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Snoop Dogg was our everyman everywhere all at once. One day he was taking a dunk with Michael Phelps, joking about his lung power; the next he was with Martha Stewart at Versailles, teaching us the difference between “piaffe” and “passage. ” For an amateur among experts, his commentary ended up as some of the best of the stretch, with his freestyle riffs voiced over BMX highlights and out at the Stade de France for the steeplechase .

These are the characteristic language games of the German right: and now politicians across the spectrum make these seemingly baffling connections, and a much larger swath of voters and journalists than before seem to accept them as logical and plausible. When white, non-Jewish Germans try to imagine the fear felt by their Jewish neighbors and friends, they instead paint a vivid picture of their own; that they themselves might figure in their Jewish compatriots’ fears is not a possibility they find worth contemplating.

The country is battered and exhausted. Under almost every conceivable metric, people are worse off than they were in 2010. Food bank use has increased fifty-fold. The number of people on NHS waiting lists has more than doubled. Child poverty is up and average child height is down. Every single river in England is polluted with untreated sewage run-off. That isn’t hyperbole. Every single river in England, and most of its coastal waters, are full of shit.

The debate’s enforced vacuity made little room for sustained discussions of policy—much less for the relationship between policy and daily life. Biden tried where he could, but he didn’t mention his transformative NLRB or FTC appointments, and he was in no position to force a conversation about the child care tax credit or reshoring manufacturing jobs on anything like his own terms, whatever those might have been.

Three months after the training, I traveled to my hometown in southern California. Officially, I was there with my parents and sister for my grandmother’s 88th birthday. Unofficially, I was there to ask her how she wanted to die. I’d looked into death doulas in the area because I was curious, but I had a feeling my grandmother wouldn’t want to hire one, mostly for financial reasons. If she had a definite death plan in mind, she’d never told us. Sometimes she’d say she wants to be buried in the plot next to her parents in Texas; other times she’d say she wants to be cremated, because cremation is cheaper. My family wanted to figure out her wishes, but we rarely discuss things like this together, and broaching the subject had so far felt overwhelming. I offered to try.

With each horror story from the city’s winding tunnels, increasingly documented in spectacular photos and videos, a collective fear resurfaces and takes hold in the media, typically helping to consolidate support for law-and-order ideologies. Violent crime, whether real or perceived, is seen by default as a crisis of public safety; but on trains and buses it is equally a matter of workplace safety.

I turned to my friend and said, “This is pretty good, but not that good. ” He agreed, “It’s fine. It gives me some ideas for other sandwiches. ” “I was expecting something to blow my mind. ” “Yeah, he said. “I thought I would eat this sandwich and declare: ‘You must change your life! ’”

As the ascendant far right attempts to assert its hegemony, it has identified universities and academics as important obstacles to its success. In this, the enemies of academic freedom and scholarly inquiry are correct. But it is not enough only to defend the institution from the intensifying siege: our divisions are magnified in defensive struggles, and the terms of debate, such as they are, are set by those who’d burn the libraries down if they could. It is only by going on the attack, and laying out a vision for a democratic university serving the common good, that we can unite the disparate and fractious forces of academic labor, along with the broader sectors of society to which they’re connected—students, first of all.

Over the following weeks, and then months, as Israel’s onslaught continued, I noticed a growing number of experts, humanitarian workers, and investigators turning to superlatives to describe what is taking place in Gaza. What they narrate is a conflict that has surpassed their records, expectations, and imagination, and a scale of destruction in the face of which comparisons break down. If there are limits to war, they have yet to be defined.

That our political institutions make big change difficult, that public opinion is often fragmentary and contradictory, that politics is a battle of competing social interests over the distribution of resources and prestige, with winners and losers who then reshape the landscape—none of this is exactly a revelation, yet none of it seems to have occurred to the authors of Common Sense.

The architecture of Columbia University enhances spectacle, a fact that historically has been both useful and not for protestors. Since 1968, the campus has been bolstered with riot-proof architecture: large gathering space is limited to the center of the campus, which makes visual performance, and the suppression of it, easy. The peculiar American fetish for the Ivy League turns this campus into a tourist attraction in the summer months, when it is impossible to avoid large groups of visitors posing for selfies. The day before CUAD began their sit-in, the lawns were filled with Spikeball trampolines and buff boys playing with the wicked sense that the world was watching their enjoyment. Since then, wide-lens cameras positioned between the metal gates on 116th have turned the semi-privacy of college life into a live-action broadcast.

Many anarchists hate cops because cops are part of “the state. ” True enough, from one angle. But seen from another, it might be more useful to think of them as a political bloc with their own interests, maybe even a “class fraction” or a Weberian status-group. As Stuart Schrader has argued, this is especially true now, after several rounds of neoliberal “police reform” efforts that entrenched police identity and their sense of group interest through “professionalization” and the emergence of entrepreneurialized competition between municipalities for limited state funding. As they became more autonomous, police started looking less like agents of the state and more like a gang or racket.

A world of muffled noise and muted color, personal space that speaks in inches, bland food served cool. It’s an apt time for reflection. Retrospection, I guess you’d say. On a long enough flight you could screen the whole movie of your life, director’s cut and all the bonus features. But the Portland–LA flight was barely two hours, and I wasn’t looking to root around in the archives of my memory palace. I was mulling and brooding, yes, but not over ancient history.

Is it wrong to want to write toward what isn’t intended to be read? What I want is a story that’s an object that can turn itself inside out. So perhaps what I’m thinking of as inspiration is something else instead. Not to be writing like Martin but to be not writing like her.