Selected Articles



is feeling good really a matter of skill?

"You Really Like Me" (The Baffler, 2024)
whatever happened to "likability" in politics? 

"Boundary Issues" (Parapraxis Magazine, 2023)
where did "personal boundaries" come from, anyway?


slightly shorter, less nerdy version of the Parapraxis essay

"Good, Likeable People Who Love Each Other" (Post45 Contemporaries, 2020)

on friendship, by way of BoJack Horseman

"Distantiated Communities" (Cabinet, 2020)

the history of "social distancing"


book review

"No Free Trials" (Guernica, 2021) 

the ethics and politics of clinical vaccine trials, from a first-person perspective

"Beasts of No Nation" (Jacket2, 2021)

essay on the invention of "invasive species" ecology and review of Marwa Helal's poems

"Home Alone With the NYT" (Avidly–a channel of LARB, 2021)

on lifestyle advice


interview with Time Magazine about Cabinet article


on a neon pile of sulfur in the Rust Belt


Orientalism turns up in far-right campaign aesthetics


Laurie Anderson's six Zoom Norton lectures

"What a Human Should Be" (Harvard Magazine, 2019)

art exhibition review for the anniversary of the Bauhaus (I won an award for this one)

"Ringing in Your Ears" (Cabinet, 2019)

a Holocaust memorial made of doorbells