June 18, 2026 On Film Drinking Movies: Down and Out at Cannes By Inney Prakash Screenshot of Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return. I first got sober at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. Two days into the festival, I woke up with my ever-present hangover in a hilltop apartment lent to me by a Parisian friend. After deciding to spend my modest savings on what should have been a cinephile’s fantasy vacation, my initial endorphin cloud cleared to reveal my true motivations: an attempt to escape depression, temporarily forget my unemployment, and ward off paralysis about what to do with my life. Nicolas Cage went to Las Vegas to drink himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas (dir. Mike Figgis, 1995), Tabea Blumenschein in Ticket of No Return (dir. Ulrike Ottinger, 1979) went to Berlin, and I went to Cannes. In the Ottinger film, Blumenschein’s character, Sie, chooses Berlin because it’s unfamiliar—nihilism is easier to indulge in a place full of strangers. She tumbles through the night in a surreal and plotless sequence of vignettes that conjures the aimlessness of a good bender. Her drink of preference is cognac; she downs it several glasses at a time. After she picks up a homeless woman as her drinking buddy, the pair cavorts around town, now sousing in a bar, now a cafe, now a hotel. They’re followed by a chorus of three women in matching suits—embodying “Common Sense,” “Social Issues,” and “Accurate Statistics”—who babble about the dangers of alcoholism. “Did you know that between Moscow and Los Angeles,” asks Accurate Statistics, “only ten percent of the population is teetotal?” Read More
June 17, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Hannah Piette on “Nijinsky Dancing” By Hannah Piette Nijinski Dancing by Lincoln Kirstein. All photographs courtesy of Hannah Piette. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Four poems by Hannah Piette appear in our new Summer issue, no. 256. Here, she dissects “Nijinsky Dancing.” How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I was tasked in a drawing class to draw a figure in space. I knew at once where to find the figure—in my giant, golden book Nijinsky Dancing. Although we cannot watch videos of Nijinsky dancing, the book assembles a photographic record of his motions. I was taking adult-beginner ballet classes and reading the New York School poet and dance critic Edwin Denby’s writings on dance. In his essay “Notes on Nijinsky Photographs,” he observes Nijinsky’s technique only through photographs and writes that Nijinsky discovered how to control the “variability” of a face, as his face transforms from role to role. I chose a photograph of him leaping, in the costume of a prince. It was one of my first drawings of a person. I couldn’t get his face right. I kept erasing it and drawing new faces over the half-erased marks. He looked askew, covered in charcoal smudges. It wasn’t the single photograph that was the beginning of this poem, but the shifts between his figures across the photographs and the shifts between his faces and the erased faces I drew. In his roles, Nijinsky “disappears completely,” Denby writes, and remains “detached” from the imaginary characters that take his place, and who exist “independently of himself, in the objective world.” I wanted to write a poem that would work toward this technique. Was it possible to write a poem in which my face completely disappeared? Read More
June 16, 2026 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes As we were working on our new Summer issue, my partner and I began fostering a rescue dog, a seven-month-old pit bull named Woody. Left to his own devices on a sidewalk, Woody has the manner of someone searching for a lost earring. Often, having found the thing he was apparently looking for, he refuses to budge. It was only after we had spent a couple of weeks dragging him down our street that a friend advised that, without being given time to sniff at things, he was exhausting his body but not his mind, which was why he was often as antic after a walk as he was before. “Smelling is like reading for them,” the friend said. I grew up being told that reading makes you a more empathetic, nicer person; more recently, I’ve heard that “deep reading” (which means, essentially, reading a book) is the best way to reclaim your atrophying attention span. For some, who might prefer to outsource the activity and receive a quick description of what it was like, it’s an anachronism. Headlines say that children are spending less of their spare time with books—in Britain, the problem is a “relentless” focus on literacy, which sounds particularly Roald Dahl. What all these conversations are missing, of course, is the fact that reading is one of the most mysterious, pleasurable pastimes we have—which is why we have put together a Summer issue that we believe will fill you with a strange feeling of yearning, like a dog at a tree stump who would like to stay longer than is feasible. So it was after my colleague Dennis passed me Shuang Xuetao’s “God’s Arrow,” which appears in print for the first time in our pages, in a translation by Jeremy Tiang, and is named after a weapon with magical powers. “If it flies through the air,” says an enigmatic benefactor of the kind we could all use, “hold in your mind what you want to happen, and it will come true.” Read More
