The Editors
Editors’ Note | Friends of Peace
The Editors
Ten thousand protestors assembled in Washington Square Park before heading up Fifth Avenue to 26th Street and looping back down to Union Square. Their signs bore phrases like “NO NATION CAN AFFORD BOTH WAR AND CIVILIZATION” and “WHAT PRICE GLORY?” This event, reported in Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, occurred in 1935, well before the Nazis invaded Poland; in 1936, Germany was the third-largest purchaser of American arms. But, sensing the...
Editors’ Note | Corrupt Organizations
The Editors
In our last issue, Piper French took aim at a statute that, she warned, was ballooning out of control. Debuted in the ’70s to curtail the Mafia, RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) enabled prosecutors to go after Mob bosses for crimes carried out by their underlings. Decades later, it’s now being deployed against targets as disparate as rappers and schoolteachers, on alarmingly shaky grounds. Since we published that...
Editors’ Note | Extremely Online
The Editors
We launched The Drift three years ago by posting a link to Twitter. At the time, people half-joked that social media was the only conduit to the outside world; certainly, it was the only way we could have presented our work to anything resembling a public. That was a singular season, a summer of protest that came on the heels of a spring indoors — a period when it still...
Editors’ Note | Circling the Drain
The Editors
It’s a truism that there are no new stories, that each narrative, no matter how novel it appears, is actually an iteration of one of three or seven or twelve archetypal plots. Maybe so, but the cultural landscape feels especially grim these days. After the shock of March 2020, something like a renaissance was supposed to play out — that’s what happens, the forecasters forecasted, when the patterns of ordinary...
Editors’ Note | Hindsight Is 2020
The Editors
“The pandemic is over,” Joe Biden declared in September on 60 Minutes, in a farcical reprise of George W. Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” photo op. The long-running T.V. program was an ideally irrelevant venue for such an irrelevant statement, in a moment that encapsulates the broader aura of irrelevance that has surrounded the Biden presidency. At least until the August passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), it looked as though Biden's...
