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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Maki Yamaguchi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image credit: Dzanc Books

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

Independent Living | Fiction

HANNAH KINGSLEY-MA

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

We are celebrating Issue Seventeen one week from today!

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

Illustration credit: Hannah Lock

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

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

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

Hi Sophie,

In your first column, you said that we should focus our attention instead of letting it wander. I felt a jolt of painful recognition reading that, because my chronic habit of letting my attention wander has caused me a whole lot of trouble. Usually this looks like daydreaming, introspecting, retrospecting, falling into internet rabbit holes, and so on. And usually the consequences are small too, but sometimes that unfocused drifting leads to bad life decisions that barely involve any conscious thought — very stupid and certainly not agentic.

I’ve tried to curb this tendency, but I’ve found it difficult. Some of my daydreams involve being sent to an army boot camp for a few months and returning with an iron will and a mechanical ability to turn thought into action. I do grasp the basic truth that the only thing that can bring about a change in your behavior is a change in your behavior, but this insight has failed to transform me.

How do I stop wasting my attention on every stray impulse?

— Dazed and Distracted

Dear “Dazed and Distracted,”

Your fantasy of a military-style boot camp for correcting your wandering attention is relatable to me. It’s a bit like when I go on a sugar binge, or spend a week eating only enchiladas, as I recently did in New Mexico, and then suddenly want to eat only vegetables and forgo even the little squares of chocolate I have after dinner. It makes sense: you feel bad doing one thing, so you expect that doing the opposite thing will make you feel better. Oscillating between extremes isn’t a great long-term strategy, however, and it’s particularly difficult to browbeat or boot camp your way into better attention.

Attention — whether focused on work, projects, books, the people in your life, or the dogwood trees flowering outside your window — is an art, a careful calibration of your brain and your senses and your body. It’s hard to say what it is exactly, but I like this line, borrowed from Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove in the recent Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement: “So crystal clean, the great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table.” Attention, then, is like a goblet: you can fill it with anything you choose. The question is less how you can will yourself into submission, and more what you want to fill your cup with.

You list a few things you view as negative uses of your attention. Some of these, I have to say, seem like very strange things to feel guilty and ashamed about: “introspecting, daydreaming, retrospecting.” I don’t know where we got the idea that those things are negative. (A version of this was recently articulated by archvillain venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who tried to claim that great men of history weren’t sitting around introspecting. To which I can only say: ???) Attention paid to the past, to dreams, to the strange things that pop into your head while you’re doing nothing — that’s the stuff of life! I find myself wondering why you feel guilty or ashamed of these pursuits; is it because you believe you can turn yourself into a machine who will do rather than think? Even if that were possible, why would you want that? The endless pursuit of productivity is not a happy place to put all your attention.

Even “internet rabbit holes,” to which I’m deeply susceptible, are not inherently bad. I wrote a bit about this for The Drift a few years ago, but online distraction can be part of the fabric of working and thinking and living. The internet and our phones have become part of our intellectual life — which now includes Wikipedia-hopping, texts from friends, even tweets. Most of us live plugged in, and the persistent fantasy of throwing our phones into the sea forever is neither realistic nor (to me) altogether desirable. Live a little! Look at some memes!

All that said, I understand what you mean when you say that something feels wrong with your attention. Something feels wrong with mine, too. Lately I’ve been on my phone a lot, especially on Instagram. I’ve been reading less than I’d like to. I’ve been struggling to focus on one thing for long periods of time, flitting between things. While I believe there is room in life for internet rabbit holes, I don’t think it’s good or normal to spend all day staring at a screen, to feel your phone like a phantom limb when it’s in another room, to refresh your email while you’re trying to read. It’s objectively true that big companies are monetizing our time and brains — the Attensity! authors use the metaphor of “human fracking.” (Another reason to try to ditch the shame: your addiction or attraction to your devices is not some purely individual failure.) I think the clearest evidence that someone has a problem is that it feels like one. And for both of us, it seems, the cups of our attention are not being filled in the ways we want them to be.

