What happened since the first volume of Folly came out? The editors, fanned out across the globe, asked ourselves this while sitting down to lay-in the latest volume, the volume sitting in your hand or on your screen at this very moment.
Italian novelist and antifascist Cesare Pavese was sent into confino in Southern Italy by the fascists. Ben Philipps reviews the poetry he composed in these lonely years.
after Ptolemy’s Prima Europa tabula
One girl gave a thirty-year-old vape store manager a blowjob while he was hawking pink and orange vape cartridges that looked like sippy cups. He died from a blood clot not long after, and she tattooed his name on the inside of her thigh. She was the wildest of us, and we treated her with a kind of awe.
It is a warm day in January 2020, and we are standing on a steep slope, just inside the lower edge of a tropical rain forest in Manoa Valley, on the island of Oahu in Hawai’i.
It felt reasonable – likely, even – that a small chunk of the Cessna’s body might wash ashore among the more minute objects: the sand-scraped bottles and fishhooks and driftwood that we would happen upon while traipsing up and down the shore. We knew any piece we might find would be small because our local drunk, Teddy Armstrong, said the plane was “smashed into a million pieces.” Since he was one of the few who were awake that night, he was the closest we could get to a trustworthy source.
The town was made of pebbledash, whitewash, pebbledash. I spent the long summer hours wandering the suburbs just to get out of the house, disrupting the silence of the streets with the slap of trainers against hot tarmac. The uniformed houses seemed to glide past me as I walked, as if I were standing still.
A movement of radical pedagogy briefly triumphed in the heyday of Britain’s welfare state, with deep roots in the aesthetic philosophies of the 19th century. Ruth Thrush writes on the possibility of recovering this forgotten moment.
Faye Chang reviews Owen Hatherley’s kaleidoscopic history of Central European exile in Britain, and the artists who reshaped the island’s architecture, design, and art.
Charlie Goldberg interviews Joshua Freeman, Professor at CUNY, on New York’s history of left struggle, the prospects of today’s latter-day revival of municipal social democracy, and the interlocking web of ethnic, labor, and mass politics that span the city.