Get in Line

CHOOSE YOUR PRECIPICE. The grist that makes modern life will run out at some point—when will we tap the last barrel of crude, blow through the remaining stocks of helium, deplete those rare metals only getting rarer? More pressing than bismuth and boron as I write this in September is who will win the election; even more pressing than that is a ceasefire in Gaza, though one worries that the war will only widen. Perhaps by publication time the conflagration will have broadened—perhaps the very worst will have come to pass, the Doomsday Clock having finally struck midnight, the world set ablaze by intercontinental ballistic missiles.

We have already endured years of near-misses by nuclear-weapons states—solar flares and training exercises mistaken for imminent attacks to be responded to with the most lethal capacity—as Emma Claire Foley points out in her essay for “Get in Line,” which considers the ways in which we wait today and for what exactly. Elsewhere on the nuclear question, Emily Harnett takes the reader on a tour of decommissioned missile silos in America’s heartland, Cold War weapons infrastructure now rented out on Airbnb or memorialized as patriotic kitsch. On the subject of cheap spectacle, Gabriel Winslow-Yost considers the promise of virtual reality, which seems to only improve in proportion to the real world’s degradation. Jess McAllen surveys the landscape of AI therapy bots: ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of mental health, they are yet another impoverishment of our health care experience. Few understand this more acutely than the poor, as Bryce Covert writes, pushed off of Medicaid across the country by the millions. Waiting on the powerful’s whims, too, are seafarers, who, as Laleh Khalili argues, have little redress against shipowners who fly flags of convenience and leave crews in limbo at sea.

There can be promise in waiting, however: Jack Sheehan considers what a finally united Ireland might look like, even as a shifting party landscape and the political rise of an Irish far right complicate the picture. Eric Dean Wilson writes on more than a decade of cruising and whether the analog experience of patiently seeing who’s around might combat sex’s domination by the apps and the gentrification of queer life. His essay is accompanied by photographs from the late 1960s by Arthur Tress depicting cruising in New York’s Central Park, a series Tress has only recently begun to show publicly. Fret as we might over life’s various ticking clocks, art rewards such forbearance (though a race can be inspiringly bizarre, per the issue’s short story by Manuela Draeger, translated from the French by Brian Evenson). Ed Park describes his rediscovery of an unpublished 1998 manuscript during the pandemic, finding a “document of sustained artistic bliss” he had yet to experience again. And Justin Guthrie contributes a series of portraits of discarded objects picked out from an obsessive period of trawling the Los Angeles River, the photographer now waiting for the waters to deposit another haul of trash he can make his own.