So what can we do? First, practical stuff: I use tools to limit the tools that suck me in. I have a Brick on my fridge for certain apps, and a lockbox where I can store my phone when I really, really want it away from me. These techniques are helpful because they create physical boundaries. I also seek out phone-free places when I can: I’ll do a walk sometimes without my phone or go on airplane mode at the gym. Churches, museums, libraries, movie theaters, saunas, and (to a lesser extent) concerts can all be good places to allow yourself to detach from your devices and direct your attention somewhere else. And if you feel yourself struggling to focus on what’s going on, reaching in your pocket to check notifications — that can be a sign that you need to undertake a program of attentional reset, a gentle version of your fantasy of the boot camp.

Such a program would look different for everyone, but here’s what I do, and I think it’s broadly adaptable. Start with reading a book that seems “hard” to you, ten or twenty pages a day. (Check in with our friend Henry James, perhaps.) Be disciplined about actually doing this every day — even if you fall short of your page goal. Do a physical activity (practicing yoga, running, going for long walks, biking around, even doing some push-ups), if not every day, then three to five times per week, and don’t look at your phone while you’re doing it. Attention is not just about floating in your brain; it exists in your body, and feeling yourself embodied in physical space can be surprisingly healing. If you’re inclined, you can mix in meditation, but here I’ll admit that I’ve never once felt like I’ve gotten any benefits from it, so, to each their own.

Some of this might sound really basic, because it is. We might crave extreme solutions, but I think this is a case where repeated small steps are better and sometimes harder. You might find yourself shirking these commitments more than you expect, and pushing through those moments is where change occurs. You also may find that in this journey, you are introspecting, daydreaming, retrospecting, and going down the occasional internet rabbit hole. And to that I would say: great! May the cup of your attention runneth over.

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

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Image credit: John Sloan, The Masses, December 1912

Rampant speculation notwithstanding, it is impossible to know how many, if any, of Donald Trump’s decisions in office have been driven by a desire to keep Jeffrey Epstein out of the headlines. Regardless, after the scandal was revivified this winter by the release of innumerable emails documenting the pedophile financier’s extensive relationships to powerful figures across business, government, and academia, the story does seem to have slightly receded from view of late.

We at The Drift aren’t ready to move on. In addition to reflections from our editors and contributors on the significance of the email release, Issue Seventeen features an edited transcript of our roundtable on Epstein featuring Brace Belden, , Alexandra Brodsky, and . The panel considered what we can learn about gender hierarchies and the fate of #MeToo, the place of sexual predation in the lives of the ultra-rich, and the appeal of conspiracy theorizing today. Read the conversation online.

“The Ultimate Conspiracy of Patriarchy”​ | A Conversation with Brace Belden, Daniel Boguslaw, Alexandra Brodsky, and Anand Giridharadas

We don’t get that kind of glimpse into the private communications of the people who run the world very often. We don’t get to see the glide from link-sharing to appointment-setting to child-raping to dinner-party-setting-up. It’s the same people, the same thumbs on the same phone, doing all those things, maybe within a five-minute span.

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Image credit: Carina Imbornone

Memorial Day is often considered the unofficial start of summer, but many experts are saying that this year the season will kick off early with The Drift’s Issue Seventeen launch party on May 14. If you are in New York, we hope you will join us at NeueHouse near Madison Square at 7 p.m. As usual, we will start with a reading from issue contributors before launching into music, mingling, and revelry.

Print subscribers get in free. Those who don’t (yet) subscribe can buy a copy of the magazine at the door to use as a ticket. We look forward to seeing you there!

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

We’re thrilled to share the seventeenth issue of The Drift with you today. In it, you will find:

• Max Norman on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s swerve from realism

• Mitch Therieau on the Trump administration’s nightmarish memeworld

• Emma Adler on historical retelling in musical theater after Hamilton

• Stephen Milder on Germany’s overblown claims to environmental leadership

• Maia Silber on the pervasive fraud that stabilizes the welfare system

• Francis Northwood on the ways workers can lose out from employee ownership

• Fiction by Caroline Porter, Julia Kornberg, Gracie Newman, Kion You, and Hannah Kingsley-Ma

• Poetry by Abou Farman, Adam Judah Krasnoff, Lily Gabaree, Carmen Gallo, Melanie Jennings, and Andy Butter

• Dispatches on the public sphere by Tarpley Hitt, Noelle Bodick, Sarah Brouillette, Edward Ongweso Jr, Erik Baker, Ege Yumuşak, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, and Sam Adler-Bell.

