The Future in Motion: Why I Judge High School Debate Tournaments
“You hope and hope they’ll get their chance and you know it’s possible they won’t.”
I hit my first debate tournament for the same reason I did everything else at fourteen: Some guy I was into was doing it. I didn’t say shit my entire first round. I just sat there, staring. Lost in the sauce.
Bryan Washington is the author of Lot, with fiction and essays appearing in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Boston Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, Hazlitt, and Catapult. He’s the recipient of an O. Henry Award, and he lives in Houston.
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What It Means to Live in Houston
In a city made up of many cities, spread out, like tiny countries, ascribing their influence is a lot like trekking through a tiny country of your own.
The Case Against Making a City “Beautiful”
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Montrose, the Neighborhood That Gave Us Everything
Montrose was unofficially codified as the nexus of queer life in Houston. If you held a map to the wall, I could tell you how we came to be on those streets.
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The police are there, expecting us, academics in revolutionaries’ outfits.
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“Trump and his administration are readable. And we must read them carefully.”
Teaching Under Threat
“During that class, I did not feel like a teacher; I only felt like a woman, a body in danger.”