ISSUE 96 | JAN 2021
PROPHECIES
Erica X Eisen
From the Editors: Bitter Water
John mentions many stars in Revelation, but the only one he gives the name of is called Wormwood.
Abraham Younes
Beirut’s Unheard Omens
In July 2015, an unusual story made world headlines: Lebanon was experiencing a garbage crisis.
Leah Gallant
Sunrise Alarm
I bought this thing because it’s a $27 orange disc of hope that the future exists, and I’ll be in it, awake.
Ethan Linck
Cataclysms to Desolate the World
What happened to a forest where fruit doves no longer ate fruit and dispersed seeds, a forest no longer filled with their mournful, cascading calls?
Fen Inman
In Which Confucius and Aristotle Place Our Hands on the Elephant
Just like touch itself, touch-like knowledge puts you in a dialogue with things that lets you move them, while sight and sight-like knowledge let you judge what something is and point it out to others.
SER
Ayahuasca, the Eye, and the Ashram
The ashram hills beckoned me; the medicine said it was time to leave my current life and go there: we had work to do.
Erica X Eisen
What It Means to Be Alive: An Interview with Ravi Amar Zupa
I’ll get stuck for long periods trying to think about the right thing to put with something. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut is talking about the same phenomena and part of human life that this Hindu god represents. Not in a very direct way, but more or less they’re talking about the same part of us, of what it means to be alive.
Hannah Sparwasser Soroka
Cannibals in the World to Come: Thomas Thorowgood, the New World, and the Lost Tribes of Israel
High up in the mountains of what is now Ecuador, Antonio Montezinos had encountered the descendants of the tribe of Reuben, who sent him back to Europe with a message of hope for the world’s Jews: “They say that the Prophecies do come to passe.”
Katy Burnett
Three Angels
Laura tries to record the things she sees in her diary. After her death, the record will turn into evidence, but even then it’s not clear what these visions mean or who they’re for, whether they’re flashbacks or premonitions or whether it’s wrong to use linear time to describe them at all.
Erica X Eisen
Sun of All Suns
For a brief period in the early 20th century, a small group of Japanese Muslims was earnestly proposing that the future of their country was Islamic—and people in serious positions of power were listening.
Bailey Trela
Prophets in the Wilderness: On Utopian Dreaming in the American Midwest
For the majority of my hometown’s inhabitants, history was at once a practicality—drawing tourists and their pocketbooks to the tail-end of Indiana—and a vaguely exotic overlay, one that almost retroactively justified the music festivals and paint-offs and theater projects that otherwise would have seemed hopelessly out of place in New Harmony, whose population, for the past 200 years, has rarely been above 1,000 residents.
Victoria Giang
Constructing the Lathe of Heaven
For overly optimistic advocates of neuroscience, dreams have become an empty frontier for new interpretations and applications. They are also venues through which the skillful can negotiate with their ancestors for future security or liaise with deities who can perhaps give them stock tips.
Cat Pierro
Pitches for Poems
This orientation toward stickiness explains the obnoxious prevalence of rhymes in poetry, though similar devices exist at all levels of depth beneath the surface—past the poem’s sound structure into its network of semantic echoes and “all the way down.”
Kit Eginton
A New Year’s Postscript
The first thing to remember when you find yourself taking a blackpill is that if it didn’t feel true, it wouldn’t have convinced enough people for you to encounter it.