metazine

Biologists once thought that humans did little to affect the course of evolution in the short term. But a recent study of cod in the Baltic Sea reveals how overfishing and selective harvest of the largest fish has caused genetic changes that favor slower growth and smaller size.

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. Who, then, abridged The Obscene Bird of Night—and what were they trying to fix?

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.

What was I trying to figure out? Beginnings, I think—what a beginning is, what one must do in order to start.

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 of oppression—oppression in which the Disney adult is complicit.

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.

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.

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.

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 frustration with inaccessible transit, and the hope Zohran’s platform held for him.

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.

Zoom in, zoom out; repeat mantras or drink soju: our pains and hopes will continue to occlude our sight.

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.

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 , 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 spreads to her son like a contagion and initiates a slide into delinquency that eventually ends in tragedy.

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.

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.

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-intentioned troublemakers instigating disruption across campus out of malice—but that is just not true! We are what makes Barnard, and you have chosen to abandon us.

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.

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.

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.

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?