June 16, 2026 On Sports The Ultimate Fighting Championship Goes to Washington By Stephanie Cuepo Wobby Photograph by G. Edward Johnson, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. In an apt omen of things to come, the first prefight press conference for UFC Freedom 250 opened with an AI-generated promotional video and ended with an unplanned altercation. It was early May; the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s “D.C. Takeover”—the culmination of Donald Trump’s promise to bring the UFC to the White House—was still more than a month away. But UFC President Dana White convened the event’s stars for a quick Q&A in Newark, New Jersey. Most of the fighters came dressed in suits, button-downs, or athleisure, but heavyweight Josh “the Incredible Hok” Hokit arrived wearing a long black cloak, an American-flag-themed skullcap, and matching gloves—candy cane stripes trailing down every finger, a solid blue block across his knuckles, an eagle glaring out from the back of each hand. Hokit, a former NFL player who transitioned to MMA because he “wanted to do a real man’s sport,” has a penchant for answering journalists’ questions in rhymes. This presser was no exception. He aimed his insults at Brazilian fighter Alex “Poatan” Pereira, in an attempt to goad him (and White) into setting up an official bout, now that the former middleweight champion had moved up to Hokit’s weight class. (“Alex gained some weight and now he thinks he’s King Kong / but his girl said the steroids killed his ding dong.”) When a reporter asked Hokit about going face-to-face with Pereira, he escalated: I come to devour. You will know the day, you will know the hour. I’m gonna give Pereira a golden shower! Read More
June 12, 2026 Diaries A Diary from the Psychic Capital of the World By Greta Rainbow Cassadaga front office. Photograph by Greta Rainbow. Friday, March 27, 2026 When I waded into the Florida humidity, Mom and Mimi were waiting for me at curbside pickup, three hours after the worst airport security I’d ever experienced. The TSA line at JFK had snaked around the sidewalk. I’d cut shamelessly. I hugged my mother first, then her mother. I’d last seen Mimi at Uncle Dan’s funeral almost two years before, and I hadn’t been down to Florida in ten. I used to spend every spring break in New Smyrna Beach, poking lizards and watching late-night TV in a room covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. I liked to watch my mother be mothered by a grandma who would never let us call her that. Mimi asked what I wanted to do now, by which she meant, did we mind stopping at an antique mall nearby. This was my childhood, Mom said. Mimi had been a Boston antiques dealer, a detail covered in Mom’s memoir in progress, which I’ve read and Mimi hasn’t. The book is about being raised by hippies, and how you can feel loved without feeling safe. I’d conceived of my role that weekend as moral support in general, and specifically in the project of locating lost paperwork involving dead men. Such items included a trove of love letters sent to Mimi in the early sixties, which Mom wanted for book research, and stock certificates belonging to Dan, who, despite practicing as a Manhattan lawyer, did not have a will—thus rendering Mimi, his sister, the executor of the estate. She’d come into the role after Dan was murdered on a spring afternoon, while walking on a bike path outside of Albany. We still don’t have answers. In the fall, a twenty-five-year-old man was charged with one count of second-degree murder—seemingly not premeditated, a random act of insane violence against a practicing Buddhist. That was also the reason for the one activity I’d added to the itinerary. Sometime in the past decade, someone told me that there is a Psychic Capital of the World. The Psychic Capital of the World happens to be an unincorporated community in central Florida called Cassadaga, and is twenty-three miles from Mimi’s house. She’d been there before, by virtue of living nearby and being the kind of person who would go to a Psychic Capital of the World, which is one of the ways that we are alike. Read More
June 11, 2026 On Poetry What Is Poetry? Chelsey Minnis’s Frying Pan Full of Diamonds By Jordan Castro Seth Lemmons, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Early on in Opera Fever, her newest collection of poetry, Chelsey Minnis asks: “Is this a poem or the back of a shovel?”—something that can literally take off the back of your head. This January, I read a dozen or so noir novels from the thirties and forties. People were smothered with towels, bludgeoned in bathtubs, beaten to death with glass decanters, and killed by stray bullets at dance marathons. Some weeks, I watched a noir film every night. I watched YouTube videos about noir. Noir, one video explained, was a reaction to the Depression and the war: it gave form to a cynical vision of American life, depicting an amoral and violent world that many had come to think of as the dark reality underlying ordinary experience. The darkness feels revelatory and “real,” yet this effect was achieved through surreal German Expressionist-influenced artifice. Noir is highly stylized—chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets, hard-boiled speech—and yet it is one of the twentieth century’s great visual languages for representing “reality.” When I first became interested in literature at fourteen, I was obsessed with realism in the form of “authenticity.” Writing, I thought, was self-expression. The more “honest” it was—and the more devoid of “unnecessary” flourish—the better. I liked Kmart realism and so-called alt-lit, in which authors expressed their bleak worldviews simply, in a seemingly unmediated manner. I listened to rap music, where being “real” was the archvirtue. But the older I got, the more “realness” as an aesthetic value felt pale and inadequate, if not deluded and impossible. Art that had once seemed to me, naively, to express real life, increasingly felt like an elaborate construction that used “authenticity” as a kind of crutch. Every so-called realism implicitly made claims about what counted as real, and what didn’t. But more obviously artificial modes know what noir’s aestheticized “realism” inadvertently shows: that the world isn’t simply there, but stylized into visibility. Read More