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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.

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.

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 guide, is a habitual mordancy.

What does it mean to live in an era whose only good feelings come from coining names for the era ? 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 lacks in organization we make up for in analysis .  .  . surely a good sign?

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 spearheads must not make the same mistake.

By themselves, strong growth and low unemployment cannot wash away social divisions, any more than they can empower labor enough to substantively increase wages, to say nothing of raising the labor share of national income. The left must not be cowed into a narrow politics of income inequality and redistribution; it must look further, toward democratic control of capital itself.

Some of Trump’s voters—namely the rich and the superrich—will get exactly what they wanted out of the deal. Most will not.

As with any object under scientific investigation, theorizing philosophy scientifically requires locating its borders, which can only be accomplished by recognizing what is beyond and outside it—that is, what is non-philosophy.

The Grand Hyatt may have been achieved through blackmail, but once Trump and his enablers set the precedent, it became the paradigm still practiced in this city and many others. In the 1970s cities needed money, and rather than pursuing revenue by taxing the rich, many mayors—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes enthusiastically—embraced the idea that it would be better not to tax them outright, and instead inaugurate a race to the bottom between cities for who could create the climate most friendly to the rich .

Join n+1, and film critic A. S. Hamrah, for a rare screening of John Flynn’s The Outfit in 35mm! In collaboration with Metrograph, Hamrah—author of The Earth Dies Streaming —will introduce the film’s first screening in New York in at least 15 years. Tickets are $17.

In the end, it was this coalition of suburban centrists, rather than the more openly villainous Anita Bryant types, who paved the way for the drug war’s worst racialized harms. By killing federal marijuana decriminalization and pushing Carter toward a “zero-tolerance” approach, networks of affluent white parents sponsored the patterns of disproportionate arrest, prosecution, and incapacitation of Black and brown youth on marijuana charges that would come to a head under Reagan and Clinton.

There are no dentists in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, much of which takes place at a lofty and ethereal architecture studio in the Chrysler Building’s tip.

The dual messages felt scrambled by that dialectic of trauma—the pain of remembering, the need to move on; the need to have it remembered, the pain of others forgetting. And what about the name? Memorials typically commemorate the dead for something they did heroically or that tragically befell them. This one played with time. Dedicated to the memory of all survivors—by definition alive—in the past, present, and future.

In media and popular culture, Newark has long appeared as irredeemably unsexy, violent, destitute. “Queer Newark reclaims Newark, ” Strub declares defiantly, “as a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance. ” The book snuffs out the dominant view of the city, one ethnography and endnote at a time.

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 violence, remained entrenched, and even received promotions—it is being reenacted today in the Western media’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza: another war that has ignited a bonfire of international legal and moral norms and deadened and perverted consciences.

In the weeks before the convention, I felt as if I wanted to break into my television, to shake history—like the phantom accelerator reaction one makes with incompetent drivers, I mouthed words for the president during the June debate, trying to influence him from afar.

The tableau was sickening and, of course, telling. On one side, a congressional representative and mouth-frothing agent of the religious right. On the other, a liberal cosmopolitan and leader of an Ivy League, and in this case, an Egyptian baroness and former VP at the World Bank. Two distinct and supposedly clashing cultural expressions of elite power, speaking in vastly discrepant registers—each one smirking or even scowling at the other. But they converged on a vital point: The time had come to smash the campus Palestine movement.

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 left.

Let me be the first and only critic to point out that Reagan, a three-year-old biopic on the life of the fortieth president of the United States that’s just getting released now—a film directed by a man whose other movies include Casper Meets Wendy, Bratz, and Field of Lost Shoes—is a better movie than Deadpool & Wolverine.

When Jane McAlevey died on July 7, aged 59, the left lost a brilliant organizer, author, teacher, and comrade. After early experience in environmental justice and anti-apartheid activism, McAlevey found her calling in the labor movement, starting in the 1990s.