Joshua John Mackin is a public school teacher in New York City. More of his work can be read at signsandmarvels.com.
The Democratic Pleasures of the NYC Health Department Rating System
There are rats in the whiskey bar.
I tremble to contend.
For all its larger-than-life bravado, Kara Walker’s sphinx is the weakest part of her Domino Sugar Factory installation. Instead, glimpse her molasses children before they are no more.
“12 Years a Slave” isn’t the film we might have hoped for, but it is the film we deserve.
One of Dickens’ antagonists, Ralph Nickelby, boasts he is a man never moved by a pretty face, for he always sees the grinning skull beneath. It’s a vision whose austerity is meant to be an attribute—a steely verisimilitude which prides itself on seeing through all such delicate coverings. But it must be a very poor […]
Beyond mere amusement, then, Lincoln is intended (and received) as a lesson in politics, a love letter with an evangelical tinge written to a divided country of red-and-blue states, persuading us that democracy really can save our national soul. Remember, the film asks, when we could get stuff done?
By the time we reached shore, the creature had made its way to my back while still clutching her stomach, conjoining our bodies in the facsimile of a couple spooning.
Passports Four, Five and, Finally, Six
I wept, a sad little man desperate for contact whose fumbled reaching for more, for some small crumb of happiness, was mediated, eternally mediated, by forsaken doorbells and inscrutable documents and postal errors.
“It’s like your whole life’s in there,” a friend remarked once about my fourth passport.
Previous page Next page