by Laurie Sheck

1.
In the summer of 1977 in New York City—summer of the famous city-wide blackout, its fires and looting—my parents stole a street sign. The sign marked the location of my father’s housewares store which overnight had been turned into a hollow shell of blackened ash and charred brick. Looted and burned. 

The sign was a remembrance of a place they had loved.

The store was in the South Bronx, which at that time was the highest crime district of NYC. 149 St. and Prospect Ave. From earliest childhood, I spent many hours there dusting shelves, sticking price tags onto merchandise, and performing a variety of other minor tasks. The store and the neighborhood were a large part of my childhood world, of my introduction to what a world even is. My father and his older brother left school in the 9th and 10th grades to support their family. His brother had died young. Now, with the blackout of July 13, overnight the neighborhood was decimated. The store was gone.

2.
Even before the blackout, the South Bronx was notorious for its empty lots and abandoned buildings, its street gangs and drugs. Of course back then, as a child, I was unaware of the statistics. I didn’t know that roughly 20 percent of the buildings stood empty, abandoned by landlords unwilling or unable to maintain them. Unemployment was nearly double the rate of the city as a whole. Fewer than half of heads of households were said to be employed. The median income was $4,600, substantially below the median for the city. One study showed the median household size as 5.0, whereas the median household size for the city overall was 2.2. Families were crowded into tiny spaces. About half of the households were headed by women.

In 1977, the Women’s City Club of New York City issued an extensive report on the area, With Love and Affection: A Study of Building Abandonment. In addition to gathering numerous statistics, the report described the relentless deterioration of the neighborhood dating back to the late 1960’s. The blackout intensified what was already there: “block after block of empty buildings, some open and vandalized, some sealed, standing among rubble-strewn lots on which other buildings have already been demolished. In the midst of this desolation there is an occasional building where people are still trying to live.” It went on, “The streets and sidewalks…are littered with rubbish, with shattered glass out of the gaping doors and windows.” A New York Times article from 1975 bore the headline “To Most Americans, The South Bronx Would be Another Country.”

And yet, even as my memories resonate with much of what the WCC report described, I also remember bustling streets, restaurants, families. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Wars have never been the concern only of their combatants. Other states pay close attention to the geo-political implications and opportunities created by armed conflict, and interfere directly or indirectly when their cynical calculations suggest that would advance their interests.  For example, various countries – the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Qatar – have been involving themselves in Sudan’s ghastly civil war, apparently looking to pick up geopolitical advantages – especially gaining access to Red Sea ports that would allow them to threaten international shipping via the Suez Canal, or to prevent other states from doing so. When extended to material support to favoured factions this increases the resources of the combatants, increasing the ambition of their respective war goals and so extending the war by reducing the scope for a mutually acceptable peace deal.

Such amoral realpolitik in international relations is as old as war itself, together with its unfortunate consequences for human lives. What is somewhat more recent is the rise of international moral concern for the lives of civilians threatened by war, expressed through the increased influence of civil society. At least since the Greeks’ 1820s war of independence, states have also been interfering in other people’s wars out of humanitarian concerns to reduce civilian suffering.

The problem is that although each individual humanitarian intervention may be sincerely morally motivated – and even sometimes succeed in its goal of reducing suffering – the practise of morally motivated interference would seem actually to increase the amount of civilian suffering due to war. It makes civil wars more likely to start and harder to end, while incentivising crimes against civilians. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The mornings have become dark. These weeks are always strange, the end of October, just before the clock falls back and the mornings brighten again. For now I get ready in a sort of hinterland; it’s not night, but it’s not day either. The sky is a sheet of gray. I back out of the driveway, turn onto the main road. In the fog, the streetlights appear as beacons. Their brightness shocks me, and I remember a Monet painting I saw once in New York, a scene not of waterlilies or his garden, but the sun as a bright orange disk in the London fog. The wall text mentioned how Monet thought London was beautiful because of the fog, not despite it. This morning, the fog acts as a filter, casting a dull grayness everywhere but allowing the greens and reds of the streetlights to pass through. The road is relatively empty, I slip through a yellow light, leave the other cars behind, and I’m out on the open road, cruising downhill as the lights glow ahead of me.

