You wanted it to stay a haven when all was lost: Kamal Adwan hospital, where even rocked by bombs and raids, you fostered all the small possibilities of care. The soldiers vacated. You found those patients whose safety ceased being yours to bear and let them sleep beneath the courtyard square. Death craves you all […]
Miss TranslationPoetryReading, Writing, and PublishingTranslation
[Anonymous] sent me several questions about translation. She worried that they were somehow “too remedial,” but they were actually something worse: ancient, unanswerable debates. Take this one: “How much ‘editing’ of an author when translating is considered permissible? What is the outer limit of acceptable on that score?”
Join n+1 translation columnist Bela Shayevich at the n+1 office in Brooklyn on the evening of Tuesday, May 19 for a translation mixer and mini-workshop for translators and the translation-curious. Bilingual participants are invited to bring “nasty, brutish, and short” selections sections of text along with an interlingual translation. “Together,” Bela says, “we will work […]
Please join n+1 at our office in Greenpoint for reading and drinks in celebration of Issue 53: EXCURSIONS! Featuring readings by Morley Musick, Angelo Hernandez Sias, Will Tavlin, Mina Tavakoli, Dennis M. Hogan, Gillian Linden, Nicholas Dames, and Mariana Mogilevich. Readings will start at 7, followed by a party, and cheap drinks will be for sale. […]
How can we train ourselves not to translate but to imbibe words that we don’t understand? How do we push past obscurity and opacity, without the requisite training in, or knowledge of, other languages?
Please join us for a night of cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and music to celebrate “the best goddamn literary magazine in America” (Mary Karr). Thursday, June 11 7 o’clock in the evening Weylin | 175 Broadway Brooklyn, New York Raise a glass, or three, to n+1—and to Dawn Lundy Martin and Paul Soto, the recipients of […]
Oscar Martinez’s remarks were emblematic of a more general response to Midway Blitz: an aggrieved, futile attempt to correct someone who has violently misinterpreted reality. Over and over, I heard Chicagoans point to the normality of life as a kind of defense against the menacing accusations and absurd theories that ICE, Border Patrol, and national politicians had promulgated about the city and then, through the government’s own violence, manifested into being.
This is her break. Her good thing. She refers to it as her Success. The money is enough to quit Bill’s, leave that stupid town, accept an internship in London. For a year or so, at the parties she now attends, she regularly brings it up. Crazy, isn’t it, what some people will pay for a piece of cardboard?
— Wait, what did he call you? Sadiya said. Julio applied everything he’d learned of hermeneutics, philology, and translation theory to give Sadiya a serviceable definition of pinche güey — It’s like [Napoleon Dynamite voice] freakin’ idiot — Is it, Sadiya said, I always fancied Chuy more a Pedro type — Wooow, Julio said, you are literally the Danger of a Single Story — Says the guy whose only exposure to South African culture was District 9 — Hey, you forgot the 2010 FIFA World Cup — I didn’t forget, I just didn’t want to relive that trauma .
We could not have imagined the reality that was coming. Forget escalating: In a few months, even the little our crew had done before falling apart — the cold emails and messages to weapons workers; the community outreach with our masks lowered, for trust building; the signed petitions — would retroactively become dangerous, a cause for firings or disappearings.
We need a book like Grandin’s now — more so, surely, than he could have known while writing it. If Grandin’s framing emphasis on US influence over Latin America and on the contrasts between Anglo-American and Latin American intellectual traditions sometimes seems too rigid, it is undeniable that we are now witnessing a watershed moment in attempts by the US to reshape Latin America to serve its own ends.
As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see. There are always “characters,” but their significance lies in the way they intersect with and illuminate social structure. They never motivate action — what they do instead is perform (and sometimes declaim) the logics under which they operate.
As things stand, the field of psychiatry offers us no precise definition for such cases of fleeting madness as those experienced by Mohammed Shatta, though literature has preserved an account of the phenomenon from the perspective of one of its more notable sufferers: L’avenir dure longtemps, by the French philosopher Louis Althusser.
What news, if any, would be contained in Francesca’s voicemail? The fact was, I was worried about Fritz. There wasn’t any need to worry; he was almost completely fine getting into the car. But, as with my son’s fear of the dark, Fritz’s accident was a vessel — something for ambient anxiety to fill and animate.
