There may be no accounting for taste, but since our taste determines what gets published in our pages, we feel we have an obligation to try. We constantly receive impressive fiction submissions that we nonetheless feel are not right for The Drift. To demystify our editorial process, Associate Fiction Editor Livia Wood spoke with our fiction assistants Kanyin Ajayi and Andres Vaamonde about what they look for — and look away from — when they’re reading through the slush pile.

Livia Wood: What do you look for in a story?

Andres Vaamonde: I look for a voice that’s sure of itself — that feels confident and poised in what it is trying to articulate — but one that I’m not completely sure of myself. If I know precisely where a story is going, I’m less interested.

Kanyin Ajayi: Initially, I was always reading at the level of sentence: looking for sentences that just popped off the page, that were clever, rhythmic, funny, and occasionally even erotic or sensual. Now, I’m also looking at the journey of the reading experience. To what extent do things change over the course of the story? Do they change in meaningful ways, funny ways, sad ways? I feel like the stories that we publish should be shaking something up.

Wood: I’m looking for a really strong character. Stories without strong characters often can’t really survive — the story loses itself without them.

Is there anything that, if you see it in a submission email, you’re immediately uninterested, or you get a sense that it’s not going to be the right fit?

Vaamonde: I try not to fall into that pattern of thinking, because I can be wrong.

A lot of stories that The Drift publishes happen to be about young people in the world of art and culture. Sometimes the protagonists are writers, journalists, artists, or students. But there’s a certain approach to those worlds that can feel navel-gazey. So if I see that, I begin to think about whether the story will work or not.

If I see what appears to be high fantasy I’m going to be a little skeptical. The magazine has published stories that definitely weave in and out of other genres. I’m thinking of Vivian Hu’s “Arrangements,” for example. But if something feels like it’s coming from Middle Earth, I immediately start to wonder if it’s really for The Drift, and whether the person has read the magazine.

Wood: The Drift does delve into other genres — we’ve published stories like “Mormon Lake Hotshots” by Samuel Jensen, for example, which incorporates elements of speculative climate fiction. When it’s done really well, genre does have the ability to present a new narrative or come at a familiar world with a new angle, and we’re definitely not opposed to reading that.

One thing that is really special about The Drift is that basically all of the fiction we publish comes from the slush section. A lot of other literary magazines have slush submissions only nominally, and are really only publishing agented fiction or fiction from well-known authors. We have a commitment to publishing emerging writers and young voices, and I think that it’s exciting how equitable our submissions inbox is — everything gets read. I’m curious if there’s anything that you’ve read that we ended up publishing that you were particularly excited about?

Vaamonde: One that stands out to me is “The Third Room” by Julian Robles. That story appeared in the inbox and there was nothing eye-catching in the subject line or in the body of the email. Sometimes people will list their bio, and it’ll be like, oh, wow, look at all these amazing accolades, or look at the books this person has published, or I’ll even recognize their name. This email had none of that. It was just the attachment. I read it, and was blown away. It was shrouded in mystery; it felt like Julio Cortázar. I love how it plays with my expectations.

Ajayi: I love “Maud” by Noor Qasim, because when I read it was just like, what the hell is this? What is going on? At every moment, I was like, oh, this is so fun, and I don’t really know where I am, and that’s the opposite of how I usually read. I love the idea that a story can look like “Maud,” a very difficult form to realize — a dialogue/interview — and consistently hold your attention. A distinguishing feature between the stories that end up being successful, and the ones that don’t, is that it’s not enough for the story to have a compelling climax. Most of the portions of the story must be compelling on their own.

Vaamonde: I don’t think we’re looking for completely polished eggs. I admire it when a story grabs me, but it can have a shaky grip. And the stories that appear in the slush do not appear exactly the same way in the magazine. There’s a rigorous editing process. If I feel like a story is very strong in several categories, but there’s something missing, or I didn’t love the way it ended, or I found a couple of typos, but I’m compelled by the voice of the character, or I’m surprised by its form, I’ll push it along.

Wood: Every so often there’s a story that seems perfectly formed, but that’s almost never the case. Sometimes I’ll be in discussion with another editor about a story, and we’ll be thinking about whether we want to take it and someone will say, “I think if we went back to this author and asked them to rework it, there’s a deeper and more interesting story inside.” There’s a good deal of rigorous editing, and I think that’s a good thing, but there is also a good deal of trust and faith in the authors. It’s a very symbiotic editing experience.

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Image credit: William Gropper, The Liberator, December 1921

In the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre, fictionalized versions of André Gregory and Wallace Shawn debate, among other things, the relative merits of traveling in search of novelty and enjoying the comforts of ordinary life. As an Issue Three Mention of the film by Michele Moses asked: “Is the world out there or in here?”

If you’re going in search of the world out there this August, consider spending the dog days of summer at one of the off-the-beaten-path locales that our Mentions contributors have reviewed over the years. If you prefer the interior world, or simply can’t make the trip to Alaska or Albany, you can still read about them. That’s its own novelty, after all.

— Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Mentions Editor

The Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern

TRAVEL

This 87,500-square-foot decommissioned reservoir, built in 1926, lies underneath Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, which offers walking trails alongside a mud-colored river and towering overpass supports. Forgotten for years, it reopened in 2016 as a tourist site and performance space called the “Cistern,” a name intended to evoke the monumental Byzantine ruins beneath Istanbul. But the Houston version involves more concrete and more tales of municipal corruption. You can take a guided tour to learn about the city’s history of dubious water sanitation infrastructure, including a memorable anecdote about a three-foot-long eel carcass clogging a downtown pipe. To demonstrate the facility’s seventeen-second echo, the guide encouraged us to scream into the musty darkness. “Leave it all inside the Cistern!” she yelled, as tourists from Dallas howled beside me.

Ariel Katz

Rio Tinto Kennecott Visitor Experience

TOURISM

Just south of Salt Lake City, you can ride a six-dollar company shuttle to the edge of the Bingham Canyon Mine, the largest open-pit excavation site in the world. (Signs along the way warn workers to “control the hazards.”) Like “Spiral Jetty,” the region’s more famous earthwork, the copper mine will leave you thinking about scale; from three Empire State Buildings up, ore-toting trucks appear planktonic. But even more mind-bending than the view is the experience of reading about Rio Tinto’s “environmental stewardship” on their website right after staring into an abyss that was once a mountain.

Colin Lodewick

The Egg

DESIGN

Enter any of the modernist megaliths that line Albany’s Empire State Plaza and it becomes nearly impossible to remember where you are, what time it is, and what the outside world looks like. But the Plaza’s many structural horrors pale beside The Egg, a performing arts center less ovoid than its name suggests. With the exterior of a UFO and the interior of a cavernous waiting room, The Egg lives up to its name only in its ability to reduce visitors to a state of fetal dependence.

