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10 Questions for Jill McDonough

May 20, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Before we brush our teeth and get dressed, before
I take two kinds of blood pressure pills and three
fiber gummies, put coffee in one kind of go-cup,
kale smoothie in another, get into the car, I say I want
to have one more cup of coffee in bed and read you
this Ellen Bass poem, but it’s short and then we’ll go.
I am always drinking 1% in my coffee and trying
to tell Josey we have plenty of time. Josey wakes up
saying We’re running out of time! Which makes
no sense. You can’t be running out when it just started!
—from "The Good Work," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I kept a...

Seventeen Songs for the Truthtellers of Gaza

May 17, 2024 - By Farah-Silvana Kanaan

(An earlier version of this essay, titled “They tried to kill the truth, but it came back stronger” was published in Issue 4 (Spring 2024) of the print magazine, Discontent.)
 

1.

Every time I’ve opened this document to continue writing, I’ve had to turn to the death toll in the second paragraph and adjust it. Every time I closed this document, I knew that, while I went on to do seemingly mundane things – go for a walk, softly squeeze an avocado at the grocery store, sit in silence, the closest thing I have to prayer – by the time I returned to what’s supposed to be something between an ode and a eulogy, a celebration and a lament, an indictment...

AN OPEN CALL TO FELLOW JEWISH ACADEMICS

May 16, 2024 - By Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Advisory Council

May 16, 2024

As Jewish academics, researchers, and higher education professionals, we are appalled by, and refuse to accept, the deliberate mischaracterization, and weaponization of persisting fears about Jewish safety and well-being on campuses across the United States as the singular excuse for a series of misguided and dangerous policies by university administrators. These include attempts to destroy one of the largest and most significant student and social movements of the last half century, efforts to crush academic freedom and freedom of expression, encouragement for brutal invasions of peaceful student-led encampments, attacks and arrests by police forces, and facilitating the wholesale takeover of universities by the most illiberal and...

10 Questions for Jen Ryan Onken

May 15, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

At dawn, when I have to pee and there is that dread of standing, and after
I pee and drink a small jam jar of water, you’re the first thing I put in my hand, Pill.

In my palm you’re so perfect and white and round, and then I add
another one of you, broken so that the half-shard is less perfect but still a good Pill.

Lately I’ve been wondering which part of me is me-me and which part that
feels a little better than before when I just couldn’t but did— was that Me-Pill
—from "Ghazal for Pill," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I wrote the poem "Breezy Point after the Hurricane" about eight years ago, I was...

Partisan Review: Of Dreams and Hallucinations

May 14, 2024 - By Jim Hicks

It must be awful to be a Republican these days. So many reasons to be terrified: immigrants flooding across our borders, gender subversion from within, swarthy people rising from below, and so few of “our nation’s core principles” left unassailed. Even Sean Hannity, culture warrior supreme, can’t seem to keep up. How on earth to fight so many foes at once?

Enter Ethan Keller, a Hannity Show producer as well as cofounder and executive director of the Locke Society, an organization with its sights set on “ensur[ing] that the next generation of Americans is not overwhelmingly socialist.” Only by “encouraging the conservative youth to pursue careers in public and private...