Latest
January 20, 2022
College Debt | USC and the Problem of the Private University
Piper French
Mark Ridley-Thomas had a plan. He also had an accomplice: University of Southern California dean Marilyn Flynn. The problem was that the plan was no good — totally baffling, in fact, like a Coen brothers plot rejected for implausibility. Its central character seemed too bumbling, too ready to risk it all, to be believable for a man of Ridley-Thomas’s position: a giant of Los Angeles politics, then representing two million...
January 19, 2022
Vibe, Mood, Energy | Or, Bust-Time Reenchantment
Mitch Therieau
The products of mass culture have learned to speak a new language: the language of the occult. Come in, an app pleads, and listen to an algorithmically curated playlist of songs that “fit the vibe.” “We caught a vibe!” yelps a voice in one of those songs; it isn’t immediately clear whether this means caught as in brass ring or caught as in disease. It’s hard, a marketing email laments,...
September 27, 2021
Stuffing Ourselves | Amazon, the Postal Service, and the Tyranny of Logistics
Jake Bittle
There is a delivery service that employs around half a million people in the United States. It delivers billions of packages per year to tens of millions of addresses. It has hundreds of warehouses and sorting facilities, and its packages travel on thousands of identical trucks and vans. The delivery service has the extraordinary ability to get a box from one side of the country to another in just a...
September 27, 2021
Truth and Consequences | Documentaries and the Art of Manipulation
Blair McClendon
The best way to begin is with a gun. We don’t need to see it, but we need to know it’s there. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to convince an American that one is nearby. Start with murky fragments of a city skyline, lights piercing the falling night. Then a disembodied voice speaks as if the story has already begun, providing basic exposition: Dallas, October, Thursday night. A blue-eyed man,...
September 21, 2021
Persistence Pays | A Young Readers' Report
Sophie Haigney
“Harriet Tubman was born a slave, and her story could have ended there. Instead, she persisted, escaping from slavery and becoming the most famous ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad,” begins the first section of Chelsea Clinton’s baffling 2017 children’s book, She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, illustrated by Alexandra Boiger. True to its subtitle, the book marches on through thirteen stories of women persisting. Helen Keller persisted,...
September 27, 2021
Invested Development | Hacking Ethiopia’s Future
Britt H. Young
A hotel app, but for quarantine! A grocery delivery app, but for people in lockdown! The frenzy of projects proposed by the Ethiopia Covid-19 Response Team (ECRT) to bolster the country’s pandemic response felt appropriate for a group of mostly techies who had never worked in humanitarian or developmental organizations. “We must help the Ministry of Health, give them everything — our best abilities, hearts, and creativity,” one volunteer commanded...
September 27, 2021
Essay | Poetry
Elisa Gonzalez
Before, no rain fell because I needed none — good in any case, because, Homer writes, Gods are daunting when they appear as they are. A student emails that class is a struggle (in a sense): I need help, he says, understanding the Problems of Mass Incarnation. In the garden, sunflower heads hoist and swing. Rain-shadow jumps through the door. Yesterday my bicycle ran over a yellow snake. Don’t we...
September 27, 2021
The Sun Sets, Input Not Detected | Poetry
Greg Nissan
The guide exits the square as anyone would, drawn by dusk to the edges of rivers a pulse erupts, parade of intervals we could fill pointing to beer drinkers or the mayflies but either way to sound a space for our recurrence, where the promise of the night and the night coincide tomorrow, if you’ll join us. I won’t deny I wrote alone I am a cold metal feather. I...
September 27, 2021
“Determined to Wait” | Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Around the World
Carey Baraka, Meher Ahmad, Nicole Froio, Pamela Maddock, Peter Vale, Tryggvi Brynjarsson, Zoey Poll
As the Delta variant spreads, much has been made of the American anti-vax movement — its political character, its expressions, its impact. Elsewhere, the question of who has access to vaccines has frequently been more urgent than who is choosing to get one. And yet, across the globe, we’re seeing instances of vaccine hesitancy and refusal, for a wide variety of reasons. We asked writers around the world: Who’s vaccine-skeptical,...
September 27, 2021
Like a Colossus | Ben Rhodes Goes Looking for Democracy
Parvin Khan
In both his first and second books, published three years apart, Ben Rhodes recalls a turn of phrase from the end of the last millennium that left a deep impression on him: “America bestrides the world like a colossus.” The neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote those words in a 1999 column for Time called “A Second American Century?” about the unipolar system that seemed to have emerged after the Cold...
