The Unwinnable War on Disease
June 21, 2021
Pandemics and the ecology of armed conflict.
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Fresh Hell
June 18, 2021
The Supreme Court Says YAASS, Honey, to Homophobia
It’s been a banner week for the nation’s highest court. On Thursday, three opinions issued forth from that marble sarcophagus of justice that, among other things, upheld corporate America’s god-given right to never be ...
Is it Obscene?
On fame, criticism, and disputes about transphobia.
Hand of War
We hold war’s hand,not so that it walks among us,but it is death,a bit tardy, we cajole it.
We hold war’s hand,convinced that this is the last timeit waves catastrophe to us,since the road is a futile wall,
and the country is searchingfor a photographof collective ...
I Put a Spell on You
June 17, 2021
The witch trial as an act of too-close reading
What Does a Fact Look Like?
June 16, 2021
We may be our own deceivers
American Fables
June 15, 2021
George Packer seeks refuge in political myth.
Specific Details
Drowning in the time allotted for truce,we manufacture spare heartsin case we lose the hearts each of us has.We’re uncertain of life’s worthon the slipping edge,yet it seems hope can’t be shelled all at once.The minute details of war,poison gas we can’t thwartfrom ...
Fresh Hell
June 11, 2021
Goodbye to All That
For far too long, millennials, when not busy eviscerating the raisin and canned tuna industries, have been living like “bourgeois royalty” courtesy of benevolent investors who have, for years, subsidized the immiseration of millions of workers (millennial ...
Escape from Little Island
June 10, 2021
New York City welcomes the bad future of urban planning.
How I Kill Soldiers
Fady Joudah, the translator of the following poem, discusses it in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Read it here.
Colonial soldiers,what have they been doingto my poetry all these yearswhen I could have easily killed themin my poemsas they’ve killed my ...
Realism’s Revenge
June 07, 2021
Do we have more to learn from the nineteenth-century novel?