Welcome to the June installment of Sophie Haigney’s advice column. Send your submissions to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

Dear Sophie,

Recently my partner and I got in a fight about ordering food on apps like UberEats. I probably order delivery two to three times a week because I’m really busy at work and it’s especially helpful for lunch. Usually one meal goes a long way and I’ll have leftovers for a while. I feel guilty about it — I realize these companies are predators, and that it’s wasteful environmentally and from a spending POV. But I can afford it, I’m not a great cook, and it doesn’t seem that much worse than other consumption habits I have. (Like... eating meat in general….) If you scrutinize everything too much, I guess, it all starts to look pretty bad. But my boyfriend feels differently. He has what seems like an aesthetic objection to getting delivery. It’s a red line for him, which is partly ethical, but also... it seems more about how he thinks it’s lazy and unattractive. I definitely hide the amount of delivery I get from him (through omission, not lying). This is going to be a bigger point of contention because we’re moving in together soon, and sharing more meals, and he really doesn’t like my delivery habit. What do you think?

— Guilty on Grubhub

Dear Guilty on Grubhub,

Unfortunately, I side with your boyfriend. But then, it seems like you actually do too: you feel bad about your delivery habit, even as you justify it. You take some steps to hide it from one of the people you’re closest to. You know something is wrong, but you don’t want to make a change — a good sign that you should make one.

But the good news is that I don’t think it will be as hard to make this change as you think it will be. People in the Silicon Valley-adjacent echelons of the self-help world have been fond, lately, of saying “you can just do things.” Often what they mean is: go forth and smash stuff. Vibe-code, start a company, crush the systems, spin your wheels of action in all directions. But in our present environment, I actually think that a more radical and interesting stance might be: you can just not do things. You can abstain from using every single quick-fix technology that promises to maximize time and convenience and increase productivity. You can just not use ChatGPT to write your emails. You can just not order books on Amazon. You can just not get delivery.

This message allows us to shift from asking which behaviors are permissible or impermissible to inquiring into what kinds of practices are good for us, in a holistic sense. As you say, nearly every consumption habit has some associated harm, so when we try to draw a line between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” we can feel paralyzed. This is why people are fond of concluding that there’s “no ethical consumption under capitalism”; from there it seems to follow that all choices are equally valid or invalid. But this is both a way out of doing any kind of ethical accounting — some modes of consumption have more significant impact than others! — and it elides the fact that different choices can still bring you closer to or further away from the kind of life you want for yourself. It sounds like you know which direction your delivery habit is pushing you.

I think this is what your boyfriend’s “aesthetic objection” to UberEats may be pointing to. When a lover calls a behavior “unattractive,” they are often expressing that what we are doing makes us in some sense less fully ourselves — that it obscures the beautiful person they know us to be at our best. Feeding ourselves, to the extent we can, helps us to thrive. Once you can figure out how to do it in satisfying, cost-effective, and self-sufficient ways, you will feel happier, and more connected to yourself. I speak from some experience, having muddled through my share of bad homemade lentil dishes and eaten my share of delivery in my twenties. I never believed early in my learning process that I would be a “great cook,” and I’m still only a decent one, but the good news is that you have so many chances to practice, because you simply must eat food every day. It doesn’t have to be restaurant-quality, or Instagram-worthy. For lunch, you can simply have a few hardboiled eggs and some fruit and toast. Or you can have last night’s dinner again. I do that all the time. A meal can mean a lot of things and it certainly doesn’t have to mean “sushi.”

You can also always call up a local restaurant and pick up the food. From the perspective of the quest to determine which actions are or aren’t against the moral rules it may be hard to see the distinction with delivery here. Restaurant labor practices are not known to be especially great; you’re still outsourcing the making of food to someone else and taking it home in a plastic container. But I think there is something important — if you’re physically able to, of course — about going out into the world and doing something in order to procure food for yourself. It is an exercise of freedom, unlike the passive modes of consumption that these apps are selling. You might be very busy with work — who isn’t? — but that’s all the more reason to claw away whatever free time you can, in order to nourish yourself.

So it’s time to make a change, and maybe a gradual one, because I am a believer in slow and gradual changes, especially when it comes to consumption habits. Reduce your delivery orders from three times a week to one, and then to special occasions only. Maybe you’ll get to the point where you delete the apps altogether. If you slip up, it happens; recommit. It might be easier than you think, especially when you begin this next chapter of living with your boyfriend and the work of cooking and eating becomes more of a shared project. I think it will be gratifying in ways you don’t expect. This is often true of restraint. We sometimes think we will be happier, or our lives will be made easier, when we indulge in what we think of as our worst impulses, when we lean into so-called guilty pleasures, be they delivery apps or endless scrolling or mind-numbing substances or too much Netflix. And yet I think there is a higher order of pleasure and ease that can be accessed in modulating these impulses, and cultivating a sense of self-sufficiency and discipline. You can just not do things, and you may be amazed by the freedom you feel.

If you enjoyed this installment, send Sophie your own question by writing to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

Image credit: John Sloan, The Masses, December 1912

Last week on the subway three bald men, all wearing athletic shirts with graphic patterns like layers of sedimentary rock, formed a phalanx around me. We rode together for several stops; I enjoyed being among them, perhaps because I myself am balding. It was like they were silently initiating me into their society — you’re safe here, they seemed to say. When they departed, a man boarded wearing a black felt hat, topped by a red, puffy ball at its center. I thought of the game of catch I played as a child, with a neon-pink ball in my right hand and a neon-green circular Velcro “mitt” in my left. There was always something embarrassing about that game; it felt like it was pretending to be baseball. The man with the felt hat wore shoes that came to disturbingly sharp points. I smiled at him. He shared my gaze.

One of the pleasures of a bounded space — a subway car, an extremely abbreviated review — is its sharpening of attention. In this week’s Mentioned, five writers notice counterfeit poems, a neighborhood drunk, buxom desert strippers, toxic dust, and everyone’s favorite Sauron-inspired surveillance-tech giant. If you notice something you’d like to review, submit a draft to mentions@thedriftmag.com.

— Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Mentions Editor

The Endless Garment

ART

Since 2015, Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky have been collecting bootleg T-shirts from the likes of CNAHEL and MAISON MARQIELA, reappraising these circumventions of copyright as sites of linguistic renewal. At a recent group exhibition at Pioneer Works, interspersed among the piles of textiles — through which visitors were encouraged to rummage — were pages of poems, operating in a similarly ruptured vernacular: “It’sNotWhoYou Are… / It’sWhaYouWear… / 1Mean, / WhoReahy Cares.” Such lines lack, by design, the transcendent senselessness of the surrounding clothes; they are counterfeit poems, no match for the real (fake) thing. The sharpest verse came from a MOSCHMO shirt: “after form / admim wob / is a uniq afired.”

Isabella Cacdac Ampil

Hank’s Saloon

FILM

If you’re under a certain age, you might not realize that the lopsided black box of a building at Atlantic and Third holds a hallowed gravesite of that endangered Brooklyn species, the actually cheap dive bar. This documentary pays respects to the titular establishment, tracing its hundred-plus-year evolution from Prohibition survivor to ironworker’s haunt to pukey country-punk pub to long-vacant real estate void. You won’t get the recipe for Patty’s Panties, but you will get to see some haunting hidden interiors, a guy playing pool with a two-by-four, and a cell phone-free dance floor. Like a neighborhood drunk, the movie rambles at times and lingers too long, but goodbyes are never easy. At a March screening, when a regular told director Leon Chase that he’s “not bitter” about the bar’s closure, the audience screamed back, “You should be!”

