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September 14, 2026
The Last Days of the Danube Institute | A Report from Postliberal Budapest
Brian Goodman
Espresso Embassy, a third-wave coffee shop in Budapest’s diplomatic and governmental quarter, is where visiting reporters and academics come to talk politics. On the way in for my morning coffee on March 18, I passed a poster for Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party that had been vandalized with a Sharpie: “the safe choice” had become “the certain way to get fucked.” From across the cafe, I spotted the American journalist and...
September 14, 2026
Abracadabra | Fiction
Chidima Anekwe
When I was a child, my father dissuaded my mother from speaking to me in our language, or I suppose their language. He said it would make it harder for me to learn proper English. I’m not sure where he read or heard this, but my father often pulled ideas out of thin air and pretended they had been written about extensively by scholars. Unsurprisingly, the emergence of the internet...
September 14, 2026
Save Yourself | Secular Celibacy Gets Trendy
Saliha Bayrak
Much of what we know about Rabia Al-Basri is based on myth. The eighth-century Sufi mystic from what is now Iraq is said to have wandered the streets delirious with love of God. She was equally famous for rejecting other kinds of love: Rabia insisted on remaining unmarried. “It does not please me,” she proclaimed to one suitor, “that you should distract me from God for a single moment.” As...
September 14, 2026
Broken Records | Hollywood’s Music Biopic Formula
Hanson O’Haver
It can be tough to remember now, but there was once a time when people had to outgrow superheroes. Fortunately, for generations of kids entering puberty, there was another place to turn for flashy costumes, goofy nicknames, personal logos, and childhood hardships channeled into special abilities by beloved figures who played by their own rules: rock ’n’ roll. When “famous musician” replaced “Batman” as the answer to the question “What...
September 14, 2026
Turbo-charged Nihilism
Prominent Novelist
When NYC “free speech” liberals dedicated themselves to fretting over “cancel culture,” I went mute and refused to engage, and instead simply proceeded as if that entire discourse didn’t exist. This worked out very well for me. And through that experience, I seem to have built the exact set of skills I have now deployed to pretend A.I. doesn't exist, and for me it simply does not. The mind is...
September 14, 2026
The Visitor | Fiction
Lily Felsenthal
I. How might I explain my daily mission? I wake up and my first task is not to piss the bed. It’s me against my own piss. A formidable opponent: its urgency makes demands of me. I have no choice but to rise to the occasion. I am Achilles, aflame with the death of Patroclus, riding into battle. I know the kinds of things they say about me. I said...
September 14, 2026
Pacific | Fiction
Ismail Ibrahim
Michel was beautiful, and by the time he arrived at the center, I’d been in there just long enough that I’d pissed out whatever remnant chemicals were making my situation bearable. The way he said it — California, dragging the vowels out of the N — was so sonorous and vast that I knew going there with him was the obvious solution to my problems. It felt as though the...
September 14, 2026
A Great Labor Displacement
News Reporter
There’s a new invite on my calendar for a team meeting. The embedded A.I. that I neither asked for nor can delete says I have no conflicts, though it also lobs potential replies that display a conspicuous deference and enthusiasm. During the meeting, my editor says usage of the in-house A.I.-powered editorial tool will now be factored into reporters’ performance reviews. Against the backdrop of doomerist narratives, the tool itself...
September 14, 2026
Editors’ Note | Democracy Now?
The Editors
Remember Graham Platner? A couple months after the rape allegations that put the final nail in the coffin of his Senate bid, it feels like the black hole of the news cycle has already sucked the ex-Blackwater mercenary and his doomed campaign past the event horizon. Democrats’ hopes of picking up Susan Collins’s seat in November now rest with progressive gubernatorial also-ran Troy Jackson. The party has upgraded from an...
September 14, 2026
“Nobody Is Minding the Store” | An Interview with Marion Nestle
The Drift Editors
Perhaps nowhere today does politics scramble more conspicuously in America than on its dinner plates. The marketplace of food and health ideas has gotten crowded; it’s no longer fringe to be anti-pasteurization, anti-vegetable, pro-methylene blue, or really anything else. The march of eccentric diet creeds from periphery to mainstream seemed to culminate with the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services....
