“The Impossible Is Always Happening” | An Interview with Saree Makdisi

The Drift

Since October 7, as Israel has attacked the Gaza Strip, young people at colleges across the country have led protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza and in support of a cease-fire. In the halls of Congress and the newspapers of record, around television sets and holiday tables, these protests ignited a set of secondary debates: about free speech, slogans, anti-Semitism, and the concept of debate itself. To help...

Shed Light | Poetry

Michael D. Snediker

Argo ergo an ego in the rye & once only once he laughs at the sun. Paired into alibis, asking a lot then (steadily) a little less. Stripped down to my funny little hip & a watercolor fuss waving it away. His lower tone, before being asked to cope wherever the kite gone missing sailed into the suffering branch. A furnace of settled hours. & the vision of a sudden...

You Made a List of What You Wanted from the Earth | Poetry

Robert Wood Lynn

and I wasn’t on it. RASPBERRIES appeared twice. I am grateful to know you well enough to understand this wasn’t by accident. You listed SLEEPING IN right above MORNING GLORIES, your own way of including SITTING WITH CONTRADICTION which would be on mine. Maybe the only item. Or maybe not — there’s you and the poems of Catherine Barnett and also I like the color of morning glories but not...

carrion | Poetry

Nicole Adabunu

the dead deer we saw on the way to your place, brain knitted wet outside its chest, once lighthouse twice blooded, pulse instinct. a body shot out of its head quarters. every car’s a fan tonight, slowing to watch a heartbeat unheat itself. who do we rot back to? steel aluminum stare, ants crawling the iced unblinking. the radio’s playing a song about getting undressed. wanting someone down to the...

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...

Great Personal Risk

S.C. Cornell

“Every miscarriage is a work accident,” Silvia Federici wrote in 1974, in the essay “Wages Against Housework.” Federici’s argument is simple. If housework is work — if cooking, cleaning, childbearing, and child-rearing are both tiring for the worker and productive for society — then why shouldn’t it be waged? What, besides a very long and successful campaign to dupe women, could lead them to do so much labor without pay? ...

An Unholy Alliance

Gaby Del Valle

To exist is to suffer; to bring another person into this world to suffer alongside you is an act of inexcusable cruelty. So says David Benatar, an anti-natalist philosopher who argues that procreation is inherently immoral. His fringe ideology, debated on digital fora and in graduate school classrooms, has yet to gain much real-world traction. But as ice caps melt and global temperatures rise, a different sort of anti-natalist sentiment...

Distress Signals

Karim Kazemi

In early December, I bought a tray of origami paper and a bottle of hypoallergenic zinc shampoo for a teenage girl I do not know personally. I had found my way to her holiday wish list through Transanta, a mutual-support platform that connects anonymous gift givers with transgender youth across the U.S. and Canada. The letters that accompany the wish lists often detail struggles to pay rent, medical bills, and...

Prehistoric Arrangements

Dan Brooks

There is a surplus of children in this world; ask any orphan. They will probably frame the issue as a shortage of parents, and they might be onto something. One Thursday afternoon last fall, I escaped to a bar to read a book about hunter-gatherers, and a man my age struck up a conversation about whether, all things considered, we might have been better off under prehistoric arrangements. “No child...

Fraud Everywhere

Elisa Gonzalez

On July 18, 2019, I dialed the National Visa Center 53 times. If the queue was full — it often was — the automated system played a short message, then ended the call. If it wasn’t, the system played a short message and placed me on hold. After two and a half hours, the person I eventually reached couldn’t solve my problem. Afterwards, I wept as hard as a despairing...