Nikita

Essays are to thinking what dance is to movement.

A qualified guess is that they spent between one and four hours daily in formal studies, and the rest on self-directed projects. Unlike children today, they had little access to entertainment, and so were often bored, unless they figured out a way to keep their minds occupied; the intellectual obsessions that grew into their life’s work often grew ... See more

But as I spent the holidays reflecting on this “Robin-to-your-Batman” mindset, I found myself facing a grimier, more menacing realization around why powering their agency has felt so much safer and easier than cultivating and motivating my own.

As I ate leftover Persian food on my mom’s antique couch in LA, listening to her 3 dogs shriek and bark in... See more

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines… [a] poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain... See more

The thing no one tells you about marriage is this: in order to form deep bonds of intimacy in heterosexual relationships, in order to truly love and be truly loved- both partners must do the very thing they’ve been taught their entire lives NOT to do. They must learn to disobey the script they were handed at birth called “how to be a man” and “how ... See more