Orpheus Revolving
“’Oh, the beautiful poem!’ He laughed again. ‘The beautiful, beautiful poem! It’s very easy to appreciate the beauty of art and ‘the profound note’ when things are good. When people are dying around you it’s a lot harder to do.'”
The Influence of Anxiety
The anxiety of global pandemic translates into the anxiety of the self: How will this effect me?
Remainder
Dworin weaves together the memory of losing her mother to an illness during her childhood with her story of becoming a mother and caring for children with their own illnesses.
Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms
On publishing in the late 2010s.
Open House
As his neighbors pass from health problems and old age, relinquishing formerly rent-controlled apartments to monied young people, writer Jeremiah Moss remembers and mourns the simple intimacies that passed among the colorful tenants of his East Village apartment building.
Cash/Consent
Lorelei Lee reflects on her career in sex work and pornography, the gradations of consent in the industry, and the ways in which radical feminists and the religious right fight to keep sex work criminalized.
Friends of the Pod
“Podcasts intensify our saturation while pretending to relieve it. It’s like a voluntary authoritarian state, except instead of state-funded sitcoms, we have Marc Maron. But what would we do without it? Die, probably. Be murdered. Become a true-crime podcast. Don’t forget us when we’re gone; please rate us on iTunes.”
Base Culture
“An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.”
Grief Network
When pain and rage play out on — and are twisted by — Twitter.
Nights of Rage
1970 is an inauspicious year for a young heterosexual feminist to launch an ambitious career of promiscuity.