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June 24, 2020
Grosseto | Fiction
Moira McCavana
Unwanted items used to migrate to the dining room of my uncle Enzo’s apartment as though of their own accord. I never once saw Enzo or his wife Gabriella go in there. And so it became a shadow room whose items, in sum, cobbled together a crude portrait of our lives. On our side, however, the absences of those objects continued to exist: in my mind there remained a cavity...
June 24, 2020
Chaos, Aggregated | A Pandemic Novelist Takes to Twitter
Madeline Conway
Like many non-essential workers whose screen times have increased in tandem with boredom and generalized anxiety, Rachel Graham of San Diego starts her day by opening Twitter in search of an update on the coronavirus outbreak. First, she checks her notifications—mostly alerts to tweets from journalists covering the disease and virologists and epidemiologists studying its spread. She looks through her direct messages, where like-minded EID (emerging infectious disease) junkies send...
June 24, 2020
Editors’ Note | Now More So Than Ever
It’s not exactly a fun time to start a magazine, nor is it a convenient one. A magazine is by definition an optimistic, social project, and the past few months have found young people fairly hopeless and dramatically isolated—alienated all over again by an undemocratic political system and a hollowed out, dysfunctional government. We’ve done our part, asked to wait out the virus indefinitely; to wonder when we’re going to...
June 24, 2020
Nothing to Apologize For | Samantha Power's Bosnia Syndrome
Krithika Varagur
To get out of Sarajevo’s Butmir airport and into the city, you have to drive down the Ulica Kurta Schorka. That’s “Kurt Schork Road,” in honor of the American journalist who famously reported the story of “Bosnia’s Romeo and Juliet,” a Serb-Bosniak couple killed in the Siege of Sarajevo. Schork was killed on another assignment in Africa in 2000, but he is memorialized for his wartime dispatches on a long...
June 24, 2020
Capitalist Pigs | Pork farming meets zombie science
Brad Bolman
I’ve heard it said that every phase of American capitalism finds its reflection in zombies: if the stumbling undead in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead evinced the mindless consumerism of the Cold War years, the infected army chasing Brad Pitt in World War Z reveals fear of a contagious, out-of-control globalization, one that Henry A. Giroux has fittingly called “zombie capitalism.” Yet zombies appeared to exit the realm...