#Issue53

Oscar Martinez’s remarks were emblematic of a more general response to Midway Blitz: an aggrieved, futile attempt to correct someone who has violently misinterpreted reality.…

This is her break. Her good thing. She refers to it as her Success. The money is enough to quit Bill’s, leave that stupid town, accept an internship in London. For a year or so, at the parties she now attends, she regularly brings it up.…

— Wait, what did he call you? Sadiya said. Julio applied everything he’d learned of hermeneutics, philology, and translation theory to give Sadiya a serviceable definition of pinche güey — It’s like [Napoleon Dynamite voice] freakin’ idiot — Is it, Sadiya…

We could not have imagined the reality that was coming. Forget escalating: In a few months, even the little our crew had done before falling apart — the cold emails and messages to weapons workers; the community outreach with our masks lowered, for trust…

We need a book like Grandin’s now — more so, surely, than he could have known while writing it. If Grandin’s framing emphasis on US influence over Latin America and on the contrasts between Anglo-American and Latin American intellectual traditions…

As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see.…

As things stand, the field of psychiatry offers us no precise definition for such cases of fleeting madness as those experienced by Mohammed Shatta, though literature has preserved an account of the phenomenon from the perspective of one of its more…

What news, if any, would be contained in Francesca’s voicemail? The fact was, I was worried about Fritz. There wasn’t any need to worry; he was almost completely fine getting into the car.…

The final possibility that occurred to me, as five milligrams of edible THC began to inflect my thinking, was conjured under a more, shall we say, suspicious hermeneutic.…

One day there is a serious earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — “Noah” — issues a tsunami warning for Alaska, which the National Weather Service overrules within an hour.…

Among filmmakers, dread over money seemed to outweigh any sense of buzz. By the first weekend the lack of major sales had already become a central topic of conversation.…

Inaugurated in this second Trump term is a new mode of dominion in which, writes Vincent Bevins, “the implicit goal of military action is not to create a government, it is to destroy one.” The nation-destroying model is more slapdash and more gratuitous…

Martha Stewart, Walter White, and Rodney Dangerfield walk into a bar. The bartender looks at Dangerfield, asks what he’s having. “Vodka soda,” he replies. The bartender starts shoveling ice. “Double?” he checks. “Course I am,” says Dangerfield.…