June 26, 2026 On Sports A Short Defense of Sports Clichés By Isabella Cacdac Ampil Photograph by Erik Drost, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. At times of especially blessed sports spectatorship, which the Knicks’ past few weeks have undoubtedly been, I often return to David Foster Wallace’s 2007 essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” Ostensibly a pan of the tennis player’s 1992 memoir, Beyond Center Court, the piece is really about the perceived chasm between a great athlete’s genius and their apparent inability to talk about it after the fact. Whether players are recounting their in-game heroics moments later, as in a postgame interview, or years later, as in memoir form, they tend to deliver the same clichés: We’re taking each game one point at a time, focusing on the fundamentals, believing in the team. I thought of this again after Game Four of the NBA Finals, when OG Anunoby addressed reporters at Madison Square Garden. They were marveling at his now-famous tip-in, sunk with 1.2 seconds left on the clock. “You just hit the game-winning shot in an NBA Finals game in front of your home crowd,” asked one reporter. “How does that feel?” “It feels cool.” This said shrugging. “I mean, everyone’s pretty excited. I’m excited too.” An eruption of laughter; OG’s guileless what-am-I-supposed-to-say smile. “We’re all excited,” he elaborated. “We’re just focused on the next game now.” Read More
June 25, 2026 First Person The Mudder, the Lawyer, the Prince, and Mr. Wrong By Lisa Carver Glowing tree mold photographed after the October 1968 eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. In 2015 I was dating three fellows at once. A mudder, a lawyer, and a prince. The mudder was Greek and on weekdays he did something with computers in a sealed room where dust meant ruination, and on weekends he’d train to race in this extreme obstacle course where you had to crawl under barbed wire through mud and then jump on a bicycle and wild turkeys attacked you. He kind of looked like a flatworm. The most attractive flatworm on earth: lithely muscular, bendy, slippery. I wanted to lick him. Yet, can you believe it, he said yes to mud and barbed wire and turkey attacks but no to fooling around with me?? And for such a reason! His reason was this: “My judgment regarding our future compatibility is clouded by physical attraction. I don’t want to get broadsided by darkness.” What the hell! We’re not a hundred years old! It’s not the future! It’s right now. We’re on a date. These are our bodies on earth that we drag around everywhere. I thought getting broadsided by darkness was what everyone longed for … to have the burden of self, the responsibility of existence, temporarily annihilated by tidal wave. To be helpless. I thought (still think?) that’s what sexual love is: the closest you can get to death and still live. He seemed to want a love both convenient and long-lasting? What?? And I don’t know how he thought he was getting closer to finding such a thing by simultaneously refusing to either accept me or reject me. Read More
June 24, 2026 Dispatch Taiwan English By Tao Lin Graphic designers and proofreaders—and the businesses and governments they work for—usually succeed at eliminating errors in the text of signs, shirts, and ads. In Taiwan, the normal standards seem relaxed for the English-language portions. I’m not sure why Taiwan has so much English—maybe due to optimism regarding tourism and business. Whatever the reason, it has resulted in widespread error-ridden, idiosyncratic, and unintentionally poetic English in public typography. I took these photos during a twelve-day visit to Taiwan. I hadn’t been there in six years. Mistakes and oddities have decreased since I started visiting in the nineties, but they’re still common. Read More
June 19, 2026 Triptych Three Horses By Missouri Williams A horse jumping over three ponies (detail). Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. I’ve never much liked horses. The first time I meet my sister-in-law is at the stables, where she keeps an enormous bay stallion with the same name as her brother, my husband. When the two of them were younger, this caused confusion: it was hard to tell which Václav she was talking about; which one, horse or boy, had behaved badly. Playing willing is a newcomer’s role in any family scene, so I ride my sister-in-law’s horse when she insists. This Václav is old, gentle, and toothless. Still, I cling to the reins. I’m much too afraid of falling. Later, in the car on the way back to the city, my sister-in-law tells me about the astronomical sums of money the animal consumes each month and the two jobs she juggles to pay for his keep, and I think of the opening of Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, in which a father, Strepsiades, listens to his son, Pheidippides, as he sleeps and dreams of chariot races, and laments that “his madness for horses has shattered my fortune.” I prefer to encounter horses at a safe distance. The difference between the immaterial horses who have galloped through my reading and the material horses that surprise me on walks in the countryside, big and breathing heavily, sidling up to fences with their long tongues lolling and buzzing with flies, never stops surprising me. Like death in a tragedy, the horses in Greek theater always seem to be happening offstage. In the final scene of Euripides’s Hippolytus, the battered body of the eponymous subject is hauled out for us to see; after being terrified by Poseidon, Hippolytus’s horses dashed his chariot against the rocks. The gravely injured boy then reconciles with his father, Theseus, before giving up the ghost. A messenger lets us know that the horses themselves have disappeared. He doesn’t know where. Read More
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