Ariel Courage

Euphoria

TV

Just as the color palette of the series has shifted (from Petra Collins blue to deep spray tan), so too have its tone and subject matter. In its third season, creator Sam Levinson abandoned high school melodrama in favor of Western noir, and when we meet the Euphoria characters all grown up, several of them are working in the sex industry. Levinson is a passable auteur and a better troll, daring his haters to cry “male gaze.” But why take any of this seriously: we’re in high camp territory now, with a giantess Sydney Sweeney trampling Los Angeles in a leopard-print bodysuit, and more buxom desert strippers than a Russ Meyer film. Pity the poor Gen-Z viewers who can’t appreciate the homage.

Sascha Cohen

Steal This Story, Please!

FILM

Scrappy journo-activist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! spends much of this documentary about her career out of breath. It opens on her chasing a cagey Trump official up the stairs with a microphone. It closes after she reveals why she’s often coughing: the toxic dust she inhaled post-9/11, when she and her team stubbornly continued to broadcast from their Chinatown headquarters. Midway through, Goodman recalls telling The Intercept cofounder Jeremy Scahill that she would work with him only if he stopped smoking cigarettes. I thought of the breathlessness of the news cycle, the many last gasps of independent media. Then I walked out of the theater and lit up.

Ben Gambuzza

Palantir’s lightweight chore coat

FASHION

After some poor soul presumably wished to a mischievous genie to no longer see so many rich people wearing Carhartt, the couturiers at everyone’s favorite Sauron-inspired surveillance-tech giant released their own line of work shirts this spring. “Chaos is Tolerable; Pain is Tolerable / The Only Thing that Matters is to Win,” reads a tag sewn into the inside of the garment, which comes in cobalt blue and Schutzstaffel black. As of this writing, the $239 jackets are sold out in all sizes, so I am unable to assess their quality, but the Palantir store boasts that they are made from “100% American grown cotton,” for fans who are nostalgic for that kind of thing.

Madeleine Baker

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Fml

For a few hours, it looked like a toss-up whether “UFC Freedom 250,” a combat sports spectacle held on the South Lawn of the White House on the occasion of Donald Trump’s eightieth birthday, would actually happen. Severe thunderstorms were blowing in from West Virginia — where I live, and where I briefly lost power. The swamp heaved with humidity; mosquitos swarmed. On Polymarket, one of UFC Freedom 250’s sponsors, odds of a weather delay or cancellation were at 78.5 percent half an hour before the scheduled start time. In the comments, one user was panicking. Apparently the bot they were using to place bets was malfunctioning, and it had bought 2500 shares of Yes. “Omg I can’t cancel my buys fml,” they wrote.

I had heard about the plan to hold an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House — the fruit of Trump’s friendship with combat-sports carnival barker Dana White — but I forgot all about it until I saw a post on X from Jack Posobiec, the former unofficial Game of Thrones blogger and current unofficial government negotiator. The post showed a video from the preshow “Fan Fest,” in which motorcycles tumbled through the air over the White House’s South Fountain. Looming overhead was the metal arc of The Claw, an arena specially built for the occasion, framing the whole scene. “The Left has no response to this,” Posobiec wrote. This is the clenched anhedonia we’re used to seeing from conservative commentators in the second Trump term. All this blood sport, all these pyrotechnics, and the only thing that can get them off, apparently, is making up a guy and imagining him getting really mad at them.

The left was owned! Now the pre-show was getting underway. Roll highlights. A falconer releasing a bald eagle. The Zac Brown Band playing what seemed to be only the patriotic final verse of “Chicken Fried,” the one about saluting the troops. And then after a slight delay, the clouds parted, miraculously skirting the city — the mandate of heaven. There were mats all over the White House, and MMA guys were milling around. It was a strange imbrication of different orders of reality. The prerecorded introductory sequence ratcheted up the incongruity: it depicted footage of classic UFC moments projected onto the surfaces of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Reflecting Pool. How is the UFC like the National Mall? Ron Perlman’s voiceover narration sweated to make the connection: “The monuments remain. Because greatness isn’t measured only in the moment, but how long the world remembers.”

Culminary

Men in the world’s tightest suits sat in the White House. They hulked in their chairs, jittering with jock-in-history-class energy. One couldn’t stop tapping his foot. “I cannot believe where I am right now!” one said. “This is the culminary of any athlete’s life,” I thought I heard another say. Culminary: a beautiful non-word. It should be a word. The culmination, but culinary; so close you can taste it. Like a corollary, but flavorful; a palate cleanser or a dessert. Echoes of pulmonary, intimating the collapsed lungs suffered by some UFC fighters after especially brutal fights — but zestful.

Walkout

The juxtaposition of the UFC with the iconography of executive pomp and circumstance has revealed something: “Hail to the Chief” is a walkout song. When Trump and Dana White started making their way to the South Lawn, however, it was preceded by an ominous extended introduction. As the camera began to track their progress from the front, West Wing-style, a lone funereal bell sounded. It reminded me of the music that plays when you fight Rayquaza in Pokémon Emerald.

There was no presidential speech. Someone yelled “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” Then Zac Brown sang the national anthem, and the Blue Angels and the Air Force Thunderbirds soared overhead. Joe Rogan revealed himself, taking a break from his job as an ideological pipeline-greaser to resume his original gig, commentating on fights. Bud Light was announced as a sponsor, finally back in MAGA’s good graces after a multi-year campaign to win back conservatives. At a press conference last month, the heavyweight heel Josh Hokit had delivered a WWE-style taunt to fellow fighter Alex Pereira: “I’m gonna give Pereira a golden shower!” Now perhaps we were all getting one. In a promotional graphic, foamy Bud Light was sloshing across the screen, Andres Serrano yellow.

Riyadh Season

The commercials and sponsor shout-outs were a roll call of MAGA’s corporate constituents, with a little bit of military recruitment sprinkled in. There was sports betting: Bet365, Sleeper, Polymarket, Prizepicks, DraftKings, Kalshi. There was crypto: Exodus Pay, NinjaTrader, Trump Coins. There was hard defense tech — Anduril, with an ad that evoked Call of Duty, and Starlink — and soft, with Meta AI announcing that they would be donating wearables to blind veterans. There was something called “Riyadh Season,” a mega-event in the Saudi capital that lasts for six months. The now-familiar genre of MAGA TV had a big showing too, with ads for shows with names like Lioness, Dutton Ranch, and The Agency. One ad for the Navy’s special forces, organized around the Cheneyan theme of real heroes working “in the shadows,” played incessantly.

Many of the commercials featured either Joe Rogan or Dana White, and I had a hard time telling them apart. One of them starred in a Ram commercial that started with what looked like A.I. video of Paul Revere’s ride and ended with the bald man, Joe/Dana, in some kind of culvert, advancing on the camera. The tagline was “In Loud We Trust.”

UFC Freedom 250 was streamed on Paramount Plus — one of the lesser Plusses, but one for which I recently discovered I had been paying without realizing it. The Trump-allied Ellison family took over Paramount last year, and they wasted no time applying their ideological animus to their new holdings. They tapped Bari Weiss to bring her anti-woke crusade to CBS News. Now it seems the DOJ has cleared the last obstacle to their acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, another vast media conglomerate that houses, among other properties, CNN. The whole evening was a spectacle of consolidation: entertainment moguls, crypto bros, polymarketeers, A.I. killbot merchants, and Saudi blood money, all united to kiss the ring. It came out in the lead-up to the event that the Trump Organization even owns part of TKO Group, the UFC’s parent company. Call it a public-private partnership.

