Frank Y.C. Liu

DOORS 7pm

Your correspondent arrived at the scene ten minutes past the slated start time for The Drift’s launch party for its latest issue. Well, the latest two issues, since, as the editors later explained, “we didn’t have a fall party.” The buzzy new magazine, founded in 2020 for “young writers who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hivemind and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse,” was healthily on Issue Twelve, and our venerable old magazine, for Harvard aesthetes and earnest ones, was finally comping half the cover for a blog dispatch.

We are sad to share the news of the passing of Charles Dessau Atkinson III '58, longtime trustee of The Harvard Advocate and a valued member of the Cambridge community.

Fredric Jameson passed away at the age of 90 on September 22, 2024. Renowned as the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke, Jameson was a profoundly influential figure in Marxist literary criticism. Jameson studied continental philosophy under Erich Auerbach and Paul de Man when the winds of Anglophone academia were still blowing west, and produced a body of culture criticism in the Western Marxist tradition that would culminate in The Political Unconscious, published in 1981. His next major work Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has become even more salient to our present day understanding of the commodification of time, space, and culture. Jameson was an ambitious and prolific critic: his analysis spanned the gamut from architecture to film to novels, and even in his final year he published three books, Mimesis, Expression, Construction; Inventions of a Present; and The Years of Theory.

They were S—— L., L—— C., C—— A., and M—— G.; a political divorceé, a post-collegiate backpacker, a collegiate backpacker, and an affluent nonagenarian. From Chicago we had climbed up the steps into the first-class sleeper car together, but we would only really meet, beyond the faintest friendly glance, on the second day, and the cross-continental trip would have time to spare. Through the narrow hallway-space, our personal attendant escorted me, then L——, then S——, then C—— and L—— (they shared a room) into our roomettes: padded facing seats, soft Union blue, white cushions, a fold-down bed, clothes-hangers, curtains, and a door.

Peter Hessler is a writer and journalist from Columbia, Missouri. A regular contributor to The New Yorker and National Geographic Magazine, he is the author of three books documenting Reform China (River Town, Oracle Bones, Country Driving), a book on the Egyptian Revolution (The Buried), and an essay collection (Strange Stones). For his work, Hessler has been named a MacAuthur Fellow and a finalist for the National Book Award.

To my Leon acetate burned through your temple in a blue curl I could see it visible as the flash and glitz you used to love isn’t that ironic you would have thought so you would have raa raa’d and judged in that deep rumbling bubbling of yours I remember bumbling grasping it distilled in feeling through your polyester tanks black enough to sink with the Alcantara seats ribbed tickling my skin ear frame after your wayfaring as you put it making building and all the ruminants of the stars will be ours one day your humid intimacy beguiles me we never had much well you had nothing noticeably noting even on remember that day you said you were a maneuver of words I word agree this will never be read a deliverance can’t make it through flames so yes I write to

Ben Fry is a designer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the founder of Fathom Information Design, a Boston-based design firm. Fry completed his doctoral degree at the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, his postdoctoral fellowship with Eric S. Lander at the Broad Institute, and was the Nierenberg Chair of Design at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He has authored Visualizing Data, and co-authored with Casey Reas Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists and Getting Started with Processing. His work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Museum of Modern Art, Nature, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Minority Report, and The Hulk. In recognition of his achievements, Fry was honored with the National Design Award for Interaction Design in 2011.

They describe us, … That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct. — Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses