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The Process: Angela Dimayuga

From 2012 to October 2017, Angela Dimayuga (b. 1985, San Jose, California) was executive chef at Mission Chinese Food, a Szechuan restaurant started by chef Danny Bowien. Founded in San Francisco, it would be brought to maturity in New York, and, early on, Dimayuga’s vision established the restaurant as one of New York’s premier dining rooms. With Mission’s version of Chinese food, she sought a debauched nostalgia, riffing on tradition with an almost cyberpunk sensibility. Dimayuga is driven by a deep……

Get Out

Remember that the eye can be a bird, a basketball, a dimmed cab passing this thumb right by. Here’s to the nutshell, the image engine, so much information tap tap trapped behind some cloudy rounded glass. We might say transparency is an empty room; mounted head; pages and pages unfurling from darkened ledge. This yellow means there’s bile in the blood. This sound plucks yoke from crown; lips from clapper; bells from the all these lost towers. Salvation in occlusion;……

The State of the Fact

At the tail end of 2017, The Believer went to Wordstock, Portland, Oregon’s literary festival. This was a year the U.S. president called the press “the enemy of the people”; his administration forbade the Centers for Disease Control from using the words evidence-based and science-based (alongside transgender and vulnerable); and fake news became popular for despots worldwide. (“There is no such thing as Rohingya,” said a Burmese security officer in relation to the people there who are undergoing genocide. “It……

An Interview with Alissa Nutting

PART I THE BELIEVER: What’s the last prank you pulled and which prankster do you admire most? ALISSA NUTTING: Does not showering count as a prank? Last week my four-year-old laughed for days at the idea of a jar of peanut butter wearing underwear, so I let her put a pair of my underwear on the jar. My favorite prankster is probably whoever invented hot dogs. BLVR: Often you can tell people’s intentions from their work. They want fancy cars,……

Tool: Keurig K55 Coffee Maker, $79.00

Features: Three Cup Sizes Removable Drip Tray Pisses Off Conservatives Brews Coffee Oftentimes—early in the morning, when the sun is just creeping over the horizon— I consider smashing my Keurig. The grating whirring noise it makes when it “warms up” (presumably, the radioactive core required to produce the cursed beverage) is an audible reminder of yet another twelve hours of misery begun anew. In the two years my wife and I have shared custody of our Keurig K55, the sound of the infernal machine belching out brown liquid……

Nocoitus Lotion

I guzzled the coconut and shea butter lotion with SPF 15 so that he could glide down my throat smooth like an ice cube but what happened was he kissed me the way preteens kiss their moms goodbye and told me he wasn’t in the mood and soon I started sprouting fibrous brown husk hairs in unsavory places which he tells me makes him not in the mood either. What do I do? I cry to my friends and they……

Magical Negroes, Karate Masters, and Noble Savages

A Symposium on Lies

Aparna Nancherla Speaks to Your Concerns

Dear Aparna: I grew up in a split-political-party household, so it’s not a surprise that I married into another one. Early on, this difference felt positive: I credit my wife for her stance on important issues, including women’s access to health-care services and right to choose abortion. (I grew up anti-choice.) We got on mostly fine until the recent election, when it became evident that, over the last ten years, we had somehow swapped perspectives. When did the young pro-Obama……

An Interview with Daveed Diggs

Seven or so years ago, I was in San Francisco, in the audience of a play I had come to review called Mirrors in Every Corner, written by Chinaka Hodge. The play was brilliant, and one performer really stood out for me—stood out in that play, and from any actor I’d seen in any other play in years. I wrote the theater to arrange an interview with the actor, Daveed Diggs. This was long before his acclaimed performance as Thomas……

Maria Bamford Speaks to Your Concerns

If the deep earnestness of funny people doesn’t feel obvious to you, and you are in the mood to read some good academic fieldwork, see Pretend the World is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors, by Seymour Fisher and Rhoda L. Fisher. After scores of detailed interviews, the Fishers found that the core concerns of funny humans are pretty much the same as those of rabbis and philosophers: What’s the purpose of all this? And……

A Survey of Fictional Banana Republics

I think of her sometimes now, sometimes

after Anne Sexton sometimes in her difficult snow, sometimes asylum and the blank hole of light sitting outside its city window bars, through which yards, trees like   clumps of my hair, as I write this, cinder and shift over lawn. What we never asked then, is which ease rested in her absurd whiteness, the nervosa visible   through black blinds and inner screens, the neighborhood scuttling, nosy sure but also like lovers vicarious through her thorough delirium, empathic  ……

From When Rap Spoke Straight to God

On an X-ray, the stomach’s curve is more like a waxing moon than organ, just a phase unchanging in the belly’s sort-of womb.   When I was young at church camp, we would get out the Ouija board and try to levitate, smashing a flashlight in one cheek to make a ghost story turn horror. I would make believe spirituality. Things like possession— going through a “knowing” phase like all believers do—blessing to womb to tomb. Growing. Tonight, I’m playing……

