Journeys Within and Beyond

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is running out of room. Six years, by their estimate. The announcement came before Cemetery Shorts, Rooftop Films' annual short-film screening held among the graves. I was back there on a warm June evening, a year after the same event featured Embodied, an animated documentary by Sam Smith that included my description of my deathbed. Last year, I left thinking about time. This year, I left thinking about where bodies belong.

What Surviving Longer Doesn’t Prepare You For Laughing sets it off. Not a polite laugh, a real one. The huge, involuntary kind that erupts from somewhere low and takes the whole body with it. That’s when the coughing fit arrives. I can’t fully inhale without triggering one. Two laps in the pool and I need to stop and catch my breath. When the diagnosis came—radiation pneumonitis—it was a relief to finally have a name for what was happening.

At every security checkpoint in Kabul, there are two entrances: one for men, one for everyone else. Parallel spaces. Separate waiting areas, separate search rooms hidden behind walls or curtains. Most public space in Afghanistan is now, by design, overwhelmingly male. Streets. Markets. Parks. Hotel lobbies. Restaurants. The visible world belongs almost entirely to men. But inside the small, hidden spaces, the waiting areas and back offices, the atmosphere changed completely.

The slide read: Know Your Rights & ICE Preparedness. I was in a church hall in the Bronx, one of perhaps sixty people. Folding chairs. A projector. Coffee and empanadas going cold on a table near the kitchen. Hands Off NYC had organized the training, drawing representatives from across the city’s rapid response network: organizations that didn’t exist five years ago, now operating at a scale that would have been hard to imagine. The training was methodical. Tactical. Precise. It was also familiar.

Burners like to laugh at Coachella dust complaints. We shouldn’t. Burning Man now has its own luxury tier, its own buffered and catered ways of keeping the desert at a polite distance. There are air-conditioned compounds, private chefs, generators humming all night so no one has to feel too much of where they are. But the desert is still the desert. Watching this week’s Coachella coverage, I kept thinking of the Burn that nearly undid us. Adrian’s first. My second.

A fragile two-week ceasefire is now in effect in the war against Iran. A pause in the bombing. Long enough, perhaps, for negotiations. Long enough, perhaps, to notice what is still standing, against President Trump’s warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” But not long enough to believe it will hold. In October and November 1999, a lifetime ago, I traveled to Tehran, Isfahan, and Tabriz on a United Nations human rights mission.

The ultrasound technician kept returning to the same spot. The gel was cold on my ribs. Each pass, under my right rib she pressed a little harder until it began to hurt. The room was quiet except for the hum of the machine. Its walls were lined with family photos. I could see her face, but not the screen. A few minutes earlier we had been joking. Now she was serious. When the scan ended, she told me she was going to send the CD overnight to my doctor. Technicians don’t usually say things like that.

It’s Cholangiocarcinoma Awareness Month, and I’ve been thinking about what it means to show up well. The bouquets arrived first. Armfuls of them. Lush, fragrant, already leaning toward their own ending. My living room began to look less like a home and more like a very tasteful wake. Then came the cheesecake. Heavy in the hands, cool through the cardboard. An offering chosen with care — as if sweetness might steady what had tilted. The texts followed.

How are you holding up? I suspect I’m not alone in cycling through various forms of anger over the Epstein files. What devastates isn’t just the exposure; it’s the documentation of how routine—and how reinforced—the enabling was. Epstein’s world appears less hidden than managed: a machinery of access and favors in which powerful men continued to engage, correspond, and benefit, their continued participation effectively absorbing his crimes into the machinery that kept it running.

As 2026 begins, this is the first thing I know how to write. I don’t have a clean way of naming the moment we’re in. It feels less like history and more like collapse, as if we’re standing in a room where too many radios are playing at once, each tuned to a different emergency. The noise is relentless: every voice urgent, every story unfinished, overtaken by the next.