Steamroomography
An annotated guide to gay cruising in New York City steam rooms
Men have had sex with each other in public spaces since time immemorial. This sensual essay explores how they've done so in New York, from personal experience.
All Back Pages
A Pandemic Archive
Max Alvarez’s interviews record working-class perspectives on the age of COVID
How will historians reconstruct our time: as a view from above, or from below?
Figure and Frame
Safi Faye's films invert the ethnologer's gaze on rural life in Senegal
By placing ordinary people at the center of her work, Safi Faye revolutionized Senegal's cinema.
Seeing and Believing
Finding faith at Ark Encounter
Nothing can prepare you for your first glimpse of the Ark.
Egypt’s Season of Starlets
In the 1940s and 1950s, all of Egypt was transfixed by the divas of its rising film and radio industries
These are the stories – full of heartache and business intrigue – of the starlets who captured Egypt's heart as it entered the age of mass media.
Well That Doesn’t Sound Like Fun
On boredom, board games, and Debord
It’s long past time to stop treating games as a narrative medium. What is important in a game is not what it says but what it does.
From Issue 3
In the Domain of the Unknown
From death mask to CPR manikin, L'Inconnue de la Seine is a mythic symbol of our attempts to grapple with death - or reverse it.
A drowned Victorian teen, her medical manikin doppelganger, and their enduring entanglement with the question: “Can death be undone?”
Genesis
A short story
“But you’re still alive ain’t ya?” A story of North Carolina.
Great minds are not like ordinary people; theydo not wash socks or remember birthdays.They see clear through one aspect of the world, socks and all. The aspect furls and stretches like a catbaked in sunlight. Or molten glasspulled like hot caramel in cool stone hands. I have known three Great...
