In the face of the country's plethora of problems, its artists continue on.
For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been aware of Nigeria’s potential.
Globally, this potential has largely been measured by the country’s natural resources, from relatively recent (and continuing) discoveries of rare earth elements, to crude oil, its greatest export commodity, and arguably also its greatest curse. Discovered some years short of independence from British colonial rule in 1960, oil has been the main cause of poverty and ecological degradation in the Delta region, often stagnating development in Nigeria’s other industries due to over-reliance on its “black gold”.
Then, there’s the potential of our country’s expansive 230 million-plus population, consisting of over 400 ethnic groups (or 500, depending on how they’re counted), with just as many languages. Equally important is our religious diversity, composed largely of Muslims and Christians, as well as practitioners of various traditional religions, the latter sometimes performed (quietly) alongside the Abrahamic faiths. Increasingly, if only marginally, there’s also a rise in irreligiosity and atheism among Nigeria’s youth, noteworthy because Nigerians are, on average, a deeply religious (pontificating and practicing) people.
There is also the potential of our diaspora. From the time of independence or even before it, the Nigerian diaspora has produced notable writers, artists, and musicians, a feat that has only grown as the country’s entertainment industries, especially in music and film, have exploded in the last decade. Notwithstanding the prevalence of a “scammer” stereotype, Nigerians in diaspora—especially in the West—stand out as among the most educated, flourishing immigrant populations across variouscountries. Last year, Nigerians abroad even remitted over $20 billion back to the country, exceeding its foreign direct investment. This statistic does more than simply demonstrate the economic success enjoyed by many Nigerians abroad; it offers insight into the intimate connections we have to the nation of our birth—or of our parents’ or grandparents' birth. It also shows that, where the government has failed to create economic conditions for the average Nigerian to meet their basic needs, Nigerians individually and collectively have offered the necessary support to fill the gap.
This, however, reveals a truth that has persisted from one generation to the next: Nigeria’s potential has not staved off its reality.
"I’ve found myself inching ever closer to a resignation that what Nigeria may mostly have in my lifetime is potential."
While the truth of any country exists beyond what data reveals, it cannot be entirely ignored. The numbers show that by most measures, Nigerians at home are collectively worse off than they were even a decade ago. Its GDP per capita, for example, has fallen to an estimated $835.49 this year; just four years ago, that figure was $2,057. Unsurprisingly, this has meant an exacerbation of extreme poverty, even as, notoriously, the combined worth of the nation’s five wealthiest people could put an end to it should they so choose.
Just as unsurprising is that Nigeria’s rate of unemployment remains high, despite the National Bureau of Statistics’ recent manipulation to arrive at the now low 4.3% figure, after surpassing 30% unemployment just a few years ago. Simultaneously, the cost of living in Nigeria has escalated to its worst in a generation, while rising security concerns, rife in different parts of the country for different reasons, have made it difficult to determine the sheer scale of crime nationally.
Put together, then, the potential of Nigeria is exponential. But the reality of Nigeria is we have a multigenerational kleptocratic political class with little interest in strengthening the nation’s institutions or improving the lives of ordinary people. Whatever improvements have been made—for decades—have been in spite of this class, and often by the sheer will of persistent individuals and grassroots community initiatives.
"Seeing the cultural and artistic production of Nigerians once again revived my belief that hope must be a practice."
You might not know any of this, of course, if you only frequent, or are attentive to, the country during its Detty December period, where the weeks-long partying never ends in the palatable parts of its Lagos metropolis. Even with hiked prices and complaints from Nigerians at home and abroad, who go less for the merriment than to visit family, the period shows no signs of easing. People anywhere, I believe, have a right to enjoyment despite whatever depths of despair we may find ourselves in. But when does this enjoyment start to become smoke and mirrors for the lack—and a desensitization to the lack—experienced by most Nigerians?
If it sounds like I am describing a country on the brink, my visits in the last two years, especially, have felt like I was witnessing it, too. This is the same country where many of our parents survived a late ’60s civil war and perennial eras of dictatorship through to the ’90s. And yet, the country today seems somehow less tolerable, because the last decade of governance has revealed even the smallest gains can be reversed; that this is not a developing country, but a regressing one.
Having frequently meditated on the state of the nation’s potential versus its reality, I’ve found myself inching ever closer to a resignation that what Nigeria may mostly have in my lifetime is potential—and a potential that will never even be minorly realized. What’s more is that the values that Nigerians ordinarily uphold—our ability to persevere, to get through, to make good of what is bad—is also ultimately what holds us back. Realizing this made me all the more hopeless, because how do a people resist over time and collectively when enough is never enough?
With all of this on my mind, last November, visiting Nigeria yet again, I was apprehensive; despite my own relative economic privilege, I’ve been enjoying my stays less, considering them more a labor of my particular family culture than a joyful homecoming. This visit, lasting less than 10 days, would be dominated by art and art makers across two cities—Lagos and Benin City. I’d also be making it to my ancestral hometown, Ughelli, in the Delta.
Yet for all my apprehensions, I found myself less fatigued by the state of the country than contemplative. While I would witness many swaths of society that spoke to the country’s regression, seeing the cultural and artistic production of Nigerians once again revived my belief that hope must be a practice.
Photographs from J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere's Hairstyles exhibit at MAMCO in 2001. (Photo courtesy of MAMCO / Wikimedia Commons.)
In its tenth year, ART X Lagos provided me with a swanky welcome as I encountered the who’s who of the Lagos art scene and beyond, the international fair now among Africa’s largest. Well-curated with numerous official and unofficial events, you would have to try to have a bad time. There were symposiums dedicated to the country’s different postcolonial art schools featuring the likes of Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye, founder of one of the largest art galleries in West Africa, named after herself. Then there was the live photography studio inspired by the late J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, who captured Nigerians’ hairstyles as an artistic process, reminding us of the great value of art as a cultural archive.
In the midst of craftspeople, visual artists, sculptors—upcoming and established—there was also hearteningly, programming for children, inviting them to be art makers at a young age. Away from ART X Lagos, the Fela Kuti: Afrobeat Rebellion immersive exhibition, ongoing since October, was a gratifying celebration of perhaps one of Nigeria’s most notable cultural icons. Savoring it all, the only reservation I had was a familiar one—that more than just well-off Lagosians and visitors deserve access to such things, too.
Leaving for Benin City shortly after—the old historic home of the once powerful Edo nation, famous for the Benin Bronzes—I attended the inaugural Black Music Art Festival, established by the artist Victor Ehikhamenor. The fair showcased exhibitions and a remarkable new Sculpture Park, all done in tandem with local Nigerians and featuring a plethora of young artists, including Osaru Obaseki. A multidisciplinary artist who won the surprise first prize on opening night, Obaseki stood out for many reasons, but most notably to me, for her incorporation of bronze casting, traditionally done by men. Between her work and that of her contemporaries, innovation was everywhere I looked, including in the mixed media installation Invisible Pedestrians by Seidougha Linus Eyimiegha, AKA Mr. Danfo, and a studio visit with artist Derek Jombo, who blends surrealism with classical realism in portraits of postcolonial Nigerians.
Osaru Obaseki. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)
On the way to Ughelli, four hours by road from Benin, I traveled with a colleague turned friend, Agohogo Otega, a photojournalist and artist whose work I was finally able to purchase after years of eyeing a particular piece showcasing our hometown’s sunrise. Once in Ughelli, I spent time with a cousin I don’t often see, who has turned his artistic vocations from music to visual art once again. He shared his work with me as he told me of his future plans of pursuit.
I had not wanted the best Nigeria has to offer to trick me into succumbing once again into narratives of our potential, and it didn’t. But what happened in spending time with the full range of artists—from those who have international acclaim to those who struggle to afford the most basic items for their practice—was a reminder that while I’ve never had much faith in the Nigerian political class, if I’m to maintain my ties to the country as a whole, I cannot afford to give up on its people.
"Nigerians—and that is, ordinary Nigerians—refuse to sacrifice art at the altar of the country’s plethora of problems."
This includes their many achievements despite the countless factors working against them. Aside from art, even with inadequate infrastructural support, everything from agritech businesses to renewable energy companies are still advancing, continually exhibiting to those that control the nation’s purse strings what the future could be, long before they’ve invested in it. Despite the very real partly religious conflicts and sometimes ensuing violence that has occurred in various parts of the country, for the most part, we also do more than tolerate each other: I was born in Ibadan, and if you’ve ever been there, you know that one’s neighbors are just as likely to be Christian as they are to be Muslim (or traditionalists) and celebrating each other’s festivities is part of the city’s ethos. There are many more Ibadans in Nigeria than not.
It’s why the characterization of Western (and Western-minded)politicians and pundits who don’t understand (or intentionally misunderstand) the complex dynamics of the nation—quick to weaponize “Christian genocide” rhetoric—are speaking out of turn; there are too many additional factors at play to oversimplify our national woes. It is true that Nigeria has an ethnocentrism problem that has seldom been adequately examined in the context of power and privilege, akin to racism. But for a people who still embody the memory of our once independent precolonial nations, that we have never really had many leaders keen to unite us—and in fact have leaders even today who weaponize our differences—my sense is we often belittle our everyday congeniality towards each other. A congeniality I would like to see more of in how we regard each other’s cultural expressions.
Derek Jombo. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)
Given all the tragedies of Nigeria, I remain astonished at the art and the artists the country produces. For a country that is in such dire straits, that quite frankly, has so much for its ordinary citizens to be attentive to, and where institutional support for the creative industries is dire, our artistic production feels like a small miracle. Beyond this, Nigerian families are notorious, if stereotyped, as discouraging their children from artistic undertakings, preferring they go into “practical” fields—medicine, engineering, or otherwise. Of course, there is also the wide gap of privilege: The difference between what a wealthy child is exposed to in Lagos artistically, and what a child from the working poor will be exposed to in Lagos, or Ughelli, or Benin, is great—a distance that ordinarily only exacerbates my despair. But I’d be lying if I didn't admit that it also gives me hope that Nigerians—and that is, ordinary Nigerians—refuse to sacrifice art at the altar of the country’s plethora of problems, as something only to be pursued by the elite.
It is here that Nigeria’s potential merges with its reality. Whether accompanied with other “practical work,” or disappointing their families, or restricting themselves to smaller towns and cities, Nigeria’s artists continue on. Many, without fame and certainly almost no fortune, continue on. And little else can explain why, other than because they can’t help themselves. It is something they must do, even with no fairytale ending in sight, because the art itself is the point. This, above all, is where the unexpected hope lies among a people obsessed with reaping the fruits of one’s labor: that even still, in spite of our condition, creating itself, and not its aftermath, is what matters most.
[post_title] => Where Nigeria's Potential Meets Its Reality
[post_excerpt] => In the face of the country's plethora of problems, its artists continue on.
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A stunning posthumous collection of poetry that grapples with living and dying.
In early March 2026, the queer Vietnamese-American poet Theo LeGro died after a long battle with breast cancer. Nearly three months later, almost exactly to the day, their debut collection, Don’t Let It Kill You, was published posthumously by Persea Books. I’d known Theo—first online, then off—since I was a teenager, around half my life. They were a beloved partner and daughter, sister and aunt, and a dear friend to many. They were also a Kundiman fellow and Pushcart nominee whose gorgeous work was published in Brooklyn Poets, Plume, and The Offing, amongst others.
