Latest
December 2, 2025
Love Language | Fiction
Will Hall
The most money I ever made from acting was for a crisps commercial. The brand wanted to show how its product brought people together by — my agent reading me the brief over the phone — “saying the unsayable.” To do this they made a series of ads in which people wordlessly apologized for things with open bags of crisps. I played an impulsive young woman who tries on her...
December 2, 2025
Battle Creek | Poetry
Kathleen Ma
A pig in the shape of me goes to the gas station. Two ninety five is not bad for the Midwest, pressed under great slabs of sun. Take it all in, what you know and what you don’t. Don’t get it twisted I would never in my life be the mayor of Battle Creek, Michigan. Open your eyes! You think it’s slick to imagine me so tall, so cool. Let...
December 2, 2025
still life in necromancy | Poetry
Leslie McIntosh
What makes the dead turn Beyond decomposition Is mystery is radical is Teleportation is a man coming Back to life is a toddler falling From a playground swing Zenith-spat smartly into mud Seeing all around lose her In descent puddle and dirt find her A worm forced from home by rain Wriggles closer to her ear saying Baby is a deer knowing no Language but understanding What it can safely...
December 2, 2025
Voraciousness and Shame | Ozempic’s Weight Loss Counterrevolution
Vivian Hu
In a March 2024 special titled “Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution,” Oprah Winfrey aired what was essentially an infomercial for a new class of drugs that promised to revolutionize the way we thought about obesity. The hour-long segment promoted Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy, which target GLP-1 (and, in Mounjaro’s case, GIP) receptors to make people feel fuller and slow the rate at which their stomachs empty. On the...
December 2, 2025
Model Employees | The Dawn of Digital Twins
Max Hancock
The H.R. software provider syd™ may ask you to submit your spit. But even if you decline to supply a saliva sample, it will still request your dietary and financial information. All this, plus your environmental data (like your home address and the temperature outside), is used to create a digital copy of you, which syd™ delivers to your boss, who can then use it to track your “Life Quality,”...
December 2, 2025
It’s All Coming Back to Me Now | Poetry
Ethan Seeley
The hills are facts. Assembling. Toyotas are crawling, antlike, all over their hairy backsides. The ants vote with their pocket- books. Lacking pocketbooks, they are disenfranchised. So, they vote with their feet. Our feet head for the hills. The hills are looking very factual tonight. The mist descends, monsterlike, to knock at the doors of the houses pouring smoke out their several chimneys. The smoke, toyotalike, crashes into the mist....
December 2, 2025
Repackaged Nostalgia | The Dubaification of Beirut
Zeead Yaghi
Em Sherif, a high-end restaurant in Beirut, recently opened a more casual outpost that, according to its Emirates-based controlling shareholder ADMO Lifestyle Holding, “offers a modern and vibrant take on Lebanese cuisine” that’s rooted in “authentic flavors.” The most popular menu item seems to be an expensive sandwich that reimagines a classic Lebanese appetizer: slices of heirloom tomato are dressed with garlic sauce, sumac, green chili, spring onion, and olive...
December 2, 2025
Instruments of Siege | Gaza Under Blockade
Joelle M. Abi-Rached
When historians look back on the genocide in Gaza, they will be struck by the ways it both echoes and deviates from historical precedents. The deliberate, politically engineered famine combines old instruments of siege, including blockade tactics, with twentieth-century developments in caloric management: the control of food and other essentials to keep a population at subsistence level. It also bears distinctly 21st-century features, like the use of social media and...
December 2, 2025
Ripe for Abuse | ICE Threatens Farmworkers
Luis Feliz Leon
In March, Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker who helped form the independent union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, was arrested by ICE and sent to a privately run immigrant detention center in Tacoma, Washington, where he was served inedible food. “Chicken was so undercooked that sometimes it dripped blood, and people got sick during the night,” he told the journalist David Bacon in August. Another farmworker, Jaime Alanís García, broke...
December 2, 2025
Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant | Fiction
Madeline Cash
Louise Flynn was afflicted by the plight of the middle child. She had never broken a bone or been mistaken for a celebrity, had never done something to warrant a medal, certificate, or plaque. She did not have a sense of individual style. At school she wore a uniform and on weekends her sister’s hand-me-downs. Even her mother Catherine bragged about the ease of easy Louise’s labor. While her elder...
