ISSUES | fall 2022

Deep Focus  Compelling new techniques in the arts are often picked up and imitated until they seem to have always been used. Discoveries of Florentine painters in the early Renaissance…    read more

A Good-Looking Guy  Valerie Sayers   In memory of Mable Godwin   In December 1969, a month so long ago that I sometimes think I hallucinated it, a guy I was crazy…    read more

Vegetable Stories  Rohini Sunderam  Gurgaon in the 1980s still had an air of innocence. The roads were dusty and potholed. The trees were young, their new leaves touched with gold.…    read more

Presque Isle  Jonathan Johnson  “Drink, please.”   Every time he wants a drink, his whole life, Jake has to say this. And yet there is always this pleasant little lilt to…    read more

Biases and Fallacies  Drew Calvert  Lara Bainbridge, the executive assistant, sat in the Rise Lounge lobby bar, deleting emails from her phone and gently reappraising her life. The facts were…    read more

The Trespasser  Matthew Neill Null   The land didn’t belong to him, but no one was even using it––he’d tell you that much.  Driving Route 33 on his way to hunt…    read more

Sonnet to Break the Crown of Invisibility Mind astray in whose skin color, whose blood gets exposed to bare the violence of shootings. A nation sits on its ass on…    read more

Discourses of Diabetes Care  It starts with the idea of control: that idea, the magnetic pole. Like it’s a sport, they’ll talk about your goals, scroll through your machine. Machine,…    read more

To the Instrument at Arecibo II    I was reading about all the animals   we’ve put into space. Monkeys and dogs    of course, but also spiders and beasts   so…    read more

Semester of the Women: Reading Grace Paley in Quarantine  Robert Cochran    I  Spring, 2020 was the strangest term ever, even before the Covid pandemic sent us all home. Perhaps…    read more

Chess Superhero  Mako Yoshikawa   In the summer of his eighth year, my stepfather, Jimmy, taught himself how to play tournament chess from a book. An achievement, to be sure, but…    read more

The Seat of Emotion  Jim Steck  My presenting symptom was neck pain that I could reproduce by turning my neck a certain way. I diagnosed myself with “tech neck,” a…    read more

The Luxury and Drama of James Van Der Zee’s Harlem Renaissance Photography  James Van Der Zee documented streetscapes, nightclubs, society teas, parades, and other forms of social and cultural life…    read more

Florine Stettheimer and the Art of Modern New York  Kristine Somerville   In 1914, the outbreak of the First World War put an end to Florine Stettheimer’s nomadic life. With her…    read more

Translators in Body and Soul  Lisa Katz  Fifty Sounds: A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing by Polly Barton. Liveright, 2022, 384 pp., $27.95 (hardcover).  Homesick: A Memoir by Jennifer…    read more