Latest
July 11, 2023
A Skeptic at Church
hannah baer
Over the last four years, everyone I know in New York started going to poetry readings. Not occasionally, but all the time. People who aren’t even poets started sharing work at poetry readings regularly (myself included). Notably, there is no particular school of poetics to which the trend adheres. People go, sit, and try to pay attention to whatever is read. Attention is important, because these readings can be dreadfully...
July 11, 2023
Half Truth and Half Fantasy
Frank Guan
As Baudelaire was quick to note, “avant-garde” was originally a military metaphor — an idiom from the battlefield transposed into the discourse of bohemians longing for some sense of urgency. It’s worth noting, too, that although later avant-gardists rushed to claim him for their own, the poet himself stated that only losers (“minds hardly militant, but made for discipline, in other words conformity, domestic minds, Belgian minds, who can only...
July 11, 2023
A Gradually Expanding Surface
Timo Andres
One of the least popular credits to my name on Apple Music is a track called “Prelude to ‘The Mystery Cheese-Ball,’” which was composed by the American experimental musician Joseph Byrd. By “composed,” I mean Byrd devised the simple instructions that constitute the piece: an unspecified ensemble blows up balloons, then releases the air from them as slowly as possible, in a chorus of squeaks and whines. The piece concludes...
July 9, 2023
A Good Prospect | Mining Climate Anxiety for Profit
Nick Bowlin
Four billion years ago, our planet was a restive place, full of geological commotion. At the earth’s center, a molten metal core began to coalesce, while heat and radioactive energy kept large swaths of the surface liquid. Violent volcanic forces made and remade the landscape. Over eons, magma pooled and hardened, forming some of the oldest and most stable parts of the earth’s crust. Heat, pressure, and fluid heavy with...
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...
