niela_no

Animal Crossing

Fable came into the world climbing. After a monthlong gestation, she emerged blind and furless, an embryonic jelly bean endowed with little more than grasping claws and an instinctual map of her mother’s topography. She clambered from cloaca to pouch, found a teat in the warm dark, and latched on. Milk flowed into her. After a month she weighed as much as a quarter; after three, as much as a deck of cards. Her ears unfurled like spring leaves. Her……

Jaron Lanier in Conversation with Tim Maughan

I attended a graduate urban planning program, during which I researched the interplay between virtual and material spaces. When I started, Google Maps was just becoming a thing, and my early research looked at how planners could design streets for hyperspace. Very quickly, I shifted to investigating the relationships between online and offline spaces and how they inform each other, and I researched the ways online user-generated content could affect the material world. Jaron Lanier’s writings were—and remain—crucial for anyone……

A Microinterview with Niela Orr and Ismail Muhammad

In late May 2020, at the very beginning of the George Floyd protests, Niela Orr, one of The Believer’s deputy editors, asked Ismail Muhammad, the magazine’s criticism editor, for advice on an essay she was writing. Ismail provided helpful feedback. Feeling a complicated range of emotions, including terror, hope, anxiety, and despair, but also heartened by their intellectual kinship, the pair decided to organize a series of roundtables between Black writers in different disciplines. (The first two of those talks……

Annunciation in a Gas Station Bathroom

After I pee and wipe, I creep close, sit on my heels, wanting to see the electric pinkness, but not wanting   to stroke the baby mouse’s nakedness or to grave it. On the broken door I read—The Lord is with you!   My tongue, ashen and chemical like it was after kissing a fire-eater, divine word trying to plant itself in the fleshy   nautilus of my ear, but I refuse it. Forgive me. If the baby was alive,……

Dismantle the Platform

Bone Broth for Dirges

For Tony Bone broth for dirges, for flowers of fat, orange zest, and too many clothes for this heat, for speeded hearts and waiting for the steam to go corporeal, for the Mozart in the death metal, and greasy soles, and a French hotel room  in June, a ceiling fan, an unmade bed, a bass drum at the bottom of the stockpot, despairing fish aghast in their nets.  Okay: our nets.  When I spoon the soup over the herbs, into……

Object: Sephora Sheet Mask, $6

FEATUREs: Single-useGood for normal, oily, combination, dry, and sensitive skinA solution for dryness, dullness, and blemishes Recently, I went on holiday with friends. We had all separately been having a bad time, and we decided to attempt having a bad time together. Each of us had just turned thirty, or was about to turn thirty, and the mood was one of slow panic. On a quiet night, Jackie, who had arrived from Hong Kong, took out from her luggage several……

Skating Costumes I Have Known

This piece is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Self-Moving Image

  1. FUTURE A shot of the desert, long focus, a rectangle of sand wavering under a blue sky. An automobile of no recognizable model glides right to left across the horizon, its chrome body a silver droplet in the distance. Close-up on the car’s only passenger, a woman, played by one of the most well-known actors of the day. Dressed in a dark business suit, she is seated in the car’s back seat, the panoramic rear windshield wrapping around……

A Microinterview with Kristen Gallerneaux

Kristen Gallerneaux is the curator of communications and information technology at the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan. Of her work, Sarah Rose Sharp wrote the following: Over the years, Gallerneaux has been engaged in prodigious research, often in connection to objects in the Henry Ford Museum’s massive and highly eclectic collection, which was founded in 1929 and was catalyzed by Ford’s interest in stories of technology, innovation, and everyday life in America. Some of these objects include a radio……

Guest Critic: David L. Ulin

The Process: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness and The Left Witness, 2019

Morehshin Allahyari, an Iranian artist, has devoted her long-term art project, She Who Sees the Unknown, to reviving stories of female/queer djinn in Islamic culture that have been neglected or forgotten. Since October 2016, Allahyari has gathered documents and images from libraries in New York and Tehran, as well as consulted with scholars worldwide, in order to construct a new narrative of the past. She terms this process “refiguring.” She Who Sees the Unknown has been showcased in many venues,……

