Latest
March 11, 2024
Capacity to Deform
Paul McAdory
As a proud member of the Chase Sapphire Preferred family, I receive, in addition to statements detailing my credit card debt, emails imploring me to “Earn cash back from doing what you love,” e.g., subscribing to Fubo or purchasing wine from the Wall Street Journal. These companies and I form an affinity network based on generous interest rates; we strengthen our bonds through 1.5-percent-back deals. You might call us “chosen...
March 11, 2024
Back-Lasch
Noelle Bodick
To the jaded feminist of our day, family life can look like a losing proposition. Not for us the sentimentalizing of romance novels, pandering to the quaint longings of a bygone girlhood. If Jane Austen’s set could take a code of hypergamy as second nature, women today are instead taught — by writers, artists, theorists, brands — to want something very different: solitary selfhood, exalted friendships, and a romantic life...
March 11, 2024
No Returns | On Family Functions and Dysfunctions
Dan Brooks, Elisa Gonzalez, Gaby Del Valle, Karim Kazemi, Lydia Kiesling, Nancy Ko, Nawal Arjini, Noelle Bodick, P.E. Moskowitz, Paul McAdory, S.C. Cornell
In December, The New Yorker asked, “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” in a piece that tracked the rise of the open relationship, from the obscure “province of utopian free-love communities” to its status as a mainstay of “Park Slope marriages and prestige television.” In January, New York magazine took on the same topic in a cover story, which explored the “increasingly mainstream world of ethical non-monogamy” and included “a...
March 5, 2024
Gender, Troubled | Judith Butler’s Culture War Misfire
Brock Colyar
In 2017, a group of right-wing activists gathered in São Paulo, Brazil, carrying a life-sized dummy with Judith Butler’s face on it. Butler identifies as nonbinary, uses they/them pronouns, and is usually photographed wearing a well-tailored blazer, but the protestors dressed the puppet in blue jeans, a witch’s hat, and a black t-shirt over which they had attached a lacy, pink brassiere. Eventually, the mob set fire to its creation,...
February 26, 2024
Stumped | Why Write (or Read) a Campaign Book?
Mark Chiusano
When Donald Trump summoned Chris Christie to the White House in 2018 to offer him a job as chief of staff, Trump’s most pressing question had to do not with background checks or political alignment, but with Christie’s new book, Let Me Finish. More specifically, Trump wanted to know: was it critical of him? “The book is honest about you,” Christie said, adding that the book disparaged people close to...
February 15, 2024
Third Room | Fiction
Julian Robles
In November my landlord and her family left the city to celebrate the abrupt cessation of her husband’s paralysis. They planned to visit Durango, where she had grown up, and Quintana Roo, where their daughter’s godfather lived. The family was feeling hopeful. All of us were. Before leaving, the landlord had halved my rent and given me a spare key to the private terraza on the building’s top floor. I...
February 7, 2024
Normcore | On the Boardwalk with Norman Finkelstein
Julia Rock
Norman Finkelstein needed to reach a moral judgment. On the morning of October 7, he received an email from a friend telling him to check the news. Finkelstein was “euphoric” when he saw that Hamas militants had broken through the barrier that surrounds Gaza. “I have this kind of weird idiosyncrasy,” he told me wryly. “I like it when people break out of concentration camps.” The notorious Israel critic and...
November 8, 2023
The War on Ecoterror | Environmental Radicalism, Left and Right
Gaby Del Valle
On August 3, 2019, after driving through the night from his grandparents’ house in the Dallas suburbs to El Paso’s east side, Patrick Crusius took a moment to say his goodbyes. “I’m probably going to die today,” he posted on 8chan, attaching, by way of explanation, a four-page document titled “The Inconvenient Truth.” Then he pulled up to a Walmart and started shooting, killing twenty people and wounding more than...
November 8, 2023
Can the Sireniform Speak? | Devolving with The Little Mermaid
Sophie Lewis
In the year that brought us the orca uprising and the disappearance of a submarine carrying tourists to the wreck of the Titanic, Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid starred an African American woman. Not entirely unlike the orcas’ antics, Halle Bailey’s selection was met with boos from conservatives and cheers from liberals. #NotMyMermaid, some tweeted. #YesMyAriel. Depending on which side you were on, the facts that director Rob Marshall’s $250...
November 3, 2023
Dorchester | Fiction
Steven Duong
In the year of the ox, my poem went moderately viral in some small but enthusiastic circles, the way a poem sometimes does. I wrote it after reading the news report about the old Vietnamese woman stabbed to death outside her home in Dorchester, which is where I was at the time, visiting Leah. These visits almost always involved her putting on a harness and me skipping dinner, so I...
