Just Beans | What Was Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism?

Malcolm Harris

In May of 1985, following the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s final defeat of the Somoza regime, the Reagan administration imposed an embargo on Nicaragua. The White House paired this open economic aggression with more covert forms, channeling money and weapons to counterrevolutionary forces — Contra groups who counted industrial terrorism among their tactics, burning literal tons of product in raids on government-allied coffee cooperatives. This multifront attack made the Nicaraguan...

“Feels Like Life” | An Interview with Barbara Kruger

The Drift

When news broke in June that the Supreme Court had struck down Roe v. Wade, we were not the only ones who thought back to Barbara Kruger’s iconic silkscreen “Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground).” Originally created in 1989, the piece, for better or worse, remains timely — like much of Kruger’s other work. Her immediately recognizable and frequently imitated style has resulted in some of the most indelible images...

America’s Son | Who’s Afraid of Hunter Biden?

Tarpley Hitt

It is easy to discount most new entries in the canon of conservative cinema, on account of the fact that they tend to be bad. By conservative cinema I mean overtly partisan agitprop, not the Clint Eastwood kind, and by bad I mean their dialogue is sermonic, their symbolism is obvious, their edits waffle between awkward and uncanny, and their casts represent a collection of Hollywood afterthoughts who ascribe their...

Controlled | Annie Ernaux and the Millennial Sex Novel

Noor Qasim

Let me tell you a story.  I was living in New York and going on dates with people I met on the internet. I was looking for love and was mostly getting sex, for which I was grateful, even if I was a little lonely. I went on a date. It was a third date, and on our second we’d slept together. It was good, the sort of gasping, grasping...

Not-So-Magic Kingdom | Disney Takes on the Affordable Housing Crisis

Gaby Del Valle

Celebration was supposed to be the perfect town. Entirely planned by the Walt Disney Company in the early ’90s, the Central Florida development — located less than a dozen miles from Magic Kingdom — was billed as a 1950s-style suburb for the twenty-first century. Celebration would be “a place that takes you back to that time of innocence,” one early ad for the community promised, “a new American town of...

The Air We Move Through | Rhetoric, Bureaucracy, and the Immigration Debate

Elisa Gonzalez

In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at a privately operated immigration detention center in Irwin County, Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint that alleged “jarring medical neglect” at the facility. The brief was 27 pages long, but it was only the contents of a page-and-a-half (section 4, subsection D) that caught the public’s imagination: hysterectomies conducted without the consent or knowledge of migrant women. Wooten’s account of a “uterus collector”...

Groom XII | Poetry

Isabel Duarte-Gray

if I go to heaven I want to ask is there such thing as a tasteful lawn ornament: how does one improve a grass rhombus to such hue as to declare oneself bound by contract to poison all surrounding flora until scott pruitt’s o-face leaks scott peterson’s crocodile tears a second question I’m saving is, when is pain real? does it require two persons: one to throe and one to...

“Room for More”

Sanjena Sathian

These days, in the literary world, the only thing trendier and triter than writing autofiction is hating autofiction. But love or loathe it, you can’t avoid talking about it — and its uncertain future. For a decade, it has reigned as the successor to the highly narrativized, stylized, maximalist “hysterical realism” of the late 1990s and early 2000s. After tiring of books like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex,...

“An Opportunity to Act”

Tope Folarin

Two new literary genres emerged during the opening weeks of the pandemic. The first, the pandemic journal, proliferated almost as quickly as the virus that kept millions of us locked inside; by the summer of 2020 it seemed as if every literary and literary-adjacent platform had secured a roster of writers to opine about their daily habits, fears, and truncated ambitions. Depending on your perspective, the pandemic journal was either...

“The Stare”

Gabriel Smith

A friend, a physicist and schizophrenic, told me recently about how she knows a break is coming.  “How I see the world completely changes,” she said. “It’s called ‘The Stare.’ Everything takes on a total hyperreality. Like reality is only what it is, and nothing else. It’s the scariest part. More scary than the break. Because you feel you’re seeing the true nature of things for the first time. And...