Human Lag

Mother told me I was born in a dark cabin surrounded by pines  so thick that all day it seemed like evening. Mother said that my bearded father could not speak and that of his face only the eyes, nose, and mouth were visible among a lingering scent of creek bed  moss. Mother told me that when I cried as an infant she would take me  into the barn where only the lowing of cows and neighing of horses  would……

Tell Me How It Makes You Feel

The omnipotent impotent waited for its cue while the buccal samples were gathered and the missionary nuns delivered the  fruit to the meningital youth in developing Southeast Asian  countries. I had another plan. I was under contract.  Not oath.  Were these postcards sent by the offshore drilling agents or  greeting cards sent by Chase Bank?  On the wrong side of the window, on the ledge actually, there  was a q-tip, the contract, and a bowl, and then I misspoke.  The……

Microreviews: April/May 2020

Tool: Portable Bidet, $13.99

FEATUREs: Ergonomic squeeze bottle Angled nozzle No batteries required Air-lock technology for stronger spray My roommate burst out of the bathroom clutching a thin piece of metal several feet long in one hand and a pair of wire cutters in the other. “I managed to get the pipe out,” he said. “It drives me crazy when I’m trying to pee.” I was twenty-one, and it was the first time I’d lived with a Western roommate. This was in Cairo, in……

How to Furnish an Apartment

You have to be home, I told my friend. She wanted to know how to furnish her apartment, which was nearly empty, as she was rarely there. Did I say rarely? I mean never. She took a sleeping bag to work, was a clinic volunteer on weekends. My busy friend, someone I didn’t bother unless she thought to bother me. But she was giving all that up—the clinic, the busy; she was going to slow way down and really take……

Both of You But Better

Guest Critic: Maria Tumarkin

Ask Jeannie: Advice from Jean Grae for April/May 2020

Hi Jean, My boyfriend’s becoming a sneaker enthusiast in his mid-thirties, which is surprising, given his lack of interest in this subculture up until this point. For his birthday, I really wanted to get him some super-rare deadstock Jordans, but I just didn’t have the money. This is shameful, but I bought a fake pair and found someone to customize the shoes so they look like the real thing. He loves the sneakers, but I’ve been feeling really guilty about……

Bad Airs

Always born too late. I know I am just the type of woman to be a consumptive beauty: more ghostly   than failure, scarlet lips of low-grade fever— tuberculosis strung up in a valentine parade.   The test was pretty: we called it daisy. It infects me, it infects me not. It infects me, it infects me not.   Outside the nurses’ bay an actual pile of cattle burning. Appalling in the fashion of bureaucracy—   disgust in turning open……

In the Morning All of Her Pain

is trying to happen at the top of its voice     drivers shutting off engines at the bus stop hanging out their cracked-open doors blue jackets     this woman too old to be my mother or she’s not too dressed in a felt hat & cashmere or she isn’t traffic is backing up along the road now a small then big crowd making itself up around her body and she is reaching her fingers right down inside herself……

Don’t Write Elegies

Don’t write elegies anymore, let someone else stumble past the mausoleum and grieve under the calm shade of a plane tree, wiping away the tears of his ex-wife, staining the knees of his black suit, first sobbing, then choking back sobs, comforting others, consoling himself by scrubbing the white stone and weeding the plot year after year, I’m sorry, it’s too sad, it’s time for someone else to mourn my dead, though who else can do it?, I just need……

This Is Not a Feel-Good Movie

This comic is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Notes in the Margin (Part IV)

Kulka Nothing like reading a Holocaust memoir at the Jiffy Lube. Distant relatives gassed so I could be here waiting on another uniformed man with a checklist. Soon, he will tell me, with a half smile, all the things I need aside from an oil change. An oil change is $37.50 (more if you use the fancy synthetic oil), but everything else is going to run the bill to—oh, my neglected Outback. There’s a TV hanging, by chains, from a……

I Celebrate Myself, and Erase Myself

Flight Risk

Guest Critic: Trisha Low

Microreviews: February/March 2020

Dust and Doubt

This comic is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.