Latest
September 27, 2021
Editors’ Note | Eighteen Months
The Editors
The first print issue of The Drift is almost exactly eighteen months overdue. At the beginning of March 2020, we were gearing up to launch our magazine. We had edited twelve pieces, picked out our fonts, run our fingers over paper stock and made final selections. The idea, then seemingly foolproof, was to order a shipment of magazines to one of our apartments and recruit friends to help us carry them...
September 23, 2021
“Left in the Dark” | Covid Behind Bars
April Harris, Christopher Blackwell, Corey Devon Arthur, Darla Jones, Felix Sitthivong, Joel Castón, Olethus Hill Jr., Patrick Stephens, Wesley Williams
Almost as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, writers rushed to narrativize the social experiment that was “lockdown.” Some of the reports, including those on the risks undertaken by workers newly deemed “essential,” have felt necessary and urgent. Others less so, like the slew of navel-gazing “quarantine diaries” produced last spring. (One prominent novelist compared her experience sheltering in place in her Los Angeles mansion to “doing time.”) Less visible...
September 22, 2021
Dead Poet Anxiety | John Ashbery in the Age of Social Media
David Schurman Wallace
Sometimes the best thing for a poet’s reputation is to die. It is preferable to do this while still young — a brief life can acquire a powerful shape, in the way Keats’s “This Living Hand” is more charged for breaking off abruptly. We stand, as they say, on the shoulders of giants, and after they are interred in the pantheon, we draw from their mythos as well as their...
September 20, 2021
Parent Trap | Fiction
Hannah Gold
I. Early on in my publishing career, which was still early when it ended, I looked up what “congenial” means on my phone but it autofilled “congenital” into the dictionary due to prior use. In this way I came to believe “congenial” means having an essential condition or deformation present since birth. By the time I realized my mistake I’d already migrated from the world of reputable words to that...
September 17, 2021
Case Sensitive | Why We Shouldn't Capitalize "Black"
Nicholas Whittaker
Every so often, an apparently seismic shift in American race talk occurs — “Negro” to “black” in the 1960s, “black” to “African American” in the 1980s, and back to “black” more recently. The summer of 2020 marked the latest linguistic revolution, as a swath of major news outlets opted, as a rule, to capitalize the “B” in “black” — a change swiftly embraced in everyday use. The linguistic revolution took place...
September 14, 2021
XOXO, Ruling Class | Gossip Girl, The O.C., and the New Gilded Age
David Klion
In 1976, the year Josh Schwartz was born in Providence, one tenth of one percent of American households controlled 7.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. By 1995, the year Schwartz graduated from a private, arts-oriented high school, that share had risen to 13.5 percent. By 2003, when the Schwartz-penned high school drama The O.C. premiered on Fox, it was at 15.9 percent; by 2007, when the Schwartz-produced Gossip Girl premiered...
September 9, 2021
“A New Form of War” | An Interview with Samuel Moyn
The Drift
Since 2008, politicians have campaigned (successfully) on the promise to get out of Afghanistan. Finally, this August, U.S. forces withdrew, and the government our military had installed unravelled overnight. After nearly twenty years, it was now clear, the U.S. had accomplished nothing besides untold death and destruction. All at once, prominent commentators emerged to decry the move and lambaste the Biden administration for its strategic blunder. To take the long...
May 2, 2021
Other People’s Despair | Mending the Social Fabric Won't Fix the Suicide Crisis
Erik Baker
Last March, in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, Donald Trump issued a warning: in what would soon become an incessant refrain among opponents of lockdowns and mandatory social-distancing measures, he claimed that unless the country was swiftly opened back up, there would be “suicides by the thousands.” Trump’s particular prophecy was clearly ridiculous, and it became more so with each passing month. But it was by no means...
May 5, 2021
Real Estate: Fables | Poetry
Adrienne Raphel
The Lion & the Statue David has fifty-nine apartments for rent and twenty-six lease takeovers to see. Beautiful, sun-drenched, south-facing. Duck light. Private dock, semi-private outdoor space, roof deck, live band. Tortured orchard, koi pond. The client’s representative drinks tap water from a Fiji bottle. We can easily represent things as we wish them to be. ** The Ass & His Shadow All the agents have their own listings, but...
May 6, 2021
The Translation Trap | Latin American Literature and the International Market
Julia Kornberg
The unnamed narrator of Valeria Luiselli’s 2011 novel Faces in the Crowd is a young Mexican woman living in Brooklyn and working, as many F-1 literary types do, at a small translation press. She spends half of the week visiting libraries around the city, carrying huge backpacks full of books while she searches for Spanish-language writers worth translating or reissuing. The rest of her time is spent in the press’s...
