"Onscreen, today's torrents of pixels exceed anything Auden could have imagined. Yet the hyper-verbal loneliness he evoked feels peculiarly contemporary. Increasingly, we interweave our actions and our rolling digital accounts of ourselves: curators and narrators of our life stories, with a matching move from internal to external monologue. It's a realm of elaborate shows in which status is hugely significant — and one in which articulacy itself risks turning into a game, with attention and impact (retweets, likes) held up as the supreme virtues of self-expression."

Forgetting the device makes it possible to forget that your online identity does not directly correlate with your physical one. Sure, you still "create" or curate yourself online, but now that the Internet is a visual arena with real-time access, your identity is no longer as amorphous or abstracted from reality as it once was. You represent yourself online using a variety of multimedia material, a complete, sensory, dynamic simulacrum of yourself who cannot instantly change or disappear according to a line of text on the screen. Contemporary mass culture equates anonymity with secrecy or downright negative intent, not harmless experimentation. Who lies about who they are online? Pedophiles, scammers, hackers, bullies, Wikileaks. Anonymity has turned from thrilling to terrifying. 1:1 self-to-body ratio is a moral mandate. It's no wonder that nailing down objective reality seems so attractive.

This is how segregation compromises the power of black community. It takes a societal ill -- say a lack of insurance -- and then concentrates it one community. Members of the whole community, uninsured and not, feel the effects of this to varying degrees, and a problem that is truly American somehow becomes "black." The black uninsured of Mississippi -- a majority of the uninsured of the state -- are not going to be evenly distributed among the various networks of the state. They are going to be concentrated in one particular network. What the state won't cover, private citizens must. Those citizen will tend to be black. The people who will have to drain their savings will be black. The people who will take out second mortgages will be black. The people who will pick up second jobs (if they can even get them) and miss parenting time will be black. You can multiply this out across social policy, and see how a wealth gap might be perpetuated.

I finished Antony Beevor's majestic The Second World War last night. I immediately poured myself a drink. Beevor's book is great look at how we think about "good" and "evil." I found it very easy to name "evil," and a lot harder to name "good."

April 5, 2013 | by Kai M Green— "I have experienced the demands of Black masculinity and the responses to my failure to perform properly are not alI that different from the experiences of failed masculinity that I felt within Black lesbian communities. But it is true, I am now a young Black American Male. People usually assume that I am somewhere between the age of 15 and 20. I'm 28. The world is unkind to Black bois. The world is unkind to Black girls. But the way our gendered bodies are policed is different."

Most written chronicles of history, and most speculative stories, put rulers, conquerors, and invaders front and center. People with less power, money, or status—enslaved people, indigenous people, people of color, queer people, laborers, women, people with disabilities, the very young and very old, and religious minorities, among others—are relegated to the margins. Today, mainstream history continues to perpetuate one-sided versions of the past while mistelling or erasing the stories of the rest of the world. There is a long and honorable legacy of literary resistance to erasure. This anthology partakes of that legacy. It will feature stories from the margins of speculative history, each taking place between 1400 and the early 1900s and putting a speculative twist—an element of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the unclassifiably strange—on real past events.

In other words, this man allows me to not to disguise my fundamental lack of desire to have sex with him. I think this feeling of being granted some type of permission to not fake enjoyment isn't unique to me and isn't unique to sex workers. I think a lot of women's heterosexual sex is or has been characterized by negotiating their own lack of "enthusiastic consent," a relatively new concept aiming to educate in a more nuanced way than "no means no" and "yes means yes." It's rare that I give authentic "enthusiastic consent" while I'm working. And that's how I prefer it.