I love driving. I was looking through my fiction writing recently—not much, just a page or two here and there—and I was surprised to see that much of it has to do with driving, or, if not driving, with the movement of the human body through space and time at an accelerated rate (ice skating and biking also feature). We are not made to move at such speeds, and when we do, something happens to our consciousness. Life feels different. Not every time, of course, but sometimes, and when it does, writing from a fictional viewpoint rather than in the style of an article seems the only way to transfer that phenomenological experience to the page.

The first thing I ever wrote that was any good falls into this category. I was in university, in a class for writing tutors, and we were tasked with writing a personal essay. I didn’t know how to write a personal essay—I didn’t know how to write about something meaningful to me without it coming off as trite and clichéd to others—so instead I submitted a short passage about diving into a lake I’d spontaneously written one summer day. I knew it was good because I’d written it while life felt different and I’d somehow managed to capture that experience in language. The essay was chosen as an example for the class. Then we had to expand our pieces into a longer story, but I couldn’t do it. I tried to re-enter the headspace that I’d inhabited while writing about diving, swimming, and floating, but no matter how hard I tried, nothing clicked. I wrote something and my teacher told me that she couldn’t follow it—it didn’t make sense. Read more »

Just something I saw in a children’s playground in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Philip Graham

When William K Gillespie was a student in one of my fiction writing workshops at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s, he turned in a brilliant, 36-page (single spaced!) story. A story absolutely typical of his talent and ambition. In the following years William went on to study under and impress a stellar cast of mentors, among them David Foster Wallace, Robert Coover, Brian Evenson, and Carole Maso. He was granted one of the first MFAs in Electronic Writing (from Brown University), and he established his own cutting edge press, Spineless Books. Since then he has written in every imaginable form, and is now organizing his diverse and interwoven oeuvre into a vast digital warren on the Web. We spoke recently about this project’s past, present, and future.

Philip Graham: The home page of your new and expanded author’s website, Collected Writings of William K Gillespie and Friends, lists and features the daunting range of genres in which you’ve written, and some of which you’ve probably invented: besides fiction, journalism, songwriting, sound collage and radio theater, there’s also “the longest literary palindrome ever written,” and “newspoetry,” to name just a small portion of your various literary explorations. Yet your career, seen in this perspective, rather than seeming scattered instead seems like solid evidence of a unified, voracious imagination.

William K Gillespie: Thank you. I’m inspired by Harry Mathews, Julio Cortázar, and Italo Calvino, who produced books so singular that each seemed to be by a different author. Visual art, music, and literature have a lot to learn from one another, and transposing ideas from one to the other is great fun.

PG: This transposition of ideas from one art form to another is certainly a hallmark of your website, and yes, your spider-like orchestration of it all is impressive. Can you say more about its architecture?

WG: In addition to preserving old works from moldy word processor files and decrepit websites, the Webwork — my new site — has hidden tools to help me compose complicated fictions spread across multiple books, forms, and media. There’s only a hint of this functionality visible now: at the bottom of the site you see an incomplete list of characters in my work. Eventually this will allow the assiduous reader to track characters between works and learn secret backstories. Read more »

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Every civilization eventually reaches the edge of its own understanding. The Enlightenment, which was basically a grand project of faith in reason, sought to replace the mysteries of revelation with the lucidity of thought. It promised that disciplined rationality could illuminate every corner of existence. It was thought that that through observation, experiment, and the methodical accumulation of knowledge, humanity could build a transparent world where nothing remained obscure. Knowledge would rise like light refracted through a cathedral of glass, cleansing superstition and disorder. Yet this grand confidence carried within it the seed of its undoing. The very tools of reason that once liberated humankind also revealed the boundaries of comprehension. The Enlightenment’s most profound legacy was perhaps not infinite clarity but the realization that even reason has horizons it cannot cross. By the twentieth century, the dream of total understanding had hardened into the austere project of formalized mathematics, symbolic logic, and mechanical computation. It finally fell crumbling down. It was a quest to capture truth in the language of machines, and in doing so, to continue the Enlightenment by other means.

