I have three names. The one my parents gave me, the one the world decided I should use, and the one I chose for myself. My parents named me Amarachukwu. It means "God's grace" in Igbo, and it is beautiful and specific and mine. It contains a theology and a hope and a sound that, when my mother says it, carries the particular melody of someone who chose every syllable deliberately. The world decided I should use Amara. This happened gradually, the way a river rounds a stone. Teachers shortened it. Friends shortened it. Immigration forms didn't have enough boxes. At some point I stopped correcting people, and the truncation became my public name — the version of myself that fits in the space allotted. The name I chose for myself is the one I sign my work with: A. Obi. Not because I'm hiding anything, but because initials create a small privacy — a membrane between the person and the public. When someone reads an essay by A. Obi, they bring fewer assumptions than they would to Amarachukwu Obi.

There's a Yoruba word that carries more than English can hold. I've been thinking about what that means for how we read online.

I've been wondering whether the way we pay for things changes how we pay attention to them.

I've been thinking about what it means to keep the things you've read — and what we lose when reading leaves no trace.

There's a Yoruba word that carries more than English can hold. I've been thinking about what that means for how we read online.

Time is slipping away like grains of sand through my fingers. It’s a currency, I tell myself. Just like money. Except I can never get more of it once spent. So I can’t help but wonder if this is what my career will look like for the rest of time.

A great essay shouldn’t need a subscription to find its worth. A reader should be able to discover it, make it theirs, and help its writer write the next one.

The story is ultimately about the idea that we do not exactly “get over” a parent’s death. We learn to live with their absence while continuing to carry their voice, habits, humor, wounds, and love forward.

Two things to know before you do it. Each manufactured cycle needs its own periodEnd, because the table refuses two rows for the same wallet and period — and those fake rows sit permanently beside the real ones. And because the send has no date filter, running it sweeps every unpaid above-floor row for every wallet, not just the one you meant.Two things to know before you do it. Each manufactured cycle needs its own periodEnd, because the table refuses two rows for the same wallet and period — and those fake rows sit permanently beside the real ones. And because the send has no date filter, running it sweeps every unpaid above-floor row for every wallet, not just the one you meant.Two things to know before you do it. Each manufactured cycle needs its own periodEnd, because the table refuses two rows for the same wallet and period — and those fake rows sit permanently beside the real ones.

Time is slipping away like grains of sand through my fingers. It’s a currency, I tell myself. Just like money. Except I can never get more of it once spent. So I can’t help but wonder if this is what my career will look like for the rest of time.

We need independent voices more than we like to admit. it is some unknown essayist, writing for almost no one, who says the exact thing that makes a private grief feel less like a defect and more like a part of being alive.

A subscription is not priced only in dollars. It's priced in commitment: the standing obligation to keep consuming, to keep evaluating whether the relationship is still worth it, to feel the small guilt of the unread. That second price is why readers ration subscriptions far more

I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.

The internet was supposed to be the great leveling. Every firefly, the promise went, would finally get its own patch of sky.

This is for our writers and their readers.

I've been wondering whether the way we pay for things changes how we pay attention to them.