Archive • in the machine • Buttondown

pick a thread and pull

In her essay “Insurrectionary Aunthood,” published in the recent collection No Straight Road Takes You There, author and historian Rebecca Solnit1 writes...

At the end of January, I was concussed by a hard punch to the head. This was a situation I put myself in willingly at my boxing gym. I’m pretty stringent...

our substances, our selves

In The Substance, Severance, and the just-released film Mickey 17, protagonists choose to separate one self into two. I hear popular media reflects the...

i was a teenage boxer

The below piece was originally published in August 2017 on The Hairpin, a wonderful launchpad for essayists, which is now an A.I. slop link farm. Common L on...

the embodied work life

The Bear is back! I haven't watched any of season three yet (my attention has been monopolized by vampires) but the trailer was enough to get me excited....

craft and hospitality

When I first started ghostwriting, I thought my clients would be people who wanted to automate their writing. I figured those who hired a ghostwriter would...

on smelling smells

January 20, 2024

I’m not a collector. I don’t particularly like having “stuff,” especially stuff that takes up space. I don’t keep a robust book collection, nor do I stock my...

my anti-book list

December 9, 2023

With the end of the year comes lists. Lots of lists. Lists of lists. I’m not really a list-maker. I’m admittedly an archivist - I keep careful records and...

the war on gaza

October 30, 2023

A few months ago, I was thumbing through my old journals from my first year of college. In April 2010, when I had just turned 18, I apparently attended a...

art, content, garbage

September 29, 2023

In my sphere, there’s been a lot of chatter about the WGA deal - obviously - but I’ve been surprised by the surge of discussion about the term “content”. In...

September 12, 2023

Rock climbers are always working on “projects,” but not in the way artists are. A climbing project is a personal challenge; it’s a route or a boulder problem...

my pandoran vacation

On Monday, I watched Avatar: The Way of Water for the first time, just the way James Cameron intended (on a ten-inch airplane screen six hours into a twelve...

behind the scenes: romancing the robot

study hall digest: romancing the robot This (paywalled) piece went through a lot of iterations; the editorial team and I chipped away at it over three...

In 1967 writer Italo Calvino delivered a lecture called Cybernetics and Ghosts in which he raised many of the same questions writers are grappling with now....