Vivienne Schlemmer

Mill City Museum

GRAIN

Minneapolis is no longer the flour capital of the world, but its riverfront is still littered with tubular grain silos and washed-up relics of the mills that once dominated the city. One of these, the Washburn “A” Mill, is now a museum. It burned down in 1991, but the mill’s walls and foundations are displayed like the remains of excavated Roman ruins. Museum visitors follow the journey of a wheat kernel in great detail while sampling freshly made biscuits from a “Baking Lab” operated by a modern-day Betty Crocker look-alike. Slick wood-and-glass paneling sits alongside ominous warnings about mauled limbs and flour-dust explosions: industrial chic distilled to its essence. It’s not a big place, but there’s plenty to sift through.

Pradeep Niroula

King Salmon Lodge

TRAVEL

Since 2008, when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cashed in free offers for a luxury three-day Alaskan vacation from his super-rich benefactors Paul Singer and Robin Arkley, the King Salmon Lodge has become notably less exclusive. Arkley, then its owner, gave Alito a room, full facility access, and fishing and sightseeing trips on small seaplanes — a package that went for a little over $1,000 a day at the time. The bigger ticket item was a private flight to the nearby “King Salmon Airport” provided by hedge fund billionaire Singer, which would have cost the justice $100,000. Alito justified his failure to recuse himself from cases involving Singer by claiming ignorance. It seems the justice had not heard of Singer’s connection to Elliott Investment Management, which he founded and controls, and which has come before the court at least ten times in the past decade and a half. In one of those cases, Elliott earned a $2.4 billion payout. The Lodge’s motto seems apt: “FISH STORIES MADE HERE.”

Brian Jordan

Oudolf Garden Detroit

LANDSCAPING

If Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf’s medium is flora, his subject is time. His plantings on Manhattan’s High Line made him famous, but Detroit’s Belle Isle is better suited to his trademark swathes of North American perennials and grasses; on the open, three-acre site, flowers, foliage, and seed heads harmonize in various stages of decay and rebirth. Buoyant or gloomy depending on the season, the garden, which opened in 2021, is rich in what Oudolf calls the “emotion of nature,” wherein “you feel more than what you see.” Don’t tell the urban renewal prognosticators, lest the garden become yet another symbol of Detroit’s comeback.

Andrew Wickenden

City Museum, St. Louis

CURIOSITIES

​​This shoe factory, built to house the literal-minded company “International Shoe,” was reopened as a museum in 1997. Post-industrial detritus — commercial cookware among discarded oyster shells, a decommissioned school bus dangling from the roof — has never been put to better use.

Samuel DiBella

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Image credit: Adolph Dehn, The Liberator, May 1924

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

Dear Sophie,

My partner and I generally split our household chores pretty evenly — and he does the grocery shopping and more of the cooking. But I seem to see more dirt, splatters, and grime than he does, and so I often end up feeling like I’m either doing more of the cleaning or asking him to go back and redo something, like I’m some sort of taskmaster (or, gasp, mother). How can I persuade him to use the requisite elbow grease, or ideally, see things the way I see them?

Sincerely,

Scrubbing the baseboards

Dear Scrubbing,

I have long noticed that in disputes about tidiness, compromise almost always entails the messy person getting cleaner. Being neat is seen as an inherent good in our society, and being messy an inherent negative. Unlike most other values-related questions, there’s not a lot of argument here. Perhaps I notice this bias and find it slightly strange because I, like your partner, err on the side of clothes on the chair or the floor and sometimes maybe, yes, a bit of grime here and there. Therefore, throughout my life, I have been told in various ways to become cleaner, and eventually, over time, I have made some progress in this regard; my will has been bent toward the clean world. But tidiness is not natural to me — even noticing certain types of mess requires an expenditure of energy in a way that it doesn’t seem to for others. I have to try to see things as another person would, not as I do.

Which brings me to the part of your letter that stood out to me: how do I get him to see things the way I see them? I don’t think that this should really be the goal. Because he is a different person with a different view of the world and different preferences, you can no more get him around, fully, to inhabiting your perspective than you can will him to accept exactly the same view of another person or a particular political issue. Even granting that you might be fairly close together on your standards of cleanliness, there are different types of mess that bother people: I can’t abide dishes in the sink, which my boyfriend doesn’t mind, but he hates when things clutter the surface of the sink in the bathroom, which I am not bothered by. These are all nothing more or less than preferences.

But some preferences matter more than others, and it seems that this one matters to you a lot, because it’s your home and you want to feel good in it. And you sense, correctly, that there can be gendered dimensions to expressing that preference and how you fear it will be received. You don’t want to be your boyfriend’s mother! And who does? We live in a society where the specter of the nagging woman looms large. So how can you have a conversation where you express that preference and feel heard without the experience of reenacting uncomfortable gender scripts?

There’s no straightforward answer; the crushing weight of gendered expectations is perhaps impossible for people — even queer people! — in a relationship to unburden themselves of entirely. It might help to prioritize big-picture conversations rather than specific arguments. In the heat of the moment, “you didn’t wash the dish the way I wanted you to” can feel like a nag. “Sometimes when you wash the dishes, I’m noticing that you might not put enough soap on them,” said in a moment of calm, can inaugurate a more level-headed conversation. You could try splitting the cleaning in a different way that plays to your strengths: a weekly joint deep clean, where you can focus on splatter and grime while he does the laundry? If the way he cleans doesn’t quite satisfy you even after critiques or rejiggering, perhaps you could take on more of the cleaning while he steps up around the house in another area. (You say you already do this to some degree, but the balance could shift further.) Part of having a stronger preference does mean you might have to do more work in this particular area, and you can try to balance it out elsewhere. Sometimes the work you do around the house might ebb and flow; equity is a good goal, but it doesn’t always mean fifty-fifty in all things.

Don’t keep score on elbow grease. But do try to address these little points of conflict and tension head-on: they are the stuff of daily life. You don’t have to choose between struggling to get your partner to adopt your point of view and reluctantly accepting that your house won’t be up to your standards. Instead, you can strive to create a shared understanding of what clean means, and then figure out how you’re going to achieve it as a household. The more you can avoid thinking about it in terms of being right about the grime and splatter, the more success I think you will have. This applies to a lot more than cleaning: being right is not as important as we often think. There is no universal judge who will award us points for rightness in perspective. Other people often respond negatively to rigid certainty when they can sense it; even if you feel deeply right about something in your bones, try not to approach an argument in that manner. Instead, we need to work with others to understand the way they see, and to make them understand what it is we see. That’s true whether you’re looking at a dusty bookshelf or something thornier.