Let us begin with Leibniz, who envisioned a future in which every disagreement could be settled through calculation. “Let us compute,” he declared, envisioning a characteristica universalis, a universal language in which thought itself could be reduced to algebraic precision. For him, reason was not merely a human faculty but an architecture of truth. It was a divine syntax underlying the cosmos. Through rational analysis, Leibniz believed, everything from theology to mechanics could be rendered transparent. This was the audacious spirit of the Enlightenment i.e., the conviction that the world, properly translated into the language of reason, would yield its secrets without remainder. Immanuel Kant inherited this dream and showed that reason, while vast, is not infinite, that it generates its own horizon. The limits of reason, Kant wrote, are not defects but conditions of possibility. He thought that we can never know the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich). This is because knowledge is not a mirror but a creative act, shaping the appearances it seeks to understand. Where Leibniz saw the universe as a divine calculus, Kant saw it as a theater of understanding. The world was ordered by this understanding not by the world as it is, but by the mind that apprehends it. Rousseau afterwards even questioned whether the march of reason brought progress or alienation, warning that civilization’s rational order might enslave rather than liberate.

Enlightenment’s faith endured in science and in the dream that the human mind, through the right method, might still one day comprehend the whole. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

The question of the day on everyone’s minds is whether AI is a boom or a bust. But if we lift our eyes ever so slightly from the question of the day and look at the bigger picture, two bigger questions come into view.

One: Will AI take our jobs? This debate seems to happen for all new technologies, but has been especially salient for AI. This makes sense. (Putting aside questions of per-unit economics and market distorting preferences), if you define AGI as something that can do anything humans can do, then by definition, you have also defined yourself out of any jobs remaining.

Two: Is dropping fertility a crisis? Fertility has been dropping precipitously in developed countries for years, first in East Asia, then Western Europe, and now in practically all countries. Immigration has been the solution, but sometime in this century, the global population as a whole will peak and start shrinking. Many economists, such as Robin Hanson, are deeply worried about this. This again makes sense. Innovation is closely linked to the number of people around to come up with innovations and shifting demographics will turn existing social security systems upside down.

However, a positive, bigger picture reading would be that these two effects might cancel each other out, or at least partly offset each other. The effects of both are of course highly uncertain, but from what we can best tell, these will largely overlap in timing, and could potentially have counteracting effects. By the middle of the century, one potential world is certainly one where AI has replaced humans in many jobs, but the number of working-age humans has gone down, so there are fewer humans that need employment. Or a world where a machine-to-machine economy fills government coffers with more than enough revenue to support the costs of the larger number of non-working age humans in need of pension and healthcare. It seems almost too good to be true that these two massive macro-level trends would coincide in time during the same century. Why is it that, just as the groundwork is laid for creating artificial intelligences that might be able to replace humans for many tasks, improvements in healthcare and economic pressures mean that families start having fewer children in most of the world? Read more »

by Eric Schenck

In Arabic, the word kahwa means coffee. At least that’s how I learned it. The Egyptian dialect doesn’t seem to care about the letter qoff, and will leave the sound off just about every word it appears in. The result? 

Ahwa.

It still means coffee, but the word takes on a much bigger meaning in Egyptian culture. That’s because the word also means “café.” And not a Western style café like Starbucks, where you sit inside with air conditioning and sip on fancy drinks. No – this is something much, much different. 

The ahwa, as I will come to find out, is the “café of the people.” 

And I love it.

*

Egyptian ahwas are a funny place. They start out intimidating. It’s 2015, I’ve just moved to Cairo, and I don’t quite know what to make of the thousands of outdoor cafés that seem to be everywhere.  They are almost constantly full of people. Loud, fast-paced, and covered in a slight haze of shisha smoke, ahwas are a shock to your senses. They give me a sort of anxiety I never knew I had. 

But they quickly become one of my favorite things about Egypt. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self-portrait in Temple, Jogjakarta, Indonesia, October 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Barry Goldman

It was more than 50 years ago that Mike and I invented Corn Mush Latke Pie. We were living in a flat on Margaret Street near 7 Mile and Woodward in Detroit. We paid 110 bucks a month for the place. It had white walls, white drapes, red carpeting and the kind of bathroom sink that has the hot water coming out of one faucet and the cold out of another. For furniture we had two lawn chairs and a big brass ashtray. We were “in school.”

