Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

Even on the Moon, where time runs slower, clocks don’t stand still. Nothing stays static on Earth, either—in the words of Maggie Nelson, though we thrill at a momentary discovery, “a moment is [just] one moment.” This year, we’ve traced time’s riches and robberies: from menopause as modern epic to hot flashes of summer rage; from monster mothers to reality’s secret matrix and galactic elders still searching for new worlds of sound; from the weight of thoughts to the memories of rivers; from Garth Greenwell’s boyhood in Kentucky to the inner lives of artificial minds; and, in a final reckoning, some poems on death and dying from the one and only Eileen Myles.

Below are some of our favorite pieces from 2025—many of which appear in our 

, which also features work by Catherine Lacey, Chris Kraus, Jamieson Webster, and many more.

Miranda July: Circle Jerks

“I don’t write books to be a writer, you know? It’s just to get through this.”⁠

Last spring, we teamed up with McNally Jackson Books to co-present the launch of 

, where Miranda July and Elif Batuman dove into love-plot fatigue, meditation retreats, and the question of whether 

 might actually be menopause stories.⁠ We were delighted to include the conversation in our 

, and to read Elif’s 4,000-word ode to Miranda on her glorious 

Is a River Alive?

Streams, tumbling across time and toward the sea, have memories too. Robert Macfarlane reflects on the fragile majesty of the waterways that have shaped our world.

Scientific Controversies: Deep Thoughts of Artificial Minds

Do LLMs really understand? Do nonliving machines have inner lives? To cut through the noise around AI, we brought in two experts shaping the field: Adam Brown and Yann LeCun. In a special episode of Scientific Controversies, LeCun and Brown joined our co-editor-in-chief, Janna Levin, to unpack how these systems work, what they can and can’t do, and whether they’re anywhere close to thinking the way we do.

A Thousand Julys

The inimitable writer shares an ode to the season that scorches: “It was all those cars, all those drugs, all that red meat, all that money it sucked up and vaporized. Summer only remembers luxury and rage.” This poem initially appeared as part of our Heat Week collection, alongside contributions by 

Toward a Maternal Gaze

We’ve heard the warnings: children will drain your time, your money, and your focus. But what might a writer gain from motherhood? Could maternity be the beginning of narrative, rather than its terminus? Kate Shannon Jenkins considers the creative perils and promises of mothering.

Garth Greenwell Is Too Much

“My whole aesthetic practice is predicated on if something is too much, you do more of it.” Writer Garth Greenwell speaks with Jordan Kisner about gay boyhood in Kentucky, the hard-won gifts of his artistic ruthlessness, and if art retains its value when everything else falls away.

Picture This: Adinkras

Are we all in a computer simulation? Theoretical physicist Dr. Sylvester James Gates Jr. writes on how Adinkras—geometric tools named after West African symbols—chart subatomic worlds and map the hidden patterns of reality. In his words: “I take great pleasure in being tagged to find, with the help of these Adinkras, truths no one else has.”

Compatible Perversities: Maggie Nelson

“Perversities can be compatible, but then perversities are not static. We all change.” Maggie Nelson talks with 

 editor Lucy McKeon about dreams, sex, anxiety, and 

Lunar Time

On the Moon, time runs faster. But as our ambitions to explore the solar system grow, so does our need for a clock made for space. Elise Cutts untangles the complicated physics of lunar time. 

Scale

The brain is the only organ that can consider itself. No heavier than two clenched fists, it nonetheless carries the weight of consciousness itself. Directed by Tom McNamara and co-written by Janna Levin and Michael Jones, SCALE considers: What is the true measure of a thought?

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

“None of this is hard work for me. It’s just writing emails to your friends and reading poetry. I don’t know what else I do.” From expiring cats to Hitler’s bathroom, the inimitable writer shares the terminal poetry they like best.

Marshall Allen's Infinite Voyage

This year, we welcomed the Sun Ra Arkestra to Pioneer Works for a special performance—and we were lucky to get Marcus J. Moore to write on the group’s galactic elder, Marshall Allen. At 101 years young, Allen “still harbors the inferno of years past” and continues to seek new worlds of sound. ♦

tec-wonder

Best of Broadcast 2025

This note from the editors appears in print in our 

—alongside essays by Emily Raboteau, Marcus J. Moore, Dr. Sylvester James Gates, and Catherine Lacey; poems by Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines; and drawings by Daniel Johnston.

We humans get much less sleep than other primates, typically not succumbing to drowsiness until well past nightfall. We’re also inclined to socialize after dusk; some celebratory behaviors are only abided after sundown. These nocturnal habits are more than cultural norms. They reflect evolutionary consequences that can be attributed to our domestication of fire. The rise in evening hours spent around burning cinders may have shaped our ancestors’ circadian rhythms in ways that are now biologically embedded.

