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What is the function of demanding that the entire federal bureaucracy search itself for traces that it might be funding programs to which the Leader might object? Plainly, to dement it. Or make it paranoid, make it pusillanimous, make it humiliated, and bring to the forefront the narcs, toadies, informers, and eager collaborators who can be promoted to replace those who continue their jobs and assert the law.

Young recruits make ideal pupils: their minds are curious, their bodies likely tireless , and their pasts, by definition, brief: no one needs to worry that much about a 12-year-old’s commitment to her bourgeois life, let alone about her being a Fed. The Party’s “Central Task, ” according to the Draft Programme, was to “prepare the masses, ” psychologically and organizationally, to seize power when the moment of revolutionary crisis arrived. Young people were the easiest demographic to prepare — hence the Youth Brigade.

The fog that drifts over Oslo’s fjords and “comes down like a low ceiling” is “gray, ” dawn is “gray, ” hair is “gray, ” Trondheim is “gray, ” birds are “gray, ” mice are “gray, ” trees are “gray, ” clouds are “gray, ” suits are “gray, ” sweaters are “gray, ” scarves are “gray, ” underwear is “gray, ” old people are “gray, ” faces are “gray, ” Saturday morning is “gray, ” November is “gray, ” December is “gray, ” spring is also “gray, ” the sky is often “gray” and sometimes it is even “grayer than it usually is when it rains. ” “Finally, ” Long Live the Post Horn! ’s Ellinor remarks as the fog descends, “everything was covered in gray. ”

I saw the outline of the Americas from space. North America was belching out strands of fat pearls, diamonds, gold and silver coins, swimming pools, cars, high-end watches, like the whole landmass was a slot machine with thousands of volcano-size receptacles. The coastline was rimmed with mounted machine guns, thousands of them, pointing outward. South America was made of mud, and I could see all layers of Earth, and the bones and skulls in it. The raised line of the Andes was not mountains, but enormous fountains of blood.

None of the following receives a substantive assessment in When the Clock Broke: NAFTA, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America, ” Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s political career, George W. Bush, the 2000 election, September 11, the war on terror, the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, the 2008 global financial crisis, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, the legalization of gay marriage, the presence of the Minutemen on the country’s southern border, the rise in mass shootings, Occupy Wall Street, Senator Mitch McConnell’s lengthy effort to enable minoritarian rule by packing the courts with right-wing judges, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, or Citizens United.

If the government is good for business, why destroy the government? It’s possible Musk really believes he is saving the American economy. By all accounts a fervent believer in whatever he currently believes in — stopping climate change, colonizing Mars, juicing up global birth rates — Musk may be speaking in earnest when he claims that government bloat is ruining the country.

As for me, my mind was blown open by Blue Velvet when I saw it college-aged in first run in 1986 at the Nickelodeon Cinema in Boston with my then-girlfriend. We could not speak when we left the theater, so rattled were we by this terrifying new thing that had come into the world . This filmic world of smashed TVs, diners, wood paneling, the ominous hum of electricity, and rose-pink wall-to-wall carpeting was not, as some viewers may now think, an alien place. It was the actual America of that time, put on screen by David Lynch in a way no one had ever seen before.

Kadare responded to political criticism with haughty petulance, but as a distraction from more troubling aspects of his work it likely saved his reputation. That’s because the connecting thread of Kadare’s oeuvre is neither an opposition to totalitarianism nor, as his less generous critics have claimed, pro-regime toadyism, but rather a monomaniacal mission to rewrite Albanian history by erasing the legacy of five centuries of Ottoman rule and fabricating cultural continuity with Greek antiquity.

Thank you to the poets, the story writers, the novelists, the essayists, the memoirists for your words that have lifted us toward the light. You remind us to slow down and be awed, to feel that unique joy in wondering about what we don’t know.

THE WORLD The first world was suffering, suffering. The second world was liberation. Liberation! But why, said the first world, does it look so much like suffering? Like suffering only once, the second world said—like suffering plus change.

So, pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of and about intellectuals. Pessimism may be where intellect, left to its own devices, tends to gravitate. But in “Intellectual Identities, ” a chapter in the new book, Mulhern sees pessimism as a professional deformation. Intellectuals idealize culture as something that they possess and as a possession that is all the more valuable to them because the society around them ignores it—and it is this self-serving idealization of culture that gives rise to pessimism.

After Mahmoud was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents from the lobby of his Columbia-owned apartment building on Saturday, March 8, returning from an iftar with his eight-month pregnant wife, for about twenty-four hours where he was untraceable. Noor, his wife, had gone to Elizabeth, New Jersey, the closest detention facility to Manhattan, and was told he was no longer there. Eventually news trickled in that he had been whisked away to faraway Jena, Louisiana, to the infamous LaSalle detention center.

Perceptive critics noted early on that Serra’s sculpture only made sense in relation to its time and place and gave meaning only to those specific conditions against which it unfolded. Serra insisted on as much himself. We might apply such a phenomenological approach, or better yet, a deambulatory one , to the work as a whole: a “picturesque stroll” through the landscapes, predominantly urban, that Serra punctuated, demarcated, and ultimately produced or dominated as his work found a privileged place in our late-modern world. Revisiting the public sculpture, as emplaced in the contexts or sites it has specifically confronted, and as these have unfurled around the work, we can see how it frames our cultural and social investments in urban space: what is hostile and what is safe, what is art and what is industry, what moves and what stays put.

They could write a short story honoring the thwarted child by envisioning what its life might have become. The story had to be a minimum of ten pages double-spaced, with an honest attempt at showing rather than telling. Mike figured he’d give it a shot, as he’d prefer not to shell out more money to the government. Lord knew he already paid plenty in taxes.