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June 24, 2025
what kind of person can watch images going by | Poetry
Benjamin Krusling
as history – so my life goes around again , irreversibly . it spirals upward like newspaper , celluloid . the stakes rise and sink – but the ceiling’s so low I can hardly dream straight . this is the mystery of art , it seems to wither to death before you , conceptually , when a head is separated from a shared plane or they find someone else’s teeth...
June 24, 2025
Hindsight | Poetry
Jessica Laser
For D.P. Staring out over a field of bees and grasses, wildflowers and ticks, knowing it was no place to lie down, that we couldn’t lie down in it, something happened to me related to difficulty. Let me start from the beginning. We were difficult people arising from our mothers’ difficulties in a shrinking because globalizing economy that made us think we could be kings, if only we invested correctly,...
June 24, 2025
Day #1144, #1167, #1403 | Fiction
Solvej Balle
#1144 I have met someone who remembers. Yesterday. That is to say, I met him yesterday. But he remembers yesterday, too. He remembers that we met yesterday. Well, actually, we met the day before, but we didn’t speak until yesterday. Yesterday he acquired a name. His name is Henry Dale, and I don’t need to tell him that time has ground to a halt. He already knows. And he knows...
June 24, 2025
Mormon Lake Hotshots | Fiction
Samuel Jensen
They sat under the stars and he had finally, a little after the fact, brought her around. Henry had expected all sorts of things from the process of moving from the city to the desert, but the one thing he hadn’t foreseen was his wife’s hesitation. He’d conquered his own in private, before mentioning the idea. Then he’d accidentally made Naomi perform hers in the open. His wife — who...
June 24, 2025
Working | Fiction
Stephanie Wambugu
My boyfriend Ed couldn’t keep supporting me on one income. He didn’t say so, but I knew. The nights out were fewer and fewer. And he never bought new clothes anymore. He was taking any work he could get on the side — tutoring, copywriting — and he was talking about getting another teaching job on top of the adjunct situation he already had. Asking his parents for another loan...
June 24, 2025
Fluff | Fiction
Matteo Ciambella
My friend who fell asleep at the New Year’s Eve sex party said the conversation there was lacking. “I didn’t expect it from an orgy,” she said. “So much talk about nothing.” I told her the same problem plagues my field. “So academics also wear cow costumes to have sex?” I laughed. “I was referring to all the talk about nothing,” I said. “Ah, I see. So no cows, no...
June 24, 2025
Dear Lillington Families | Fiction
Owen Park
For several months of my twenty-third year, I received an automated phone call every weekday from a number with a North Carolina area code. The purpose of the call was to inform me that the school bus was running late. After a while I stopped picking it up, and it went to voicemail. Dear Lillington families, the prerecorded message always began, in the tinny, rather severe voice of a woman...
June 24, 2025
God-Like Confidence | Donald Trump’s Cult of Faith
Tope Folarin
“Trump is unique among modern American presidents for his seeming lack of deep religious orientation,” the CNN correspondent MJ Lee wrote in 2017. Trump no longer belongs to a church, but he grew up attending services — first at a local Presbyterian ministry in Queens, and then at a church led by Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister turned self-help guru. “Obstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness...
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...