• A conversation about Jeffrey Epstein with Brace Belden, Daniel Boguslaw, Alexandra Brodsky, and Anand Giridharadas

• Extremely abbreviated reviews of the so-called fastest game in the world, the world’s least charismatic carnival barker, and a stealth history of the entire world

• And an editors’ note

If you’re a subscriber, you can expect the issue to arrive in your mailbox within the next few weeks. Print copies are stocked in Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, and more than sixty independent bookstores in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

You can also purchase individual copies in our online shop, along with totes, tees, caps, and more.

Now that we are over the edge of seventeen, we hope that you find in this issue what Stevie Nicks called “the slow graceful flow of age.” Thanks, as always, for reading.

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.

A strange thing keeps happening. We at The Drift keep publishing pieces that explain what’s wrong with the world and what to do about it, but for some reason, there are still a lot of problems with our society and culture. We asked around, and it turns out we aren’t alone: nearly everyone, it seems, often feels like they’re shouting into the void, whether online, in print, or in the streets. For Issue Seventeen, to examine the state of our collective reasoning — and the maddening feeling of political impotence — we asked a roster of writers, scholars, and podcasters to write about the public sphere today. Dispatches from Edward Ongweso Jr, Ege Yumuşak, Erik Baker, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, Noelle Bodick, Sam Adler-Bell, Sarah Brouillette, and Tarpley Hitt are now online for you to read. And a reinvigorated civic life, we presume, is just around the corner.

A Nicely Situated Ideal​ | On the Public Sphere

With our billionaire-captured media, algorithmically mediated and intensely surveilled social media feeds, censorious universities, and ever-diminishing cohort of independent publications, does a space for public, democratic consideration of ideas exist? Did it ever?

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Image credit: Ivy Sanders Schneider

“I think the moral of the story is we should both do a light comedy,” Jeremy Strong said to Karl Ove Knausgaard at the end of an extremely long January interview, to which the Norwegian novelist replied, “Yeah. I don’t know what to say to that.” It’s rare to find Knausgaard at a loss for words. With the publication of the fourth volume of his Morning Star series earlier this year, 2,512 pages from that project alone have now appeared in English — still a far cry from the 3,600 pages of his magnum opus My Struggle. In our new Issue Seventeen preview, Max Norman digests the Knausgaardian oeuvre and produces a careful, incisive account of the author’s evolution from autofictional hyperrealism to the philosophical semi-fantasy of the Morning Star novels. Read the fruits of Norman’s struggle online today.

Roman-Flood | Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Diabolic Realism

MAX NORMAN

The cumulative effect of the slowly rising tide of this series, less roman-fleuve than roman-flood, is an uneasy and not unpleasurable uncertainty, both within the novels themselves and at the level of the whole project. How much farther can he go? And will we have the patience to follow him?

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Image credit: Maki Yamaguchi

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael famously says that the sperm whale enjoys “an unwritten life.” A new study of the mighty creatures’ communication, however, finds “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages.” With that in mind, we’d like to hedge our bets and extend a warm welcome to any and all cetacean readers of The Drift. We hope that in Issue Seventeen’s extremely abbreviated reviews — of Infinite Jest’s thirtieth anniversary edition, the en dash, Jake Paul and Anthony Joshua’s boxing match, and more — you find delight enough to stay your inscrutable malice.

Mentions | Extremely Abbreviated Reviews
VARIOUS AUTHORS

This is a sport where spandex-decked buffalos of men shed single tears while American flags unfurl and F-16s roar overhead.

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.

Today is the last day to subscribe in order to receive a physical copy of Issue Seventeen in your mailbox. If you’re already a subscriber, please take a moment to make sure that your address is up to date before the new issue ships out.

While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive, you can enjoy a virtual taste of the real thing, much like Beth, the narrator of Caroline Porter’s Issue Seventeen short story “Devochka,” who becomes obsessed with watching videos of one particular adult actress on a borrowed V.R. headset. Beth’s porn binge leads her to revisit memories of an adolescent stint studying abroad in Siberia — memories that feed back into her fantasy life. Read “Devochka” online today.

Devochka | Fiction

CAROLINE PORTER

That I had only been able to understand snatches of what she had said, could pick up on just the suggestion of dirty talk, had made it hard to tell if she was a bad actress or not. When she’d looked into my eyes, beseeching, and unleashed her torrent of half-nonsense, it had felt sincere.