LettersScience and TechnologyTheory and Philosophy
The final possibility that occurred to me, as five milligrams of edible THC began to inflect my thinking, was conjured under a more, shall we say, suspicious hermeneutic. I wondered — and, I can’t emphasize this enough, as just a rube in central New York — if the letters were themselves an instance of the hype cycle, which had reached a specific crest thanks to a recent post on X.com by a corporate evangelist, who announced that AI was at a crucial before-and-after moment in February 2026.
EssaysEcologyMy Life and TimesScience and Technology
One day there is a serious earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — “Noah” — issues a tsunami warning for Alaska, which the National Weather Service overrules within an hour. One day I realize I haven’t seen a bald eagle in a while, and when I ask Ana she says they are all at the annual convention in Skagway. One day a worker wanders over to our science corner of the fish factory carrying a bycatch coho, which must have some mutation, because it should not be fluorescent yellow.
Among filmmakers, dread over money seemed to outweigh any sense of buzz. By the first weekend the lack of major sales had already become a central topic of conversation. As it happens, two of the best films in Sundance’s slate confronted the industry’s distribution crisis head-on.
Inaugurated in this second Trump term is a new mode of dominion in which, writes Vincent Bevins, “the implicit goal of military action is not to create a government, it is to destroy one.” The nation-destroying model is more slapdash and more gratuitous than the American aggression we grew up with, its innovations familiar but somehow nastier.
Martha Stewart, Walter White, and Rodney Dangerfield walk into a bar. The bartender looks at Dangerfield, asks what he’s having. “Vodka soda,” he replies. The bartender starts shoveling ice. “Double?” he checks. “Course I am,” says Dangerfield. “Dangerfield’s dead.”
ReviewsReading, Writing, and PublishingThe Academy
If Gass entertained any escape fantasies, however, The Tunnel does not indulge them. It’s the big, the biggest, Man Alone in a House story. It’s an anti–systems novel, uninterested in conspiracist linkages, fantasias of historical causality, politics, even money; it’s got no reportage, no news. It’s a novel of minor academic failure but invites no pity or nostalgia — it’s the anti-Stoner, that’s for sure.
n+1 is seeking a full-time Audience Manager to work in our Brooklyn office. Compensation will range from $60,000 to $64,000 and includes health and dental insurance. n+1 is a print magazine of literature, culture, and politics published three times a year. Founded in 2004 with a mission to revive the tradition of little magazines, it […]
Biaggi’s rise went hand-in-hand not just with law and order politics but with a shift in the balance of power within the police profession writ large—away from the respected chiefs, and toward the irascible rank and file and the unions that represented them.
Join n+1 on Sunday, April 26 for a celebration Alphabet Soup: The Translingual Sayings of Emma and Eva as Recorded by Their Father, Eugene Ostashevsky, published by Tamizdat Project and Rab-Rab Press. Alphabet Soup collects the sayings of two multilingual girls written down by their poet father. As their Turkish-German-Russian-American family moves from New York […]
By channeling the Delphic spirits of his mentors, Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits: finding the sense and nonsense in natural speech; intersplicing shards of citation and quotation; and contesting the very concept of a stable narratorial voice.
In a 250-word takedown sent to me over text, the brain trust of my father and Anthropic LLM Claude (which was, incidentally, trained not only on my father’s critical tendencies but also on my stolen work) described my first column as “name-droppy and insecure,” “passive-aggressive about academia,” and “somewhat pretentious despite the anti-pretension pose.” “For someone claiming to be unpretentious,” Claude/my father declared (and where did I claim to be unpretentious?), “she casually drops terms like ‘metafictional dimension,’ ‘political imaginary,’ and ‘autofiction’ without explanation. The folksy tone masks what’s still pretty insider-y literary discourse.” Got my ass, Claude-father. Mask off. Thank you for doing your part in advancing humanity.
Today, the poster is rarely, if ever, remembered for its relationship to the Cattle Baron, despite the name printed prominently in the bottom right corner. Instead, in museums and academic papers, Facebook posts and news outlets, it is referred to as a “feminist protest poster” by “anonymous.”
The prosecutorial strategy is a puerile one: completely overwhelm the jury with unrelated images of leftist protest—for ten full days!—and then hope for guilt by association.