Aura

The portion of UFC Freedom 250 that wasn’t devoted to commercials mostly consisted of prerecorded highlight reels — each fighter’s “hype edits and aura moments,” as the writer Eli Schoop aptly put it. These reels had a music-video quality. The majority of them were set to what we now call “butt rock”: Godsmack, Skillet, two separate Kid Rock songs. Josh Hokit’s walkout music dipped into butt rock’s prehistory; it was probably the first time, but maybe not the last time, the Marine Band played a song by Rick Derringer. During one live interlude, the British fighter Tyson Fury emerged to a clunky mashup of “American Pie” (played by the Marine Band) and “Sex on Fire” (prerecorded). He wore a hat that said DONALD TRUMP FOR PRIME MINISTER.

Ronald Reagan’s fertile soil was subjected to vigorous aura farming. Halfway through the proceedings, we were treated to one of his Flag Day speeches, set to grainy footage of the Gipper at Camp David, which then gave way to a sub-Grok A.I. video rendering of Francis Scott Key’s experience as a captive aboard a British ship during the War of 1812. Reagan presided over it all, through the power of montage, in his tipped cap and yellow polo. History is a hype reel from which we are trying to swipe away.

The fights

There were seven fights. The main event came last: a twenty-minute slugout in which the American Justin Gaethje upset the lightweight favorite Ilia Topuria, leaving his face a bloody slush. The preceding fights were less brutal, though they all ended by either KO or TKO. I found my unrefined notes were truer to the experience than a smooth paragraph:

SECOND FIGHT: BO NICKAL VS KYLE DAUKAUS

Daukaus looks like Ryan Gosling Ken

NICKAL takes him down in like 10 seconds. It’s a grapple. So intimate wriggling. Do they whisper in each other’s ears?

POLYMARKET

NICKAL delivers swift beatdown. GODSMACK plays

Then YMCA

Zuckerberg daps him up ringside.

The winner of each fight got the opportunity to be interviewed by Joe Rogan. The Brazilian fighter Maurício Ruffy, a lithe technical striker, used the occasion to propose to his girlfriend. Hokit used it to say, “MICHELLE OBAMA IS A MAN.” Rogan responded to both stunts with perfunctory congratulations and the same blank grin. Damn, you could almost hear him thinking, that’s crazy.

Roman Empire

Was all of this bread and circuses? A sop to the hooting masses while the empire flails? On TV, a former DHS chief of staff under the previous Trump administration bewailed “America’s Roman moment.” Others took a different tack: it’s a Roman moment, and that’s good actually. One such post on X read, “I love that we’re the new Rome. Peace with Persia in the afternoon and a gladiator fight in the evening, all on the Emperor’s birthday. Another 1,000 years.” And another: “whoever said bread and circuses were bad neglected to consider what if the circuses were really fucking cool.”

What if bread and circuses were epic and based? What if Zac Brown was there? What if the unsustainability, the sheer futility, of your vision of the good life was exactly what made that vision so attractive? Sure, this was a sleight of hand especially well-timed with what looks like an all-time diplomatic defeat in Iran. And sure, the Trump family may make money off UFC Freedom 250 in the short term. But the event was also profligate, wasteful for the sake of waste: one last potlatch to own the libs. The thousand-year reich isn’t the right chronotope. The right one is — to quote a ubiquitous bit of A.I. slop advertising fake concert tours by legacy artists, especially endemic to Facebook — one last ride. One last squeeze of the profit machine, one last push for data centers before the whole thing combusts, one last chance to expel or exterminate the immigrants, one last shot at total hemispheric dominance through shock and awe.

After the event, the FBI announced that it had foiled a plot to attack some of the VIP attendees from the air with explosive drones. The alleged would-be attackers need not have bothered. UFC Freedom 250 was above all a spectacle of self-annihilation. Its ultimate message, as Daniel Kolitz wrote of gooning last year, was kill yourself. Hold the coin until it’s worthless. Wrap yourself in a tissue of hallucination until the real world can no longer make you feel anything. Take the punches, take the kicks, spit out some teeth and take some more, until you are pulverized meat — and enjoy!

Mitch Therieau is a writer and English professor living in West Virginia. His latest piece for The Drift, Issue Seventeen’s “Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld,” examined the Trump administration’s visual imagination.

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

We hope our New York-based readers are enjoying the Knicks celebrations today. If you’d like to simultaneously show off your taste in teams and magazines, our limited-edition Championship Cap is available for purchase now.

For those not able to attend the parade, we recommend consoling yourself with the power of literature. In “Tooth Skin,” Gracie Newman’s Issue Seventeen short story, a graduate student writing a dissertation on dentistry in American literature takes a job at a dentist’s office to make ends meet. Sink your teeth into Newman’s uproarious and vivid prose today.

Tooth Skin | Fiction

GRACIE NEWMAN

It’s a good thing I don’t have ambitions in the academy. I’m just clinging to the coattails of studenthood. I think it’s best this way. Long-range planning begets little but the illusion of stability and a basic knowledge of Excel. I guess I would like to acquire more ducks. I still don’t have a dentist duck, which seems like a serious gap.

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

Image credit: Hayley Watson

It’s a good time to be a small magazine, and an even better time to be a small point guard. Our limited-edition Championship Cap is available for purchase now.

As celebrations in New York continue, it’s also a good time to read Emma Adler on another local phenomenon gone national.

There is no shortage of reasons why the effort to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has felt like a slightly embarrassing national sideshow instead of a flashpoint for a broad patriotic revival. The current occupant of the Oval Office is surely chief among them, along with the widespread sensibility that, as a pollster famously put it in 2024, America is “a dying empire led by bad people.” But it surely doesn’t help that we have already spent a lot of time over the past decade examining this country’s founding and litigating all the debates it engenders, thanks in large part to Lin-Manuel Miranda and the success of his blockbuster 2015 musical Hamilton.

In Issue Seventeen, Adler examines the bind that musical theater artists have found themselves in since then: faced with audiences eager to see history presented on stage, forced to reckon with years of both aesthetic and political criticism of Hamilton, and also tasked with delivering an entertaining theatrical product. Adler argues that the posture of overt mockery adopted by recent works like Slam Frank and Oh, Mary! opens the door to a musical theater that no longer feels compelled to use history as a proxy for present-day concerns. It’s a strategy that may be working: Oh, Mary! has won numerous awards, and, according to Playbill, the “incendiary” Slam Frank will return to the stage this fall.

History Has Its Eyes on You​ | Slam Frank and Musical Theater’s Hamilton Bind

EMMA ADLER

In a much more cheerful moment for American liberalism, Hamilton held out the hope that Americans could recuperate their fraught history by remaking it to conform with contemporary values. But the Hamilton ripoffs that rushed in to capitalize on this hope — and now Slam Frank, in satirizing progressive retelling — have instead revealed, in varying ways, that this aspiration is futile.

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

Image credit: Scott Howard

Adam Judah Krasnoff’s poem in Issue Seventeen, about a hilltop and its vista, is titled “Encounter.” That would also make a plausible title for Andy Butter’s poem about the relationship “between viewer and painting,” but it is instead called “A Severe Face Angle Makes the Shadows Clear.” Both Krasnoff and Butter reflect on all that seeing can do to us, and all that it can’t do for us.

