An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s writing is in Jacobin, The Nation, Current Affairs, Boulevard, CHEAP POP, The New Territory, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. He graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018. Find him at @devintoshea on Twitter and Instagram.
  • Pruitt-Igoe: A Black Community Under the “Atomic Cloud”

    Pruitt-Igoe: A Black Community Under the “Atomic Cloud”

    In the 1950s, the U.S. military conducted unethical radiological experiments on Black communities, including the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis, MO. Devin Thomas O’Shea shares a historical mystery involving nuclear physics, scientific racism, and the cruel neglect of the public good.

  • The Cult of the Veiled Prophet

    The Cult of the Veiled Prophet

    Devin Thomas O’Shea relates the sordid history of St. Louis, MO’s Veiled Prophet Society—an occult men’s club and debutante ball for Southern power elites, founded by a Confederate who adapted a 19th-century poem to serve as a stand-in for the Ku Klux Klan.

  • The Busch Family Brood

    The Busch Family Brood

    Devin Thomas O’Shea shares the saga of the scions of the Anheuser-Busch brewery empire: their arrogance, their self-mythologizing reality show, and the impunity afforded them for their crimes.