Young cat owners are alike in that most cats they’ll adopt found them in a vulnerable moment — an audible cry in a rainstorm, an endearing look in an adoption center — and the young cat owner will choose to take them in. Sure, the young human will think, I’ve…

This is the story of me courting, winning, and losing a wild animal. This was in Guangzhou, a Chinese city of 14 million people, and she was a cat who lived the first seven months of her life under a bush next to a metro station. …

“[There is] something so obvious it hardly needs pointing out about the epic loneliness of a society in which people live across the country from their families, don’t know their neighbors, fuck strangers, and see their friends mostly online.” …

Lesya’s was not the first face he’d tattooed. The first to get him in the headlines was one that involved a British tourist who’d walked into a shop he was working at in northern Belgium. …

I’ve only seen it once in my life and, at the time, for some reason, thought it was called The Cadillac Graveyard, which still seems a more fitting name. It is also how I’ll refer to it for the rest of this story. The best way I can think to…

In the short story “Omakase,” by Weike Wang, the protagonist, a Chinese-American woman who had a conservative upbringing, says, while assessing an Asian-American waitress with blue hair and a nose ring, something along the lines of You don’t know how many generations before you had to struggle just so you…

A Wandering Thought Experiment — The results you get when you type “suicide” and “joke” into a search engine are almost all variations of Suicide isn’t a joke or Don’t joke about suicide, but there are a few gems. …

Part 1 I tried something new this school year and assigned Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 breakout hit Fight Club as the novel for the first semester reading assignment. …

From “The Cult of Dave” to “The Magic of David Foster Wallace,” an odd resurgence of interest in the late author is taking place. Fans take note: this essay is me bouncing a few ideas off his legacy and not so much about the dude himself. At the start of…