Demand Your Voice | Online Only | n+1 | Reem Al-Ghurba, Maryam Kanaan, Habiba Majd
My weapon is better My weapon is organic It is an organ, a pulse, a history| n+1
After Milton Friedman published a 1975 compilation of writings titled There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, the phrase (lifted from Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel about a lunar penal colony) became something of a libertarian shibboleth. For Friedman, the “free lunch myth” was epitomized by the ostensibly “free” goods and services provided by the […]| n+1Articles – n+1
Countless people are left in harm’s way because of the state’s refusal to make evacuation plans. The hurricane ends up coming through weaker than expected—but then the levees break. Within hours, 80 percent of the city is underwater.| n+1Articles – n+1
BLACK RUSSIAN TERRIER, read the chyron on Madison Square Garden’s GardenVision video display. Beneath: THEIR ONLY COLOR IS BLACK.| n+1Articles – n+1
Semiotically, it's detached from all these kinds of things that it was originally designed for. But this kind of sign was always part of the corporate blandification of the American travel experience. The idea of the app is funny, because it turns out that apps are all like these highway signs, really. Like you're traveling on the information superhighway when you're on your phone.| n+1Articles – n+1
The poet Alice Notley died on May 17. But death was a place that she had visited before, a state with which she had long communed. Step into the uninvidious nonvoid inter alia especially be- Tween the live and dead for I have been there often and know it she writes in The Speak Angel […]| n+1Articles – n+1
On Monday, September 8, join n+1 for a discussion of Rutgers anthropology professor Christien Tompkins’s book A Burdensome Experiment: Race, Labor, and Schools in New Orleans after Katrina. Tompkins will be in conversation with UCLA history professor Robin D. G. Kelley. Copies of the book will be for sale, along with beer and wine. The event is […]| n+1Articles – n+1
On Thursday, September 4, join n+1 for a conversation with contributor Alyssa Battistoni about her new book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, out now from Princeton University Press. Battistoni will discuss the book—which Daniel Denvir calls “a remarkable, important work of sophisticated Marxist theory informed by spectacularly detailed analysis of our actually […]| n+1Articles – n+1
My weapon is better My weapon is organic It is an organ, a pulse, a history| n+1
The first round is often perversely the most fun. The heaviness of expectations and the levity of possibility warp spacetime, making every win feel both satisfying and insufficient, like candy, and every loss feel both nauseating and not quite dread-inducing, also like candy.| n+1
Too long, too hard, too loose, too crass: these are the problems that abridgment seeks to fix. They are only problems to a writer’s enemies: politicians, skimmers, benefactors, and prudes. (For now we will spare critics, editors, translators, educators, and, naturally, other writers.) Who, then, abridged The Obscene Bird of Night—and what were they trying to fix?| n+1Articles – n+1
For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages. On one especially unnerving Saturday the few employees in Penguin’s 23rd Street office that day looked out their windows to see thousands of New York–area Muslims who’d arrived to protest the publication of The Satanic Verses bowing to Mecca in unison. The management of the company behaved with disgraceful cowardice.| n+1Articles – 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
Each of these classification rooms was decorated with an astonishing density of Disney paraphernalia. Men with grief-lined faces sat in front of Mickey Mouse reliquaries, mini princess figurines arranged in rainbow tiers on top of metal cabinets. Inspirational wall art, printed on polyethylene panels, read P.S. You Got This and One Small Thought in the Morning Can Change Your Whole Day. The decor raised the possibility that the fixations of the Disney adult are a direct response to conditions...| n+1Articles – n+1
The problem came on slowly, like delayed-onset tinnitus: one day I notice the whole world’s pitch is off, and in the moment of noticing I realize it’s been like that for a long time. Every opinion I have is someone else’s, baby bird food I suck down and turn around and spit into someone else’s throat. Every fact is flanked by a targeted ad. A scaly rash has bloomed around my eyelids.| n+1Articles – n+1
You can tell men’s cycling isn’t a serious sport because the “Big Six” athletes come from four small nations—Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Slovenia—with a combined population of 38 million.| 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
My students didn’t volunteer much about the intervening six weeks, except that they had been grateful for all the reading. Time in prison is always slow, counting down, and for the prisoners, the strike was primarily experienced as an excruciating further slowdown.| n+1