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: The Liberator, July 1921

Last week I spent some time on the water and in the sand. I drove my mother to a motel on Maine’s midcoast, where she lived for six years four decades ago. We explored the region’s tentacular peninsulas: scrying tidepools at the tip of Harpswell, scrambling over the quartz-flecked rock formation called Giant’s Stairs, sharing a lobster roll on gluten-free bread upon a shaded wharf as we enjoyed the out-of-tune stylings of a cover band called Dysfunction Junction. On a boat tour of Casco Bay steered by employees of the local maritime museum, I learned that I’d been misusing the word “brackish,” which does not describe water that is dirty, but instead describes water that is salty but not too salty, as where a river meets the sea.

This week’s Mentions spend time under the water and in the mud. Read on for a plastic bag balaclava, thornless honeylocusts, Inner Mongolia, the grasp of the sublime, and the pursuit of a Godly woman.

— Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Mentions Editor

“The Blindboy Podcast”

AUDIO

The Irish writer who goes by Blindboy Boatclub curates an extended universe for fellow obsessive iconoclasts; that he wears a plastic bag balaclava is the least interesting thing about this national treasure. He’s published three collections of satirical short stories — most recently Topographia Hibernica — and was named Best Documentary Presenter at the 2025 Grierson Documentary Awards for Blindboy: The Land of Slaves and Scholars, an LSD trip into early Irish Christianity. (The country’s monks invented spaces between words.) But it’s the podcast, which has run weekly for eight years, that best showcases Blindboy’s range. Subjects vary from a vulnerable dissection of his mid-thirties autism diagnosis (“Intrapersonally Speaking”) to audio essays like “The miserable blood drenched history of Jaffa cakes” (one installment of what The Guardian called “some of the best food writing being published anywhere”) and creative nonfiction like “Why I want to fuck Captain Planet.” He has also interviewed no fewer than two Irish presidents.

Elizabeth R. Blackburn

Message from the Mud

ART

The grass at Storm King Art Center looks lush and well-kept until you arrive at Anicka Yi’s newly installed excavation. In a circle of bare dirt, glowing acrylic columns filled with soil and pondwater emerge from a kidney-shaped pool. The deep black soil blooms with lurid green algae, gesso-like white areas, and ochre stains of bacterial growth. The work could be a Clyfford Still abstraction, or marble from an alien planet; it is unmistakably alive and slowly bubbling. Although Yi’s disruption of the Minimalist surrounding scenery — the landscaped trees, Alexander Liberman’s tubular sculptures nearby, and the impressive ionic columns at the top of the hill — is genuinely jarring, the effect is ultimately serene. Whatever message the mud has for us, the mud will speak it slowly.

Caroline Magavern

Ghostbox Cowboy

FILM

Documentarian-turned-feature-director John Maringouin’s criminally under-watched 2018 movie starts off as if Midnight Cowboy took place in contemporary Shenzhen, but slowly morphs into a Kratom-infused Apocalypse Now, set against the global commodity supercycle instead of the Vietnam War. Our protagonist, Jimmy Van Horn, ventures deep into Inner Mongolia in search of the elusive Johnny Mai Thai, an underworld figure who eventually utters the most unbelievable “bruh” ever recorded. It’s the only film I know of that scratches a similar itch as that A.I. video of Biden and Trump performing a duet of “Yi Jian Mei,” and, like all great cinema, it’s streaming for free on Tubi.

Owen Harrington

Ghost Ships Festival

ARTIFACTS

Scores of septuagenarians gathered in Manitowoc, Wisconsin on a gusty March day for this annual community event hosted by the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association (woo-ah for short). Via slide decks and Ken Burns-esque voice-overs, underwater archaeologists, divers, and maritime historians reported on the latest Great Lakes shipwreck discoveries, including the Lac La Belle, a steamship seated at the bottom of Lake Michigan since 1872. The audience leaned in, grasping for the sublime, as the two divers on screen plodded their way through the freighter’s remarkably well-preserved hull — and groaned when the footage confirmed that no whisky barrels had survived. By the end of WUAA’s program, a more pressing message had been communicated: quagga mussels are plotting world domination.

Lukasz Grabowski

The Raw Milk Kid

SOCIAL MEDIA

You can get a good grasp of this manosphere influencer’s deal from his Instagram “highlights” collections, which include “Gym,” “Meals,” “God is good,” and “Proof I’m 19.” It’s the last topic that separates purported 19-year-old Liberty University student Owen Stubblebine from the hundreds of other influencers promoting a mostly beef diet, calorie-tracking apps, and the pursuit of a Godly woman. The dissonance between the Raw Milk Kid’s image — with his pubescent face and voice like Pamela Adlon’s — and his manosphere message is obvious, though perhaps that’s the point. His fans call him “Precum.”

Drew Gillis

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Abou Farman’s work explodes the conventional boundaries between art and science, poetry and scholarship, and the textual and the visual. An anthropologist of science and technology, Farman has exhibited installation and video art as part of the duo caraballo-farman and has published two previous genre-bending books: Clerks of the Passage (2012) and On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020). His latest book, No Silence in the Afterlife, is out today from Noemi Press and includes the poem “Nuclear Magnetic,” which originally appeared in Issue Seventeen of The Drift. To celebrate the publication of No Silence in the Afterlife, Poetry Assistant Hua Xi spoke with Farman about MRIs, protons, and ontological undertakings.

The book’s structure allows it to be read from both ends. How did you construct it, and what does that mean to you?

I didn’t plan it like that. I didn’t plan any of it, really. There were notes; performance texts; medical documents; my artwork; and the artwork I did with Leo, my partner whose illness and death led to our experiments in dying, mourning, and the afterlife. As I compiled the material, it became clear that it was not holding together — that there were too many unintegrated kinds and genres. I had to cut, but I also couldn’t cut it all out. There was research I liked and material that the collection as a whole needed, even if it was too formal or pedantic — all the stuff, for example, on the origins and technologies of the MRI. So I turned to the academic bag of tricks and pulled out footnotes. I split the page in two and the notes ran across the bottom. But it seemed banal and ineffective. It got me going on a useful track, though, namely the poetics of the footnote. How do footnotes function within the conventions of language and text, what else can they do, and how do they add poetry to scholarship rather than simply serve as additional information or mandated citations? One day, when I was formatting the footnote section I saw an option for “endnote.” Obviously. How could I not have thought of it? These should be endnotes since this is about endings. At the same time, I didn’t want that writing to be relegated, like the secular dead, to some neglected netherworld. So I realized that what I had in front of me was a life with two connected beginnings/endings, and one should open life from both ends. It became a structure that reflected the point of the book itself. Also, I never liked calling it a book, but that’s another story.

Tell us about your use of scientific language throughout the book — you draw from physics, biology, medicine, and more.

