Essays, etc.
Selected essays and reviews, updated sporadically:
The year before you were born, my love, I traveled constantly. It was sometimes magnificent and sometimes numbing. I was very tired, but there were moments of grace.
Spoiler alert: I have no idea why so many books have ‘girl’ in the title. But some of the numbers are fascinating.
Sontag once wrote, “What makes me feel strong: being in love, and work.” All she wanted was everything.
It’s a danger I’d rank well below, say, the ever-present possibility of being hit by a car on my way to work in the morning. This possibly says more about New York City drivers than it does about Ebola.
By Grand Central Station is a staggering accomplishment, an exquisite and often ecstatic rendition of a tumultuous affair: “Jupiter has been with Leda, I thought, and now nothing can avert the Trojan wars. All legend will be broken, but who will escape alive?”
On the novelist and former textile manufacturer Edoardo Nesi's Story of My People, clothes as armour, and the unspeakable cost of cheap fashion.
We live in a performative age. What participation in social media comes down to, I think, is that either you have an instinct for broadcasting your life, or you don't. Mary MacLane would have been a natural.
Enduring the everyday is relatively straightforward—just keep breathing and putting one foot in front of the other—but how to transcend the everyday, in this world neither you nor I have made?
This was the Midwestern tour: five cities in five days, condensed in such a manner so that I'd only have to take three days off from my day job. The stars were so bright as I was leaving Minneapolis.