About Me
I'm a journalist, essayist, and critic and the executive editor of Jewish Currents. Previously, I was a staff writer at The New Republic and a contributing writer at Slate. My writing also appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Baffler, Harper’s, and Ploughshares, among other places. My essays have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021 and The Opening of the American Mind: Ten Years of The Point, and listed as “notable” in The Best American Essays 2022.
You can reach me at nora.caplanbricker@gmail.com.
A Few Recent Pieces
Staging Resistance: on the novels of Isabella Hammad (Jewish Currents)
A World Inside Out: on the countercultural fiction of Katherine Dunn (The Nation)
Days of Rest: on reconciling anti-work politics with an attachment to meaningful work, especially the work of political struggle (co-written with my colleagues at Jewish Currents)
Fables of Finitude: on Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour (Jewish Currents)
Long May They Reign: on monarch butterflies, the people trying to save them from extinction, and the shape of environmental grief (The Atavist)
Republished in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021, edited by Ed Yong
Vivian Gornick Doesn’t Get the Hype: on the critic and memoirist reckoning with the adoration of a new generation of readers (The Cut)
Featured in New York’s “One Great Story” newsletter and chosen as one of Longreads’ top five stories of the week
Thresholds (or, On Donation): on love, gifts, and bone marrow transplants (Ploughshares, Winter 2020-21)
Listed as “notable” in The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee
The Depression-Era Book that Wanted To Cancel the Rent: on the “housers” of the New Deal and the rent strikes of the pandemic (The New Yorker)
In the Gendered Economy, Women Are Perpetual Debtors: on Kate Manne’s Entitled (The New Yorker)
Preservation Acts: on the ethical dimensions of archiving a social movement’s online imprint (Harper’s)
Women Are From Venus: on Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women (The Baffler)
Successful People Listen to Audiobooks: on my conflicted relationship with Audible and its assault on leisure time (The Baffler)
Choose Your Own Family: on feminist arguments for abolishing the family and Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now (The New Republic)