In my day job, I was an anthropologist of medicine and a science and technology studies (STS) scholar. I did my research on technoscientific immortality. So I carried that with me. For a long time, I was a good secular lefty, so science was the language of reality I learned and leaned into. Poetry was a way to break away from the restrictions of all that we call the real. It is such a strange thing, poetic language in a material world. WTF?! I had influences from poets like A.R. Ammons and Will Alexander, who traveled the vernacular and cosmic scientific domains, but the interplay of those worlds, their merging, became increasingly important to me as I explored non-Western, non-secular histories and cosmologies. Science has a lot of odd aspects, and one of its odd aspects is that so much of it is made up of or through language. But it is also — and perhaps often despite itself — an exploration of the oddness of the universe itself. In this case, the oddness of it came to me and Leo through research on how MRIs functioned. The MRI mapped a fantastic technological continuum between the body and the universe. From protons up, or on, or out. A physicist once told me that protons can’t get destroyed. That was it. Protons became for me a way to reckon with origins and continuity and the afterlife. Not the only way, but one way — going from the smallest and most primordial physical thing to the expansiveness of existence, life, language, and mind.

The work seems to collapse dimension, placing biological and cellular patterns in conversation with contemporary geopolitical patterns and even larger cosmic patterns in the universe. How did you think about scale?

The big questions become much more intense the smaller they get. And the small questions become much more mysterious the larger they get.

List poems and lists of terms appear frequently, including in your poem “Nuclear Magnetic,” which was published in The Drift. How did you put these together, and what is their significance?

Both poetry and science name things to bring them into being. These disciplines are ontological undertakings. And from the ground of that ontology they take flight, though in different ways. Science has possibly named more things in the world than any other language — that is its power and its arrogance. Most contemporary poetry is much less arrogant, but it still describes things we didn’t have names for. Religions and cosmologies are often like that — naming is an act of self-constitution. Or world-making.

I felt that, in the face of death, of disappearance, naming things that make us up — made us up, that made up Leo and me, made up the disease and the survival — was important. I see behind every appearance a disappearance, too; every named thing hosts a world unnamed.

You illustrated the book yourself; what was the process like?

Leo and I worked as artists — under the name caraballo-farman — so the visual was always a part of how we grappled with our lives, and in this case with illness and death. We did a whole series of works visualizing cancer, 3D printing tumors, and playing with the pink-washing commercialization of cancer. Then we did a film (Icaros: A Vision), along with our friend Matteo Norzi, that combined some of these ideas and visuals. For Leo, life was always visual; the image prior to language was how she took in and put out the world. Cancer and dying turned into experiments in that realm. So until the very end and beyond, we were fully imbricated in the world of images.

The images, then, are not all my own. One set comes from a series in our cancer/3D project, called “carcinodaemons,” where the visualization of tumors through 3D meshes turned them into creatures or constellations that some other instrument, like a telescope or a microscope, might see somewhere close or far in the universe. Another set comes from the great Shipibo artist Sara Flores — an artist whose work Leo saw in the Amazon but whom she never got to meet. The Shipibo Conibo Center of New York, which we co-founded with Matteo, took on the project of breaking the barriers that prevented Amazonian indigenous artists like Sara from participating in the contemporary art world. Sara is now an artist celebrated around the world for her brilliance. The other set is just me visualizing one version of Leo’s protons put together in the body of a cockroach. I established a relationship with this cockroach and have tons of video and images.

The design and illustration were also collaborative. I did the initial draft but various people — Sara’s niece, Fiorella; one of my anthropology students, Isabel Arciniegas Guaneme; and the great designer of the book, Steve Halle — put those bits together into the full design.

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: Noemi Press

The sculptor Giuseppe Penone was a protagonist of what Germano Celant, in 1967, called arte povera or “poor art,” a generation of mostly Italian artists making frank, unprecious work that thumbed its nose at an increasingly rapacious marketplace. Even though Penone, at 79, has long moved on, he has never escaped the association, and it still feels off to encounter him at Gagosian, the cynosure of the art market and an arena for conspicuous cultural consumption. The Reflection of Bronze (closes today) marks Penone’s arrival at something like the opposite of where he began back in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, he would let a tree grow around metal in the shape of his silhouette or fist, and he began carving away the wood around knots in industrially milled beams to reveal a sort of arboreal skeleton. A later iteration of this series — “Albero di 3 metri (3-Meter Tree)” (1995) — hangs in The Reflection of Bronze with all the pathos of a medieval crucifix; a tear of sap sweats down from its upper reaches. But most of the sculptures at Gagosian are trompe l’oeil bronze casts of trees on which Penone has performed his trademark surgery — sculptures that resemble nature but are in fact pure artifice.

Penone’s soulful and serious if ever more spectacular work has long been growing in size, and has involved bronze in one way or another for decades, often in combination with wood. But The Reflection of Bronze has a certain Gagosian gigantism about it. Penone’s musings are stencilled onto the walls, and, after reading his statement about bronze being the “mirror of man,” you can take a look at a ping-pong-paddle-sized Egyptian bronze mirror, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum, just in case you needed to be reminded of the material’s antiquity. Though Penone’s early work was quietly radical, rejecting the mass-produced feel of Minimalism to embrace a back-to-the-earth ecology, these latest sculptures aspire to the timeless, blue-chip realm of myth. “While he is celebrated for his use of and interest in wood, bronze for him is not a more permanent, more marketable substitute for that material,” writes the show’s curator, former Whitney director Adam Weinberg, in a telling reassurance. “Rather, his use of bronze involves a profound, rich, varied, and lifelong response to enduring artistic questions.” The truth feels less either/or, more both/and. Permanence is not unrelated to what the professionals call “preservation,” and it is measured as much by markets as museums.

The show’s room-sized centerpiece, the first thing you encounter when you walk in, is indeed worthy of the ancients. “Marsia (Marsyas)” (2024) is an abstract representation of the flaying of Marsyas, a satyr who got on the wrong side of Apollo for playing the aulos, or ancient Greek oboe, with a bit too much skill, and by extension an avatar for every artist. A tall bronze cast of treebark — a kind of skin — stands vertical on a base of granite scored with semi-circular channels, equally evocative of a column’s flutes and of the bore-holes left by traditional methods of cutting stone. Against this skin, on one side, leans a bronze of two intertwined tree-trunks, stripped of their bark, in a natural finish; the taut stainless steel cable which binds them together is connected, on the other side, to an identical pair of trunks, with a haunting teal patina, which hang suspended above the granite in what feels like agony — the agony of Marsyas, of the artist, and, perhaps, of nature itself, flayed and sacrificed to man’s needs. (One shudders to consider the show’s carbon footprint.) The room’s walls are sheathed in natural cork, occasionally decorated by smaller masks fashioned from bronze-cast acacia leaves, and some other slender trunks, which hang like clubs or talismans. Penone uses all his considerable material and aesthetic resources to turn the gallery’s conventional white cube into a tomb, or a temple.

