Latest
May 3, 2021
Objects of Desire | Fiction
Clare Sestanovich
The two of them live in a small apartment, small enough that it is impossible to ever be truly out of sight. In the room that is both the living room and the bedroom, there is a lofted bed. They have learned, faster than they anticipated, to navigate the ladder in half-sleep, when one of them needs to pee or retrieve a glass of water or confiscate the cat’s...
April 27, 2021
The ISIS Beat | Why Caliphate and Everyone Else Got It Wrong
Rozina Ali
In March 2019, I arrived in eastern Syria to witness the demise of the Islamic State. The movement had been largely defeated, having surrendered major cities like Raqqa and Mosul. All that was left of the Caliphate, which had gripped our collective fears for the past six years, were a few square miles of desert along the Iraqi–Syrian border. The towns here appeared to be deserted. Car doors were left...
April 25, 2021
The End of the Road | Nomadland, My Mother, and the Frontier's Broken Promise
Mitchell Morgan Johnson
For the first few months of the Great Recession, I was glued to cable. When I got home from school, I would turn on the news, usually CNN, to check in on the financial collapse. The same people were on TV all the time: sobbing families and defensive bankers, Hank Paulson and Octomom. Reporters toured abandoned Las Vegas cul-de-sacs in search of the average American. Jon Stewart seemed always on...
February 3, 2021
“Speak to the Moment” | Art and Culture under Trump
Blair McClendon, Jenny G. Zhang, Matt Christman, Merve Emre, Rosemarie Ho, Sasha Frere-Jones, Sophie Haigney, Tausif Noor
In 2016, grand predictions were issued about the fate of art under the new regime. The culture would suffer, dragged into the morass of Trump’s gaudy, ’80s flair — his ill-fitting suits, overlong ties, and overcooked steaks. Or no — it would usher in an artistic renaissance, a flourishing, heady underground. Comedy might be dead, but things were looking up for punk. Four(ish) years later, it’s time to prematurely diagnose the...
February 3, 2021
Mr Blythe Esq. | FICTION
Amber Medland
Typing I Today my boss handed me an envelope, then a stamp, and told me to lick it. My online therapist, Susan, says that my inability to set appropriate boundaries indicates low self-confidence. I am convinced that Susan is a bot. I reply: I do not have low self-esteem. What I have is impeccable manners. Julie and I used to live together. She wants me to get a real...
February 3, 2021
New Sheriff in Town | Law Enforcement and the Urban-Rural Divide
Jonathon Booth
Big Harris Rood had spent his life growing cotton on a plantation near Lumpkin, Georgia. He had been free from bondage for less than a year when three white robbers arrived outside his cabin late one night in early 1866. After a brief argument, Rood killed the leader, driving an ax into his skull. The next day, the dead man’s father swore out a warrant and traveled to the Rood...
February 3, 2021
[A Moment Breaking Loose from the Past Becomes the Voice Inside Your Head] | Poetry
Jackie Wang
Where in this architecture of dust will you find the space to build a house that does not split? There I see your hand trying to escape the raw activity of laying stones Formations will spryly emerge the dampened loam shaped into something terrible From the mud she tells me, “Some days I wake up laughing because these forms are so unnecessary” “Some days I wake up crying because these...
February 3, 2021
Strong Female Leads | The Reese Witherspoon Literary Canon
Marella Gayla
In 2012, Reese Witherspoon was thirty-six years old and sick of Hollywood. Her acting career had slowed since her Oscar win in 2005; she had filed for divorce in 2006 and appeared in a few box office duds, and she wasn’t encouraged by the sexist, stultifying scripts she was receiving. Witherspoon requested meetings with studio bigwigs, and was disappointed to find that they didn’t care about developing stories with female...
February 3, 2021
Not All Millennials | Generational Wealth and the New Inequality
Kiara Barrow
Peddlers of self-help and pop-psychology are quick to assure us that we’re each our own toughest critic. In fact, it’s often our peers who will exact the harshest judgments, being best positioned to sniff out the social cues and latent hierarchies that are most legible within a shared milieu. Last year, Pete Buttigieg, the only millennial candidate in the Democratic Presidential field, failed to win the support of other members...
February 2, 2021
First-Person Shooter Ideology | The Cultural Contradictions of Call of Duty
Daniel Bessner
For decades, historians of the twentieth century have debated why, exactly, the United States fought a protracted, destructive, and ultimately pointless Cold War with the Soviet Union. Some have claimed that the United States was simply reacting rationally to Joseph Stalin’s provocations; “the brave and essential response of free men to communist aggression,” in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Others, including Stephen Wertheim and myself, have pointed to the...
