Writer Maggie Nelson Asks What It Means To Feel Free
In On Freedom's allusive, blunt, funny essays, the author of The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty tries to imagine freedom as it exists in the contemporary contexts of art, sex, drugs, and climate.
"Can you think of a more depleted, imprecise, or weaponized word?" asks the writer Maggie Nelson at the beginning of her elastic, imaginative study of the idea of freedom.
It's a word that lends itself to any agenda, any wish, any fear. In the past few months, vaccines have demonstrated this with special clarity, in their double guise as tickets to liberation and tools of authoritarianism, depending very much on who you ask.
At the beginning of , Nelson describes walking across the campus where she
