Latest
November 8, 2023
Craving | Poetry
Emma Winsor Wood
In the aquarium, the fish “dart,” their movements “jerky” as if afraid I will “scoop” them out of the “water” and into my “mouth,” or “as if” they are tiny machines, programmed to “dart” so their scales “catch” the light “just so.” When “pregnant” for the “first time,” with a “daughter,” I began to eat fish for the “first time” in “twelve” years. I ate it “for” her, felt “no...
November 8, 2023
Greenness | Fiction
Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind
The professor is, of course, talking. The notion that a sentence cannot be a fragment. Adverbs, adverbs. Every language pretends that its word for nostalgia is untranslatable. Camus killed his mother. Tezeta, saudade. He missed her, probably. The professor’s lips are making noises. As professors’ lips are wont to do. A narrator is rather like a fiber supplement. Final papers. Samuel Richardson folded a song into a book. In fact,...
November 8, 2023
2129 | Poetry
Prince Bush
I overslept. I had an hour To look at Jupiter, or I had To wait 100 years. I needed a telescope. I, at least, needed Binoculars. It was its closest In opposition. I knew Someone who could get Only so close to me. For casual observers, It would appear the same. I spotted Mars and Almost walked away.
November 8, 2023
Lost in Translation | On J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole
Ella Fox-Martens
When my grandfather started to die, the first thing he lost was language. Like most people in South Africa, he had been multilingual, fluent in English and isiZulu, competent in Afrikaans and isiXhosa. This ease of passage remained a continual point of pride for him, as the spoken fabric of the country was rewoven after the end of apartheid. When Nelson Mandela, the son of a Xhosa chief, ascended to...
November 8, 2023
We Can No Longer Afford Illusions | The Supreme Court and the Left
Alexandra Brodsky, Andy Liu, Aziz Huq, Aziz Rana, Ben Sobel, Diana Reddy, Duncan Hosie, Eleni Schirmer, Henry Hicks IV, Nick Martin, Noah Rosenblum, Rhiannon Hamam, Samuel Moyn, Steven Donziger
That the Supreme Court is ethically compromised has become almost comically obvious. Recent sweeping decisions, from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the dismantling of affirmative action, to the extension of innocent Americans’ prison sentences, have been handed down in the midst of myriad scandals involving justices and their wealthy, purportedly uncorrupt friends. The high court, now dominated by conservatives, is not just independent but dangerously rogue. For Issue...
November 8, 2023
The Ultimate Originalist Stamp of Approval
Nick Martin
In Haaland v. Brackeen, decided this June, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion again reminded readers just how rarely the high court has demonstrated a clear, coherent approach toward federal Indian law. The case focused on the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which was passed in 1978 to reduce the number of Native children removed from their families and to preferentially place Native adoptees and foster youth within...
November 8, 2023
A Collective of Freelance Lawyers
Eleni Schirmer
The Supreme Court isn’t as much a body of government as it is a collective of freelance lawyers, and Biden v. Nebraska was less a case than a grab bag of grievances dumped out by disgruntled ideologues. Six Republican-led states, in order to prove injury by the student-debt cancellation policy, claimed that local entities would lose money, which would harm the states in various ways. Missouri argued that it would...
November 8, 2023
An Old Story
Noah Rosenblum
For the first time in years, there are signs that liberals are ready to give up their infatuation with the Supreme Court. While it has not come easy, it is long past time. And there are promising avenues for reform on the horizon that could wrest control from right-wing ideologues on the bench. Liberals’ past resistance to reform has seemed connected to their belief in an old story about the...
November 8, 2023
A Judicial Coup
Steven Donziger
The Supreme Court has become a political and not a judicial body. Its members wear black robes, look like impartial justices, and try to act like impartial justices, but the majority — Alito, Thomas, Barrett, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh — were placed there by a dark money network to carry out an extremist agenda on social issues and a corporatist agenda on economic issues, all against the will of the people....
November 8, 2023
A Tradition of Radical Imagining
Henry Hicks IV
It was only twenty years ago that the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, struck down bans on “homosexual conduct” and legalized physical intimacy between same-sex couples nationwide. Universal marriage equality, following the Court’s holding in Obergefell v. Hodges, has only been guaranteed since 2015. Taken together, these cases represent an extreme transformation in legal doctrine in only twelve years. One could say that the last two decades of legal...