Somehow the magic dissipates in the show’s second room, where we walk into a forest of mainly bronze trees — four of them (each called “Clepsydra,” or “Water Clock,” dating from 2012 and 2024) totemic casts of Penone’s more familiar wooden sculptures. Atop a big pile of black earth in the middle of the space stands the bronze cast of a hollowed-out larch trunk, within which a living sapling grows. The conceit is obvious and, beneath the touching contrast, strained. More moving is the final work, from which the show takes its name: “The Reflection of Bronze” (2005). Penone presents a series of seven bronze rectangles about 4 by 2.5 feet cast one from the other using the lost-wax process, accumulating the marks the artist made in the wax to become progressively more obscure. The piece constitutes a poem on what lasts, and what gets lost, with permanence. Reflected in these darkening mirrors, the big bronzes that dominate the show appear as the monuments of an aging artist, eager not so much to capture the transient or, conversely, create outdoor sculptures of monumental scale (two of the ends to which Penone has used the material in the past), but to make some claim on eternity in the face of the end — not just his own, but nature’s.

Few other sculptors can afford to make grand work out of expensive materials, and I’m not sure they’d want to, anyway. You could see the giant crumbling heads and busts that Mark Manders is showing at Tanya Bonakdar (closes July 31) as variations on Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” with a skepticism of monumentality baked into their “shattered visages.” And much of the recent sculpture on display in galleries around town has been decidedly low-key. Gedi Sibony’s recent show at Greene Naftali continued his practice of making sculpture out of salvaged wood and other junk from his studio. At Reena Spaulings, Ryan Sullivan offered, among his more familiar paintings, rectangular columns made of a composite material you might call trash terrazzo — and a table piece assembled with recycled Styrofoam, wood (complete with a shipping label), and a copper wing. Most memorably, Mitchell Charbonneau, at his latest solo show at Off Paradise (closes August 7), presents immaculately produced glass sculptures of burnt-out fluorescent lightbulbs, like dead Flavins or studio trash handcrafted by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, along with wall hangings made of copper and lead treated to resemble the walls of various basements he has known. All this smaller, more self-effacing work lives in the flash-fast world of cheap commodities, asking what happens to goods when they aren’t good anymore.

Perhaps the show in most revealing contrast with Penone’s is Meg Webster’s Thicket a few blocks south at Paula Cooper (closes July 31). Webster, who is 82, is roughly Penone’s contemporary, and both began as something like post-minimalists who used nature as their primary medium. But instead of seeking permanence, Webster has typically preferred transience. “Thicket” (2026) is a large spiral hedge woven out of plant cuttings; the spiral begins at the ground and rises as it curls inward to a height of maybe seven feet or so. The leaves and flowers — which are tended and occasionally replaced by the gallery staff — exude a grassy-alfalfa smell you sense as soon as you open the street-level gallery door; you hear, too, birds chirping (a recording made at the Hutcheson Memorial Forest in New Jersey). The scent strengthens as you walk up the stairs and then into the thicket. The installation is like an organic Richard Serra: you move inward and find yourself hidden, embraced. But rather than the rusted geometry of an alien form, Webster makes something that feels like the bushes you hid under as a child. When the show is over, Webster will disassemble the piece, as is her wont. (There are other, lesser works in the show, including boxes made of musky beeswax and a slender reflective spike leaning in a corner like a narwhal tusk, that are permanent, and therefore saleable.) Webster’s aesthetic, as it first emerged roughly half a century ago, might be read as offering a feminist alternative to the more masculine strictures of the preceding generation’s Minimalism. But Webster’s delicate art of foraging, assemblage, and tracelessness — of embracing dissolution, rather than striving for bronzed eternity — now feels like the future.

This is the July installment of Max Norman’s column on contemporary art.

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During the whole Graham Platner meltdown last week, I really missed the feminist internet. I took it for granted during the 2010s: the thriving ecosystem of independent feminist publications, some complementary corporate verticals, and a nonstop, rich, vicious conversation on Twitter. A handful of stars left explicitly feminist sites for bigger platforms with broader audiences. Combined, we — I used to write and edit for Feministing — reached a lot of people, shaping left and liberal discourse, including on matters of sexual violence.

That’s all dead now. There’s a longer story to tell here, but the short version is that Feministing and nearly all of our peer publications have shuttered. Those that remain, like Jezebel, are shells of their former selves. (As of my writing, Jezebel’s most prominent list of articles on its home page is made up of years-old pieces “resurrected from the Jezebel catacombs.”) Much of the fall of the feminist internet is rightly attributed to the general demise of digital media. But it has happened at the same time as a broader anti-feminist backlash in the wake of #MeToo and the rise of an unapologetically misogynistic New Right. And it has also coincided with Twitter, which I still cannot bring myself to call X, turning into an absolute hell site under Elon Musk, who has invited harassment onto the platform and driven out feminists, including (for the most part) me. As I touched on at a Drift panel in March, we’re now in a real drought of public feminist thought, even when it comes to topics that cry out for gender analysis, like Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

Back to Platner. Two women have now accused the Maine Senate candidate of sexual abuse, including rape. I believe them, as do a lot of people. But also, man, has the internet been stupid and sexist this past week, including and perhaps especially on the left. To give a couple of high profile examples: Drop Site News cofounder Ryan Grim bemoaned that Politico left out of its reporting on the rape allegation that Platner’s victim had, earlier that night, texted him that she “needed a glute massage” — as though the text constituted consent to his breaking into her house against her explicit wishes and raping her. Mourning the end of the Platner campaign, Matt Stoller and Glenn Greenwald dismissed the allegations variously as unsupported by evidence (untrue), a “tiny bit of scandal or controversy,” and insufficiently vetted by the legal system, as though no one were allowed to believe a woman until a cop or court does. (On that last point: I have a book recommendation. Also, ACAB except for rape?) Michael Tracey insisted that a woman who doesn’t fight back hasn’t been raped, which is one of the oldest and most idiotic rape myths our world has invented. Chris Wright, the author of Class War, Then and Now, described the former mercenary as a “courageous, even heroic, pioneer” because of his anti-war convictions, “whatever happened one night five years ago when he was blackout drunk.” Can’t let a little whoopsy rape get in the way of hero worshipping our way toward class war.

This is all idiotic. Yet these views echoed around the internet — the same internet that used to be a lot more feminist. The sexist lefty man is a tale as old as time, and these are a particularly sordid set of characters. But I really believe that this response has been more misogynistic and less informed than it would have been a decade ago when feminist analysis was in the water. As I remember it, back then the left at least pretended to believe that rape was bad, that it mattered personally and politically, and that feminist reformers were more right about sexual violence than the seventeenth-century British jurists who codified rape myths.