It was around a million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand, that the first hominids controlled fire. Our evolutionary predecessors would have known fire’s heat and light, engulfing trees or torching plains, shaping their landscapes. Naturally occurring fires were first captured and maintained to warm hands and roast game, to protect caves and kin from predators at night. But then our forebears struck flint to dry grass to make fire themselves, a discovery that still eludes our chimpanzee cousins. This advance has been credited by scientists with much of what makes us human. Fire allowed us to migrate from tropical to temperate zones; to cook and consume vastly increased sums of protein and calories; to take in the fatty acids that our brains needed to grow. We controlled fire. But then fire controlled us––not just our daily cycles but our mandibles, our metabolisms, our minds.

With fire we developed a compulsive need to transform our circumstances by controlling Earth’s resources. We forged ever-more potent tools for doing so. Since the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, this impulse has defined our accelerating dash toward what once may have looked like techno-salvation but which looks increasingly like our own extinction. Our will to turn Earth’s combustibles into energy has been the essential story of the anthropocene ever since James Watt got his steam engine whirring in 1769. Ambition cooking the biosphere into oblivion.

We contemplate these aspects of our species’ story at Pioneer Works, sometimes with bemusement. After dark, our audience collects around the fire pit in our garden for conversations and music that have inspired pages in this print issue, 

’s third. Robert Macfarlane reminded us, as we recount in an assemblage of quotes from animals who’ve graced our stage, that “when we recognize what is human in the creaturely, we also recognize what is creaturely in the human.”

It’s perhaps inevitable, as our own oblivion feels proximate, that we’ve turned our technology toward a signal fantasy of our age: the aim of leaving our damaged earth altogether to colonize space—never mind that our mandibles, metabolisms, and minds have been forged by forces here on Earth. That’s the subject of one piece here. Others skirt our self-proclaimed importance and our technological compulsions. Biologists remind us that whales have been breaching and thriving in our oceans for 50 million years with no technological ambition, while we’re on the brink of self-inflicted extinction after tens of thousands.

We sapiens are a technological species. We’re also an artistic one, and have been since our forebears threw up drawings by firelight on the walls of caves. We examine our lot, and produce wonders. This issue charts some of those, in the prose of writers we cherish and drawings by a musician we love; in geometric diagrams of reality’s matrix and maps of ocean floors; in tributes to cosmic jazz and efforts to daylight a brook in the Bronx; in an excavation of the history, and ghosts, of the brick-walled former iron works we call home.

Our fundamental nature as pyrotechnic primates may well be incompatible with our longevity as a species. This we know. What will we do while we’re here? Are we apes? Are we geniuses? Are we poets? Will we burn Earth to the ground? Can we save it? Will we go to Mars? Should we? Are we the apex in life’s experiment or villains in the evolutionary story?

As Cornel West said from our stage, “We are a wretched species…yet we are also wonderful.” ♦

Janna Levin and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro are the editors-in-chief of 

gen-excaliber-nouveau

Issue 03, Available Now

This conversation appears in print in our 

—alongside essays by Emily Raboteau, Marcus J. Moore, and Catherine Lacey; poems by Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, and Brandon Kilbourne; and drawings by Daniel Johnston.

 in galleys in October 2023, during a trip to a book festival in Lviv, Ukraine, where I’d been invited to take part in a panel on the relationship between Russian novels and Russian expansionism. All week, I was meeting with Ukrainian writers and activists, hearing stories from the front, and attending memorials for journalists who had been killed. Under these circumstances, 

And yet, the book met me where I was. Early into its pages, the narrator characterizes herself as someone who, having “just been paid $20,000 for one sentence about hand-jobs,” plans to spend the $20K on redecorating a motel room in the style of Le Bristol in Paris. The novel’s implicit question about stakes, and the moral responsibilities of art, constitutes the real suspense of the plot and is just as pressing as the erotic “will they, won’t they” between its narrator and her crush. Even in a country at war, I understood 

as an important novel—one that would open up new paths of thinking, writing, and living for many people, including myself. In it, Miranda describes aspects of emotional, conjugal, erotic, reproductive, and biological life that I had never seen put into words. Like all art that documents a previously undocumented part of experience, 

 is radical and political. There are kinds of political radicalism that are possible only in war, and there are kinds that are possible only in peace.

