Issue 5 - Attention Heads/Tails At around midnight on a random weekday in 2007, I wandered downstairs from my bedroom to the kitchen. I found my father with a pencil, a quarter, and a piece of paper covered in hundreds of letters: “H T H T T” on one
Issue 5 - Attention An Invitation of Attention I have a confession to make: I’ve become a grumpy, easily irritated person when I’m out in the street. If someone walks too slowly in front of me when I’m in a hurry (usually I am), I get impatient and mentally
Issue 5 - Attention describing blood Thank you for making space for me. Getting in my car at the very last minute because life feels a bit too hectic is nothing new for me. Staying with strangers is scarcely strange. Entering into a town you do not know and somehow
Essay Grave Tracing W e are all collectors of nothing. Taking pictures of things we’ll likely never spend much time looking at, and never spending enough time on a single object to ever truly experience much of it. Every kid I grew up with came home
Essay Putin, Save the Penguins of the Arctic Translated by Nina Murray. Nina is a poet and literary translator currently on sabbatical from her job as a Foreign Service Officer. She lives in the UK. This piece is a reflection on the Maidan protest that started at the end of the 2013
Essay They Carry A Sickle and We Bow Down To Them I am a petite, baby-faced woman. Many people close to me still joke about it. It is all too familiar—every time I get ID'd at a bar (or worse,
Essay Becoming a crumb: Thoughts on truth and recounting memory J acques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction grapples with the incidental term ‘tracing’—a distinction or mark that something is missing. Trace is also a condition of thinking. Whether one has studied Derridian philosophy with enough depth to wrestle with each interpretation of the
Essay How to Buy Teeth in Mexico "D ental Tourism” the brochure called it. “Save thousands of dollars,” it touted, tempting U.S. citizens to cross the southern border for affordable healthcare. My husband and I had been on the road for five years. The lingering fumes of adolescent optimism and
Essay On Faith Life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek A ugustine didn’t say this, but somebody did and it is credited to the saint all over the internet: “The world is a book and those who
Essay Pathways to our Past The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and loitering. —Walt Whitman T he winter winds arrive late in November. The icy exhalation from the north barges into my yard, breaches the garden walls, and creeps ever so slightly
Essay Shapes of Love A s a teenager, love had been clearly laid out for me in church services and Bible studies. Love was sacrifice, it was sometimes difficult, it endured all burdens, it was outlined clearly in the Bible. Then there were the implicit definitions, too: love
Issue 3 - Searching Home is where you find it T he path to the summit of Scotts Bluff National Monument is Nebraska at its best. Morning walks among sweeping panoramas in the serenity of the prairie are treasured rituals for many of us who live nearby. So in 2015, when 25,000 tons
Issue 3 - Searching Tracking Your Life A s a boy I spent every day in the South African bushveld apprenticing under some of the greatest Shangaan animal trackers in the world. I was taught to attune to a hidden world of stories and information etched faintly in the earth as
Issue 3 - Searching Star Tours: The Rise of Space Tourism and the Return of the Sublime O n the dusty morning of July 11, 2021, two hundred miles south of Albuquerque, Sir Richard Branson squeezed into a blue and gold jumpsuit and shot into space. He
Issue 3 - Searching Big Stories: They Still Matter P erhaps, like me, you’ve noticed a curious sort of temporality since the pandemic began. Time is passing both unbearably slowly and frighteningly quickly. The slow dragging days add up before they come to pass. History seems to outpace itself, leaving absences of
Issue 3 - Searching Searching in the Dark: The Case for Dark Matter *The artwork featured in this piece was done in collaboration with digital artist Kendra Oliver, an educator and artist living in Pittsburgh. O n a September evening in 1846, German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle received a letter requesting that he point his telescope at
Issue 3 - Searching Antibiotics: To the Clerk at the Pet Shop, Chicago, Lower West Side S ince we didn’t make it to that pet shop, let’s just say we’re still on our way there. I write “we” because I wasn’t looking for it alone. Actually, all of this happened only because there was a “you”
Issue 3 - Searching The Ends of Information: Searching for Truth in the Digital Age "T he universe,” wrote the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, “(which others call the library), is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.” The library in question is the imaginary
Issue 3 - Searching Preschool as a profession of philosophy A few weeks ago I heard a scream and turned my head to see Robert stomping his foot. He and Harry, both around four years old, were standing next to each other. Robert was leaning forward, chest out, holding his arms straight down, fists
Issue 3 - Searching Crypto's Search for Meaning I magine that you make a salary of $100,000 a year. After taxes and various living expenses, you manage to save $10,000 of that original figure. You tuck that sum into a savings account that steadily accrues interest. You feel like you
Issue 2 - Recovery Hope Is I n April, we run bloody fingers under sink-water, and tape over our broken skin. We hold him in oven mitts, in mittens, in anything we can find. We hide our hands and feet under sweatshirts and socks. So he bites our necks instead.
Issue 2 - Recovery The Transformative Potential of Trauma Recovery This piece explores the interrelationship between trauma and recovery in psychotherapy. While it does not discuss any specific details of traumatic events, it is important to acknowledge that the topic itself may bring up unwanted memories or reflection. I n my office, I have
Issue 2 - Recovery Lost and Found F or more than seventy years, my grandmother Lilly’s diary sat untouched at the bottom of a cardboard box stuffed into a tiny closet in my family’s home. The dark green leather notebook gathered dust, the pages—beginning to yellow around the
Issue 2 - Recovery A Purple Heart Buried on the Rhine U nder a clear blue sky in Wesel, the sun’s beams hit the Rhine River on Good Friday. A cargo vessel lumbered by. The soft chatter of adults and contagious laughter of children’s play filled the air with calm. There’s virtually
Issue 2 - Recovery On Time I t’s June 6, 2018, and I’m trying to sleep, but the heart rate monitor is beeping and the CPAP machine is hissing ceaselessly. My daughter, Em, is sleeping in her isolette. A well-deserved rest. She’s been alive for sixty-eight hours,
