Gaps, Which Is to Say Openings | Online Only | n+1 | Jonathon Atkinson
What was I trying to figure out? Beginnings, I think—what a beginning is, what one must do in order to start.| n+1
What was I trying to figure out? Beginnings, I think—what a beginning is, what one must do in order to start.| n+1
I have admired Naipaul as much as I have found him difficult to admire, a murky admixture that I find difficult to explain or clarify, and which I find with no other writer, to anything like the same degree. (Edward Said referred to his “pained admiration,” and dissonant phrases of that kind are scattered through appreciations of his work.) I know, too, that you knew him, which I did not. I don’t know if that makes him more or less difficult to appraise.| n+1
Today, the war on terror is widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. But it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco: an attempt by the Western media as well as the political class to forge reality itself, which failed catastrophically, but not without embedding cruelty and mendacity deep and enduringly in public life. And partly because this disaster was unacknowledged—editors and writers pushing false narratives, and cheerleading large-scale ...| n+1
I was embarrassed. To be grieving incorrectly, to be doing it publicly, to be preoccupied with whether I was doing it well. Dissonance was everywhere. The blunted, abject language of bereavement, and the responsibility I had, which I had worked for and wanted, to speak clearly about my own sentences.| n+1
At a time when the United States is backing Israel’s wanton destruction of the besieged Gaza Strip, in what some scholars have called a “textbook case of genocide,” principled dissent is of paramount importance.| n+1
