June 25, 2026 First Person The Mudder, the Lawyer, the Prince, and Mr. Wrong By Lisa Carver Glowing tree mold photographed after the October 1968 eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. In 2015 I was dating three fellows at once. A mudder, a lawyer, and a prince. The mudder was Greek and on weekdays he did something with computers in a sealed room where dust meant ruination, and on weekends he’d train to race in this extreme obstacle course where you had to crawl under barbed wire through mud and then jump on a bicycle and wild turkeys attacked you. He kind of looked like a flatworm. The most attractive flatworm on earth: lithely muscular, bendy, slippery. I wanted to lick him. Yet, can you believe it, he said yes to mud and barbed wire and turkey attacks but no to fooling around with me?? And for such a reason! His reason was this: “My judgment regarding our future compatibility is clouded by physical attraction. I don’t want to get broadsided by darkness.” What the hell! We’re not a hundred years old! It’s not the future! It’s right now. We’re on a date. These are our bodies on earth that we drag around everywhere. I thought getting broadsided by darkness was what everyone longed for … to have the burden of self, the responsibility of existence, temporarily annihilated by tidal wave. To be helpless. I thought (still think?) that’s what sexual love is: the closest you can get to death and still live. He seemed to want a love both convenient and long-lasting? What?? And I don’t know how he thought he was getting closer to finding such a thing by simultaneously refusing to either accept me or reject me. Read More
June 24, 2026 Dispatch Taiwan English By Tao Lin Graphic designers and proofreaders—and the businesses and governments they work for—usually succeed at eliminating errors in the text of signs, shirts, and ads. In Taiwan, the normal standards seem relaxed for the English-language portions. I’m not sure why Taiwan has so much English—maybe due to optimism regarding tourism and business. Whatever the reason, it has resulted in widespread error-ridden, idiosyncratic, and unintentionally poetic English in public typography. I took these photos during a twelve-day visit to Taiwan. I hadn’t been there in six years. Mistakes and oddities have decreased since I started visiting in the nineties, but they’re still common. This was for a pistachio drink, I think, at a café. I emailed my parents, who are fluent in English, asking them to translate the middle text. My mom wrote, “Taste the moment, wake up the soul.” My dad didn’t respond. I asked again. He still didn’t respond. The verbatim translation of the four large Chinese words is “Thick Cheese Egg.” The nonverbatim translation—“CHEESE AND EGG OVERLOAD”—seems preferable. This store had a long line. My mom said only one party is allowed in at one time, whether it’s an individual, a couple, or a family. There is often an extra space before question marks and exclamation marks in Taiwanese English. This was on the Taipei Metro, where most of the English is perfect. The mistakes here are subtle—not capitalizing “light,” leaving out “on,” though to me “Which” seems preferable to “on Which” here, even if technically incorrect. An example of correct English from the Taipei Metro. Cute-looking animals often stand in for humans in Taiwanese signage. This was next to a giant electronic screen in a subway station. While trying to figure out whether it’s grammatically correct—it isn’t—I found a Facebook group called Taiwan Chinglish. I found this in Taiwan Chinglish. So much to examine here. The elliptical density of these thirty-three words feels entrancing. I like the focus on motivation and change. Imagine if someone chiseled this into a stone tablet and people found it ten thousand years from now. Unique message. I also saw a shirt that said ALONEMASTER. I saw many shirts with positive messages in correct English. This one, at the Taipei Expo Farmer’s Market, was the most direct. I saw it while talking to my mom about the negatives of thinking negatively. I jogged back to the woman to take this photo. This was in a new mall in a building near my parents’ apartment in Taipei. No mistakes here, in my view—just a simple, calming message. I approve of contracting “Order sofa” and “Order Bedding.” Capitalizing “Bedding” but not “sofa,” or vice versa, seems unintentional. Good use of italics. Maybe this was a typo (R and E are adjacent on the keyboard) that got through due to a lack of copyediting by someone fluent in English. The more I look at it, the more acceptable it seems, though. This was in an area of Jiaoxi—on the east coast—where people pay money to submerge their legs in water while fish eat dead skin off their feet. The name HEAVY TASTE DR. FISH amused and impressed me. There were at least ten such establishments in a one-mile radius. In Taiwan, many versions of the same type of store converge in one area. Another place had four restaurants with kiln-roasted chicken. My