Latest
June 24, 2025
Fluff | Fiction
Matteo Ciambella
My friend who fell asleep at the New Year’s Eve sex party said the conversation there was lacking. “I didn’t expect it from an orgy,” she said. “So much talk about nothing.” I told her the same problem plagues my field. “So academics also wear cow costumes to have sex?” I laughed. “I was referring to all the talk about nothing,” I said. “Ah, I see. So no cows, no...
June 24, 2025
Dear Lillington Families | Fiction
Owen Park
For several months of my twenty-third year, I received an automated phone call every weekday from a number with a North Carolina area code. The purpose of the call was to inform me that the school bus was running late. After a while I stopped picking it up, and it went to voicemail. Dear Lillington families, the prerecorded message always began, in the tinny, rather severe voice of a woman...
June 24, 2025
God-Like Confidence | Donald Trump’s Cult of Faith
Tope Folarin
“Trump is unique among modern American presidents for his seeming lack of deep religious orientation,” the CNN correspondent MJ Lee wrote in 2017. Trump no longer belongs to a church, but he grew up attending services — first at a local Presbyterian ministry in Queens, and then at a church led by Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister turned self-help guru. “Obstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness...
June 24, 2025
Collective Political Activity | Reclaiming the First Amendment
Rhiannon Hamam
Ask almost anyone what the First Amendment guarantees, and they’ll answer, simply: “free speech.” Ask a pundit or professor, and they might add, as the legal scholar Noah Feldman recently did in a conversation with Katie Couric, that “you have free speech even when you’re saying the most unpopular things. Free speech really is freedom of speech for the ideas that we hate.” This framing has been repeated endlessly over...
June 24, 2025
Easy to Exploit | Collapsing the Urban-Rural Divide
Nick Bowlin
So often portrayed as stuck in the past and lagging in the wake of cultural and market currents, rural communities are frequently the first to feel the sting of economic instability. This makes their circumstances a useful portent of the future that Trump is creating. Rural workers have been hurt by automation; more jobs do not necessarily result from productivity gains in sectors like mining and manufacturing. Rural economies, often...
June 24, 2025
A Bureaucratic and Feminine Mind | The Right’s Misogyny Politics
Becca Rothfeld
In the video, posted last year, a group of twentysomething women stand in a circle in an open-plan office, the sort of blandly unassuming place that can be found in any city in the world. You know the look: the lights are scouring and fluorescent; the palette is a slush of tans and grays. Angular windows and ergonomic chairs are visible in the background. The women are dressed in forgettably...
June 24, 2025
“Politics Is Conflictual”
| An Interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
The Drift Editors
“Massive changes often unfold on large time scales,” philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò told The Drift in 2022. But if the past three years have shown us anything, it’s that they can also happen pretty quickly. Just three years ago, corporations proudly touted their DEI commitments, and a program of climate reparations seemed, if not imminently achievable, at least worth discussing concretely. But the topics we covered in our last conversation...
June 24, 2025
“We Will Not Win on Our Own” | An Interview with Eman Abdelhadi
The Drift Editors
In April 2024, Columbia’s administration brought in the New York Police Department to dismantle the tents that had been set up by pro-Palestinian protesters occupying the university’s South Lawn. Undeterred, students at over one hundred other campuses across the United States emulated the Columbia activists’ example in the following weeks. Over a year later, colleges are facing retaliation from Trump and his cronies, who relish the opportunity to turn skirmishes...
June 24, 2025
“Losing Any Claim to Moral Leadership” | An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh
The Drift Editors
The Drift first spoke with Nikhil Pal Singh at the dawn of Joe Biden’s presidency, shortly after the January 6 riots. Trump, we wrote in our introduction to that interview, was “finally, dramatically out of office,” and “efforts to historicize his tenure” had “already begun.” At the time, Singh — a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at NYU, founding faculty director of the NYU Prison Education Program,...
June 24, 2025
“They’re Using Megaphones” | An Interview with Wendy Brown
The Drift Editors
In the first issue of The Drift, we kicked off our interview series with Wendy Brown, one of the foremost political theorists in the United States. That conversation, which took place in between the onset of Covid and the eruption of the George Floyd uprising, largely centered on the role of neoliberal ideology — as articulated by Brown in books like Undoing the Demos (2015) and In the Ruins of...
