March 24, 2023
The sofas were aware of what we were up to, and my own bouquet regarded us conspiratorially.
Regular dispatches from our contributors.
March 24, 2023
The sofas were aware of what we were up to, and my own bouquet regarded us conspiratorially.
March 15, 2023
Our cars, no matter how much we cherish them, hold us in social and economic custody
For most of us, our cars, no matter how much we cherish them, hold us in social and economic custody. As more and more vehicles are financed, and with higher loans and interest rates, creditors exert a carceral pull over our ability to earn a sustainable livelihood. Perhaps the most telling evidence of this servitude is that, in times of financial stress, households will prioritize their monthly car payments over all others, including basic necessities. Surely it is the mark of our perverse civilization when food, medical care, and housing have to take a back seat to our need to keep wheels on the road.
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March 2, 2023
“On the truck, boom, I have energy, I know what I’m doing”
Trucking saved her, she said, but she still got lonely. Solitude became its own source of claustrophobia. “I have blue days,” Jess said. “If I slammed my truck into a mountain, would anyone notice? Does anyone know I’m out here?”
February 21, 2023
The government’s primary focus was not on relieving suffering but on punishing dissent.
February 20, 2023
I turned away from abstraction
Writing fiction hadn’t been false, for nonfiction isn’t truer than fiction; but I’d seemed to row at the shallowest region of the narrative stream, where the water wouldn’t reveal its deepest enchantments. I needed to allow the subject to change the form as I progressed. Where I began with curiosity about my uncle’s fate, my travels made me aware of how little of the war had been monumentalized in the Nigerian landscape, ultimately making it necessary for me to define the shape of my work as a reconciliation with the fragmented nature of the past.
February 17, 2023
Industrial toxicity without industrial employment
How many times have we seen this drama play out in the last several decades? Every presidential administration wants to fix America’s “crumbling infrastructure” until they discover the business interests profiting from disrepair.
February 9, 2023
It’s one of the most gorgeous and mysterious things ever to happen on an electric guitar.
February 7, 2023
Love found me twice, at once
Love found me twice, at once. If it never
happens again I’ll still be luckier
than the moon. Breathing, typing these lines,
texting a friend, checking the time,
thinking it wouldn’t always be like this,
but still, sometimes, it was. It is.
January 27, 2023
Less myth, more moth.
January 25, 2023
“Minorities Unite! Fight for Democratic Rights!”
There is a symmetry between Corky Lee’s passing and the rise of Stop Anti-Asian Hate: the departure of Asian America’s greatest documentarian and its most visible recent efflorescence. Years earlier, the brief window of postwar Asian American radicalism seemed to have already swung shut. Today, our most notable figures are corporate CEOs and conservative politicians, the eponymous Asians rich and crazy, so the artists, revolutionaries, and workers preserved in Lee’s prints can feel as elusive as their author. No matter how distant an Asian American poor people’s movement may seem, his prints still vibrate with radical temporality and potential.
December 24, 2022
What of the political discord between the neighboring countries? “That is for the bureaucrats.”
“You should see my kids,” Issam continued. At his home in La Capelette, a neighborhood in the tenth arrondissement, one child had been wearing face paint in the colors of the French flag, the other face paint in the colors of the Moroccan flag. “It’s 50-50,” he said with a smile. “For French-Moroccans we will win no matter what.”
December 23, 2022
On the New School picket line
Then the parents threatened a class-action lawsuit. The students occupied a university building. The full-time faculty began rumbles about a vote of no confidence against the president. They had nowhere left to go.