Latest
February 3, 2021
[A Moment Breaking Loose from the Past Becomes the Voice Inside Your Head] | Poetry
Jackie Wang
Where in this architecture of dust will you find the space to build a house that does not split? There I see your hand trying to escape the raw activity of laying stones Formations will spryly emerge the dampened loam shaped into something terrible From the mud she tells me, “Some days I wake up laughing because these forms are so unnecessary” “Some days I wake up crying because these...
February 3, 2021
Strong Female Leads | The Reese Witherspoon Literary Canon
Marella Gayla
In 2012, Reese Witherspoon was thirty-six years old and sick of Hollywood. Her acting career had slowed since her Oscar win in 2005; she had filed for divorce in 2006 and appeared in a few box office duds, and she wasn’t encouraged by the sexist, stultifying scripts she was receiving. Witherspoon requested meetings with studio bigwigs, and was disappointed to find that they didn’t care about developing stories with female...
February 3, 2021
Not All Millennials | Generational Wealth and the New Inequality
Kiara Barrow
Peddlers of self-help and pop-psychology are quick to assure us that we’re each our own toughest critic. In fact, it’s often our peers who will exact the harshest judgments, being best positioned to sniff out the social cues and latent hierarchies that are most legible within a shared milieu. Last year, Pete Buttigieg, the only millennial candidate in the Democratic Presidential field, failed to win the support of other members...
February 2, 2021
First-Person Shooter Ideology | The Cultural Contradictions of Call of Duty
Daniel Bessner
For decades, historians of the twentieth century have debated why, exactly, the United States fought a protracted, destructive, and ultimately pointless Cold War with the Soviet Union. Some have claimed that the United States was simply reacting rationally to Joseph Stalin’s provocations; “the brave and essential response of free men to communist aggression,” in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Others, including Stephen Wertheim and myself, have pointed to the...
February 1, 2021
The Original Karen | Colonial Nostalgia and Nairobi’s Out of Africa Industry
Carey Baraka
After Kenya declared independence from British rule in 1963, there came a flood of renamings. Schools, suburbs, and roads were rechristened in ways that spoke to a new idea of what it meant to be authentically Kenyan. In Nairobi, “Queens Way” became “Mama Ngina Street,” and roads named after the first four colonial commissioners were redesignated for African leaders: Dedan Kimathi, Muindi Mbingu, Daudi Dabasso Wabera, and Mbiyu Koinange, respectively....
January 28, 2021
A Pool of One’s Own | Group Biographies and the Female Friendship Vogue
Noelle Bodick
No friendships worthy of Flaubert’s exacting pen emerge from the Ursuline convent of Emma Bovary’s schooldays. Blame it on the local black market. Out of sight of the nuns, a matronly seamstress stashes books “full of love and lovers” in her apron smocks and slips copies to the older girls — hypnotizing tales of moonlit crossings, fainting damsels, horses ridden to death by perpetually late beaux. Only lovers (noblemen in...
January 27, 2021
The Land Was Ours | Trump, Biden, and Public Lands
Nick Bowlin
Northern Nevada, not far from the Oregon border, is a vast steppe, where rolling hills and basins stretch on for hundreds of miles beneath sagebrush and other shrubs that can endure the cold winters and dry summers. Beneath the surface are deposits of minerals, the sort that make our phones glow and electric cars run. It is one of the darkest regions — with the lowest levels of light pollution...
January 25, 2021
How To Be Oblivious | Complacency and Doom in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind
Hannah Gold
Social media didn’t invent apathy, but it has a particular genius for reproducing it. At times, scrolling through one’s feed feels like reading a rollicking, absorbing social novel, but in fragments, disordered, and with the reverse effect, since when you lose yourself in it, your interest goes too, and everything is vaguely similar: what you buy, what you owe, what tragedy befell someone else. Nestled among your preferred ideology, drama,...
February 3, 2021
“A Punishing American Zeitgeist” | An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh
The Drift
With Trump finally, dramatically out of office, the efforts to historicize his tenure have already begun. What is his legacy? How did we get here? What’s next? Long an astute commentator on race, imperialism, and the history of American political struggle, Nikhil Pal Singh has been an essential scholarly voice amidst the chaos that defined the Trump era, and the online noise that continues even in his absence. Singh is...
February 3, 2021
Editors’ Note | The First But Not the Last
Even before he was elected, CNN reported, Donald Trump had “awakened a feminist revolution in America.” The Access Hollywood tape in which he uttered the phrase “grab ’em by the pussy” was greeted as the end of the election, almost universally expected to spark the backlash that would ensure his defeat and usher in a new era for women. The future was female, and for a brief moment, even Fox...
