Spike Magazine #86 – Salad Days: Youth, Play & the Poetics of Leisure

Spike Magazine 86 explores the creative energy and cultural urgency of youth, play, and unscripted moments that shape how we live now. Named after the nostalgic phrase for carefree times, this issue looks at how playfulness, experimentation, care, and rest inform contemporary art and thought. Not as frivolity, but as essential cultural acts.

Inside, contributors reflect on youthful forms of expression, unexpected pleasures, and the poetics of leisure in a world fixated on productivity. Through essays, interviews, and visual narratives, Salad Days reconnects ideas of care, play, imagination, and radical rest with artistic practice and everyday life.

This Spring/Summer edition is both a call to slow down and a celebration of the unpredictable vitality that drives culture forward.