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

Tyler Wells Lynch is a writer, editor, and journalist with bylines in The New York Times, USA Today, Vice, and others.
  • The Symbolic Narcotic: How Dystopias Hide From Themselves

    The Symbolic Narcotic: How Dystopias Hide From Themselves

    by Tyler Wells Lynch. Good science-fiction doesn’t predict the future; it tweaks a feature of the present and extrapolates, obsessively. Ursula K. Le Guin likened extrapolative works of science fiction to the methods of a scientist feeding large doses of a food additive to lab mice “in order to predict what may happen to people…