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November 8, 2023
A Racist Cause-and-Effect Story
Andy Liu
I remember hearing in high school that I needed to score about 200 points higher on my SATs than an otherwise equivalent white student for an equal shot at college admissions. I don’t recall my reaction at the time, but it wasn’t anger. Most likely, I felt teenage self-loathing over how nerdy the statistic implied Asians were. The memory came back to me a few years ago, when Students for...
November 8, 2023
Editors’ Note | Corrupt Organizations
The Editors
In our last issue, Piper French took aim at a statute that, she warned, was ballooning out of control. Debuted in the ’70s to curtail the Mafia, RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) enabled prosecutors to go after Mob bosses for crimes carried out by their underlings. Decades later, it’s now being deployed against targets as disparate as rappers and schoolteachers, on alarmingly shaky grounds. Since we published that...
November 6, 2023
“The Logic of Plunder” | An Interview with Verónica Gago
The Drift
Over the past five years, leftist political parties have swept into power across Latin America, in what has been called a “pink tide.” In Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile, politicians have channeled collective anger against reactionary regimes, catastrophic debt, and violence against women and Indigenous people into broad political victories. Verónica Gago is a professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University...
November 2, 2023
Grief | Poetry
Harmony Holiday
There’s a video of a lynx burying another lynx in the snow in what people on the Internet perceive as a show of mourning and care. It’s gone viral as a testament to how warm and civilized the beast really is. A quiet polemic. The video is severed and missing the first part, where the one performing the burial killed and ate the carrion it’s now submerging, which it will...
November 2, 2023
Something very much like sadness and very much like develish enjoyment | Poetry
Harmony Holiday
Oblivion is full of so much optimism it’s almost time for bombs to go off and I haven’t selected to right hue of lipstick the one that suggests ripeness with a hint of ironic smoldering that I’m on the market that I’m sold and about to blow up cherry mist in the dust of biofilms white teeth chattering as debris flies by in arks of broken memory dendrites of hypothetical...
November 2, 2023
Truth to Power | Our Dissident Obsession
Alexander Wells
If you are concerned about your children — if you suspect they might be taking their freedoms for granted, or failing to sufficiently appreciate the Great American Experiment — then perhaps the Dissident Project can help. This initiative, founded in 2022 by a Venezuelan-born Columbia graduate student named Daniel Di Martino, offers to bring real-life dissidents to present at your kid’s high school, gratis. Its mission? To inform the youth...
October 31, 2023
Dispatches on the War on Gaza
Bobuq Sayed, Dylan Saba, Hadas Binyamini, Mariam Barghouti, Nasreen Abd Elal, Natan Last, Sophia Goodfriend
There have been many dark hours in Gaza since war broke out on October 7, but on Friday, that darkness became literal: for 34 hours, internet and phone services were shut down, cutting off Gazans from one another and from the outside world. As the violence continues into a fourth week, we asked writers to share their perspectives on the unfolding crisis from across the globe — from the West...
October 31, 2023
Davy | Fiction
K Patrick
Ronnie did not know the bed-and-breakfast was haunted until she checked in. Then, there it was, proudly announced on a leaflet propped up on the desk. The Fifth Most Haunted Building in the Country. They went all over, assured the woman retrieving Ronnie’s room key, and this place came in the top five! The woman was proud, referred to the ghosts as “they.” Told Ronnie that they must have put...
October 25, 2023
Turning the Tables | The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Revisited
Nancy Ko
Deep down, here’s what we already know: this is not just a war. It is not just a war because wars happen between states. It is not just a war because there is a world of difference between a military with the capacity to even consider cutting off water, electricity, and routes of escape to more than two million of its captives — and the people who are those captives....
October 24, 2023
“A Desperate Situation Getting More Desperate” | An Interview with Rashid Khalidi
The Drift
Since Hamas’s gruesome attack on October 7, we’ve watched as Israel has — with our government’s blessing and material aid — bombarded the captive residents of the Gaza Strip and displaced more than a million people. As protesters around the globe have expressed outrage at Israeli violence, a series of debates has played out on the American left: over whether mourning the deaths of 1,400 Israelis lends cover to Israel’s...