Any intrigue is not over a win or loss, but tiny details: Can the opponent break Sinner’s serve? Reach a break point? Win more than two or three points against Sinner’s first serve? Get that first serve back at all, and survive the devastating follow-up forehand if they do?
For my part, I knew that I had fallen in love with Dry Leaf when another cow—or was it a horse?—ambled through the frame enfolded in a pixelated outline distinct from the rest of the sky behind it. I understood that what I was looking at was the byproduct of a ringing artifact, a ghost at the meeting point of cow and sky.
As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center.
The mere existence of a second Mary Bronstein movie, much less one as amazing as this, proves that patience and a bad attitude are not just their own rewards. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, her second film and her first since 2008’s Yeast (one of the best American films of the 21st century), is a masterpiece of alienated frenzy. It’s a comic version of The Exorcist in which the mother is the one possessed.
The presumption that the world follows American athletes in particular at anything like the level that NBC coverage suggests is its own breed of bias. But as the NBA All-Star ads reminded us throughout the first Olympic week, we have committed as a country to the format of “USA vs. World.”
n+1 is coming to LA, and we want to see you! Please join us for a happy hour hang in the arts district to celebrate our readers, Issue 52, and over two decades of n+1. Entry is free for subscribers and $10 for nonsubscribers. The first 100 subscribers to RSVP can join us for free, and […]
As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the weekend—is hardly a tendency idiosyncratically restricted to our forty-seventh president. It’s a core feature of the office, especially after decades of bipartisan fealty to the all-rationalizing theory of the unitary executive. No matter how crude or clumsy Trump may be in forcing his will upon the world, his grandiose and murderous entitlement is directly continuous with his predecessors’.
If you live in Baltimore, or are headed there for AWP, join us for a party on Friday, March 6! We’ll be celebrating alongside our friends at New Directions, The Yale Review, Yale University Press, and Dorothy, a publishing project. Entry is free, as is your first drink. Friday, March 6 7–9:30 PM Pratt Street […]
Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the principle that no one should be in a cage.
What we saw as shrines were remnants of a home, a bit of a lifetime or several lifetimes that still had some of the magic of the everyday in which the gods had for long happily existed.
If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes of this conjuncture, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overseas empire.
Even as the pace of work life quickened exponentially across the next two decades, email inboxes overflowing, media outlets proliferating and then contracting, websites and newsletters dominating and then collapsing, newspapers going online-only and then vanishing altogether, glossy magazines ceasing print or, again, vanishing altogether, only Michael Silverblatt remained unchanged.
You may have noticed that this column feels a little incestuous (there is that Saskia Vogel again . . .) but that’s our world in translation. It’s small, and its actors, often by necessity, are prolific. It might also be because there are only so many people in the Swedish literary mafia. The theme for this month is the cold, by the way.
What we’re doing now is this: The trainings have evolved into street medic workshops on protecting yourself from chemical weapons and lessons on digital security; there’s a meet-up to sew reinforced umbrellas as shields from mace and a collection spot for barricade materials. And this is what it’s like: Sometimes you’re chasing ICE off your street, maybe you’re buying groceries for a family, but a lot of the time you’re on your phone.
The ongoing uprising is rooted in the political economy of structural adjustment, which forms the unstable medium through which revolt becomes contagious.
Join n+1 and film critic A. S. Hamrah for a Saturday double feature at Metrograph on the Lower East Side! Hamrah will introduce two films that explore spectacular American violence under capitalism: Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), and George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005). Hamrah will sign copies of his new […]
Rarely considered together, the intertwined legacy of this odd couple, Skinner and Lilly, has given us the world we live in now: the world of surveillance capitalism and generative AI, of high-tech woo-woo and algorithmic self-optimization, a world that is a weird and improbable synthesis between the visions of these two era-defining midcentury mind scientists.
Dunn was quite possibly the last writer anyone would have expected to resurface, after nearly two decades of silence, with the 1989 bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award.
The murdered Poet became for him the gash in the center of the sun, the model and the justification for being misunderstood. From the audience, during academic conferences, he hurled passionate and senseless accusations at the speakers, which were met with chuckles and mild feelings of guilt. Even though he had a stable relationship and many occasional lovers, more and more it seemed to him that the double seduction left unfulfilled on that far-off day was the one true memorable event in his life.
