In this hybrid visual-literary meditation, Photojournalism Fellow Mackenzie Miller examines the meanings we assign to objects in an age of capitalist excess, partisan identity, and spiritual scarcity. Through Eula Biss, family photographs, and a deeply personal encounter with her grandmother’s dementia, Miller considers how possessions can both obscure and illuminate what we value most.

Ultra-distance bikepacking races push athletes across hundreds of miles of rugged terrain with little support, demanding extreme endurance, self-sufficiency, and resilience. For Stephanie Hall, a Texas-born, Vermont-based off-road ultra-cyclist, those challenges come with an additional layer of complexity: managing Type 1 diabetes while racing and training in remote conditions.

Fran Ayala-Rock is the founder of Bitches in Stitches, an all femme and them stand-up comedy collective that began in Hong Kong and has since expanded internationally. In this conversation with The Parlor, she reflects on building community in male-dominated spaces, rejecting the “good girl” script, and why rage can be a powerful force for self-definition.

What began as a semester abroad fueled by novelty and flirtation became a seven-year education on race, migration, and the uneven weight of belonging. This is an examination of what it means to build a Black American life in a country that reads you first through your passport and your accent, then later through your skin. It is about exoticization and privilege, illegality and grace, diaspora love and cultural distance.

What does accountability look like when you reject the politics of your home country but continue to benefit from its power? This essay traces a personal reckoning with American identity, liberal disavowal, and passive resistance—moving from anarchist experiments in the United States to life as an expatriate in China and Japan. It interrogates the limits of dissent, the seductions of moral distance, and the uncomfortable truth that opting out of empire does not absolve one o