I think of the people I met on canvasses. The older Polish woman in Greenpoint who took a thick stack of Zohran flyers to give out to all her friends. The hijabi Indian American mother and daughter who drove in from Long Island to knock doors for Zohran so that, the mother said, life could be as affordable for others as it was when she was growing up in the Bronx. A mobility-impaired man in Bay Ridge who said he rarely got visitors and invited me into his apartment, where he talked about his ...| n+1
The Trump Administration’s reliance on ICE underscores a transformation toward a domestic politics of domination that mirrors its lawlessness abroad. Just as Trump felt no obligation toward any kind of established diplomatic processes before invading Iran, he has positioned himself entirely against the courts, attacking the bedrock concepts of judicial review and due process as interfering with the project of mass deportation.| n+1
Zoom in, zoom out; repeat mantras or drink soju: our pains and hopes will continue to occlude our sight.| n+1Articles – n+1
Sensitivity to contradiction—of “In My Room,” he noted: “Two people wrote a song about loneliness, and five people sang it”—and spiritual conviction were foundational elements of his work.| n+1Articles – n+1
Shimizu’s films are often preoccupied with women forced into servitude by a hostile society, and geisha and sex workers are a recurring presence. Their subordination is marked by scent: In Forget Love For Now (1937), the perfume that a single mother has to wear to her job as a bar hostess causes her son to be bullied when his friends smell it on him, kicking him out of their group “because your mom is bad.” The smell of the perfume marks the mother as socially deviant, a condition that ...| n+1Articles – n+1
This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have done to the world. Furthermore, it isn’t hard to bring politeness and evil into view at the same time.| n+1Articles – n+1
IV. Homage to Boris Lurie Translation is enlightenment. When you translate yourself to another language, cast away the dictionary. If you do not forget your first language, on your death bed you will still say O Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, your artichoke is highly competitive with other plant species. Upon first taking the vow of poetry, […]| n+1Articles – n+1
M texted me from the adjacent bedroom at 7:30 AM: “Are you awake?” In the kitchen, he combed out his beard and ate a banana, which his people’s warriors ate to feel full, he said. I pointed to a stray hair that stuck out the side of his neck. “I keep meaning to pluck it,” he said. We arrived […]| n+1Articles – n+1
British movies these days—from good ones like The Old Oak to OK ones like Bird to wretched ones like Saltburn—present British people as ruthlessly mean to each other, petty, conniving, classist, vulgar shits who add “innit?” at the end of sentences that are aren’t questions but insults. What is going on over there? Mike Leigh presents a meta-answer, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the performance of the year as the meanest of all, a depressed, grieving wife and mother ruining everyon...| n+1Articles – n+1
As the neighborhood bar played “New York, New York” (they do this for every Yankees win), the air felt electric. This was the team we came to watch, and while we weren’t sure exactly where they’d been the last week, we were happy to have them back. The final score of 11–4 lent a rosy sheen to what was, in truth, a night of ghastly behavior at Yankee Stadium.| n+1Articles – n+1
Just once in her life she shot a gun, when she was in the Venture Scouts, aged 16. It was at the Thiepval Barracks a few months before she took her GCSEs. The army must have been trying to recruit them or something. As if. The army guy, who’d shown her how to shoot the gun, looked like Travis Bickle prior to the mohawk. She’d fancied him slightly. They didn’t converse.| n+1Articles – n+1
Let me just finish disinfecting a table number marker and then off I go, I just have to put down what I’ve got in my hands to serve, I tell her that with my eyes, yes I’m coming, I’ve seen the whole thing, I saw you adding the sauces, the napkins, I know the order’s complete and besides that’s all I’ve got to do, serve, I’m available, I’m capable of taking that initiative. The crewmember calls for me all the same, she’s looking right at me and she calls for me.| n+1Articles – n+1
“I only love swimming,” I said. And it was true that I’d always felt awkward on land. Sometimes I wondered if that was why I was so unsuccessful at online dating: technology was incompatible with the water. “The monk thing does appeal.”| n+1Articles – n+1
Nowhere did I witness the guardsmen at the gates of the mind — those responsible for self-consciousness and self-doubt — more swiftly outsmarted, pacified, or outright killed than in that room. And the children seemed to inherently grasp the complex psychodramatic relationship they shared with their dummies — they were not sidekick, nor instrument, nor prop, but extension of brain and self.| n+1Articles – n+1