Fateh and Fatimah lived on the westernmost edge of Simpelveld, at the end of a long row of apartment blocks, in the tallest building in the vicinity. To the west were sunken lanes that ascended into low hills; to the east the paved street that led to the town proper. I blew out a thick stream of smoke, musing that, as in a cartoon depiction of anger, I was literally blowing off steam.
That night I dreamed that my dad had died. The lectern at the service was too high and nobody could see me. I didn’t know what to say, so I gave a eulogy about someone I knew a little better who was still alive. When I woke up, my pillow was drenched with sweat. Had my speech been well received? I did some googling and learned that lecterns are between forty-five and forty-eight inches tall. I am nearly a foot taller than that. Thank God.
“Men make their own history,” Marx wrote, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” That may be broadly true, but Dick Cheney got to make history under the exact circumstances he would have chosen.
The feminists got headaches and worked so relentlessly that they forgot to eat. They smoked too much and made half-hearted attempts to quit. They sent each other presents — articles of clothing, a copy of the latest pamphlet from the Radicalesbians. They slept with disappointing men and mused about bad sex under capitalism. They expressed adoration for one another. They earnestly poured their hearts into writing and recording songs about housework. They organized community meetings with the mothers of schoolkids and then got bored with the mundane things the mothers wanted.
In the contemporary Chinese context, the idea that crucial parts of the central government could simply cease to operate for more than a month, as part of a procedural standoff between rival governing factions, would beggar belief. And in turn, to an American observer, the thought that miles of new high-speed rail lines could simply materialize by bureaucratic fiat, unencumbered by years of legislative horse-trading, environmental review, suburban backlash, and budgetary overshoot, is no less astonishing.
The story of humanity in space is not over, but the reality is that Musk is probably already yesterday’s man. The apogee of his arc was most likely the chainsaw tableau onstage at CPAC — and what a pathetic apogee it was: a man in late middle age, haunted and horribly unhappy, drug-addled and gibbering, further in that moment from Mars than he had ever been. If he has a legacy in space, it is less likely to be the Martian accomplishment and more likely to be that he took Kennedy’s dream and made it tawdry, partisan, and stupid.
The point of all this cataloging — which is less schematic in Lewis’s presentation than my summary suggests — is to help us recognize traces of enemy feminism when we encounter them in the present. And we will encounter them, Lewis argues, because they’re everywhere.
I always got moody on Sunday afternoons when I woke up from a long nap and it was already dark outside, as if I had wasted the only Sunday of my life. I had a hunch that six years of elementary school was really an escalator with a starting point but no end. I told my mom I couldn’t picture myself in junior high or high school. She was appalled, taking my comments as a fatalistic premonition of premature death.
Storm is a quick study. When he doesn’t know, he inserts Japanese, like he’ll get back to you with the translation. His eyes twinkle. He’s a trickster.
You got to love that Storm.
Adams will be remembered for his petty corruption, his self-mythologizing, and his ignominious dealmaking with the Trump White House; but he should also be remembered as the mayor who got New Yorkers to stop tossing giant bags of trash onto city sidewalks as if there were no alternative. You can laugh at a New York mayor who walks into a press conference wheeling out a trash can, beaming as if he invented the contraption, while “Empire State of Mind” blares triumphantly in the background. But truly, Adams’s proclaimed “trash revolution” represented a tremendous advance over abysmal past practice.
So, in the cramped airplane’s limited sightlines, I looked for clues about whether these were just regular Midwestern dads, like me, flying for work, or whether they were regular Midwestern dads, flying for work, to terrorize and disappear people. How would I know the difference?
Years after defending his dissertation, perhaps unable to adapt or evolve, he appeared stuck in an eternal limbo that would give any student the night sweats. On the other hand, John seemed an extreme version of a kind of intellectual ideal. Wasn’t the freedom to read for much of the day one of the draws of graduate school, after all?
More than fifty years since its thirty thousand inhabitants—most of them Greek-Cypriots—fled before the advancing Turkish army, the resort city of Varosha on Cyprus’s southeastern coast has been reborn. Now, from 8 AM to 6 PM every day, visitors are free to enter this modern wasteland through a casually guarded gate and wander a small portion of its once-thriving streets. From what I’ve seen, the tourism may be less dark than dumb, kitschifying the skeletal city into yet another selfie backdrop.
