Five days before the 2016 election I proposed to Eliza Borné, my editor at the Oxford American, that in 2016 we, as a nation, had experienced a long-delayed realization of the 1967 Summer of Love, a spiritual awakening made possible through the struggle for racial justice. Whereas in the post 2016 election analysis, some insisted racial politics needed to […]
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In Feb. 2017, The New York Times’ Michael Powell selected my reported essay, “My Name is Alex” for the Times’ feature, “What We’re Reading,” which highlights “great stories from around the web.” The piece appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of the Oxford American and was later included in the magazine’s picks of Best Essays in […]
The NYTimes’ Room for Debate recently posed this question: Is Criticism of Identity Politics Racist or Long Overdue? Some complain of being unfairly accused of bigotry. Others say discrimination needs to be directly addressed. I was invited to participate on the panel of debaters. Below is my contribution which you can also access here. The attack on political […]
This piece took ten years to place. I first drafted some of the arguments found in my new piece, Trumpworld, in 2006 while I was working at The Washington Post. Then, as now, political chatter centered on border security issues, an “invasion” via the U.S. Mexico border. Politicians and the press considered the function of the border […]
In the Spring I was invited to speak at the Power of Narrative conference in Boston. I remember attending the conference years ago, admiring the speakers and imagining–hoping for–the opportunity to write long form narrative pieces. To be invited to speak was huge honor. The conference was also the setting where famed writer Gay Talese […]
_ This piece seems to be increasingly relevant in this, ahem, interesting, election season. Earlier in the year a “taco war” broke out between Austin and San Antonio after a clearly confused New York-based writer crowned Austin the home of the “breakfast taco.” The outbreak of rhetorical war contained much more than simply a dispute over a […]
In late January, I traveled to West Texas, to Terlingua, at the invitation of an innkeeper who offers space to writers and artists. As these things often do, the entire experience came together through a delicate mix of resolve and serendipity. A few weeks earlier I had been camping out at her coffeeshop, working after hours […]
