“Intimacy is about the experience of saying to another person — not necessarily in words — ‘This is who truly I am and what I want. Who are you? What do you want?’ ” writer Michael Lowenthal says. “If that kind of honest exchange is combined with physical touch and pleasure, it’s all the more profound.”

In his newly published short story collection, Sex With Strangers, about which he’ll be giving a virtual talk and reading on Wednesday via East End Books Ptown, Lowenthal takes the reader beyond raw, brief sexual acts between strangers to reveal moments of true intimacy. Some of the encounters he describes are passionately, even desperately, physical. In others, the connection between strangers transcends any need for physical touch.

A young caretaker lies down in bed next to an emaciated, dying AIDS patient twice his age and realizes, “The closer to his death, the more aware I was of his still-aliveness.” A homely busboy discovers his own beauty when a singer invites him into her changing room, pulls down his pants and orders him to look in the mirror while she brings him to orgasm. “Don’t forget,” she tells him before leaving. On a cruise, a middle-aged woman about to renew her marriage vows confides to a novice priest that she longs to leave her husband for a woman she met online. “I feel I’m finally there,” she says. “You know what I mean. Everything else dissolves.”

Through the experiences of people who are gay, straight, male, female, young, and old, Lowenthal shows that “life gains meaning through sharing it intimately with others.” And, despite the undeniable biological imperative of our sexual desire, what we ultimately long for is a connection to others.

Even so, it’s a painful fact that “intimacy can often go hand in hand with — and can even provoke — profound loneliness,” Lowenthal says. “The longer I live, the more I’m struck by the inescapable fact that no matter how much we bare our souls to one another, no matter how passionately we insert our body parts into one another, we can never, never, never know how it feels to be another person. And even if we could really know other people, maybe we’d have much less drive to get intimate with them. That would be the truly sad thing.”

Lowenthal, who has published four novels prior to this, his first short story collection, realized when compiling the stories for the book that he’d been focused on themes of sexuality, sexual relationships, and intimacy ever since he began to write.

“There was literally only one story I’ve ever written that couldn’t have fit well into this collection,” he says. “I’m sure this has to do with growing up gay in the ’80s. I felt like a non-native to the language of sexuality and intimacy the world around me was speaking. I knew that my own language had a different vocabulary, but I didn’t know how to articulate that.”

The good fortune of meeting the writer John Preston shortly after graduating from Dartmouth College in 1990, Lowenthal says, “expanded the scope of what I thought I could write about.” Preston was a proponent of gay and lesbian literature during the 1970s and ’80s, as well as an author of gay erotica and editor of gay anthologies. He read about Lowenthal in the New York Times after the young man revealed in his graduation speech, in front of an audience of thousands, that he was the college’s first gay valedictorian.

In the years that followed, Preston became a mentor to Lowenthal. “He persuaded me that writing about any topic — even transgressive sexual stuff — could be worthy of a wide audience, as long as the writing was good enough,” Lowenthal says.

Preston died of AIDS in 1994. Before his death, he entrusted Lowenthal with the task of completing two fiction anthologies he was editing, as well as a collection of essays, Winter’s Light. “John considered it a gift that I agreed to finish his work. I think it helped him feel more settled about dying,” Lowenthal says. “But, to me, it was he who was giving me an incredible gift, not only to do something for him out of love, but also to get a jump start into the publishing industry.”

Lowenthal published his first novel, The Same Embrace, a story of sexual and religious identity struggles, when he was 29. Now, as part of Lesley University’s creative writing faculty, he mentors young writers and considers it an essential aspect of his work. “I think about what John gave me and try to pay it forward,” Lowenthal says. “I love the experience of seeing something in young writers that they may not even yet see in themselves and helping to nurture that.”

It’s not surprising, then, that the theme of self-discovery is a thread that runs through Lowenthal’s stories. “Breathing by myself had lost its point,” the busboy thinks to himself after the singer wraps her mouth around his nose. A man who is unfaithful to his long-term partner admits, “For us, sex was never an end in itself, but just a means, a way to buttress the love we built together.”

At the core of Lowenthal’s stories lies the astonishing message that during sexual intimacy with a stranger, in the words of one of his protagonists, “the stranger I discovered was myself.”

Brief Encounter

The event: Virtual talk and reading with Michael Lowenthal, author of Sex With Strangers: Stories

The time: Wednesday, March 31, 6 p.m.