I won’t overstate the matter. I don’t think this nadir in online feminist analysis is the sole cause of the Platner apologia. But we shouldn’t be surprised if it’s a contributing factor. A lot of zoomers have grown up without readily accessible feminist analysis in the places they look for news and commentary. Without regular reminders, a lot of people who once knew better appear to have forgotten what was once common sense.

Alexandra Brodsky is a lawyer and the author of Sexual Justice.

Read Brodsky and other Drift contributors on the state of feminism today in Issue Six.

“Steered by the Reactionary”​ | What To Do About Feminism

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Image credit: Ivy Sanders Schneider

Even if most of what you know about the World Cup is that it’s currently happening, you might also know that Lionel Messi is involved. The diminutive Argentine is everywhere. At this point, Messi is the undisputed soccer GOAT — or, in fútbol nomenclature, D10S, a portmanteau of his jersey number (10 is often awarded to a team’s most skillful playmaker) and the Spanish word for God. In his native Argentina, though, Messi has not always been beloved as a D10S. In fact, he was once a subject of significant dispute, and even acrimony. In a move emblematic of modern Argentine culture, Messi was deified only after he had become a conduit for national self-pity.

Unlike many legendary Argentine football stars of yore, Messi did not rise through the ranks of the nation’s club system. His family struggled to pay for the expensive medical treatments required to treat his case of growth hormone deficiency, and his local youth club, Newell’s Old Boys, did not follow through on its initial promise to cover the total cost. In 2000, when Messi was thirteen, FC Barcelona swooped in with a contract written on a napkin and an offer to pay for his care. The rest is history. Messi would spend the next twenty years of his life in Barcelona, winning a litany of titles and awards and scoring practically infinite goals. (In 2021, Messi had a brief, odd stint with Paris Saint-Germain before he shipped out stateside in 2023 to make an eye-popping salary playing for Inter Miami.)

Messi wasn’t the only Argentine to jump ship at the turn of the twenty-first century. The Argentine economy shrank by nearly twenty percent between 1998 and 2002. Unemployment spiked and civil unrest blossomed: the country had five presidents within just two weeks at the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002. An estimated 250,000 Argentines left between 2000 and 2004, and the period left yet another psychic scar on a nation that had been struggling for generations to reclaim the prosperity it had enjoyed in the late nineteenth century, when Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. Since the crisis at the start of the new millennium, this golden age has seemed further away than ever for many Argentines. As a couple of balding men said to me in Queens minutes after the Argentine national team squeaked out its victory over Cabo Verde: “Siempre sufriendo, che?” Always suffering.

This sense of national beleaguerment found its way into Argentine football culture. A country used to winning soon found itself mired in a title drought. As the shaggy-haired teenage Messi rose to prominence, many hoped he’d be the one to end it, but the national team — known as the Albiceleste — continued to disappoint and a narrative took hold in Argentina that he just couldn’t win. The problem was that he didn’t understand the country; he didn’t play like an Argentine. Messi’s legendary precursor Diego Maradona was born to an indigenous father and an Italian mother in the dirt-road slums of Buenos Aires. He was brash and authentic, operating at full tilt on and off the field — chest out, curly mane flying. Messi, meanwhile, was demure, even dull-seeming; an ostensibly privileged white kid from the Argentine equivalent of the Midwest. He had a European style, walking around the pitch, patiently waiting for his turn to strike. Where Maradona earned love by expressing passion, Messi seemed incapable of articulating his emotions. At a charity soccer match in 2016, Maradona was caught on a hot mic telling the Brazilian legend Pelé that Messi “is a good person, but he has no personality.”

That same year, after a third sequential heartbreaking defeat in a major tournament final, Messi gave up. Speaking to reporters at MetLife stadium in New Jersey (which will also be the site of this year’s World Cup final on Sunday), he announced his retirement from the Argentine national team. It was a come-to-D10S moment for the Argentine football world. The city of Buenos Aires repurposed transit signs on main roads and in subway stations to mimic a popular social media hashtag: “Lio, no te vayas.” Lio, don’t go. Then-President Mauricio Macri publicly encouraged Messi to reverse course. Rallies were organized to collectively mourn the loss and beg for his return. One banner unfurled at the airport upon Messi’s return read: “Messi, si jugarías en el cielo, moriría por verte.” Translation: Messi, if you were to play in heaven, I would die just to see you. Messi himself became a kind of martyr: a legend felled by the weight of unreasonable expectation and early disappointment. Argentines blamed themselves. As one promising teenage soccer player wailed on Facebook: “How are we going to convince [Messi] if we are disastrous?”

Since Messi returned to the national squad in the runup to the 2018 World Cup, his teammates have sought to prove that they’d do anything to help the star achieve redemption. And they’ve delivered, winning the Copa América in 2021 and 2024 and the World Cup in 2022. The triumphant Argentine national team of the 2020s essentially consists of Messi — an exceptionally talented but, in his late thirties, aged messiah — and a hoard of unselfish ushers and pugnacious security guards intent on atoning for the great national sin of having initially driven him away. That teenaged soccer player who criticized a “disastrous” Argentina, for example? He’d grow up to be Enzo Fernández, the midfielder who scored the game-winning goal against Egypt in the Round of 16. Veteran defender Nicolás Otamendi (who is only one year Messi’s junior) sports a photorealistic tattoo on his abdomen that features not one but two different depictions of Messi. The hero of the 2022 World Cup, goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez, put it bluntly: “I want to give him life, I want to die for him.” Nowadays, the question of Messi’s argentinidad no longer arises. He’s delivered at the highest level for his nation — and even begun to publicly express his emotions. After Argentina’s last-minute (and controversial) comeback against Egypt last week, Messi let loose a torrent of tears.

Andres Vaamonde is an Argentine-American writer and fiction assistant at The Drift.

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Image credit: Bryan Berlin/Wikimedia Commons

Replay technology has long served up fodder for intense arguments among sports fans, but the hyper-sophisticated system FIFA has deployed at this year’s World Cup has generated a series of controversies that threaten to overshadow what human beings are doing on the field. Most recently, and most dramatically, Argentina’s miraculous comeback over Egypt in the Round of 16 was aided by the decision to overturn a pivotal Egyptian goal on the recommendation of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR), fueling longstanding accusations of FIFA favoritism toward Lionel Messi’s team.

According to Wired, the version of VAR in use at this year’s World Cup “represents some of the most advanced uses of adjudication tech to date — not just in soccer, but across all high-level sports.” One important and especially controversial dimension is the “digital twin” technology with which replay officials simulate everything on the field to determine the exact position of a player, down to their shoe size, relative to the ball, other players, and boundary lines. “You would find it difficult to find a true fan who thinks this goal should have been disallowed,” former Premier League referee Andy Davies wrote of a last-minute score by Colombia in group play overturned because centre-back Davinson Sánchez’s digital twin was found to be offside by the tip of his foot.

