Latest
February 28, 2023
Electric Bodies | Medical Technology Takes Over
Jameson Rich
We begin in a forest. The camera pushes through a clutch of trees to a clearing that reveals a drop into a ravine. “The owner of this watch has taken a hard fall,” Siri says. We’re listening in, apparently, on an automated 911 call on behalf of Bob B., who crashed while mountain biking and went unconscious. She provides “an estimated search radius of 41 meters” in her familiar clipped...
February 28, 2023
Posed Riddles | Seeing Through Empathy with Diane Arbus
Max Norman
“I am not ghoulish, am I?” Diane Arbus wrote to a lover in 1960, describing how she couldn’t help but stop and watch as a woman lay crying in the street. “Is everyone ghoulish? It wouldn’t have been better to turn away, would it?” For half a century, Arbus’s work has kept us asking these same questions. Her unlikely subjects have become almost proverbial: the twin girls, dressed in...
February 28, 2023
Words Exchanged | Italophone Somalia, Then and Now
Iman Mohamed
“Italian language teaching is back in Somalia!” the Italian embassy in Somalia tweeted in late September 2021, announcing a new program at the Somali National University that would reintroduce the language of the country’s former colonizer. “Learning a new language,” the tweet continued in shaky English, “means opening your mind and seize unexpected opportunities.” For days, it was ridiculed and meme-d across social media by young Somalis. Why, some wondered,...
February 28, 2023
“There’s a Lot More That Needs to Be Done” | An Interview with Barbara Smith
The Drift
“Where would Black feminism be today if it wasn’t for Barbara Smith?” asked the organizing collective Black Women Radicals in 2020. Where indeed? Smith’s influence on Black and queer feminist politics is immeasurable. She helped found the Combahee River Collective, whose 1977 manifesto coined the phrase “identity politics,” and shepherded the emergence of the style of leftist politics that we now call intersectional. As cofounder of Kitchen Table: Women of...
February 28, 2023
Indians Can’t Fly | Fiction
Magogodi oaMphela Makhene
The blue of the water was a bright electric hue. It made sounds: clapping rain sounds, trickling ice sounds, running water; water running… rushing in cold waves and against river rhythm. Splash! Spumes exploded. Spit spray. Water breaking on the ceiling shore. The waves blocking out cries from the hose welting rubber into her back, hoarse shouting rattling something free deep inside her ear. The water blocked out the barking....
February 28, 2023
The View from Jeju | Behind Nancy Fraser’s Hidden Abodes
Nancy Ko
It is said that in Korea there is a strange-looking, fantastical creature called a bulgasari, which can dissolve iron and swallow it whole. — Kim Sokpom, 1972 Fifty miles off the coast of the Korean Peninsula, in the sea passage that connects Korea to Japan, sits a small island of nearly 700,000 people that began to form when an underwater volcano erupted more than a million years ago. Home to...
February 28, 2023
Heartbreaking Breathtaking | Poetry
Rigel Portales
Pia, Peter, or Pete thrifting truffles for Tristan, methylphenidate for Miriam & her ADHD, Angel’s HD Olympus Mark III opening to oleanders in Isaac’s isopropyl clarity, Hans handing a handkerchief over to Virgil on the verge of vomiting, Pat patting her pistil, Sol stabbing his stamen, Raisa & Ralph & Ram rising out of bed & beading sweat & Seth seeping semen, Kirsten coming out of her coma for Faith...
February 28, 2023
Summer People | Fiction
Silas Jones
“In the winter,” said the cop, “it’s the same crew committing a bunch of different crimes. Left.” He picked up my left hand like a CD he didn’t want to scratch, from the edges. “In the summer, it’s different perps doing the same few over and over.” “That must be exciting,” I said, watching as he smashed my fingertips one by one onto the blue inkpad. His badge said Officer...
February 28, 2023
Latent Heat | Poetry
Gospel Chinedu
to see in a city like this is to hoard catastrophe in the storage of your memory become a virus your psyche disturbed : distorted : difficult to sanitize in this city every boy is an isotope weighing a mass greater than the atomic mass of his original body in my mourning i drag myself to the mouth of a big hole when i open my mouth it swallows the...
February 28, 2023
Bóín Dé | Poetry
Timothy Donnelly
Little cow of god, the wattage of your red reverberates the earth, and spots of onyx nestle on its lacquer like fixed stars. Bravissima! You are red’s least loud-mouthed ambassador, paradise’s miniscule half-apple mobilized by a half-dozen legs, and under the split-open dome of you: gold-leaf wings, folded over esoterically, like dress patterns, whose thinness whispers to the near- devotional care called for to pin them out properly. Meanwhile,...