An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
by Jimmy Wu. Class is back on the big screen. From Sorry to Bother You to Joker, the past year has seen an explosion of popular movies that offer, with varying degrees of coherence, a critique of contemporary capitalism. But perhaps no recent film does so with more savvy than Parasite, a new genre-bender that became the first Korean movie to win the Palme d’Or.
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by Jamie Hood. Let me try again. We know this story. A girl wanders alone in a wood. A path, unencumbered.
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by Ash Jarrow. ‘Scary Stories’ is set in a past haunted by the Vietnam War, made for adults haunted by eternal remixes of their youth, and aimed at a future straining to reconcile the ghosts of its past. The film winds up nostalgic for a past no one experienced. It’s a product of a larger struggle to imagine our way out of an absent future.
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by Morgan Dowdy. we shouldn’t be here but we are / precisely here / in this groove of the rock / at the electrified edge of the yard / chewing gum and shutting down
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by Sarah Sturgiss. It’s summer and we’re playing soccer with a red rubber ball in the front when Max starts to do the thing he does when I’ve scored more goals than him. It’s the same frustrated look he’d get when he was a baby; his smile shrinks into a squinched-up line, and he pushes his breath out of his nose.
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by A.M. Gittlitz. In the Pampas, the vast prairies of southern Latin America, there’s a tale that stretches back to colonial times: the legend of the luz mala, or the bad light. It appears just above the ground, in the hills, or in the sky, a foreboding and spectral fireball of fluorescent white, red, blue, or green that follows solitary travelers.
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by Jamie Peck. Apparently, some people do not take kindly to an ostensible progressive letting her hair down with the primary enabler of America’s torture program. Can’t a wealthy liberal hang out with her war criminal friend in peace?
Read Moreby Hibah Shabkhez. Born too late to be children of the spring / Lost too early for the grave of the fall / You fly.
Read MoreDuring the one-month run of our recent Kickstarter campaign, where many of our generous readers were kind enough to pitch in and help us create our second issue, we were confronted with some disturbing news. Kickstarter is ostensibly a “public benefit corporation,” and in the past it has prided itself on its adherence to ethical principles. Yet management had just fired two workers for organizing activities with the company union, Kickstarter United.
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by Abby Cartus. For as much as Health Justice Now is about the machinations of health finance and the details of single-payer, it’s also a book about health as a function of power. It’s a book about a society that makes us sick, then punishes, scams, and profits off of us for it.
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