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Image credit: Valentina Boeck

The propaganda that the Trump administration has disseminated relentlessly on its social media channels is distinguished, among other things, by its mind-melting semiotic density. Take the now-deleted image the president posted to his Truth Social account yesterday evening; it appears to be an A.I.-generated painting of Trump as Jesus Christ, receiving the prayers of the faithful while healing a man described variously by interpreters as Uncle Sam and Jeffrey Epstein, as something like an eldritch god marches out of the heavens flanked by what may or may not be American troops. In the face of such a blitzkrieg of bizarre symbolism, it is tempting to throw up one’s hands and simply conclude, alongside the Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon: “I genuinely believe Trump is currently demon possessed.”

We at The Drift lack the expertise to assess whether the president is in need of an exorcism, but we have something better: a new essay by Mitch Therieau on the current administration’s online phantasmagoria. Building on his short piece “Agit-Slop” in last summer’s issue, Therieau presents a tour-de-force exegesis of the torrent of videos, memes, and A.I. nightmares that has issued from official government accounts since last January. In the Trumpian dreamworld, Therieau writes, “opposites converge: insanity and reason, self-actualization and self-annihilation, Jedi and Stormtrooper, bootstraps and jackboots, North Pole and South.” Read the essay online today, and be sure to subscribe by Wednesday to receive Issue Seventeen when it arrives.

Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld​ | DHS’s Regime of Images

MITCH THERIEAU

In the same way that the physical sensations we experience in the sleeping body are registered obliquely in our dreams, the right-wing imagination senses that history is coming for our treats: our conveniences and little indulgences. It senses, in other words, that the diminished horizon of its own political vision is entertainment, enjoyment, and consumption, insulated from the surplus populations that the American empire has produced around the world. And if Americans can’t have our treats, nobody can.

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Image credit: John Kazior

In “The Blonde,” Julia Kornberg’s Issue Seventeen short story, an internet friend appears IRL, shaking up the lives of two Lower East Side writers and roommates. Tali and her new friend, Rue (or La Rubia, as our narrator calls her), initially seem more different than similar, but they share a past with anorexia and an affinity for a far-out podcast. As their bond intensifies, La Rubia’s motives appear increasingly sinister.

Read Kornberg’s story online today, and be sure to subscribe to receive Issue Seventeen when it arrives.

The Blonde | Fiction

JULIA KORNBERG

During La Rubia’s visits early that year, she and Tali replaced their Reddit exchanges with long discussions about Tali’s readings, her bookshelf providing a series of topics about the titles La Rubia hadn’t read. The two became very close in a way I never understood, and often closed the door to Tali’s room and left me outside, like an idiot, imagining what they were doing.

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Image credit: Anna Sorokina

Now that April Fools’ Day is safely behind us, you can rest assured that this is no hoax: Issue Seventeen of The Drift is coming soon. In our first preview piece, Maia Silber examines the Trump administration’s accusations of widespread welfare fraud and argues the ensuing debate has masked the way the U.S. welfare state relies on rule-breaking to keep recipients fearful and disorganized. “From its earliest days,” Silber writes, “America’s welfare system has forced its beneficiaries to lie not only for their survival, but also for its own survival.” Read her essay online today, and be sure to subscribe to read the full issue when it arrives.

Fraud With Benefits | How Breaking the Rules Makes Welfare Work

MAIA SILBER

Overly punitive as it’s always been and truly draconian as it’s become, welfare policing still doesn’t really deter welfare fraud. It does, however, deter the poor from confiding in one another, from discovering, as activists once did, that their sources of private shame are part of a common struggle.

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Image credit: John Kazior

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

Dear Sophie,

I’m in my early thirties and an artist working for another, more successful artist. I’ve had some meaningful career successes, but financially I’m worse off than my parents were at my age. In a strange way I feel downwardly mobile economically but perhaps upwardly mobile socially, through the art world I inhabit. I enjoy my life and the work I’m doing, but it often means accepting a level of financial precarity. I tend to romanticize artists who lived modestly for years before things clicked, but lately the world feels less romantic and more pragmatic. At what point does one decide it’s time to pivot? Is that a decision you make now, in your early thirties, or later? Should I double down and pursue an MFA, or move toward something more stable and become a “Sunday painter”? I also think about this in terms of relationships. I’m not expecting anyone to rescue me financially, but it seems increasingly common — at least in dating culture — to foreground financial stability. When people list things like contributing to a 401(k) as a “green flag,” it makes romance feel oddly transactional. So I guess my real question is: how does someone live as a romantic in an increasingly unromantic time?

