Caleb Azumah Nelson: “The confrontation with myself enabled me to find a brief freedom.”
April 23, 2021
The author guides us through the tapestry of Black art, music, cinema, and literature that animates his debut novel, Open Water.
Elizabeth Lo: “Like the dogs, I existed in a limbo where I wasn’t entirely part of human society.”
March 5, 2021
The director of Stray talks about shooting a film from a dog’s point of view, and what we can learn from de-centering the human gaze.
Clothes, Interrupted
December 7, 2020
Introducing a special issue on fashion and time.
Hilton Als: “It’s always so moving to see how art claims us out of a kind of loneliness.”
November 12, 2020
Using a selection of his favorite cinema excerpts, writer and critic Hilton Als talks about what happens when artists tell the truth.
Fashion in Isolation
June 22, 2020
Considering the sentimental, contradictory, and inescapable relationships we have with what we wear.
Miscellaneous Files From Racial Justice Activists Around the World
June 19, 2020
Sylvana Simons, Rosebell Kagumire, and Amanda Adé use their tweets, screenshots, and Instagram videos to discuss how a time of momentous change has transformed their work.
Miscellaneous Files From Racial Justice Activists in the US
June 19, 2020
Cat Brooks and Eric Ward use screenshots of Zoom-meetings, resource manuals, and policy proposals to discuss how this time of momentous change has transformed their activism.
Ken Liu: “We get to define the stories we want to be told about us.”
May 28, 2020
Using photos of his text editors, mapmaking software, and 3D-printed prototypes, the writer talks about technology, myth, and telling stories during a pandemic.
Namwali Serpell: “I almost always find my errors productive.”
January 21, 2020
Using archival photos, excerpts from language courses, and eBay finds, the author and critic explains how she mines mistakes for discoveries.
SIMA Docs: Marie’s Dictionary
September 6, 2019
Marie Wilcox is the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, one of the roughly 130 endangered Native languages in the United States. This documentary follows her efforts to keep her mother tongue alive.
Helen Phillips: “Living with the awareness of the abyss is probably a good thing.”
July 19, 2019
The writer discusses why motherhood lends itself perfectly for speculative fiction—and the album that helped her during writing and labor.
Binnie Kirshenbaum: “If you think you shouldn’t say something, say it.”
May 13, 2019
Writer Binnie Kirshenbaum shares the drafts of her latest novel, Rabbits for Food, and talks to us about writing unreasonable characters.
Presented by SIMA: Hotel USA
May 6, 2019
This intimate documentary follows a group of refugees as they spend their first night in the United States in a New Jersey roadside motel. Watch here.
Leanne Shapton: “The mix of proof, shock, and totally crappy images.”
April 12, 2019
Writer and illustrator Leanne Shapton gives us a tour through her studio and shows us her mock layouts, her collection of ghost stories, and the pile of scrapbooks she found on Etsy.
Presented by SIMA: Sanctuaries of Silence
April 1, 2019
This virtual reality documentary follows an acoustic ecologist's journey to document noise pollution in one of the quietest places in North America. Watch it here.
Presented by SIMA: The Super Salmon
February 15, 2019
Watch the gorgeously-shot, deliriously-paced documentary that follows an Alaskan salmon on an unlikely journey on "the Mount Everest of rivers," as residents consider the costs and benefits of a mega-dam.
Valeria Luiselli: “There are always fingerprints of the archive in my books.”
February 12, 2019
The writer opens her archives to reveal maps, recordings, and questionnaires that have fueled her work—including photos that didn’t make it into her new novel.
Anelise Chen: “Then I changed it to third-person clam, and that was exactly how it was meant to be.”
January 18, 2019
The writer shares a collection of digital fragments that have shaped her practice, including an image depicting cycling exercises, a photo of Kafka’s diaries, and a video of her mother’s first time seeing snow.
Presented by SIMA: The Walls
December 21, 2018
Watch this month's documentary, in which a prison debate team joins forces with college students to discuss gun control, even though some inmates have landed there precisely for firearm-related crimes.
Jabari Asim: “Narrative can be a form of resistance.”
December 10, 2018
The writer Jabari Asim on stories as instruments of power, how he places himself in the lineage of African American literature, and how writers of color should navigate an onerous publishing landscape.
SIMA Docs
November 16, 2018
Our new documentary series, presented by SIMA.
Presented by SIMA: Noise Runs
November 7, 2018
In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, a group of young Haitians produces a radical newspaper to democratize information and offer hope to the population.
Ottessa Moshfegh: “Sentimentality is a curse.”
November 6, 2018
The writer Ottessa Moshfegh on the line between sensitivity and sentimentality, the universal experience of sadness, and the influence of Nirvana.
Olivia Laing: “It turned out to be an exercise in structure, in how to assemble objects in empty space.”
October 4, 2018
In the first installment of our multimedia interview series, Olivia Laing uses screenshots to explain how the secretarial parts of writing can be both pleasurable and productive.