At the time I was 45 and working on my own book about middle age. I had been rereading Dante’s 

: a book I had first read in my 20s, and one that looked very different to me in the second half of life. I now saw it as the story of a famous love poet, a socially and politically successful man, who suddenly loses all his advantages—who descends, literally, into hell. He has to find a way to climb back into a world that isn’t governed by romantic love and glittery successes—a world that includes aging, death, and the afterlife. This story, too, I found in 

. Just as Beatrice, the love object in Dante’s youthful verses, must take a new form and become some kind of cosmic regulatory principle of goodness, so does 

 turn Davey into something far beyond a boyfriend. He is less like some guy than like Shiva, the Lord of Dance, a cosmic force of creation and destruction for a writer confronting her own career, early success, workaholism, and the alternately deadening and enlivening experience of fame and hierarchy. She’s working to nurture the spark that made her want to make art in the first place—and grappling with how to carry it into the future.

Right after I got home from Ukraine in fall 2023, I felt lucky to interview Miranda, briefly, at a press event in New York. (Our 10-minute conversation was followed, as I remember, by the ceremonial cutting of a giant cake with the color scheme of the book's cover.) Pub date was some six months away. Miranda had no idea how the book would be received. I thought

knew; I couldn’t understand why she seemed nervous. In the year after its publication, 

 became a global phenomenon, taking on a life of its own, and transforming Miranda’s in the process.

This spring, I felt even luckier to get to do an hour-long interview with Miranda for the 

 paperback launch at Pioneer Works. Rereading the book in May, shortly before my 48th birthday, I was struck by how constantly, unpredictably, and dramatically the narrator’s mental and physical state changes over its course. I felt how much

had changed in the past year and a half. Reading Miranda’s Substack, I understood how provisional and open the ending of the book was—how it had made room for these enormous changes, which of course came for her, too, and for her readers, with whom Miranda is currently engaged in the kinds of electrically open, infectiously sincere interactions that have typified her work for decades. Talking to her about this book again felt like getting to step into the same river twice—and the river, of course, wasn’t the same at all.

Elif Batuman

How were you imagining the reception of this book, as you were writing? In your Substack, you mention a voice in your head that said, "this could go very wrong"—the possibility of mockery from women who would say, "Oh, I'm not like that.” But you decided to place a different bet, to write "as if all the women in the world knew just what I meant and were urging me on."

Since then, the book’s come out and had this amazing life. As you put it, "The bet paid off (big time) but it's not exactly what I pictured." I wanted to hear about your fantasy of what might happen with the book, and how you were able to place that different bet in the first place.

Miranda July 

, I talked about it a lot with my friend Isabelle, who the book is dedicated to, and who the character of Jordi is based on. You know how you can psych yourself up with your friend? You're like, "Yes, this is gonna be amazing. How is anyone not gonna wanna be in on this?" Within our two-person circuit, we were so confident.

And you were right. It’s so great that you don’t have to discount that feeling.

I have it when I’m teaching sometimes. And I think: “What if we’re just this room of 12 people psyching ourselves up?”

Exactly. It’s super inspirational. Just because something makes you feel better doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

My friend Isabelle is a sculptor, like Jordi, and she came out with a $60 art book recently. She went to a psychic, and the psychic said, "Your book is gonna be huge," though she hadn’t mentioned anything to do with it. Isabelle was like, "Really?” The psychic said, "Yeah, it's very sexy and very funny." And Isabelle was like, "Oh no, that [book is] just dedicated to me. It's not mine."

She came back and told me, and so the circuit became me and Isabelle and this psychic. We were picturing a scene out of a musical. You know: "Hey, girl, have you heard?!"

But the reality is so specific. It's many, many women's individual stories.

We just heard one backstage, someone came and told you about her water breaking. I thought, "This must be what her year was like."

I didn't have a model for so much of my career. There’s always this emphasis on being a new voice, and then if you've made it, your story becomes what everyone talks about. But how I feel now is that I'm literally safer in the world. I'm less alone. The limb I thought I was out on is not a limb off of the world, 

Has this experience changed your idea of the role of books? When I started writing, I wanted each book to explain everything. And then, when strange and unpredictable things happened post-pub, it made me want to write another book that included them—a book that was bigger. But when post-pub reaches the level [of 

], you can’t even really fantasize about fitting it all into another book, it’s too big.

You know when you're writing a book and you get confused? I had years where I was telling people, "This book is different, i.e. brilliant, because it combines science and education and real interviews with the novel. I'm melding those. And there's charts, and people are gonna be like, ‘Whoa, I didn't know Miranda July had that in her. Just thought she was creative, but no, here she is.’”

I was working and doing interviews with women older than me, and with gynecologists and naturopaths, and I thought, "Ooh, for the first time, I actually have some facts, some information, some stuff I didn't make up." I suddenly knew more than my friends because I'd done this special research, which is so weird, right? I mean, we should all be told, when we get our periods, "This will stop, and that will also be a huge life change filled with meaning."