The place: Register with Eventbrite for a Zoom link at eastendbooksptown.com

The cost: Free

Michelle Alexander changed conversations about race-based discrimination in 2010 when she published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander explained that four in five Black men living in urban areas had at some point spent time in jail, many with felony convictions. States sustained “racial caste” long after Jim Crow’s supposed demise by relying on the 14th Amendment to deprive Blacks of the basic rights of citizenship.

The “war on drugs” coincided with some states’ increased reliance on felony convictions to justify denial of voting rights, exclusion from jury service, and discrimination in areas such as housing, education, child custody, and public benefits. We Americans, Alexander wrote, “use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

Reuben Jonathan Miller’s Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration is the single most powerful work about justice in America that I have read since The New Jim Crow. Miller describes what it has been like for those living in and out of prison over the last 15 years. Things have, unsurprisingly, gotten worse, not better, for those subject to the crushing weight of some 45,000 federal and state laws regulating the lives of those accused of committing crimes. A sociologist at the University of Chicago, Miller tells the stories and incorporates the voices of the incarcerated and their families, using granular details to underscore depths of suffering rooted in the unfairness of what he calls the American “carceral system.”

Many of Miller’s characters come and go in Halfway Home, but two appear in all of the book’s three sections. Each section is structured loosely around a central theme or thesis: debt, wage, and salvation. One of these characters is Ronald, a jailhouse lawyer who served 27 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. The other is Jeremiah, Miller’s brother, whose small offenses continue to put him behind bars throughout his life. As a “repeat offender,” Jeremiah loses his constitutional rights, and struggles to find treatment for drug addiction as well as a place to live. Miller includes the stories of many others in the book, which sometimes confused me. I had to remind myself which character and narrative Miller was describing, but once I’d gotten back on track, I found the stories deepened my investment and sense of outrage.

Sometimes, I wanted Miller to signpost more clearly at the beginning of a chapter. His riffs on James Baldwin and summaries of the history of Black enslavement initially felt unneeded. Once I summoned a bit of patience, though, I found that these poetic explorations packed a punch. In one particularly indirect chapter, “Sinnerman,” Miller takes readers back to the Village Gate, conjuring Nina Simone’s 1962 performance of the storied Black spiritual. He moves to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of guilt, invokes journalist Ida B. Wells’s chronicles of lynching, and returns to Simone singing “Sinnerman.”

“The people I followed were rejected, and they were rejected at every turn,” Miller writes. “I could hear myself saying that word — rejection — with Ms. Simone playing in my head. It all made sense. The rock, the river, the sea, and the good Lord all rejected the sinner. This is the nature of sin.” This is also the way the best essays work. Writers help readers connect surprising bits and reach unexpected conclusions.

Miller follows standard practices of academic sociology, explaining how, when, and where he interviews his subjects. He also breaks some of the rules, especially when he incorporates his own anxieties about his brother. His proximity to the story, he argues, positions him to understand and communicate the indignities and injustices of mass incarceration even more skillfully. At times, I wished he had ignored his internal editor, giving himself over more fully and with less self-doubt to the conventions of memoir rather than sociology — or had at least invoked the heavenly being that is Studs Terkel.

Miller makes many important points in the book, several of which felt especially urgent to me. He asserts that Black children are born presumed guilty and know that they will be arrested at some point. They live in places that are “overpoliced and underprotected.” And given the prevalence of arrests and incarceration, millions of Black families must manage a plague of picky details to access loved ones — from for-profit prison phone systems to the intervention of so-called child welfare agencies.

Re-entry programs intent on changing behavior issue certificates for all manner of “soft skills” but ultimately fail to provide decent jobs with benefits. There’s a vicious cycle here, with a lack of housing and employment fueling community instability, and community instability fueling a lack of housing and employment. Sometimes, Miller concludes, the greatest hope for change comes from within Black families and communities — when young activists are empowered to drive change and drive out shame.

For all the stories and details, Miller winds up where Michelle Alexander left off. Changing hearts and minds matters, he writes, but “the problem of mass incarceration is ultimately a problem of citizenship.” As Alexander argued in her analysis of the 14th Amendment, until Americans change the law to restore the full rights of citizenship to Ronald and Jeremiah and all those forced to live in cages, we cannot begin to dismantle a system that takes advantage of our very worst racist instincts.

