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Cultural Criticism | Literary Essays
A publication for becoming through culture. Books, music, art, film, food, perspective, and places as rituals.
Start here: Essays as Rituals

Featured
The Pirate Queen by Ariel Lawhon
Books
The Pirate Queen by Ariel Lawhon
Books

She could command a ship. She could not inherit a chieftaincy. On The Pirate Queen, and the woman who built authority from a title no one would give her.

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Books
Featured
Before The World Was Ready
Art
Before The World Was Ready
Art

Beginning in 1906, Hilma af Klint produced radically nonrepresentational paintings, years before the artists traditionally credited with abstraction. On readiness, and the artist who left the work for another audience.

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Art
Featured
What Latino Cinema Knows About Inheritance
Film + TV
What Latino Cinema Knows About Inheritance
Film + TV

In Real Women Have Curves, a Los Angeles dress factory is paid eighteen dollars to sew a dress a department store will sell for close to six hundred. On inheritance, and the six films that show what a family hands down before anyone can choose.

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Film + TV
Featured
How an Artist Finds a Voice
Music
How an Artist Finds a Voice
Music

Originality was never about making something no one has heard. On Simone, Björk, Bowie, Mitchell, and Prince, and the long, unglamorous work behind a sound that seems inevitable.

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Music

Perspective

Identity, growth, power, and the inner life—explored slowly

Featured
The Strange Grief of Watching Yourself Age
Outer-Self
The Strange Grief of Watching Yourself Age
Outer-Self

Watching yourself age is strange because, most of the time, you do not feel yourself doing it. On aging, and the grief that comes with a life continuing.

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Outer-Self
Featured
The Life That Doesn't Fit in a Sentence
Inner-Self
The Life That Doesn't Fit in a Sentence
Inner-Self

Women learn to answer the questions before they learn to ask whether they want the life the questions assume. On the story we’re expected to tell, and the life that keeps going without one.

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Inner-Self

Places

Place, perspective, and the meaning of moving through the world

Featured
Why Childhood Vacations Feel Larger Than They Were
Travel
Why Childhood Vacations Feel Larger Than They Were
Travel

At age eight, a single week at the beach can occupy more remembered space than an entire ordinary year does now. The trip wasn't longer. It only feels that way.

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Travel
48 Hours in Ferrara: Where History Is Still How People Get to Work
Travel
48 Hours in Ferrara: Where History Is Still How People Get to Work
Travel

In Ferrara, history is still how people get to work. On a Renaissance city that never became a museum, and the lives still being lived inside it.

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Travel