nor are you wealthy. Sometimes you regret not working harder. Other times, you regret not making more irresponsible choices. If traditionality is suffocating, living free is like treading water and trying not to sink.

Defenses of liberal arts education seem a dime a dozen these days.

Can dating advice ever be universal?

Neuroscientists tell us that what comes to the retina of the eye is only a part—and not even the largest part—of what we see.

Christine Hume’s experimental autobiography Saturation Project is about the dissolving of its subject—or maybe, even, The Subject.

The first time I saw an image of William Sommer’s “Winter Landscape” painting, I was doing something unmemorable online; but I remembered the moment I saw it perhaps even more than I remembered the painting itself because it so strongly evoked the view from my childhood bedroom window.

Where are the great climate novels?

It is easy to take translation for granted. It is easy to appreciate a text only in its current context, to visualize a listed translator as a talented mathematician with some innate knowledge or intuition for what an original author or source text imagined, performing equations to convert languages for our understanding and pleasure.

Deforestation, spree shooters, plastic bag islands, the last vaquita (a shy, small dolphin with panda eyes)… The world, if we’re being honest, is screwed.