I used to have these dreams all the time when I was a kid about my teeth falling out. Or I would reach into my mouth and pull them out. But I hadn’t had them for a decade or two, until last week, when I woke up to get ready for my shift as...
Near the end of the hellish first year of the coronavirus pandemic, I was possessed by the desire to eliminate sugar—all refined sugar—from my diet. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best time to add a new challenge to the mix of mayhem...
In 2018, after learning about the dangers that Serena Williams and Beyoncé Knowles faced during childbirth because of improper care, I became curious about pregnancy risks that Black women face in the US. Their stories might be well-known...
Is it possible to understand the persistent lag in vaccination rates as a function of failed metaphor? That is to say, as a failure of language—the language of data, the language of science, the language of political rhetoric (to name just...
Great Plains. One man grabs a calf’s hind leg and lifts. Another seizes a front leg and heaves, flipping as easily as possible the two-hundred-pound animal. Then each man pulls hard to keep it still.
English is a treasure trove of words, each with a precise meaning. It is also a source of confusion and frustration, since so many of those words have subtle connotations and refuse to stand still.
The house my mother grew up in burnt down in ’85. I hope y’all never experience something like that—losing everything, Mom told my brothers and me when we were too young to understand.
