Landing

The ramp they skated on was in the back corner of the city’s zoo, which hosts more than 150 animals. There is also an entire exhibition of taxidermy mounts, paying tribute to the animals killed by the Israel army during the Second Intifada. Zoo-goers would pause to watch Eihab and Abdullah skate, as if they too were part of the exhibit.

Little Privatized Suns

Joan Didion would have known what to say about Richard Stockton Rush III. I’m almost surprised she never wrote about him. He was a pure effusion of California plutocracy, someone in whom amour-propre had been sublimed over generations, each forebear transforming a bit more of the dross of ordinariness into something insipid yet undeniably compelling, […]

On Daniel Ellsberg

The drama of Ellsberg’s life, however unique his circumstances, isn’t alien or inaccessible, because it is also the drama of a political life as such: the steady, growing awareness of one’s participation in a system that one understands to be intolerable, and the eventual action that breaks with it. On this path, he was helped along not just by the antiwar movement, but by a number of others who were somewhere along the same path, even if they didn’t end up where he did.

Summer Party!

Celebrate new issues of n+1, BOMB Magazine, and Gagosian Quarterly! Join us at Public Records on June 28 for signature drinks by Brooklyn Gin and Other Half Brewing and music by a live DJ. The party starts at 8 PM. This is a 21+ event. Tickets are free, but space is limited so RSVPs are required. RSVP here. […]

Mother Sauce

Johnson has inverted this form by writing a memoir of a recipe, rather than a “memoir with recipes.” If Reichl’s development as a person can be traced from her aunt’s potato salad to her first taste of foie gras, Johnson’s development flourishes under a narrower lens—a single red sauce.

Smoke Week

On the weather map on my phone, as I stood and consulted it at 81st and Central Park West, the color-coded diagram of the plumes scorching and stretching south from Ottawa looked exactly like a circa-2004 televised aerial heat map visualization of some especially deadly nighttime moment in a town somewhere in Basra. The colors populating my Instagram feed when I swiped over from the weather map—filtered, balanced, enhanced—were similarly vivid and lively, the colors of harvests and autumn leaves. In real life at midday, the chromatic effects on Central Park West were more like sepia, paprika, piss.

Brother

For years the person he feared most was not his mother or father, not his teacher, not the bad kids in class who smoked and brawled, not Ah Fei the local street tough, but that other self in that photograph. It was a fear verging on hatred.

The Assignment

The approach to the farmhouse is not meant for walking, and Bibi feels that she is barely making any progress. The haze blankets her surroundings, giving her approach a dreamlike quality as images come into focus like memories and dissolve like dreams. Slashes of moss-green lawn, the sharp, blue inhalation of what is perhaps a swimming pool. Bibi wonders why swimming pool floors are always painted blue and if this has anything to do with the sky and the ocean. She wonders what it would be like to swim in the ocean and look up at a blue sky.

Mating

The birds unveiled themselves slowly, first by sound and then by sight. Despite what you might expect from the term, the “booming” call of the greater prairie chicken sounds, in reality, more like a mournful coo. When several chickens let out the call at once, they meld together into a swirling, plaintive chant.

Ari M. Brostoff and Emily Segal in conversation

Join n+1 and Deluge for a conversation between Ari M. Brostoff, n+1 contributor and author of Missing Time (n+1 Books, 2022), and Emily Segal, author of Mercury Retrograde (Deluge Books, 2020). The event is free and open to the public. Monday, June 12 7PM PST Human Resources 410 Cottage Home Street Los Angeles Praise for Missing Time “In […]

A Third Alice

After the wine guy was gone from her life forever, Mary lit a fourth cigarette, a brand you can’t get here. She couldn’t explain exactly what was so upsetting to her. And then from the blah bar emerged Alice—a small, brilliant, self-contained, comely brunette with a conversational knowledge of the mother of Alexander the Great—Alice, of whom Mary had taken so little notice in the past, who without saying a word, because she had no secrets, at this very moment rested her head upon Mary’s shoulder.

The GrubHub of Human Affliction

We had a color-coded system for managing the hierarchy of suffering: green was for welfare snafus, lead paint violations, legal procedural errors, fertilizer-related illness, corporate malfeasance and minor environmental damage; yellow was for assault in jail, wrongful conviction, citywide poisoning, retaliatory solitary confinement, grievous and preventable workplace injuries, strikebreaking at the national scale, anti-labor espionage of any kind; red was for police murders, police or military torture, counter-radical operations involving violence or murder, war crimes (many of these last categories pertaining to refugees who had lost their homes or family members to American military campaigns).

I’m Fucking Agitated, Are You Going to Murder Me?

Real estate greed, the glutted police budget, ceaseless gentrification, racist journalists, Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul, white people—we cycled through the injustices, against them, resuscitating despair into focused rage.

Issue 45 Reading and Launch Celebration

Please join n+1 at our office in Greenpoint for reading and drinks in celebration of Issue 45: Attachment Issue! Featuring readings by Victoria Uren, Jared Jackson, Caleb Crain, Mark Krotov, Laura Preston, and Ken Chen. Entry is free; drinks and copies of the new issue for sale. Tuesday, May 16 7 PM n+1 office: 37 […]

J. D. Vance Changes the Subject

Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening.

In Gaziantep

I notice Islahiye’s clatter when a hundred bystanders are told to go quiet so the volunteers can listen. You can tell who is tearing a wrapper or ruffling their puffy coat and where the caution tape flaps. The ambulance that recovers one life interferes with the search for another.

What Are You?

Like many mixed-race/mixed-culture peoples who have emerged, are emerging, or perhaps yearn to emerge from a colonial legacy, most Filipinos see no contradiction in this racial, ethnic, and cultural mix. It is not a problem or a source of confusion to the people in that mix.

Little Miss Bigmouth

When she’s in a state of panic, my mother bargains with the Lord and imposes fioretti on herself: no eating sweets, no going to the movies, no reading magazines, no listening to Rai Radio 3, for weeks, months, years. These days she can’t go to the hairdresser’s or watch TV. Sometimes the combination is no Radio 3 and no sweets. Or no coffee and no new shoes. She mixes them, matches them — it depends.

The Cheapo Stuff Wins

In the late ’90s there was this trend toward blob cars that was probably seen as very ugly at the time, but now represents an infinitely more beautiful path lost to the auto industry by the late ’00s. Now all we have are cars that are soft and hard at the same time, like the swole AF backend coders we all apparently want to be.

The New New Reading Environment

For larger publications, the upside of newsletters is obvious. Email-bound readers can seamlessly swipe over from their Zocdoc appointment notification to their health insurance bill payment notification to their student loan payment notification to their local mass shooting notification to a Washington Post opinion newsletter about the biggest threat facing the nation (still, somehow, cancel culture). Of course, no one has pursued newsletters as zealously as the legaciest legacy-media operation of them all: the New York Times.