As Sheehi recently argued, “It will be the university that enacts the violence of fascism. The fascist just sends off a letter.” To this story we can add the psychoanalyst, who also seems all too willing to post. The university and its thinkers, and mainstream psychoanalysis and its analysts, have extended the Palestine Exception into the hollowed-out zones of purported free speech on the one hand and free association on the other.| n+1Articles – n+1
You were an organic intellectual if you were an intellectual who organized. That was news to me.| n+1Articles – n+1
Postcommunist Romania is manifestly a postcensorship society, a society in which everything is permissible and therefore explicit, lurid, cheap. Watching Bad Luck Banging, a film as pornographic as the society it critiques, it feels as if every line or image is a double entendre, even as the fucking is right there in front of us.| n+1Articles – n+1
This is how Amel is remembered today: charismatic, courageous, defiant. Walking in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, you’ll likely encounter a stenciled image of Amel’s face, looking out with a beaming smile, with graffiti urging passersby to read his work. As a friend once remarked to me, the combination of Amel’s martyrdom and his difficult prose makes him a perfect object for cultish fervor. But the renewed interest in his work — in the streets, in movement spaces, in academia ...| n+1Articles – n+1
For years now, commentators like Mounk have singled out the Democrats’ alleged fealty to “wokeness” as the reason for their electoral underperformance. Never mind that no nationally visible Democratic politician actually uses abolitionist jargon or gender-fluid pronouns; unlike the economic pain felt by a plurality of voters, the wokeness backlash really is mostly vibes.| n+1Articles – n+1
George Floyd’s murder made being black at the university significantly worse. When I try to understand how, I can’t help but look back on the chancellor’s words, ostensibly full of hope that the “national crisis” could “catalyze powerful change” — and how those words did nothing. After all, the scholars and writers I’m drawn to are in the business of shedding light on linguistic and other structures that pretend to be something that they are not.| n+1Articles – n+1
What is the tone of this literary-theoretical tone? Take away anything from reading these books together and it’s their similar vibe: something quietly persistent, invested in its own disinvestments, obsessive rather than obsessed; something that can’t notice without feeling implicated in what’s been noticed and so isn’t prone to anger. Hard as it is to wrap one’s hands around the vaporousness of tone, I’d still risk a label. The tone of the moment, if you take these books as a gu...| n+1Articles – n+1
What does it mean to live in an era whose only good feelings come from coining names for the era (and its feelings)? On one hand, perhaps our surfeit of coinages, many inspired by various resurgent Marxian traditions, suggests an intellectual ecosystem in which, as Jameson wrote, “everyone” — well, not Brooks — “is a Marxist and understands the dynamics and the depredations of capitalism,” albeit “without feeling it possible to do anything about them.” What the left la...| n+1Articles – n+1
In a majority-homeowner nation, the rental crisis alone cannot explain Harris’s defeat, especially since the concentration of renters in cities means that as a group they likely still tilted toward her. But the demographic overlap between tenants and those who moved away from Harris cannot be ignored. Moreover, the failure to adequately address the housing crisis exemplifies the fecklessness that doomed Harris’s campaign. Any effort to challenge Trump and the reactionary forces he spearhe...| n+1Articles – n+1
I increasingly wonder how often we've labeled protesters as “anti-globalization” who were, in fact, advocating for alter-globalization, and were critiquing the lack of labor or environmental protections in major international trade agreements, or in WTO decision-making processes, and so forth, but were not necessarily opposed to economic interdependence. So on top of the critiques of the decolonizing world and the Global South, we also see this reinvestment of grassroots energy from the l...| n+1
The political and moral problems involved with particular bureaucratic practices are largely whitewashed by those same narrative and aesthetic techniques that draw all of these films into generic proximity. The filmmakers, like their characters, are just doing their jobs.| n+1
This was how I would first understand Pavement’s music: dense bursts of esoterica punctuated here and there by mellow springs of warm pop hum, an Oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Various forms of self-fashioning followed, and soon I became myself, a guy named Stephen who smirks and scoffs and dodges questions compulsively, who dresses preppy but never combs his hair.| n+1Articles – n+1
