2025 was another fantastic year for literature, and the team at MAYDAY enjoyed classics and new publications alike. Every year, we survey the team to see what their favorite books of the year, whether they’re new releases or just new to them. And this year, we had the privilege of welcoming in new team members. […]
Featured Culture
MAYDAY Staff Survey: The Best Reads of 2025
Please Don’t Make Fun of God
by McKenzie Watson-Fore
This essay is written by MAYDAY magazine’s Critic in Residence This past summer, my partner Michael and I attended the wedding of two of our friends. One of them grew up in a Y2K prepper cult in Eastern Oregon. Her now-wife is a Dutch gynecologist. The four of us will often laugh about the mirrored […]
There Is No Male Body Positivity Movement. It’s Time We Start One.
by Justin Kolber
This essay continues the theme of Men’s Mental Health Month, whose important message should be recognized all year rather than just in November. Eating disorders are a “silent scream.” According to Monte Nido, a specialized treatment center for eating disorders, “Millions of people are hiding an eating disorder every day.” Specifically, 29 million Americans today […]
Dark Humor in a Time of Genocide
by Rebecca Ruth Gould
Imagine living in a world in which a phone call from a stranger may announce the bombing of your home, the destruction of your neighborhood, and the deaths of your loved ones. Imagine making a living from this destruction, by weaving shrouds for the bodies of those whom the bombs flying overhead will soon kill. […]
The Ghastly Ghost Writer
by Jadi Campbell
“I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn’t question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world.” Author Marilyn French wrote this passage […]
Entranced
by Holly Maurer-Klein
I am obsessed with Don Draper. I like his white shirts and his big, capable hands. I like how his straight black hair sometimes falls across his long, wide forehead and how he has to brush it out of his eyes like a little boy. I like that he’s so tall he towers over everyone. […]
The Silo of Spirituality
by McKenzie Watson-Fore
Christ icon in the Chapel of St. Augustine near Sveti Duh na Ostrem vrhu. Photo by Clemens Stockner (via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0) This essay is written by MAYDAY magazine’s Critic in Residence for Spring and Summer 2025. When you grow up religious, you grow up steeped in media the likes of which secular folks […]
The Body Expendable
by Clement Obropta
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 […]
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 […]