mom said it starts with one store’s success, attracting competitors. Me and my parents at one of the chicken restaurants—the original and largest, with the most advertisements. It claimed to have five patents on its roasting process. Later, a cab driver told us that locals preferred a smaller chicken restaurant that didn’t use frozen chicken. We ate there the next day. An employee there—whose job was to put chickens into kilns—said the bigger place sold “fame,” while they sold “chicken.” This type of wonky translation has become rare in Taipei but is still common in other places. I enjoy the ungrammatical translations more than the grammatical ones. Here, I like the run-on sentence changing abruptly to a single error-free sentence starting with “And.” It feels friendly. Also in Jiaoxi, which had public areas for people to soak their feet in water from hot springs. I wish I could see a split-screen video showing (1) the English text as it was typed into the sign, and (2) a close-up of the face of the person typing the text. I like the directness here. The Chinese version was on another sign. The “real estate” seemed to be an empty lot that was completely fenced off. I wonder what they thought would happen if people acted on “election propaganda.” This was a few feet to the left of the previous sign. I’m not sure why there was so much concern over people messing with this fenced-off area. There are signs like this everywhere on the island, giving the scientific names for plants, sometimes with the English common names. I haven’t noticed mistakes on these—the binomial nomenclature is always correctly italicized and capitalized. A correct translation in high-level English at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. While we were there, both my parents separately told me that Chiang Kai-shek’s government transported many artifacts from China to Taiwan, into this museum, during the Chinese Civil War. People write Chinese on devices by typing the phonetic sounds of words using the Latin alphabet, or by drawing the characters, as my dad does here. I emailed him asking why, and he replied, “Drawing is faster.” I’m not sure what he’s texting. I can read maybe 0.5 percent of Chinese words. This was in Jiaoxi, where probably less than 0.1 percent of locals would get the English wordplay here. Caffè is “coffee” in Italian, which probably even fewer locals would know. To most people, this sign will look how Chinese looks to people who can’t read Chinese. Tao Lin is the author of ten books. He is active on his blog/newsletter. His essay “GemStone” appeared in issue no. 255 of the Review.
June 19, 2026 Triptych Three Horses By Missouri Williams A horse jumping over three ponies (detail). Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. I’ve never much liked horses. The first time I meet my sister-in-law is at the stables, where she keeps an enormous bay stallion with the same name as her brother, my husband. When the two of them were younger, this caused confusion: it was hard to tell which Václav she was talking about; which one, horse or boy, had behaved badly. Playing willing is a newcomer’s role in any family scene, so I ride my sister-in-law’s horse when she insists. This Václav is old, gentle, and toothless. Still, I cling to the reins. I’m much too afraid of falling. Later, in the car on the way back to the city, my sister-in-law tells me about the astronomical sums of money the animal consumes each month and the two jobs she juggles to pay for his keep, and I think of the opening of Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, in which a father, Strepsiades, listens to his son, Pheidippides, as he sleeps and dreams of chariot races, and laments that “his madness for horses has shattered my fortune.” I prefer to encounter horses at a safe distance. The difference between the immaterial horses who have galloped through my reading and the material horses that surprise me on walks in the countryside, big and breathing heavily, sidling up to fences with their long tongues lolling and buzzing with flies, never stops surprising me. Like death in a tragedy, the horses in Greek theater always seem to be happening offstage. In the final scene of Euripides’s Hippolytus, the battered body of the eponymous subject is hauled out for us to see; after being terrified by Poseidon, Hippolytus’s horses dashed his chariot against the rocks. The gravely injured boy then reconciles with his father, Theseus, before giving up the ghost. A messenger lets us know that the horses themselves have disappeared. He doesn’t know where. Read More
