metazine

By December 1999, the feeling at the Conglomerate’s Y2K office was that nothing more could really be done. This is a common enough cliché on the approach of any moment of finality, but was particularly apt in our case, since nothing really had been done.

It’s not surprising that Biden — longtime member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, interlocutor with world leaders, international legacy burnisher — would leave his biggest mark in foreign rather than domestic policy. His greatest impact will be felt not in Afghanistan or in Ukraine, however, but in Gaza. Any assessment of Biden’s presidency is stained by Gaza, where for almost a year he has supported, defended, armed, and funded Israel’s genocide.

But to say that “if this technology is left unchecked, it will radically reshape the field of journalism” is to paint a rather rosy picture of the field. The dystopian future Mazria Katz and Crabapple fear will come to pass if GenAI is left unchecked — the one in which “only a tiny elite of artists can remain in business, their work selling as a kind of luxury status symbol” — is, unfortunately, already here.

The girls accepted me as one of their own. We often turned into a single many-armed, many-legged creature, jubilant, all-powerful, devastating. In those moments, I no longer felt my own powerlessness or the weakness in my knees.

I was embarrassed. To be grieving incorrectly, to be doing it publicly, to be preoccupied with whether I was doing it well. Dissonance was everywhere. The blunted, abject language of bereavement, and the responsibility I had, which I had worked for and wanted, to speak clearly about my own sentences.

The carceral system is vastly larger and more pervasive now than it was a half century ago. When the revolt began, the United States incarcerated approximately two hundred thousand people; today it imprisons almost two million. This expansion in turn presents contemporary abolitionists with different challenges.

The pope consumes three grams of psychedelic mushrooms, and as he does not speak, the therapist also remains quiet. Two hours into the session the therapist plays Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka’s 2012 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations at a low volume, causing the pope to weep and wonder why he didn’t listen to music more often during the many years prior to the visitor’s arrival.

Pinocchio turns into a real boy at the story’s end not because he has absorbed some Kantian sense of duty, but because his slow-growing love for the blue-haired fairy and Geppetto compels him to care for them in their sickness and old age. In other words, he learns to obey them because his love for them singles them out as people worth listening to. This is Collodi’s answer to an inescapably human dilemma: to whom do you listen when you are surrounded by warring factions and have not yet developed a will of your own?

This is the state of American immigration politics: a destructive competition over who can do border better. But, as the unholy linking of foreign military aid to domestic border defense attests, this gross spectacle distracts from a far wider web of issues. Who has a right to migrate to the US and make their home here? Who gets to drop US-made bombs, and who is expected to silently suffer them? Because a Democratic President is punishing refugees at the US-Mexico border while also sponsoring the genocide of refugees in Gaza, these are not unrelated questions.

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.