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There’s perhaps no better emblem of contemporary existence than a shattered phone screen. Abundance and dysfunction, it turns out, are not mutually exclusive. It follows that a broken phone recurs in Flat Earth, the debut novel by Anika Jade Levy, billed as “Speedboat for the Adderall Generation,” which is to say, zeitgeist-y and written with abrupt prose that skewers a certain downtown artistic scene—but with its own dissociative flair. Flat Earth follows Avery, an aspiring writer, occasional sex worker, and grad student living in New York. At the outset of the novel, she accompanies her best friend Frances on a cross-country trip…

An auctioneer wearing a judge’s black gown sits stern-faced, between an international currency conversion table suspended in midair and a large abstract painting for sale. Above him, a foreboding night sky appears where one expects a ceiling. This is the scene of Nicole Eisenman’s The Auction (2025), where a painter is also present, with a canvas, similar to the one on sale, by his side. Positioned within the composition as if he had been called to testify, he’s rendered in flat Cubist color blocks, which make him look gobsmacked—if not by the fact that he might be on trial than by the sight of an eager bidder before…

“I wanted the dangerous love built on long-distance plane rides, trauma, and failed girlhood,” the unnamed narrator of Grace Byron’s Herculine confesses, walking quietly along the narrow river that runs through a patch of land in rural Indiana inhabited by 15 or 20 trans girls, inhabited, in turn, by their 15 or 20 corresponding demons. 700 miles from New York with a broken-down Honda Civic and spotty cell service, she weighs the risks of remaining long enough to trial the return to her first love, her ex-girlfriend Ash. The most notable risk is that of demon possession, which would tether her eternally…

I annotated Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi, in the middle of February, while I was visiting my boyfriend in Zürich. Each day, I walked to the library and clutched the printed galleys in my hands, sandwiched between my iPhone and a bottle of Swiss Alps water. I spent most of my time with the neurotic-and-slightly manic narrator inside the brute-concrete wing of the Swiss National Museum, or Zürich’s Landesmuseum. From the beginning of the novel, the melody and baroqueness of Koestenbaum’s sentences (sometimes spanning across an entire page) harmonized with my view of the Crystalline-clean Limmat river that I faced. My…

In the wake of what has been termed the “livestreamed genocide” in Gaza, images of Palestinian suffering have saturated our screens with an unprecedented persistence and immediacy. Yet these images demand something different from us. This conversation with scholar and writer Milka Njoroge brings us into the heart of her urgent question: “What demands do images of suffering place on our viewing practices?” As Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University whose dissertation explored the colonial logics undergirding humanitarian imagery, Njoroge brings a critical lens to understanding how Palestinians’ own documentation of genocide represents both continuity with and rupture from historical…

Have any of you ever imagined logging into your Cloud to find your phone after your death? The strangeness and a sheer, frantic-like ineffability of it? Would a ghost remember a password? Would it qualify for a face recognition app? Perhaps not. I mean, how would or could we? How could we know that? Inside the bardo realm of Amie Barrodale’s novel Trip (2025), Sandra—the protagonist’s soul or its clumsy scraps—attempts to access her former Cloud on her laptop. The habitual memory of what’s left of her reels in between the astral realm of death and rebirth. Within a baffling waiting room…

When I reflect on the films of Christian Petzold, a host of indelible images return to me. The end of Phoenix (2014), for instance, when Johannes (Ronald Zehrfeld) finally catches a glimpse of the serial number on Nelly’s arm (Nina Hoss), and cannot bear to bring himself to face her: the weight of his betrayal and deception, both within and beyond the film, crashing down on him. Or, in Jerichow (2008), when clandestine lovers Laura (Hoss) and Thomas (Benno Fürmann) are forced to embrace by a rose bush in order to obscure their faces from a group of school children walking past, and the…

I met Rhayne in the summer of 2020 in Winnipeg, shortly after I moved to Canada for my PhD. She was DJ’ing, already with a visible spark, already operating beyond recognizable structures. There was a sense, even then, that she was not simply participating in a scene but quietly rearranging the conditions of it. Our friendship grew slowly, largely through what we did not exchange: not turning proximity into possession, not forcing disclosure into currency. I’ve come to understand her films in much the same way. They refuse extraction. They withhold resolution. They linger, knowing that true confrontation and disclosure…

At a moment when many artists and arts workers feel increasingly distant from the institutions that shape their professional and cultural lives—and determine their income—questions about institutional leadership and operations have taken on new urgency, especially in light of ongoing controversies around donors and financial transparency. Institutions are sites of power and control, but also of possibility. They shape our understanding of art through the exhibitions they present and the structures they create. For many people, a public art museum is their first encounter with art and what they see there often defines what they think art is. Curator, writer,…

The book I’m holding is sturdy like a rock but appears as vibrant gradation, like a spear of light in a prism or the memory of a peacock in flight. I thumb open the tome guided by one of three ribbons, each a different shade of red, to mark the start of something, or my eager return. Inside I find lines of instruction, but also many other kinds of lines, some that provide directions (“Journey inward toward new exteriors”) or pose questions (“What are the heroics of a lack of heroic qualities?”). Still others simply stretch open the mind. I’m…