I’ve never had an office, apart from the sad, windowless closet I occupied as a grad student. I don’t own a desk. Some days I work at my kitchen table, but more often I sit on my couch or in bed with my computer on my lap. Music, rather than location, is what grounds me as I write.

On the train back to Grand Central, the city itself did not feel enough for me. I longed for the presence of another human being—a person I can touch, feel, and shelter with—to save me from the coming isolation of the second wave.

The Abbey of Crime offers none of the playful indulgences of the arcade…As Delcan explains, "there were plenty of games of immediate gratification and this was clearly not one of them."

Imagine a society where we had empathy for those with opposing views. Imagine a society where we read more and fought less.

For Piper, race was always a conscious affiliation, not an essentialist identity. […] Throughout all of this, Piper seems to have organically arrived at an understanding of race that aligns with its actual definition—a social construct rather than a biological fact.

My own mother died years ago, and, similar to Honor Moore’s experience, she left me her journals, letters, essays, and notebooks filled with quotations and existential pondering. Like Moore, it took me years to fully unpack the boxes, a decade slipping away before I gathered the courage to read it all front to back and try to make sense of my mother’s life.