If the enshrinement of a salary cap does not yet feel entirely inevitable, the prospect of a lockout does, at least amongst the baseball commentariat. The tenor is the same: the situation has gotten out of hand, and the mythical fan, an amalgamation of conventional wisdom and vibes transubstantiated into hypothetical flesh and blood, is now for the first time starting to side with management over labor.
The Dodgers’ model, like the city’s, depends on endless escalation, infinite growth; more spending, more spectacle, more winning. The Reds, meanwhile, live on prayer and parsimony. When you know the ending before the first pitch, fandom curdles into masochism.
American PoliticsMoney and PowerNew YorkUrban Planning
If the Democratic discourse du jour pits populist socialism against technocratic “Abundance,” nobody seems to have told New York City voters. One the same day that a majority chose Zohran Mamdani to be the second-ever democratic socialist occupant of Gracie Mansion (and a decidedly more fervent one than David Dinkins), voters also overwhelmingly approved three […]
I find comfort in the thought that cinema is not just moving pictures; it sets hope in motion! . . . It is a sensory journey . . . in which . . . even pain can find new meaning. —Pope Leo XIV, ten days ago Tom Cruise given a special Oscar in obscure ceremony […]
Maybe you know the drill: metahistorical intrigue and antiauthoritarian politics; several deep benches’ worth of quirky characters toting loudly emblematic affectations and not-strictly-probable names; song-and-dance numbers with rhythmically typeset lyrics and toy instrument arrangements, plus screwball wordplay and cartoon pratfalls and gags, gags, gags.
As the Western media and politicians breathlessly celebrated the return of the final Israeli prisoners, a number of them soldiers captured in combat, Israel began returning hundreds of captives it had snatched from Gaza over the previous two years and held in abominable conditions ever since. Having released some 2,000 people, Israel still holds around 9,000 Palestinian men, women, and children in captivity, hostages for a future day.
Two recent books, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine and Andrew deWaard’s Derivative Media, explore the consequences of these technological intermediaries for the music, film, and television industries. While Pelly’s account focuses on the power of Spotify’s ever-changing playlisting practices, deWaard turns to the rise of intellectual property, as remakes, reboots, and spin-offs have come to saturate mass media markets. Both center on the changing relationship between labor and capital in the platform era.
JK Mehta, José Sanchez, Nikil Saval, Colin Vanderburg
American PoliticsMoney and PowerNew YorkPolitics
“I am a democratic socialist.” These words were really spoken by an American politician on live TV, just hours after being elected to govern a city with a population greater than that of all but twelve US states, in the year 2025. In the big, packed room in Brooklyn where I watched Zohran Mamdani’s victory […]
What initially appears to be a dialogue between geometric form, architectural allusion, and figuration transforms into a preadolescent coup d’état by scythe qua jumprope. It is, after all, Baghdad’s people that will make it modern, not shapes on canvasses.
We are near an old strain of folk utopianism, one that depicts the afterlife as a place with towers of food rising to the heavens. One of the first songs Hurley came up with was a sort of mantra he and his brother would chant aloud as children: “There’s such a thing as doughnuts / In the wide, wide world / Doughnuts! Doughnuts!”
n+1 is seeking a full-time Managing Editor to work in our Brooklyn office. Compensation will range from $58,000 to $64,000 and includes health and dental insurance. n+1 is a print magazine of literature, culture, and politics published three times a year. Founded in 2004 with a mission to revive the tradition of little magazines, it […]
It was not the underprivileged who took the initiative. It was one Luke Iseman, merchant of hardware and software, founder of multiple companies, former director of a “tech incubator,” builder of art installations for the Burning Man festival. Iseman had read Neal Stephenson’s cli-fi novel Termination Shock, in which a rogue Texas billionaire motivated by […]
Can New Yorkers have nice things? With a Mamdani mayoralty almost in reach, it seems tantalizingly possible—but what kinds of nice things should we have? On Tuesday, October 14, join n+1 and the Center for Architecture for a freewheeling discussion of usable pasts, working models, and radical horizons for building a social democratic New York. […]
Candy was different from the girls Robert knew. She didn’t care about vampires or makeup, but she knew about the Faces of Death VHS tapes you couldn’t find in the library or at Blockbuster. She was a vegetarian and loved looking at the potted plants at Home Depot, dreaming of the day she would have a yard.
