metazine

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.

In a league hellbent on favoring the pass, the honest, appraising physicality of blocking and tackling has been replaced by the weaselly violence of the passing game. We wince for defenseless receivers, or throw up our hands at another ludicrous pass interference call, or stare in disappointment at another dropped ball.

Labor’s future will also be decided by its response to a reactionary political climate, and whether it can overcome two sinister and mutually reinforcing dynamics that are now at play in the movement: opportunistic collaboration with Trumpism along narrow sectoral lines, and the embrace of an “America First” nationalist agenda targeting immigrant workers. Left unchecked, these forces promise to further fracture labor by dividing native from immigrant workers, and to consolidate a tenuous affinity between working-class anger and the MAGA movement, diverting economic frustration into a far-right populist coalition. This is a time to choose sides: between deeper class unity and solidarity, or shortsighted conciliation with Trumpist power brokers.

The Roman historian Tacitus once chronicled the last speech of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain rousing his troops to resist the foreign invaders of their land. “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire, ” Calgacus said of the Romans; “they make a wasteland and call it peace . ” Much the same might be said of the contemporary invaders of the former Roman province of Palaestina Prima. The Israelis spent 470 days feverishly trying to reduce the densely inhabited territory of Gaza to a barren wasteland, a solitude, a desert. They can call it whatever they want—the outcome is anything but peace.

The job parameters for wildland firefighters haven’t changed significantly since the 1980s. What has changed significantly since the ’80s is the climate. So essentially, they’re working with the job expectations, compensation, and health care packages of a planet in which they fight fires for maybe 10 percent of their time and spend the other 90 percent doing forest management projects. But now wildland firefighters spend at least 90 percent of their time fighting fires, if not 100 percent of their time. Their compensation hasn’t kept up with that, partly because it’s impossible to increase pay and benefits at the federal level when you need Republican congressional approval to do so.

You can almost hear the chattering class’s chattering teeth as they balance the need to generate clicks with their sanctimonious shock at the public’s hatred for Brian Thompson, the company he ran, and the industry he represents. Mangione took a straight shot at capital, and now popular ire is being directed at CEOs rather than Congress, the free market rather than the immiserating state. This won’t do.

Chicago 1968 was where the New Left anti-war movement’s increasingly radical trajectory finally crashed headlong into the Democratic Party, setting the terms of a debate we’ve been stuck in ever since—a debate that's grown particularly acute in the past several months. Our generation’s convention playing out as a geographic rerun of the older one is just an uncanny coincidence.

British movies these days—from good ones like The Old Oak to OK ones like Bird to wretched ones like Saltburn—present British people as ruthlessly mean to each other, petty, conniving, classist, vulgar shits who add “innit? ” at the end of sentences that are aren’t questions but insults. What is going on over there? Mike Leigh presents a meta-answer, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the performance of the year as the meanest of all, a depressed, grieving wife and mother ruining everyone’s day in supermarket lines, car parks, living rooms, graveyards, etc.

As the neighborhood bar played “New York, New York” , the air felt electric. This was the team we came to watch, and while we weren’t sure exactly where they’d been the last week, we were happy to have them back. The final score of 11–4 lent a rosy sheen to what was, in truth, a night of ghastly behavior at Yankee Stadium.

Just once in her life she shot a gun, when she was in the Venture Scouts, aged 16. It was at the Thiepval Barracks a few months before she took her GCSEs. The army must have been trying to recruit them or something. As if. The army guy, who’d shown her how to shoot the gun, looked like Travis Bickle prior to the mohawk. She’d fancied him slightly. They didn’t converse.

Let me just finish disinfecting a table number marker and then off I go, I just have to put down what I’ve got in my hands to serve, I tell her that with my eyes, yes I’m coming, I’ve seen the whole thing, I saw you adding the sauces, the napkins, I know the order’s complete and besides that’s all I’ve got to do, serve, I’m available, I’m capable of taking that initiative. The crewmember calls for me all the same, she’s looking right at me and she calls for me.

“I only love swimming, ” I said. And it was true that I’d always felt awkward on land. Sometimes I wondered if that was why I was so unsuccessful at online dating: technology was incompatible with the water. “The monk thing does appeal. ”

A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer meant fewer shipping costs for Netflix, and fewer DVDs for the company to manage and store. Netflix tracked heavy users of its service — labeling them internally as “pigs” — and secretly throttled their deliveries. It didn’t matter if Netflix rented fewer DVDs than Blockbuster, because the company would keep collecting its monthly fee. The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was this: Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.