Arts & Culture
What Vin Diesel Taught Me About Singing and Sincerity
Vin closes his eyes and bares his soul, meaning each word of the song, and isn’t that the point? Vin never claimed to be a good singer.
How Fanny Mendelssohn’s “Hiob Cantata” Inspired Me to Become a Screenwriter
This film is an opportunity to help rescue Fanny Mendelssohn from near-obscurity; and to do the same for me.
For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway
I imagine she wrote it for women like me. Women who wear their hearts on their sleeves but hold their hands over their mouths.
Love, Peace, and Taco Grease: How I Left My Abusive Husband and Found Guy Fieri
Guy Fieri allowed me to ask: who do I fear noise and brightness for? Who do I fear food for? And he gave me the answer: I fear it for myself.
Redrawing the Lines: How Anime Helped Shape My Nonbinary Identity
At the time, I didn’t know I could be anything but a girl, a quiet Chinese American girl, cute and easy to ignore, but Kurama hinted at other possibilities.
How a Picasso Painting Helped Me Move Past Numbness After Trauma
I had not been erased by the violence I’d suffered, but was changed by it. A new, difficult layer had been added to my life.
How Wrestling Saved My Life and Let Me Express My Queerness
Wrestling never stops, so I couldn’t stop, and thus I am still here.
Letting Go of Guilt to Live My Truth as a Queer Woman
As euphoric as my queer epiphany felt, I’d had it as my mother lay sick. It felt like I was reentering the world as my mother was leaving it.
Tailoring My Clothes, Fitting into My Life in America
My idea of home had changed, so I took the symbolic step of finding a new tailor—marking Philadelphia as a place that now fit me right, too.
A Cure to Feeling Like You Need to Be Cured: Talking to Sayaka Murata in Tokyo
I go to Japan, pulled like a magnet, to see what is mine, undiscovered or forgotten; to see what will never be mine; and to find some way to reconcile the two.