Writers who die young often seem to leave behind the most prolific thoughts on life, and Theo was no exception. I devoured Don’t Let It Kill You in one sitting, and then savored it in another. The collection is raw but exacting; sumptuous and sharp; tender and devastating. Much of it also grapples with dying, and existing in a body that is killing you. In some of their poems, Theo humanizes the tumor that has made a home in their chest, as they navigate their relationship to something both a part of them and not: “It’s humiliating, / how what’s killing you never even thinks of you. The storm / pulling down your house doesn’t even know your name.”
The collection is seeped in want as it is in longing. As Frontier Poetry puts it, Theo “leans into what could have been—a life not marred by disease.” (“It should be a miracle, to be so young / and ancient,” Theo writes. “To watch a scar’s colors change.”) But it is equally a trove of poems about trauma and inheritance; about distance, literal and felt; about the death of Theo’s father and their complicated relationship with their mother in Vietnam. It explores love—both its complications and its ease—and grief.
In the Jeff Tweedy song the book’s title is referencing (“Don’t Forget”), the line that precedes “don’t let it kill you” is “we all think about dying.” Perhaps more than most, this was true of Theo, long before they even knew they were sick. A few years ago, they were featured in a segment on The Today Show about the power of music to save us when we feel most untethered from life. They spoke of their depression and PTSD, grappling with suicidal ideation, and how music helped bring them back to themself. “Sometimes,” Theo said, “music becomes this communal experience that has reminded me of what's worth sticking around for.”
This sentiment is interwoven throughout Theo’s collection—in its title, in certain poems like “I’d Rather Go Blind,” and in the rhythm of the writing. Don’t Let It Kill You is for anyone who’s ever felt seen in the lyrics of a song, who’s been touched by music’s particular kind of poetry—which is to say, all of us. But the collection also feels like listening to music when you’re reading it, as if imbued with all the songs that shaped Theo’s life.
At their joyful celebration of life in May, there was a video of Theo reading “Dress Sexy at My Funeral,” a reference to the Smog song of the same name. It also acted as a checklist for the very event taking place. Theo made music requests, of course (including “fiddles / even if I’m the only one / who thinks they’re sexy”); asked for those in attendance to “wear leather / wear chains” and “dance like nobody / is dying”; requested an after-party with karaoke. “Bury me / in the red dress / and the Reeboks,” they said, voice steady. “I wanna be ready / to run / in the next life.” They spoke, too, of wanting to come back, their body intact and scarless. “Let me / tell you a secret,” they said. “I’m not ready / to go / so / miss me / even though / it’s selfish to ask.”
From a Zoom call, thousands of miles away, I watched Theo in black and white, smoking a cigarette, beautiful as ever, and cried. But even those who might not have known them would have been able to see and feel the particular magic of Theo’s words and voice. Don’t Let It Kill You is an extension of this magic, and a testament to something—and someone—lost. “This life is nothing / but a thievery of hours,” Theo writes, “and I can’t even be / grateful I haven’t gotten caught.”
We aren’t owed our time on Earth, I know—but there is a specific kind of grief when someone dies so young, like expecting another step and slamming your foot on flat ground. I wonder what Theo might have written about if they’d had more time; what new music they might have liked that doesn’t yet exist. But more than anything else, I just wish they’d had more time to be.
“Sometimes, I get bogged down thinking about where all this time spent in this depressed state has gotten me, and one way to sort of alchemize it has been writing poetry,” Theo said in that same Today Show interview. “I feel like another way to alchemize it might be just using it to help other people if I can.”
We all think about dying. But sometimes, what gets us to the other side is finding something that helps us make sense of living. What a gift, then, to have Theo’s words, in Don’t Let It Kill Youand beyond, to guide us through.
~
In honor of Theo’s life and legacy, Kundiman has established the Theo LeGro Scholarship Fund to help support queer and disabled writers participating in their online classes and retreats. To learn more about the fund and donate, you can visit TheoForever.com.
[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Don't Let It Kill You" by Theo LeGro
[post_excerpt] => A stunning posthumous collection of poetry that grapples with living and dying.
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I grew up in a small town in Northern New Jersey, where the local mortician is fantastic. In their parlor, one frequently hears the refrain: “Make sure I get done by the Pizzis!” These days, I think about the Pizzi Funeral Home often; namely, every time I see the photographic remains of a red carpet. Given the rage for deflating one’s body with GLP-1s and re-inflating it selectively with filler and implants, then pinning back and sucking out various parts with buccal fat removal, blepharoplasty, and deep-plane brow lifts, before finally freezing it all with Botox…one could be forgiven for mistaking a step and repeat for an open casket: To appear rich or famous is to look embalmed while alive.
The plastic surgery industry is as old as Hollywood. I recall my childhood horror watching Katherine Helmond’s saran-wrapped facelift in Brazil, to say nothing of Death Becomes Her. However, given the proliferation of medspas, and the plague of twenty-somethings freaking out about their “elevens,” facial modification has come to the masses. You no longer have to be somebody to look embalmed. Seeing forehead movement sometimes feels as quaint as modem dial-up sounds, and not only amongst celebrities or in the society pages, but amongst anyone—from coworkers to MILFs in your area.
This is why, when I recently found myself in Vienna, I reveled in one particular room at the Belvedere: the one that contains Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s Kopfstücke, usually translated as “character heads.” For the uninitiated, these 64 busts were created in the 18th century Hapsburg Austrian Empire. Yet, they evince no calm of the Enlightenment grin, nor do they possess a buttoned-up Teutonic air. Rather, they are largely recognized as the masterworks of a man who lost his shit. By the 1770s, Messerschmidt was a successful sculptor with multiple royal commissions to his name. However, in the wake of a series of career snubs and medical setbacks, he flamed out completely, retiring to Pressberg (now Bratislava) where he lived simply, focusing on these weird, remarkable, sublimely expressive heads.
Taken as a whole, the busts evoke a symphonic range of human emotion written upon the face. Typically bald—perruque tossed to the wind, Turkish hairlines a far-off future—many bare their teeth and stick out their tongues in a way that shreds any historical filter, like seeing a photograph of a Victorian smiling. They scowl, grimace, laugh, shout, and howl. To create some of them, Messerschmidt pinched himself and studied his own reactions in a mirror. Some art historians believe he suffered from hallucinations, others say the busts are satire; there is no clear consensus. The context is nil, which makes them seem that much closer to us, that much more human and alive. Though carved from silent stone, their volume is turned permanently to 11. I fucking love these things, and I made my luggage overweight schlepping home a giant monograph.
Visiting a room where stone could scream, sing, sob, and sneer made me depressed at how inanimate—how quiet—we now wish human flesh to be. We prick it, slice it, stab it, lop it off, suck it out, and drug it to keep it at bay. Smiling begets crow's feet; laughter begets lines. So we bolt the tits high beneath the caved in clavicle. Trim the eyelid, freeze the jowl. Buy a silk pillowcase. Break your nose. Jam needles in your lips. Shove Gore-TEX in your chin. Go ham with hyaluronic acid. Don’t sag, don’t crease, don’t jiggle, don’t fold—the antithesis to Kopfstücke. While I could go on about how sad the dearth of human facial expression in the media makes me and how it distorts beauty standards and impairs artistic expression, we’ve had that conversation already. Besides, I’ve got to be real with you: I inherited my father’s forehead lines, and I don’t like that at all.
For Messerschmidt, his face was a canvas, a stage, even a lab. For me, my face is something very different: It’s my calling card. I don’t say this because I’m a model or an actress, but simply because, unlike Messerschmidt, I’m a woman. And, as a woman, you are first and foremost judged by how fuckable you are. This is as cruel as it is true—and remains true even if sex is far from the matter at hand. Since time immemorial, no matter what is going on between a woman’s ears, what could be going on between your legs is always lurking somewhere in the ether. Younger women are ruthlessly judged by their reproductive choices; older ones find themselves “invisible.” And it has also only become increasingly acute a reality as social media and smart phone use warps society far beyond what any Enlightenment philosopher in Habsburg Vienna might have anticipated. This, I can assure you, takes a toll. And it bums me out way more than Ozempic face ever could.
Beauty standards are inherently fucked up by virtue of their existence. Someone will always get the short end of the stick. But when your participation in society at any moment can be reduced to Darwinian sexual selection, the result is, to put it lightly, toxic and demeaning. It drives you to think that maybe your life will be different if you lose ten pounds or do something about those elevens, which, obviously, it will not be. But, you reason, maybe you’ll feel a little better about yourself, so you book an appointment, or cave into some other bodily misadventure to chase an illusion of control.
And, yeah, I’ve read up on the male loneliness epidemic and the crisis in masculinity. (Let's make it about them for a minute!) Clavicular may facemog a lot of column inches in his fascistic looksmaxxing quest, and plastic surgery is on the rise among men, but women are still trapped, as usual, by lose-lose scenarios. If the classic dichotomy of the genre is virgin or whore, we now have looking overdone or giving up on life; doing too much and aging oneself prematurely versus looking so young it’s scary. Women cannot win: They are getting more degrees and finally closing the wage gap a little, threatening the very men they’re supposed to want to attract while they continue getting terrorized by capitalist scams involving Botox, egg freezing, perimenopause, and weight loss drugs—as though their platonic ideal of a final form were a smooth-faced vulva with a 401(k).
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that many of these surgeries and treatments enable gender expression, facial reconstruction, and other medical treatments beyond walking the finest of lines that exist between vanity and sanity. But given this state of affairs, I will always forgive vanity in women, no matter how uncanny the valley. So what if your face is frozen in some weird rictus? So what if your cheekbones could impale someone on a crowded subway car? It’s YOUR face. We cannot write anyone else’s playbook on how to present as female during End Times. We are all just trying to get by. Whatever choices we make to do so—trapped in Zooms and FaceTimes and forced to look at ourselves constantly in a world where over 16 trillion images exist yet you cannot shake the 15 of your double chin—vaya con Dios. We cannot tell anyone else how to cope.
If it isn’t for you, that’s also fine. If you wanna go natural and raw-dog Mother Nature and Father Time, right on, sister. That’s a hell of a threesome. But, no matter where on the plastic surgery spectrum you fall, just give yourself the grace to do whatever the fuck you want, and cut everyone the slack they refuse to cut themselves—literally and metaphorically, until the Pizzis themselves have their turn.
And, should you need to release any number of emotions related to this beauty standard garbage fire, no matter what you have or haven’t done yourself, I can direct you to a room in Vienna full of appropriate reactions. It's fitting that Messerschmidt is often written off as crazy or difficult or overly emotional. In this way, he is in touch with his feminine side. What is deeply powerful or expressive is often dismissed as crazy, and these busts remind us of that, too. They remind us how raw emotion has the power to reach across time. Though they are of one particular man’s face, we can all see ourselves in them—regardless of what degree of mobility our own faces have. One might even think of those character heads as 64 Dorian Grays. Each, in its extreme state, stands in for a facial expression one can no longer make in the service of looking youthful and taut. They scream for those who can but smize.
[post_title] => How to Present as Female During End Times
[post_excerpt] => Why I'll always forgive vanity in women.
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How women impacted by incarceration are building new futures for themselves and their communities.
This article originally appeared in Ms. magazine as “Breaking the Cycle,” a three-part series on how women impacted by incarceration are building new futures—from education and job training, to debate teams and book clubs inside jails.
