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Notes from a Burmese Prison, The Verge, February 2026

A collaboration with my cousin, journalist Danny Fenster, who was arrested by the military in Myanmar after the 2021 coup. In this epic interactive comic, we tell the story of his time in prison through notes and media Danny exchanged with his partner, Juliana, through prison bars.

Read it here.

Read an interview about my process and our collaboration here.

Palimpsest: On the value of creative process, The Humanist Review of AI, Issue 01, July 2026

Why is it important to scratch and rub at the page? An essay for our human future.

Read it here.

Thinking in Circles about The Meaning of Attention, LA Times, February 2026

What is attention? What does it have to do with the lovely loops of the spirograph? And what does William James have to say about it? A collaboration with historian and activist D. Graham Burnett, co-author of Attensity! among many other things.

Read it here!

The Electric Grandma, LA Times, June 2025

In Ray Bradbury’s 1969 short story “I Sing the Body Electric,” we meet The Electric Grandma. Will she provide? A feminist retelling…

Read it here.

A Passover Recipe, LA Times, April 2025

Bubbe’s gefilte fish recipe lives in the oral tradition. Since she died on Passover last year, I’ve realized the only way I’ll ever taste it is if I make it myself.

Read it here.

A Palestinian, an Israeli, and a Path to Peace, LA Times, November 2024

*Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America’s Best Cartoon Award for 2024*

A profile of peace entrepreneurs Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon

Read it here.

Technofeelia vols. 1-4, The Believer Magazine

Adventures in technology familiar and strange, my four part series with The Believer Magazine, nominated for Reuben and Ignatz awards

Click an image to read its corresponding essay.

On Text, Image, AI and Artistic Translation, Literary Hub, November 2023

In which I reflect on the relationship between text and image and the status of AI’s multi-lingual abilities, while coining the term “Walnüssian.”

Read it here.

Learning to Dance with AI, Moment Magazine, July 2023

I take a tour through humanity’s archives and grapple with what AI means for our self conception.

Read it here.

Give & Take. The Verge, February 2022

My take on social media’s relationship to art and commerce, featuring Georgia O’Keefe’s Deer Skull, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, and my most popular women’s underwear cartoon of all time 

Read it here.

When a Fictional Utopia Offers a Pathway Home. The New York Times Book Review, August 2021

Reading one of my favorite books, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, after my cross-country move to California.

Read it here. 

From the Notebook of a Fellow Graphic Memoirist: An Illustrated Review of Nora Krug’s Belonging. Moment Magazine, November 2018

I review German illustrator Nora Krug’s graphic memoir, Belonging, a reckoning with her family’s history and potential complicity in Nazi crimes, and I imitate the book’s own gorgeous collage art-style.

Read it here. 

Two Cartoonists Sit on a Bench and Talk: An Illustrated Interview. Literary Hub, October 2018

I interview fellow New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck about her new beautiful and intimate graphic memoir, Passing for Human.

Read it here.

Prose

Food for all over security for some, August 2025, LA Times

An Op-Ed that argues: Those wielding the most resources, Israeli and American institutions, must be willing to sacrifice some security in the name of feeding hungry people in Gaza. A reflection in light of my family’s history with starvation.

My grandmother escaped the Warsaw ghetto after her first of four sisters died from hunger. She slipped through a few missing bricks in the wall that sealed the Jewish population away from their Aryan neighbors, where they were trapped in poverty and malnourishment and subject to Nazi plans for extermination… Read the rest with The LA Times.

Chatbots of the Dead, February 2025, with Prof. Daniel Story, Aeon

We can now create compelling experiences of talking with our dead. Is this ghoulish, therapeutic or something else again?

Chatbots of the dead should not be used as stand-ins or companions. Nor should they be built to be as realistic and fully formed as possible. Instead, chatbots of the dead should be made to serve a purpose that is more familiar and more complex, a purpose that can help us transcend our mortal condition, not through technological resurrection, but through imagination... Read the rest with Aeon.

Mourning in a Time of Global Grief, June 2024, Literary Hub

On the bridge from caring about to caring for.

I want to write about sitting at my grandmother’s death bed, a small cot in a simple room, watching her chest rise and fall, listening to the surprisingly forceful snore of her body expiring. It was April. Bubbe had just turned 98. Or close enough—I never knew her real birthday. Facts like these were lost along with her entire family in the Warsaw Ghetto, in bombings and trains and camps that Bubbe, as a teenager, narrowly escaped, alone... Read the rest on Literary Hub.

An Interview with Gene Luen Yang, October 2023, The Believer

I sit down with the master graphic novelist.

Cartoonist Gene Luen Yang is having a good year. His most beloved masterpiece, American Born Chinese, which began as a xeroxed and stapled series hand-sold at comics conventions and became the first graphic novel finalist for the National Book Award, is now, seventeen years after its release, debuting as a Disney+ TV show starring Oscar winners Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. … Read the rest with The Believer.

What Banning Maus Means for the Generation of Artists It Inspired. February 2022, Literary Hub

I consider the benefits of chorus over cannon.