Encounter | Poetry

ADAM JUDAH KRASNOFF

Two stones at rest at the summit of a hill.
Two stones at rest at the summit of a hill
Atop which we too are seated, resting.
We two at the summit of a hill, seated atop
A pair of immovable stones, whose rest
Is permanent. This is the summit of feeling,
I do not say, you do not say, we do not say,
But rather point out facts about surrounding
Hills, on which we will never sit, not in all
Likelihood. Two members of a race of
Hill-cresters, patient onlookers, silent yet
Officious prospectors of open space,
Rock-noters, tree-noters, bird-noters,
Forecasters of a weather internal, we
Are careful not to speak of what we cannot
From this vantage distinguish, of images
Discrete and therefore ever-vanishing,
Ever-feathered by wind and mocking rain
Falling upon a landscape irreal and therefore
Unpuddled, falling upon the brow of our
Hill soundlessly, upon our two summit-stones.
Better to speak of things solid and therefore
Uninterpreted, better not to infract on solid
Silence, only look and in looking unfurl,
Give up on meager provenance, on walks
Through pine forests or on grassy tracks,
On afternoons when through a chink of
Wood or vale of fog there would appear
A hill, solitary, in the center of our sight,
And at the summit of that hill two stones
At rest. Better not to have seen that which,
Once climbed, would unseam us, would seem
To radiate and in its radiating offer nothing
But its sight, of which we were never sure
Though sure that we would never tire.

A Severe Face Angle Makes the Shadows Clear | Poetry

ANDY BUTTER

A new study made no claims on discovering
anything of value, it was only an extension
of every other study’s conclusions: if we’ve found
abandoned cities under the rainforest’s canopy
using LIDAR let’s assume from here on out
there will be a great deal more buried
in the Earth’s crust. A pocket
of parasites squeezed out of a sheep’s skin.
Here’s everything I know about everything
we don’t know: extreme one-to-oneness
between viewer and painting is rare.
A music unfolds invisibly between the two.
Big swatch of bright orange and that dark blue…
Since I saw my first Rothko
I hear it bleating from the museum wall
like a radio beacon no matter where I’ve traveled.
I remember the paint daubs rising like ancient temples.
I was there in a room in a building in a city
of strangers weeping. I was in love!
And decided to dedicate
myself to enacting that futility.

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

Image credits: Hollis Duncan (Krasnoff); Jude Weir (Butter)

While for most people late May and early June mean the start of summer, for the scholastically affiliated the season has a more precise name: graduation. A time of bittersweet goodbyes, new beginnings, and miserable traffic, graduation is the subject of Kion You’s Issue Seventeen short story, narrated by a student whose difficult family has come to see him receive a graduate degree from a university in Texas. You’s poignant and sharply observed writing captures the exquisite melancholy of the one commencement in our language that is also an ending.

My Graduation | Fiction

KION YOU

Once Hannah stopped picking up our mother’s calls, our mother started calling me instead, every day. I had only heard her cry once before, during the worst of her menopause, but now she wept constantly, excoriating our cousin’s ex-husband and repeating ad nauseum that such tragedy could not possibly have fallen on the fair-skinned.

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

Image credit: John Kazior

With her books Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (2025), the writer and theorist Sophie Lewis has earned a reputation as one of our most provocative and incisive political voices. But Lewis crafts more than just manifestos: she writes prolifically on gender and cultural politics with dazzling sweep, theoretical acuity, and humor. Her pieces for The Drift have addressed the long queer feminist history of mermaids and the misadventures of the female cop from the silver screen to the campaign trail. The former essay appears in her new collection Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe, which is out this month from Haymarket. To celebrate its publication, our Essays Editor Lyra Walsh Fuchs spoke with Lewis about mothering against motherhood, antifemininity feminism, and lysergic acid diethylamide.

Femmephilia covers a wide range of subjects. A non-exhaustive list: mermaids (in an essay that first appeared in The Drift); Marilyn Monroe; the myths of Daphne and Apollo and, in another essay, Leda and the Swan; Shulamith Firestone; vampires. What were the most surprising resonances or contradictions between these various topics?

Yes, I hope it feels like an intellectual femme pervert’s florilegium: there’s midwifery, momfluencers, acid-heads, bird-vaginas, and a girl who wants to be a tree. I also realized only belatedly that there are female-separatists both straight and lesbian in these pages, and I think I’m about equally critical of both. Let’s see, what else could I call “surprising”? Perhaps, on some level, that I can adore Shulamith Firestone even while fighting her about so much, but I truly cannot forgive Andrea Dworkin, whose fascistic epistemic syntax really chills my blood.

The essays in this book are thick with theories, citations, stories about your life, and, delightfully, jokes. What’s the role of humor in critical theory?

If a theorist isn’t funny, I’m not having a good time while I’m reading her. And if I’m not having a good time while I’m reading her, why should I trust that she wants the good life for all earthly beings? Aside from that, it’s a secret article of faith with me (as in: I cannot prove this) that there’s no getting at the seriousness of things in the absence of humor. And maybe this thought derives from my quasi-spiritual reverence for lysergic acid diethylamide, but: the base tissue of reality seems to me to be more or less equal parts aching with devastation and funny.

Why is “antifemininity feminism, with its aversion to gratuitous, unserious gender,” as you write, “thriv[ing] in the twenty-first century,” particularly in the media?

“Femininity” has myriad complicit applications and coerced manifestations in white supremacist, ableist, capitalist, trans-eliminationist and colonial systems. “Femme,” in contrast, is a concept of working-class lesbian derivation that joyfully telegraphs that the feminine is self-consciously artificial, chosen, non-ontological, labored. Its guardian spirits are Amber Hollibaugh, Joan Nestle, Jewelle Gomez, and Marsha P. Johnson.

Femininity is also classed. And the reason why media establishment feminists attack its more “unnatural,” “gaudy,” too-much, porny, shameless — i.e., femme — iterations is their commitment to social order. It’s about the defense of class relations. For that reason, though, I’m trying and failing to think of a moment in anglophone feminism’s two-hundred-year history when feminist femmephobia wasn’t a thing. For example, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication (1792) is heavily stuffed with disgust at ladies for getting too excited about novels and delighting in little dogs; just as Susan Brownmiller’s book Femininity inveighs against women (including her not-yet-totally-reformed self) who perform a “fluttery wave goodbye” almost two centuries later.

Our culture’s hegemonic cisfeminist commentators can be deeply macho whenever they feel like it, because they are wedded, above all, to the naturalization of assigned sex. The arrangement that power has historically made is a remarkably permissive allowance of gender freedom for ruling-class (and particularly white) women specifically… but nobody else. Recall J.K. Rowling’s gender performance, puffing on her cigar with her stiff drink on her yacht, celebrating the further purging of trans women from public life via legislation that she bankrolled.

The mission of this collection is a more positive one — the subtitle promises “Love Letters,” and section breaks are indicated with a sweet black heart — in contrast to the sharp criticality of some of your other work, including Enemy Feminisms and your biting essay on Kamala Harris in our pages. How do you think about the relationship between critique and celebration in your own role as a writer?

I like to do both at once. One of my “breakout” essays back in 2017, in fact, was a love letter to Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto” that turned into an assault on Haraway’s twenty-first century slogan “make kin, not babies.” I’ve felt compelled a few times to use an early incarnation of a theorist against their less-utopian later selves (Silvia Federici is another example). When it comes to my books, I see that there’s superficially an up-down-down-up thing going on: “full surrogacy now” (positive), “abolish the family” (negative), “enemy feminisms” (negative), and now “femmephilia (aww…). But I see myself as doing the same thing all the time. Maybe I will reach some of the people who were scared off by the more overt haterade, thanks to the friendlier packaging of this beautifully candy-cloud-covered essay collection. Inside, they’ll soon find out that there’s nothing toothless about the femmephilic war on the work society. Disliking and liking things with improper intensity certainly seems to be my m.o.

Next Tuesday, June 9, Lewis will be in conversation on Femmephilia with the writer and Drift contributor Jamie Hood. You can get tickets here.