For Women Leaving Prison, Education Can Be a Way Out
Standing at the bottom of the steps, waiting for her name to be called, Stephanie King took a deep breath. She was ready to walk across the stage at Tulane University and receive her diploma.
“At that moment, I knew it was a bigger deal than I had allowed myself to believe,” she told Ms.
King was 63 years old. She had spent 27 years, seven months, and 24 days in prison. She had never attended a graduation ceremony outside a corrections facility. As a teenager, she dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant. It would be 13 years before she obtained her high school diploma—and that was in jail.
“I just wanted to walk across that stage,” she says.
King was the first person to graduate from the college-in-prison program offered by Tulane University and Operation Restoration, a Louisiana-based organization that provides education, housing, and other resources to women impacted by the criminal justice system.
(Courtesy of Stephanie King.)
Syrita Steib, who herself spent nearly 10 years in prison, started the organization in 2016. Upon her release in 2009, she found no reentry resources specifically for women in New Orleans. She applied to college and was initially denied after disclosing her conviction. Two years later, she reapplied without revealing that history; she was accepted.
While completing her degree to become a clinical lab scientist, Steib applied for a lab assistant license. As part of her licensing application, she once again had to disclose her conviction history. But the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners considers each case individually and, fortunately, several of her professors were on the board. Her conviction was not held against her.
Female incarceration increased by more than 600 percent between 1980 and 2023. While women and girls make up approximately 10 percent of the nation’s imprisoned population, they have far fewer opportunities than their male counterparts—both inside and upon release.
For years, Louisiana was considered the nation’s “prison capital.” There, efforts to reduce incarceration largely focused on Black men and boys. Steib founded Operation Restoration to address this gender disparity, and it’s one of a growing number of programs across the nation serving women impacted by the justice system.
Steib graduated college. She became a clinical laboratory scientist. She started a family.
She also joined the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, a network of justice-impacted women advocating for state and federal policy changes. Through the council, she met Vivian Nixon, a formerly incarcerated woman and then-executive director of College and Community Fellowship, which works to help justice-impacted women in New York City pursue higher education, and assists formerly incarcerated women in other cities working on reentry.
Meeting women in these nonprofits gave Steib blueprints for how to create a nonprofit that addresses women’s incarceration in Louisiana in ways that are impactful, sustainable, and long-lasting.
Operation Restoration began with direct services, providing clothing for women returning home from incarceration and GED tutoring for women in jail and out in the community. By then, Steib was working in a supervisory role at a hospital. Whenever applicants checked the box disclosing their criminal history, she made sure to walk them through what to expect during the interview process and how to present themselves so that board examiners saw past their conviction.
From there, Steib’s organization grew to include a lab assistant training program open to women both inside prison and outside in New Orleans. It developed its Safety and Freedom Fund to post bail for people who could not afford it and to connect them with other resources needed while awaiting trial. The organization also joined advocacy efforts to remove barriers to reentry, including amending the question about criminal history on public college application forms.
In 2017, Operation Restoration began a partnership with Tulane University to offer college courses at the Louisiana Correctional Institution for Women in St. Gabriel, just south of Baton Rouge.
By then, King had already been imprisoned for more than 20 years. She had taken other courses at the prison, including a degree program offered by the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. But she knew that when she finally did walk out of the prison gates, she needed as many skills and as much education as she could get.
“I knew that the answer to breaking the cycle that I had been going in since I was 15 was going to come through education,” she says.
But getting an education in prison has a unique set of challenges. Students struggle to acquire basic supplies, like pens, calculators, paper, folders, notebooks, erasers, and highlighters. Operation Restoration had to provide these—as well as textbooks.
Students cannot conduct their own research. Instead, they rely on Tulane students, who are sent lists of research requests written out on paper. Often what the women get in return isn’t what they were looking for. Once, King intended to write a paper about the disparity in educational programs in men’s and women’s prisons. But the materials she received weren’t what she needed, so she had to pivot to a different topic.
The actions of others, even if they aren’t enrolled in the program, affect the students as well. During a semester when students were studying movies and TV shows, a woman in the prison was caught watching a show on someone else’s tablet—a violation of the institution’s rules. In response, the prison removed movies from all prison tablets. The students and instructor managed to get through the rest of the class, but without access to the shows and films they had intended to watch and analyze.
In October 2023, King was released from prison. She had been in the middle of two classes and had nine more to go. Tulane allowed her to finish her classes online. Federal student aid paid for her tuition; Operation Restoration paid for her books and other materials. King, who was incarcerated in 1996 when beepers were the latest technology, had to learn 21st century tools.
Lacking a computer, King figured out how to use her cell phone to Zoom into classes and turn in her papers. The professors worked to accommodate her, but she no longer had access to the peer support system she had built inside prison, where she and five other students in her housing unit frequently turned to each other with questions or for support. Outside, and in Baton Rouge—far from Tulane’s New Orleans campus—she had to figure out everything on her own. Still, if not for Operation Restoration, King wouldn’t have had that opportunity at all. Now approaching its 10th year, the organization reportedly provided 22,650 direct services and worked with 2,058 women from 2020 to 2024 alone.
(Courtesy of Operation Restoration.)
M.D., who asked that only her initials be published, learned about Operation Restoration when her mother went to bail her out of jail. Members of the organization’s Safety and Freedom Fund paid M.D.’s bail. They also gave her mom information on the organization. When M.D. contacted them, she learned about the lab assistant program. (M.D.’s charges were later dropped.)
“I didn’t even know what [being a lab assistant] was,” she says.
Still, as a single mother, she knew she needed a career that paid better than what she earned as a restaurant hostess. Operation Restoration provided childcare, allowing her to bring her 3-year-old, who played while she learned.
M.D. says she was intimidated by some subjects, but her classmates motivated each other and the cohort learned together. After graduating, she was hired at a local hospital.
“She came in with green scrubs,” Steib recalls. “She was dancing, and she was so excited. That was such a drastic change from us bailing her out and her and her daughter living in this one room at her mom’s house.”
Later, M.D. was arrested again after her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend called the police on her. Operation Restoration not only bailed her out, but spoke with her hospital supervisors so that she didn’t lose her job.
They also spoke with M.D., encouraging her not to jeopardize the new life she had built.
“We had those tough conversations with her, like, ‘You can’t put yourself in that position for a man. You got to figure out how to control your emotions,’” Steib says. “She appreciated that we didn’t quit on her.”
M.D. attended an expungement workshop, applying to remove the arrest from her record. (She is currently awaiting the judge’s approval.)
Kendreka, who asked that only her first name be published, has never been incarcerated. But her children’s father cycled in and out of jail, leaving her to raise their two sons. During one of his absences, she lost her job. A friend told her about Operation Restoration and its lab assistant program.
“I had always wanted to be in the medical field,” Kendreka told Ms. But drawing blood scared her, so she never pursued that avenue.
She enrolled in the eight-week program and became a licensed lab assistant. She stopped juggling three jobs and instead found a position at a local hospital. The schedule is still grueling—12-hour shifts for seven days followed by seven days off work—but having every other week off allows her to spend time with her sons, now ages 10 and 12.
“If it wasn’t for Operation Restoration, I don’t know where I’d have ended up,” she says. “It has set me up to be where I am now.”
Inside the DC Jail Debate Team, Women Find Their Voice
“I know of a woman who spent the majority of her first prison bid in isolation. She didn’t have access to any programs to help her heal from her childhood trauma, abuse, neglect and depression,” Chelsee Wright wrote in remarks she prepared for a February debate. “The lack of mental health treatment led her to self-mutilate and multiple suicide attempts.”
Wright is part of the DC Jail Debate Team. Started in 2024, it’s the first coed team of the National Prison Debate League. Each semester, up to 20 participants—many of whom have no previous debate experience—meet twice a week at the Washington, D.C., jail where they are incarcerated.
Each semester starts with a mini-debate on questions like “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” or “Is ice cream the best dessert?” From there, the participants vote on 10 potential topics related to incarceration and prepare for a debate against a university team.
Like people in prisons, those in jails do not have access to research materials. Law students at Georgetown University put together evidence packets—typically 200 pages for the affirmative and 80 pages for the negative. Each member of the jail debate team is responsible for reading the entire packet and coming to class prepared to discuss what’s missing and whether more research is needed.
London Teeter takes the stand to argue against mandatory minimum sentences. (Courtesy of Sarah Istel.)
“They’re really mastering the material,” says Sarah Istel, a cofounder of the debate program and volunteer coach. Once they’ve done so, they fill out their preferences for debate roles: affirmative speakers, rebuttal speakers or closers.
“There are different kinds of roles,” Istel notes. “Some require thinking on your feet more. Some require more lengthy [arguments] written in advance.”
Participants write the first drafts of their arguments and refine them through practice debates in class.
But conditions in jail are often unconducive to preparation. They cannot do their own research or type their drafts. They cannot have binders or paper clips to organize their notes. Cell searches scatter their papers. Still, students not only persevere, but support one another, encouraging and helping each other with their arguments.
Inside or out, coed classes carry the potential for male students to dominate at the expense of their female classmates. The coaches strive to ensure that women aren’t overlooked. At least two of each semester’s six speaking roles go to women.
London Teeter, now 22, joined the team after giving birth behind bars. She had spent her third trimester on the medical unit, where she was locked in her cell for 22 hours a day. Only one other woman was on the unit (their babies were born 15 days apart) and other than those two hours outside her cell, Teeter had nothing to do and no one to talk to.
At first, she didn’t want a speaking role in the debate. “I have really bad speaking anxiety,” she says.
But with her coaches’ encouragement, Teeter agreed to speak in the debate about mandatory minimums, laws that require judges to impose specific minimum prison sentences for certain crimes, regardless of the defendant’s circumstances. She asked for the closing, which, at 90 seconds, was the shortest role. Istel and the other coaches persuaded her to take on a larger role—and she did.
Teeter went through the packet and pulled out the most meaningful arguments. She also worked her own story into the materials.
“It was tricky because I’m not great at talking about myself,” she says. “I also wanted to make sure it included my team.”
London Teeter. (Courtesy of Sarah Istel.)
When she presented her first draft, her classmates were brought to tears. Last May, Teeter stepped up to the podium in the debate against Towson University.
“I currently face a mandatory minimum, as does every speaker on my team. And in total, our team faces a minimum of 198 years behind bars,” she began.
She went on to enumerate her arguments against mandatory minimums: their failure to prevent crime, their diversion from more effective resources, the devastation of families, the colossal price tag of long sentences, and prosecutors’ weaponization of mandatory minimums to coerce guilty pleas.
“Imagine being a 20-year-old woman, a first-time offender, no criminal background and 24 weeks pregnant when arrested. To exercise her fundamental right to trial, she faces a mandatory minimum of 49 years and even eventually was forced to give birth while incarcerated."
“This woman is me,” she said as she drew her argument to a close. “Before my team and I leave today, we ask that you remember, each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. Each of us deserves a chance to be considered as an individualized person, not a statistic, and it starts by abolishing mandatory minimums.”
The jail team won the debate.
~
The only time Chelsee Wright had ever attempted a public speaking role, she was so nervous that she stuttered.
Joining the debate team gave her an opportunity to overcome her fears. “I wanted to be able to stand up in front of a lot of people without stuttering,” the 31-year-old told Ms.
After she delivered her first speech to the group, her teammates gave her feedback: read slower, make more eye contact, emphasize certain words. She followed those suggestions, and by the time she read her final speech, she could look at her teammates and coaches and deliver a powerful argument. They gave her a standing ovation.
