metazine

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.

Instead of fearing that LLMs will replace me by writing better essays, I’d love to hear how they can support me write essays better.

The story of humanity in space is not over, but the reality is that Musk is probably already yesterday’s man. The apogee of his arc was most likely the chainsaw tableau onstage at CPAC — and what a pathetic apogee it was: a man in late middle age, haunted and horribly unhappy, drug-addled and gibbering, further in that moment from Mars than he had ever been. If he has a legacy in space, it is less likely to be the Martian accomplishment and more likely to be that he took Kennedy’s dream and made it tawdry, partisan, and stupid.

The point of all this cataloging — which is less schematic in Lewis’s presentation than my summary suggests — is to help us recognize traces of enemy feminism when we encounter them in the present. And we will encounter them, Lewis argues, because they’re everywhere.

I always got moody on Sunday afternoons when I woke up from a long nap and it was already dark outside, as if I had wasted the only Sunday of my life. I had a hunch that six years of elementary school was really an escalator with a starting point but no end. I told my mom I couldn’t picture myself in junior high or high school. She was appalled, taking my comments as a fatalistic premonition of premature death.

Storm is a quick study. When he doesn’t know, he inserts Japanese, like he’ll get back to you with the translation. His eyes twinkle. He’s a trickster. You got to love that Storm.

Adams will be remembered for his petty corruption, his self-mythologizing, and his ignominious dealmaking with the Trump White House; but he should also be remembered as the mayor who got New Yorkers to stop tossing giant bags of trash onto city sidewalks as if there were no alternative. You can laugh at a New York mayor who walks into a press conference wheeling out a trash can, beaming as if he invented the contraption, while “Empire State of Mind” blares triumphantly in the background. But truly, Adams’s proclaimed “trash revolution” represented a tremendous advance over abysmal past practice.

So, in the cramped airplane’s limited sightlines, I looked for clues about whether these were just regular Midwestern dads, like me, flying for work, or whether they were regular Midwestern dads, flying for work, to terrorize and disappear people. How would I know the difference?

Years after defending his dissertation, perhaps unable to adapt or evolve, he appeared stuck in an eternal limbo that would give any student the night sweats. On the other hand, John seemed an extreme version of a kind of intellectual ideal. Wasn’t the freedom to read for much of the day one of the draws of graduate school, after all?