As I was working on it, it was a book about a woman writing a book. And that's still in there, but it's only a couple sentences. I realized I had other stuff—romance, aging in general, this story that I’d hit upon—that I felt like I needed to capture.

Sometimes when you’re writing, It's almost like you don't have to create anything. It's all already there and the book is tapping into it. Or the book is like a machine that makes something happen in the world. It's so exciting.

When people were like, "Finally, a menopause novel," I was like, "Yes, and that's great." But then I watched Fellini’s 

, which was recently restored (with completely illegible subtitles, but that’s another story), and it reminded me so much of 

. It’s about a mid-career artist looking back at when he got started, and at how to bring that energy into a new time. And I was thinking of Dante, who we talked about in our last conversation.

[Before this talk] I wrote my questions as notes, and gave them to the woman with whom I hope to spend the rest of my life, as we've discussed she should be referred to in public. She was like, "Oh my God, are you gonna go there and say 

 are all menopause novels? ’Cause that's baller."

I'm into that. So many men—okay, no, a couple men—have come up to me and said, "I realize I'm in perimenopause," or, "I really feel like I relate to this journey." And it's like, why not?

How did you create a work for public consumption that has the quality of a private communication? You’ve been playing with that line between public and private on your Substack, where you include some anonymized correspondence. I really appreciate what you’ve said there about trying to hold on to ideas and reactions that seem simplistic, because that's another thing you can lose when you're writing for the public.

In your Substack, you write: "This is mortifying, but also, this is the job. There is no way to think deeply and presentably at the same time."

My process is very unpresentable—like not okay, would ruin my life [to reveal]. Worse than not good. Problematic. But the act of thinking and feeling and writing things down, tracking changes over time, it’s all so private.

I'm so stressed out each time I hit post on Substack. I have this brand new assistant, and she just went through this with me for the first time. I was like, "Read it and then just say what you're feeling, but don't have my energy be affecting you. And does this part seem Republican?”

In your book, this woman is chasing something unavailable with all of the highs and lows and thrills—a pattern which I think is relatable for a lot of people. Maybe especially for women.

She’s chasing sex with the love interest, Davey, but also has this desire for security. If you get the security, that ruins the thrill. But the thrill leads to misery. And then she breaks out of the whole paradigm. This is not even two-thirds into the book—I think it’s when she finds out Davey is in Sacramento. Then the narrator and Jordi have this conversation about the Coyote and the Road Runner. How the Coyote’s whole life involves longing for and chasing this unattainable thing and experiencing crushing defeat and doing it all over again.

Traditionally, the rules of narrative are based on deferral and frustration. And it’s so exciting to me that it feels like you’re challenging this. Like there’s the question of what happens if the Coyote 

 the Road Runner? Does the story fall apart, and do we need a new kind of story at that point?

Well, I remember thinking, "The great challenge of this is that the Davey part ends." I didn't know what would happen after that because it was about aging. I knew I had to live into it. I was sort of collecting clues as I went, but that narrative problem was also a life problem. I thought a lot about where I would “spend the sex,” because she doesn’t have sex [with Davey]. I would spend it on the things she needs most, and that was sex with Audra. But she wasn't longing for Audra. That opened up the whole scope of what the goal even was.

My other answer to your question is that I'm 51. The book came out when I was 50, and from the time I was a teenager till then, I'd just worked. I've Road Runner-ed my way through my life, working as hard as I could. But after this book came out, that part of me kind of cut loose. Maybe everyone who's this age feels this. It's like, "Okay, that's done." You can’t repeat the same goals, the same wants and needs forever.

I don't write books to be a writer, you know? It's just to get through this. But things are different now. That Road-Runner thing appears to be over.

I love [what you say] about not longing for Audra, because it liberates the reader from the constraints of their own imagination.

Right. You should be like, "Oh my God, all I want to know is: Does she have sex with Davey? Does it happen?" And then when it goes this other way, you're like, “Whoa, I was looking so small. My vision was like a pin. All of life was out here?”

I’ve been thinking about the limitations of that particular love narrative. One thing I love about this book is that the answer is closer to: "Who knows? Meaning could be anywhere." I was thinking about the Jungian idea of Eros becoming Logos. You thought you were chasing the guy or the girl or whoever, but you were actually in pursuit of the book itself.

There's a line where Jordi says, "Okay, so you have sex with him, and then what?" And the narrator can't even think past that ’cause she's just too happy. You write: "I could hear myself. I sounded like other people, believing that sex could save me as opposed to knowing that only my work could save me." When I read that, I wondered whether you thought she was right—or whether believing that work can save you is just another version of believing that love can save you.