What is the likely career trajectory of an inventive, gifted Teacher of the Year who is passionate about racial and social justice and who works in an urban public school? Choose one: (A) department chair; (B) principal; (C) district administrator. Quitting probably wasn’t on your list, either. And yet, quitting is exactly what LaQuisha Hall did this past summer.

Hall is the teacher Melinda D. Anderson chose to profile in Becoming a Teacher, her superb contribution to Simon & Schuster’s Masters at Work series. Anderson explains that Hall was named Baltimore City Public Schools Teacher of the Year in 2018-2019. At the time, she was the first African-American teacher to be recognized in five years in a district where more than 80 percent of students are black and in a high school, Carver Vocational Technical, whose population is all black.

Hall, who is from North Carolina, entered the profession at 21 in 2003. She was poised to attend a Christian law school in Virginia when she moved to Maryland to earn a tuition-free master’s degree in education in exchange for five years working as a teacher. Getting an advanced degree for free and working for pay seemed like a better opportunity to Hall than going to law school. Though it was difficult to enter a middle-school classroom without any experience, Hall managed, drawing on her talents as an artist, pageant winner, life coach, and survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Finding an older, supportive teacher to mentor her was also critically important to her success.

Over the course of 17 years, Hall developed classroom strategies so that she could teach in ways that made sense to her and her students. She decided to tackle freshman English at Carver, which allowed her to avoid preparing students to take an annual standardized skills test. When she realized that her students were turned off by the district’s curriculum, she ditched it and had students choose a book from classroom bins she had filled with works they would find relevant, including young adult novels written by black authors. Anderson provides ample evidence and anecdotes demonstrating Hall’s delight in connecting academically and emotionally with students, who clearly respected and enjoyed being in her classes. With patience, humor, and forgiveness, Hall got students writing as well as reading. She self-published an anthology of student writing and worked to change perceptions of young teens of color.

Even as she showcases Hall’s many virtues in Becoming a Teacher, Anderson makes clear the obstacles that most teachers encounter. She promises in her introduction that she will tell “the story of one master teacher,” and thereby show readers “the nitty-gritty of the profession” while exploring “the enormous, messy, and complex system of American public schooling.” That “nitty-gritty” includes qualifying exams that often prevent teachers of color from pursuing the profession, low pay, high stress, endemic burnout, lack of respect from parents and politicians, rigid curricula equating student test scores with mastery, heaps of administrative paperwork, crumbling facilities, supply shortages, inequities in funding between urban and suburban districts, and a lack of diversity among teaching staff. Anderson explains that these and other problems lead half of all new teachers to quit in their first five years on the job. The numbers are even higher among teachers of color. And yet, Anderson writes, having a teacher of color is one of the most important variables leading students of color to complete high school and go to college.

Both Anderson and Hall confirmed independently that, early on, they had discussed the possibility that Hall would leave full-time teaching. Anderson edited the last chapter just before publication to reflect Hall’s decision. Hall can be found on Instagram @mrshallscholars. She has more than 10,000 followers. She reports that she continues to find ways to coach other teachers, especially in areas related to language and literacy.

Given Hall’s departure from the classroom, it’s tempting to see the book as more about leaving than becoming a teacher. It’s to editor Stuart Roberts’s credit that he and Anderson did not feel compelled to sugarcoat the profession and that he kept the book in the Masters at Work series, which will ultimately include about 30 titles. Roberts explained to me that the goal of each book is to introduce a variety of jobs to young people considering careers and also to older people thinking about transitioning to new work. Other professions covered in this nifty series range from neurosurgeon to hairstylist, venture capitalist to crime scene investigator.

“I am so, so proud of Becoming a Teacher,” Roberts said. “It’s important.” He is especially pleased with the ways that Anderson homed in on “bigger issues of identity and equity in education.”

In some ways, Hall’s decision is no surprise, given all that Anderson explains about the difficulties of the profession. But in other ways, Hall’s choice — which Anderson reveals on the second-to-last page of the book — is a stunner. “Effective teaching, like all professions, is a fusion of talents and competencies,” Anderson writes, “among them exceptional oral and verbal communication skills; attentiveness to others’ needs; unending patience and resourcefulness; stellar organization and time management; and a reservoir of motivation.” LaQuisha Hall ticks every box.

