IN 2016, SANA JAVERI KADRI found herself at a crossroads. After moving from her hometown of Mumbai to California, she wanted to learn more about the historical forces shaping her own identity and experience as a queer woman of color in the United States. A food photographer, Javeri Kadri turned to culinary history to better understand…
How freelancing can improve your dating life (and vice versa)
A few years ago, I left a job, a relationship, and an apartment all in the same month. One, the job, came to a natural ending; I set off to begin my full-time freelance life. The other two endings were far more abrupt, and both were related to gender-based violence. I’m a food, sex, and mental…
This Writer is Tweeting Everything Sylvia Plath Ever Ate
LIKE MANY YOUNG, ASPIRING WRITERS, Rebecca Brill was obsessed with Sylvia Plath’s diaries. Their luminous, sensual, and often dramatic prose charts the ups and downs of Plath’s internal state with a serious attention that young women’s feelings rarely receive. So when the pandemic lockdown began in 2020, Brill, in the grip of a depression brought on…
Why LGBTQ couples split household tasks more equally
For Kara and Jo Chambers-Grant, communication has been key to maintaining equilibrium during the upheaval of the pandemic. The couple, who live in Bath in the UK, married in 2017, shortly after meeting through an online group that offers peer support for women, trans and nonbinary people coming out later in life. Following a whirlwind…
Keep Your Quarantine Garden Growing With These 8 Unique Seed Companies
WHEN THE REALITY OF THE pandemic hit, nearly a year ago, something unexpected happened: Americans began gardening. Alarmed by a possible breakdown in food supply chains, and inspired by wartime Victory Gardens and lockdown boredom, people across the country who never grew food before developed green thumbs. For many pandemic gardeners—including me—the experience was a revelation….
How to Make Peace With Your Jealousy
I called her the jealous woman. She was fierce and relentless, and during a difficult period in my life she arose in me when she sensed a threat. I was dating someone around that time. The butterflies were flying, and much of the time it felt so right, but the jealous woman kept popping up….
How to Make Long-Term Plans in a Crisis
Mona Eshaiker was two years into a high-profile job when she realized something wasn’t working. It was 2020, and Eshaiker, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, was working at a digital mental health startup. Her work days were gruelling, and as one of the only queer people and people of color in the room, she…
How Trauma Changes Our Relationships
If you grew up experiencing violence or repression — whether in the home, from the state, or due to poverty — you may have experienced the culture shock of being around people who had more privileged experiences. Similarly, if you’ve had a traumatic experience of some kind as an adult — sexual assault, armed conflict,…
Feast on This Guide to Modern Māori Cooking
NOT MANY COOKBOOKS KICK OFF with the creation of the universe. Yet that’s where Monique Fiso begins Hiakai, a groundbreaking new book on Māori cuisine. First, there was nothing. Then, in the nothing, there were two lovers, Ranginui and Papatūānuku. Ranginui and Papatūānuku held each other so close that their children were trapped between them. Craving light and…
The Museum Treating Home Cooking as Fine Art
LIKE MOST THINGS THIS YEAR, the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Reclamation exhibition did not go as initially planned. Curator and director of public programs Melani N. Douglass wanted to treat kitchen labor—the often-invisible daily work that disproportionately falls on women and feminine people—as high art. She envisioned an exhibition centered around kitchen-like spaces physically installed at…