June 18, 2026 On Film Drinking Movies: Down and Out at Cannes By Inney Prakash Screenshot of Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return. I first got sober at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. Two days into the festival, I woke up with my ever-present hangover in a hilltop apartment lent to me by a Parisian friend. After deciding to spend my modest savings on what should have been a cinephile’s fantasy vacation, my initial endorphin cloud cleared to reveal my true motivations: an attempt to escape depression, temporarily forget my unemployment, and ward off paralysis about what to do with my life. Nicolas Cage went to Las Vegas to drink himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas (dir. Mike Figgis, 1995), Tabea Blumenschein in Ticket of No Return (dir. Ulrike Ottinger, 1979) went to Berlin, and I went to Cannes. In the Ottinger film, Blumenschein’s character, Sie, chooses Berlin because it’s unfamiliar—nihilism is easier to indulge in a place full of strangers. She tumbles through the night in a surreal and plotless sequence of vignettes that conjures the aimlessness of a good bender. Her drink of preference is cognac; she downs it several glasses at a time. After she picks up a homeless woman as her drinking buddy, the pair cavorts around town, now sousing in a bar, now a cafe, now a hotel. They’re followed by a chorus of three women in matching suits—embodying “Common Sense,” “Social Issues,” and “Accurate Statistics”—who babble about the dangers of alcoholism. “Did you know that between Moscow and Los Angeles,” asks Accurate Statistics, “only ten percent of the population is teetotal?” Read More
June 17, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Hannah Piette on “Nijinsky Dancing” By Hannah Piette Nijinski Dancing by Lincoln Kirstein. All photographs courtesy of Hannah Piette. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Four poems by Hannah Piette appear in our new Summer issue, no. 256. Here, she dissects “Nijinsky Dancing.” How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I was tasked in a drawing class to draw a figure in space. I knew at once where to find the figure—in my giant, golden book Nijinsky Dancing. Although we cannot watch videos of Nijinsky dancing, the book assembles a photographic record of his motions. I was taking adult-beginner ballet classes and reading the New York School poet and dance critic Edwin Denby’s writings on dance. In his essay “Notes on Nijinsky Photographs,” he observes Nijinsky’s technique only through photographs and writes that Nijinsky discovered how to control the “variability” of a face, as his face transforms from role to role. I chose a photograph of him leaping, in the costume of a prince. It was one of my first drawings of a person. I couldn’t get his face right. I kept erasing it and drawing new faces over the half-erased marks. He looked askew, covered in charcoal smudges. It wasn’t the single photograph that was the beginning of this poem, but the shifts between his figures across the photographs and the shifts between his faces and the erased faces I drew. In his roles, Nijinsky “disappears completely,” Denby writes, and remains “detached” from the imaginary characters that take his place, and who exist “independently of himself, in the objective world.” I wanted to write a poem that would work toward this technique. Was it possible to write a poem in which my face completely disappeared? Read More
June 16, 2026 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes As we were working on our new Summer issue, my partner and I began fostering a rescue dog, a seven-month-old pit bull named Woody. Left to his own devices on a sidewalk, Woody has the manner of someone searching for a lost earring. Often, having found the thing he was apparently looking for, he refuses to budge. It was only after we had spent a couple of weeks dragging him down our street that a friend advised that, without being given time to sniff at things, he was exhausting his body but not his mind, which was why he was often as antic after a walk as he was before. “Smelling is like reading for them,” the friend said. I grew up being told that reading makes you a more empathetic, nicer person; more recently, I’ve heard that “deep reading” (which means, essentially, reading a book) is the best way to reclaim your atrophying attention span. For some, who might prefer to outsource the activity and receive a quick description of what it was like, it’s an anachronism. Headlines say that children are spending less of their spare time with books—in Britain, the problem is a “relentless” focus on literacy, which sounds particularly Roald Dahl. What all these conversations are missing, of course, is the fact that reading is one of the most mysterious, pleasurable pastimes we have—which is why we have put together a Summer issue that we believe will fill you with a strange feeling of yearning, like a dog at a tree stump who would like to stay longer than is feasible. So it was after my colleague Dennis passed me Shuang Xuetao’s “God’s Arrow,” which appears in print for the first time in our pages, in a translation by Jeremy Tiang, and is named after a weapon with magical powers. “If it flies through the air,” says an enigmatic benefactor of the kind we could all use, “hold in your mind what you want to happen, and it will come true.” Read More