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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...
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...
