After a storm at sea, salvage washes up on the beach. The post-shipwreck project becomes seeing what you can save from the receding tide. A long terrain is in front of us, laced with the wreckage of our failed forays, waiting for us to rebuild. 

In sports, a “rebuilding year” is the period of time that follows a major change. If Walter Benjamin had been a sports fan instead of a snowglobe enthusiast, he might have used “rebuilding year” instead of Rettung (salvage) as a metaphor for recombining the wreckage of history. You say something is a rebuilding year when you know that there are no victories in your immediate future, and so instead of chasing near-term returns, you choose to focus on building strength for future fights. Get a new coach; flush your roster; drill the basics; go to ground. Rebuilding Year is about the feelings that wash out when the tides turn against you—grief, weariness, and determination. It’s the feeling after upheaval, after your companions-in-arms have departed, after a regime change. 

We are in the time after shipwreck, and yet more damage is imminent. This is a time of shocking destruction. It is impossible not to empathize with a desire for rupture—when people are pressed this hard, when they are this angry, they will go for any kind of change as long as it’s sweeping and profound. There is more ruin to come, a thousand breakages in the world as we knew it. We would have chosen a different way to tear things down. But it is our challenge now to map the proliferating rubble and to offer the possibility of an equally radical change, from a different perspective. We can’t have the past and we can’t have the version of the future that the past imagines. Knowing it will take a lifetime to rebuild, now is the time to strategize: what are we going to make instead?

Naming the rebuilding year allows us a reprieve from the exhaustion of constant forward movement. It’s also an acknowledgment of the importance of defense—while we are mashaling our resources, the other team is making moves. But when we are boxed out of our usual routes, we open new avenues: unexpected diagonals, new kinds of pressure. The horizon is larger by far than we understand, and the tide can stretch out to meet new boundaries. Picking our way across the damp sand, we are looking for flotsam and jetsam we can use. 

Dania Rajendra resets the goalposts for the Democratic Party for the rebuilding years ahead through an analysis of NFL playbooks, which shows a reluctance to take up new strategies even when they are clearly beneficial to achieving established (field) goals. Why did it take a hundred years—a hundred years—to adapt football playbooks to the passing game, and what can this resistance to change show us about that other neoliberal war game, Democratic politics? How long is this rebuilding year going to last?

Join Kate Thomas for a warm and flavorful journey through the nourishing work of Queer Soup Night, from its historical origins in liberatory queer movements to its growth as community-oriented praxis. In what ways does feeding others—and gathering around food—strengthen our efforts to build lateral social ties and knit together the frayed edges of communal life? How have cooking and eating together played a part in shaping new visions from seemingly exhausted possibilities?

Kelly Pendergrast explains the joke behind a brutal object gifted from Benjamin Netanyahu to Donald Trump—a golden pager mounted on a slab of olive wood as a trophy that functions as an obscene hand-buzzer joke (“backslappery”) between two chummy military leaders and real estate developers who want to rebuild Gaza as an imperial resort. Simultaneously a document of barbarism and a kidding-but-not-kidding proposition for more, the golden pager is an object that is meant to live as a “good-enough” image that circulates online until it boomerangs back to hit us in the face.

In an essay about extreme cleaning videos on YouTube, Sam Thompson theorizes the radical, political potential of the social strike and traces its roots in the debates of social reproduction theory. What if the satisfactions of the extreme cleaning discourse weren’t reducible to the right’s obsession with purity and naturalized hierarchy? What role does the labor of cleaning play in rebuilding movements, political will, and sustainable forms of collective care? 

Brittany Dennison dances the night away in Itaewon, Seoul’s “international neighborhood,” which has been rebuilt with nightclubs and shops that echo the camptowns surrounding what Itaewon used to be: the garrison of an occupying army. Inhabited first by the Japanese and then the U.S. armies (whose troops are still present, just recently moved outside of town), Itaewon has an uneasy relationship with the South Korean government that both relishes its revenue stream and keeps its culture at arm’s length. It’s a place (treasured by queer folks, women, and expats) set apart to practice “Western” pleasures; it’s also a place, as Daniels finds, that’s hard to leave.

This issue is illustrated by Katherine Streeter, whose images build teetering compositions from salvaged pictures of the past.