Wright’s sentencing was originally scheduled for this past December, but she requested that it be postponed so she could finish the debate program.
Wherever she’s transferred to serve her sentence, she plans to attend college.
“I didn’t attend [in jail] because I thought it was too hard for me,” she says.
The debate team taught her otherwise. Being part of the team, she says, “gave me confidence. It made me realize who I am and how far I can go, and that my voice can always be heard.”
At a February debate about solitary confinement, Wright used her voice in her closing remarks: “When her release date was near, she intentionally assaulted numerous officers. She needed more time."
“Three years later, she thought she was ready … but the outside world was intimidating. Now this individual is back in jail on a charge that could have been avoided if she had learned healthier outlets. Being home felt uncomfortable. You wouldn’t believe this, but solitary felt like home. Being controlled, degraded and caged in was what she was used to. They don’t feel deserving of freedom. No human should feel like this, to the point where human contact is frightening.”
She paused for a few seconds, then added, “And by the way … the woman I just described is me.”
At Rikers, a Book Club Is Helping Women Imagine Life Beyond Bars
In 2024, comedian Nora Fried started the Rosebuds Reading Collective, a monthly book club for women incarcerated at Rikers Island, New York City’s island jail.
After considering local volunteer opportunities, Fried set out to start a jail reading group to find a way to make a difference using literature as an outlet and a lifeline. She put out feelers about a book discussion group to several organizations and was surprised when the director of volunteer programs at Rikers Island responded.
Fried purchased copies of Tara Westover’s Educated, a memoir about a woman’s journey from a Mormon survivalist family in rural Idaho to earning her Ph.D. at Cambridge University, and in February 2025 she sat with nine women in a jail classroom to talk about it.
Rosebuds quickly became a popular program (22 women attended the last meeting). Discussions aren’t limited to the book. “Women cry, share personal stories about their cases,” Fried told Ms. “I always make it very clear that what happens in this room stays in this room.”
Jails are transitory. Each week, some women are sentenced and either transferred or released. Each day, new women arrive to await adjudication. Books must be approved and ordered in advance, and not every woman receives the book before the meeting. Fried estimates that 80 to 90 percent of attendees are new. But Fried, who performs stand-up, is used to reading and winning over an audience, a skill set she uses each month.
“I was looking forward to this all month,” Fried recalls multiple women telling her. “This is the only thing I had to look forward to.”
The women read Down the Drain, a memoir by actor Julia Fox. After the discussion, Fried tagged Fox on Instagram. Fox, whose brother was incarcerated at Rikers at the time, agreed to visit the group.
Although Fox had visited friends and family at Rikers many times before, this time was different. “I felt like I’d known these girls my whole life,” she says. “They are amazing, remarkable, intelligent young women [who] made mistakes. We’ve all made mistakes. Some of us are lucky enough not to get caught.”
Julia Fox facilitates a monthly creative writing workshop at Rikers Island. (Courtesy of Rosebuds Reading Collective.)
Fox learned that her book was a particularly hot commodity and that one woman’s copy had been stolen. Still, all were curious about how a girl like them had become a published author. The room resonated with laughter, from both the incarcerated women and the guards.
“It made me think to myself, I would do this every weekend. I want to come back. I love these girls,” Fox says.
“I’ve been there,” she recalls. “I have been in trouble with the law. I was facing a lengthy jail sentence if I didn’t turn my life around. … We’re cut from the same cloth, but I got really lucky. I want to make sure that they’re awarded the same opportunities and grace that I was given.”
After Fox’s visit, Fried added a 15-to-20-minute creative writing component. “A lot of women were really inspired by Julia’s book to start writing,” she notes.
Now Fox facilitates a monthly creative writing workshop. She had her own brushes with the legal system as a teenager. She says she found creative writing to be a therapeutic, cathartic release and she wanted to share that. Fox creates prompts from the books the group has read, such as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild about reinventing your life.
“You wake up in your dream life. What does it look like?” Fox asks the group.
Then, she encourages participants to read their writing aloud. Some stride to the front of the classroom. Others read aloud from their seats, while the shiest writers only allow Fox to read over their shoulders.
Fox is awed by the women’s willingness to share and show vulnerability, especially in a setting where vulnerability is often seen as weakness. She marvels at their bravery in standing before a group of near-strangers and sharing their deepest desires.
“My dream is that they each write something and we get it published somewhere,” Fox says. Reflecting on her own life, she adds, “For me, that was huge.”
That’s not the only goal that Fried and Fox have for Rosebuds. They hope to eventually expand, partnering with other organizations to offer more. For now they’re providing books and a safe space to dream of life beyond bars.
As Fox says, “Aim for the moon and land in the stars.”
Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana.
To get ahead of the odds against them—an unsympathetic media, a punitive legislature influenced by the American Christian right, and a public uninformed about biological diversity—the intersex movement in Ghana has had to get crafty.
In January 2025, the Ghanaian government announced a new constitutional review process, instituted by President John Mahama shortly after he was sworn in. Its main aims were to “propose reforms to enhance transparency, limit executive power, strengthen checks and balances, and improve judicial and local government structures."
In it, however, the intersex movement saw an opportunity: All of Ghana’s constitution could be reviewed. This included Article 17, which states that all are equal before the law and no one is to be discriminated against on the basis of race, place of origin, political opinions, color, gender, occupation, religion, or creed. If the movement could propose a review of Article 17, they reasoned, perhaps they could amend it to explicitly include that no one could be discriminated against based on their sex characteristics, or if they are of indeterminate gender (intersex).
It seemed like a solid plan.
After several strategy meetings, legal review, and input from constitutional law experts, however, the leaders of the movement realized it would not be so straightforward. Article 17 represented an “entrenched position," meaning a long-held view that was unlikely to change. As such, not only would it be difficult to convince the public of the importance of including intersex people for protection under the constitution, socially; legally, it would also require a referendum to pass.
The intersex movement already had only a few allies among the political class, and based on their findings, they also knew a majority of the public did not understand the concept of indeterminate gender—that someone may be born male with female sex organs, for instance, and should not be discriminated against for something out of their control. Making matters worse, the media also regularly conflated sexuality with gender in bad faith: A slate of investigations by friendly NGOs had revealed some major media organizations had even received funding from anti-LGBTQIA+ rights groups.
They changed tack.
Instead, the movement decided to seek an intervention through Article 28, which provides for the protection of children’s rights. They proposed that the provision be updated to explicitly ensure the recognition and protection of intersex children, who, in Ghana, are currently subjected to “corrective” and “forced” surgeries and medical procedures, according to firsthand accounts reported to Intersex Ghana, the country’s first intersex-led human rights organization.
Specifically, the group hoped to protect intersex children from “medically unnecessary, nonconsensual and irreversible procedures, intended to alter their sex characteristics.” These speculative procedures—sanctioned by doctors and parents without due consideration for the well-being of the child—can have lifelong physical, psychological, and even economic consequences, impairing the child’s ability to make a living in the future, says Lawrence Shone Edem Adjei, director of Intersex Ghana, over a video call.
"At age 14, I have undergone more than six surgeries after non-consensual procedures were performed on me at birth. I feel like the doctors used me for studies,” intersex advocate Emmanuella Kwarteng shared in one testimonial.
Kwarteng’s experience is not an uncommon one, and Intersex Ghana has had to intervene in a number of medical cases gone awry. In one particular case, Adjei recounts that a child had gone through up to eight surgeries over a span of ten years. Initially, their testes were removed, and the child was identified as female. Years later, doctors realized their initial procedure had caused the child to begin bleeding internally during menstruation. An additional surgery then had to be performed to remove the child’s womb.
“It's like just trial and error," Adjei says.
To make the case for intersex children in front of the constitutional review committee, and to prevent this from happening again, the intersex movement put together a murderer’s row of accomplices. Alongside activists like Adjei, this included two doctors, three lawyers, a High Court judge, and families with intersex children who could share their lived experiences.
It was a particularly precarious time: The intersex rights movement was working with significantly fewer resources than it had ever had. Intersex Ghana and other NGOs had been depleted by the U.S.-led funding cuts to pro-LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy groups all over the world, and philanthropic support had dried up.
The movement was throwing everything it had left at this case. Before the constitutional review committee, it had a few propositions. First, that the Ghanaian government provides an additional gender “I” (or intersex) on its Birth and Death registry upon discovery at birth that a child is not identified with one gender. Second, that the Ghanaian government outlaws and criminalizes forced surgeries to deter doctors from performing them, regardless of the demands of the child’s parents. Controversially, by Adjei’s own admission, “We are not in favor of the parents serving consent.” Instead, the movement proposed that the intersex individual be allowed to develop naturally. When the child is of age, they can then make an informed decision on their own bodies.
The advocates made their case to the constitutional review panel, drawing precedent from a case in Kenya. In the 2014 case, Baby A v Attorney General, an intersex child was denied a birth certificate because their sex had been marked with a question mark, effectively barring them from participating in civic life. The court, hedging, declined to admit a human rights violation, but still ordered the state to issue the birth certificate and begin the slow work of collecting data, developing medical guidelines, and contemplating a legal framework for intersex people. As a result of the case, the Kenyan government is now mandated to collect data on intersex individuals, and consider legal reforms and protections for them more broadly.
This landmark court case eventually resulted in an Intersex Persons Bill in 2024 which, among other things, guaranteed the “prohibition of harmful medical practices” against intersex people—including children.
The advocates argued that Ghana should follow Kenya’s example and recognize intersex people as a distinct legal entity, allow for intersex markers in civil documentation, include intersex persons in national census and data gathering, and establish a national commission for intersex individuals. They further argued that the condition of being “intersex” is not in conflict with Ghanaian cultural values by demonstrating support from religious and traditional leaders.
After months of deliberation, which included hearing from anti-intersex and anti-LGBTQ+ groups opposed to the proposed changes, Ghana’s constitutional review committee reached a decision. They recommended to the government that the constitution be amended to “provide for the right of every child to bodily integrity, including freedom from irreversible, non-consensual medical or surgical interventions that are not strictly necessary to preserve life or prevent serious and immediate harm; that the best interests of the child shall override social, cosmetic, cultural or expediency-based justifications for invasive medical procedures; for protection for intersex children, recognising their distinctive vulnerability to medically unnecessary ‘normalising’ interventions carried out before informed consent is possible.”
The movement was thrilled.
Their excitement, however, was short-lived. Soon after the committee submitted its recommendations, anti-intersex rhetoric started appearing in the press. On a national news show, Ghanaian legislator Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah called the proposed protections the “most crucial” part of the constitutional review, claiming the changes would “transform our constitution”—but not for the better.
“We know that these things can be the entrance of LGBTQ,” Awuah said, repeating a common trope widespread in the media that conflates sexuality with gender. “You want to sneak this into the constitution!”
Awuah was not accusing anyone in particular with his statement, but turned to fellow guest Oliver Barker-Vormawor, an activist and lawyer involved in the constitutional deliberations. In response, Barker-Vormawor defended the committee’s recommendations.
“We're saying that these are medical decisions that must be made, not parents using cultural basis to demand for surgeries to be imposed on children,” Barker-Vormawor said, reiterating their intentions.
