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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
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
fall2008

From the Editors

Poet Karen Rigby’s “Norma Desmond Descending the Staircase as Salome” inspired The Straddler to rewatch the final scene of Sunset Boulevard, in which Gloria Swanson, as Norma Desmond, as Salome, lost in fantasy, descends the stairs for the close-up she is famously “ready for.”

BY    Editor
October 18, 2023