As Max Hancock explained in The Drift last year, however, the contemporary craze for digital twins goes far beyond FIFA — and has made its way into both industrial and white-collar workplaces. Enticed by promises of drastic improvements to productivity and efficiency, bosses have so far realized only marginal gains from digital twins, but their main effect has been the intensification of surveillance and discipline for ordinary employees. “Simulations aren’t coming to steal your job,” Hancock writes. “They’re coming to make your job worse.” Just ask Davinson Sánchez.

Model Employees​ | The Dawn of Digital Twins

MAX HANCOCK

The first industrial revolution, in the middle of the eighteenth century, gave capitalists steam power and mechanization. The second, at the turn of the twentieth, ushered in electricity and the assembly line, and the third, some seventy years after that, computers. The fourth, apparently, will let middle management play The Sims.

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Image credit: Sentient via YouTube

In October 2022, when our editorial team first started talking about commissioning a piece on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Atlanta rapper Young Thug had been in custody for five months. He had just been hit with another round of charges and denied bail. The indictment against him and over two dozen other associates of his label, YSL Records, read like a book report on rap by humorless nerds who’d never heard the music. The Fulton County prosecutors pitched YSL as a sprawling criminal enterprise, a claim they substantiated with a smattering of disparate allegations, blurry screenshots of Instagram posts, and lyrics close-read with breathless paranoia. “Defendant states ‘Red just like Elmo but I never fuckin giggle,’” they wrote, “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

By the following summer, rumors had started circulating that Georgia might bring similar charges against the protesters opposing Atlanta’s proposed police training facility, Cop City. To many on the left, the two investigations looked like signal cases of prosecutorial overreach. The mainstream media, on the other hand, was infatuated with RICO, which Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was leveraging to investigate something more obviously mob-like: Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. When a grand jury finally indicted him and eighteen others, it was under the same statute Willis’s office had wielded against Young Thug.

RICO occupies a unique space in the public imagination: a rare federal law recognizable to anyone who’s seen a mafia movie, yet simultaneously inscrutable — a vague legal scaffolding connecting thirty-odd crimes from murder to mail fraud. In half a century, this Nixon-era legislation has been deployed, at both the federal and state level, against defendants as varied as the Hells Angels, the Los Angeles Police Department, Major League Baseball, Atlanta Public Schools, and the junk-bond financier Michael Milken.

No one was better suited to the task of demystifying this headspinning statute than Piper French, a veteran Drift contributor with a firm grasp on the complex stupidities of the American legal system. As French concluded in her essay, RICO was designed to be vague. Its architect, G. Robert Blakey, wanted to cast a wide enough net to catch the big fish with the small — not just the mafia henchmen who did all the dirty work, but also the bosses who ordered them to do it. And yet, “everything that made RICO useful against the Mob makes it ripe for abuse in the contexts in which it is now being applied,” French wrote. It became “more atom bomb than silver bullet.”

As RICO enters its 56th year on the books this fall, French’s piece looks more and more prescient. While Young Thug was subjected to an error-ridden trial, the longest in Georgia history, Trump has been granted near-total immunity by the country’s highest court. An attempt to use RICO to send dozens to prison for protesting Cop City was stymied by a judge in December after a years-long legal battle, but the president has since publicly toyed with the idea of charging other protesters under the act. With mainstream legal opinion set against this strategy, at least for now, the administration has recently found success using Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), issued last year, which expansively redefines the criteria for prosecution under anti-terrorism law. Eight people were sentenced last month to decades in federal prison for their participation in a protest outside a Texas immigration detention facility at which one activist discharged a firearm. Another defendant, who did not participate in the protest, received a thirty-year sentence on the grounds that he transported zines, which he did not write, that discussed anarchist ideas; his wife got seventy years for printing them.

NSPM-7 has created a regime of guilt by association that takes the logic of RICO to new extremes. The result is a legal system that has become something like the opposite of what Blakey once hoped RICO would create. “We don’t want one set of rules for people whose collars are blue or whose names end in vowels,” Blakey said in 1989, “and another set for those whose collars are white and have Ivy League diplomas.” French’s essay illuminates the history that brought us to this point and supplies an apt parable about the current president, who was endorsed in 2024 by, of all people, Gambino underboss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. “I’m gonna call him a gangster,” said the man behind at least nineteen known murders. “We need a gangster.”

Sincerely,

Tarpley Hitt

An Offer You Can’t Refuse | How a Mob Statute Metastasized

PIPER FRENCH

The story of RICO is the story of the American criminal legal system’s metamorphosis; the two can’t be separated from one another.

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Image credit: Emma Kumer

“We must be doing something right to last two hundred years,” a country singer croons in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) on the occasion of the United States’s then-upcoming bicentennial. Fifty years later, this logic is more questionable than ever. The most potent political slogan of this century takes the evanescence of American greatness for granted, while the malfeasance of MAGA’s standard-bearer augurs, for some observers, an “American century of humiliation” akin to that suffered by late-Qing China. Meanwhile, in the wake of the 1619 Project, it can no longer be taken for granted that the signing of the Declaration of Independence is even the right place to mark the start of American history.

This country’s “250th birthday” on Saturday, then, is an occasion for critical reflection as well as celebratory barbecuing. In between hot dogs, you can ponder the paradoxes of American national identity with some of our favorite Dispatches, essays, stories, and poems from the Drift archive.

1. From our Issue Fifteen Dispatches on the Trump administration, Rhiannon Hamam and Elisa Gonzalez examine, respectively, the First and Fourteenth Amendments and ongoing conflicts over their legacy.

2. From Issue Six, Nick Martin considers the limitations of decolonial efforts to rewrite the narrative of early American history.

3. From Issue Two, Joel Rhone criticizes the “cruel optimism about what a rightfully realized idea of America could be” displayed in the 1619 Project and other works of liberal, anti-racist historical revisionism.

4. From Issue Seven, Chanelle Adams challenges the mythology of the national parks system as “one of America’s greatest ideas,” in the words of president-turned-documentarian Barack Obama.

5. Speaking of presidents and movies, from Issue Two, Rebecca Panovka reviews perhaps the most dubious source of popular understandings of U.S. political history: “schlocky president movies.”

6. Also from Issue Two, Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s poem stages a visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

7. From Issue Six, Nick Bowlin warns against the caricatured view of “rural America” that leads some Democrats to engage in futile cowboy cosplay.

8. From Issue Seven, Alec Niedenthal’s short story chronicles one Florida retiree’s romance with a certain “patriotic hat.”

9. From Issue Three, Daniel Bessner reveals the fatalistic view of America’s role in the world — what he calls “imperialist realism” — baked into the Call of Duty franchise, whose latest installment will appear this fall.

