I stood in the middle of a courtyard in the sweltering Washington, DC heat, nursing a cocktail and watching strangers dance. I had decided to attend only days before when the instructor of the Bhangra class at my gym handed out fliers announcing this event celebrating South Asian culture. It…

Elegy (S1E20) Nothing in the Dark (S3E16) The Shelter (S3E3) The Midnight Sun (S3E10) People Are Alike All Over (S1E25) Uncle Simon (S5E8) The After Hours (S1E34) It’s a Good Life (S3E8) Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room (S2E3) Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up (S2E28) Shadow Play (S2E26) The Lateness of the Hour (S2E8) Time Enough at Last (S1E8) Escape Clause (S1E6) The Masks (S5E25) The Invaders (S2E15)

In all the back and forth over identity politics — how it should be defined, who is or is not practicing it, what if any role it should play in progressive politics — there has been little discussion of the form of politics being proposed as an alternative. As with…

Something my mother used to say to me that I still repeat to myself several times a week: “You’re absolutely right. And that and $1.15 will get you a ride on the subway.” If there is any statement that could sum up the attitude of Black women in my family…

The first time I heard the phrase “theory of change” I recoiled. The world is a messy tangle of people and institutions interacting in ways that are often unpredictable and counterintuitive. Forcing that messiness into a coherent theory rooted in cause and effect seemed both dishonest and counterproductive. We are…

One morning, when I was around 10 years old, I woke up to what I was sure was the sound of my mother being murdered. As I crept across my bedroom floor and slowly opened the door, I could hear her screaming with a kind of guttural desperation that could…

They renamed this land They renamed the peoples who belonged to it They took our names They gave us a collective name in order to remake us into a collective They renamed hatred, oppression, persecution, rape, genocide, murder Called it States' Rights, Honor, Christianity, Our Way of Life, Public Safety, Neighborhood Character… Renamed the war and its cause; renamed the labor camps Meanwhile We searched for new names

I didn’t know it until recently, but for the last 39 years, 40 has been the Age of Adulthood somewhere in the recesses of my brain. A forty-year-old is not old but she certainly isn’t young and she is expected to have her shit together. So to approach that age…

A wide range of changes in the last 50 years — among them growing populations of people of color and the development of the internet as a platform for people of diverse views to speak out without a gatekeeper (for better or worse) — have all allowed for greater attention…