There are a lot of things the narrator says that I know aren’t true, that I wrote in because I've thought them or we've thought them. With that one I'm like, maybe work is literally killing you.

I did have a big physical collapse right after the book came out, which seems like a no-brainer, like giving birth. But it was pretty hardcore. I would hang out with Isabelle but I couldn't talk. We'd never hung out not talking. I was so lonely, so she'd come over and we’d start out on the couch and I'd end up sort of lying on the floor. After a couple visits like that, she asked, "Do you wanna just lie in bed?" It’s not a romantic relationship and it was the only time we'd really just touched each other.

But in retrospect, as I was writing this book, I did these dance breaks [on Instagram]. I always felt like such shit about them. You know? Like, I’m such an attention whore and everyone can see it. I'm not saying that's not true. But I also now see those moments less as breaks from the thing, and more like they 

 the thing. I was underwater, and they brought me up for air.

I don't write books to be a writer, you know? It's just to get through this. 

I love that way of thinking, because it redefines work. I just went to a silent retreat and I thought it would be really hard, but I found it incredible to not talk. It felt like a part of working.

It was a crunchy one where they were like, "Here's your journaling prompt," and everyone would take out their notebook to write about being silent. This is a totally frivolous question, but are you into yoga at all, or meditation?

When I came back from my five-day thing, I was like, "I'm super into the Bhagavad Gita now; non-attachment is everything." And that does feel, in some way, connected to your narrator’s line of inquiry in the book.

Should I share my meditation-yoga history? I did two of those Vipassana things in my 20s.

Yeah, the high misery level. The first time I went, I thought of the ending of the movie I was trying to write, 

, on day two of the nine-day retreat. I had to repeat it to myself every day so I wouldn't forget it, because you can't write anything down. The second I got out, I went to my car and wrote it all down on my map with eyeliner. Just like, "Goddamn it, I fucking held this thing." That's exactly what you're supposed to get out of those retreats—they’re meant to be 

The second one I had a cough, and I developed a crush on the woman sitting in front of me. I won't tell that whole story because I told it to Carrie [Brownstein] at the time and she made a 

 sketch out of it. But I never told her the most humiliating, heartbreaking part. There's a point in the retreat where you can go up to the teacher and whisper a question quietly. My crush was this short, gray-haired woman, and when she went up to talk to the teacher, I strained closer to hear it. I just needed to hear her voice. And she said, "The woman behind me has such a percussive cough, and I’m really struggling."

I’d been holding it together for days, and the tears just fell one after another. I stood there silently, thinking,

 this might be the worst moment of my life.

Yes. Later I did some other retreats, and sometimes I had a sitting practice but mostly not. And then I took TM, which always seemed a little Scientology-like, because I knew so many actresses who were into it. All I have to say is that it’s been incredibly helpful. I'm not a proselytizer. It feels like the cartoon image you have of what meditation's gonna be. It’s what I was doing before we started talking.

As the introductions were happening, I suddenly realized my energy was dropping. I slumped into a weird position, and you were so sweet, you were like, "You're a star!” [because you thought I was nervous]. I wasn't quite doing TM, but I was trying to get centered, like, "Even though there's all these people and they're talking literally about me right now, I can drop into my core, deeper self."

I love that. It’s making me think about what you said about stepping out of the story of writing the thing, and just doing it.

But I wanted to tell you—I was just in Milan, where you had this incredible retrospective. I was there with a friend of mine, an Italian writer. She's an incredible writer and an incredible person but sometimes our conversations are a little tense because I think she feels—correctly—that American writers, and English-language writers, have so many more opportunities than writers in most other countries. Even in Italy, there are residencies that American writers have access to and Italian writers don’t. So I didn’t know if the exhibition would tap into any of that tension, but when we came out I was floating. And I looked at her, and I saw that she was floating, too. She said, "Sure, there were parts where my envy kicked in, but Miranda July always makes me feel like I didn't realize what I was allowed to do." I think that's the highest compliment. You make so many people feel that way. ♦

This conversation took place on May 29, 2025, for the paperback launch of Miranda July’s 

, co-presented by Pioneer Works and McNally Jackson Books.

Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. She is the author of three works: 

art-gopher

Do large language models really understand you? To cut through the noise around AI, we brought in two experts shaping the field: Adam Brown and Yann LeCun.

, LeCun and Brown join our Founding Director of Sciences Janna Levin to unpack how these systems work, what they can and can’t do, and whether machines are anywhere close to thinking the way we do. ♦

brings together two scientists in conversation to explore unsolved quandaries. The focus is on ideas and the unknown, the precipice between where we are now and where we imagine the future will bring us.

