Writer, Academic, Activist, Commentator
Some of you already know this from my pinned posts on Facebook and Instagram, but I wanted to write a quick piece for anyone not on social media, who might be wondering why I haven’t posted for a while. The shortest version of the story is that I fell apart from exhaustion sometime in early […] The post Delayed by Exhaustion appeared first on Yasmin Nair .
I just spent part of a recent evening trying to find something new or interesting to watch on Netflix and failing as I clicked through endless categories. This is a short set of musings, drawing upon my 2018 essay “Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship,” where I discussed the rise […] The post Netflix Is Just the World’s Worst Video Store appeared first on…
Over the last few years, I’ve encountered a number of books in all genres, fiction and non-fiction, that seem quite disengaged from their presumed readership. This appears to have coincided with an uptick in online “literary communities” where writers only talk to and write for each other. There have been several conversations lately, on social […] The post Write for Strangers appeared first on…
Many thanks to M. for the input. We can thank John Mulaney for parasociality. Or, rather, for causing a relatively unknown psychiatric term to suddenly burst forth into everyday public discourse. In 2021, the comic announced that he had finished a stint in rehab, was divorcing his wife, was now in a relationship with the […] The post On Writers and Parasociality appeared first on Yasmin Nair .
The news about Kristi Noem broke today (Tuesday, March 31) and I have some initial thoughts on this breaking story. If you like this, please support my work The latest news to emerge from the current administration is that Kristi Noem’s husband Byron Noem has been a part of online fetish communities. The news first […] The post On Kristi And Bryon Noem, and Secrets and Lies appeared first on…
This was originally supposed to be just two paragraphs, and expanded into something else. Since this is a very short essay and one drenched in opinion the way a good Tres Leches cake is soaked in several kinds of milk, I will allow myself the luxury of not providing a single graph or poll to […] The post Is This the End of Book Reviews? appeared first on Yasmin Nair .
The Cesar Chavez revelations are both shocking and unsurprising. There is probably not a single a woman on the left who has not endured some form of profound sexism in her organising work. I have written about the misogyny of the left many times (see links at the end), and in this essay I try […] The post Cesar Chavez and Why the Left Is a Pit of Misogyny appeared first on Yasmin Nair .
If you like this, please support my work. Every week since January 2025 has felt like a year, but the past three months have been especially brutal. It is very hard to remember and absorb the fact that the bombing of Iran only began a few days ago. Several events have been happening almost simultaneously: […] The post War Is Everywhere appeared first on Yasmin Nair .
If you like this, please support my work. As the world crashes and burns, we can still find hope in some dimly-lit corners. One flickering light is what appears to be a growing refusal to let politicians treat us like domestic violence victims, as people who have to endure their incompetence, corruption and indifference — […] The post The Left and the Language of Domestic Violence appeared first…
I have been working on an essay about Heather Cox Richardson, easily the most popular and the most troubling historian of our times, for a long while. A recent episode of The Reckoning with Jason Herbert provided the impetus to finally finish it. I don’t offer what follows below as a historian but as a […] The post Heather Cox Richardson, Class, and the Failure of the Liberal Imagination appeared…