The Fool | Poetry

Emily Skillings

I, too, long for a cradle Of brilliant grasses Braided through with wildflowers Rocking on a historic mound That drinks the blood of men Clots of irreverent sight— A shadow spills out Of a pinprick In the form Down below on the hill The men gasp and gurgle Until they go out Their weapons flirting in the sunshine Slick with insides The grasses grow strong and toxic So goes my...

Beyond “Hate” | Evading the Carceral Trap of Asian American Grievance

Rose Nguyen

To mark the one-year anniversary of the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that left eight people dead, six of whom were ethnically Chinese or Korean women, The New York Times published an op-ed by Korean American novelist Min Jin Lee headlined “Asian Americans Have Always Lived With Fear.” Lee draws on the results of an informal Twitter survey in which she asked her Asian and Asian American followers how they’d...

A Star Is Born | Raffi Gessen-Gould’s Examined Life

Piper French

Social media has produced a curious phenomenon: the unwitting child star. These are kids who seem to intuitively mug for the camera without having the slightest idea of what it means to be watched by thousands of strangers around the world. Their parents have made them famous before they can really grasp what the internet is, or meaningfully consent to have their image distributed there. It’s hard to say who...

The Patriotic Hat | Fiction

Alec Niedenthal

At the end of her first life, Mrs. Cohen moved to Florida. During her first days in the state she proclaimed the beauty of everything, while inwardly hating it. She was used to the aching distance between the things she said and the things she felt; it seemed to be how she was structured now. “I can’t believe we’re so close to the beach. It’s like a dream,” she said...

What Was the TED Talk? | Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting"

Oscar Schwartz

Bill Gates wheels a hefty metal barrel out onto a stage. He carefully places it down and then faces the audience, which sits silent in a darkened theater. “When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war,” he begins. Gates is speaking at TED’s flagship conference, held in Vancouver in 2015. He wears a salmon pink sweater, and his hair is combed down over...

My Ancestral Home, the Mall | Lil Miquela's Post-Racial Society

Kim Hew-Low

Last June, faced with the prospect of turning nineteen for the sixth time, Miquela Sousa suffered something like an existential crisis. From the bathroom of the Silver Lake restaurant where loved ones had gathered to celebrate her birthday, she reached out to three million followers in an Instagram story, iridescent tears streaking mascara down her face. “What I wanted for my birthday was PROGRESS,” she lamented. “I want to know...

Couture | Fiction

Lucie Elven

On the boat back, the sea got very slightly rougher, and a plastic curtain weighed down with chains knocked at the reception desk that separated the lounge from the restaurant. All the rules not to bring pets or your own food had been abandoned in the lounge. Dogs sat on tables and children ran laps, spilling their sandwiches. She thought of the director of the first museum they had visited,...

The Girlboss and the Anti-Woke Cool Girl

Jamie Hood

It seemed, for a brief moment — perhaps by virtue of the intensity of energy driving the 2017 #MeToo movement — that the bloated corpse of feminism might be reanimated, given a path forward. That #MeToo was rapidly recalibrated to advocate in the interests of the most privileged and protected within its subordinated class (broadly, victim-survivors of sexual harassment and assault) — not to mention implicit and plainfaced unions with...

The Law on Trial

Alexandra Brodsky

I assume that, by next summer, the Supreme Court will have overturned Roe v. Wade. Many states will swiftly outlaw abortion; some already have laws on the books that will be triggered as soon as the Court hands down its decision. I also fear that, within a decade, the Court will rule that abortion is unconstitutional. If it does, even blue states that would like to keep abortion legal will...