The 2023 novel ‘Safe Colors’ by Thaddeus Rutkowski — I like literature that probes a question deeply without necessarily resolving it. Safe Colors by Thaddeus Rutkowski invites readers to step inside its silences and gaps that yawn wide like doorways and to try to slide the puzzle pieces or balance two ends of an equation that never quite reconcile…

On the Tucker ’n’ Carlos Show, insights from Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppelganger’ — Good evening. Let me introduce myself and my cohost. My husband, Carlos, writes under his middle name, Arturo, having decided that a sufficient number of other men in Colombia are keeping the name Carlos alive and well. You may call him by either name, and he is not mad. I…

Rereading ‘Mars and Her Children’ by Marge Piercy — Thirty years ago, my parents gave me a copy of Mars and Her Children by the poet Marge Piercy. I was 13, and it was my first adult poetry book, one that was mine, not for children, and not for class. As I remember it, it was a title I…

Doing so won’t hurt you. California Assembly passes two bills in 2023 — All of us are real people who engage with other real people’s real concerns as they come up. Our interactions aren’t scripted. We can respond specifically to whatever’s going on. Life’s better that way. I wrote about this a while back in a long essay, “How to Reduce Your Anxiety…

Prejudice obstructs continuous and coherent thought — Seven months into covid, we who were paying attention to Twitter were horror-tickled by this Kim Kardashian tweet:

Live within the bounds of the person you are — We’re taught early on to write essays based on what we know: Make a simple thesis, find several pieces of evidence to support it or make several logical arguments in its favor, and write an introduction and conclusion around it. This structure is predictable—and it can be boring. …

Leave room for growth — We often think of not-knowing as an opportunity, and it is, but often it’s presented rigidly: We’re in a classroom or workplace, and we’re supposed to learn a fact or skill that someone else already knows and wants to teach us to do exactly whatever they’ve decided we should do. …

I’ve learned so much from writing about transphobia — When writers don’t know how to continue an essay, we often use the metaphor of a roadblock, as if something stood between us and our goal and we didn’t detect any path to circumvent it. Or we use the metaphor of stuckness, as if our feet were trapped in mud. …

You have this feeling because you’re alive — The first U.S. presidential election in which I voted included the primary at the end of my sophomore year of college when I was 19 and the general at the beginning of my junior year when I was 20. I felt energized about casting my vote. I saw it as…