Latest
June 24, 2025
Collective Political Activity | Reclaiming the First Amendment
Rhiannon Hamam
Ask almost anyone what the First Amendment guarantees, and they’ll answer, simply: “free speech.” Ask a pundit or professor, and they might add, as the legal scholar Noah Feldman recently did in a conversation with Katie Couric, that “you have free speech even when you’re saying the most unpopular things. Free speech really is freedom of speech for the ideas that we hate.” This framing has been repeated endlessly over...
June 24, 2025
Easy to Exploit | Collapsing the Urban-Rural Divide
Nick Bowlin
So often portrayed as stuck in the past and lagging in the wake of cultural and market currents, rural communities are frequently the first to feel the sting of economic instability. This makes their circumstances a useful portent of the future that Trump is creating. Rural workers have been hurt by automation; more jobs do not necessarily result from productivity gains in sectors like mining and manufacturing. Rural economies, often...
June 24, 2025
A Bureaucratic and Feminine Mind | The Right’s Misogyny Politics
Becca Rothfeld
In the video, posted last year, a group of twentysomething women stand in a circle in an open-plan office, the sort of blandly unassuming place that can be found in any city in the world. You know the look: the lights are scouring and fluorescent; the palette is a slush of tans and grays. Angular windows and ergonomic chairs are visible in the background. The women are dressed in forgettably...
June 24, 2025
“Politics Is Conflictual”
| An Interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
The Drift Editors
“Massive changes often unfold on large time scales,” philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò told The Drift in 2022. But if the past three years have shown us anything, it’s that they can also happen pretty quickly. Just three years ago, corporations proudly touted their DEI commitments, and a program of climate reparations seemed, if not imminently achievable, at least worth discussing concretely. But the topics we covered in our last conversation...
June 24, 2025
“We Will Not Win on Our Own” | An Interview with Eman Abdelhadi
The Drift Editors
In April 2024, Columbia’s administration brought in the New York Police Department to dismantle the tents that had been set up by pro-Palestinian protesters occupying the university’s South Lawn. Undeterred, students at over one hundred other campuses across the United States emulated the Columbia activists’ example in the following weeks. Over a year later, colleges are facing retaliation from Trump and his cronies, who relish the opportunity to turn skirmishes...
June 24, 2025
“Losing Any Claim to Moral Leadership” | An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh
The Drift Editors
The Drift first spoke with Nikhil Pal Singh at the dawn of Joe Biden’s presidency, shortly after the January 6 riots. Trump, we wrote in our introduction to that interview, was “finally, dramatically out of office,” and “efforts to historicize his tenure” had “already begun.” At the time, Singh — a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at NYU, founding faculty director of the NYU Prison Education Program,...
June 24, 2025
“They’re Using Megaphones” | An Interview with Wendy Brown
The Drift Editors
In the first issue of The Drift, we kicked off our interview series with Wendy Brown, one of the foremost political theorists in the United States. That conversation, which took place in between the onset of Covid and the eruption of the George Floyd uprising, largely centered on the role of neoliberal ideology — as articulated by Brown in books like Undoing the Demos (2015) and In the Ruins of...
June 20, 2025
My Mother’s Husbands | Fiction
Mariah Kreutter
I think it was very selfish of my father to die in September. That was always my favorite month. Cruel, too, to die right at the beginning — of cool nights, golden afternoons, a blissful absence of mosquitoes. Withered leaves, shriveled flies. September always felt new, even as around me things were dying, and I think that’s why I liked it. It is September, now, as I write this. I have...
June 17, 2025
Anti-Anti-Rape | On the #MeToo Backlash
Jamie Hood
After sexual assault allegations against author Neil Gaiman resurfaced in January, “Red Scare” host Anna Khachiyan wrote: “Are we really still doing this? #MeToo was rejected at the ballot box!” In the wake of almost a decade of anti-anti-rape sentiment — much of which calcified in the hyper-discursive, ideologically slippery podcast and social media sectors — Khachiyan’s refried Paglia-isms hardly shock. What alarmed me was an accelerating sense that I...
June 12, 2025
Agit-Slop | The White House’s Numbing Aesthetic
Mitch Therieau
In the video, two brown-skinned men — shot mostly from their torsos down, the camera rising briefly to reveal glimpses of faces and a tattooed neck — stand handcuffed in front of an airplane. They are marched up the jetway, before receding into a warm blur. Two words stand out below the haze, painted in bright green lettering on the side of what looks like a truck: “BORDER PATROL.” The...
