An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
Shane Burley interviews Vicky Osterweil about her book, which examines the concept of looting and how it takes back power by shifting the context of spaces, material wealth, and community. What does looting mean in an uprising like we’re experiencing, and why has her defense caused such a panic?
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by Jonah Goldman Kay. Louisiana residents often depend on mutual aid to help rebuild communities after devastating hurricanes. But in a deeply conservative region, it often comes as a surprise to residents that this kind of aid might also be coming from socialists.
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by Khalypso: no & i have only just considered stopping. / it doesn’t hurt enough. the pain has only just settled / into the grooves—maybe there’s spendable gold
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by Whitney Curry Wimbish. Connie practiced her gratitude meditation as she drove home. If she listed everything to be grateful for, she would see how rich she really was, and she would get happier and happier. She tried to think of every single thing, right down to the fact of her existence. To life itself!
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by Saritha Ramakrishna. In the foreword to Welcome to Hell World, Luke O’Neil admits that he does not know what his book is. It covers a lot: loneliness and addiction in all their forms, absurdity and cruelty and how they’re often paired together, people as soft matter shredded by this nation’s exploitative systemThe collection hits upon all the major works in the canon of Americanness: opioid addiction, the border wall, climate change, pollution, the healthcare system, police violence, mass shootings, etc.
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by Annie Levin. Liberalism, as it is observed in this nation, is an ideological void on whose surface any New York Times reader might see themselves reflected. So, the role of the writer is to burnish that void to ensure its polish is maintained.
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by Stephanie Kaylor. The days I am tired after bed because my bed is my office and I recall its etymology, pertaining to moral duty, performance of a task; the days I think what it means to go to bed after that, how I dream myself
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The Italian communist philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi devoted his 2018 book Breathing to our “contemporary condition of breathlessness”—a condition which has only grown more acute in the years since its publication. Berardi frames the act of breathing as “a vibrational search to attune oneself to one’s environment.” Yet to do so in this era would…
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The first days of October have tallied one point in the column for the existence of a just and moral God. Trump has the dreaded virus; he and a number of high-placed cronies have contracted the Red Death because they wouldn’t wear a Masque.
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by Ernest Tjia. At the Charlotte Douglas Airport there is a mural / featuring an alligator flying, wearing a yellow / dress shirt that has been tailored-fit to
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