Sadness is general, as is solipsism. Kevin Brockmeier's second collection of stories, The View from the Seventh Layer, comprises four "Fables" and nine other morose and mystical fictions. The book confirms that Brockmeier, who moonlights as a writer of children's books, is as prolific as he is sensitive and sorrowful. Now thirty-five, he has published one previous collection and two novels. His first novel, The Truth about Celia, like many popular national news stories of the past decade, concerned a missing little girl. The Brief History of the Dead, a portion of which appeared in The New Yorker, proceeded from the premise that there is a city where the souls of the deceased dwell for as long as someone alive on earth remembers them; in the course of the novel, the city's population bulges, then dwindles as the planet is ravaged by a world war and then a plague that threatens to wipe out humanity. Read More

A military dictatorship is a military dictatorship, and a democracy is a democracy. And the latter is always automatically better than the former. It is safer to agree with this statement and to look at every particular complex political situation through the lens of this cliché than to risk having one's liberal-democratic credentials questioned. But as a friend of mine once remarked, "All arguments for democracy in Pakistan are theoretical. For dictatorships, the greatest argument is the actual experience of Pakistani democracies." Very similarly, another friend recently commented that "There are of course no theoretical arguments for a dictatorship, only practical ones." In the case of Pakistan, the last two Read More

Alex Gourevitch is right to say that the campaign against global warming can lead to left fantasies of an antipolitics of emergency. I'll vouch for this, because I have these fantasies myself.

After the non-election of 2000, Al Gore temporarily withdrew from public life. He became fat, bearded, and to all appearances depressed. During the grim Bush years after September 11, 2001, he occasionally came out of his burrow and, unlike all the trim, clean-shaven, and optimistic figures who held active hopes in electoral politics, told the truth. Global warming was much on his mind. Read More

There is a word in American politics that represents all our local, regional, and global concerns about the condition of the land, water, and sky; all plant and animal life; and our own lives insofar as they are affected (and they're always affected) by the foregoing. If one word must be so overworked in the service of such vast, essential affairs, it would be nice to have a reverent, all-encompassing one, like Tao or YHWH. Instead we've been stuck with environmentalism—a gloomy, marginal term, with a breeze of irrelevance whistling through the bureaucratic archways of its ns and ms. Read More

Necessity, the tyrant's plea, Milton called it, and it's no doubt possible that the compelling necessity of reducing carbon emissions may be invoked to justify the suspension of democratic politics. But Alex Gourevitch is worried not so much about the possibility of green tyranny as about environmentalism becoming an "antipolitics" that destroys civil society from within. In this scenario, political life would be dominated rhetorically by talk of security, of disaster prevention. A stealthily coercive model of shared identity through shared risk would displace a vigorous democratic politics in which the differing interests of citizens are acknowledged through conflict and compromise. Read More

I know my way fairly well around literary lectures. Generally—and perhaps especially in a place like Los Angeles, where there are more glamorous things to do on a Friday evening—they are poorly attended by a ragtag assortment of professors, students, and writers, who come dressed in blue jeans and rumpled shirts with notebooks under their arms and pens behind their ears. During the lecture, they nod, furrow their brows, and make notes; at its conclusion, the boldest among them raise their hands with questions the purpose of which is as often to demonstrate their own intellectual perspicacity as it is to clarify that which they have just heard. Later, bold and timid alike disappear into the night, back to the usually modest homes, filled with books and ideas, in which they take their refuge. Read More

II.

A month has passed since the donation of the little stove in Villa El Salvador. Keiko Fujimori isn't wearing sneakers or a suit today, but a jacket in her political party's trademark bright orange, standing on a raised platform (also orange) before a crowd of some five thousand, in the heart of Lima. She is joined on stage by members of her party, her brother Kenyi Gerardo, her husband, (who, like Keiko, is always smiling) and some friends. Read More

I.

Cae bien. O, mejor dicho, es difícil que ella, Keiko Sofía Fujimori Higuchi, caiga mal, así uno se esfuerce para que eso suceda. Inténtelo. Piense en su padre. Alberto Fujimori es un ex presidente del Perú acusado de corrupción, de ser responsable de asesinatos y de construir, durante diez años, un país a su medida: un periodismo, una política, un sistema de espionaje a su medida. No se trata de una estadística generalizada, pero los dictadores no suelen ser recordados con cariño. Tampoco sus familias. En todo caso, la familia de un dictador se agazapa con los años y puedes olvidarla con indiferencia. A ella no. Keiko Sofía Fujimori fue la hija que más acompañó a su padre durante su gobierno y que luego, con un masoquismo tal vez premeditado, decidió seguir en política. Entonces, como quizá detestas a su padre –nada es tan seguro en el Perú–, por extensión tendrías que odiarla a ella. Es difícil. Keiko Sofía Fujimori cae bien. Tal vez ése sea el rasgo de carácter –de afuera hacia ella– que la define. Read More

You like her. Or rather, it's hard to dislike Keiko Sofía Fujimori Higuchi, so you make an effort. Try it. Think about her father. Alberto Fujimori, the ex-president of Peru, currently standing trial, accused of corruption, of ordering extrajudicial assassinations, widely thought to have constructed during his ten year rule a country built to his sinister specifications: a docile, easily manipulated media, a system of widespread espionage, a venal and corrupt political system whose lifeblood was bribery. There are no statistics on this, of course, but generally speaking, dictators do not tend to be remembered affectionately—and their families are hardly remembered at all. Most fade with each passing year, and you can forget them. But not in this case: Keiko stood alongside her father throughout his government, taking on a prominent and highly visible role. Then, after his fall, in a decision that borders on masochism, she chose to continue in politics. Just as you might detest her father—though certainly not everyone in Peru does—by extension, you would have to hate her. But it's not easy. Keiko is likeable, and perhaps it is this likeability that defines her. Read More