Latest
April 21, 2026
Nuclear Magnetic | Poetry
Abou Farman
Three or four mysterious forces without which we would not be here none of us without which the universe would not have come together nothing so they must be there they must always have been there the forces without which nothing none of us Of all the things — the mastodons, the stallions, the candles, the mascara, the mammaries, the mutations, the vibrators, the medications, the hairiness, the cameras, the...
April 21, 2026
Independent Living
Hannah Kingsley-Ma
My last trip to the retirement home before Margaret and I broke up was a pleasant one. Margaret’s grandmother couldn’t stop laughing because her boyfriend Hal kept getting beaten at pool by a man who had gone legally blind. We sat in the dining room, where workers in dark gray scrubs offered us coffee with whiskey in it, topped with a dollop of whipped cream. For the holidays, they explained. ...
April 21, 2026
“To reconstruct the animal” | Poetry
Carmen Gallo
To reconstruct the animal from the promises it was capable of keeping. And forget. Not from the bones it left behind but from its tracks retreating. From how it ran. Simple shape. The inner story and the outer. Whoever runs loses. Whoever runs vanishes, taking everything with them. Whoever stays learns to hide. To be nothing. To concoct theories. Nothing happens to those who disappear. Translated from the Italian by...
April 21, 2026
Tooth Skin
Gracie Newman
Yesterday, Microsoft Word started to identify the word “tomorrow” as a spelling error. I keep adding it to the digital dictionary, and it keeps forgetting. I think my computer has dementia. Soon it won’t even remember my name: “Hello, User!” That’s how my year is going. Every morning I sit down with my laptop and a stack of books and don’t touch either. Instead, I watch things wither through the...
April 20, 2026
A Nicely Situated Ideal | On the Public Sphere
Edward Ongweso Jr, Ege Yumuşak, Erik Baker, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, Noelle Bodick, Sam Adler-Bell, Sarah Brouillette, Tarpley Hitt
When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died in mid-March, the contentious debates about his ideas and influence that had stalked his career reappeared in posthumous assessments. Some recognized Habermas’s role in keeping Frankfurt School critical theory alive and defending the values of “democratically organized social life,” as Matt McManus wrote in Jacobin, against reactionaries. Others condemned Habermas’s own rightward drift, especially his “long history of being deliberately unquestioning of Israel,”...
April 20, 2026
A Surrender to Market Forces
Tarpley Hitt
Toward the end of the eighth season of Murphy Brown, the 1990s CBS sitcom about a broadcast journalist at a 60 Minutes-like TV magazine, the titular news anchor runs into real-life Newt Gingrich. Brown, played by Candice Bergen, has been hosting the “Press-capades,” a dinner where members of the media lightly roast their audience of politicians. She is dressed as Hillary Clinton, having just wrapped up a skit in which...
April 20, 2026
A Blank Generation
Noelle Bodick
The late Habermas, theorizing the public sphere, rendered the coffeehouses of the past as discursive hubs, places of free exchange, with every caffeine-head a constitutionalist of sorts. It was a nicely situated ideal, pulled from the annals of eighteenth-century English history — all that yak and verbal sparring hemming in the dull, unimaginative control of autocrats and bureaucrats at large. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele convened a “little senate” at...
April 20, 2026
The Return to Orality
Megan Marz
Everywhere we read that we are illiterate. On Substack, Abundance coauthor Derek Thompson laments the “handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality,” a “return” to the world as it was before the invention of writing enabled us to hold ideas at a distance and pin them down. He fears that this power of abstraction — which opened the way for science, philosophy, and much more —...
April 20, 2026
Alone Together
Sam Adler-Bell
Being a podcaster is a bit embarrassing. It’s much easier than writing (my intended career) but much better paid. The term itself is dweeby — sounding at once outdated and newfangled — and impossible to say unsheepishly. I think every podcaster who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice (pace Janet Malcolm) knows that what he does is a benign grift, not sordid enough to inspire shame...
April 20, 2026
A Post-Political Fantasy
Ege Yumuşak
“To the extent that the Academe remembers its ancient origins, it must know that it was founded by the polis’s most determined and most influential opponent,” Hannah Arendt wrote, referring to Plato, in “Truth and Politics.” Originally appearing in the pages of The New Yorker in 1967, the essay was perhaps one of the most-assigned texts in university classrooms at the height of liberal panic over the so-called post-truth age. ...
