Alan Licht is a musician, author, and curator based in New York.

1
BILL ORCUTT, A MECHANICAL JOEY (Fake Estates)
Orcutt built this whole album from a sample of Joey Ramone counting off “One, two, three, four, five, six,” relentlessly looping and permutating it for thirty-five phantasmagoric minutes. A conceptual masterstroke, it pinpoints and illuminates the Ramones’ inner minimalism.

2
75 DOLLAR BILL (People’s Pavilion, Columbus Park, New York, August 29)
The sound clash that wasn’t: An expanded version of this percussion-and-guitar duo inadvertently faced off against a nearby troupe of Chinese

JJJJJerome Ellis is a Black disabled animal, a stutterer, and an artist. His album and book The Clearing were released last month by the Poetry Project, NNA Tapes, and Wendy’s Subway.

1
EMILY RICE, MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE I’M A LONDONER (First Artists Recordings)
I was grateful to witness Rice, who is known primarily as a composer of emotionally deft scores for television and film, shift her musical focus inward on her debut album.

2
THE HAWTPLATES, MAKE ME DOWN: SONGS FOR MAKING IT THROUGH ALIVE (4Be)
On this EP, The HawtPlates—a performance trio formed by family members Jade Hicks, Justin Hicks, and

Raque Ford is a New York–based artist whose work incorporates Minimalism, abstraction, and narrative fiction. Her art has been featured at numerous galleries and institutions, including the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art in Massachusetts as well as New York’s 321 Gallery, P.P.O.W, SculptureCenter, and Shoot the Lobster. Ford’s work will appear in this year’s edition of “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1, and her first solo exhibition with New York’s Greene Naftali will open in March 2022. 

Moses Sumney is a singer, writer, and multidisciplinary storyteller. His debut album, Aromanticism (2017), topped end-of-year lists for media outlets such as Bandcamp Daily, the New York Times, NPR, and Pitchfork. In 2019, the artist received an SXSW award for his music-video work and completed a MacDowell Fellowship residency. Sumney’s 2020 sophomore double album, græ, has received top marks from Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, and the New Yorker, among other publications. Sumney’s first solo exhibition in New York, “technoechophenomena,” will be presented by Pioneer Works and staged at

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane is a fashion designer and artist based in Mexico City. Her work—in haute couture, painting, performance, writing, and installation—has been featured in several group exhibitions, including “Prince·sse·s des villes” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019); “Señora!” at Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna (2020); “Otrxs mundxs” (Other Worlds) at Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (2020–21); “Prêt-à-Patria” at Kurimanzutto in Mexico City (2021); and “De por vida” (Forever) at New York’s Company Gallery (2021).

Copenhagen-based Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is a musician and poet. He is the lead singer and lyricist of Iceage, whose most recent album, Seek Shelter, was released this month by Mexican Summer.

Adam Curtis is a British documentary filmmaker and a journalist at the BBC. His most recent film, the six-part Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, was released on the BBC iPlayer in February.

I AM PUZZLED that so much of our mainstream social and cultural imagination seems frozen. A considerable amount of the film and TV drama produced today is about re-creating a reality that has already existed—consider how The Crown is judged by how perfectly it manages to simulate the British royal family and its many palaces. Even superhero movies are facsimiles of fantasies

Tavares Strachan is a multimedia artist who works in New York and in his hometown of Nassau in the Bahamas. His art explores subjects such as aeronautics, astronomy, deep-sea exploration, and extreme climatology, and has been featured in the Biennale de Lyon (2013), the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2018), and the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2019). He is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, where he will have a solo show in May 2022.

Torrey Peters is a writer who splits her time between Brooklyn, New York, and rural Vermont. Her first novel, Detransition, Baby, was published by One World in January. Peters is also the author of the novellas The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (both 2016).

I DEDICATED MY FIRST NOVEL, Detransition, Baby, to divorced cis women. While working on the book, I found a model for how to live as a trans woman in the writings of divorced cis women. Think about it: Divorced cis women must start over at a point in adulthood when they’re supposed to be established; they must give up on the

Akeem Smith is a New York–based artist and the founder of underground clothing label Section 8. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and Kingston, Jamaica. His first major solo presentation, “Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test,” is currently on view at New York’s Red Bull Arts.

Katherine McKittrick is a professor of gender studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006) and Dear Science and Other Stories (forthcoming).

Samuel R. Delany is a novelist and critic. His most recent books include Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012, Magnus Books) and The Atheist in the Attic (2018, PM Press). He lives in Philadelphia.

YEARS AGO, I remember encountering the idea that there is no problem we have in the world that could not be solved by the proper education; you’d think, then, that education would be one of the most important things there is, and I think it is, but it is such a broad category that there is no way to define, really, what it is. Some people are educating themselves when they walk down an old