Latest
November 1, 2022
Four Stories | Fiction
Garielle Lutz
It wasn’t early retirement, it was a layoff late in life, and now that jobs were about to open up somewhere else, in some other division, the man kept being told not to make himself a stranger. Some days he could make himself feel just a stone’s throw from his old life. On other days he became known as the perfect guest. One host was a woman whose face kept...
November 1, 2022
Very Polite | Fiction
Percival Everett
I drove onto the road from the Goodwill parking lot without a mishap. I wondered whether that was the same as driving out with a hap. I could see that my route was exceedingly simple, one road, Interstate 95 all the way to Washington. I was not driving south because I had been instructed to drive south, though I had been, but because I, contrary to my nature, was concerned...
November 1, 2022
War Kink | Fiction
Bobuq Sayed
The war in Afghanistan was ruining my sex life. All month, I’d been trying to avoid that annoying question from Martin. “But, wait, where is your family from?” he asked over the shower steam the second time we had sex. I laughed and tweaked the ends of his sensitive little nipples with suds. A week later, he tried again. “Sorry, I didn’t catch it the first time, I know you...
October 24, 2022
Arrangements | Fiction
Vivian Hu
When I felt particularly bad about the night before, I chugged a glass of saltwater, to flush out the toxins. If I timed it right, I could dial in to our Monday call and say hello before situating myself over the toilet, my insides liquefying into painful sludge as my coworkers said their good mornings and asked about the weather in Seattle or Houston or Tampa or wherever it was...
November 1, 2022
Just Beans | What Was Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism?
Malcolm Harris
In May of 1985, following the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s final defeat of the Somoza regime, the Reagan administration imposed an embargo on Nicaragua. The White House paired this open economic aggression with more covert forms, channeling money and weapons to counterrevolutionary forces — Contra groups who counted industrial terrorism among their tactics, burning literal tons of product in raids on government-allied coffee cooperatives. This multifront attack made the Nicaraguan...
October 20, 2022
“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...
October 18, 2022
America’s Son | Who’s Afraid of Hunter Biden?
Tarpley Hitt
It is easy to discount most new entries in the canon of conservative cinema, on account of the fact that they tend to be bad. By conservative cinema I mean overtly partisan agitprop, not the Clint Eastwood kind, and by bad I mean their dialogue is sermonic, their symbolism is obvious, their edits waffle between awkward and uncanny, and their casts represent a collection of Hollywood afterthoughts who ascribe their...
October 12, 2022
Controlled | Annie Ernaux and the Millennial Sex Novel
Noor Qasim
Let me tell you a story. I was living in New York and going on dates with people I met on the internet. I was looking for love and was mostly getting sex, for which I was grateful, even if I was a little lonely. I went on a date. It was a third date, and on our second we’d slept together. It was good, the sort of gasping, grasping...
June 14, 2022
Not-So-Magic Kingdom | Disney Takes on the Affordable Housing Crisis
Gaby Del Valle
Celebration was supposed to be the perfect town. Entirely planned by the Walt Disney Company in the early ’90s, the Central Florida development — located less than a dozen miles from Magic Kingdom — was billed as a 1950s-style suburb for the twenty-first century. Celebration would be “a place that takes you back to that time of innocence,” one early ad for the community promised, “a new American town of...
June 14, 2022
The Air We Move Through | Rhetoric, Bureaucracy, and the Immigration Debate
Elisa Gonzalez
In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at a privately operated immigration detention center in Irwin County, Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint that alleged “jarring medical neglect” at the facility. The brief was 27 pages long, but it was only the contents of a page-and-a-half (section 4, subsection D) that caught the public’s imagination: hysterectomies conducted without the consent or knowledge of migrant women. Wooten’s account of a “uterus collector”...
