[Ed. Note: Igiaba Scego first published this essay on the Tampon Tax, her most popular ever, in Italy’s Internazionale magazine on January 19, 2016. Since that time, an European Union measure against taxing femine hygiene products has been promised, and in the UK Parliament has passed legislation to eliminate their tampon VAT, due to go . . .
Read More
In his debut novel, John Barth admonishes people who pause when the world presents them with coincidence: “Nature,” he observes, “seems at times fairly to club one over the head with significance.” The sun suddenly appears, to rhyme with our newfound hopes; the road to the cemetery is a one-way street. “The man. . . .
Read More
In 2010, I was thirty-one years old, running twenty-five miles per week, doing yoga twice a week, and eating a vegetarian diet. My blood pressure was 110/60, I weighed 135 pounds, I took multivitamins and omega-3s, I flossed daily. I was so healthy I was smug about it—I’d never even broken a . . .
Read More
My response to the 2016 US Presidential election was by no means unusual—shock, sadness, rage. I suspect that I was not the only woman to feel attacked, as if someone had run up behind me and slammed a baseball bat into my head. The election of President Trump felt like a sharp . . .
Read More
My dad immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1973, at the age of 17. He’d long dreamed of this country, and as a teenager in Karachi he used to ride the bus to the U.S. Embassy after school and read American books in the library there, everything from John F. Kennedy’s Profiles . . .
Read More
Language is alive. Diachronic linguistics has taught us that words often change meaning over time. In a 2014 piece written for TED[1], language historian Anne Curzan notes how words like “nice” and “silly” actually meant the opposite of what they mean in our current usage. Nice meant “silly, foolish, simple,” while silly . . .
Read More
Late in the afternoon of January 13, 1954, less than a year after my marriage to Anne Halley, with a two-month-old son at home in our apartment, I was sitting in my half of an office in Folwell Hall, a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota, when the phone rang. It . . .
Read MoreSince the US election, there have been two major debates on the left and in the broader public about the implications of Trump’s election and his assumption of the presidency. The first has concerned the relationship between the Trump movement and various potential historically analogous movements, especially fascism. The second has involved . . .
Read More
As a Canadian citizen and U.S. permanent resident—with an “Alien Number,” no less—the concept of “Our America” is, well, foreign to me. Defining nationhood in possessive terms reflects the notion that nationalism is the work of imagined possession and therefore also exclusion. If something is ours, it cannot be yours. This election . . .
Read More
Love Letter to America Dear America, I sat down to write you a breakup letter. But I can’t tell if I want to break up with you, or if you have already broken up with me. Does this election mean that we are going through a rough period, or that we are . . .
Read More