This was sex, not discourse
New fiction by Elisa Gonzalez, plus new Mentions
Elisa Gonzalez has contributed to nearly every section of The Drift: Essays, Dispatches, Poetry, and now Fiction. “The Wife,” her Issue Sixteen short story, is both an intellectual and a literary delight. Gonzalez’s account of a young woman who becomes entangled with a famous filmmaker in an open marriage with his even more famous wife is both a richly observed romantic fable and a devastating examination of gender, family, and celebrity. Read the story online today.
ELISA GONZALEZ
Had there not been a line at the coat check, had she not paused to check directions on her phone, he might not have caught up with her outside. Later, they’d gloried in how close they’d come to not knowing each other. He’d once ventured the word fate. When he said that, she’d felt briefly ancient, amazed at his innocence.
There are also wives to be found in this issue’s extremely abbreviated reviews. Read on for a redheaded wife in a kind of harem scene and the Mormon tradwife behind the infamous Ballerina Farm, plus star-crossed lovers, David Cronenberg’s psychosexual hang-ups, and Susan Sontag’s sexual conquests.
Howard Gardiner Cushing: A Harmony of Line and Color
VISUAL ART
The grandson of opium smuggler John Perkins Cushing, little-known outside of Rhode Island’s toniest quarters, may be best remembered for his association with the artist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who founded a museum of some repute in New York. Cushing’s retrospective at the Newport Art Museum’s “Cushing Gallery” confirms that his own work was largely unremarkable, save for some delightfully outré Orientalist-inspired paintings. (One study for a mural cast Cushing’s redheaded wife Ethel in a kind of harem scene, flanked by turbaned attendants.) The exhibit was organized by a guest curator, following layoffs in 2024 of the museum’s entire curatorial staff for reasons that remain murky, and co-sponsored by Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman — perhaps in an attempt to ingratiate himself with locals in the wake of controversial (and probably sinkhole-causing) construction on his new mansion.
Zach Ngin
“Goose Gazette” Subscriber Chat
NEWSLETTER
Hannah Neeleman, the Mormon tradwife behind the infamous Ballerina Farm, joined Substack in the spring to “share things close to my heart,” including lasagna and focaccia recipes, a tribute to her deceased father, and an announcement about her new Utah farm stand. The real action, though, takes place in the subscriber chat, where fans ask how to store flour and discuss whether pregnant women should eat raw milk ice cream (no response from Neeleman, but Ballerina Farm’s soft serve is pasteurized). Recently, posts soliciting donations for Gaza converged with Neeleman copycats boosting their own channels. Commenters seemed divided on whether the chat should stick to “home life topics,” raising the question: what would Jesus report as spam?
Diana Heald
In the Mood for Love 2001
FILM
After the rose-toned feast that is Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 opus, his short of the same name released the following year — and recently revived at IFC — goes down like a digestif. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung return as a miraculously magnetized pair of strangers, but this time they meet in an ice-blue Y2K convenience store instead of in a shabby-chic 1962 apartment building. The film is less a sequel than an alternate universe, one that is frothy and absurd; the star-crossed lovers bond over concurrent nosebleeds and spend much of the nine-minute runtime in a cake-smeared makeout, the frame dominated by her hands in his conspicuously un-gelled hair. At last, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan get to fool around, uncoiffed.
Izzy Ampil
The Shrouds
FILM
David Cronenberg is the only working director who understands what the fuck is going on with technology right now. The Shrouds is post-late style, so stilted that it seems a cross between a filmed theater production and a dream. Silver fox Vincent Cassel, a clear Cronenberg stand-in, delivers his lines with an eerie intensity A.I. could never replicate. The Promethean hope of conquering death — an ambient obsession across Silicon Valley — is revealed to be a mere conduit for the expression of psychosexual hang-ups. The scariest moment of the film comes with the reveal that Cassel’s character drives a Tesla. Beneath the intellectual carapace, Cronenberg has the heart of a comedian.
Mathias Fuelling
Sontag: Her Life and Work
NONFICTION
Rarely does the doorstopper moonlight as page-turner, but Benjamin Moser’s dazzling 800-page biography deserves a spot in your beach bag. Come for the riveting account of the highest-brow New York intellectual’s life and times, stay for the epic record of her sexual conquests: Annie Leibovitz, Warren Beatty, Rothschild heiress Nicole Stéphane, Joseph Brodsky, Lucinda Childs, Bobby Kennedy. (Sontag loved lists.)