In reality, the intersex movement in Ghana has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the LGBTQ+ movement as a safety and security strategy. It is also one of the biggest criticisms the movement faces from its potential allies. When an anti-LGBTQ+ bill was first introduced in Ghana in July 2021, intersex advocates campaigned tirelessly for the removal of intersex persons from the law, which included recommendations for surgery and hormonal treatments to “correct” them. Later that year, Intersex Ghana sent a memo to the Ghanaian legislature’s Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, asking for the bill to be thrown out in its entirety. But overall, the movement continues to tread the line between distinction and solidarity with its LGBTQ+ allies as best it can.
Still, some argue the two movements are ultimately inseparable because of their intersections: There are people who are intersex and trans; or intersex and gay.
“The movement has become too medicalized,” intersex and trans activist Awo Dufie Fofie says.
Dufie, assigned male at birth, later discovered she was intersex in her 20s, and initially went great lengths to reverse the growth of breast tissue in her body. At some point, she was taking fifteen pills a day. Upon meeting a queer elder—who had also been born a hypereffeminate male, but had socially transitioned to female in the 1950s—Awo stopped blocking estrogen in her body and instead let her body develop as it would without pharmaceutical intervention.
The intersex movement often has to make its case through visual aids of intersex bodies, Dufie argues, and as such, she believes it has created “a system that becomes a bit puritan about who can rightfully call themselves intersex and who is intersex enough to represent the community.” When Awo decided to transition, she was even advised by a fellow advocate that if she made it public, it would make the intersex movement “look bad."
"It is my sincere hope that intersex advocacy…adopts a much more decolonial framework and approach which embodies and centers the entire experiences of intersex people, such as their everyday lives,” she says. “Not only what medical conditions we have and how much intersexphobia we experience.”
Adjei acknowledges the catch-22 the intersex movement finds itself in, and understands why it believes it has to advocate for itself by providing distinctions between sexuality and gender. But she also believes it must also be in solidarity with the queer movement because of their overlap and intersections—including continued discrimination. “Ghanaians will not differentiate between an intersex person walking by and an LGBT person,” Adjei says. An effeminate but masculine-presenting intersex person is just as likely to be attacked—as has happened in many cases across the country—as a gay man expressing himself in a way that might be considered feminine.
“I was not seen as human growing up… because I had two genitalia,” Comfort Bugre, an intersex person, shared in a testimonial presented to the review committee.
“Growing up, I was isolated from people due to my intersex condition. I was relocated because people found out and started calling me names,” Elorm Enne, another intersex advocate, shared in a separate testimonial.
Currently, the hard-won constitutional review recommendation is in the implementation stage, and the Presidency has set up a committee to see how proposals may be effected.
The intersex movement is counting on seeing three things: First, large scale research on intersex people across the country, both to shed light on the quantitative heft of these protections, and to better understand the prevalence and diversity of intersexuality. Second, mass sensitization and public education across the country’s 16 regions on the harms of corrective child surgeries, in partnership with key institutions such as the Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Civic Education. And perhaps most importantly, the legitimacy of intersex as its own gender, and protection for all intersex people in the country.
The movement is tempering ambition with pragmatism. Advocates are also preparing for an outcome where the recommendation is struck down, or isn’t implemented, either in whole or in part. But if this comes to pass, the movement—with whatever funding it has left—plans to play its trump card. There are a number of government agencies and offices that should be involved in protecting intersex children: medical boards, the Attorney General’s office, the Ministry of Health, local government administrations.
It plans to sue all of them.
~
Additional Research by Nyameye Kiki Akumia.
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A new-ish community gathering, happening May 2026.
We’re back with another Conversation Club event, and you’re invited! Conversation Club is a friendly discussion group spotlighting some of our favorite stories through hosted conversations where our writers can answer your questions and share more about how their stories came to be. It’s kind of like a book club, but you don’t have to read a whole book!
Join us Friday, May 29th, when we’ll be discussing Leila Seiitbek's recent piece, “We Must Hold the Line,” about rising global authoritarianism and billionaire-driven power. Leila is a human rights activist and lawyer from Kyrgyzstan who has spent years representing political prisoners, journalists, and activists at risk. (You may recognize her from our podcast episode on kleptocracy—same Leila!) She will chat with our Executive Editor Gina Mei, sharing what she’s learned about authoritarian repression and what we can do together in this moment to combat it. She will also answer questions from the community, including readers just like you.
Read the article, come with questions (or not—just bring your mug of tea if that’s what you’re feeling), and be in community with us. It’s an inclusive space to stay curious, informed, and connected with fellow Conversationalist readers.
You can RSVP to our next Conversation Club below, and read Leila's piece right here. We can’t wait to be in conversation with you. See you there!
The writer's new memoir is a feast, exploring how food can be both deeply personal and impacted by forces much larger than ourselves.
Our appetites are deeply personal, a reflection of our idiosyncratic tastes. They’re shaped, too, by what our communities feed us, by what’s available or accessible or shared. Growing up in New England, you might develop a love of fried clams; raised in Hong Kong, you might hunger for congee; spend enough time in France and you’ll probably become a pastry snob. In every extended family lies one recipe that’s an instant passport to time spent with a beloved matriarch, or a meal that feels like home. And who doesn’t have a dish they’ve sworn they’ll never eat again because it reminds us too much of an ex?
Food writer Alicia Kennedy knows these contours well. In her writing—including in her fantastic history of vegetarian eating, 2023’s No Meat Required—she explores how our relationships to food can be deeply personal, yet impacted by forces much larger than ourselves, from local climates and family histories to global supply chains and government policies. Her work illuminates the ethical and sociopolitical elements of what we eat and why, yet sacrifices none of the thrills our appetites expose us to. And her latest, On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, is a feast, exploring her personal relationship to food and cooking as she journeys from an adolescent gourmand to vegan baker to established food and culture writer.
In her new memoir, Kennedy organizes each chapter around a specific food—beans, lamb, bread, pumpkin, and more—tying each to a moment in her life. She writes about developing culinary preferences via the plentiful apples of Long Island, where she grew up; about the Proustian power of a box of Entenmann’s doughnuts. When she goes to college, her coursework inspires her to think more critically about the systems of power that ensnare us all, and naturally, this leads her to consider how the food she loves has made its way to her plate.
She begins with a childhood obsession. “Chocolate, the first true object of my longing and love,” she writes, “was the way I learned about exploitation in the global food system.” When she reads about the enslaved child labor and exploited farmers up and down the cocoa supply chain, she starts seeking out fair trade-certified chocolate—then bananas, and sugar, and coffee. She goes vegan, then falls in love with baking, and stumbles into running a vegan bakery out of her home kitchen alongside her day job as a copy editor. As Kennedy traces her winding path to meatless eating, she continually challenges the reader to consider food as an extension of our ethics. But her clear moral stance—her assertions that one’s choices around food ought to reflect one’s principles—never feels didactic; instead, it offers a blueprint for self-interrogation that can help lead the reader to their own conclusions.
When a long romantic relationship dissolves in the face of her ambition, she shuts down the bakery and moves to Brooklyn. There, she immerses herself in the city’s vegan food scene while picking up assignments as a freelance writer, endeavoring to normalize vegan coverage in the world of food journalism—an especially difficult task given its love of meat and masculinity. After several reporting trips bring her to Puerto Rico, she decides to move there—in part, because she’s fallen in love with her now-husband, whom she meets by chance while reporting on a rum distillery.
From Puerto Rico, she tells the story of their romance through wine. She walks through the island’s sugarcane fields, considering the crop’s relationship to slavery and colonialism. In her chapter on plantains, she also reflects on her own Puerto Rican heritage: Her paternal grandmother was born on the island, but rarely spoke about her childhood, forcing Kennedy to negotiate her understanding of her identity after she moves there. “Here, in my Puerto Ricanness, was something I couldn’t disappear into,” she writes; “this was something I had to seek in order to claim.” In part, she ultimately achieves this via her relationship to food, incorporating the island’s seasonality and culinary history into her kitchen.
Writing many years and miles removed from her childhood, Kennedy also finds newfound perspective on her home and the food that grows there—and the indelible way it has shaped her. Most of all, she grows to appreciate Long Island’s oysters, which she devours in a period of mourning following the death of her younger brother: They had been his least favorite food. “Maybe that urge for an oyster, and all the urges after it, were a way of reclaiming my appetite from the immense sadness,” she writes. “A way of saying, ‘I’ll live, and I’ll live enough for both of us, but because I’m mad at you, I’m going to eat the food you hated most.’” Her grief rips a hole in the metaphysical center of the book, a wound she can’t repair but which colors the way she looks at everything—eventually prompting a renegotiation of the strictures of her veganism to allow for her newfound craving.
Much of Kennedy’s work evokes the complex systems and philosophical concepts underpinning how we nourish ourselves; her writing about grief—and love—offers a moving reminder of the deeply personal, human scale of these choices. We ought to consider how far food traveled to get to our plates, Kennedy argues; we should know how much work it takes to grow crops, to slaughter animals, to cut down sugarcane. But these are not merely ideological considerations—nor are they simply a setup for a joyless life, a way of prioritizing our principles over our pleasures. To truly consider our own appetite is a way of connecting us to ourselves and to each other. Seen through that lens, the ethical choices we make about our food aren’t a burden, but a gift.
The day after I finished reading On Eating, I made dinner for my sister and her husband, who had just welcomed their first child. They’re omnivores; meanwhile, I haven’t eaten meat in over a decade, drawn to vegetarianism’s respect for animals and the planet. I worried, as I cooked, whether they’d enjoy the meat-free, bean-centric dish I was preparing. But as I made it, I also kept thinking of Kennedy’s belief that “inevitably … cooking becomes care: for self, for others”—her insistence that the delights of a well-made meal and our responsibility as stewards of this planet are inseparable. Food is a means of tending to our own bodies; it’s something we share with those we love; it’s a way of putting our values into practice. Her words echoed in my head as I cooked, feeling nourished by each of these overlapping versions of care, and the many appetites we feed when we embody them.
[post_title] => Book of the Month: "On Eating" by Alicia Kennedy
[post_excerpt] => The writer's new memoir is a feast, exploring how food can be both deeply personal and impacted by forces much larger than ourselves.
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How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.
In 1979, as the Iranian hostage crisis played on American television screens 24/7, the television producer, librarian, activist, and intellectual Marion Stokes began recording the news broadcasts on tape. The live coverage—across all channels, at all hours—launched what we now recognize as the never-ending, ambient flow of media. Simultaneously, Stokes recognized a shift in the narrative America was telling about itself, and the role of media manipulation toward pro-American policies. So, for the next 30 years, she recorded any and all TV news broadcasts, commercials included. All of it was then archived, stacks of VHS tapes quickly accumulating in her Philadelphia apartment, as portrayed in the 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.
This kind of project by an individual who operates outside of an institution was a radical endeavor: When Stokes began, broadcast channels didn’t archive their own material, often erasing tapes so they could reuse them due to cost. But Stokes’ project and its often innocuous content would also foreshadow the long-term value of guerrilla archives, both in preserving an accurate historical record and holding the media—and government—to account. Activist archives began as a practice in the 1960s, when organizers filled in the historical gaps where universities and institutions could not. These, however, were collective efforts; Stokes operated individually, until eventually, her son donated the recordings to the Internet Archive, where digitized selections are now available online. “By [Stokes] having that collection, it means the scholars, artists, and researchers have access to the information without paying for it,” says Shola Lynch, filmmaker and Professor of the Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. “Because when our history is bound up in commercial hands, that's problematic.”
