metazine

The poet Alice Notley died on May 17. But death was a place that she had visited before, a state with which she had long communed. Step into the uninvidious nonvoid inter alia especially be- Tween the live and dead for I have been there often and know it she writes in The Speak Angel Series, her. ..

In “Slaughter-land” — the First-Place Winner of the 2025 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — two Latin American filmmakers document how hundreds of mega-farms that contain tens of thousands of pigs are trampling Indigenous rights and befouling the air and water in the Yucatan.

A discussion of A Burdensome Experiment

A celebration of Free Gifts in Brooklyn

My weapon is better My weapon is organic It is an organ, a pulse, a history

For the first time, wind and solar are beginning to displace coal power in China, causing emissions to drop. Analyst Lauri Myllyvirta explores the challenges ahead for policymakers, who must now choose between propping up coal or doubling down on the shift to clean energy.

The first round is often perversely the most fun. The heaviness of expectations and the levity of possibility warp spacetime, making every win feel both satisfying and insufficient, like candy, and every loss feel both nauseating and not quite dread-inducing, also like candy.

In “Chasing Birds” — Second-Place Winner of the 2025 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — filmmaker Salma Sultana Barbhuiya explores how Rustom Basumatary, who came of age during a time of violent conflict in the Indian state of Assam, found identity and purpose in nature.

In “Amazon Tipping Point” — Third-Place Winner of the 2025 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — Brazilian filmmakers capture striking images of clear-cutting and explore how human activity is so damaging the world’s largest rainforest that it will not be able to recover.

Biologists once thought that humans did little to affect the course of evolution in the short term. But a recent study of cod in the Baltic Sea reveals how overfishing and selective harvest of the largest fish has caused genetic changes that favor slower growth and smaller size.

Too long, too hard, too loose, too crass: these are the problems that abridgment seeks to fix. They are only problems to a writer’s enemies: politicians, skimmers, benefactors, and prudes. Who, then, abridged The Obscene Bird of Night—and what were they trying to fix?

For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages. On one especially unnerving Saturday the few employees in Penguin’s 23rd Street office that day looked out their windows to see thousands of New York–area Muslims who’d arrived to protest the publication of The Satanic Verses bowing to Mecca in unison. The management of the company behaved with disgraceful cowardice.

What was I trying to figure out? Beginnings, I think—what a beginning is, what one must do in order to start.

Each of these classification rooms was decorated with an astonishing density of Disney paraphernalia. Men with grief-lined faces sat in front of Mickey Mouse reliquaries, mini princess figurines arranged in rainbow tiers on top of metal cabinets. Inspirational wall art, printed on polyethylene panels, read P. S. You Got This and One Small Thought in the Morning Can Change Your Whole Day. The decor raised the possibility that the fixations of the Disney adult are a direct response to conditions of oppression—oppression in which the Disney adult is complicit.

The problem came on slowly, like delayed-onset tinnitus: one day I notice the whole world’s pitch is off, and in the moment of noticing I realize it’s been like that for a long time. Every opinion I have is someone else’s, baby bird food I suck down and turn around and spit into someone else’s throat. Every fact is flanked by a targeted ad. A scaly rash has bloomed around my eyelids.

You can tell men’s cycling isn’t a serious sport because the “Big Six” athletes come from four small nations—Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Slovenia—with a combined population of 38 million.

My students didn’t volunteer much about the intervening six weeks, except that they had been grateful for all the reading. Time in prison is always slow, counting down, and for the prisoners, the strike was primarily experienced as an excruciating further slowdown.

I think of the people I met on canvasses. The older Polish woman in Greenpoint who took a thick stack of Zohran flyers to give out to all her friends. The hijabi Indian American mother and daughter who drove in from Long Island to knock doors for Zohran so that, the mother said, life could be as affordable for others as it was when she was growing up in the Bronx. A mobility-impaired man in Bay Ridge who said he rarely got visitors and invited me into his apartment, where he talked about his frustration with inaccessible transit, and the hope Zohran’s platform held for him.

The Trump Administration’s reliance on ICE underscores a transformation toward a domestic politics of domination that mirrors its lawlessness abroad. Just as Trump felt no obligation toward any kind of established diplomatic processes before invading Iran, he has positioned himself entirely against the courts, attacking the bedrock concepts of judicial review and due process as interfering with the project of mass deportation.

Zoom in, zoom out; repeat mantras or drink soju: our pains and hopes will continue to occlude our sight.