One night it got to be time to eat and neither of us had any money so we had to look in the cupboard. Naturally, there was nothing in there you could just eat. Stuff you could just eat we had long since eaten. The stuff that was still in the cupboard you had to cook. It was left over from the first week we moved in when we said we would stop eating in restaurants all the time and save money.

What we came up with was some potatoes with giant tubers growing out of them and some Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. We snapped off the tubers and grated the potatoes, mixed the corn muffin mix with some water and garlic powder and hot pepper flakes, and put the whole thing in a cast iron skillet and put it in the oven. We called it Corn Mush Latke Pie because we didn’t know what else to call it and because latke is Yiddish for potato pancake and potato pancakes are traditional on Hanukkah and it was roughly Hanukkah as near as we could figure.

It was awful, as you might have guessed. Read more »

Rear View

In reflection, the world’s not just a shifty place,
but odd really, the unexpectedness of it, it’s
sudden winds & wild humans shifting as I’ve aged,
sliding from simply familiar to things with
torn edges, never fully knowable, open-ended,
dangerous, yet held together tentatively by
threads of love and unexpected revelations
of beauty until, in entirety, it’s become
not just odd, but
odder still.

Jim Culleny, 11/9/25

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by Eric Feigenbaum

From a corner room in Singapore’s Peninsula hotel, I spent many nights staring out the windows, watch sparks fly silently from the nearby construction sites. Up on the 18^th or 14^th or 20^th floors, Singapore looked still and calm at midnight or 1am. Unlike many big metropolitans, Singapore streets – even in the city center – become quiet at night, especially a weeknight. There was an other-worldly quality watching Singapore’s downtown sleep at night.

My very first visit to Singapore was in February 2004. As business had it, by the end of the year, I was going frequently and for increasingly long stretches – sometimes for seven to ten days at a time, until I rented a condo in March 2025.

But 2004 was filled with nights looking out at the big, fast-moving clouds, giant sky, ships anchored offshore and ever-growing skyline. And sparks. Always sparks coming from below.

It took me a visit or two to realize the new National Library building being built just a couple of blocks away was under construction seemingly 24 hours a day. Which meant from visit to visit – even if it was just a few weeks between – the building grew rapidly. In fact, the 16-story, 338 foot tall, 121,675 square foot site with a gross floor area of 632,918 square feet was completed in less than 18 months. An amazing accomplishment.

As a comparison point, a recently very similar sized project in San Francisco – the 5M Office Tower at 415 Natoma Street took began in mid-2019, taking two years and nine months. Its cost – $158 million – is only $3 million more than the National Library’s – and ironically, the building received a development loan of $393 million from Singapore’s United Overseas Bank.

In a similar time-period as the construction of the Singapore National Library, my alma mater, the University of Washington, built a new Business School building – PACCAR Hall – on nice flat land in exactly two years from 2008 to 2010. Despite it being five stories and 133,000 square feet of total floor area – almost one fifth of the National Library’s – it still took six months longer to construct.

Obviously, 24-hour a day construction gives Singapore an advantage in construction time. But doesn’t that create around-the-clock noise that disturbs the city? Isn’t it inordinately expensive? Aren’t labor unions protesting? Read more »

by Charles Siegel

There can have been very few musicians who played such key roles, in so many different bands in so many different genres, as Danny Thompson.  When he died at 86 in September, music lost one of its great connectors.

I first learned of Thompson as a freshman in college, when my roommate introduced me to Pentangle. There had never been a band like Pentangle, and there really hasn’t been one quite like them since either. They were an utterly unique melding of folk and jazz. The band’s guitarists, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, were two of the leading English folk guitarists of the day when Pentangle was founded in 1967. Terry Cox was an established jazz drummer, and Jacqui McShee was an up-and-coming folk singer.

At the center of it all was Danny Thompson on bass. By 1967 he’d already had a wide variety of musical experience, not to mention a turbulent life.

Born in Devon, he never knew his father, a miner who joined the Royal Navy at the start of World War II and was killed in a U-boat attack.  His sister died not long after, and he and his mother moved to Battersea, then a rough area of London yet to be gentrified.

