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April 21, 2026
History Has Its Eyes on You | Slam Frank and Musical Theater’s Hamilton Bind
Emma Adler
For those who struggled through The Diary of Anne Frank as adolescents, wishing it were more entertaining, 2025 brought a special treat: Andrew Fox and Joel Sinensky’s musical Slam Frank. A send-up of both identity politics and the musical theater that has attempted to cash in on identity politics, Slam Frank imagines what would happen if a woke community theater decided to give the story of Anne Frank the Hamilton...
April 21, 2026
My Graduation
Kion You
At the airport, I hustled out of my Subaru and waved down my family. They looked awful, but who doesn’t at Arrivals. “Why is it so hot?” my mother asked. “Austin, Texas,” my dad said, switching from Korean to English. “Great!” My mother handed me her suitcase and scrutinized the FREE PALESTINE sticker on the car’s bumper. My friend Joana had put it on — she sold me the car...
April 21, 2026
Encounter | Poetry
Adam Judah Krasnoff
Two stones at rest at the summit of a hill. Two stones at rest at the summit of a hill Atop which we too are seated, resting. We two at the summit of a hill, seated atop A pair of immovable stones, whose rest Is permanent. This is the summit of feeling, I do not say, you do not say, we do not say, But rather point out facts about...
April 21, 2026
A Severe Face Angle Makes the Shadows Clear | Poetry
Andy Butter
A new study made no claims on discovering anything of value, it was only an extension of every other study’s conclusions: if we’ve found abandoned cities under the rainforest’s canopy using LIDAR let’s assume from here on out there will be a great deal more buried in the Earth’s crust. A pocket of parasites squeezed out of a sheep’s skin. Here’s everything I know about everything we don’t know: extreme...
April 21, 2026
Editors’ Note | The House Never Chickens Out
The Editors
You may have noticed that Donald Trump often seems to change his mind. His record of abruptly backing off dangerous courses of action to which he had previously committed himself — from tariffs to civilizational annihilation — inspired the slogan “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out). For a while, TACO was a reassuring thought. It conjured up an image of a weak, flailing president who was playing with empty threats but...
April 21, 2026
ESOP Fables | The False Promise of Employee Ownership
Francis Northwood
In December 2021, employees of the prominent New York-based architecture firm SHoP — most famous for designing landmarks like the Barclays Center, the Brooklyn Tower, and 111 West 57th, the thinnest supertall skyscraper in the world — announced they were seeking to form Architectural Workers United, the first professional architecture union in over seventy years. Organizers told the press that they had been driven to unionize by mismanagement, an inconsistent...
April 21, 2026
The Myth of Green Germany | Energiewende Runs Out of Fuel
Stephen Milder
In May 2015, after a weeklong visit to Berlin, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called Germany a “Green Superpower” that “deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.” The Germans, he argued, had made a “great contribution to the stability of our planet and its climate” by “converting almost 30 percent of their electric grid to renewable energy.” Friedman was not alone in singing the praises of Germany’s Energiewende, or its...
April 21, 2026
“The Ultimate Conspiracy of Patriarchy” | A Conversation with Brace Belden, Daniel Boguslaw, Alexandra Brodsky, and Anand Giridharadas
The Drift Editors
Jeffrey Epstein — pedophile, sex trafficker, consigliere to the ultra-rich and the ultra-connected — once belonged to the truly elite. As the full extent of his crimes was exposed, he became the property, at least symbolically, of a different in-group: online conspiracy enthusiasts on both the far right and the far left. In 2019, he died in federal custody, and now — after the Department of Justice’s chaotic file dumps...
April 21, 2026
Travel, Goals, Experiments | Poetry
Melanie Jennings
Travel The jellyfish lay flat on the beach, wiped out from the journey. First, she was in Japan, then Ecuador, now here, somewhere south of Tijuana, judging by the tide’s flavor. There’d been an earthquake recently, and another on the way. She tasted that too, an ashy note. Jellyfish are terrific gourmands, something most people don’t know. Real connoisseurs some of them. Her mother, a Peruvian by birth, made a...
April 21, 2026
Sick | Poetry
Lily Gabaree
In later days I felt a fragility I heard dogs I was little twigs lying there ready to break I tell my body to wake there is a happy bounding dog with a big stick extra long and the dog is jumping and its man twirls and I heard a cough sun breaks the tree and I am almost leaves almost sheer the dog runs the grass coated light he...
