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June 24, 2025
State of Exception | National Security Governance, Then and Now
David Klion
Minutes into his January inaugural address inside the U.S. Capitol dome, standing before the leaders of both parties and the world’s wealthiest tech oligarchs, Donald Trump declared a national emergency. America was confronting “threats and invasions” from across the U.S.-Mexico border, the new president explained, and extraordinary steps would be necessary “to defend our country” from migrants. “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored,” he promised. With...
May 29, 2025
Brutality and Opacity | Birthright Citizenship Under Attack
Elisa Gonzalez
Among the barrage of edicts issued by Trump in the early days of his second term was Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which seeks to redefine the citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment by revoking birthright citizenship for the children of all undocumented, and some authorized, immigrants. Judge John Coughenour, the Reagan appointee who first stayed the order, called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” So far,...
June 24, 2025
“All Sticks, No Carrots” | An Interview with Adam Tooze
The Drift Editors
In our 2021 conversation with economic historian Adam Tooze, we grappled with what was beginning to feel “a lot like normal life” after the unprecedented shocks of the pandemic. Today, the idea of economic turbulence as exceptional sounds almost quaint. Donald Trump’s second administration seems determined to stress-test nearly every assumption that guided post-pandemic economic policy — not to mention the longstanding international order. To help us understand what these...
June 24, 2025
Editors’ Note | The View from Somewhere
The Editors
Much about the world in which we are celebrating the fifth anniversary of The Drift would have startled us when we published our first issue in the summer of 2020 — including the fact that we’ve managed to hang on for this long. At the time, it was difficult to imagine any aspect of the future with much clarity. A global pandemic had thrown our lives into a still, repetitive...
June 24, 2025
Streaming | Poetry
T. J. Cusano
Pirating the latest prestige drama, I am faced with a question: Do you want to fuck an older woman who lives in your area? No. I’m not interested in that. I click full screen as the hero tries to drown his daughter in the bathtub. He does it as if he knows it’s a movie, I’m watching him and I want him to go through with it. Coward. The baby...
June 24, 2025
List of Programs Broadcast by CNN, Late Winter 2021 | Poetry
Sasha Debevec-McKenney
I have to have an Early Start. I wriggle into the New Day like my favorite pair of yellow pants. My apartment is my CNN Newsroom and the female anchor scratches in her litter box. At This Hour I always dance in front of my SAD lamp, because “Dance in front of SAD lamp” is always on my To Do list. My To Do List also says, “why not put...
June 24, 2025
the impersonal and the mythic , ok , I wish | Poetry
Benjamin Krusling
that was never really meant to happen I still want a part of desperate living even with the jaws getting sick of general pacifism but that’s all in an evening screening . to be in the USA no less , most mysticism seems inadequate to it , so whatever’s happening at least bears the ripped muscle of a journey through a few paid-for programs . and I asked , I...
June 24, 2025
what kind of person can watch images going by | Poetry
Benjamin Krusling
as history – so my life goes around again , irreversibly . it spirals upward like newspaper , celluloid . the stakes rise and sink – but the ceiling’s so low I can hardly dream straight . this is the mystery of art , it seems to wither to death before you , conceptually , when a head is separated from a shared plane or they find someone else’s teeth...
June 24, 2025
Hindsight | Poetry
Jessica Laser
For D.P. Staring out over a field of bees and grasses, wildflowers and ticks, knowing it was no place to lie down, that we couldn’t lie down in it, something happened to me related to difficulty. Let me start from the beginning. We were difficult people arising from our mothers’ difficulties in a shrinking because globalizing economy that made us think we could be kings, if only we invested correctly,...
June 24, 2025
Day #1144, #1167, #1403 | Fiction
Solvej Balle
#1144 I have met someone who remembers. Yesterday. That is to say, I met him yesterday. But he remembers yesterday, too. He remembers that we met yesterday. Well, actually, we met the day before, but we didn’t speak until yesterday. Yesterday he acquired a name. His name is Henry Dale, and I don’t need to tell him that time has ground to a halt. He already knows. And he knows...