Deep Thoughts of Artificial Minds

Change the frequency. Subscribe to Broadcast.

, my memoir, is both a product of images, and is itself a long image, if a singular image could be stretched through time like a thread of light. The book is written in fragments to induce the feeling of being online and shuttling between browser tabs. It attempts to deconstruct the metaphor “going viral” by tracing the interrelated histories of HIV/AIDS and the Internet. Amid this simulated clicking, my own history emerges: during the early ’90s, my parents died of AIDS.

Images influence text, but they also sustain and nurture the mental processes connected to writing. What follows are examples of images directly connected to 

, and images that provided (life) support as I wrote it.

In graduate school, I wrote about how the Internet has changed our brains, particularly in terms of narrative cognition. At one point in the text, I set the 

Opte Project Visualization of the Internet

 alongside an fMRI scan of the human brain to illustrate the structural similarities between biological and technological networks. Whether this resemblance occurs as a product of chance or unconscious drive, who’s to say. But when I first saw these two images side by side, a lightning bolt had pierced my skull. Their similarities seemed to reveal something about the nature of reality, and I came away with the sense that the Internet, an ocean of textual and graphical information, was closer to the world I was living in than the material one, where people abided by the unidirectional flow of time.

Linearity does not exist on the Internet, just as it does not exist in the coral-like vessels of our brains. Online, everything is more or less an image, and you can pluck one out and follow it backwards into history, sideways into fantasy, or nowhere at all.

I wrote about all this in 2014 and 2015. A decade later, is it any wonder there’s been an explosion of content pertaining to multiverses, portals, and time travel—taking us beyond beginnings, middles, and crucially, endings?

In 2016, I began doing research for an art installation based on the concept of “going viral.” I had no idea what shape the artwork would take, but I knew I wanted to dismantle the viral metaphor from all possible angles, including the biological. I found a free 

 course offered online, which was genuinely delightful because the professor’s extreme enthusiasm for viruses was, well, contagious. In one lecture, he introduced a time-lapse of a viral infection with the description: “The greatest movie ever made.”

Virology 2018 Lecture #2: The Infectious Cycle

This loop of infection left a welt across my mind, though the planned installation never materialized. As I fell harder and deeper into the rabbit hole of research, it very slowly became apparent that I wasn’t collecting information to create art pieces, but to write a book, and that I was writing it because my parents died of a virus. I knew this was true because my visual sensibility, normally overactive, went dark. Not a single image presented itself to me. I had no choice but to turn to words.

Once I was able to admit to myself that I was writing a book, I came across an 

 with Anthony Vaccarello, published about a year into his tenure as creative director for YSL. He reminisced about creating his first collection for the house, which involved visiting the Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent for research. While there, one particular dress, “a fall/winter 81–82 black gigot-sleeved velvet number with a heart-shaped décolletage and a taffeta pouf skirt,” captured his attention. The obvious choice for his debut would be to update the dress in accordance with contemporary trends and build a set of looks around it, but Vaccarello “didn’t want to just take it and cut it like a mini-dress.” He “wanted to play with the collection as a collage, taking one sleeve from that dress, playing with leather...” I read these words and shivered: Could I do the same thing with a block of text—or an idea? Could I break it into pieces, a sleeve here, a neckline here, and grow a body around it? The article did not contain a picture of the inspirational dress, and its effect on me has been so profound that I’ve been afraid to seek it out.

 is ultimately about metaphor, and it employs several metaphors in a weird shell game to repeatedly demonstrate linguistic gaps between thoughts and feelings. I am fascinated by metaphor because it requires an act of conjuration, of producing an idea from a void. 

 perfectly conveys this. It is one of the first photographs I had a proper visceral reaction to in a 

: I stopped breathing—not for very long—but for long enough to think, “Did a photograph just take my breath away?” The work itself is deceptively simple, not much more than a segment of desert captured through a tear in a window’s tent screen, but from this collision a portrait emerges—one of 

, no less. In fact, the true subject of the photo is the frame and its power to generate something out of nothing, like a metaphor. Without the screen’s tear and the other rectangles present within the image (which serve as additional frames), space would remain absorbed in the panorama of life, and completely invisible to the naked eye.

The structure of the book is loosely influenced by a Soviet montage technique known as the Kuleshov effect. Similar to metaphor, the effect works by refracting an idea into existence through the juxtaposition of images. Often these images are unrelated to each other, as in Eisenstein’s film 

 (1925), which features a sequence of factory workers on revolt interspersed with the graphic slaughter of a cow.