Stokes’ practice of recording any and all materials resembles the history of what is now called “memory work,” or individuals who preserve the photographs, documents, and ephemera of a community. A relatively recent tradition, this form of archiving has taken on new meaning in a digital era where data sets can be wiped and personal data sold, seemingly without consequence. Following the start of the second Trump presidency in January 2025, more than 2,000 datasets suddenly disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S.’s government's data portal. Since then, the Trump administration has overhauled even more data, including entire web pages and important coding tools for researchers and climate scientists.
Over the last five decades, open source tools and government data have been integral to preserving the historical record and maintaining public infrastructure in the United States. According to America’s Essential Data, New Orleanians received smoke alarms because fire departments used American Community Survey (ACS) data to identify neighborhoods most in need. School districts could (previously) make the case for increased teacher salaries using the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) to highlight underpaid teachers. Residents could avoid scams in their community based on federal Consumer Sentinel data. Now, these records are liable to disappear from the internet, possibly forever.
The government is ultimately responsible for preserving a record of its own actions. But when federal agencies are unable to preserve all their data, or willfully choose not to, it begs the question if this work is best done by civil society and those outside of the government. Guerrilla archives—whether digital or analog like Stokes’—are generally nonpartisan acts of preservation to serve the public good. There’s the Internet Archive, which has been archiving the web and other cultural artifacts since 1996, and Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which provides the most comprehensive chronicling of evening television news broadcasts in the world. There’s also the End of Term Archive—one of the largest of these projects in progress—which downloads all government information at the end of each presidential term. It’s a grassroots alternative to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which notoriously did not receive all of the presidential records from the first Trump administration in 2021 as mandated under the Presidential Records Act. (Trump promptly fired the head of NARA when he re-entered office in 2025.)
Despite having distributed its data more digitally over the last 20 years, the government has not issued any dedicated preservation or access strategy for its information. Additionally, the current laws and policies around government data preservation are outdated and inadequate. This hole in the system has compelled librarians to join the race to copy digital federal archives, beginning in 2016 with the Data Rescue movement, which drew over 1500 volunteers for dozens of hackathon-style events throughout the year. “Distrust re-orients care,” researcher Laura Rothfritz wrote in her analysis of these early efforts for Big Data & Society. When a public distrusts a system and a possible threat is identified, however, anxiety can be mobilized into producing future forms of infrastructure.
As the situation becomes more dire, these efforts have only expanded. Today, the Public Data Project runs within the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, collecting and authenticating all federal datasets, more recently including the Smithsonian Institute’s public domain data. So far, they have downloaded the entirety of Data.gov, copied it, and digitally signed it with a provenance mark to authenticate its origins. The project launched in early 2025 as part of Harvard Law School’s repository system, which dates back centuries.
“I think a lot of us in the library and technology communities are sort of waking up to the fact that we need to have a strategy in place for the preservation and access of government data beyond what the government provides,” says Molly Hardy, the Project Lead for the Public Data Project. Their team also works closely with the Data Rescue Project, a grassroots nonprofit preserving massive data sets and consisting entirely of volunteers.
“Public data infrastructures have long been considered essential components of democratic governance, scientific accountability, and civic participation,” Rothfritz continues in her Big Data & Society piece. Much like our city’s infrastructure, however, we don’t recognize its value until it's broken. It is the invisible fiber that holds democracy together, from our roads and postal service to job numbers and environmental data. Increasingly, its preservation is also a task that has been left to individuals and communities. In October 2025, the nonprofit organization Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth web page on its most popular service, the Wayback Machine, an initiative that allows users to find web page screenshots from specific dates. It has become an essential tool and digital service for independent organizations and guerrilla archivists alike. (The largest archive on the internet, dedicated to “universal access to all knowledge,” has not been without its setbacks however: In 2024, it suffered a data breach affecting millions of users and a copyright infringement case over its digital lending library.)
The Invisible Histories Project, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina, has been preserving the digital history and cultural memory of LGBTQ+ life in the South using tools like the Wayback Machine. “We could no longer trust institutions to protect marginalized histories,” says Maigen Sullivan, the Co-Executive Director of Invisible Histories. She recalls a community effort at the start of last year to preserve government and university pages with references to diversity offices, along with flyers and photos. According to Sullivan, by August and September 2025, when universities returned to term, about a quarter of those pages were already gone. “This is the only evidence, other than what individuals might hold, that exists,” she says.
Invisible Histories has also built its own server because of mistrust in corporations like Google and Microsoft that store and hold onto their data, another issue facing digital archivists. The organization has endured two cyberattacks—one in 2023, and the other in 2025—since its founding in 2017. Because of this, they’ve considered cybersecurity training and increased security for potential threats against the archive. “If you feel like you're hopeless and helpless and have nothing to do, archiving is a tool of resistance and anyone can do it,” says Sullivan.
These examples of digital mutual aid have become essential for documenting history, and are one way to combat historical revisionism. Activist archives also continue to challenge which institutions have a say in the historical record, nationally and beyond. Zakiya Collier, a Brooklyn-based archivist, says individual archives preserve more than just data. “I think that memory work has a liberatory capacity to it,” she says. “I use that term because it calls on a legacy of people who dedicated their time and energy to preserving history in their homes, communities, churches, attics, and basements. They decided something was important to document and keep.”
Collier, who has worked as the digital archivist in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Public Library, now works with the organization Archiving the Black Web, which trains archivists to document a more inclusive history of the internet. Its potential to create more live archives and documentations of the web aims to contribute to a more equitable historical view of how we catalogue our lives online.
As data and information is getting purposefully disappeared from the internet—an increasingly fertile ground for fascist ideology—archiving becomes increasingly necessary, or else, the public cannot bear witness to itself. In April 2025, the National Park Service erased references to Harriet Tubman on its webpages. The following month, Trump issued an executive order sanitizing federal cultural institutions by accusing the Smithsonian Institute of promoting “race-centered ideology” in its exhibit, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” The USDA ended its annual survey of hunger in America two weeks before the government shutdown in October 2025, affecting the distribution of food stamps.
Data is information and has become a weapon in the digital age. But both individuals and communities are not powerless to fight back. With the rapid monopolistic takeover of mediaplatforms, it’s no surprise that users are beginning to archive their own data and leaning towards physical media. Sales of vinyl are up, print book sales are rising, and DVD collections are in.
“All archives create futures,” says a voiceover in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, as news broadcasts and infomercials from Stokes’ archive flash in rapid pace onscreen. The organization of information by the lay person may help overcome barriers of the institutionalized index and history, as the threat of excessive online information and its disappearance still looms large for activist archives. But this work has become even more critical, not only for deciding how the past will be remembered, but how an imagined future might pull from its past to mobilize this kind of anticipatory care in the present.
[post_title] => On Guerrilla Archives in the Disinformation Age
[post_excerpt] => How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.
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Unlearned historical lessons from Jacques-Louis David’s retrospective at the Louvre.
Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersections of art, capital, and politics with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.
Many of us have had enough of living through Interesting Times. As an American raised in the misguided, batshit optimism between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, I often feel as if my adult life has been lit by the glow of a global garbage fire no one conditioned me to anticipate—a garbage fire lit by the US government, and tended to with as much care as it lavishes on the Eternal Flame. For this reason, I was eager to see the monumental Jacques-Louis David retrospective at the Louvre earlier this year: David is, in many ways, the official court painter of Interesting Times. He lived through some of the most shocking regime changes in European history and both painted and propagandized them.
Born in 1748 during the ancien régime, David rose through the traditional, royally patronized ranks to become a painter known for his austere style and his focus on Neoclassical themes. Though socially connected, during the heyday of the salon, he was tormented by a benign facial tumor that impeded his speech, somewhat setting him apart from polite society. When the French Revolution kicked off, he dove into radical politics and befriended Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror, which saw some 17,000 public executions by guillotine. David served in government designing festivals, monuments, and uniforms; he also sat on the Orwellian Committee For Public Safety and voted for the death of Louis XVI. When Robespierre fell, David went to prison for the better part of a year, but kept his own head. A few short years later, he rose to prominence once more as the official court painter of Napoleon, outliving the empire, only to die in 1825 in exile in Brussels. Remarkably, this was a voluntary exile: the restored Bourbon King had invited him to serve as court painter, despite knowing David voted to guillotine his brother.
If this Louvre show was any indicator, the French curatorial class is still vaguely terrified of one of its most emblematic painters and unsure of what to make of him, the same way French elected officials are still afraid of an electorate that once managed to chop up its ruling class. The Internet likes to joke the White House would be covered in shitand on fire if Trump were governing France and, there is, perhaps, some truth to this. The French are known as feisty, indignant, and quick to strike or riot in a way that we Americans deem “bad for business.” Each time I’m in the country for any kind of civil unrest, it is not hard to imagine how they conceived of the guillotine, a sublime machine of both political horror and political theater concocted under the cynical pretense of science, democracy, and progress (cf., Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité).
"Napoleon Crossing the Alps" by Jacques-Louis David
A Neoclassical master, David’s most famous paintings include “The Oath of the Horatii” (1785), “The Death of Marat” (1793), “Madame Récamier” (1800), “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” (1801), and “The Coronation of Napoleon” (1807). The show was organized chronologically to chart the violent, winding historical path between these paintings, and David’s relationship to each regime he served. His evolution marks him at best as a cipher, and at worst, the most corrupt hypocrite. But David was hardly alone in changing alliances to survive: Talleyrand, the French statesman and contemporary political chameleon survived five regimes in succession, brazenly switching sides to do so. When he died, Metternich, his Austrian nemesis, sarcastically remarked, “I wonder what he meant by that?” In many ways, that question felt like the animating force of the David exhibition. One could easily assert he was an artist without scruples who went where the moment and money took him. But, that’s too simplistic. David painted the long, strange journey through the phases of one’s life, one’s country, and one’s era. He painted the life and death of ideas and the flesh-and-blood people who lived them; his works testify to the gap between espoused ideals and lived reality—between pulling the trigger and watching the body fall.
Hot-headed and famously difficult from the jump, David attempted suicide the second time he failed to win the Prix de Rome in 1772. His third time was the charm, however, and he proved to be a prescient artist: His themes of stoicism and self-sacrifice conveyed through Neoclassical renderings of Athens and the Roman Republic foretold a great deal of politics and fashion, from the empire waistlines to the rise of democracy in modern Europe. His earliest successful paintings, such as “The Oath of the Horatii”, are impressive, even as they are also re-imagined scenes from a mind untested by political reality. The 1784 painting is literally bloodless: men swear to die for a cause while their wives cry in a corner. Nine years later came “The Death of Marat”, a visceral masterwork of propaganda. Oddly, when I first came upon it in the exhibit, I said to myself, “Welp, there it is,” and meandered into the next room. It wasn’t until I re-entered the gallery, painted green to match the solemn background of the composition, that I realized I had seen a copy: The entire room was filled with painted copies that had been disseminated across France. I turned around to face the utterly electrifying Real One. You didn’t need to know a thing about art to figure out which one it was: a painting of the cold, calculated stabbing of a vulnerable man in his bathtub, the artist’s own murdered best friend, dead for the Republic.
