The majority of the 2.3 million domestic workers in Mexico live hand to mouth. When strict orders to quarantine at home were put in place in April, many of their employers prevented their household staff from coming to work in order to protect their own families. They terminated domestic workers’ contracts and...

Felicia de Jesús spends her quarantine days behind a sewing machine making reusable masks on the balcony of her home. She sells them for $3 dollars apiece, a price she considers affordable for her neighbors, and just enough to cover the cost of materials. She lives four blocks from the...

This is the nineteenth piece in our Polity of Literature series: In 2012, when the Dutch city of Rotterdam closed eighteen of its twenty-four library branches, one neighbourhood responded by making its own leeszaal (or “reading room”). They organized a pop-up version in an empty storefront—a local library, more or...

The eighteenth piece in our Polity of Literature series: In the 1970s and ’80s, American writer Kathy Acker discovered that the surest way to develop her most innovative work and secure its eventual fame was by using the widely available parts of a parallel economy in the arts—a range of...

MIRROR | CINEMA | CITY: KARACHI CAPRI Althea Thauberger: The Capri Cinema Project By Zarmeené Shah Through a small window in a closed door, we see the world outside from within a darkened interior space. A man walks by across the street, past a shuttered healthcare shop. It is daytime...

“I really think it’s time to go,” our guide says as he nervously glances at his phone that glows half past five. Around us, as if on an unspoken cue, the air of urgency and anxiety thickens, and it strikes us that we have lost track of time and we...

Chapter 1 – Holes in the Sky MYITKYINA, KACHIN STATE, NORTHERN MYANMAR The half-dozen works of art hanging on the bare wooden walls depict family scenes—they are painted in bold primary colors with rudimentary strokes. Human figures hover ghostlike above the ground. They have no faces, nor do they reveal...