When I was a girl, I’d often have a nightmare in which I was somewhere with religiously diverse friends — when I was younger, usually Guides, and school friends as I got older. There’d be food. Someone would offer me a plate, and I’d accept unthinkingly. And then, somewhere after…
We all know “the look.” We’ve seen it more times than we can count: the mingled disgust, anger, and horror. The step back and double take that says “You don’t belong here.” Get out. Pervert. Freak. For those of us who are gender non-conforming*, transgender or trans*, gender non-binary, genderfluid,…
Public libraries rock. This is a fact of life. Because I was fortunate to be born into a life of relative privilege, they rock for a whole bunch of reasons I’ve been lucky enough not to need to know. They offer free heat and light and air conditioning, free water,…
So you’ve decided to write a novel! Or a play! Or a screenplay! Or a short story! Or a fanfic with OCs! Congratulations! But unless you are like artsy, and I mean, super-duper artsy, your characters will need names. What to do? Every writer knows that names are important. They’re…
I read Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant earlier this month, and it still smarts. (If you haven’t read it yet, fear not: I won’t reveal anything past what you might gather from the cover copy.)
Hey there, 16-year-old self! Hey, 31-year-old self! You probably didn’t expect this back in 2001, but The X Files is back! With a six-episode miniseries. No way! Do Mulder and Scully finally make out? Just kidding, I’m way too embarrassed to admit that’s one of the main reasons I love…
So my mom and I went to get mani-pedis while I was home over the holidays. It’s not the first time I’ve had my nails done, although I can count the total number on the usually un-polished fingers of one hand. Apart from the discomfort of paying a stranger to…
Often, when white writers like me consider how we write about race, we discuss how we write about racialized people. We seldom (with some exceptions) discuss how we think and write about the experience we know most about: that of being white. This is not about the ludicrous idea that white…
So I think I’m ready to write about why I disagree with the Sept. 2015 Atlantic cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The authors, both university professors, claim that requests for “trigger warnings”–that is, warnings about content that may link to students’ own traumatic experiences, such as sexual…
This year, I tried for the second time to play an installment of Phoenix Wright, mystery-solving, case-winning video-game lawyer extraordinaire. And, for the second time, I gave up in frustration close to the beginning of the game. I did this even though this particular game was a crossover with Professor…