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Cover image credit: Haymarket Books

The Council of Experts on Climate Change, an independent panel tasked with monitoring Germany’s progress toward its emissions goals, recently issued its latest assessment, and the verdict was damning: if current trends hold, a range of targets to which Germany has committed will “be increasingly and significantly missed over time.” Germany is far from the only country struggling to make good on its climate promises, but its failures are glaring in light of decades of national boasting about the Energiewende, the much-vaunted German decarbonization program. As Stephen Milder argues in his Issue Seventeen essay, the disappointing fate of the Energiewende should make us skeptical of “the tantalizing idea that a few tweaks and technological fixes could turn industrial capitalism green without diminishing the comforts of consumer society” — not just in Germany, but everywhere.

The Myth of Green Germany​ | Energiewende Runs Out of Fuel

STEPHEN MILDER

Today, it’s increasingly hard to argue that building up green industries is a surefire means of ending fossil fuel use and tackling climate change. Instead, it seems that green technologies and carbon-intensive industries can easily live side by side. Going green has become business as usual.

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Image credit: John Kazior

Welcome to the May installment of Sophie Haigney’s advice column. Send your submissions to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

Dear Sophie,

Over the last few years, someone very close to me has become involved with a spiritual community that has all the trappings of a cult: a charismatic leader; a cartoonishly cult-y name; a website that, as my husband put it, looks like something they’d have created for a 30 Rock episode where Jenna joins a cult; opportunities to spend lavishly for access to esoteric self-improvement techniques; and most conspicuously, some weapons-grade preposterous beliefs about reality.

The twist is that their access to this community has been almost entirely mediated by the internet, and their real life otherwise remains totally normal. All their important relationships are intact (and then some), and the wacky beliefs seem to come up interpersonally rarely or never — which isn’t surprising, since they don’t touch on health or diet or sex or politics or any of the usual areas where cult-derived convictions tend to ruin lives most conspicuously. The expenditures, as far as I’ve been able to figure out, are regrettable but well within their budget and have not grown over time. They are succeeding at work.

So, my question for you: is there actually a problem here, at least one that’s any of my business? Do we have an obligation to try to steer our loved ones away from beliefs that are clearly untethered to reality if they don’t seem to be doing them any material harm? And if so, what’s the best way to bring someone back to this planet?

— Cult-Adjacent and Confused

Dear Cult-Adjacent and Confused,

First of all, I’d just like to say: I’m sorry this is happening! It’s disorienting to watch a loved one drift like this. What you’re describing is familiar to me from a few instances of watching someone in my own life go down the rabbit hole, or into the wormhole. “What can I do?” is a natural response, because we are used to springing into action to help friends and family who are in need.

I think, though, that the right course of action here is to do nothing. Or mostly nothing. You might try some gentle dissuasion, as I imagine you already have. You could wonder out loud if this movement is really where they want to spend their money, point out that so much screentime is not good for them, or even more directly voice your concerns; it’s never bad to be honest about the behavior of someone close to you. But, given what you say about the relative benignity of this cult-adjacent organization, I would not take any more drastic steps than that right now. I draw my lines in policing others’ behaviors based on harms. If you observe that they’re causing harm to themselves (screwing up their work, draining their bank account) or others (messing up their relationships), that’s when I’d say you should step in. Stage the big intervention, get others involved, and sound the alarm on all fronts!

But in this case, your fear seems to be about what this person believes. Someone else buying into objectionable theories does not necessarily give you license to step in. They’re giving money freely to a cause they think is worthy; I give my money freely, and regrettably, to some expensive restaurants I happen to like. Their beliefs might seem crazy on their face, but the foundations of a lot of widely accepted religions must have looked pretty weird at first. They’re putting their faith in unproven self-help techniques — just as most of us do, at one time or another.

Living in the society we’ve constructed requires tolerating some pretty wacky, and occasionally odious, beliefs in people we love, and even in people we don’t. We don’t get to decide who our neighbors vote for, or even what they think about the new construction down the street — and we have to live with that. Up to a point: there are views that seem “beyond the pale” to me, as I’m sure there are to you. That line is personal and can be blurry. The line between belief and action matters too; fretting over someone’s beliefs is different from objecting to something they’ve done. (Though of course, what one person can experience as an abstract disagreement — a vote for a politician with an oppressive agenda, for instance — another may experience as an expression of disrespect or aggression.) We all get to decide where those lines are for ourselves, but generally I think we could make better peace with difference. It’s part of the bargain of living in a pluralistic society.

Culture-war polemics may distract us from the fact that most of the bizarre views we encounter, and with which we must find ways to coexist, are not “political” in the strict left-right sense. As you’re seeing with your loved one, these ideas are more often questionable amalgamations of views about the universe, health and wellness, the self, and how we should live our lives. I recently attended a conference where people were making many spurious claims about health and wellness. I was talking to someone about why she chooses to follow a strange, strict diet not backed by mainstream scientific evidence. She turned the question around on me: “You feel fine eating food pumped with chemicals, addicted to sugar, waking up with headaches from alcohol?” She saw my diet — which used to be hers — as the strange one. No study has confirmed that hers “works,” but I can recognize that my diet is not ideal by any standard, either. It’s up to each of us what we put into our bodies, and it should remain that way.

All of this reminds me of a scene from Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04. A student comes into the narrator’s office, in the throes of a mental breakdown. He starts rambling:

“Nobody thinks we’re being told the truth about Fukushima. Think about the milk you’re buying from a bodega, the hot particles there, I mean in addition to the hormones and what those do. There are rabbits being born there with three ears. The seas are poisoned. Look at this” — here, he pulled his hair back, maybe to indicate his widow’s peak, I wasn’t sure — “that wasn’t there when I lived in Colorado. And I know that some of the bone mass in my jaw has thinned, I can feel that when it clicks, but I can’t afford insurance. And now there is this storm, but who selects its name? You have a committee of like five guys in a situation room generating the names before they form.”

The narrator, Ben, struggles to respond to this, because the student’s speculations depart from insights that are on some level correct: the food system is fucked, the weather is getting more fucked and it’s our fault. And yet these insights, rather than bringing the student closer to the truth, have propelled him into a dark and conspiratorial spiral.

What can Ben do? Direct the student to mental health services, push back gently, try to talk him down from the ledge — and not much else. That is the last thing I would say about the situation you are in: even if (God forbid) this person’s engagement with this movement becomes more dire, the tools we have for changing people’s minds are very limited. When someone’s mental state has gone dark, we may not be able to do much about it even if we want to, except love them all the same. I hope that your loved one remains, for the most part, grounded in the reality you share.

If you enjoyed this installment, send Sophie your own question by writing to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

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Image credit: John Sloan, The Masses, December 1912

Considered carefully, as William Blake recognized in “The Tyger,” the creatures with which we share the condition of animality provoke more questions than answers — as do the following three Issue Seventeen poems, which stage encounters with beings of bone, fur, and whatever jellyfish are made of.

“To reconstruct the animal” | Poetry

CARMEN GALLO

To reconstruct the animal
from the promises it was
capable of keeping. And forget.
Not from the bones it left behind
but from its tracks retreating.
From how it ran. Simple shape.
The inner story and the outer.
Whoever runs loses. Whoever runs
vanishes, taking everything with them.
Whoever stays learns to hide. To be nothing.
To concoct theories. Nothing happens
to those who disappear.