My friend, a poet and professor, was telling her nine-year-old daughter last week about the banning of Maus. She explained that Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust had been banned, and that it’s especially important to shine a light on dark histories when certain communities are attempting to silence those stories. “It’s banned?” The daughter processed, “Can I still read it?” … Read the rest on Literary Hub.

Re: Hate Mail. November 2018, Longreads

After receiving a string of menacing emails, I wonder: Can I safely extend a writer’s empathy to men who harass me on the internet?

I’ve received 15 emails from my internet stalker in the past four days. It’s like watching an inmate from behind a two-way mirror. He read a short story I wrote once satirically titled “The Greatest Story Ever Written.” It’s about a group of male writers who lose their way. He didn’t like it. I think I’m open to criticism, but I wonder whether I really am. … Read the rest on Longreads. 

The Actuary’s Dilemma. July 2017, H.O.W. Journal

Aaron is a clear-headed thinker, able to deduce “bestness” in all life situations. But when he’s transferred from the green gray sprawl of Waltham, Massachusetts, away from his girlfriend Sarah, to the strange, quaint streets of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the local ice cream parlors introduce him to more than just vanilla soft-serve, what will become of his love life and his comfortable ideology?

Aaron and Sarah had been dating for nine months when Aaron was transferred to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He kissed her goodbye and boarded the train. The sun rose. He found a window seat and watched her waving from the platform. In her favorite yellow tank top, Sarah had a flatness to her. Her hairline to her hips charted a wide, golden plain. … Published in H.O.W. Journal, Issue 13 (last issue)

Learning to Love the Clothes My Mother Bought Me. May 2017, Lenny Letter

I reflect on my mother’s glamour and how a childhood of textile wars reached its copacetic ceasefire.

Once I stopped growing — 5’4″ (or close enough), size 4–6 (depending), foot size 7 (wide), 34C — it became clear how I measured up: an inch, maybe two, shy of my mother from head-to-waist, hip-to-toe, fingertip-to-tip. If I’d known just how important a role these dimensions would play in my sartorial future, I would have hung from my feet every night, eaten more vegetables, been more diligent about those bust exercises the girls in Judy Blume novels are always doing. But whatever I did or didn’t do, I did not keep growing. … Read the rest here with Lenny Letter

The Party. January 2017, The Awl

“Then a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest guy at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.” Prescient George Saunders offered this thought experiment in 2007. Here it becomes an extended allegory for our unfortunate political circumstances.

George Saunders asked me to imagine a party. It’s a fine party, diverse. People are talking, making nice. Some talk about the cheese platter, preferring or avoiding the spicy cheese respectively, others about all the construction in the neighborhood and what’s-to-be-done, others about their recent breakup and what’s-that-new-app. Then, says Saunders, a guy with a megaphone walks in. In my mind, this guy is orange and has no neck and he starts a rumor that J by the cheese platter ate all the good spicy cheese and he wasn’t even invited. It doesn’t matter what he says; what matters about the megaphone guy is that he’s loud. … Read the rest here at The Awl. 

Quantum Theory and The Entanglement of Oolong. September 2015, Washington Square Review

An engineer falls for a tea drinking co-worker. Will a gift from his brother and a series of falsifiable experiments cure his perplexing ailment?

Dale Stein needed a new philosophy. A mechanistic view of the universe had served him well until now, but when, at three minutes past the hour, Starla Stewart strolled through the silver elevator doors of RocketSpace Hosting— fifth floor, Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, California—the principles of the physical world split, stuttered, and confessed defect. … Read the rest here in Washington Square Review, issue 36.

The Greatest Story Ever Written.  June 2015, The Toast

What happens to a group of struggling writers when The Greatest Story Ever Written lands on the literary scene?

Bob finished it first. Stop everything, he said, and get to your nearest e-bookstore… Read the rest here at The Butter via The Toast.

This is a Love Story. May 2015, Blackbird

As thought experiment meets love story, what does student Missy and Professor David’s unlikely romance say about Hume’s empirical notion of the self?

David had the kind of chest (convex, pasty, pimpled) that should have been ugly. David had long muscleless limbs, knobby joints, and a pelican nose. He was bald as they come. David himself should have been ugly, and he was, objectively. … Read the rest here in Blackbird Vol. 14 No. 1.

A List of Names for Our First Born Child. May 2015, Shenandoah

Fiction meets memoir as a daughter and her mother review a list of the dead in preparation for the naming of an unborn child.

How long should a Jew be dead before you name your child after him? My mother thumbs through The Big Book of Baby Names, recently dusted. Hunting for free supplies, I found the book boxed up, in the back-most room of my parent’s dim-lit basement. … Read the rest here in Shenandoah Vol. 64 No. 2.

What we take with us: February 2014, Hobart

An explore-your-roots voyage has our snarky protagonist less than enthused until she finds something she can take with her, literally.

My iPod, recently loaded with all the decent tracks I could pilfer from my brother’s CD collection (Surrealistic Pillow, Sgt. Peppers, American Beauty), which I found under his old bed at our parents’ house, next to a box of unbranded condoms. … Read an interview about this piece here.

Or buy Hobart 15: Hotel Culture here!

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