“Maybe it was my other daughter.” Turning toward the bathroom, I realized what my mom had already noticed: The garbage can was overturned. I emptied the trash and forgot to put it back in its original position. In a flurry of chores, I was not consciously trying to leave it awry. Maybe this “other daughter” […]
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Family Romance, LLC and How to Make a Family
Taking on the Environmental Crisis, One Painting At a Time: An Interview with Lauren Matsumoto
by Aya Kusch
Lauren Matsumoto is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work touches on one of the most urgent crises facing humanity today: environmental degradation. Through her gorgeous, brilliantly executed paintings, which involve flora, birds, and vintage ephemera, she beautifully illuminates the fissures that have formed between humans and nature. In this fascinating interview, Matsumoto shares her insights on […]
Sons of The Confederacy 2.0: Not Just a Few Bad Apples
by Laketa Smith
Finally, after one of the most suspenseful and unnerving elections of my lifetime, the United States Congress was poised on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, to certify Electoral College votes, a long-held ceremonial element of every incoming presidential cabinet. Instead, mayhem descended on the capital city, and Congress itself, as a mob of Trump supporters laid […]
STATE OF THE UNION
by Michael Meyerhofer
All the news is talking about the lack of surgical masks and ice cream trucks for the dead, how many grandfathers need help to breathe, but today, I can’t seem to stop wondering how oranges smell when they’re burning. For that, too, is something I’ve never known, having missed my one chance to walk a […]
WATCHING MY MOTHER BAKE
by Michael Meyerhofer
Strangest of all was the knife, how gingerly she pushed it through the soft raw crust of the pie freshly-formed on the oven’s surface, preheat already rising in waves, her glance warning me not to touch— the same woman who decided, a week before my seventh birthday, to have me circumcised […]
Unmaking Whiteness
by Erin Monahan
The toxic, masculine white power displayed from the nation’s Capitol for the world to see started from a young age, within their families. Our homes are breeding grounds for this kind of white entitlement and violence. White people must investigate our complicity. Those who stormed the Capitol are regular, everyday, white people we greet on […]
Breaking Currents: eddy at M23
by Corey Durbin
An eddy, the titular inspiration for this show, is a flowing water phenomenon where the current is disrupted by inverse movement, causing a whirlpool. This exhibit of young emerging sculptors makes a similar gesture against a cultural current, long spiraling toward doom. M23 is a small gallery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the […]
Re-defining Drag Transformation: An Interview with Maxi Glamour
by Robin Gow
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity Robin Gow: It’s so nice to get to chat with you! I’m really grateful for this opportunity to delve into your work. I guess I want to start by asking where your drag name “Maxi Glamour” came from? Maxi Glamour: I created it when I […]
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
Reviewed by Sophia Kaufman
At the end of Ziwe Fumudoh’s Instagram Live shows this summer—in which she quizzed her guests on civil rights leaders, asked them whether they’d ever worn blackface, what they qualitatively like about Black people, how many Black friends they have, and whether they would commit to reparations, among other rapid-fire prompts often tailored to her […]
closet sonnet
by Gillian Ebersole
this sticky summer night is a beet stain – let me paint your skin & clear my schedule, sit in my room until you call me back. I imagine you struggling with a jar of marinara sauce in your kitchen – let me take it. here, I’m haunted by prayers before dinner & boyfriends […]