Translated from the Italian by Will Schutt

Sick | Poetry

LILY GABAREE

In later days I felt
a fragility I heard
dogs I was little twigs
lying there ready to break

I tell my body to wake

there is a happy bounding dog with a big stick extra long and the dog is jumping
and its man twirls and I heard a cough

sun breaks the tree and I am

almost leaves almost sheer the dog runs the grass coated light he gets it
the dog lies down he rolls his man with his fingers deep in the fur twirling
almost me too I could feel it

me and the tree shadow me and the loam me and this little passing pug

I love the neighborhood I love the grass the trees the clinking playground the
queer girls and their bikes

I was here anyway

Travel, Goals, Experiments | Poetry

MELANIE JENNINGS

Travel

The jellyfish lay flat on the beach, wiped out from the journey. First, she was in Japan, then Ecuador, now here, somewhere south of Tijuana, judging by the tide’s flavor. There’d been an earthquake recently, and another on the way. She tasted that too, an ashy note. Jellyfish are terrific gourmands, something most people don’t know. Real connoisseurs some of them. Her mother, a Peruvian by birth, made a habit of following the tides for apples and pears. Her father preferred seabirds. The jellyfish? A shark woman. Tastes like steak. She hopes to find some here. That’s part of why she came. That and anxiety.

Goals

The jellyfish hit Send on the job application, hoping for the best. Long-range missile engineer would be a stretch, but a good stretch, she thought, for her skill set. There were already over one hundred applications, but the jellyfish’s friend, a starfish who worked in quality at the plant, had contacted the hiring manager on the jellyfish’s behalf. Now it was a matter of waiting, another ninja-level skill of the jellyfish’s. She had progressively responsible experience over the past several decades, tons of projects she could point to with successful outcomes, patience her primary virtue. Plus, she blew things up effortlessly and that seemed like the best qualification of all.

Experiments

The jellyfish let her tentacles unfold and lay atop the waves on a sunny afternoon, for once relaxing a little. She took deep breaths and savored the smell of a happy day on the beach — bonfires, women’s perfume, blackberries. “Striving’s for gloomy days,” her crab friend always says. “And thinking like The Man.” But it’s easy for her, the jellyfish thinks. After all, she’s covered in a tough, barbed shell. Whereas the jellyfish is vulnerable. Transparent. Floppy. She must always be watchful or end up a snack, swallowed down in a gulp by hungry predators. Still, the crab’s way sounds better. Stop pushing so hard. Stop striving. The jellyfish is going to try it. Just for a few minutes.

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Image credits: Jude Weir (Gallo); Roxana Kenjeeva (Gabaree); Yaoting Wang (Jennings)

Whether your summer plans involve the beach, the porch, or the Great Indoors, The Drift makes an ideal companion. This week, join us in commemorating the contributions of Drift writers in days gone by: all back issues are just five dollars (down from twenty), plus shipping. You’ll find that each issue can serve, in a pinch, as a portable fan.

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This is the first installment of a new column by Max Norman on contemporary art.

The American pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale is an opportunity missed and a responsibility shirked. For a while, it was unclear whether the U.S. would be represented at all. The State Department, which oversees the delegation, didn’t seem to begin the selection process until late April of last year: after Vanity Fair’s Nate Freeman inquired, the usual application for proposals finally went live online, scrubbed of references to diversity, but preserving its token insistence on the “non-political character” of exhibitions. Early rumors suggested the show might nonetheless comment on the chaos of which it would be a product. Robert Lazzarini’s warped take on American iconography — which fell through, apparently, due to negotiations over funding — would have named the elephant in the room. Even Curtis Yarvin’s hypothetical “Salon des Déplorables” featuring “dissident-right art hos” would have actually invited discussion, albeit of the debased variety extruded from the algorithms that govern the Trump era. The American right has been intent on remaking cultural life, and here was a golden opportunity to offer something more interesting, if more repulsive, than the predictable progressivism of Jeffrey Gibson’s 2024 pavilion. After all, the Biennale itself — expanded by Mussolini, and an important venue for the Futurists — testifies to the fact that fascism, for all of its many evils, can be aesthetically interesting, even revolutionary.

Instead, the American exhibition is so anodyne that it hasn’t even provoked a protest. The five-person jury tasked with awarding the festival’s three major prizes resigned on April 30, refusing to consider any nations “whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court,” which meant Israel and Russia; nearly half of the Biennale’s artists have withdrawn themselves from consideration for awards in solidarity. (Two “Visitors’ Lions” will be decided upon in November by a poll of visitors.) A phalanx of cops and private guards patrol the Israeli pavilion, and Pussy Riot recently descended upon the Russians. But, setting aside a flurry of bad press in the lead-up, the collection of sculptures by the artist Alma Allen staged in the American pavilion has been greeted with a resounding shrug. Frieze found it “vacuous”; Hyperallergic dismissed it as “a whole lot of nothing.” “Bronze may be heavy, but this is as insubstantial as air,” wrote New York Times critic Jason Farago.

Allen lives in Mexico City and is often described as “self-taught,” but he is far from an art-world outsider. He participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, though his greatest exposure has been on the traffic medians of Park Avenue, where a number of the Venice sculptures were exhibited last year. After several more established artists declined, reportedly including William Eggleston and Barbara Chase-Riboud, Allen was tapped last November, a mere six months before the opening of the Biennale. His last-minute selection, and the slapdash pavilion in which his works are displayed, are typical of the new American bureaucracy. Like many administration appointees, Allen played a bit part until being catapulted to main character, and the other protagonists are even more improbable: before heading up the American Arts Conservancy, the freshly incorporated nonprofit sponsoring the pavilion, Jenni Parido founded Tampa-based Feed Pet Purveyor, “a healthy lifestyle market for dogs, cats, birds & the people who love them.” The pavilion’s curator, Jeffrey Uslip (full disclosure: we’ve met and corresponded a few times), found his promising early career derailed in 2016 after a controversial show at the museum where he worked in St. Louis — just minutes from Ferguson — of paintings by the white artist Kelley Walker, who appropriated images from black civil rights magazines, smearing some with chocolate and toothpaste; except for co-curating the 2022 Malta Pavilion, he has largely retreated to the shadows.

And like so much of Trumpworld, Allen’s show, “Call Me the Breeze” — which shares its title with a 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd track — seems more suited to a luxury mall in Miami Beach than the world’s most important, and most political, art event. Farago, echoing the architect James Wines, called the Park Avenue sculptures “plop art.” But another word inevitably came to mind as I walked among shiny, striated surfaces, compact blobs, and chemically stained wall hangings: “slop.”

The 25 sculptures — mostly in bronze, some in stone, and one in wood — are inoffensive, occasionally handsome, sometimes silly, and on the whole unremarkable. They’re not quite abstract, not quite figurative, not quite anything at all. (They are also all “Not Yet Titled.”) Though they might be parsed in terms of postminimalism or indigenous craft or biomorphism, the label most often associated with Allen, they don’t really participate in tradition. There are echoes of Brâncuși and Noguchi, among others, but no allusions. The materials — particularly the veined marble walnut burl — are often more interesting than the forms, which might be appropriate for a culture that fetishizes mineral over intellectual resources. There’s syntax but no sense, and the show is a jumble of mixed registers and messages, whose apparently apolitical incoherence masks the deeply political conditions that made it possible in the first place.