We run clubs, we start projects, we advocate for ourselves and for fellow students. We have watched the most documented genocide in history play out, have watched our international friends be targeted and disappeared, have watched a countrywide assault on free speech and higher education, and have been pushed to action by the social justice education we have received, and by deep fear for our friends, our community, our world. You want to believe we are the exception—that we are a few ill-i...| n+1Articles – n+1
To be free is to be a subject instead of an object, to be able to act decisively in the world rather than only to be acted upon. For Du Bois, as for young people in Gaza and on college campuses around the world, by attempting to create a new freedom in the world, they came to know the world as it was; with some courage, they could imagine it as it could be.| n+1Articles – n+1
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It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at least one genre-disorienting tour through the facades of a studio lot, like the masterpiece sequence in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and plenty of languid musing about the vicissitudes of fame, often delivered poolside.| n+1Articles – n+1
Delivered Youssef to the place in Maine. I say “the place,” because I don’t know how to describe it. Is it a camp? A hospital? An asylum?| n+1Articles – n+1
Today anti-China policies are a rare point of bipartisan consensus. Popular opinion on China has steadily soured since the 2000s, first among business owners, then the public. Pew polling shows that some 80 percent of Americans view the country unfavorably, a historic low. Enrollments in Mandarin courses at US universities, which climbed steadily after 1978, have been falling since 2013.| n+1Articles – n+1
Anyone who has ever emerged from a multiday academic conference will recognize this truth: as the sun sets on the jetsam of crumpled programs and the custodians vacuum the carpet, you set out for the bus station or the airport and wonder what, and whom, it was all for. Our alternative ecologies, our archives of resistance, our insurgent epistemologies — what do they do, except make a living for ever fewer people every year?| n+1Articles – n+1
“Don’t write about me. Write about Korea, about the issues,” Mom has told me multiple times. Dad: “You seem to write about our family when you run out of topics.” I am embarrassed by memoir and simultaneously drawn to the form. I am always reading books by sons and daughters.| n+1Articles – n+1
He wouldn’t be thinking of my daughter, but then I also hadn’t been thinking of my daughter. Now I brought to mind her classroom, which I’d seen only once, during parents’ night. I brought it to mind deliberately and placed her at a little round table, reading a book, eating a snack. I imagined her hands, which still looked like the hands of a toddler. My son had elegant hands.| n+1Articles – n+1
Maybe it’s the case that younger readers — always a sizeable faction of n+1’s audience — associate email with school or work, and don’t think to sit down and compose, for fun, corrections or admonishments about, say, the misuse of Bourdieu in the latest Intellectual Situation (Issue 16, inspiring four letters in Issue 17). Maybe our email address (editors@nplusonemag.com!) is poorly publicized?| n+1Articles – n+1
What is the function of demanding that the entire federal bureaucracy search itself for traces that it might be funding programs to which the Leader might object? Plainly, to dement it. Or make it paranoid, make it pusillanimous, make it humiliated, and bring to the forefront the narcs, toadies, informers, and eager collaborators who can be promoted to replace those who continue their jobs and assert the law.| n+1Articles – n+1
Young recruits make ideal pupils: their minds are curious, their bodies likely tireless (and later, strong, for armed struggle), and their pasts, by definition, brief: no one needs to worry that much about a 12-year-old’s commitment to her bourgeois life, let alone about her being a Fed. (The memory of COINTELPRO was not distant for RevCom, and the group was serious about security culture.) The Party’s “Central Task,” according to the Draft Programme, was to “prepare the masses,” ...| n+1Articles – n+1
The fog that drifts over Oslo’s fjords and “comes down like a low ceiling” is “gray,” dawn is “gray,” hair is “gray,” Trondheim is “gray,” birds are “gray,” mice are “gray,” trees are “gray,” clouds are “gray,” suits are “gray,” sweaters are “gray,” scarves are “gray,” underwear is “gray,” old people are “gray,” faces are “gray,” Saturday morning is “gray,” November is “gray,” December is “gray,” spring is also “gray,...| n+1Articles – n+1
The thing about novel people is they think they are characters in novels. Or novelizable life. What is life. Round characters of course | who would ask to be flat a mere device to get us from one identifiable event to.| n+1Articles – n+1
I saw the outline of the Americas from space. North America was belching out strands of fat pearls, diamonds, gold and silver coins, swimming pools, cars, high-end watches, like the whole landmass was a slot machine with thousands of volcano-size receptacles. The coastline was rimmed with mounted machine guns, thousands of them, pointing outward. South America was made of mud, and I could see all layers of Earth, and the bones and skulls in it. The raised line of the Andes was not mountains, ...| n+1Articles – n+1
