Columns

The fourth installment of #VQRTrueStory—our new social-media experiment in which stories and images cross platforms, from Instagram to the website to the magazine—features Jamie Alliotts’s encounters on the sidewalks of Manhattan.

The third installment of #VQRTrueStory—our new social-media experiment in which stories and images cross platforms, from Instagram to the website to the magazine—features Julia Cooke in Mawlamyine, Burma.

The second installment of #VQRTrueStory—our new social-media experiment in which stories and images cross platforms, from Instagram to the website to the magazine—features Lauren Markham reporting on migrants in Central America.

For #VQRTrueStory, our new social-media experiment in nonfiction, Meera Subramanian reports on a changing India. Follow @vqreview to keep up with the project.

The day is cool and grey. 
The solemn cuckoo haunts the damp limbs 
And recesses of the sour woods next door;
Her tone sucks summer from the air.

Christopher Nogy’s Passion for Medieval Instruments

“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” Quoth the raven. Why not quoth the curlew? Quoth the grackle? Quoth the—well, the crow?

Whereas the proto–science fiction of a century past (H. G. Wells, Octavia E. Butler, Edgar Rice Burroughs) looked to a bright if complex future, we can now scarcely imagine one that’s not irredeemably awful.