metazine

In a 250-word takedown sent to me over text, the brain trust of my father and Anthropic LLM Claude 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 , “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 , is a masterpiece of alienated frenzy. It’s a comic version of The Exorcist in which the mother is the one possessed.

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-sixth 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’.

Obviously Canada considers the US its biggest rival. They’re playing in the gold medal game, and the Soviet Union no longer exists.

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.

Not being a monuments person has determined the kind of writer I am. Two things are anathema to me: subjectivity, with its family members, psychology and self-expression; and historiography, whose household includes monuments, key events, and great personalities.

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 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.