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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...
April 29, 2021
Fiction Detective | On Literary Citation and Search Engine Sleuthing
Sophie Haigney
At the end of Miranda Popkey’s novel Topics of Conversation, there is a short section titled “Works (Not) Cited.”1 She writes, “This manuscript emerged in part from an engagement with and in some cases refers elliptically to the following texts, televisions shows, films, web series, works of art, songs, e-mail newsletters, and podcasts.” The list of these works is roughly four pages long. I read it like a sleuth, trying...
May 6, 2021
Editors’ Note | Party Time
There are many consequences to the fact that an extremely high percentage of the American media lives in New York. The limitations of this situation become particularly apparent during, say, California wildfire season, or when anything else happens in any other part of the country. Meanwhile, faraway readers of our hometown national newspaper are treated to in-depth analyses of the subtle social hierarchies being hashed out in what amounts to...
May 4, 2021
“A Radical Demonstration of ‘America First’” | An Interview with Adam Tooze
The Drift
A year into a crisis of world-historic proportions, and what have we learned? After flubbing every aspect of the pandemic response, from masks to contact tracing, the U.S. has been rewarded with a return to what seems a lot like normal life. The market — following a series of erratic plot twists and what looked like it should have been another Great Depression — seems to have bounced back stronger...
May 6, 2021
“An Impossible Feedback Loop” | The Year in Mental Health
Andy Hyatt, Anne Larsen, Anonymous contributors, Beth Blum, Brianna Suslovic, Jess Bergman, Mike Rosmann, Rachel Connolly, Şerife Tekin, Tarpley Hitt
It’s no secret that the profound losses and disruptions to daily life of the past year have had a major emotional and psychological impact on nearly all of us. Many of the effects are obvious — loneliness, grief, disorientation, anxiety — and yet, aside from a profusion of dubious self-care tips and misused therapeutic language on social media, we have barely begun to reckon with their enormity and complexity, not...
May 6, 2021
Personal Hell | The Climate Anxiety Novel
Rithika Ramamurthy
In March of 2017, the American Psychological Association officially announced that feelings are valid: climate anxiety is real. In a sixty-nine page primer on therapeutic practice in the era of ecological decline, experts identify a range of negative emotional reactions including ecoanxiety (“a chronic fear of environmental doom”) and describe the psychosocial links between these states of mind and the state of the climate. The preface to the report explains...
May 6, 2021
A Jerusalem of the Mind | Academic Freedom After Edward Said
Andrew Marzoni
Joseph Massad started raising eyebrows on the Columbia campus around 2002. That spring, students circulated a petition calling for the political scientist’s dismissal; one, writing in The Columbia Daily Spectator, cited a lecture from Massad’s elective, “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society,” as evidence of a growing climate of anti-Semitism, likening the talk to a swastika tagged on the wall of a campus bathroom. At a pro-Palestine rally that April,...
May 6, 2021
Good Immigrant Novels | Jhumpa Lahiri and the Aesthetics of Respectability
Sanjena Sathian
When I was in tenth grade, my favorite English teacher pulled me aside ceremoniously to deliver some news. That year, Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 story collection The Interpreter of Maladies was replacing Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart on our “World Literature”-themed syllabus. (Never mind that most of those Pulitzer Prize-winning short stories take place in the U.S.) This was 2006, before the emergence of the bromide “representation matters,” but that was...
May 6, 2021
Eternity Now! | Jeff Bezos's 10,000-Year Plan
Josh Marcus
Over the course of a week at the end of 2020, the air tens of thousands of feet above the North Pole heated 100 degrees in what’s known as a sudden stratospheric warming event. This phenomenon, which scientists predict could become more common with climate change, wobbled the great atmospheric turntable of the jetstream, sending waves of Arctic air towards the U.S. Two months later, Winter Storm Uri arrived, blanketing...
May 6, 2021
The Underlying Issue | Fiction
Pete Segall
Slaughter Rule My son said he wanted to play baseball. I didn’t know if he really wanted to do it or was just being charitable: I had a lot of free time that summer. His teammates were changelings, gnomes, humanoids. The whole outfield were creatures out of Herodotus. A boy with a German Shepherd’s head; a boy with a face in the middle of his chest; a boy with his...
