“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...

“A Catastrophic Loss of Faith in America” | An Interview with Pankaj Mishra

The Drift

Over the past few months, each day has brought devastating new reports from the war in Ukraine. Beyond the horror and grief, it’s been difficult to know quite how to react — and how to interpret the mainstream commentary. We’ve wondered, at times, if there’s a reason we feel a bit out of the loop, as if everyone else is having a conversation for which we’ve missed the subtext. Maybe...

“A New Form of War” | An Interview with Samuel Moyn

The Drift

Since 2008, politicians have campaigned (successfully) on the promise to get out of Afghanistan. Finally, this August, U.S. forces withdrew, and the government our military had installed unravelled overnight. After nearly twenty years, it was now clear, the U.S. had accomplished nothing besides untold death and destruction. All at once, prominent commentators emerged to decry the move and lambaste the Biden administration for its strategic blunder. To take the long...

“A Radical Demonstration of ‘America First’” | An Interview with Adam Tooze

The Drift

A year into a crisis of world-historic proportions, and what have we learned? After flubbing every aspect of the pandemic response, from masks to contact tracing, the U.S. has been rewarded with a return to what seems a lot like normal life. The market — following a series of erratic plot twists and what looked like it should have been another Great Depression — seems to have bounced back stronger...

“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...