The musical conquests of Goopy and Bagha
“Warmth and empathy are qualities found in all of Ray’s movies, but this genre allows him to display them in their rawest, least guarded form.”
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Angry Animals at the Muzeum Czartoryskich
A trip to the Muzeum Czartoryskich with Lauren Barnett.
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Mistress of a New World
The Blazing World — via a dizzy mix of animal-human hybrids, Immaterial Spirits, and burning foes — tells of a woman’s absolute rule as Empress over a parallel planet. Emily Lord Fransee reflects on what the book and its author Margaret Cavendish can teach us about empire, gender, and imagination in the 17th century.
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Fifty Years After Soweto: A Struggle Without Documentation Is Not a Struggle
“South Africa’s anti-apartheid photographers did not merely record brutality. They preserved evidence, built collective memory, and transformed the camera into a weapon of political education and international solidarity.”
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The Lexicon of Facism
“Langston Hughes’ words sent chills down my spine. It gave me the wherewithal to truly understand that fascism is not at all a foreign term, nor is it strictly related to Europe or even novel in twenty-first century American life.”
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Night of the Long Knives: One Night in Istanbul
‘It’s going to be a long night,’ I said. And it was.
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Memory Beyond the Mind
“Taken together, these examples challenge the idea that the past disappears once it is no longer actively remembered. The past often remains present in quieter and less obvious ways. It stays in what is unsaid, in the places people move through, and in the physical traces of those who came before them.”
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July Issue, 2026
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
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Independence Day Tears: The Memphis Blues of Furry Lewis
“On July 5, 1968—just three months after King’s assassination and the April 16th settlement that ended the strike—blues musician Furry Lewis was quietly shedding tears while entertaining friends at a party in his Memphis home. … The previous day had marked the nation’s first Independence Day since King’s death, yet for many black Americans in…
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Fiction: Blood Orange
I wonder where these guys are from. I wonder if they’re far from home. I wonder if they have kids or wives or parents or dogs who miss them. Or, maybe, who are glad they’re gone. Which would be worse?
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Maya Deren: The Magical Woman as Filmmaker
“In At Land, and in Meshes also, domestic interiors signify the world of human society in which the protagonist is contained and trapped, but here there is also an exterior world of landscape and seashore, in which she becomes empowered and where she acts with confidence and certainty.”
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The Art of Dancing in the Storm: A Philosophical-Practical Approach to the Enigma of Suffering and Existence
“You cannot command the oceans, nor can you dictate the trajectory of the winds. But the mastery of the helm—the art of adjusting the sails—is, and forever remains, your sovereign right.”
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Recognizing Beauty: An Interview With Patrick Joust
“Much of what has the most meaning relates to small stories and moments. This isn’t all there is to it, but recognizing beauty is really a big part of that too, especially if it can be highlighted in places that are unexpected or overlooked.”
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Movement and Memory: Oluwapelumi Fagbemi’s Photographs of Ballet
“Whether this movement is the careful pattern and madness of dance, the search for meaning, or the apotheosis of the human as spirit, the essence is always the act of becoming.”
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On Finding My Grandmother’s Portrait
For generations a formal portrait wasn’t a mere document but an assertion of self-hood: I’m here. Remember me.
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Thoughts on Photography: Walker Evans’ Polaroids
“People ask me what camera I used. It’s not the camera. Its—.” He tapped his temple with his index finger: it’s the eye and the brain.
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June Issue, 2026
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
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Potholes and Potshots: Yvonne Rainer
“From descriptions of individual feminine experience floating free of both social context and narrative hierarchy, to descriptions of individual feminine experience placed in radical juxtaposition against historical events, to explicitly feminist speculations about feminine experience”.
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Flash Fiction: 15 Seconds of Fame & Hopscotch at the Hospital
2 short short stories from Alfred D Searls
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Living Ghosts: In Times That Don’t Exist
The supernatural does not require foggy graveyards; it is closer and far more mundane. It manifests in a midnight kitchen, a crowded yet silent subway car, or a house where silence moves between rooms like an uninvited guest.
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Animals at the memorial art gallery in Rochester ny who know something you don’t
A trip to the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery with Lauren Barnett.
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Liminal Bingo
“Part of what I wanted was to create an excuse for people to find themselves in places they might pass by often but never actually stand in. Ditches. Behind shopping centers. Meadows and fields. Service roads.”
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Every Portrait Tells a Lie
“I might add that portraiture is also a tender art. It tries to hold onto what can’t be contained, which is life itself and a clear view of it.”
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Through Graciela Iturbide’s Eyes: Ritual, Identity, and the Poetry of Mexico
“When I stepped out onto El Prado after viewing the exhibition, I suddenly saw Balboa Park with different eyes, Iturbide’s eyes.”
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May Issue, 2026
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
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Letter From the Editor May: The Sticky Little Leaves, the Blue Sky
Springtime ramblings.
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Magpies Mix Tape: Troubled Sleep
A playlist of songs about sleep, not sleeping, and dreams for these troubled times.
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How to Love an Owl
I felt like the owl mother to the whole family. I wanted to spread my wings and cover the whole nest, and the father in the neighboring tree as well. To keep them safe and protected, from predators and bad weather and falls, and from us.
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History into Fear: The Ghosts of Edo
“Spirits return because something in the social fabric was left unfinished—an unacknowledged injustice, a normalized cruelty, a promise broken within a rigid order that leaves little room for repair.”
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Zeinabu irene Davis
“Surrounded by people who were almost entirely unrepresented in film, Davis found her calling. She returned to the US galvanised — she would dedicate her career to telling their stories.”
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More Than Half a Poet: The Grasmere Journals
It’s a strange but probably not-so-strange thing that a beautifully-written account of the baking of bread, of illness and worry, of the beauty of the light on flying crows, the wind on the water, the glow through the mountains, would have such an enduring power to move us.
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