None of the following receives a substantive assessment in When the Clock Broke: NAFTA, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America,” Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s political career, George W. Bush, the 2000 election, September 11, the war on terror, the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, the 2008 global financial crisis, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, the legalization of gay marriage, the presence of the Minutemen ...| n+1Articles – n+1
If the government is good for business, why destroy the government? It’s possible Musk really believes he is saving the American economy. By all accounts a fervent believer in whatever he currently believes in — stopping climate change, colonizing Mars, juicing up global birth rates — Musk may be speaking in earnest when he claims that government bloat is ruining the country.| n+1Articles – n+1
As for me, my mind was blown open by Blue Velvet when I saw it college-aged in first run in 1986 at the Nickelodeon Cinema in Boston with my then-girlfriend. We could not speak when we left the theater, so rattled were we by this terrifying new thing that had come into the world (the same summer and fall as Down by Law, She’s Gotta Have It, Big Trouble in Little China, and Something Wild). This filmic world of smashed TVs, diners, wood paneling, the ominous hum of electricity, and rose-pink...| n+1
Kadare responded to political criticism with haughty petulance, but as a distraction from more troubling aspects of his work it likely saved his reputation. That’s because the connecting thread of Kadare’s oeuvre is neither an opposition to totalitarianism nor, as his less generous critics have claimed, pro-regime toadyism, but rather a monomaniacal mission to rewrite Albanian history by erasing the legacy of five centuries of Ottoman rule and fabricating cultural continuity with Greek an...| n+1Articles – n+1
Thank you to the poets, the story writers, the novelists, the essayists, the memoirists for your words that have lifted us toward the light. You remind us to slow down and be awed, to feel that unique joy in wondering about what we don’t know.| n+1Articles – n+1
THE WORLD The first world was suffering, suffering. The second world was liberation. Liberation! But why, said the first world, does it look so much like suffering? Like suffering only once, the second world said—like suffering plus change.| n+1
So, pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of and about intellectuals. Pessimism may be where intellect, left to its own devices, tends to gravitate. But in “Intellectual Identities,” a chapter in the new book, Mulhern sees pessimism as a professional deformation. Intellectuals idealize culture as something that they possess and as a possession that is all the more valuable to them because the society around them ignores it—and it is this self-serving idealization of culture that gives r...| n+1Articles – n+1
On Wednesday, May 7, join n+1 and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the launch of Rachel Cockerell’s experimental history, Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land. Cockerell will be in conversation with Lili Anolik, author of Didion & Babitz. Copies of the book—out from FSG in May—will be for sale, along with beer and wine. The event […]| n+1Articles – n+1
After Mahmoud was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents from the lobby of his Columbia-owned apartment building on Saturday, March 8, returning from an iftar with his eight-month pregnant wife, for about twenty-four hours where he was untraceable. Noor, his wife, had gone to Elizabeth, New Jersey, the closest detention facility to Manhattan, and was told he was no longer there. Eventually news trickled in that he had been whisked away to faraway Jena, Louisiana, to the infamous LaSalle detentio...| n+1
Perceptive critics noted early on that Serra’s sculpture only made sense in relation to its time and place and gave meaning only to those specific conditions against which it unfolded. Serra insisted on as much himself. We might apply such a phenomenological approach, or better yet, a deambulatory one (as the very eminent art historian Yve-Alain Bois proposed when both of their careers were still in their youth, in 1983), to the work as a whole: a “picturesque stroll” through the landsc...| n+1Articles – n+1
They could write a short story honoring the thwarted child by envisioning what its life might have become. The story had to be a minimum of ten pages double-spaced, with an honest attempt at showing rather than telling. Mike figured he’d give it a shot, as he’d prefer not to shell out more money to the government. Lord knew he already paid plenty in taxes.| n+1Articles – n+1
