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winter2017

A House Is Not a Home: Dreaming about Property in America

When asked what her dreams are, Star (Sasha Lane), the displaced, teenage protagonist of Andrea Arnold’s 2016 feature, American Honey, tells a sympathetic trucker that she wants to get her own place—a trailer where she can raise a family. Always just out of reach, the imagined home propels her forward as she travels between towns selling magazine subscriptions, at one point accepting cash in exchange for a sexual encounter with an oil worker. Set on the open road, the film repeatedly depicts the homes of Star’s potential customers—lavish mansions whose inhabitants thoughtlessly discard jewelry amongst piles of presents or happily offer cash to watch the spunky teenager drink tequila. Honey is Arnold’s inaugural portrait of American culture, a bold, dreamy declaration that, regardless
BY    Alison Kozberg
June 3, 2025
June 2026

This Oval Office

Geopix/Alamy “Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered,” said Mr. Erskine. “I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray[1]   Prior to the arrival within its storied circumference of the effulgent portfolio of pathologies bound up in the decreasingly resilient skin of Donald Trump, the symbolic power of the postwar Oval Office relied in part on an oppositional quality. Existing at once inside of and walled off from the America it guided, the Oval Office in the age of postwar televised politics had served to signify an essence, to throw into stark relief the contrast between the monastic meditations required to keep America on its course and the ephemeral din
BY    Dan Monaco
March 22, 2026
winter2017

Against the Renting of Persons

David Ellerman, philosopher, mathematician, economist, and political theorist, is highly critical of the intellectual underpinnings of the current employment system, which he says institutionalize “the renting of persons” on dubious philosophical grounds.

BY    Editor
June 2, 2025
springsummer2008

Enough of Your Yankee Bloodshed

Emily Dickinson’s Victory comes late— first appears in a letter (absent any contents but the poem) sent to Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, in late 1861 or, at the latest, early 1862:

BY    Dan Monaco
October 18, 2023