Jun 21, 2018
A Profound Desert Monument, or the Most Useless Tunnel in the World?
Burro was regarded by his contemporaries as a crazy person.
Burro was regarded by his contemporaries as a crazy person.
Collecting and burning wood, I felt close to my family. It was something tangible, something that kept us warm.
An inverse relationship between the price of a drink and Turkey’s stability.
In Houston, as with everywhere else, the arts serve as tiny lifeboats—and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we all find ourselves floating together.
“One in ten people in Houston is undocumented. And for them the storm is scary on many levels.”
Misfits, outliers, drifters have always lived by the sea and at the mercy of the elements.
If traditions like the rodeo can accommodate Houston’s diversity, whole new traditions will be formed—leaving us with something even better.
After I left, everything became clearer, in the way that a breakup can clarify a toxic relationship; put things in sharp relief.
“I take these photographs so she’ll be able to remember the time when she had two heartbeats. Tears bucket down her face.”
“When you’ve spent your life apart from a loved one, what prepares you for not knowing how to mourn?”
“Turkey remains a country too complex and rich to split into tired binaries of east/west, secular/religious, and Old/New.”
Raji Lian, my great-grandfather, came over from Syria in 1899.
Each time I am lured by the mirage of progress, someone knocks at the door and I am reminded of being thirteen and having nightmares about ICE at our door.
The state bird of Alabama is the yellowhammer, and the state game bird is the turkey. One bird for beauty, and one to blow up.
Dance is about freeing ourselves, finding a secret space inside our bodies that no lock can close.
We’d made a connection across tables, generations, tongues, our own tiny blip of transcendence. Holiness in the noodle bar.
“I usually emphasize that I am a hapa author,” says Kahakauwila. “It’s a political move.”
“Utopian communities are inherently tragic because they are always, every single time, doomed to failure.”
When we conflate men’s sexuality with harassment and violence, we don’t ask much of them. Masculinity doesn’t have to be toxic.
It’s a space where language is manipulated and contorted and pulled and borrowed. It sounds like everywhere and anywhere else.