The effect was discovered in 1919 by Lev Kuleshov, the newly appointed director of the National Film School in Moscow, and his students, when they intercut a test shoot of matinee idol Ivan Mozzhukhin with images of a bowl of soup, a young girl in a coffin, and a reclining woman.

Despite the neutrality of Mozzhukhin’s expression, audiences were convinced these montages portrayed scenes of hunger, grief, and lust. From this, Kuleshov and his cohort determined that the actual power of cinema was in the organization of shots, or the editing, more than even the content.

I had written over 300 pieces of text for 

 but had no idea how to jigsaw them together. I could viscerally feel they were all connected, but I was unable to see the arrangement. However, something about the propulsion and intuitive logic of montage kept coming to mind, so I started to imagine I was editing a film. Applying the Kuleshov effect to the text allowed me to create unarticulated streams of content simply through the arrangement of information. It was another way for me to “write” about heartache and grief without explicitly engaging with those discourses. The feelings were not on the page, but in the cut.

On a sharp day full of ice rain, I stumbled into the modern wing of the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. In a small room with pale walls, I found the accordion of Ed Ruscha’s 

spread inside a glass case. For a moment I caught the sunshine and car exhaust and felt at peace. Shortly after this encounter, I found a full-page image of his work 

. Straightforward, the phrase of the title appears in white lettering over ominous storm clouds. While seemingly digestible in a single glance, internalizing the text is, to borrow from T. S. Eliot, an “occupation for the saint.” I tore the page out of the magazine and taped it above my living room doorway, so I would have to face it multiple times a day, every day, while writing about the past.

According to the Sotheby’s webpage for 

, Ruscha lifted the phrase from the title of a 1985 Emilio Estevez film, which is itself is an adaptation of a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton. This movement of content—from book to screen to paint to magazine—is, to my mind, emblematic of the creative freedom of Los Angeles, the city where I grew up: Everything is there, in the light, floating around the smog and the infinity pools.

The freeways of Los Angeles lace the city together, and driving over (and under) some of the giant interchanges can feel almost like a divine hallucination. The engineering is so extreme that the typical response is one of marvel: How the fuck could anyone build anything so absurd? Solely functional in purpose, utilitarian in aesthetic, these structures nevertheless have a way of embedding themselves into you. In a certain light, these roads appear as the underlying foundation of the city’s psyche. When writing about networks and the Internet, I’d Google images of the Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange, and the Eugene A. Obregon Memorial Interchange, and study them like mandalas.

I had a postcard of the Griffith Park Planetarium above my writing desk in London because I wanted it to connect me to Los Angeles, where I no longer lived. I would fall into this image—which was an illustration and not a photograph—and let my mind wander. I have a deep fascination with postcards as a form of communication; sending the “scenic view” of a holiday destination to a person (you love) back home is a unique type of transmission. It is a picture broken off from its referent and sent hurtling across the globe, making it a literal moving image.

When I find used postcards at flea markets, I am often crushed to the point of tears by the simplicity of their messages. I can’t really explain it, but it feels related to how immaterial our communications have become—in both form and content. To write a postcard, you must hold someone in your thoughts, and the act of holding someone in your thoughts, no matter the duration, is a great and beautiful thing. Especially now.

A great love of mine is noir, in all forms. It is a genre of loose ends and smoke rings: No one finds the falcon in 

is narrated by a dead man floating face down in a swimming pool, and 

. Rarely, if ever, do the plots of these texts add up to anything. There is no redemption, no resolution, only the feeling of life.

My work owes a great deal to Raymond Chandler, but also to the film 

 (1949), one of the most perfect examples of cinema to date. Not only does it seamlessly capture the complete chaos of post-war Europe in under 90 seconds, but it also scrapes away at human relations with a charm so deceptive it isn’t until you leave the theater (or exit the streaming window) that you realize you’ve been mortally shredded. It is my favorite film noir, though it swaps out the hardboiled detective for “a scribbler with too much drink in him.”

There is nothing like the feeling of loneliness in LA. It is a brutalizing force that can very easily lead to madness if not counterbalanced by some ember of grace that, more often than not, is found in the changing spectrum of sunlight. As a rule, it is never to be found in other people, though the city is full of them, which is what makes the lack of connection so intolerable.

A duet of photorealistic murals that lined the 110 freeway pictured this feeling for me. From the early ’80s to the early ’00s, two faces rendered by the phenomenal artist 

 tried to see each other across eight lanes of traffic and a cement pylon. On the northbound side of the 110, beneath the 7th Street overpass, a woman’s face stared out from between her hands—her palms out, open, and spread, as if up against a sheet of glass.

Directly across from her was a man performing the same gesture.

