Wayne Hsiung: The 10,000-Year Famine
The failure of storytelling leads to calamity. Hannah Arendt, in her studies of atrocities, notes that they are typically the result of inattention rather than malice.
Todd Friedman: Two Poems
Israel, you have become like Joseph’s brothers
who abandoned him in an empty cistern
and then sat down to a feast.
Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi: Those With Chronic Illness in Gaza Say They’re Denied a Bare Minimum to Survive
This is an engineered famine — deliberate starvation under Israeli siege: Markets are empty. Aid trucks are blocked. Weeds are being boiled for soup.
Video: Eternity
Valerie and Alan have been married 57 years. Eternity is a look at love that lasts a lifetime, whether they like it or not.
Jack Gilbert: A Brief for the Defense
We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
Deborah DeNicola: Millennium Jubilee
We were called to attend the fake alien invasion. The subpoena arrived in a blue vellum envelope with a stamp of clouds and empty sky and a watermark hologram of a dove. They gave the date and time but Jim noticed the venue was missing.
Joseph Bathanti: Cletis Pratt
First man I ever saw in irons,
wearing nothing but a pair of scurvy white
long john britches, was Cletis Pratt
Andrea Mazzarino: How MAGA Uses Violence to Consolidate Power
Cruelty is the point.
Betsy Sholl: Haibun | Tarantula
Our creature, named Slash, also bulked up. He had a taste for crickets we fed each week…
Matthew J. Parker: How Courage, Kindness, and Creative Iconoclasm Can Counter the Tramp of Fascist Feet
I’m alarmed by this new wave of attacks on our institutions.
Moudi Sbeity: Something Rather Than Nothing
What can be more holy than this?
The ground beneath our feet,
the stories we carry from one day to the next,
the fluency of rivers as a reminder of something
rather than nothing.
Ghada Abu Muaileq: In Gaza, Even the Cost of a Grave Has Become a Luxury
We tear up chairs for firewood. Soap is watered down to make it last. Basic necessities are increasingly out of reach.
Video: Side Hustle
Interweaving fiction with documentary testimony of sugar babies and sex workers, Side Hustle follows a young dancer making rent with the financial support of her sugar daddy.
John Guzlowski: Hunger
He ate what would kill a man
in the normal course of his life:
leather buttons, cloth caps, anything
small enough to get into his mouth.
He ate roots. He ate newspaper.
