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November 8, 2023
Basic Behavior | Mary Gaitskill Posts Her Drafts
Hannah Gold
During the summer of 2022, a troubling suspicion began to take root in my mind. It was June, and ever since I’d left my news blogging job the previous year, the compulsion I’d once felt to stand stalwart and hypnotized at the gates of global content mills — which for some time had been as much a matter of personal curiosity as professional necessity — had eased considerably. I went...
November 8, 2023
Moments of Elevation | Fiction
Eliza Barry Callahan
On August 29, 2019, I was meant to travel to Venice to watch a lifelong friend get married — a small reception for just ten people. The friend was marrying a Venetian. When I awoke that morning, I felt a deep drone in my right ear accompanied by a sound I can best compare to a large piece of sheet metal being rocked, a perpetually rolling thunder. I moved from...
November 8, 2023
Craving | Poetry
Emma Winsor Wood
In the aquarium, the fish “dart,” their movements “jerky” as if afraid I will “scoop” them out of the “water” and into my “mouth,” or “as if” they are tiny machines, programmed to “dart” so their scales “catch” the light “just so.” When “pregnant” for the “first time,” with a “daughter,” I began to eat fish for the “first time” in “twelve” years. I ate it “for” her, felt “no...
November 8, 2023
Greenness | Fiction
Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind
The professor is, of course, talking. The notion that a sentence cannot be a fragment. Adverbs, adverbs. Every language pretends that its word for nostalgia is untranslatable. Camus killed his mother. Tezeta, saudade. He missed her, probably. The professor’s lips are making noises. As professors’ lips are wont to do. A narrator is rather like a fiber supplement. Final papers. Samuel Richardson folded a song into a book. In fact,...
November 8, 2023
2129 | Poetry
Prince Bush
I overslept. I had an hour To look at Jupiter, or I had To wait 100 years. I needed a telescope. I, at least, needed Binoculars. It was its closest In opposition. I knew Someone who could get Only so close to me. For casual observers, It would appear the same. I spotted Mars and Almost walked away.
November 8, 2023
Lost in Translation | On J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole
Ella Fox-Martens
When my grandfather started to die, the first thing he lost was language. Like most people in South Africa, he had been multilingual, fluent in English and isiZulu, competent in Afrikaans and isiXhosa. This ease of passage remained a continual point of pride for him, as the spoken fabric of the country was rewoven after the end of apartheid. When Nelson Mandela, the son of a Xhosa chief, ascended to...
November 8, 2023
We Can No Longer Afford Illusions | The Supreme Court and the Left
Alexandra Brodsky, Andy Liu, Aziz Huq, Aziz Rana, Ben Sobel, Diana Reddy, Duncan Hosie, Eleni Schirmer, Henry Hicks IV, Nick Martin, Noah Rosenblum, Rhiannon Hamam, Samuel Moyn, Steven Donziger
That the Supreme Court is ethically compromised has become almost comically obvious. Recent sweeping decisions, from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the dismantling of affirmative action, to the extension of innocent Americans’ prison sentences, have been handed down in the midst of myriad scandals involving justices and their wealthy, purportedly uncorrupt friends. The high court, now dominated by conservatives, is not just independent but dangerously rogue. For Issue...
November 8, 2023
The Ultimate Originalist Stamp of Approval
Nick Martin
In Haaland v. Brackeen, decided this June, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion again reminded readers just how rarely the high court has demonstrated a clear, coherent approach toward federal Indian law. The case focused on the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which was passed in 1978 to reduce the number of Native children removed from their families and to preferentially place Native adoptees and foster youth within...
November 8, 2023
A Collective of Freelance Lawyers
Eleni Schirmer
The Supreme Court isn’t as much a body of government as it is a collective of freelance lawyers, and Biden v. Nebraska was less a case than a grab bag of grievances dumped out by disgruntled ideologues. Six Republican-led states, in order to prove injury by the student-debt cancellation policy, claimed that local entities would lose money, which would harm the states in various ways. Missouri argued that it would...
November 8, 2023
An Old Story
Noah Rosenblum
For the first time in years, there are signs that liberals are ready to give up their infatuation with the Supreme Court. While it has not come easy, it is long past time. And there are promising avenues for reform on the horizon that could wrest control from right-wing ideologues on the bench. Liberals’ past resistance to reform has seemed connected to their belief in an old story about the...