"The Death of Marat" by Jacques-Louis David
David’s political journey is also evident in the gap between his stiff, slightly asexual representation of so many female figures in his earlier allegorical paintings, versus the real and vibrant women he painted with loose brushstrokes and incredible intelligence in his portraits, such as that of Marie-Louise Trudaine.David’s own wife, Marguerite-Charlotte, divorced him in 1789 for being a regicide, but they remarried after he was released from prison, raising four children together who sat for him often. For a painter often criticized as unfeeling, his portraits of married couples are a delight: “father of chemistry” Antoine Lavoisier and his wife (and underappreciated fellow chemist) Marie-Anne Paulze dominates his depiction of them together in the lab; he also painted a tender double portrait of Antoine and Angelique Mongez, simply because they were great friends of his, as an inscription attests.
That he eagerly chased an ideal (or three) is nothing novel or noteworthy, but his art became more compelling the more tested he was by events. The more shit spiraled out of control, the more David understood the power of the narrative—as well as when to turn it off completely. His self-portrait in prison is a high watermark of decontextualizing. It’s a testament to that ever-present gap between our personal political thoughts and our complicated, shared realities. Finding an authentic perspective on that gap is impossible: If the Renaissance painters taught us about visual perspective, David demonstrated that perspective on current events is a lie. In fact, his best use of literal perspective is a metaphorical one. In his great portrait of Comte Antoine-Français de Nantes he shows us the cost of living through Interesting Times: The count, once a fiery, young revolutionary, became a Napoleonic crony. David painted him from below, so he literally looks down his nose at viewers. His contemptuous face and saggy jowls are articulated with unsparing detail, a countenance juxtaposed with and choked out by finery—the lace, the velvet cape, and a medal for the ideals he betrayed along the way. Survival is an exercise in brutality. This sellout—the sellout—David says, is what winning actually looks like. This is the political happily ever after.
I came to this show as a citizen of a different empire presently running amok. France forged the United States’ first alliance and, like so many American allies to come, was left holding the bag. (This should have been a caveat emptor for future allies: Leopards do not change their spots, and Americans do not change their stars and stripes—but we Yanks are, if nothing else, fantastic at sales.) Funds sent to aid the American Revolution helped bankrupt the French crown and sparked a chain of events that cost the French king his head. All the while Thomas Jefferson meddled in The Declaration of the Rights of Man from his Parisian salon, Sally Hemings was enslaved in the next room. From this eventful early alliance, France and the US allegedly share ideals (cf., the Enlightenment), but we don’t exactly share historical roots. One major difference was reflected in a telling piece of wall text in the show: the role of the Catholic church. Next to the OG “Death of Marat”, the curator alluded to how revolutionary France needed martyrs to fill the void left by the abrupt banishment of the Catholic Church and the monarchy. Hours after Marie Antoinette was beheaded, “The Death of Marat” was unveiled at the Louvre, recently changed from palace to museum. That is to say, a cult of the state was invoked to fill the void of state religion.
Self-portrait by Jacques-Louis David
To this New Yorker, it often feels laïcité—the French principle of secularity—demands its own sort of worship. Religious freedom in France looks to me more like a hole in the ground where a Catholic church once was. Rather than a new structure where all are welcome and inclusion is additive, it’s one that demands the sacrifice or sublimation of all other cultural tenets for those wishing to be included. This creates toxic conditions as France wrestles with a number of postcolonial realities, including a large Muslim minority. Those limitations on the public imagination for an honest plurality were, to me, somehow reflected in this state-funded exhibit’s unwillingness or inability to reach final conclusions about David—and his attempts to fill that civic-religious void with new meaning. If America’s fundamental struggle is with equality, France’s is with diversity. Today, the French do not understand their secularity is exclusionary, much the same way we Americans don’t understand our democracy is a fiction.
Unlike France, we never have had a class revolution in the United States. In 1776, a bunch of rich lawyers told a king far away to fuck off, then immediately turned around and did business with him without changing all that much on the ground. That’s why the 13th Amendment is still, somehow, just sinking in. Ironically, white Americans scored many of their freedoms from Britain when the country was still a colony: Even the pope of the Enlightenment himself, Voltaire, envied the British their Parliament and the rights it accorded in the mid-18th century. From France, we may have learned exceptionalism, but we never learned real revolution. In America, the “revolution” was just another nice thing that only rich white people could have; in France, the revolution cost the upper class their heads.
If the French figured out how to stop deifying the king, maybe someday we can figure out how to stop deifying billionaires. And if we do, maybe someone will stay alive long enough to paint the whole drama as it unfolds. Doing so requires vanity, opportunism, gall, cruelty, and a profound degree of hypocrisy. However, it also requires bravery, and for that bravery, David was rewarded with awareness of some very modern dilemmas that keep his work relevant: of knowing it is impossible to portray a scene without altering it; of knowing all art is inherently political; of knowing the stories we tell control our realities; and of knowing that you will be judged as harshly as you judged others—and going through with it anyway, charging into The Void, no matter the cost.
[post_title] => Painting as It Burns
[post_excerpt] => Unlearned historical lessons from Jacques-Louis David’s retrospective at the Louvre.
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How the ephemerality of the internet and the many ways we present ourselves online has warped our ability to know who we really are.
Will the Future Like You? Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention begins with a declaration: Our personal identities have not kept pace with the tempo of technology. And, according to author Patricia Martin, this imbalance has made us wholly unprepared to explore—let alone answer—the age-old question of who we really are.
In her book, Martin, a cognitive psychology-informed cultural analyst and host of the podcast Jung in the World, frames many of her arguments using Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, applying them to identity formation in the digital age. If Jung’s original thesis proposes that humans rely on universal themes and inherited behaviors in the psyche to present who we are across self, shadow, persona, and anima, Martin contends the ephemerality of the internet has warped our inheritance. Her primary concern are the selves we present to the world via our various performances online, often manufactured as authentic while being anything but. Carrying out numerous ethnographic approaches including content analysis, narrative interviews, and sorting and coding “15,000 online users across 500 million posts,” she concludes these performances are also occurring at an exorbitant rate never experienced before in human history, sowing mass identity confusion in the process.
Having become increasingly skeptical (and weary) of internet self-presentation via social media, I devoured Martin’s latest work, which utilized psychoanalytical language and frameworks to explore observations I’ve mainly considered through a cultural and anthropological lens. But even those who don’t agree with Martin (or me) about the current state of affairs will likely find instructive value in the book’s summations about our ever brave new technological era and its effects on identity.
According to Martin, there are three main elements contributing to our modern distortions of self-construction and development: “personal fog,” “chronic self-doubt,” and “cascading crossroads.” Borrowing from Jung’s definition of the persona as a complex system that helps the individual relate with the world socially by wearing a kind of mask, Martin argues that personal fog comes from the continuous amplification and proliferation of various personas online, which obliterate our sense of who we are. Chronic self-doubt, meanwhile, delineates the distances between our digital presentations, which rely on external validation, and the selves we present offline, a gap that can cause tremendous self-uncertainty. Finally, cascading crossroads is characterized by how previously reliable identity anchors—such as family and work, or even other modes, such as class, gender, and where we consider home—now fluctuate more frequently, making our shape-shifting far more incessant.
Among the many examples Martin offers of this increasing ephemerality, she cites the story of the trailblazing confessional blogger, Heather Armstrong. In the early aughts, Armstrong’s blog, Dooce, was a “mommy tell-all” magnet to millions, especially young mothers, who regularly consumed her relatable personal accounts of raising two children in Salt Lake City, Utah. But even before Dooce’s eventual decline due to the rise of social media, Martin points out that as Armstrong “matured, she found her light waning,” and the blogger increasingly divulged more serious confessions, including daily alcohol consumption and marital issues, not to mention the details of her history with depression. Martin isn’t explicit about whether Armstrong’s solemn shift was a cry for help or an effort to reinvigorate the blog. She does, however, add that “Dooce attempted several comebacks. But traffic never bounced back.” In 2023, Armstrong died by suicide. Examining how she was remembered, Martin notes “how little was said about her massive output of content, the effort it took, and the emotional toll of constant reinvention…”
While Armstrong’s story is a particularly dire case, there are others—admittedly less tragic—throughout the book that still speak to the toll our relationship to having an audience is taking on our relationship to ourselves. Martin also makes clear this goes beyond those who are, in some shape or form, attempting to be influencers: All of us online are liable to the emotional struggles of trying to juggle various presentations at cost to our psyche and identity development.
However, the book doesn’t propose that we all abandon the internet (to the extent that we can) to counter these identity disruptions. Nor does Martin suggest that we wholly desert digital performance and presentation altogether. Rather, she asks the reader to more carefully consider the repercussions to our relationships—both to ourselves and others—online, where our identities are overwhelmed by seemingly endless transmutations, and ultimately underpinned by digital spaces extorting our identity confusion for profit.
This inevitably has affinities with Karl Marx’s concept of the alienation of the factory worker from anything that could give their work meaning. But for me, it brought to mind Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and its thesis that the thingification of the colonized subject turns them into a commodity, isolating a person from themselves and the other. Transposing Cesaire’s contentions onto Martin’s begs questions worth probing further: Are we being colonized by the internet? Or by the tech bros that run it?
Luckily, Martin doesn’t leave us without specific resolutions for alleviating our identity disruptions, the greatest of which is—perhaps surprisingly—a spiritual recommendation: that we reconsider the soul. Some anecdotes in the book are even dedicated to people who've been able to subvert identity confusion by relying on time-honored means of transformation and soul-enrichment: insulating themselves offline, and leaning on close bonds in the flesh.
Martin also challenges us not to render onto technology what cannot be done by technology. Instead, she encourages us to create and honor our most true selves beyond the curations the internet can only offer. “We set boundaries, we verify claims, and we don’t give ourselves away too easily for the sake of a little fawning attention,” Martin writes in the concluding chapters of the book; to me, sound advice regardless of which continuum of internet identity discourse you choose to be on. She also offers perhaps one resolve for the question the book’s title proposes, Will the Future Like You?: Ultimately, the quest to answer this in the digital space is a hollow endeavor, because it requires an endless reconfiguration of selves, often to our own detriment. So, whatever selves we do offer up as performance in digital spaces, at the very least, we should refuse to give in fully—saving us perhaps not only from ourselves, but for ourselves.
[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Will The Future Like You?" by Patricia Martin
[post_excerpt] => How the ephemerality of the internet has warped our ability to know who we are.
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How samba schools in Brazil are teaching Black history through the parades at Carnival.
The torrential rain couldn’t stop Unidos da Tijuca, one of the oldest samba schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from rehearsing in the streets. On an evening in early February, dancers flooded the Morro do Borel community, moving their bodies in unison as a crowd cheered them on, shouting their loyalty to the samba school and dancing alongside them. The crowd had been waiting for hours for the rehearsal to begin, drinking beer and barbecuing, the evening already a celebration. Now, the sound of snare drums, quick and sharp, moved each spectator to sing along to the music, as the year's anthem began to play. The performance had officially begun.
Though the parades in Rio are world-famous, attracting a global audience for Carnival each year, the greatest show in the world still belongs to these communities, where the parades—a pivotal part of the season’s festivities—originated. It is also here that these samba schools work hard year-round to honor the parades’ original purpose: bringing marginalized histories that aren’t taught in Brazilian schools to the national stage.
“Since the 1930s, samba schools have been addressing themes closely related to Brazilian history,” historian Luiz Antonio Simas tells The Conversationalist. “This created a tradition in which Brazilian history, important figures from Brazilian history, and the country's natural beauty became recurring themes [at each parade].”