10. Lastly, from Issue Fourteen, our editors take Kamala Harris’s infamous slogan “Country Over Party” literally, urging us to attend, in the aftermath of Trump’s second election, to the dissolution of America’s “imagined community.”

Help The Drift avoid its own century of humiliation — purchase your favorite back issue to read by the rocket’s red glare.

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Image credit: Art Young, The Liberator (May 1920)

Most New York galleries show painting most of the time. The reasons for this may have less to do with the prestige of the medium than its unit economics, as the sculptor Josh Kline suggested in a recent essay in October on the stifling of contemporary art by New York City rents. Painting isn’t just cheaper to make; it’s also cheaper to store, ship, and display than sculpture, and compared to video or installation work, it’s easier to sell to wealthy collectors with walls to fill. There are other factors, too, not least of which is a cultural bias toward the shareable, postable, forgettable image. Painting takes up less physical and digital room, so it occupies an ever greater share of our cultural attention.

Space and its limitations were the implicit theme of the painter Emily Kraus’s impressive New York solo debut, “In Relation,” at Luhring Augustine (April 11–June 13). The six expansive, articulate abstractions on display were made with a mechanism that Kraus contrived while at the Royal College of Art to paint at scale in the eight-by-eight-foot studio she was assigned. Using four shower rods, Kraus made a scaffold around which she stretched large pieces of canvas she sewed together to create a kind of cube. She worked inside this room within a room, painting in oil on the canvas and then pulling it around the frame. The mechanism has changed a bit since her school days, but the results are similar: dense echoes of sinuous lines and clustered splatters, as if a Pollock had gotten stuck in an inkjet printer. The paint is striated with tendril-like creases left behind by the canvas’s uneven passage over the rollers.

Each of the paintings exhibited this spring posed a kind of paradox: they seemed equal parts manual and mechanical, and it was never quite clear to me which marks were made by the machine, and which were left by Kraus’s own hand. “The Draw of the Moon,” a vast painting 10 feet tall and nearly 19 feet wide, was made up of two canvases set close together; these were presumably once sewn together, into a single surface. The half-pipe of dark greenish black that dominated the left canvas seemed more organic, while the stringy tidal wave of splattered but regularly repeating lines on the right half of the painting bore the telltale signs of reproduction. The tops and bottoms of the two canvases were punctuated by black marks, whose staccato rhythm recalled a roll of 35mm film. (Kraus’s mother, Mariana Cook, is a noted portrait photographer; her father, Hans P. Kraus, Jr., is the leading American dealer of early photography.) Étienne-Jules Marey’s “chronophotographs” of motion — vaulting pole jumpers or birds in flight shown in multiple ghostly exposures in a single frame — were somewhere in the background, particularly in the (relatively) smaller “Hopping Time,” a canvas about 5.5 by 10 feet whose single defining motif, a cursive squiggle, ricocheted across the whole canvas.

But the paradox was also spatial: abstraction abandons illusionistic perspective to embrace the flatness of the picture plane. Yet Kraus’s paintings always implied, and sometimes evoked, the three dimensions of the studio space, most literally in “Anemoi” (“winds” in ancient Greek). The piece was once again a diptych, though most of the paint was concentrated on the right half, in two large, vertical fields of white and dried-blood red, from which purple and green pigment seemed to flow leftward, in two long tails, like wind. But instead of hanging flat on a single wall, these two wings were mounted at a right angle in a corner, so as to become, in a touch of theatricality, a half-room you could walk into. If action painting — the ultimate macho enterprise of postwar American art — recorded the mark of the maker, these paintings reflected the contemporary material conditions of their making. As those conditions change, though, it’s hard to imagine how Kraus will continue to use her painterly prosthesis without its novelty decaying into gimmick. She could find herself painted into a corner. Pollock only dripped for three years or so.

If Kraus used her machine to defy the constraints of her workspace and to push against the flatness of abstraction, Lisa Yuskavage, in her latest paintings and new experiments in collage at David Zwirner (May 14–June 26), plunged ever further into the studio and the perspectival depths of figuration. (The Drift receives funding from David Zwirner.) With her complex imaginary scenes and rigorous compositions, Yuskavage has always been as much or more an intellectual painter as she is a sensualist; there has perhaps always been an implied studio in her pictures. Here, in paintings mostly set in imaginary studios and filled with quotations of her previous work, you felt as if you were being let into the back of the shop.

That was in part because of the presence in the show of several studies, which you could compare to the finished works. But, as in Kraus’s paintings, process was also within and upon the work itself: Yuskavage’s pastel and collage pieces foregrounded their own madeness, and, in the studio paintings — which included several self-portraits of the painter at work — Yuskavage employed here for the first time collage’s painterly equivalent, trompe l’oeil.

“Endless studio (portal)” was the largest and most ambitious of the paintings, and in a way the key to the show. In the left-most square of the triptych, a balloon-bellied young girl with a cherry-round nipple carried a steaming cup of coffee (a quotation from Yuskavage’s 1995 painting “The Good”). She crossed in front of a green painting on an easel of a woman in peasant dress (Yuskavage’s own “Nel’zah’s” from 2012), and behind a glorious peacock (straight from Girolamo dai Libri’s “Madonna and Child with Saints,” at the Met), which stared out into a Venetian sky. Empty canvas stretchers tumbled out of the middle panel, from behind a large nocturne (a Whistler?) being painted by a woman fully clothed in blue. She was smaller than you might have expected, even diminutive; she stood on a platform and poked or pointed at the shining white-yellow moon. Leaning at the bottom left side of the platform was a mustard-yellow rectangle, maybe a canvas but maybe just a shape, which presaged the geometric proliferation in the right panel. There, instead of paintings, were simply yellow and green and occasionally orange and blue forms, some square and attached to the wall like accumulated Post-its, some ovaline and leaning against the wall, which was also mustard yellow. There were an allegory’s worth of forms among them: a brown stool bore a book and another coffee cup. A pinkish stick leaned against a piece of trompe l’oeil legal pad paper, and a mysterious yellow beam rested a bit further down the wall. Two little balls, one yellow, one green, rested on the floor, along with a third coffee cup and some paper scraps. A few nested file boxes completed the mess. One seemed almost to jump out of the painting, in a weird perspectival trick, but when you stepped back it seemed to exist in a plane in front of the canvas you didn’t quite realize was there, in which the girl also seemed to be moving.

We went from the world within the painting to the scene of painting to the surface of the painting, from figuration to figuring to the point where figuration resolves into a species of abstraction. For Yuskavage, the imaginary studio is endless. She proves that painting is, too.

This is the June installment of Max Norman’s column on contemporary art.

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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

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.

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.

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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.

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.

Cover image credit: Haymarket Books