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January 24, 2022
The Complete | Fiction
Gabriel Smith
It was the no-summer summer. Nobody had to work so we ate and drank in the streets. We shared stories and videos of mob violence, food shortages, burning buildings, black men beaten or shot to death. The climate changed in faraway places. The Americans ended the endless war. A sleepwalking woman attempted her former commute and stepped in front of a high-speed train. At the Empty Olympics in Tokyo, athletes...
January 31, 2022
If Only Someone Would Get Aquinas in Here | Fiction
Missouri Williams
The schoolmaster leaned over, a puff of black robes, and read to them from the dusty book on the desk in front of him. Today the world was weaker: a milky sun hung in the sky and wanted nothing to do with the earth. What seeped through the cracked glass of the window behind him was a thin, soupy light that washed the schoolroom a bleached yellow, and this meant...
January 31, 2022
A History of Pigs in America | Fiction
Hannah Kauders
Again, a naked woman in the living room. This one is pantless, diminutive, with a lavender bob cut just below the ears. I know she sees me because she scurries from the bathroom across the hall into Jorge’s room, pulling the open sides of his hoodie around her. I never felt weird about meeting Jorge’s conquests when Rafael was here. It seemed natural to bear accidental witness to our roommate’s...
January 31, 2022
Untranslatability | Fiction
James Yeh
1. It’s an old story. Two people together, simple, straightforward. She’s a translator; he is, I am sorry to say, a writer. Emily’s more successful, Charles more embittered. He hadn’t meant to end up like this — who does? But that’s life sometimes. Let’s say they’re in their early thirties, have been together a while, weathered the storms to emerge more or less intact, stronger even, when Emily receives a...
January 20, 2022
College Debt | USC and the Problem of the Private University
Piper French
Mark Ridley-Thomas had a plan. He also had an accomplice: University of Southern California dean Marilyn Flynn. The problem was that the plan was no good — totally baffling, in fact, like a Coen brothers plot rejected for implausibility. Its central character seemed too bumbling, too ready to risk it all, to be believable for a man of Ridley-Thomas’s position: a giant of Los Angeles politics, then representing two million...
January 19, 2022
Vibe, Mood, Energy | Or, Bust-Time Reenchantment
Mitch Therieau
The products of mass culture have learned to speak a new language: the language of the occult. Come in, an app pleads, and listen to an algorithmically curated playlist of songs that “fit the vibe.” “We caught a vibe!” yelps a voice in one of those songs; it isn’t immediately clear whether this means caught as in brass ring or caught as in disease. It’s hard, a marketing email laments,...
September 27, 2021
Stuffing Ourselves | Amazon, the Postal Service, and the Tyranny of Logistics
Jake Bittle
There is a delivery service that employs around half a million people in the United States. It delivers billions of packages per year to tens of millions of addresses. It has hundreds of warehouses and sorting facilities, and its packages travel on thousands of identical trucks and vans. The delivery service has the extraordinary ability to get a box from one side of the country to another in just a...
September 27, 2021
Truth and Consequences | Documentaries and the Art of Manipulation
Blair McClendon
The best way to begin is with a gun. We don’t need to see it, but we need to know it’s there. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to convince an American that one is nearby. Start with murky fragments of a city skyline, lights piercing the falling night. Then a disembodied voice speaks as if the story has already begun, providing basic exposition: Dallas, October, Thursday night. A blue-eyed man,...
September 21, 2021
Persistence Pays | A Young Readers' Report
Sophie Haigney
“Harriet Tubman was born a slave, and her story could have ended there. Instead, she persisted, escaping from slavery and becoming the most famous ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad,” begins the first section of Chelsea Clinton’s baffling 2017 children’s book, She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, illustrated by Alexandra Boiger. True to its subtitle, the book marches on through thirteen stories of women persisting. Helen Keller persisted,...
September 27, 2021
Invested Development | Hacking Ethiopia’s Future
Britt H. Young
A hotel app, but for quarantine! A grocery delivery app, but for people in lockdown! The frenzy of projects proposed by the Ethiopia Covid-19 Response Team (ECRT) to bolster the country’s pandemic response felt appropriate for a group of mostly techies who had never worked in humanitarian or developmental organizations. “We must help the Ministry of Health, give them everything — our best abilities, hearts, and creativity,” one volunteer commanded...
