ISSUE 97 | APR 2021

PROPHECIES II

Kit Eginton

The Weight of Breasts That Aren’t There

The demands of the trans community have advanced from medical transition, to depathologization, to the institutional recognition of the possibility of trans happiness. But the question of what dysphoria actually is—a market preference, a neuroanatomical difference, an ontological mismatch between soul and body, a structure of desire—still lacks a satisfying answer.

Tamara Fernando

Ecology’s Ghosts

In 2016, among lonely sea urchins the color of day-old blood and a smattering of feather-soft hydrozoa wafting in the current, a team of scientific divers set out to catalog the physical features and species composition of known pearl-oyster reefs in the waters around Qatar.

Ben Carter Olcott

Just This

The Arctic is in Texas, the Sahara in LA; yet the snow melts in Austin, and it’s still 70 in February. There is a plastic island in the Pacific with a surface area of 1.6 million square kilometers, and I wash my cup so as not to be the problem—I wash it with more water.