Category: Non-Fiction

Singularity In 1993, mathematician Vernor Vinge warned against the coming technological ‘singularity,’ an event he predicted would occur between 2005 and 2030. The event: basically, robots take over the world. Vinge felt ambivalent and said more or less this: The robots are coming, the robots are coming, the robots are almost here. I am excited…

Early in the German sci-fi rom-com I’m Your Man, Alma, a fairly nondescript middle-aged white woman, enters a Berlin dance club. Inside, she encounters a crowd of fashionably dressed people smoking, flirting with each other, and dancing to a live band. She isn’t fooled. The people are holograms—part of a meticulously designed romantic atmosphere. They…

  This is a story about a mouse whose death taught us what it means to live. It’s a story about a mouse as a teacher. About a mouse and a teacher. And a trial. This is a story about all the ways we don’t understand what we’ve done until after we’ve done it. It’s…

After Laurie Easter ACROSS   During talk sessions with Lance, when I don’t want to say the hard thing, I approach it from its love handles & nestle in the belly. I spend my time with him writing________  on Post-it notes, taping, sometimes stapling them, caddy-corner to each other & reading them to him out…

Family I was too young to know these things. They were my big, beautiful and exciting teenage stepsisters. I had inherited them overnight when our mothers fell in love and moved us all in together to that apartment on 15th street with the tall ceilings and steep winding stairs that led to a sunny patch…

I am staring down at my grandmother’s sunken face.   She wears her FitBit on her wrist, the same amethyst-filled rings she always wore, and her hair is spiked like usual. Only today, the tips of her hair are purple. “Do you like it?” my mother asks between sniffles. I nod my head. “She always…

By the time I was fifteen, I was a regular in a bar. Which, back then, wasn’t all that unusual. It was the late-60s, we lived in Queens, and the bartender was a barmaid, a novelty at the time. Gracie. Black spit-curls, white boots, black miniskirt, white scoop-neck blouse. She called me Hon. She called…

IT STARTED THAT SUMMER with Bookie & Reynaldo’s mom, the one with blonde hair who looked like T-Boz from the R&B group TLC. The boys and their mom lived in an apartment down the street from us until one day their windows were boarded up and they were gone. My friend Nina, who had a…

I’ve never met a Caroline I couldn’t fantasize about. When someone mis-pronounces my name more than once, I tell them, “It’s like Caroline, but Emma. Emmeline.” When they ask where that name comes from, I tell them my mother read it in a book. I tell them that Emmeline is often a side character in…