Writing
Racquet Magazine
How to Pick Your Guy
I rely on the emotions a player evokes in me when I watch them compete. In psychoanalysis this reliance on emotions as data is called transference. I’ve analyzed this data and produced for you a name. That name is Rafael Jodar.
Guernica
Ketamine
Some people describe it as a lifting of a veil,” I try. “Others describe it as a weight off their chest. And some people just say that they feel like their old self again.” Yet my own recovery from depression has been more complicated: I’ve found that there is no return to a nondepressed self. There is only something new.
Things Imagined
I know too much about the pathophysiology that killed my father. I know how nauseated he must have felt when he woke up that morning, and I know his blood pressure must have bottomed out before he hit the ground. What I don’t know: Was he afraid? Did the internist diagnose himself in his last few seconds? Cardiology has always been my most difficult subject.
American Chordata · Issue 11
The atlantic
A Dialogue On Race and Speech at Yale
I appreciate your sympathy, but the fact is that I would much prefer your empathy. If you were to empathize with me—which is to say, if you were to imagine yourself in my position—you would understand that there is nothing unjust about declaring that you have been hurt.
The New journal
On Shame and Moving Forward
I can envision a world in which I think of my blackness and I don’t have to think of all the ways in which it makes me vulnerable, and others frightened.