The Drift
“There’s a Lot More That Needs to Be Done” | An Interview with Barbara Smith
The Drift
“Where would Black feminism be today if it wasn’t for Barbara Smith?” asked the organizing collective Black Women Radicals in 2020. Where indeed? Smith’s influence on Black and queer feminist politics is immeasurable. She helped found the Combahee River Collective, whose 1977 manifesto coined the phrase “identity politics,” and shepherded the emergence of the style of leftist politics that we now call intersectional. As cofounder of Kitchen Table: Women of...
“Feels Like Life” | An Interview with Barbara Kruger
The Drift
When news broke in June that the Supreme Court had struck down Roe v. Wade, we were not the only ones who thought back to Barbara Kruger’s iconic silkscreen “Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground).” Originally created in 1989, the piece, for better or worse, remains timely — like much of Kruger’s other work. Her immediately recognizable and frequently imitated style has resulted in some of the most indelible images...
“A Catastrophic Loss of Faith in America” | An Interview with Pankaj Mishra
The Drift
Over the past few months, each day has brought devastating new reports from the war in Ukraine. Beyond the horror and grief, it’s been difficult to know quite how to react — and how to interpret the mainstream commentary. We’ve wondered, at times, if there’s a reason we feel a bit out of the loop, as if everyone else is having a conversation for which we’ve missed the subtext. Maybe...
“A New Form of War” | An Interview with Samuel Moyn
The Drift
Since 2008, politicians have campaigned (successfully) on the promise to get out of Afghanistan. Finally, this August, U.S. forces withdrew, and the government our military had installed unravelled overnight. After nearly twenty years, it was now clear, the U.S. had accomplished nothing besides untold death and destruction. All at once, prominent commentators emerged to decry the move and lambaste the Biden administration for its strategic blunder. To take the long...
“A Radical Demonstration of ‘America First’” | An Interview with Adam Tooze
The Drift
A year into a crisis of world-historic proportions, and what have we learned? After flubbing every aspect of the pandemic response, from masks to contact tracing, the U.S. has been rewarded with a return to what seems a lot like normal life. The market — following a series of erratic plot twists and what looked like it should have been another Great Depression — seems to have bounced back stronger...
