Lesson Plan

Pranav Jani on Free Speech and College Activism

The Right and I agree on the potential of universities as a space in which students develop ideas that can transform the world. The difference is, they want to stamp it out, and I want to encourage it.

Practice Losing Everything

I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.

A Conversation with My Father

You could make things up that actually felt more like truth, somehow. You could build a world so precise that other people started to believe it, too. And if you didn’t believe the things my dad said, he’d find a way to make you.

Ghosts of the Small Rooms

To be a government researcher in a prison is to straddle two different roles. The women I talked to understood that I worked for the institution that incarcerated them. In this way I was just like the corrections officers who locked them in each night. But I was different too.

Four of Cups

Maybe it was a mistake choosing such a solemn and contemplative place. Raising your voice above a whisper feels like an intrusion. The entrance branches into different rooms, leading you through multiple cultures and eras. You can move through time, follow the various paths available to you. You pick a direction and go.

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Moon Jellies

Some nights I dive into the sound / and let the waters have me. / I’ve felt the brush of a jelly arm— / they never really sting. It’s the glimpse / of that phantom-thing gliding beside me.

The Trouble with Pillows

She needs one medium / and a soft. He’s a soft.

The Coast of Nowhere II

Sleet and black rain / pelting the eaves, the kind of predawn / that reaches through the window, hissing, / Your heart never was a bird let alone / a bright-red singing one.