— Trying to Stay Romantic

There was a theme in the letters I got this month: financial anxiety and the arts. Recently, various online discussions about money and freelance writing have circled similar questions, with people bitterly debating “$2 a word” and whether in some circumstances it’s okay for really tiny magazines not to pay contributors. In most of these conversations, people were talking or yelling or, really, tweeting past each other; they have different goals, different lifestyles and desires, different financial cushions, and different ideas about what “making a living as an artist” entails. And so little new emerges each time this conversation recurs, except more frustration about the state of things, which we all agree is bad. Spring cleaning, tax season, the imminence of resurrection, and the perennial quandary: how can I make my art, and also make some money?

The answer is that it’s literally harder than ever, and also that it has never been that easy. Just check out some dead writers’ letters and see how many times they were asking parents for money; scheming to write a bestseller that never came to be; complaining about a book advance; or wondering about the riches they might find if they turned to television. George Plimpton bounced a fifty-dollar check to Terry Southern in 1962 for a short story in The Paris Review, if you don’t think it’s always been a little bit of a bad deal to write for magazines. But add in the death of print media, the decline of universities, the threat of A.I., the overall state of the job market — and the idea of pursuing any career in the arts, or adjacent to them, is scarier than ever.

Given all of this, I’ll say: it’s always perfectly fine to seek out a career that will translate into 401k contributions, to take the day job, to ease the financial precarity. There’s no shame in that, and there’s certainly sense. Being an artist of any kind is not, in my view, inherently “better” or “worse” than most other paths in life. It’s not even egregiously precarious in the grand scheme of work. When measured against the standards of professional class affluence — by those of us who feel, as you say, “downwardly mobile,” with doctor-or-lawyer-or-tycoon parents — being an artist looks bad, financially. When measured against lower-wage work, a career like the one you have been building might already look comfortable — not to mention animated by the joy of doing something you love, as well as the social rewards you point to. A lot depends on your vantage point.

You say, “I enjoy my life and the work I’m doing, but it often means accepting a level of financial precarity.” And I would just say: it does and it will. It’s about tradeoffs, and you have to decide what those are. They might change over time. There can come a point, or points, when you will know or feel or see, when looking at your bank account: this isn’t working, I need a job that pays me better, so what kind of job will it be? I can’t say if you’re there yet — it doesn’t sound like it, based on the tone of your letter — but I also want to give you the permission to feel that way if or when you do. One way I like to think about it: your artistic career and life will have phases. There can be points when you go to an office every day and there can be points where you accept less money to do work you love. Your desires might dictate some of this, as will circumstances. But the tradeoffs will always be there.

It’s hard to accept that living a certain kind of life isn’t going to make you rich, or even comfortable, unless you’re really lucky. Lucky feels like a juvenile word and it’s not quite precise, but it is capacious. In some cases financial success in the arts boils down to “the luck of the draw,” or who you are born to be, whether you’ll get an inheritance or help from family or a partner or a partner’s family, and even this kind of luck is more changeable than many people seem to believe. (“Families are always rising and falling in America,” to quote Leo in The Departed, misquoting Hawthorne.) There is much more to luck, though, than birth and marriage. Talent is unequally distributed and it’s not always rewarded. More often than not it isn’t. People write really good books that people don’t buy because of the cover or an accident of timing or because people don’t really buy books like they used to. People paint beautiful stuff no one ever looks at. Then, conversely, some book you know is bad is rumored to get a really big advance, and someone you don’t like starts a Substack and it takes off. It doesn’t feel fair, and it’s not. We are required to make peace with this again and again, which can be painful; like many painful things, coming to terms with fortune is worthwhile.

