metazine

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.

In retrospect, the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration was an inopportune time for Walmart to hold the grand opening of its new corporate campus.

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.

This is what we are dealing with now in Iran: Imperialist powers, led by the United States, are preparing the ground for an attack, portending bombardment, civil war, and immense destruction.

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. Each of these documentaries is a deft archival dive, and, taken together, they give us a new angle on this pair, the unacknowledged Romulus and Remus of contemporary technocapitalism.

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.