Protean Magazine

hard as fuck. 21st century classic

The Same Battle, Again • Protean Magazine A.C. Corey unpacks the misguided revolutionary and cinematic hopes pinned on Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another"—each an expression of left melancholia and mania, of political and cultur...

"People with wireframe glasses like mine seem to have a lot riding on this movie being really good."

proteanmag.com/2026/02/24/t...

red script of questions • Protean Magazine In "red script of questions," poet Ali Choudhary creates a harrowing dialogue with the children of Gaza as they continue to endure Israel's genocide.

proteanmag.com/2026/02/11/r...

This is the best take I’ve seen on OBAA, which I wanted to like; I certainly love PTA, and I loved Inherent Vice. But transposing a ‘60s vision of urban leftist guerrilla activism in the present just feels really odd; doubly so when those movements petered out to such little effect.

The Same Battle, Again • Protean Magazine A.C. Corey unpacks the misguided revolutionary and cinematic hopes pinned on Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another"—each an expression of left melancholia and mania, of political and cultur...

A.C. Corey unpacks the misguided revolutionary and cinematic hopes pinned on Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another"—each an expression of left melancholia and mania, of political and cultural restlessness, of the fantasy of resolution.

proteanmag.com/2026/02/24/t...

from @hudafakhreddine.bsky.social's 'Poetry Begins at STOP: Etel Adnan & Arabic' (April 2025), which I return to over & over @proteanmag.com shorturl.at/SYDkx

The Workplace Arms Race • Protean Magazine Shane Boyle reviews Craig Gent's Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management. "Rather than representing a step towards scientific perfection, algorithmic management is simply the latest episode in c...

"Algorithmic management is 'a way of organising work in which workers are directed, tracked and assessed—all at once, in real time—by a computer system[.]' Tendrils of this managerial regime are now creeping into offices, universities, even hospitals."

–Shane Boyle

proteanmag.com/2025/12/23/t...

Anti-Convention: Richard Hell on Godlike • Protean Magazine Richard Hell's novel Godlike has just been re-released with a new afterword by New York Review Books. Andrew Holter spoke to Hell on his literary trajectory as a novelist and street poet, the sometime...

Richard Hell's novel Godlike has been re-released by NYRB Classics. Andrew Holter spoke to Hell on his literary trajectory, the inevitable Rimbaud and (Tom) Verlaine comparisons (and other noms de plume), the New York School poets, and his fearlessness of influence.

proteanmag.com/2026/02/13/a...

Anti-Convention: Richard Hell on Godlike • Protean Magazine Richard Hell's novel Godlike has just been re-released with a new afterword by New York Review Books. Andrew Holter spoke to Hell on his literary trajectory as a novelist and street poet, the sometime...

Richard Hell's novel Godlike has been re-released by NYRB Classics. Andrew Holter spoke to Hell on his literary trajectory, the inevitable Rimbaud and (Tom) Verlaine comparisons (and other noms de plume), the New York School poets, and his fearlessness of influence.

proteanmag.com/2026/02/13/a...

It's a sequence of poems written as answers to questions that children from Gaza asked the staff of the Palestine Trauma Centre (UK)

will the dogs that ate the dead bodies of the martyrs turn into humans?

red script of questions • Protean Magazine In "red script of questions," poet Ali Choudhary creates a harrowing dialogue with the children of Gaza as they continue to endure Israel's genocide.

In "red script of questions," poet Ali Choudhary creates a harrowing dialogue with the children of Gaza as they continue to endure Israel's genocide.

proteanmag.com/2026/02/11/r...

Threadbare in Rafah • Protean Magazine Poet Ahmad Ibsais's "Threadbare in Rafah" narrates the steadfastness of Palestinian children against the unimaginable terrors of Israel's genocide.

"In Rafah lies a girl
And for this girl, a brother
And for this brother, a kite made of cloth scraps
And for the cloth, a seam stitched by their mother
And for the stitch, a spool of red thread—
still rolling across the broken tiles..."

– Ahmad Ibsais

proteanmag.com/2025/12/10/t...

“The Serge that I love is the individualist anarchist. That, I think, was the best Serge.”

Mitch Abidor interviewed for @proteanmag.com on his new book, Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary:
proteanmag.com/2025/12/18/v...

Marx Goes to Texas • Protean Magazine From Issue IV: Ryan Moore examines Marx's analyses of the U.S.—and his onetime emigration plans. Drawn to communities of German socialist expatriates in the area, Marx once considered making his way t...

Karl Marx considered moving to Texas when he was in his 20s.
proteanmag.com/2024/08/11/m...

Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide • Protean Magazine Fargo Tbakhi writes with this reflective essay on the role and duty of writing in this time of a genocide. How do hegemonic prerogatives dictate style, content, and status? What can words do for us, w...

My essay on Abdaljawad's writings and Palestinian resistance is my attempt to answer the question that Fargo Tbakhi asked us in December 2023: 'What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?'
proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/n...

And here arises this testimony—not only as a daily record of generosity, selflessness, truth, and cooperation, but as proof, in itself, of an astonishing resilience in the moral structure of this community under genocide. This, precisely, is what anthropology must learn from Gaza: that despite the magnitude of the genocide, despite Zionism’s belief that its policies would produce a society the reflects its own monstrous image, the moral fabric of Gazan society has remained remarkably intact, even as long as the genocide has continued.

⟨from the excerpt in Protean Magazine ↑⟩

"This society held onto its image of itself [ ] its moral and cultural system. A significant part of it refused to let go, as if echoing Wasim’s search for the meaning of life, but at the scale of an entire people, the Palestinian people."

The Cave Olm To be an olm in its slipcase of dark is to live out a saintless century. No stars in our cave night, eyeless is our slow vigil, our waking is close to sleep. The waters coverlets, we dream sleeping olm dreams interspersed with midnight shrimp, pearlescent freshwater crab. We larval, half-grown, Protean masters of our coiled living fill dolomite caves, sweet aquifers. The long-lived olm, who feasts and fasts, whose element is shade, whose shape is a languid question half-made.

A sonnet for one of my favourite beasts, originally published in Fourteen Magazine a year or two ago!

We Had it Coming [EXCERPTS] • Protean Magazine Three new short stories by Luke O'Neil—"The rules," "How to live," and "Something that was once potentially good"—are excerpted here from his new book of stories, We Had it Coming, out from OR Books.

If writing can accomplish anything anymore (or ever could), it’s writing like this: proteanmag.com/2025/11/01/w...

Return of the Body Snatchers • Protean Magazine This Halloween, Kim Kelly digs into the history of medical graverobbing and desecration-for-profit—a long-buried symptom of the heedlessness and abject cruelty of centuries past. Right? Surely nothing...

the people yearn for bones proteanmag.com/2025/10/31/r...

🙏❤️ -Tyler & The Gang

2025 End of Year Round-Up | Protean Magazine Get more from Protean Magazine on Patreon

2025 was a helluva year for @proteanmag.com – and, if you are able to, you absolutely should chip in to support their work over the ✨year ahead✨, imo.

it's become a tired cliché, but no less accurate to point out: truly independent, high-quality, leftist media could not be more indispensable.

Extractive Frontiers: An Interview With Thea Riofrancos • Protean Magazine In this extensive, wide ranging interview, Laleh Khalili speaks with Thea Riofrancos about her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, the political economy of lithium mining, the poss...

Long and great article with @lalehkhalili.bsky.social interviewing @triofrancos.bsky.social!

Can't wait for Riofancos to write about her views on JB Fressoz book about energy transitions. Will lithium be yet another material added in the symbiosis?

@proteanmag.com

proteanmag.com/2025/12/22/e...

Emily Oster is aligned with Conservatives on nearly every important health issue: proteanmag.com/2022/03/22/m...

Haven’t read yet but reminded me of your post: bsky.app/profile/prot...

The Possession • Protean Magazine Poet Ian Maxton's "The Possession" roams across the "spooked-out American map," surveying the machinery of empire and the scorched landscapes it leaves behind.

"All the while
more and more bones
still stacking up
underhill
with no sign
of the stolen ones
yet

So America said
what’s spoken
is what is
even in possession

So America says
but what’s seen is another matter."

– Ian Maxton, "The Possession"

proteanmag.com/2025/04/08/t...

“Recoiling from the crudity of global politics-as-property-development while pining for the “rules-based international order”—the reflex of the very centrist international elites that primed the world for Trump and his ilk—is an exercise in futility”

This book by @lukeoneil47.bsky.social is full of beautiful, gut-wrenching prose. I'd call it Cormac McCarthy-esque.

'Across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we see a particular kind of real estate development thriving in the absence of territorial integrity and sovereign political authority'

Protean Magazine Issue V: Contra Temps • Protean Magazine Protean Magazine Issue V: Contra Temps features some of the best writers and artists working today. In dozens of critical essays, poetry, and art, our contributors and editors grapple with genocide, h...

And more besides. We also published dozens of poems, put out a print issue (Issue V, available at our store—see below), and hosted our first-ever event at the Verso office in NYC, w/readings from Kyle Carrero Lopez, Kinsey Cantrell, David Buuck, and Hanif Abdurraqib.

proteanmag.com/product/prot...