Essays

Malak Mattar, Peaceful Reading (detail), 2021, acrylic on canvas
Featured
I Hate WhatsApp
The U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan over two years ago, but I still receive messages and phone calls from my cousins and friends on a monthly basis, asking me to help them get out because they can’t live in fear and hiding anymore. I do not hear from them directly when their houses get raided by the...
Rats
It’s difficult, impossible really, to live on acreage in a rural place and draw a firm line. This side: orderly, civilized, tidy, clean. That side: the wilderness. Some days, you mow the patch of lawn in front of the woods, admire its smoothness, its edge of sweet clover left for the bees.
A Walk on Cape Cod
Among the things I like about Thoreau is that he was born in 1817 and died in 1862 at the same age my father did, one hundred years later. So Thoreau’s lifespan is familiar to me. I grew up ten minutes from Walden Pond—we all called it Lake Walden. My family had gone...
Mythologizing Disaster
The landscape is legend, each valley and hill the stuff of myth. Here, below the tombs that honeycomb the cliffs of Lycia’s second- largest city, Pinara, says the Iliad, roamed the raging Chimaera, “a bane to many men.” There, in the port city of Patara, Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas of Myra, was born. Shh, listen: there sings the...
Everything and More
As a child, I wasn’t particularly interested in the idea of treasure. I suppose I didn’t believe back then that there was anything so marvelous to be found. Instead of pirates who spent their time searching, I thrilled to the story of Billy the Kid, who spent his on the run, hiding. Only years later...

The Writing Lives of Roe v. Wade
The essays gathered here remind us that Roe v. Wade not only ensured access to abortion but also enabled writers to choose for themselves how, what, and when their creativity—in every sense—would manifest.
From the Archive
The Great Heron Feeds
Good People in Times of Evil
In every war, we act as they did, repeating their actions in new and different ways: we cry, we bid farewell, we lose. . . and we say, “Tomorrow, the war ends.” We build a bridge out of the actions we are cut off from, the activities we would rush back into if the war should end. And here twenty-eight days have gone by, and the war has not ended.