metazine

The Trump Administration’s reliance on ICE underscores a transformation toward a domestic politics of domination that mirrors its lawlessness abroad. Just as Trump felt no obligation toward any kind of established diplomatic processes before invading Iran, he has positioned himself entirely against the courts, attacking the bedrock concepts of judicial review and due process as interfering with the project of mass deportation.

Zoom in, zoom out; repeat mantras or drink soju: our pains and hopes will continue to occlude our sight.

Sensitivity to contradiction—of “In My Room, ” he noted: “Two people wrote a song about loneliness, and five people sang it”—and spiritual conviction were foundational elements of his work.

Shimizu’s films are often preoccupied with women forced into servitude by a hostile society, and geisha and sex workers are a recurring presence. Their subordination is marked by scent: In Forget Love For Now , the perfume that a single mother has to wear to her job as a bar hostess causes her son to be bullied when his friends smell it on him, kicking him out of their group “because your mom is bad. ” The smell of the perfume marks the mother as socially deviant, a condition that spreads to her son like a contagion and initiates a slide into delinquency that eventually ends in tragedy.

IV. Homage to Boris Lurie Translation is enlightenment. When you translate yourself to another language, cast away the dictionary. If you do not forget your first language, on your death bed you will still say O Jerusalem.

This was how I would first understand Pavement’s music: dense bursts of esoterica punctuated here and there by mellow springs of warm pop hum, an Oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Various forms of self-fashioning followed, and soon I became myself, a guy named Stephen who smirks and scoffs and dodges questions compulsively, who dresses preppy but never combs his hair.

We run clubs, we start projects, we advocate for ourselves and for fellow students. We have watched the most documented genocide in history play out, have watched our international friends be targeted and disappeared, have watched a countrywide assault on free speech and higher education, and have been pushed to action by the social justice education we have received, and by deep fear for our friends, our community, our world. You want to believe we are the exception—that we are a few ill-intentioned troublemakers instigating disruption across campus out of malice—but that is just not true! We are what makes Barnard, and you have chosen to abandon us.

To be free is to be a subject instead of an object, to be able to act decisively in the world rather than only to be acted upon. For Du Bois, as for young people in Gaza and on college campuses around the world, by attempting to create a new freedom in the world, they came to know the world as it was; with some courage, they could imagine it as it could be.

It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at least one genre-disorienting tour through the facades of a studio lot, like the masterpiece sequence in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and plenty of languid musing about the vicissitudes of fame, often delivered poolside.

Today anti-China policies are a rare point of bipartisan consensus. Popular opinion on China has steadily soured since the 2000s, first among business owners, then the public. Pew polling shows that some 80 percent of Americans view the country unfavorably, a historic low. Enrollments in Mandarin courses at US universities, which climbed steadily after 1978, have been falling since 2013.

Anyone who has ever emerged from a multiday academic conference will recognize this truth: as the sun sets on the jetsam of crumpled programs and the custodians vacuum the carpet, you set out for the bus station or the airport and wonder what, and whom, it was all for. Our alternative ecologies, our archives of resistance, our insurgent epistemologies — what do they do, except make a living for ever fewer people every year?

“Don’t write about me. Write about Korea, about the issues, ” Mom has told me multiple times. Dad: “You seem to write about our family when you run out of topics. ” I am embarrassed by memoir and simultaneously drawn to the form. I am always reading books by sons and daughters.

He wouldn’t be thinking of my daughter, but then I also hadn’t been thinking of my daughter. Now I brought to mind her classroom, which I’d seen only once, during parents’ night. I brought it to mind deliberately and placed her at a little round table, reading a book, eating a snack. I imagined her hands, which still looked like the hands of a toddler. My son had elegant hands.

Maybe it’s the case that younger readers — always a sizeable faction of n+1’s audience — associate email with school or work, and don’t think to sit down and compose, for fun, corrections or admonishments about, say, the misuse of Bourdieu in the latest Intellectual Situation . Maybe our email address is poorly publicized?