Read Becoming a Teacher to appreciate the gifts fine teachers offer their students and, perhaps, to be inspired to give the profession a go. Read Becoming a Teacher as a primer to understand the crisis in American public schooling, elements in place well before Hall made her decision to quit and before Covid struck. Most of all, read Anderson’s vivid portrait to fathom the depth of the loss when such an extraordinary teacher decides to leave her classroom — for her students, for her school, and for us as a nation.

Watch a video clip of mathematician Eugenia Cheng making puff pastry with Stephen Colbert, and you’ll quickly appreciate why her students at the Art Institute of Chicago surely consider themselves lucky. As she engages Colbert in verbal and physical swordplay — bashing butter with a rolling pin — Cheng gets him to experience the power of exponentials by making a mille feuille. She is funny. And she makes math fun.

Cheng stepped away from the conventional life of a tenured scholar at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. to connect with popular audiences. Her previous books include The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, and How to Bake p: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics (in which each chapter begins with a recipe — for pie, of course). Given her current career, it’s no surprise that in her latest book, x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender, Cheng uses wit and playfulness to explain why and how to be done with attitudes she argues perpetuate inequality and harm us all.

Cheng divides her manifesto into two parts, “Gendered Thinking” and “Ungendered Thinking.” She includes an introduction and postscript, the latter written in the first week of the lockdown this past March. She ends with an appendix containing hypothetical conversational ripostes to illustrate how readers might employ what they’ve learned in the book. If, for instance, a sexist co-worker tells you, “One day you’ll learn,” you might be tempted to say, “One day you’ll retire.” Better, she suggests, would be to ask, “What do you think I’ll learn?”

In “Gendered Thinking,” Cheng uses math to investigate problems she identifies with feminism and gender equality. She finds these concepts needlessly divisive because they insist either that men be more like women or that women be more like men. She takes particular umbrage at Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s suggestion that women “lean in” to succeed. By “leaning in,” some women help each other to behave like men, she writes, but they don’t change the gendered paradigm or definition of individual success.

Math can be useful in moving beyond such divisions, Cheng writes, because it “illuminates deep structures built by ideas … often hidden in their complexity.” Category theory, Cheng’s field, helps spot patterns, identify networks, and express them as abstractions, which are, at their simplest, equations. It’s entertaining to watch Cheng illustrate her points with algebra, graphs, and flow charts to underscore her conviction that it’s time to get rid of gender altogether.

In “Ungendered Thinking,” Cheng explores her own terminology, which she links to character. Using different language, she reasons, we move away from gender and towards a fairer, more inclusive world. She writes that her goal is to explain “how to stop perpetuating subtler forms of systemic bias that favor men by favoring — for no good reason — characteristics associated with men.”

Cheng’s chosen words are “ingressive” and “congressive.” She uses these words to separate behavioral characteristics into two groups. Those who behave in “ingressive ways” privilege the self over the community and are “more competitive and adversarial than collaborative.” By comparison, those Cheng describes as “congressive” behave in ways that focus on “society and community over self” and emphasize “interdependence and interconnectedness,” collaboration, and cautiously slow thinking. Taking aim at entrepreneurs and prize-winning scientists, Cheng explains why collaboration and extensive safety nets are as important, if not more so, than aggressive risk-taking and competition.

In the chapters that follow, Cheng provides examples of a more “congressive” world. Several of these chapters are weaker than previous sections and can be repetitive. The parts I found most interesting applied Cheng’s concepts to teaching and research. Rather than rewarding students who are fast and can provide right answers, Cheng says, teachers can emphasize collaboration, contribution to the group, depth, and curiosity. Students in such classrooms understand that “nobody is trying to win but everyone is trying to make sure the group is making progress and learning.” To encourage “congressive” behaviors, teachers can validate students who help others and who can create and improve. When it comes to academic scholarship, emphasis can be on peer-reviewing methodology rather than supposedly path-breaking results. And the academy itself would be vastly more “congressive” and inclusive were it to value teaching, mentoring, outreach, and public engagement — not just getting grants and winning prizes.

Cheng acknowledges that her manifesto to rethink gender might strike others as “a naively utopian dream.” But, she writes, given that we are all trying to find our way through a pandemic, we need some better strategies for leadership. It is not possible, for example, to “outposture a virus.” She hopes by the time readers encounter x + y, the pandemic “will all be over; I certainly hope so.” Six months in, readers still need hope. Perhaps rating presidential candidates on their “congressivity” will pave the way for a better way forward.

