N + 1

OCTOBER 24. 2024

The Outfit at Metrograph

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.

OCTOBER 23. 2024

The White Kids Are Alright

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.

OCTOBER 22. 2024

Design Authority

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.

OCTOBER 21. 2024

Survivor Mission

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.

OCTOBER 8. 2024

Eroticize the Hood

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.

SEPTEMBER 28. 2024

The Last Days of Mankind

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.

SEPTEMBER 25. 2024

If It’s Free, I’ll Take It

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.

SEPTEMBER 23. 2024

Summer’s Over

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.

SEPTEMBER 17. 2024

Who’s Afraid of Free Trade?

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.

SEPTEMBER 13. 2024

Vacuum Studies

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.

SEPTEMBER 9. 2024

On Jane McAlevey

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.

SEPTEMBER 5. 2024

Against the People

These conflicts tend to recur every ten years or so, with a different cast of characters, but always involving the idea that taxpayer money is being spent on a public institution that undermines the private authority of parents—abortion clinics, child care centers, public libraries, public schools.

SEPTEMBER 4. 2024

Fear and Favor in Chicago

The way I’ve begun to think about this is that it’s just not possible to have a US imperial fortress state with Rainbow Coalition characteristics—the most multiracial genocidal coalition in the history of the world. It’s a strange fact, and it can’t be resolved.

AUGUST 22. 2024

Emily Witt and Tony Tulathimutte in conversation

On Wednesday, September 25, join n+1 contributors Emily Witt and Tony Tulathimutte for a discussion of their new books, Health and Safety and Rejection . Both books are available for preorder from the n+1 bookstore and will be published in September.