He was a good soccer player — good enough to play for Chelsea’s youth teams. And he was a good boxer, winning 22 of 23 fights. But already, music was becoming his consuming passion. By the time he was a young teenager he had tried guitar, mandolin, trumpet and trombone. He told an interviewer that one reason he gave up trombone was his boxing, “because a smack in the chops is not very good for that.”

After all of those instruments, he settled on the double bass. Like pretty much every young musician in England in the 1950s, he started out playing in skiffle bands, and like everyone from Paul McCartney to Jimmy Page, he was inspired by Lonnie Donegan.

From there, he played in strip clubs in Soho and on American military bases. In keeping with his already ornery personality, in 1957 he was arrested for failure to report for national service.  Three days before he was sent to prison, he married his girlfriend, and then was posted to Malaysia for two years, where he took up the trombone again in an army band. Read more »

by Akim Reinahrdt

Language: Ooh, a talkie!
Strong Language: No shit
Disturbing Images: Worse than a mirror?
Nudity: Promises, promises
Sexual Content: Awkward birds & bees talk?
Sex: That’s not sex
Substance Abuse: That’s not abuse
Alcohol Use: Shots!
Smoking: With what cigarettes cost nowadays?
Product Placement: Good reminder not to buy any of it
Violence: You talkin’ to me?
Child Abuse References: I could use a good spanking
Birth: The horror!
Graphic Medical Procedures: Democracy’s autopsy?
Flashing Lights: Bamp-Bamp-Bamp da-da-da-da
Suicide: Spoilers, people!

Gore: Lesley, Frank or Vidal, I’m good. Al or Tipper I’d like a heads up.

[SCENE]

There’s a voice that says The following is intended for mature audiences only. Viewer discretion is advised and I want to slit its throat so that all the blood drains from its veins, for only then can I be sure it will never chide me again.

There is something wrong with me, to be sure.  But there is also something wrong with the show or movie I’m about to watch.  That’s what the voice is telling me.  Be discreet.  Think twice before letting others know you have watched it.  Will you watch it?  Are watching it.  Are you watching it?  Be careful.

What is wrong with you?  Why would you watch this show we made for you?  We’ve warned you.  There’s something wrong with it.

Maturity is required.  Are you mature enough to hear the alkaline truth?  There’s something wrong with you.  You’re trying to hide away what everyone else already sees.  You’re thin skinned and have a fragile ego.

It was a simple advisement, not a searing admonishment, but you couldn’t handle it.  You turned the objective into the subjective.  You were lacking in discretion. Read more »

by Michael Liss

No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquility and contentment, harmonious relations between management and wage earner, freedom from industrial strife, and the highest record of years of prosperity. —Calvin Coolidge’s “Annual Address,” December 4, 1928

“Silent” Calvin Coolidge was a man of few words, but he might have uttered those particular few with a sense of satisfaction. Times were good in America in 1928—not for everyone, not for every industry, but, in the main, there were more jobs that paid a living wage, new industries that had great promise, and less rancor both politically and between the classes.  

The Roaring Twenties had begun with a political earthquake—an electoral realignment. America wanted something different from the status quo, and the status quo was Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s second term was dominated by America’s late entry into the war, debates over the League of Nations (as the country was growing more isolationist), and general domestic unrest.  He was a man of great intellect and serious talent, but, if there was a sunny, optimistic side to Wilson, he hid it well. This was even more so after the serious stroke he suffered in October of 1919, a time in which he essentially sequestered himself from the public and even from most of his Cabinet. It is perhaps a measure of his monumental ego that, post-stroke, he still saw himself as a potent political force, not merely able to discipline his own party, but to convince the public to give him a third term.  

Any rational viewer would have seen that as completely impossible, and a third Wilson campaign never got off the ground, but it was not merely his dyspeptic temperament, but also his policies which more and more of the country doubted or outright rejected. The forces that had given him the White House in the first place now inverted themselves. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt had sought to reclaim the Presidency from his former VP pick, now turned President, William Howard Taft. TR wanted a continuation of his Progressive policies, and Taft was by nature and ideological preference a conservative. Losing the White House to a Democrat (and a Southern one at that) convinced many in the GOP to move further away from the Progressive wing and Progressive values. That shift was echoed by a smaller (but decisive) transition in the views of the electorate.  Read more »