Emily Witt

Awoman​ wants to be the agent of her own life. She doesn’t want to be a victim. She wants to believe she has made choices of her own free will, even when shown evidence that she’s been coerced. She prefers to maintain that she was not seduced, manipulated or threatened, that she was an equal player. She is annoyed when her individual circumstances are taken as proof of structural...

The​ San Pedro cactus evolved thirty or forty million years ago in the deserts of South America. Today its native habitat is the barren cliffs of the high Andes, two thousand metres above sea level. In spring, the distinctive green columns produce a large white and yellow blossom, which blooms at night and is pollinated by hummingbirds and bats. Like many plants, the San Pedro cactus...

As we now understand, a significant portion of the US population supports a politics of white nationalism. Writing against this reality is hard. No one seems to have found a register that reaches the other side. Americans thought we had some consensus about certain shared values. When it turned out that we didn’t, suddenly everything had to be argued for, even something as simple as a commitment not to harm people who would like to live in the United States, and never to harm children.

In 1996, a company called Purdue Pharmaceutical launched a new opiate painkiller called OxyContin. At a party celebrating its release to the public, Richard Sackler, a scion of the family that owns the company and its senior vice president of sales, made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,’ he said, according to a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’

Early​ in The Mars Room, a bus full of prisoners is being transported upstate from Los Angeles County on Interstate 5, which bisects California’s Central Valley. The bus passes by the stench of a cattle farm and follows a truck full of turkeys headed to slaughter. The valley is blighted, ‘a brutal, flat, machined landscape, with a strange lemonade light, thick with drifting...