In a jargon-laden curatorial statement, presented, of course, only in English and itself worthy of ChatGPT, Uslip tells us that these works are meant to resist meaning, but he and Allen both gloss the sculptures with banal readings. Allen has told the press that his show is inspired, somehow, by Hieronymus Bosch’s “Visions of the Hereafter” in the nearby Accademia museum. The pavilion’s forecourt is dominated by two large bronze pieces, out of whose bases of snail-like curls sprout phallic booms, angled toward each other like the cannons of two tanks; one of them, Allen told Vanity Fair’s Freeman, is a version of Don Quixote. Parked behind them is a rectangle on four legs swaddled in shaggy, linguine-like strips, which, Allen told Freeman, represents “a black sheep.” Allen has suggested that the first piece you see upon entering — a 2016 mushroom-shaped totem some four feet tall and made of coral-colored Persian travertine — is a mushroom cloud. In the same room, a waist-high human figure made of a striated reflective bronze stands on a small pedestal like a blinged-out garden gnome, as if you asked Midjourney to cross Joel Shapiro with Lynda Benglis. In another room a massive human form, also in polished brass, clutches its knees in a corner. But if Shapiro’s humanoid abstractions evoke the vertiginous feeling of bodies in precarious balance, and Benglis’s swoops seem slyly to defy their materiality, Allen’s two human figures are, despite their wavy limbs, static and inert (as are many of these sculptures, which sit heavy on the floor, volumes that reminded me of anchors and ploughs). So, apparently, is their meaning: in a wall text, Uslip seems to call the smaller form “a young person witnessing ‘the terror of war.’” The best piece in the show might be the shiny brass disk hung on the outside of the Pavilion, a watchful eye in which passersby can see their reflections; unlike the show’s sometimes vapidly monumental wall pieces, this is the only sculpture which really seems to pose a question, eliciting our attention rather than expecting or demanding it.

“Call Me the Breeze” is pablum. But this pablum is perversely presented as high-minded courage to “open dialogues and foster discourse,” and resist the polarization of which it is a direct result. “We are at a critical moment in culture,” Uslip concludes in his wall text. “As the nation approaches its semiquincentennial, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the United States Pavilion champions art that favors deep time, eschews finite positions, and encourages artistic autonomy and curatorial independence.” In other words, art that recognizes the overwhelming concerns of the present and nonetheless decides not to say much of anything about them — and curation that chooses decoration over real discourse, let alone the risks our culture so badly needs. (“Here is the biggest risk of my life except for all the other ones,” Allen says in his artist’s statement, which might as well have been a quotation of the Skynyrd song.) With Trumpian contempt for his critics, Uslip told the Financial Times that he is “embarrassed” and “sad” for those disappointed with the lack of political content in Allen’s art. “Have you given up on the agency and promise of art? On what art can do, uniquely to itself?” But it’s this pavilion that evinces little belief in art’s agency and promise to do much of anything at all.

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Image credit: Max Norman

Republican Coffee Co., one of a rash of new anti-woke coffee brands that have recently appeared for some reason, advertises a special Memorial Day blend called The Liberator. “This isn’t just coffee; it’s a statement,” its presumably A.I.-written blurb explains. For us at The Drift, The Liberator means something different: the monthly socialist magazine published from 1918 to 1924 after its predecessor, The Masses, got shut down for discouraging military enlistment during World War I. We’ve always sought to commemorate the legacy of these great magazines; our covers riff on their artwork, and we repurpose their extraordinary cartoon archives — now in the public domain — in our pages.

This Memorial Day season, starting today, you can help us keep the tradition of independent left-wing publishing alive by purchasing any Drift back issue — on sale, through next week, for $5 instead of the usual $20 (plus shipping). Our Liberator, we think you’ll find, also makes a statement.

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The investment firm KKR became famous as a symbol of rapacious capitalism in the late 1980s after its high-profile leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. Now the firm boasts of a kinder, gentler approach to money-making: employee ownership. In an interview with New Private Markets earlier this month, CFO Robert Lewin extolled the higher profits reaped by the 85 KKR portfolio companies that provide workers with an ownership stake. “You’ve got higher engagement scores. You’ve got higher retention rates. Working capital efficiency is up, margins are up, and ultimately, profitability is up.” Sounds like a win-win.

Not so fast, Francis Northwood writes in his Issue Seventeen essay “ESOP Fables.” All too often, employee ownership schemes serve as a vehicle for capital owners to unload risky or downright toxic assets onto workers while discouraging the formation of unions and ginning up good PR for companies like KKR looking to shake a predatory reputation. No matter how much today’s financiers rhapsodize about helping workers to own the means of production, greed is still good on Wall Street.

ESOP Fables​ | The False Promise of Employee Ownership

FRANCIS NORTHWOOD

If history is any guide, experiments with employee ownership typically end up juicing returns for the investor class rather than benefiting workers. Profit-sharing and employee ownership sound like a nice deal for workers as long as there are profits to share. The question is what happens when there aren’t.

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Image credit: John Kazior

In Issue Sixteen, Katie Way wrote about the lessons Zohran Mamdani might learn from how Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty was derailed by the New York Police Department — how, “faced with a blue wall of opposition to his reformist agenda, de Blasio faltered, and never regained his footing.” Now that we’re over a hundred days into Mamdani’s first term, our Essays Editor Lyra Walsh Fuchs checked in with Way about Mamdani’s early efforts to find his own footing when it comes to the boys in blue.

In your Drift piece, you wrote that in order to succeed, Zohran Mamdani “cannot flinch” at the reactionary voices within the NYPD. You also warned against keeping Jessica Tisch on as police commissioner — advice that Mamdani, of course, did not take. What’s your sense of the state of the relationship between the mayor and Tisch? Her own brother called Mamdani an “enemy” of Jews.

It feels pretty safe to say that, when it comes to their specific dynamic, Tisch is running the show. At City & State’s New York City Power 100 event on April 28, she made a quip about the mayor’s “core principle to ensure the strength of our city: Support, Reinforce, and Grow, or, for short, SRG.” It was a joke, but one that is ultimately about asserting her dominance: Mamdani vowed to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), which responds to protests, but Tisch hasn’t agreed to it. She doesn’t seem to be worried about political blowback.

One of the times that the mayor stood his ground against the NYPD outrage machine — because it really is an outrage machine — was when police showed up at a snowball fight that had been set up by streamers and got hit with snowballs. Mamdani was clear that he didn’t think we should arrest anyone over it. I just wish he brought a bit more of that energy to his other dealings with both Tisch and the department as a whole.

Is it possible that Mamdani is too afraid of the NYPD’s P.R. machine?

Mamdani is so politically canny. In realms where he feels more comfortable, he’s taken stands; I think he is trying to draw power from other victories. But I also think it does feel like a kind of abdication, at least so far. He announced a Mayor’s Office of Community Safety, falling short of his campaign-trail promise to create a full Department of Community Safety. And Jessica Tisch wasn’t at that announcement. No one in uniform from the NYPD was at that announcement. How much buy-in can there really be? It feels more like a pet project than a serious evolution in the way that the city imposes law and order and justice.

What’s your sense of his supporters’ reactions to all of this?

It’s only been a hundred days; it would be pretty crazy if we were having this conversation and saying: Wow. He did it all. The SRG is gone. There’s no more gangs database. Still, he could have gotten rid of Tisch.

But even as he was making these promises on the campaign trail, they weren’t his core focus. Most people were not voting for him because of a super fleshed-out NYPD-related policy. He has been delivering and putting up fights in other areas that were most important to his base. The people most likely to ding him on this are, broadly, to his left. I think his base isn’t thrilled, but is more focused on other aspects of the mayoralty.

Is there anything that has surprised you so far when it comes to Mamdani and the police?

I would have liked to have seen him react more strongly to the shooting of Jabez Chakraborty back in late January. After reaching out to the city many times, trying to get this young man mental health treatment, his family ended up calling 911 and requesting, specifically, an ambulance. Two cops showed up instead, and after less than a minute, shot Chakraborty. Thank God he didn’t die.

Mamdani commended the officers in his initial statement, which inspired a lot of anger. He did end up meeting with the family. Still, even though the mayor advised against it, Jabez did end up getting charged for assaulting an officer. The NYPD has a long history of shooting New Yorkers who are having mental health crises. Mamdani could have used the incident as more of a launch pad for the Office of Community Safety, or the Department of Community Safety.

