Issue 118: 17 September 2020

Letters Then and Now

By Patricia McTiernan   A few weeks after a stay-at-home advisory was issued in Massachusetts, I turned 60. As someone with a chronic illness, I felt I had jumped head first into the high-risk pool. With a long-planned vacation cancelled, I reconciled to staying home a lot and tackling projects I had long put off. […]

Humanity

By Steven Croft   Wants to believe kindness, its namesake, can still a morning rain of bombs, calm the lightning strike of artillery shells on cratered streets scorched hot and unlivable as the surface of the sun Wants to believe foresight will quiet the chainsaws’ outcry against ancient trees in the last remaining rainforests, make […]

The Fire Still Burns

By Gary Priest   Fire makes us all believers. There’s a unity in fear that allowed science and religion to merge into a rational hysteria that swept us all along on a wave of koala memes and apocalypse FOMO. The eco-inspired crimewave started in the mid 2020s. This was not just shutting down airport runways […]

Donald Trump’s Titanic

By Cassandra Henken   The world today is like watching a shipwreck in slow motion. Donald Trump is the iceberg, and America is the Titanic. We laughed about being able to smell ice when it’s near— Iceberg, right ahead! We elected him anyway. Just as they said, “God himself could not sink this ship!” when […]