metazine

“Nobody knows who the Houthis are, ” Hegseth says in the group chat—another way of saying that, when we’re dealing with the Houthis, or the Houthi-adjacent, or anybody adjacent to anything or anyone else we find menacing, then those people also become nobody who matters, nobody we should bother knowing about, and definitely nobody whom anybody who matters should actually care about. And now that we think about it, isn’t it interesting how you want to know more?

Wracked since November by a crisis of confidence, Democrats have repeatedly defaulted to autopilot in ways that embody this ethos. In Congress, that means deference to seniority and aversion to perceived risk. Democrats have been much kinder than Republicans to leaders atop their party’s caucuses. In bureaucracy, it means reverence for procedural niceties. The path of least resistance even gets celebrated as a positive good: look at us, following the rules.

Two moments are irresistible to rock biopics: the birth of a good song, and its activation in front of an audience. The scene where the initial idea strikes the songwriter, usually while tapping idly at the piano, is a virtual requirement in the genre. Malek-as-Mercury hits on the “Bohemian Rhapsody” theme while pecking at the keys lying upside down. In the truly lovely Love and Mercy, in which a mumblecore romcom slowly swallows a rock-and-roll trauma plot, Paul-Dano-as-young-Brian-Wilson pulls “God Only Knows” out of the æther in much the same way. He then plays it for his overbearing father and onetime manager, who more or less tells him it sucks.

The teleprompter is certainly not as important as the flag pins, the red tie, the red hats and all the other visuals of the MAGA movement. But it offers an interpretive key to the moment.

The homies call it mobbin’. Mom shuttles us to and from Walmart, Taco Bell, Circle K, Blockbuster, the mall, while Sisqó—who previously lived in an abandoned car—rides shotgun in our silver minivan and slaps 2Pac and Biggie and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony songs for us to rap to and mariachi songs for us to yelp to.

Raya and Karim moved back into the family home. Her parents rented two gloomy rooms on the first floor of a house and shared a kitchen and a bathroom with the tenants upstairs. To Raya the rooms felt closed in and the whole house smelled sour. There was a narrow lane between their house and the one next door, and men passing by sometimes used the alley as a urinal.

So if you ask me about the signature strength of the department where I work, I will tell you. It is world-caliber field-defining research, wedded to a fantastically dynamic practice of instruction, accomplished at nothing less than the scale of the institution itself—all of it operating inside financial margins so narrow, at such absurdly low cost relative to its peers, you can hardly believe it.

The left understands the idea of collective provision. We understand the idea of solidarity. You don’t just go out on strike. You have a strike fund; you have alternative means of provision. But I don’t know what those are in this case, if what’s being threatened is an NIH grant that funds an entire chemistry department, for example.

Like any candid analysis of a sexual subculture, this material was seized upon by some readers as lurid and inappropriate, especially given my openness. The gender-critical feminists, in particular, have held it up as a kind of smoking penis, proof of my fetishization of women and, by extension, the pathological character of all transfeminine desire. I find this very amusing. For what am I accused of? Not, it would seem, aggression, violence, control, or any of the other supposed hallmarks of toxic masculinity. On the contrary, I am imagined as a slave to my own perversions, as a narcissist fixated on my own physical appearance, as someone broken, dominated, violated, manipulated—in short, as hopelessly feminized.

On our lunch breaks we planned a union-organizing drive for the office. We would go to this café that was small enough that we could see everyone in there , far enough away that it didn’t really make sense to walk there and back , a little too expensive to be reasonable . “I’m a socialist, because if capitalism worked I’d be rich, ” Teo explained to me after we had ordered scrambled eggs prepared with crème fraîche. “We’re friends now, ” I said.

Sometime in 1997 Beth Stryker, who was one of Shulamith’s younger friends, sent us the manuscript. Would Semiotext like to publish Shulamith Firestone’s new, second book? I think we said yes right away before even reading it. But when we finally did, I was just blown away by the way that Airless Spaces wasn’t a memoir.

Like Critical Race Theory before it—but with a supercharged intensity, since each new campaign of right-wing hate has been more aggressive than the last—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has come to stand in for efforts and programs that have nothing at all to do with these words’ putative definitions or implications. The DOGEistes, in combing through personnel data on the hunt for “women, ” “historically, ” and “status, ” have made it very clear that they’re not particularly concerned with workplace training programs or low-stakes capitalist proceduralism. Instead the claims made by Musk and Project 2025 are far more expansive: for them DEI refers to any effort that acknowledges the reality that people other than cis white men operate in society.

It hardly matters for this purpose whether the new spy writers, late of their intelligence agencies, can produce basically competent thrillers; they all can. The question is what else they can do, what new spin they can put on the established library of espionage tropes. What value can their past intelligence careers confer? And if that value is bound up, in whatever way, with authenticity, then what is authenticity doing that makes it valuable?

Perhaps because, unlike the Green New Deal, they actually exist, transgender people have been especially easy to single out and harm. Signed on the day of his inauguration, Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” requires all parts of the federal government to share the same definition of sex: “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. ” Female “means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell”; males produce “the small reproductive cell. ” This order and ones that followed on sports, DEI, education, and the military collectively constitute an attempt to exclude transgender people from the categories that make our existence legible.