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I Didn’t Understand Pornography—Until I Did

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There's a moment, maybe you remember yours, when music stops being background noise and starts feeling like a mirror. It doesn't happen with the songs that fill school dances or the albums your older cousin swears changed his life. It happens quietly, almost inconveniently. A record finds you, or you find it, and instead of offering escape, it provides exposure. You don't nod along. You pause. You don't feel bigger. You feel seen. Not triumphantly. Uneasily. That's when music becomes something else entirely. It doesn't just fill silence; it replaces it with something heavier. Before you hear your first "real" album, the kind that doesn't just take up space but unsettles it, you think music has a job: to excite, to soothe, maybe to make you feel cool. At fourteen, that was my world. Music blasted from passing cars, rattled locker doors, and soundtracked weekends. It was adrenaline and swagger, drums to bang your head to, lyrics to scribble in notebo...
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Where the Wild Boar Dies: Power, Pageantry, and Performance in Carle Vernet’s A Boar Hunt in Poland

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Carle Vernet,  A Boar Hunt in Poland , ca. early 19th century. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Photograph by the author. The moment you look at it, you can feel the dirt fly. Not metaphorically. Literally,  A Boar Hunt in Poland  by Carle Vernet seems to detonate right in front of you. Horses rear, dogs snarl, a pike catches the light mid-thrust. In the middle of it all, a dying boar still fights back, a lump of muscle and defiance against the crimson swirl of aristocracy on horseback. It’s not a painting so much as a tableau frozen milliseconds before either triumph or gore. But beyond its bravado, the painting whispers something older and colder: this isn’t just a hunt, it’s a ritual. A performance of dominance. A mirror of empire. And the more you look, the more it begins to resemble a history painting in disguise, a drama of class, conquest, and the spectacle of control. Carle Vernet’s  A Boar Hunt in Poland  is an early 19th-century oil painting, pa...
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What Grief Leaves Behind: On Isla Morley’s Come Sunday

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It begins on Maundy Thursday, the kind of day where the weight of the world doesn’t come all at once but in small, unremarkable pieces. A child wants to wear something impractical. A husband moves too slowly. A wife, already overwhelmed, tries to hold everything together. Abbe Deighton, the wife in question, has a full day ahead and plans for the evening. To make room for it all, she leaves her daughter Cleo with a friend. Not the friend she first thought of, but one close enough. A safe choice, she believes. The kind of everyday compromise parents make constantly. But by nightfall, the road outside that friend’s house is clogged with police, neighbors, and blue lights. Cleo is gone. Some novels teach, some entertain, and some simply sit with you.  Come Sunday , Isla Morley’s first does the last. It does not move with urgency. It does not try to dazzle. It opens a door to grief and leaves it open, inviting you to stand in the doorway and feel the air turn cold. Morley’s writing is ...
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