April Zhu: Let’s start with the charges. UnHerd columnist Kat Rosenfeld wrote that we editors who resigned in protest had reached with our “hot little hands” for “the censor’s pen.” According to Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, we were outraged by “the humane reflections of a Jewish woman seeking reconciliation and recovery in her […]
So I told everyone that night
At Chapel Bar, where a boy spoke
Of trying to suffocate himself
With a bag that had once held
Snacks, but the second he smelled
Sour cream and chive, he knew
He had to stay. “I thought you
Would laugh at that,” and I did.
The truth is, I want to fucking kill him. Because, not that long ago, I was a semi-together individual with some irons of my own in the fire, living in an apartment that had finally achieved the elegantly shabby je ne sais quoi one might hope for in a quaintly garret-like Brooklyn abode. And now I’m this wild-eyed person with scalloped rat barriers around her doors who watches her space heater on a baby monitor.
What is discussed in classrooms, rather than conference halls, about “our alternative ecologies, our archives of resistance, our insurgent epistemologies ” is important. It provides a vocabulary, a grammar for the very students whose encampments were met with such violent resistance. And at least here in the UK, literature departments are hubs of union organizing and resistance. If it weren’t so, there wouldn’t be such a concerted effort — whether in the neoliberal garb of austerity, or in the racist cloak of “fighting woke” — to dismantle the humanities.
We have no tradition, she said. What could we say to the dead except that we’re sorry for living? No, we confuse people too much already. How much more could they take? They hear “transsexual” and want us to prove it. They want weeping in front of mirrors. They want heartfelt confessions with parents on the couch. They will never take you seriously or consider you normal. They want hand-me-down emotions.
All the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents I saw in the atrium were white, of medium height and build, and many wore plain baseball caps. They were all men and they stuck out because they displayed an exceeding level of stillness and homogeneity in a room with a flow of people from all over the world, people who were always in motion and who mostly looked different from one another.
EssaysMy Life and TimesPoliticsTheory and Philosophy
The more experienced attendees explain that here, one’s individual experience is seen as a symptom of the group’s dynamics. If someone is physically ill, it is because the system needs to eject someone; if someone feels rejected, it is because the group needs a scapegoat to hold everyone’s feelings of shame. If you act out or say something inflammatory, it’s because you’ve been unconsciously mobilized by others. Everything means something: if you close a window, you are trying to protect the group. If you’re sleepy, it’s because the group is making you sleepy. You do not have food poisoning; you have group poisoning.
Both the neoliberal turn and the nationalist backlash, Lomnitz argues, are parts of a single process that has given rise to a new kind of state — one characterized by “an excess of sovereignty and a deficit of administrative capacity.” It’s hard to imagine a stronger sovereign for Mexico than AMLO, but his administration failed to make the state more accountable or trustworthy.
EssaysAmerican PoliticsArt and ArchitectureRace and Racism
Trump was — and is — intent on creating a new future, and to gain a better sense of that vision, I needed to understand what future he was working to prevent. I asked Andil to meet that weekend, and he agreed. I would play amateur journalist and interview Andil again, this time about how he fell into the government’s crosshairs.
I don’t care about anything else, I have them, when they wake up we can celebrate the prison break, the reunion, the successful hostage exchange, we can stop for breakfast, decide together what to do next.
Eco-confessionalism marshals the self-reflexivity of poetic language, its distance from everyday communication, to register commitments without reifying them, to critique the present without lapsing into fatalism about the future. Looking outward, to the desperate reality of our world, and inward, to its own lyric preconditions, this new poetry is learning how to speak, subtly and capaciously, about the biggest crisis in history.
The Intellectual SituationReading, Writing, and PublishingScience and TechnologyThe Internet
The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.
The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organizations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible.
More and bigger detention infrastructure follows a strict logic of “if you build it, they will fill it.” Larger county jails not only enable the incarceration of more people by local police; they also offer flexible detention capacity to ICE and other federal agencies. As one recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative puts it, local jails both “obscure and facilitate” mass deportation.
Naturally there were lots of law enforcement types hanging around the convention — men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the Bible and the Constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse — one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.
