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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.

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.