What scares them is something else: the realization spreading across Los Angeles that the private housing market isn’t just failing wildfire victims—it’s failing by design. That the inability to meet this moment isn’t the result of a few bad landlords, it’s a feature of a system built to extract. What landlords fear is that we might imagine something better: a world where housing isn’t a commodity at all, a world without landlords.| n+1Articles – n+1
• Mama writes (in reply to the photo of evening Lviv drenched in summer sun): Teach him Russian! Your child must not be deprived of the right to learn the Russian language. • I write: But didn’t you forbid papa to teach me Romanian? Who at that point decided our linguistic fate—yours and mine?| n+1Articles – n+1
“Nobody knows who the Houthis are,” Hegseth says in the group chat—another way of saying that, when we’re dealing with the Houthis, or the Houthi-adjacent, or anybody adjacent to anything or anyone else we find menacing, then those people also become nobody who matters, nobody we should bother knowing about, and definitely nobody whom anybody who matters should actually care about. And now that we think about it, isn’t it interesting how you want to know more?| n+1Articles – n+1
Wracked since November by a crisis of confidence, Democrats have repeatedly defaulted to autopilot in ways that embody this ethos. In Congress, that means deference to seniority and aversion to perceived risk. Democrats have been much kinder than Republicans to leaders atop their party’s caucuses. In bureaucracy, it means reverence for procedural niceties. The path of least resistance even gets celebrated as a positive good: look at us, following the rules.| n+1Articles – n+1
Two moments are irresistible to rock biopics: the birth of a good song, and its activation in front of an audience. The scene where the initial idea strikes the songwriter, usually while tapping idly at the piano, is a virtual requirement in the genre. Malek-as-Mercury hits on the “Bohemian Rhapsody” theme while pecking at the keys lying upside down. In the truly lovely Love and Mercy, in which a mumblecore romcom slowly swallows a rock-and-roll trauma plot, Paul-Dano-as-young-Brian-Wilso...| n+1Articles – n+1
The teleprompter is certainly not as important as the flag pins, the red tie, the red hats and all the other visuals of the MAGA movement. But it offers an interpretive key to the moment.| n+1Articles – n+1
The homies call it mobbin’. Mom shuttles us to and from Walmart, Taco Bell, Circle K, Blockbuster, the mall, while Sisqó—who previously lived in an abandoned car—rides shotgun in our silver minivan and slaps 2Pac and Biggie and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony songs for us to rap to and mariachi songs for us to yelp to.| n+1
Raya and Karim moved back into the family home. Her parents rented two gloomy rooms on the first floor of a house and shared a kitchen and a bathroom with the tenants upstairs. To Raya the rooms felt closed in and the whole house smelled sour. There was a narrow lane between their house and the one next door, and men passing by sometimes used the alley as a urinal.| n+1Articles – n+1
The Last Soviet Artist at the n+1 office| n+1Articles – n+1
So if you ask me about the signature strength of the department where I work, I will tell you. It is world-caliber field-defining research, wedded to a fantastically dynamic practice of instruction, accomplished at nothing less than the scale of the institution itself—all of it operating inside financial margins so narrow, at such absurdly low cost relative to its peers, you can hardly believe it.| n+1Articles – n+1
The left understands the idea of collective provision. We understand the idea of solidarity. You don’t just go out on strike. You have a strike fund; you have alternative means of provision. But I don’t know what those are in this case, if what’s being threatened is an NIH grant that funds an entire chemistry department, for example.| n+1Articles – n+1
Like any candid analysis of a sexual subculture, this material was seized upon by some readers as lurid and inappropriate, especially given my openness. The gender-critical feminists, in particular, have held it up as a kind of smoking penis, proof of my fetishization of women and, by extension, the pathological character of all transfeminine desire. I find this very amusing. For what am I accused of? Not, it would seem, aggression, violence, control, or any of the other supposed hallmarks of...| n+1Articles – n+1
Combinations are endless, but materials are scarce.| n+1Articles – n+1
I can only take so much messiah talk in science fiction, especially when it’s coming from Javier Bardem and Timothée Chalamet, both of whom I generally like, but here all I could think about was that they’d played Desi Arnaz and Bob Dylan. Did those two ever meet? This movie takes place in the year 10,191 and once I knew that I kept wondering if movies from the 10,180s and 10,170s were better. Anya Taylor-Joy shows up, a refugee from Furiosa, a much better film set in a much more interes...| n+1Articles – n+1
There may well be normalcy again. But it lies on the other side—not in accommodation to this malevolent insanity, run by lackeys and toads. The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.| n+1Articles – n+1