But your particular question belies not only a desire for financial security, but a desire for an artistic and intellectual life that transcends the cold machinery of money. You ask how to hang on to the romance of an artist’s life in an “increasingly unromantic time.” And while there might be romance in making art, in looking at it, I wouldn’t romanticize the bohemian ideal of the artist’s life. It’s not really romantic to be threadbare; nor is it necessarily unromantic to put some money in your 401k. I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about the artist’s life this way. The question I would ask, if I were you, is not how to live romantically, but: do you like what you’re doing day to day enough that it outweighs the sense of financial precarity you feel? And relatedly: is there something you could do, on the side or in general, to lessen that burden? Finally and most importantly, I would ask: are you making the art you want to make? Are you writing or painting or playing music or acting or doing puppetry to your own standards of satisfaction? The most important thing — whether on Sunday or every day — is to do it, and to do it well. If there’s any romance, it’s in that achievement.

Which brings me to another question I got this month, a very simple and short one: “Should I do The Artist’s Way?”

And to that my answer would be an enthusiastic yes. Not because Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is some kind of cure-all; I find the tone of the book to be difficult, off-putting, eye-rolly at times. But what I like about it — what I like about a lot of programmatic self-help stuff — is that it’s something to do. The deal with The Artist’s Way is that for twelve weeks you wake up, write three pages by hand, and pick an “artist’s date of your choosing” every week, which could mean walking around for two hours without your phone, or looking at one painting for twenty minutes, or going to a concert solo. You do some other exercises throughout the week and a lot of thinking about creativity. I do not think this program will totally transform your life, as Cameron claims. But it might, and more importantly it’s a practice. It’s about orienting yourself toward doing something every day. If you are interested in living an artist’s life, the best thing you can do is do it.

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

Nancy Lemann’s writing is brash and candid, capturing her hedonistic, chaotic hometown of New Orleans — America’s most interesting city — as a society in spirited decline. Though Lemann’s work has long enjoyed cult appeal, she now swaggers back into the literary spotlight 24 years after her last published novel, Malaise. Alongside a new work, The Oyster Diaries (New York Review Books), and the reissue of her celebrated debut, The Lives of the Saints, Lemann’s sole work of nonfiction, The Ritz of the Bayou, returns to bookstores in a fortieth anniversary edition on April 7. It was my 2024 Mention in The Drift on The Ritz of the Bayou, which has long been out of print, that caught the eye of Hub City Press publisher Meg Reid and prompted the publisher to revive the book for the first time since its original hardcover edition. I caught up with Lemann to talk about memory, the scars of history, and, of course, New Orleans.

— Lauren LeBlanc

New Orleans is a place where the truth is often more absurd than fiction. How do you distill the stories you want to tell into fiction? How do you play with nonfiction to tell a story that feels most true?

With nonfiction you’re just chronicling what you see. It’s straightforward. What I see is going to be the humanity (or lack thereof), the personalities, the mannerisms, the characters, the atmosphere, the sense of place, etc.

Though you no longer live there, you’ll forever be a New Orleanian. While the city is, at its best, wildly original, achingly beautiful and utterly joyful, at its worst it has intersected with some of our country’s most brutal legacies. So often it takes leaving a city you love to fully appreciate it. When did you first recognize how distinctive the city was? What does New Orleans mean to you?

I definitely did not recognize how distinctive it was until I left for college in the North. Then I realized it was the ace in my back pocket precisely because it is so distinctive. What it means to me is a place that is truly original, its isolation having fostered its individuality. A spark so divine is not easily extinguished.

Is it easier to write about New Orleans and the stories you want to tell from memory? Is distance essential to writing?

The opposite — memory doesn’t cut it half as well as being there because I’m a reporter at heart. Easier to just chronicle what you see.

Your novels tend not to adhere to a traditional plot structure, but instead follow the voice of your characters and the cadence of the city they inhabit. Could you talk about how you came to find and trust your voice as a writer?

Plot is not my strong suit, and I consider that a deficiency. But you have to go with your strengths. I recognized that style (or voice) was my strong suit, so I ran with the ball. You have to identify your strengths and weaknesses, lead with your strengths, and try to cultivate (improve) your weaknesses. How did I discover my voice? I’m a compulsive journal-keeper and I discovered it in my journals because there it was unselfconscious and came straight from the heart.

The Ritz of the Bayou grew out of a piece that was commissioned by Vanity Fair. At the time, you had published your debut novel, but you hadn’t worked as a journalist. What made you want to take on the assignment, and how did it evolve?

It was a lucky break, it was a joy, it was a thrill, it was the perfect assignment for me. I only wish I had had more assignments like that. So much easier to be assigned a task or topic than to dream it up out of your head.

