The winter issue of The Point, “American Realism,” is now online, with an editor’s letter by Becca Rothfeld assessing the art and culture of the “liberal resistance” that thrived during Trump’s first administration and why she won’t pretend to be able to predict what will come in the next four years, Jessi Jezewska Stevens on responses to right-wing irony, Lauren Michele Jackson on the failures of the DNC, and more.
For the New Yorker, Hanif Abdurraqib reflects on the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Butler, who lived in and is buried in Altadena, seems to have predicted the future with her 1993 novel. But “it’s not the fires of drug use or tumbling literacy rates that she invented—all of those problems were simply there for her to see,” Abdurraqib notes. “What ‘Sower’ imagines, rather, is a future in which surviving the seemingly unsurvivable requires people to show some emotional dexterity, some ability to surrender whatever selfishness they’ve been harboring and see if they have something that someone else needs.”
In the latest episode of the Granta magazine podcast, hosts Leo Robson and Josie Mitchell talk with director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle, So Long, My Son) about literature, cinema, and his approach to independent filmmaking.
McSweeney’s Quarterly, the Yale Review, and the Virginia Quarterly are among the finalists for the 2025 National Magazine Awards.
Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours, is being adapted as a series for Starz. Charlotte Shane reviewed the book for the summer issue of Bookforum: “With stunning accuracy, July captures the inner vacillations of a woman trying, and failing, to convince herself of her sexual obsolescence.”