On our lunch breaks we planned a union-organizing drive for the office. We would go to this café that was small enough that we could see everyone in there (no eavesdroppers), far enough away that it didn’t really make sense to walk there and back (no one would look for us there), a little too expensive to be reasonable (too decadent for two dirtbags). “I’m a socialist, because if capitalism worked I’d be rich,” Teo explained to me after we had ordered scrambled eggs prepared with c...| n+1Articles – n+1
Sometime in 1997 Beth Stryker, who was one of Shulamith’s younger friends, sent us the manuscript. Would Semiotext(e) like to publish Shulamith Firestone’s new, second book? I think we said yes right away before even reading it. But when we finally did, I was just blown away by the way that Airless Spaces wasn’t a memoir.| n+1Articles – n+1
Like Critical Race Theory before it—but with a supercharged intensity, since each new campaign of right-wing hate has been more aggressive than the last—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has come to stand in for efforts and programs that have nothing at all to do with these words’ putative definitions or implications. The DOGEistes, in combing through personnel data on the hunt for “women,” “historically,” and “status,” have made it very clear that they’re not particularly ...| n+1Articles – n+1
It hardly matters for this purpose whether the new spy writers, late of their intelligence agencies, can produce basically competent thrillers; they all can. The question is what else they can do, what new spin they can put on the established library of espionage tropes. What value can their past intelligence careers confer? And if that value is bound up, in whatever way, with authenticity, then what is authenticity doing that makes it valuable?| n+1Articles – n+1
Perhaps because, unlike the Green New Deal, they actually exist, transgender people have been especially easy to single out and harm. Signed on the day of his inauguration, Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” requires all parts of the federal government to share the same definition of sex: “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.” Female “means a pe...| n+1Articles – n+1
Decenas de millones de trabajadores quieren un sindicato. La encuesta nacional más reciente, de 2017, concluyó que casi la mitad de todos los trabajadores no sindicalizados en Estados Unidos se afiliarían a uno si pudieran.| n+1
In a league hellbent on favoring the pass, the honest, appraising physicality of blocking and tackling has been replaced by the weaselly violence of the passing game. We wince for defenseless receivers, or throw up our hands at another ludicrous pass interference call, or stare in disappointment at another dropped ball.| n+1Articles – n+1
Labor’s future will also be decided by its response to a reactionary political climate, and whether it can overcome two sinister and mutually reinforcing dynamics that are now at play in the movement: opportunistic collaboration with Trumpism along narrow sectoral lines, and the embrace of an “America First” nationalist agenda targeting immigrant workers. Left unchecked, these forces promise to further fracture labor by dividing native from immigrant workers, and to consolidate a tenuou...| n+1Articles – n+1
“When did we beat Japan at anything?” Trump railed in 2015. “They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.” Commentators at the time laughed at Trump’s Japan fixation. They called it “anachronistic,” “out-of-date,” and “odd.” But Japan has in fact been foundational to Trump’s worldview, as historian Jennifer M. Miller has argued, dating back to his...| n+1Articles – n+1
Join n+1 and Spectacle for a screening of two films from the struggle to Stop Cop City: Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest, directed by Sasha Tycko, and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work, directed by Marion Lary and Tycko. Tycko—coauthor of “Not One Tree,” from n+1’s Fall 2023 issue—will be […]| n+1Articles – n+1
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The Roman historian Tacitus once chronicled the last speech of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain rousing his troops to resist the foreign invaders of their land. “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire,” Calgacus said of the Romans; “they make a wasteland and call it peace (ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant).” Much the same might be said of the contemporary invaders of the former Roman province of Palaestina Prima. The Israelis spent 470 days feverish...| n+1
The job parameters for wildland firefighters haven’t changed significantly since the 1980s. What has changed significantly since the ’80s is the climate. So essentially, they’re working with the job expectations, compensation, and health care packages of a planet in which they fight fires for maybe 10 percent of their time and spend the other 90 percent doing forest management projects. But now wildland firefighters spend at least 90 percent of their time fighting fires, if not 100 perc...| n+1Articles – n+1