In Ritz of the Bayou, you write: “A flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing.” How do you capture the essence of a flawed but beloved place or person? Has your perception of this changed over time?

Well, as in your earlier question mentioning the scars of history, almost every place is scarred by history, isn’t it? New Orleans is scarred by racism; Buenos Aires, where I just went, is scarred by the dictatorships of the 1970s. There is something noble or inspiring in a place (or person) scarred by history or trauma but which persists through adversity. Like New Orleans — hurricanes, etc. A spark so divine is not easily extinguished! (I’m saying it again in case I forgot to say it in the book.)

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Image credit: Hub City Press

Literary greatness, poetic immortality, influence, tradition: these terms seem almost laughably quaint, and the high summer of literary theory feels as far away as Prohibition. Worse, such phrases have been corrupted by contemporary resonance. Literary greatness has given way to American Greatness, poetic immortality to biohacking for longevity. Influence is now the province of Instagram, and tradition belongs to the right. So what to make of the authors and poets whose greatness and influence was once inescapable, whose immortality in the tradition once seemed assured?

David Schurman Wallace ventures some answers in his brilliant 2021 essay “Dead Poet Anxiety,” which takes a posthumous volume of John Ashbery’s poetry as its occasion. In Schurman Wallace’s rendering, Ashbery — who died in 2017, and whose late-modernist poetics won him awards like the Pulitzer Prize and the rhapsodic praise of canon-forming critics like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler — is “a writer likely too elusive to inspire passions today.” Still, Schurman Wallace shows how Ashbery’s sprawling tapestries of near-synesthetic language anticipated the kaleidoscope of the feed — while remaining distinct from the identity-driven, short-form poetry that succeeds on social media.

Schurman Wallace’s essay isn’t just a helpfully comprehensive look back at a fading star. It’s an astute — and entertaining — analysis of the major currents in poetry today, and the aesthetics of online culture. (I’ll think about modernism, and the internet, differently after reading about “the chronic meme-ability of William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say,’ tortured in its too-transmissible afterlife.”) I encountered this essay soon before I joined the staff of The Drift, and it’s remained for me something of a standard for what our criticism can achieve by leveraging the closest of close reading to think through some of the biggest questions of how culture is changing.

Max Norman
Associate Editor, The Drift

Dead Poet Anxiety​ | John Ashbery in the Age of Social Media

DAVID SCHURMAN WALLACE

Ashbery’s poetics is an internet poetics avant la lettre, invoking the absolute connectivity we wish its connections offered, but rarely have in practice.

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Image credit: John Kazior

At this point, the two terms of the Barack Obama presidency, and their aura of feel-good liberal professionalism, are ancient history. But the Democratic Party is still chasing the feeling of those eight years, constantly hoping to escape the obvious repulsiveness of the current administration by returning to some pre-2016 normalcy. Democratic pundits seem to respond to each atrocity — including this year’s military operations against Venezuela and now Iran — by echoing the refrain that none of this would have happened had Kamala Harris been elected or had Biden still been in power. “Another forever war because people can’t bring themselves to vote for women,” declared Blue Missouri Executive Director Jess Piper on Bluesky after the attack against Iran. Harris might not have been a perfect president, according to liberal talk show host Brian Shapiro, but “she wouldn’t have started an ill-advised war, certainly not in Iran.”

Such counterfactuals are difficult to assess. (The official Democratic Party platform in 2024 criticized Trump’s “fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression.”) But the historical record is clear: devastating wars in the Middle East, then and now, must be reckoned with as part of Obama’s legacy, not a departure from it. For those who remember Obama’s drone wars, something so present in the public imagination that the president could joke about killing the Jonas Brothers with a Predator strike, nostalgic longing for mainstream Democratic governance has always been unseemly. But the precedent that Obama’s militarism solidified has only become more and more malignant as Trump has moved through his presidency.

In Obama’s time, the massive expansion of drone warfare (with more strikes in his first year than George W. Bush conducted during his eight) was justified by the president under the guise of avoiding the most high-profile downsides of the War on Terror as prosecuted under Bush: “more U.S. deaths, more Black Hawks down, more confrontations with local populations, and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars,” he said at the National Defense University in 2013. Drones, high in the air, targeted, precise, with supposed checks and balances in place, would allow the military to establish “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured” before authorizing any strikes.

