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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
As she could not applaud the mothers and fathers, their slithering climb, Liv was there ah ah ahing the wrinkled faces, 768,946,830,137 units of DNA, coded for survival mostly. The gallery yelled, "Ask us how we plead?" And the official, the official said, "Girl, let’s not lose sight of why you shy from them. Let’s not forget what stalls you and who, who is responsible. You in that feeling billions feel, envenomed sense of enormous, and yet, standing there, stumped, considering, though dimpled still."
Is the approaching moment ever not demotic? Each desired, however knotty, hormonally generated. To surrender the outcome is to lose the script, to let the ridicule, ridiculous, and therefore the joy arrive us elsewhere. In our pregnancy, our public showings of much private resolve, every hand listening for the kick assumes bliss exists. And, in consequence, the blurring landscape is set against speed. It holds so much of our lives, in accidents, departures triumphant, arrivals. The night, the fog, a white moss of melted dew or mossy green of soaked leaves. You needn’t shuffle. There needs to be seen the chance in a thing, the possible embrace, not simply the spiderweb lace (ugh) lining the ouch. Be bop, Ersatz, when we approach
be not distracted by grinding back molars, milky shakes drawn up in a straw, there resides butterflies off kilter in all. It is clear, no tingle without intention survives. We mean to be good.
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Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.
“I was my father’s son. My father was Nai Nai’s least favorite.” A Taiwanese American man, driven from home by a secret, reevaluates his childhood memories of his grandmother.
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