Latest
October 31, 2025
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life | Self-Help Gets Philosophical
Madeleine Baker
Donald Trump’s endeavors in business and politics frequently overshadow his contributions as a philosopher of the futility of human achievement. “We’re here and we live our sixty, seventy, or eighty years and we’re gone,” he reflected to Playboy in a 1990 interview. “You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.” Subsequent winning does not seem to have shaken this conviction. “Nothing matters,”...
October 29, 2025
Porn | Fiction
Nick Foretek
Marissa likes to begin her stories with walks on the beach. The beaches are never idyllic because the travel agencies are always devious. After setting the scene (dusk, iridescent oil slicks on the waves, sand), her characters enjoy a brief stroll before undertaking ferocious sexual intercourse. Marissa encourages the reader to suspect the lovers are siblings, but it turns out they’re just third cousins. In this way, she humanizes the...
October 23, 2025
Bleak and Desolate Shelves | What Starvation Looks Like in Gaza
Abubaker Abed
I left Gaza in April after receiving a scholarship to study in Ireland. I’d delayed leaving for over a year, resistant to the idea of abandoning my family and my country. But I finally decided to go after facing symptoms of acute malnutrition and, as a journalist, continued Israeli threats to my safety. Until then, I’d lived in Deir al-Balah, a city in the center of the besieged territory. Those...
October 21, 2025
Walking the Thin Blue Line | Bill de Blasio, Zohran Mamdani, and the NYPD
Katie Way
When Bill de Blasio was running for mayor in 2013, he vowed to “end the misuse of police tactics that have made New York into something out of Dickens,” invoking A Tale of Two Cities to describe the effects of stop-and-frisk under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The practice — which further criminalized life in majority black and Latino communities — was increasingly controversial, and de Blasio vowed to “repair police-community relations,”...
September 25, 2025
The Silence in My Kitchen | Cooking in Gaza
Hamada Shaqura
My pot is cold and empty. Outside, people stand in line with bowls in their hands, waiting for a kitchen that will not open. Children see me in the street and ask when I will cook for them again. Before the war I was a food blogger, visiting restaurants and writing reviews to showcase Gaza’s food culture. Cooking for others was not part of my life. It was only after...
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...
