Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Melatonin supplements have become one of the most widely used sleep aids in the United States, with consumption increasing sharply over the past decade. They're sold without a prescription, marketed a...
Read article →Sleep debt is one of those concepts that sounds intuitive until you look at it closely, and then it becomes more complicated than the phrase implies. The idea that you can bank sleep, draw it down, an...
Read article →If you've ever crammed for an exam the night before and found the material slippery by morning, or noticed that a skill you practiced before sleep felt more natural the next day, you've encountered th...
Read article →Most people think of sleep as a single event — you close your eyes, you're out, you wake up. But what actually happens during those hours is far more structured than that. Sleep moves through a repeat...
Read article →Living at the intersection of Muslim identity and LGBTQ+ identity is one of the most complex negotiations a person can undertake — not because the intersection is impossible, but because both the Musl...
Read article →The economic dimensions of LGBTQ+ life receive far less attention than the cultural dimensions, and I think that is not accidental. It is easier to celebrate Pride month with rainbow merchandise than...
Read article →Living far from a city means living far from certain assumptions. In rural areas, queer people often find themselves navigating a social geography that was never designed with them in mind — sparse po...
Read article →Immigration is already one of the most destabilizing experiences a human being can undergo — the loss of language fluency, of familiar social cues, of the networks that make daily life navigable. For...
Read article →I grew up in a faith community that did not leave room for the person I would eventually become, and I spent years assuming that leaving was the only option. What I have learned since — and what the s...
Read article →I want to begin with the names, because they deserve to be named. Layleen Polanco. Dominique Fells. Riah Milton. Brayla Stone. Tony McDade. These are not statistics. They were people with histories, r...
Read article →Something clicked for me when I first encountered research showing significantly higher rates of LGBTQ+ identity among autistic people compared to the general population. It was not a surprise so much...
Read article →When I first encountered the concept of Two-Spirit identity, I was struck by something that should have been obvious: this is not a new framework trying to fit contemporary ideas onto the past. It is...
Read article →Film has always been a technology of empathy — a machine for making you inhabit someone else's experience for two hours. Which makes the history of LGBTQ+ film representation both a story of progress...
Read article →There is a specific feeling I get when I finish a book that sees me — not a character who shares one or two surface traits with me, but a character whose internal life maps onto mine in ways I had not...
Read article →Camp is one of those concepts that everyone has an intuitive sense of and almost no one can define precisely, which is part of what makes it so interesting and so specifically queer. It lives in the s...
Read article →I have been sitting with queer art history for years now, and what strikes me most is not the art itself — though it moves me — but the persistence of making under conditions designed to erase. Queer...
Read article →The intersection of LGBTQ+ identity and disability is one of the most under-discussed convergences in either community, and the silence is not accidental. Both communities have fought hard for visibil...
Read article →Being queer and being a person of color are not additive identities — they are not two separate things you carry in two separate compartments. They are entangled in ways that shape every aspect of how...
Read article →Music is where I learned that I was not alone before I had language for why I had felt so alone. I was sixteen, listening to a mixtape a friend had made — half of which I had never heard — and somethi...
Read article →There is a specific pleasure I take in watching old films now, knowing what to look for. The best friend who never marries and is slightly too devoted. The villain with the limp wrist and the knowing...
Read article →Queer culture has done a lot of serious work. It has built political movements, fought for legal recognition, documented medical crises, processed collective trauma, and held space for some of the mos...
Read article →Drag has been called many things: performance art, political provocation, community ritual, pure entertainment, subversive theater, and — by people who do not understand it — a threat. The reality is...
Read article →Ballroom culture is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued traditions in American history. I first learned about it through a friend who vogued competitively in New York, and watching him move...
Read article →Few questions generate more heat in online LGBTQ+ spaces than the distinction between bisexual and pansexual identity. Some people feel strongly that the terms describe meaningfully different things....
Read article →
