I thought I’d list 10 or so of the non-HU essays I wrote this year I was happiest with. So here goes, in no particular order.

At the Atlantic I wrote about rape and rape fantasy and Nancy Friday’s Secret Garden. I think this is my favorite thing I wrote this year.

At Slate I wrote about 7 Miles A Second by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cook, in which I talked about the way the book links marginal pulp trash and marginal sexual identities.

At Public Books I contributed to a great 50 Shades of Grey roundtable,in which I argued that the novel fetishizes incompetence.

At Salon I had a long two part piece on Orson Scott Card’s defense of genocide, first in Ender’s Game, then in Speaker for the Dead.

At the Chicago Reader I had a kind of diptych about comics in the gallery. First on the MCA’s anxious and mediocre Dan Clowes show, then on the quietly glorious MCA Lilli Carré” show.

At Reason I wrote about the history of school reform failure,as discussed in Jal Mehta’s great book The Allure of Order.

At the Atlantic I had a piece about not having sex in college and being a virgin for a really long time. And sort of as a follow-up to that I had a piece about how the male gaze gets men at Splice Today.

I had two pieces at the Atlantic on 12 Years a Slave, one on the way it refuses to make slavery about masculinity, and one about slave narratives and truth, or the lack thereof.

At Wired I wrote about the music bargain bin and mysterious Japanese fusion.

And I wrote about different versions of I Can’t Make You Love Me at Splice Today.