text

On a single wall, as if the three-dimensional space of a bedroom had been flattened onto it: Each drawer conceals a small speaker: when a drawer is opened, a voice emanates; when it is closed, it is silenced. The drawers are programmed to be opened and shut in a specific order. Each drawer is associated […]

My first crush was on the knife. It made the fork look like an artless rake; the spoon was just plain pathetic. Now you may think I was perhaps projecting my daughterly love for my father onto the knife, but my father was a fat ugly bastard, and I knew that as soon as I

Oct 29, 2025 It’s a place of residence. Viscerally, first and foremost, the White House is a place of residence. In destroying a place of residence—a temporary place of residence where people, who are granted permission, live while serving their terms as a servant of the people—a visceral message is being sent to everyone: You

I am a prodigious dreamer. I have notebooks filled with them. They have guided and shaped my life as much as anything I have learned in books, or discovered through experience, or acquired by diligence. They are some of my proudest “possessions,” my most treasured gifts, and they are invisible to everyone else, difficult to

What follows really happened. On the bus ride home from my painting studio, one misty February evening in Bologna, I noticed a solitary Asian woman wearing a surgical mask. I tried to make eye contact with her, but she seemed to be trying to be invisible. I thought it was odd. Her manner was furtive,

About seven or eight years before the lockdown, there were signs and changes in Ciulli’s behavior and personality—some remarkable only in retrospect, others shocking at the moment they were happening. Writing this thought in a sentence, using familiar words and idioms, following rules of grammar and punctuation, belies the mayhem and isolation that comes with

The truth is I was deeply terrified when I finally got back into my studio in 2013; after a month in the hospital and several weeks in a physical rehabilitation center, and a definitive diagnosis of MS, it would be months and months and months of slow recovery before I felt well enough to go back

The first sign I had of multiple sclerosis was a numbness in the middle toe of my left foot. I had been working for many hours in my studio on a hot day in August 2012—in flip-flops, climbing up and down a ladder, priming a large canvas, which it turns out I wouldn’t be able

Well, I got sent home early from school today, which I always love … but this time was pretty … dramatic, you might say … It started in Social Studies, I mean History … we were discussing “geniuses” and Mrs. Rubs-Herself asked the totally boring question: “Does the genius make the times …” and then