Faced with impending climate doom, extreme housing shortages, and a global pandemic that spreads through close human proximity, most people hope Americans will get fewer and farther between. In his new book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, Matthew Yglesias, the 39-year-old cofounder of the news website Vox and host of the podcast The Weeds, argues that all of these issues are better tackled by a U.S. population that’s triple its current size.

Yglesias is less wedded to the one billion count than he is to “thinking bigger” — the figure seems to function mostly as a fun point of comparison. Though a billion-person America would be vastly different from the roughly 330-million-person nation that exists today, it would still be significantly less densely populated than peer countries in Europe. The point being: the idea of having many more American citizens is not that crazy.

Yglesias argues that massive population growth is the galvanizing notion that could finally restore American hegemony and achieve everything from paid family leave to newfound prosperity in the Rust Belt. “The One Billion Americans agenda,” he writes, “is about returning to America’s geopolitical posture at its best, not domineering but self-confident that our country is secure and strong, and that our economic and social system is in fact superior and will be adopted at the end.” He prescribes a European-style social safety net that’s meant to bolster the fertility rate and an expansive, merit-based overhaul of the immigration system. More Americans, he says, will lead to more innovation, more competition, and sustainable economic development.

The book strikes a decidedly optimistic tone. Yglesias argues that the U.S. can and should remain the world’s leading superpower — a statement he says is “uncontroversial,” though that’s likely to be the case only for a conservative swath of the electorate that would probably oppose massive population growth.

Arguments against such growth hinge on the idea that the American economy is a zero-sum game. From this perspective, spreading the wealth of this country’s natural resources among more and more residents would impoverish the nation. “But today, most people don’t work in farms, mines, or factories,” writes Yglesias. “They work in schools, hospitals, restaurants, stores, bars, yoga studios, and salons. And the ‘fertile land’ that people in these lines of work need is access to other people.”

Once this scene is set, Yglesias counters possible objections to a billion-person America one by one. Housing shortages in already overcrowded cities can be solved through pro-development policies and rezoning. Congestion-based tolls, modeled after those successfully implemented in Sweden, should replace the gas tax and prevent traffic jams. Public transit projects should be modeled after the cheaper, better ones in Europe.

The federal government should decentralize, moving headquarters of agencies like the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to shrinking cities like Cleveland or St. Louis. Likewise, there is no reason for Silicon Valley, overflowing as it is, to host so much of the nation’s tech industry. The struggling news industry should ditch its high-rent headquarters in Washington, D.C., and New York City in favor of cheaper digs midway between, in Philadelphia.

One objection Yglesias claims to take especially seriously: won’t tripling the American population lead to an extreme rise in greenhouse gas emissions?

Keeping global populations poor for the sake of preventing further climate damage, he argues, would be deeply immoral. On the other hand, because climate change will disrupt certain parts of the world more harshly than others, “reducing barriers to population movement is a highly effective way of reducing warming’s costs.”

According to the author, innovation, largely spurred by immigrants, will solve climate change — so long as policy makers fund the easy stuff, such as targeted research and development, “basic science,” and early deployment. Here, Yglesias once again leans on the idea that modern living standards are more dependent on innovation than natural resources. This is “the fundamental reason that population growth increases rather than reduces prosperity,” he writes. “The climate problem raises the stakes but doesn’t fundamentally alter the calculus.”

The author seems to think there is no threshold, no point at which population growth becomes a problem. Or, perhaps, he thinks the realization of his own hope for one billion Americans is so unlikely that the environmental implications aren’t worth following up on. A bigger, better, greener, more marketable approach to climate change isn’t played out here in an innovative or detailed way.

Instead, he claims there is plenty of space in the U.S. and plenty of resources for a prosperous tomorrow, if only we could “break out of the current dysfunctional veto-laden approach to building things, and find a way back to a future-oriented mindset that says change is good.” This is the fundamental prerequisite to his agenda: that Americans should embrace change.

One Billion Americans presents many interesting, progressive ideas. But so does the Democratic Party’s platform this year, and even the “Priorities” page of Sen. Ed Markey’s website. Maybe the push toward a more densely populated America will be the policy agenda that overcomes the stagnation and dysfunction in its politics today — but calls for welcoming foreigners and more “responsible public figures” have achieved little to date.