They were always connected but doomed never to meet—at least this is how my teenage brain understood the murals upon first seeing them. The whole situation of traffic, architecture, grime, graffiti, longing, sight, all felt symbolic to the place I was growing up in. What else to do but leave?

The murals were commissioned, along with nine others, in 1983 as part of the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. They were intended to convey the same sense of gravitas as the statutes that once lined the road to the original stadium in Greece. This brief was very liberally interpreted to create artwork on LA’s most highly visible and trafficked walls, which happened to belong to the freeways.

 with the intention of creating a welcoming gateway in the heart of downtown. It turns out the faces, belonging to artists Lita Albuquerque and Jim Morphesis, were looking out at the commuters the whole time, not striving to reach each other. The other thing about loneliness? It makes you the fool.

, people submit essays to win an all-expenses paid trip to a duplicate Earth that has mysteriously appeared in our solar system. Over a montage that shows the protagonist’s solitary, daily life as a high school janitor, we hear her submission:

When early explorers first set out west across the Atlantic, most people thought the world was flat. Most people thought if you sailed far enough west, you would drop off a plane into nothing. These vessels sailing out into the unknown: they weren't carrying noblemen or aristocrats, artists, merchants. They were crewed by people living on the edge of life, the madmen, orphans, ex-convicts, outcasts... like myself. As a felon, I'm an unlikely candidate for most things. But perhaps not for this.

Ever since seeing this film, I haven’t been able to get these words out of my mind. It was the first time I had encountered something on screen that so openly acknowledged the radical value of being on the periphery, of being an outcast (or, in my case, an orphan).

All the works of art and literature that have transformed my thinking were made by freaks, sorcerers, or hermits—by people who didn’t belong. The act of creation, particularly with words, requires such a colossal leap of faith that the only ones truly capable of it are those “on the edge of life.” They are the only ones with enough courage—and sometimes recklessness—to pioneer into the dark, where, quite often, the future is located.

ANOTHER EARTH Official Trailer

On days when the uncertainty of writing a book overwhelmed me, I’d just think of Peggy Olsen from 

 waltzing out of the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a painting of an octopus fellating a woman under her arm.

Peggy Olsen's Graceful Exit

Hovering in the background of season four of 

. The show is set in the early ’90s, and 

, a first-person quest through fantastical environments. Over the course of five episodes, the same fragment of 

 cycles over various computer screens as characters attempt to conquer a particularly trying level. The viewer sees the pilgrim, an enigmatic, warrior-like figure, walk through a field, towards a floating ensō puzzle. The assumption is solving this puzzle will advance the player forward, and yet, no matter how it is solved, the player is always deposited back to the edge of the field. Unsurprisingly, 

 is deemed pretentious, navel-gazing bullshit.

The 8-bit landscape of the game is austere and Crayola bright, and its visual presence in the show registers as a strange horizon line, silently linking scenes and themes across episodes—until it fully erupts into the plot during a montage set to P. J. Harvey’s “Rid of Me.” In this sequence, a main character discovers that the pilgrim can travel on the Y-axis and into other worlds. Harvey’s screams punctuating the pilgrim’s ascent into the sky creates a revelatory sensation: You can only play this game by abandoning gravity, through a paradigm shift.

The idea of a video game exposing how presumption leads to failure is so wild and so unexpected that even though this whole subplot constitutes only three percent of the narrative, the moment is gasp-inducing. Players kept flaming out because they doubled down on logic instead of considering poetry.

The best artworks force us to confront the mechanics of our own thinking. They go beyond providing content or perspective, and guide us to the actual structures that shape our thoughts. Once this becomes visible, observable, these structures can be consciously reengineered. As a consequence, your whole life can change.

A photo of my mother and someone I do not know. ♦

Heather McCalden is a multidisciplinary artist working with text, image, and movement. 

, winner of the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, is her first book.

ser-marvin-visions

13 Ways of Looking: Heather McCalden

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

At some point, after he stocked the rivers with salmon and peopled the villages with descendants and in-laws, Coyote disappeared. Of course, he did not die—at least not permanently. Coyote, like the Coyote People, could not be put down forever. He would come back. Someday... probably? And we would too. At least that’s what the Coyote People believed back when we still called ourselves Coyote People.

Best of Broadcast 2025

Best of Broadcast 2025

Issue 03, Available Now

Issue 03, Available Now

Miranda July: Circle Jerks

Deep Thoughts of Artificial Minds

13 Ways of Looking: Heather McCalden

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

The Cooler Jesus

The Cooler Jesus

Truth or Dare with Laura Albert

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

A Bundle of Desire

A Bundle of Desire