Right HERE, Right NOW

What does a MOMENT look like? How do you capture the ENERGY of one and what's in the AIR? We asked 16 ARTISTS, WRITERS, and THINKERS to show us the way.

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THE WORLD RIGHT NOW might be best described as inundating. There is too much happening, in too many places all at once, to even attempt to catalog or make sense of it all. It can be disorienting. It can be disconcerting. It can be so overwhelming that it's hard to see much more than a little piece of it.

These glimpses, though, are important. It has been said-over and over-that these are unprecedented times. But history has rarely unfolded in predictable waves of progress and regression, doing and undoing. More often than not, it's our collective response to change that leads us to regroup, pick up the pieces, and rebuild things differently. History is human, part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, and how we process it (or don't) in real time has bearing on our understanding of that larger narrative.

What's so special about that narrative is that it belongs to us. We are the ones who author it. As James Baldwin wrote in his era-defining 1962 novel Another Country (and, as it happens, in the pages of this very magazine): "We are the time."

For this issue, we invited a group of artists, writers, and creative minds to make an original piece of work or share a work in progress that reflects what they're feeling and thinking about right now. Their modes of expression vary wildly, from painting and poetry to cake making, choreography, TikTok, and-in the case of Fran Lebowitz-talking. But they each, in their own singular way, offer a snapshot of this moment in the world and in their lives.