Leonardo Carrato
Founded in 1931, Unidos da Tijuca is one of 12 samba schools that compete during Carnival, each putting on a parade built from scratch that highlights a different piece of forgotten Brazilian history. For this year’s parade, Unidos da Tijuca chose to tell the story of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian memoirist, poet, composer, playwright, and best-selling author, most known for her book Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, published in 1960 and translated into 14 languages. Last year, the school chose to tell the story of Logun-Edé, an orisha of the Black Brazilian religion Candomblé, and the year before, the influence of Portuguese folk tales on Brazilian samba music.
Other competing schools chose different figures to celebrate this year: Acadêmicos do Salgueiro paid homage to Carnival designer and professor Rosa Magalhães, a samba school legend who won six Carnival championships in the 1980s. The samba school Paraíso de Tuiuti performed a parade about Afro-Cuban religious practices, with a whole chorus written in the Yorubá language. And the 2026 winner, Unidos do Viradouro, honored Moacyr da Silva Pinto, or Mestre Ciça, the school's legendary percussion conductor.
In telling these stories, Unidos da Tijuca and other samba schools aim to make marginalized histories—and Black history in particular—more accessible through popular culture, allowing them to keep these histories alive. The construction of the parade is a year-long process that starts again right after Carnival ends, beginning with each school democratically electing a theme, running a song competition, and translating history into a visual performance through choreography that involves hundreds of dancers.
But while the parades are a joyful culmination of the schools’ efforts, for the communities each samba school represents, it’s the lead-up to the final performance that often most solidifies the history being celebrated.
Leonardo Carrato
That rainy Sunday was Unidos da Tijuca’s last street rehearsal before the official parade at the Sambadrone, and party dwellers excitedly gathered to watch an intimate preview of what would later earn the school 7th place in the official competition. At 6 PM, onlookers dressed in the colors of Unidos da Tijuca—blue and yellow—waited outside of the school, a tall building painted in yellow. The energy was high as people gathered, and the song composed for this year’s parade played loudly through speakers at the closest bar, along with songs from previous years: "Logun-Edé - Santo Menino que Velho Respeita" (“Logun-Edé - The Holy Child Old Men Respect”) and "O Conto de Fados" (“The Tale of Fairies”).
As the time for the performance neared, people began singing along to the story of Maria de Jesus, one that mirrors the stories of many Black women in Brazil today. A single mother of three, Maria de Jesus lived in the favela of Canindé in São Paulo, where she spent her time picking up recyclables to sell, taking care of her children, and writing about her day-to-day life. One of her notebooks from this time would eventually become her first best-selling book, Child of the Dark, which sold 10,000 copies in its first week of publication in 1960—an achievement that was unheard of at the time, and still rarely met in Brazil now.
But the majority of the community was unfamiliar with these details of Maria de Jesus’s life before Unidos da Tijuca chose to tell her story for the 2026 parade. “It’s essential that we talk about a person who has been made invisible by society and by the Brazilian people,” Mariah Dantas, one of the principal dancers, tells The Conversationalist. “Almost nobody remembers her importance, or how impactful she was at the time, and how important she is today. Because many women still live in poverty like she did… This isn’t just about telling Carolina’s story, but also about highlighting that Black women still live like that, and that this needs to change.”
Many of these same women also live in Morro do Borel, and saw themselves reflected in Maria de Jesus’s story for the first time. “It was the perfect choice,” Carlos Batata, member of Unidos da Tijuca and president of Unidos da Tijuquinha, a version of the samba school for children, tells The Conversationalist. “The story was unknown, [but] with time, people got to know more about Carolina’s work, and now people sing the samba song and relate and cry to it, because there are parts of the lyrics—a phrase, a chorus—that represents each woman’s story here.”
Leonardo Carrato
To accurately tell Maria de Jesus’s story, Unidos da Tijuca worked with an academic consultant on everything from the writing of the samba song’s lyrics, the design of thousands of costumes and five floats, and even some of the choreography. (The practice of hiring a consultant is relatively new across samba schools, a union of institutional education and popular education that only began around 10 years ago.) This year, Unidos da Tijuca collaborated with researcher Fernanda Felisberto, a literature professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is a part of an editorial committee that has salvaged, re-edited, and published Maria de Jesus’s work in recent years.
“For a long time, we used to say that there are histories that traditional schools don’t tell, but that Carnival will tell those histories, almost as if they’re in opposition to each other,” Felisberto says. “But in reality, we are building a process that goes hand-in-hand, especially because hiring consultants has become more and more common for samba schools. So, samba schools today are learning from these traditional sources of knowledge. The challenge for Carnival is to translate that knowledge in a way that reaches more people.”
The act of performing in community is a large part of this translation, and in Morro do Borel, it is what has brought Maria de Jesus’s story back to life. “Sou a liberdade, mãe do Canindé / Muda essa história, Tijuca / Tira do meu verso a força pra vencer / Reconhece o seu lugar e luta / Esse é o nosso jeito de escrever,” both members of the samba school and party dwellers alike screamed at the top of their lungs during the street rehearsal. (“I am freedom, mother of Canindé / Change our history, Tijuca / Get the strength to win from my verses / Recognize your place in struggle / This is our way of writing.”)
Leonardo Carrato
For this year’s parade, Felisberto says the school intentionally focused on lesser known works by Maria de Jesus, like the music she composed and recorded, and the plays she wrote, which remain unreleased to the public. They hoped to show Maria de Jesus was more than her biggest successes, in part so that she is recognized for the breadth of her creative work, which never got as much exposure as her first book. “We want people to understand that Carolina was a multidimensional artist,” Felisberto says. “Child of the Dark constructed an image of Carolina that spotlighted precarity, which is how people see her today. The challenge was to humanize her, show her failures and successes beyond a narrative around her best-selling memoir.”
Like Felisberto, many view the Carnival parades not just as a celebration marginalized histories, but as a collective experience with a lasting impact. “I consider samba songs by samba schools to be historical documents,” Simas says, adding that in his 30 years working as a history teacher in public schools in Rio, he has used samba songs as pedagogical sources. “It’s a tool to start debates, we can analyze the lyrics, study the trajectory of some historical characters who are less talked about in formal education.”
For Unidos da Tijuca member Douglas Coutinho, studying samba songs even helped him to pass his university entry exams. “My history teacher used the samba song from 2008, ‘João e Marias’ by Imperatriz Leopoldinense, [in class],” Coutinho says. “The samba song helps teachers teach, and it helps students understand the material that is being taught.”
Leonardo Carrato
Perhaps most importantly, in telling and preserving these stories through samba parades, communities are able to reclaim the narrative from the dominant classes, which tend to dismiss or downplay the importance of marginalized histories. Sometimes, it also allows these stories to become the dominant narratives—at least, during Carnival, when the media’s attention turns to the communities these samba schools represent.
“Samba schools will tell us stories that are important for the people,” says Iara Cassano, a member of Acadêmicos do Salgueiro and a samba teacher. “The dominant narratives will tell histories that are important to the elites… Carnival gives us autonomy to tell our own histories.”
[post_title] => A History Lesson Through Samba
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A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States.
The Mixed Marriage Project’s title will more than likely give an onlooker pause. Perhaps that’s the point. But before conjuring up too many presumptions based on the name, one might also note it is the work of renowned law professor and sociologist Dorothy E. Roberts. Amongst other books, Roberts is the author of Killing the Black Body (about black women’s reproductive history in the United States) and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. In her latest, a memoir interwoven with historical research, she unfolds her parents’ interracial relationship, and through it, partly unravels a United States’ history of the subject itself.
The “project” of the book’s title is personal for Roberts: In the 1930s, her father, a white American of Welsh and German descent, set out to examine interracial relationships between black and white people specifically, while studying to be an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. His interview-based research, which explored interracial unions formed as early as the late 1800s, continued till the 1960s and ’70s, and included interviewing the children of couples he’d earlier surveyed. This feat was supposed to become a book, sold to a publisher while her father was working as a professor at Chicago’s Roosevelt University. But the book was never published, and its stories left untold until now.
Roberts theorizes the reason for this was that her father’s work had become so interwoven into his identity—and their family life—that its completion would have caused a real identity disruption. Who was he if he wasn’t working on the project? And where did that leave her and her family?
Through her own research, Roberts learns her mother, a black, Jamaican immigrant, was also involved in this work, conducting interviews alongside her father for many years. Both were committed to the project’s objectives, one of which was to demonstrate that interracial relationships are not inherently abnormal, because black and white people are not fundamentally different. This was also how her parents met: While majoring in chemistry at Roosevelt, her mother became her father’s research assistant. (In the book, Roberts explicitly states she “wonder[s] how their professional partnership evolved into a romantic one—and whether they worried about the perception of impropriety.”) This prompts Roberts to question an underlying reason for her parents' marriage: Were they supposed to be embodiments of their own mixed marriage project? If Roberts’ parents were indeed as much a part of the study as they were leads of it, she concludes, it would make her and her sisters its subjects, too—or, at least, its personified outcomes.
Rather than be rattled by this possibility, the author measures it against the people she personally knew her parents to be—curious, culturally-aware, well-traveled, and community-minded. Her parents’ relationship, after all, existed beyond their work, and they were initially drawn to each other by their shared sense of adventure, similar values on education, and complementary sensibilities—her mother as the planner and her father as the spontaneous one. By her own admission, Roberts gives them a latitude that an outsider might not. But I reckon this is where the book shines as memoir, rather than an investigation of an investigation: the reader gets to know Roberts’ parents through her loving eyes. Loving eyes that, for the record, do not condone the same politics her parents—especially her father—may have arrived at through their work: that interracial relationships offer some kind of medium to restore black and white relations in the United States, shaped by white supremacy and violence. (On this, Roberts pointedly disagrees.)
Beyond family history, the themes in Project will be recognizable to anyone versed on the discourse, likely causing you to wonder if anything really changes in these United States. The politics of the study’s participants—black men, black women, white men, and white women in heterosexual, interracial relationships—reveal how black men-white women couples were seen as more “acceptable” but also more arduous in the long-run; white women often lost privilege they couldn’t regain unless divorced. The research also highlighted the sexual tropes attached to black women-white men couples—and the misogynoir that informs outsiders' views of them. Recurring themes, regardless of interracial pairings, showed how marital cutting across the color line affected one’s choice of neighborhood and the life afforded to them and, possibly, their children. Also recurring—especially in the civil rights era—were the many well-meaning couples who entered these marriages in the hopes of proving to the world as much as to themselves that interracial coupling inherently combats a racist society. This hope, Roberts argues, was often an erroneous one, as countless couples later found out.
In the lasting analysis of her father’s work, Roberts arrives at the same conclusion that she began with regarding interracial relationships: They are not panacea for a society, a country, or a world that has yet to unravel itself from white supremacy, let alone repair its many casualties. But in Project, Roberts shows us that despite flawed, socially-constructed and racialized societies, people will enter unions and arrangements of all kinds, her parents included. These unions may not transcend race, but they do demonstrate that, in spite of the race politics attached, people will deem them worth fighting for. Some do so naively and are thus confronted with seeing the depths of racism like they never have before. But others, especially the curious, culturally-aware, and community-minded, go into them with eyes wide open, prepared to confront all of its politics united.
[post_title] => Book of the Month: "The Mixed Marriage Project" by Dorothy E. Roberts
[post_excerpt] => A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States.
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