Sept / Oct 2015 Issue
“Happiness”

Pupsie Cola and One Hundred Thousand Glowing Beacons

Pupsie Cola and One Hundred Thousand Glowing Beacons

  The Girard Wing at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe is louder than a New Mexican Rodeo. Two months ago, I was drawn into this place …

Saya Woolfalk’s Happy People

Saya Woolfalk’s Happy People

In July 2015, when I encountered the installation by the New York–based artist Saya Woolfalk in the Disguise: Masks and Global African Art exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, I felt like …

Long Live Catharsis

Long Live Catharsis

I haven’t cried since the summer before I went to college and broke up with my high-school girlfriend. And by cried, I mean like when your face starts uncontrollably heaving …

Elena Ferrante’s Bad Feelings

Elena Ferrante’s Bad Feelings

Recently, I was Tinder messaging with a manarchist type (white, bespectacled, etc.) whose profile read: “Looking for the wisdom of Alice Munro in the body of Joan Didion.” A reference …

Taking Care

Taking Care

During a particularly unpleasant heat wave this past summer, I had a fever dream in the middle of the day. A conversation was unfolding over my text messages with someone …

How to be Happy: An Art Guide

How to be Happy: An Art Guide

Guess who’s happy all the time? Not many artists. While on the happiness scale artists may rank somewhere between a dog without a bone and an emo kid’s Livejournal, don’t …

Pursuit of Distraction: Internet Cats as Anti-FOMO

Pursuit of Distraction: Internet Cats as Anti-FOMO

Cats comprise some of the most popular content on the Internet. This is a well-documented phenomenon, but its precise reason has remained elusive. Cat culture came into its own in …

Godflesh

Godflesh

Tinder presupposes that one can find happiness in not having to commit to anything because one is willing to commit to everything. Becoming meat, from this perspective, is not degradation so much as liberation from some of the ordinary constraints of the real world, the “meatspace.”

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor: Alicia Eler

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor: Alicia Eler

When I was twelve years old, I remember seeing it: my first smiley face. It was gigantic and bright yellow, hanging on the exterior brick wall of a car dealership, …

The Happy Artist

The Happy Artist

If you’re constantly suffering, how can you make art that thoughtfully reflects on suffering? To make art that is personal, good, and potentially curative, you, my dear artist, need to …