Latest
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,...
February 28, 2023
All Roll Is B-Roll | Adam Curtis Goes Quiet
Mitch Therieau
Is there anything left to say about Adam Curtis? Over the course of more than 25 BBC documentaries, depending on how you count — each an attempt to trace the workings of what he repeatedly, enigmatically calls “power” across the twentieth century to the wreckage of the present — the director has developed a sensibility so idiosyncratic that it simultaneously begs for and preempts parody. Along the way, he has...
February 28, 2023
Editors’ Note | Circling the Drain
The Editors
It’s a truism that there are no new stories, that each narrative, no matter how novel it appears, is actually an iteration of one of three or seven or twelve archetypal plots. Maybe so, but the cultural landscape feels especially grim these days. After the shock of March 2020, something like a renaissance was supposed to play out — that’s what happens, the forecasters forecasted, when the patterns of ordinary...
February 28, 2023
On Snowfall | Poetry
Joanna Klink
Some days I am so filled with myself I can see nothing — who I was, others are, what any burden meant. The nights come and go, my thoughts loosen and return, and even now I am not sure the cardinal in the empty tree is there or if I dreamed it waiting. If I walked out now into that muffled quiet, my face would cover in ice-dust and my...
February 28, 2023
Thrown | Fiction
Clare Needham
From London’s King’s Cross to Edinburgh’s Waverley station, the evening journey of four hours seemed short. All along, coaxed into being by the smooth motion of the train, Marie’s thoughts took a glimmering, hopeful shape, and she recorded them in a small notebook. Several times, she got up to go to the bathroom in her excited state, and on each return believed she saw the eyes of other passengers flick...
February 22, 2023
RIP Good Times | On the Future of Big Tech
Annie Rauwerda, Ben Tarnoff, David Adler, David Ethan Jones-Krause, Jane Chung, Jeannette Estruth, Jordan Coley, JS Tan, Lora Kelley, Sophie Haigney, Tarpley Hitt
The trouble in Silicon Valley goes far beyond the tumult at Twitter and the implosion of FTX; in the sixteen months since Facebook rebranded as Meta, the company has shed thousands of employees, including 11,000 in a single round of layoffs, and has extended its hiring freeze. Across DoorDash, Stripe, Lyft, Salesforce, and other companies, more than 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022 alone, and stocks have taken...
February 22, 2023
Running Like Ticker Tape
Sophie Haigney
I’m on Twitter all day every day, which doesn’t mean I’m looking at it all the time, but that it’s a kind of burbling backdrop to everything else going on in my life — all the reading and writing and thinking and talking. “Backdrop” isn’t quite right, though, because Twitter is also integrated into whatever it is I’m doing, feeding and sometimes poisoning it. By which I mean I don’t...
