The puppeteer darted in and had his black cloth strung waist-high, pole to pole across the Métro car, before the doors even closed. We were standing to the front of the carriage but a bit behind him and could see only his right side, where a tattered tricorn-hatted Punch,
Lahore is Lahore, the saying goes. For the twelve million who, until recently, made their way through its streets every day, that is all that needs to be said. For the others—the foreign, the displaced—it is an idea, resisting definition. Before the pandemic emptied the streets, I landed in a city I could still move through freely.
We are in the midst of a publishing renaissance of novels about blackness; of literary novels with black protagonists; of novels about race and of novels published by black authors. This wave of publications follows a similar black-literature boom in [...]
It is rare to walk through empty streets in downtown Washington, DC, in broad daylight. Yet this past spring, when it seemed as if every living thing had leapt into a void, I learned that what you see and how you see it changes in a relatively unpeop [...]
I wonder. Yes, I’m looking up as I say this, I wonder if I do have a superpower. Maybe I have more than one aspect of attraction, this knack for drawing others in close, almost touching me.
By Joshua Wolf Shenk, Illustrations by Kelsey Dake
March 2, 2020
In the fall of 2005, at the shuttle terminal of New York’s LaGuardia airport, I entered the security line and noticed, in front of me, a slight and slightly stooped older woman. After a couple of blinks, I recognized Joan Didion.
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