Latest
July 19, 2024
Bridge for Sale | Poetry
Jen Frantz
I would like to buy your bridge, the man said to me, carrying a purple briefcase. Well, I said, it’s not for sale. And he said, why isn’t it for sale? And I said, it’s where I go to listen to disco. He put a hand through his hair. Listen, he said, I’m going to put in a traffic light. A traffic light! I was the only one who came...
July 19, 2024
Aliens | Fiction
Gideon Jacobs
John removes Jacob’s mask and jacket so his son can play in the playground unencumbered, and then, alone on a bench away from other parents, composes a sext to a woman who is not his wife. He wants the sext to be good. He wants it to be sexy. He wants to increase his deviancy by the rightsized increment, large enough that she will be surprised by the advance, small...
July 19, 2024
Underwater | Fiction
Hannah Kingsley-Ma
What a pool it was, Sam thought. A special kind of pool. Very cold and salty. There was no chlorine in it, someone informed her. All saline. She took that to mean they were basically bathing, treating their various open wounds. She had been on vacation with her husband’s family for exactly two days. A frog was dying somewhere in the corner of the pool. A well-bred dog, genetically modified...
July 19, 2024
No Atlanta Way | Stop Cop City Meets the Establishment
Sam Worley
Two years in a row, on the very same day, police descended on the campus of Emory University, an elite private school on the leafy eastern edges of Atlanta. In the spring of 2023, students staked tents on the university’s quad, agitating against the construction of a controversial police training center in a forest south of Atlanta. Opponents had nicknamed the hundred-million-dollar facility “Cop City” for all the amenities that...
July 19, 2024
Time and Time Again | Proust in the Age of Retranslation
Simon Leser
How should translators — or any writers, for that matter — respond to their critics? The usual advice is quiet dignity: for certain distances to be kept so that a sense, however slight, of superiority might be implied. Some even urge writers not to bother reading their critics at all, which is the literary equivalent of the sort of self-care that encourages melancholiacs not to watch the news, or check...
July 19, 2024
Richard Leoneck | Fiction
Diana Kole
“But then of course I’ve always hated food. “Say something like… ‘His dearest fantasy was to survive without eating, perfect and pure.’ Lay it on quite thick. This is relevant to the novels, I promise. “You could start with when you met me, the thing with the brandy. But I see no reason not to proceed chronologically.” As a child in the seventies, Richard Leoneck stole copies of the...
March 12, 2024
Character Assassination | How the Hindu Right Distorted Gandhi
Aditya Narayan Sharma
Even outside India, it can be difficult to escape the cult of Mohandas Gandhi, the lawyer, thinker, and politician who helped liberate the nation from British colonial rule in 1947. The praise ranges from the anodyne (Gandhi is a “hero not just to India but to the world,” per Barack Obama) to the ironic (“really phenomenal,” according to Burmese political prisoner turned genocide defender Aung San Suu Kyi) to the...
March 12, 2024
Dance, Revolution | George Balanchine and Martha Graham Trade Places
Juliana DeVaan
“Dance these days — spring ’59 — is decidedly split into two main factions,” wrote the dancer Paul Taylor: neoclassical ballet, a modernist update of classical ballet, and modern dance, which broke free of ballet’s strictures to use movement as an expressive tool. These two genres were epitomized by the work of the choreographers George Balanchine and Martha Graham, respectively. “So when it’s announced that the two giants will collaborate...
March 10, 2024
Maud | Fiction
Noor Qasim
What I really want to talk about is the work. Of course. If we have to talk about something, it might as well be the work. Well, we don’t have to talk about anything. But you’d like to, right? So you have something to write about. I’m open to discussing anything that interests you. Okay. I don’t know. It’s just been a lot. I’d just like — I mean, we...
March 12, 2024
A Bullshit Genius | On Walter Isaacson’s Biographical Project
Oscar Schwartz
On a friendly stroll somewhere in Colorado in the summer of 2004, Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson if he would consider writing his biography. Isaacson, a journalist, academic, and policymaker who was then CEO of the Aspen Institute, an influential think tank, had just published a six-hundred-odd-page study of Benjamin Franklin, and was at work on another about Albert Einstein. “My initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly,” Isaacson later...
