Thirty years from now, humans will be colonizing far-off planets. Legally dubious clones called expendables will be used for deadly grunt work. And everything else will be, unfortunately, very much the same. Such is the vision of the future in Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi gonzo adventure Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattison as one of those expendables […]
Culture
The Body Expendable
Our Mansfield Girl
by Matt Ferraz
Six Ziegfeld girls in their teens were in the theater dressing room that night in 1916: Olive Thomas, Lilyan Tashman, Fifi Alsop, Bessie Poole, Kathryn Lambert, and Martha Mansfield. An old woman walked into the girls’ dressing room to sell them cosmetics. As they talked, she told them she used to be exquisite too, one […]
The Gravel Path of Belief, Non-Belief, and the Ambiguous In-Between
by McKenzie Watson-Fore
This essay is written by MAYDAY magazine’s Critic in Residence for Spring 2025. Sharp bits of gravel poke through my leggings into my thighs. Chilly autumn air wafts from the moonlit surface of the Big Thompson River to where I am sitting in the middle of the path. Flecks of cigar paper cling to my […]
Author in Progress
by Emma Wilkins
Author in Progress When Megan Tudehope decided, aged 40, to write her first novel, she started reading and watching anything and everything that might teach her how, and she noticed a common theme: people talking about how they’d wanted to be authors their whole lives, and had been writing since childhood; who had written their […]
The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep: Doug Cockle Gruffs It Up As Geralt Again
by Caroline Cao
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Doug Cockle is an accomplished video game voice actor, but of all his work, he’s most famous for one gruff voice: the rugged Witcher Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher CD Projekt Red video games that act as sequels to Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher books. Although […]
MAYDAY Staff Survey: The Best Reads of 2024
by MAYDAY Staff
Murder mysteries. True crime. New works by Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, and Kristin Hannah. Romantasy, YA romance, and frankly all around too much romance to read. 2024 provided so many amazing and enticing books that there’s no way any of us could possibly read them all in one year. But just in case your to-read […]
Ladies at the Club
Yesterday at the swim club in Berkeley, two women about my age were sitting in the hot tub, giggling about adventures on beaches along the opposite coast. I joined them. When they asked about my teenage memories of the same, I hesitated. I don’t know them except as our paths cross at the pool. I […]
UNDERDOG DAYS
by Beatriz Seelaender
BREEDING MUTTS “And there is only one thing in our way and, at times, (this) invalidates our qualities. I want to allude to what I could call a ‘Mongrel Complex’. I am imagining the reader’s shock:—‘And what would that be?’ I will explain—by ‘Mongrel Complex’ I mean the position of inferiority in which Brazilians […]
Despair Descended First
by Ulysses Hill
This story is a product of the MAYDAY:Black Incubator. It doesn’t take long for a child to realize they’re poor. No longer than the moment they’re exposed to something more. I was in the fifth grade. After waiting in line for an hour at a charity event, I received just one present, an astronaut […]
A Conversation with Kalani Pickhart
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with novelist Kalani Pickhart about her debut novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land. The book provides a vivid portrait of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine through the interconnected stories of four characters whose lives are forever changed by the events. In our wide-ranging conversation, Pickhart […]