The past week or so has seen a few flashpoints: the NYPD’s apparent support of ICE arresting an immigrant at a hospital in Bushwick, and the NYPD’s barricading of blocks around a synagogue where a real estate company was selling illegally occupied land in the West Bank. In both incidents, the NYPD violently cracked down on protesters. What’s your sense of the conversations happening within and around the Mamdani administration about these episodes?

I think the NYPD’s response to both of these incidents shows that Mamdani is letting someone else call the shots when it comes to the way law enforcement responds to protesters. NYPD’s actions showed deference toward, respectively, the federal government’s immigration policy and the Democratic establishment’s tolerance for land sales that the U.N. and International Court of Justice have both described as illegal. The former is especially striking to me because Mamdani’s star rose in the mayoral race when he was captured on video shouting down Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan last spring. One would expect (or, at least, hope) that Mamdani, as mayor, would do what he could to maintain that stance, but it seems like he doesn’t consider forbidding his police department to coordinate with ICE within the realm of possibility.

See you tonight at NeueHouse at 7 p.m. for our Issue Seventeen release party!

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

Image credit: Maki Yamaguchi

We’re excited to celebrate Issue Seventeen tomorrow at 7 p.m. at NeueHouse near Madison Square. The evening will kick off with short readings from issue contributors, followed by conversation and merriment. Print subscribers get in free; others can pay $20 for an issue and admission. We hope to see you there!

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

In 2024, the writer Dur e Aziz Amna penned a Dispatch for The Drift about the colonial-era origins of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, reflecting on the destructive decisions whose repercussions reverberate to this day. Amna’s new novel, A Splintering, is set in and against contemporary Pakistan, telling the story of a young woman whose carefully managed life begins to buckle under the weight of social expectations and geopolitical realities. Associate Editor Zain Khalid spoke with Amna about inheritance, estrangement, and the forms, both narrative and political, we use to try to hold people together.

In your 2024 Dispatch for The Drift, you wrote: “Who must face the consequences of imperial hubris, and who is spared? The U.S., Russia, and the U.K. have successfully evaded responsibility for untold numbers of people displaced by the turmoil left in their wake. One hopes this spell of indemnity will expire soon.” How did your thinking about imperial indemnity shape the architecture of the novel, how the characters refuse or internalize their complicity within Pakistan’s entanglement with the West (and Saudi Arabia)?

I grew up in Pakistan in the shadow of the War on Terror, and because I was a devoted newspaper kid, reading the daily paper front to back, the war was a constant presence in my childhood. By my teenage years, it was no longer restricted to the western hinterlands of the country but became a daily presence in the big cities. One dreaded the car stalling at red lights; there were daily suicide bombings; family friends died; it was what we talked about at school.

And yet, at the same time, as you point out, there was complicity. The military dictator at the time, Musharraf, had Pakistan officially join Bush’s catastrophic misadventures: the US controlled a major airfield in Balochistan, and Musharraf later admitted that he had secretly signed off on American drone strikes inside Pakistani territory.

In the novel, some of that complicity is addressed in the characters’ attitudes towards Afghan refugees from the war, in the mention of a failed attempt on Musharraf’s life, but the novel is much more interested in complicity closer to home, particularly in gender-based complicity. The protagonist Tara, for example, is haunted by the misogynistic violence of her brother, yet at times she mimics that same violence.

The novel suggests that the real negotiations of power aren’t simply happening in public or political arenas, but inside marriages, families, schools. Were you consciously relocating resistance into the domestic sphere?

Absolutely, yes. One of my models for A Splintering was Khadija Mastur’s novel Aangan (The Women’s Courtyard), which is set during the time of the Partition, and takes place entirely within a family courtyard. Men are thrown in and out of jail, the Independence movement is raging on outside the gates, but the lens never widens. It’s a very claustrophobic book — all petty love affairs, arranged marriages, and so on — and I had an uncomfortable time reading it. Part of that discomfort arose from the truth of how small and cloistered women’s lives can be, while still being affected by things happening at the global and national levels.

A Splintering refuses the sentimental return to Pakistan that we often see in diaspora fiction. Instead, it presents Pakistan as stratified, unequal, and already shaped by global capital. Was this a rejection of a legible Pakistan for Western readers?

I don’t — I can’t stress this enough — care what the Western reader thinks of Pakistan. More broadly, I don’t care what any reader thinks of Pakistan. That is out of my remit. I’m a Pakistani writer — it’s the only place that’s truly home, I hold a Pakistani passport, I can smell the place in my dreams — but in a novel, I become the characters, I am inside them, I feel and think as they do. And Tara is not a patriot. She’s a cunning, ruthless woman who’s trying to get rich. She doesn’t get goosebumps at the national anthem, even if I do. So, the country is represented in the novel as Tara sees it.

Money feels present in every part of the novel. Did you think of money as a character, or perhaps as a narrative engine?

The novel’s span roughly charts one of most dramatic expansions of the middle class in Pakistan. What’s interesting about Tara’s milieu is that many of its members — small businessmen from the provinces, property dealers in a booming real estate market — feel they have the opportunity to accrue wealth for the first time, in a province that is still the domain of feudal farm owners and landed industrialists. Tara is different because she’s a woman; in one scene, a man scoffs at her ambitions, telling her that “proximity” to money is the best she can hope for. Money is certainly a character for her — it jeers at her from afar and consoles her when it’s close. At least in one scene in the book, it even helps her climax.

Tara is understandably forward-facing. But the novel keeps insisting on the past, or at least the residue of the past. Did your thinking about nostalgia change while working on this book?

The Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov’s book My Dagestan came out in the late 1960s and is a cult favorite in Pakistan. It’s about the poet’s deep associations with his mountainous hometown, a fondness burnished by his years away in Moscow. It’s a beautiful book and likely appealed to men across the Asian continent who, in the 1970s and 1980s, were making the necessary, heartrending move from communitarian village life to the city, as economies shifted from agrarian to industrial. But it’s filled with the kind of nostalgia that Tara has no patience for. Her life changes dramatically for the better once she moves from the village to the city — she gets her own flat, works outside the house, learns how to drive, earns her own money. And yet the hold that home has on her is just as powerful as it is for the lovers of Gamzatov’s book. Instead of nostalgia and longing, home becomes the stuff of her nightmares, a constant reminder of where she could end up if she doesn’t play her cards right.

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

Image credit: Dzanc Books

To break up with a long-term partner is also, in most cases, to break up with their family — a source of grief or of relief or any number of other complicated emotions that our cultural scripts for relationships rarely make space for. Hannah Kingsley-Ma examines this dynamic in her Issue Seventeen story “Independent Living,” which centers on the narrator’s final visit to the retirement home where his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend’s grandmother lives. Read the story online today.

Independent Living | Fiction

HANNAH KINGSLEY-MA

Yes, I was in love with Margaret, but I did not fully understand Margaret, and I did not relate to Margaret. As if those three things were not intimately related. Never underestimate the delusional force of a man living on borrowed time.

We are celebrating Issue Seventeen one week from today!

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.

Illustration credit: Hannah Lock

We will be celebrating Issue Seventeen one week from Thursday, on May 14 at 7 p.m. at NeueHouse near Madison Square. We’ll kick off the festivities with short readings from issue contributors Emma Adler, Lily Gabaree, Ismail Ibrahim, Adam Judah Krasnoff, Megan Marz, Gracie Newman, Caroline Porter, Maia Silber, Kion You, and Ege Yumuşak. Then we’ll get down to partying. We hope to see you there!

The Drift is supported by its readers. Your subscription or donation will help us continue to pay our writers and artists and grow our magazine. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible.