The Midway Review

Update on Fall 2020 Issue:

We hope you have all been doing as safe and well as possible over the last several months.

When we set out to revive The Midway Review last Fall Quarter, we were living in a completely different world. We could not have predicted the scale of the upheavals in all facets of our personal and social lives that have occurred within the last half-year.

After thoughtful deliberation, we have decided to indefinitely postpone the slate of articles initially planned for Spring 2020 (and later moved to Fall 2020). We came to this decision for two main reasons:

First, we are unsure about the logistics required for a successful online and print issue in the fall: the capacity to format and publish your pieces online or in print without resources from the Regenstein Library, which we will have limited access to under the administration’s restart plan; whether the printer we had planned on working with is still in operation; how to organize distribution in a campus setting where large social gatherings will be discouraged or banned, etc.

Second, in its history The Midway Review has sought to publish pieces on “pertinent cultural and political topics.” True to this ethos, we find it imperative that the work we publish is in dialogue with the world in which those pieces are published. We feel that it would seem jarring and insensitive for us to put out a slate of articles not explicitly related to the various issues that are affecting our readers in this moment. As Editors, we feel a responsibility to ensure that your work is done justice to, and shared with readers in a climate in which they can be properly received.

We are tentatively considering an issue that explicitly addresses the pandemic, the Movement for Black Lives, and any other aspect of the general global upheaval that we find ourselves experiencing. In addition, we will publish an announcement when we decide to resume work on this planned slate. We welcome any and all feedback on this idea, as well as on the decision to postpone the Fall 2020 issue.

Please do not hesitate to reach out with questions and concerns.

Wishing you all safety, stability, and health,
The Midway Review Editors

Hello everyone,

We hope that you are safe and healthy in this challenging moment. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we will be pushing back the first issue of the revived Midway Review to Fall 2020. As such, the new deadline for submissions is Friday, October 2. What we are looking for in a piece remains the same:

- We cover a broad range of subjects – politics and current events, literary and cultural criticism, book and film reviews, religion, philosophy, and history. We are also looking for short, reflective personal essays on pertinent cultural and political topics.

- In brief, we are looking for articles that are articulate, well argued, and generally interesting – essays in the original sense of the term: thoughtful attempts, not academic papers.

- To send in a piece for consideration, please email it as an editable Word document to [email protected] and include your year and major, or other relevant biographical information if you are not a UChicago student.

- There is no upper word limit for submissions, however we would like them to be at least 1,000 words in order to allow for the full development of a topic. In your piece, please cite fully with endnotes rather than footnotes. We do not accept submissions that have been published elsewhere.

To get a better sense of The Midway Review, it may also be helpful to check out our past issues, which can be downloaded as PDFs from our website's archive (http://midwayreview.uchicago.edu/archive/).

Please feel free to send any questions, ideas, or thoughts that you might have to our email, [email protected].

Archive – The Midway Review

After a two-year hiatus, The Midway Review, a journal of longform essays by students within UChicago and without, is back! We cover a broad range of subjects: politics and current events, literary and cultural criticism, book and film reviews, religion, philosophy, and history. We are also looking for short, reflective personal essays on pertinent cultural and political topics.

In brief, we are looking for articles that are articulate, well argued, and generally interesting - essays in the original sense of the term: thoughtful attempts, not academic papers.

We are sending out a call for submissions for the Spring 2020 volume, due by Friday, April 3. To send in a piece for consideration, please email it as an editable Word document to [email protected] and include your year and major, or other relevant biographical information if you are not a UChicago student.

There is no upper word limit for submissions, however we would like them to be at least 1,000 words in order to allow for the full development of a topic. In your piece, please cite fully with endnotes rather than footnotes. We do not accept submissions that have been published elsewhere.

To get a better sense of The Midway Review, it may also be helpful to check out our past issues, which can be downloaded as PDFs from our website's archive (http://midwayreview.uchicago.edu/archive/).

Please feel free to send any questions, ideas, or thoughts that you might have to our email, [email protected].

Archive – The Midway Review

Feast your eyes on this piece from Aesthetics for Birds:
“In some ways, the aesthetic pleasures of cooking should be foremost in our minds. Because for a lot of serious cooks, you spend so much more time involved in the cooking process than you or your guests do eating it. And the cooking process is something that’s actually contained in the cookbook itself — it’s surely part of what you’re buying and getting out of the book. So why do we leave out the aesthetics of the cooking process when we review cookbooks?”

WHAT’S MISSING FROM COOKBOOK REVIEWS What follows is Part 1 of 3 in a series on the aesthetics of food. Read enough cookbook reviews, and you’ll start to notice a curious gap. Cookbook reviews mostly focus on how the recipes turn out …