Rebecca West and The White Lotus
On how Daphne Sullivan’s sunnily subversive hedonism is best described by midcentury writer Rebecca West, Lit Hub, January 2023.
Call This Violence What It Is
Language and violence against women, The New York Times, December 2022.
Past and Present on Rapa Nui
“The sun rises gray and sticky at 8:30 in the morning, and sets late, too. This is not the only disorienting thing about Rapa Nui, but rather the most objective example.” On history in the present tense at Rapa Nui, Easter Island, for The Common, Fall 2021.
Artists & Elders
“At the start of a global pandemic of unknown duration, what the elderly truly needed was science, not art: better epidemiological understanding of the disease, a vaccine. Amid such stakes, art as activism seemed urgent insofar as it could convince an elder to stay home, but incidental as art.” On pandemic-era art project “Artists & Elders: First Response,” The Point, Fall 2021.
Intimate Odyssey
Modern motherhood and the birth story. Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2020.
Buried Deep
On walking in graveyards amid quarantine, artist Sophie Calle, and the secrets we keep and tell. Guernica, 2020.
The Older New Journalists
On a remarkable group of women writers who should be yet more famous than they are. Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2018.
The Improbable Life of Paula Zoe Helfrich
She was the daughter of a U.S. spy, an exile from Burma, a Pan Am flight attendant on a rescue mission to Saigon, and one half of an epic love story. But only part of that was true. The Atavist, May 2017.
Eating and Being in Portugal
A quartet of travel stories on Lisbon and the Azores: Architecture (Conde Nast Traveler), new food (Saveur), and the seaside town that inspired James Bond (Saveur), and what to do in the Azores (Departures).
Art in Captivity
Artist Colleen Plumb’s photographs and projections highlight the plight of elephants in captivity. Short-form, The Village Voice, and longer, Lit Hub. 2017.
Circling Back
Mexican contemporary artist Gabriel Orozco—painter, sculptor, provocateur—changes direction in this profile for VQR's winter 2014 issue.
Amigos
"If there was one thing Sandra knew well, it was hair." VQR, Spring 2013. Also Best American Travel Writing 2014, edited by Paul Theroux; in Spanish in Gatopardo, May 2014; and One World, Many Cultures, 10th edition.
TV's Female Spy Problem
"As gender issues claim magazine covers and newspaper features, inquiring whether an equal marriage can allow room for sex, why women lack confidence, and if ‘it all’ can ever be had, the female spy runs laps around premium cable, regular cable and back to network TV." Salon, June 27, 2014.
Mario Testino
"Mario Testino talks with his hands. He waves them when excited. He uses one to poke at the other to illustrate a point. He twirls them to emphasize the continuation of an idea, and he holds them in front of his body to indicate stillness. Testino addresses questions with half words, half hands." On photography, Peru, and Anna Wintour. Surface, October 2014
Alice Aycock
"This is, more or less, artist Alice Aycock’s goal: “If I am successful, people will say, ‘Hey, what is that?’ They won’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s a piece of art,’” she says. “They’ll say, ‘I saw this thing and it was interesting.’ And then I’ve caused the average person to at least for a moment break through the monotonous visual landscape we have in this country, of highways and cookie-cutter houses and shopping centers.” Surface, Winter 2013.
Lost & Found: On Reading Rebecca West
"All of this is to say that when I picked up The Fountain Overflows, I knew what I loved about West’s writing: her spare way of tracing a character’s interiority, anchoring meaning to a revelatory gesture, and her keen eye for how femininity functioned in a world increasingly aware of a diversity of female desires." Tin House, Issue #70, Winter Reading.
Found in translation
"She sat at the table with her purse strap still slung across her shoulder and the bag in her lap. Every ten minutes or so over the next three hours, the strap slipped down toward her knees and she would grab at it with clumsy fingers, first one minute after it had fallen, then four, then ten, as if the more she talked about her situation the slower the impulse arrived at her hand. The strap always made it back up to her shoulder." The Threepenny Review, Fall 2016
ART IN THE TIME OF POLITICS
On art, optimism, change, the lack of change, and artist Tania Bruguera. Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2015; Notable, Best American Travel Writing 2016.
The Art of Participation
"In 1826, when a German archaeologist named Mattheus Eisenacher finally discovered the cuneiform tablets he’d been searching for in northern Iraq, he’d already spent four years digging, finding nothing, convinced of his own failure." Essay on transformative German archaeologists & Pablo Helguera's participatory performance art, A Public Space, Winter 2015. PDF here. Notable, Best American Essays 2016.
Take Your Daughter to Work Day
A personal essay on growing up with a (wonderful) food writer for a (wonderful) mother. McSweeney's Lucky Peach #13, Winter 2014.
Michel Pérez Pollo's Paintings
"A lump of modeling clay is not a human, not when it’s sculpted into a bust in likeness of someone the artist knew and less so when it’s still a lemon-yellow ball of clay with a lumpy right side, as if its shaper got a bit of bad news while worrying it with his hands and pressed too hard with a stray index finger." Introduction to Turner's monograph on Cuban artist Michel Pérez.
CINEFILIA EN LA HABANA: FERNANDO PÉREZ
How one Cuban filmmaker bucks the revolution and reimagines Utopia. Guernica, March 2012.
Yanet's Vintage Emporium
The ins and outs of the underground vintage furniture trade in Havana. The Paris Review Daily, November 2012. Included in Best Women's Travel Writing 2013.
Under the Table
Learning to eat in Havana the black-market way. Guernica, August, 2011.
STEVE HELLER DOESN'T NEED YOUR MATISSE
Insanely prolific and colorful design writer Steve Heller – a fetish for Nazi design esoterica and 140 books written, co-authored, edited, or somehow otherwise compiled by the man – made a great profile subject for The Village Voice, October, 2011