Because words are interesting. — Slang-whanger. Great word. Back in 1807, it was coined by the American writer Washington Irving in his satirical periodical Salmagundi to describe someone who wields words like a weapon. Not an elegant weapon, mind you — a slang-whanger does not possess a rapier wit. Rather, this person is more like…

A tortured history of learning languages and the quiet pleasure of letting it go. — When we met, it was an unbearably hot day. I was living in Italy on a research grant, where I immediately settled into a routine. I got up, had breakfast, and set off for the town archive, navigating the narrow streets at a brisk pace. Once I arrived, I presented…

While Christian nationalists feign oppression here in the States, Russian women are beaten by police for protesting the war. — While anti-war protestors took to the streets in Russia, Ricky Schroder joined the People’s Convoy to protest mildly inconvenient mask policies. “We’re not livestock,” he said, using his Instagram account to confront some imaginary entity. “Unless you’re ready to, I guess, kill us all, you better change your minds because…

A new startup wants to make meals as efficient and joyless as possible — A friend of mine recently came into an abundance of prepared meals. He likes to try out different meal-delivery services, but accidentally set one of his accounts to renew when he already had another shipment coming. He wanted to know if I’d take this surplus off his hands. I live…

I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out, if only so I can tell you about Yatreda, Noah Kalina, and Julie Blackmon — Multiple things can be true at once, even when they appear to be contradictory. Granite, for example, can be both solid and ethereal. Hold a chunk of it in the palm of your hand and it’s clearly a rock. View it at the atomic level and it’s a galaxy of…

Catharine MacKinnon continues to work tirelessly to ensure you don’t mistake sex workers for actual human beings. — When I was fifteen years old, I got really into guerilla art. I designed posters and flyers, ran a bunch of copies at Kinko’s, and pasted them up on walls when nobody was looking. This was back in the nineties, so the aesthetic was somewhere between punk zines and some…

The rhetoric is that sex workers need to be saved from exploitation. But sex work is precisely what protected me from it. — Editor’s Note: This Medium Writers Challenge entry was added to Human Parts on October 20th, 2021. The job was a one-year teaching position at a private university. Not tenure-track or anything, but good. Jobs were increasingly rare in my field so competition was going to be stiff, and since I…