Despite the insistence that everything was being done by proper, constitutional procedure, the Obama administration arrogated to the presidency immense power to attack other nations without oversight or legislative authorization. Responding to a question about a hypothetical strike on Iran while he was campaigning in 2007, Obama affirmed that “the president does not have power under the constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” and that it would be “always preferable” to obtain prior congressional authorization even in cases of self-defense. When, as president, Obama began drone strikes in Libya in 2011 to assist in the overthrowing of Muammar Gaddafi, the Justice Department wrote an internal memorandum declaring that in fact no congressional authorization was needed, because the actions under consideration did not amount to a “war.” The memo asserted that legal precedent secured for the president the authority to take military action abroad “for the purpose of protecting important national interests, even without specific prior authorization from Congress.” The permissible scope of such military activity, in the eyes of the Obama administration, was apparently vast, encompassing the overthrow of an entire government if it so desired.

Obama’s allies often scolded critics of his drone program — whether they protested strikes in countries like Pakistan and Somalia that we were not at war with, killing U.S. citizens without trial, or the many attacks that did in fact kill civilians, sometimes a dozen at a time — for their supposed ignorance and naivete. When Senator Rand Paul filibustered John Brennan’s CIA Director nomination in 2013 to speak about the threat posed by the expansion of drone strikes, he was derided by liberal commentators and Democratic senators alike: MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell lambasted his “paranoia” about the precedent Obama was setting, Senator Dianne Feinstein called one of his deliberately outlandish hypotheticals “stupid,” and Adam Weinstein of Mother Jones called Paul a racist for using filibustering tactics, as arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond had done.

Attorney General Eric Holder tried to reassure Paul that killing U.S. citizens outside of combat, on U.S. soil, would be unconstitutional. Holder had to split such hairs because he had argued a year prior that since “due process” and “judicial process” were not the same, no court action was needed to authorize the killing of U.S. citizens whom the government had deemed terrorists. That was how the Obama administration justified the killing of the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader within Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and his son, Abdulrahman, a 16-year-old from Denver who at the time of his own killing in a subsequent strike was having dinner with his cousin. The Department of Justice initially said that Abdulrahman was not the target of the strike in Yemen that took his life, which was instead aimed at a separate AQAP commander who happened to be nearby. U.S. officials then tried to claim that Abdulrahman had been a “military age-male” even though he was a minor, a categorization regularly used by the Obama administration to automatically designate potential combatants in a given area without knowing their innocence or guilt. When those deflections did not work, Obama adviser and former Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took to making comments that are indistinguishable from a War Department statement today: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children.”

Trump expanded the scale of American drone strike attacks even further in his first term, using them, as in the assassination of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, to kill officials in the militaries of sovereign states. Trump vetoed congressional legislation meant to hinder his ability to strike Iranians unilaterally on grounds that echoed the Obama administration’s legal reasoning: attempts to demand prior authorization overlooked “the President’s need to respond to threats beyond imminent attacks on the United States and its forces.”

Trump’s second term has seen a major expansion of presidential war-making on multiple fronts, and the abandonment of any pretense to scrupulous legality in favor of a scorched earth policy that has finally demolished whatever checks and balances survived Obama’s presidency. The awesome power of attacks by air alone has become the defining feature of war under Trump: he wagers that no combat troops need to be deployed for regimes to be changed, for countless Iranians to die, and for America to deliver unbearable devastation. Trump’s supporters, like Obama’s before him, rationalize this method as a corrective to the excesses of the Bush-era War on Terror. “The president has found a way to change the world without putting boots on the ground,” representing an end to “forever wars,” according to one sycophantic Washington Post op-ed written by none other than the chief speechwriter for both Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

Bloviating about wanting to avoid alienating local populations has fallen by the wayside. Forget extrajudicial killings without congressional or judicial approval; now entire countries can be subjugated without jumping through such hoops. When questioned about drone strikes on boats in the Caribbean on December 2, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson hit back with an obvious response: “One of the things I was reminded of this morning is that under Barack Obama, President Obama, he had — I think there were 550 drone strikes on people who were targeted as enemies of the country, and nobody ever questioned it.”

Séamus Malekafzali is a journalist and writer primarily focusing on Middle Eastern affairs. His Issue Sixteen Drift essay, “Be Grateful,” examined Trump’s foreign policy and its roots in the War on Terror.

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.