An Interview with Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Mierle Laderman Ukeles penned her Manifesto for Maintenance Art overnight, in a cold fury. It was 1969; she had given birth to her first child the year before. Ukeles no longer knew how to respond to the question, regularly asked by other artists, of what she was “working on.” Constantly occupied with tasks, she had no obvious product to corroborate her labor (a clean kitchen? a robust baby?), so in a singularly radical gesture, Ukeles invented “Maintenance Art.” In doing……

Prozac

Postcard from Montreuil

Love

An Interview with Pope.L

At this year’s Whitney Biennial, Pope.L exhibited 2,755 slices of bologna. He pinned the meat with a grid of photographs on the walls of a large pink and green cube and allowed its greasy orange juices to dribble down the walls and pool in green gutters around the cube’s perimeter. Over the three-month exhibition, the meat festered and the smell grew increasingly putrid, filling the museum’s galleries with the undeniable sense that something in the air was off. Pope.L has……

The Call of the Wildflower

I. THE TRAM TON PASS On October 29, 2013, Scottish botanist James “Jamie” Taggart flew from London to Hanoi via China. He was embarking on his third plant-hunting expedition overseas, and his first solo trip. Originally, the plan was to reunite with Quang Son, a guide he had befriended on a trip to northern Vietnam in 2011. But Son was out of town on a trek when Jamie emailed him shortly before his trip. Jamie was undeterred. He had long……

Microinterview with Bear Grylls

Bear Grylls is the author of over twenty books, including a series of adventure stories for children. In the early 2000s he found international fame as TV host of the Discovery survival series Man vs. Wild. Trained from a young age in climbing and martial arts, he spent three years as a soldier in the British Special Forces. At the age of twenty-three, despite a fourteen-thousand-foot free-fall accident in Tanzania, during which he broke his back in three places, he……

A Practical Guide to Impractical Demons

A Chaos of Possibilities

I. HORSES, DEBUTANTES, BAROQUE, AND BALLET Six women, girls really, march toward a dressage ring dressed in tiny tunics girdled with wide leather belts from which horsetails—real horse-tails—shake proudly. The dancers wear white gloves, white knee socks, and high heels made of hooves, requiring balletic balance. They parade past porcelain horse figures—the kind of statuettes you’d find in a girl’s bedroom—arranged by two prim attendants. A stunned photographer in bell-bottoms rushes to capture the scene, and the crowd stares. It is……

An Interview with Lynne Tillman

A few years ago, I got a glimpse into the mind of Lynne Tillman. She and I were with mutual friends, wandering through New York City, seeking out a space that was large but quiet enough to talk in. Eventually we found an empty Japanese restaurant. After fielding our modest order (a couple of appetizers and a round of complimentary green tea), our server snatched up the menus, muttering as she walked off, “Thanks… for nothing!” Still, we stayed. Then……

Wife in Reverse

x. In the old museum, we both avoid looking at the taxidermic display. The animal heart inside the animal chest. ix. Before the evening has ended, you have kissed each one of my knuckles. We undress like suitcases openingafter a long trip. In Nashville, in Spain, in the backroads of Georgia, when you start the car engine, my first prayer is for you. viii. You like to hear about the women in my family. They burn dinner. They divorce and……

In Conversation with Grace Simonoff Dunham

Alfred Kinsey and his researchers conducted over eighteen thousand interviews throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. He published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, followed by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Kinsey’s sex histories attempted to determine where subjects fell on a scale from zero (exclusive heterosexuality) through six (homosexuality). Since the Kinsey interviews are structured around a binary conception of gender, the scale collapses if the subject opts out of male or female identification……

The Telephone Museum

I’m Going to Die Young

The Process: Nii Quarcoopome

I have visited the Ghanaian Fante Asafo flags at the Detroit Institute of Arts dozens of times. In their exquisite handwork and loaded symbolism, the flags strike a perfect balance between art and craft. But I have often wondered, What is the provenance of this form, inevitably labeled “folk art” in displays or auction catalogs? I spoke with Dr. Nii Quarcoopome, native of the Ghanaian capital of Accra, and the co–chief curator and head of the Department of Africa, Oceania and……

An Interview with Ram Dass and Rameshwar Das

The human appetite for devotional guidance remains as voracious as ever. In the last half century, that guidance has come increasingly from the East, in the form of proliferating yoga studios and self-help best sellers, the rise of meditation, and the slowly increasing awareness that the earth’s health has a direct relationship with our own well-being. Many figures have been responsible for the migration of Eastern thought into Western culture: Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki opened minds to Zen……