Latest
September 27, 2021
Essay | Poetry
Elisa Gonzalez
Before, no rain fell because I needed none — good in any case, because, Homer writes, Gods are daunting when they appear as they are. A student emails that class is a struggle (in a sense): I need help, he says, understanding the Problems of Mass Incarnation. In the garden, sunflower heads hoist and swing. Rain-shadow jumps through the door. Yesterday my bicycle ran over a yellow snake. Don’t we...
September 27, 2021
The Sun Sets, Input Not Detected | Poetry
Greg Nissan
The guide exits the square as anyone would, drawn by dusk to the edges of rivers a pulse erupts, parade of intervals we could fill pointing to beer drinkers or the mayflies but either way to sound a space for our recurrence, where the promise of the night and the night coincide tomorrow, if you’ll join us. I won’t deny I wrote alone I am a cold metal feather. I...
September 27, 2021
“Determined to Wait” | Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Around the World
Carey Baraka, Meher Ahmad, Nicole Froio, Pamela Maddock, Peter Vale, Tryggvi Brynjarsson, Zoey Poll
As the Delta variant spreads, much has been made of the American anti-vax movement — its political character, its expressions, its impact. Elsewhere, the question of who has access to vaccines has frequently been more urgent than who is choosing to get one. And yet, across the globe, we’re seeing instances of vaccine hesitancy and refusal, for a wide variety of reasons. We asked writers around the world: Who’s vaccine-skeptical,...
September 27, 2021
Like a Colossus | Ben Rhodes Goes Looking for Democracy
Parvin Khan
In both his first and second books, published three years apart, Ben Rhodes recalls a turn of phrase from the end of the last millennium that left a deep impression on him: “America bestrides the world like a colossus.” The neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote those words in a 1999 column for Time called “A Second American Century?” about the unipolar system that seemed to have emerged after the Cold...
September 27, 2021
Editors’ Note | Eighteen Months
The Editors
The first print issue of The Drift is almost exactly eighteen months overdue. At the beginning of March 2020, we were gearing up to launch our magazine. We had edited twelve pieces, picked out our fonts, run our fingers over paper stock and made final selections. The idea, then seemingly foolproof, was to order a shipment of magazines to one of our apartments and recruit friends to help us carry them...
September 23, 2021
“Left in the Dark” | Covid Behind Bars
April Harris, Christopher Blackwell, Corey Devon Arthur, Darla Jones, Felix Sitthivong, Joel Castón, Olethus Hill Jr., Patrick Stephens, Wesley Williams
Almost as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, writers rushed to narrativize the social experiment that was “lockdown.” Some of the reports, including those on the risks undertaken by workers newly deemed “essential,” have felt necessary and urgent. Others less so, like the slew of navel-gazing “quarantine diaries” produced last spring. (One prominent novelist compared her experience sheltering in place in her Los Angeles mansion to “doing time.”) Less visible...
September 22, 2021
Dead Poet Anxiety | John Ashbery in the Age of Social Media
David Schurman Wallace
Sometimes the best thing for a poet’s reputation is to die. It is preferable to do this while still young — a brief life can acquire a powerful shape, in the way Keats’s “This Living Hand” is more charged for breaking off abruptly. We stand, as they say, on the shoulders of giants, and after they are interred in the pantheon, we draw from their mythos as well as their...
September 20, 2021
Parent Trap | Fiction
Hannah Gold
I. Early on in my publishing career, which was still early when it ended, I looked up what “congenial” means on my phone but it autofilled “congenital” into the dictionary due to prior use. In this way I came to believe “congenial” means having an essential condition or deformation present since birth. By the time I realized my mistake I’d already migrated from the world of reputable words to that...
September 17, 2021
Case Sensitive | Why We Shouldn't Capitalize "Black"
Nicholas Whittaker
Every so often, an apparently seismic shift in American race talk occurs — “Negro” to “black” in the 1960s, “black” to “African American” in the 1980s, and back to “black” more recently. The summer of 2020 marked the latest linguistic revolution, as a swath of major news outlets opted, as a rule, to capitalize the “B” in “black” — a change swiftly embraced in everyday use. The linguistic revolution took place...
September 14, 2021
XOXO, Ruling Class | Gossip Girl, The O.C., and the New Gilded Age
David Klion
In 1976, the year Josh Schwartz was born in Providence, one tenth of one percent of American households controlled 7.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. By 1995, the year Schwartz graduated from a private, arts-oriented high school, that share had risen to 13.5 percent. By 2003, when the Schwartz-penned high school drama The O.C. premiered on Fox, it was at 15.9 percent; by 2007, when the Schwartz-produced Gossip Girl premiered...
