The Editors
Editors’ Note | Country Over Party
The Editors
Joe Biden’s first campaign for president, in the 1988 election cycle, met with a swift and ignominious demise. The Delaware senator’s attempts to cast himself as the candidate of youth and change — the standard-bearer of the “Pepsi Generation,” a Kennedy for the ’80s — fell flat. (Perhaps voters had some premonition of the senescent egomaniac we know today.) Three months after the campaign’s launch, the scandals, or, more precisely,...
Editors’ Note | Walled Off
The Editors
Everything about the hulking, sclerotic American state seems to move on autopilot. The levers of power — let alone of hope or change, the watchwords of another, now-distant election season — appear entirely out of reach. The illusion that the American electorate will in any meaningful way “make its voice heard” is looking especially threadbare this year. Free (or free-ish) elections are by definition not entirely predictable, but this fall’s...
Editors’ Note | Friends of Peace
The Editors
Ten thousand protestors assembled in Washington Square Park before heading up Fifth Avenue to 26th Street and looping back down to Union Square. Their signs bore phrases like “NO NATION CAN AFFORD BOTH WAR AND CIVILIZATION” and “WHAT PRICE GLORY?” This event, reported in Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, occurred in 1935, well before the Nazis invaded Poland; in 1936, Germany was the third-largest purchaser of American arms. But, sensing the...
Editors’ Note | Corrupt Organizations
The Editors
In our last issue, Piper French took aim at a statute that, she warned, was ballooning out of control. Debuted in the ’70s to curtail the Mafia, RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) enabled prosecutors to go after Mob bosses for crimes carried out by their underlings. Decades later, it’s now being deployed against targets as disparate as rappers and schoolteachers, on alarmingly shaky grounds. Since we published that...
Editors’ Note | Extremely Online
The Editors
We launched The Drift three years ago by posting a link to Twitter. At the time, people half-joked that social media was the only conduit to the outside world; certainly, it was the only way we could have presented our work to anything resembling a public. That was a singular season, a summer of protest that came on the heels of a spring indoors — a period when it still...
