Heather Radke on the Profound, Unruly Butt

“Human bodies—and honestly probably animal bodies too—resist our weird human need to categorize and order and manage. Our bodies not going to let us be interchangeable parts on a car. That’s not how it works.”

Heather Radke is the author of Butts: A Backstory as well as an essayist, journalist, and contributing editor and reporter at Radiolab, the Peabody Award­–winning program from WNYC. She has written for publications including The Believer, Longreads, and The Paris Review, and she teaches at Columbia University’s creative writing MFA Program. Before becoming a writer, Heather worked as a curator at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago.