Richard Beck

When I read In the Freud Archives for the first time, I understood myself to be looking for facts, dates, quotations—material. The material was there, and like a good nonfiction writer I dutifully underlined and annotated, but I also found that the particulars of the story she told had difficulty competing with the writing she used to tell it.

For a while in the 2010s, music critics were obsessed with “hauntology,” the return of dead and disappeared genres to contemporary music in ghostly form. Hauntology was not just nostalgia, the idea that the past was better and that we’d like to return to it. The most famous practitioner of hauntology in music, Burial, produced loving memorials to British rave music of the early ’90s based not on his own memories—he was too young to go to the raves—but on stories told to him by his older brother. Rave culture promised a future that Burial should have inhabited as an adult, but that future never arrived, and that sense of the past failing to keep its promises to those who came after is what made hauntology such a fruitful project for those born to the wealthiest generation in world history.

Much of what David Berman wrote and performed throughout his life was country music: songs about the sadness and difficulty of trying to get by in the world, along with descriptions of that world. “When God was young, he made the wind and the sun,” Berman sang on the opening song of Bright Flight. “And since then, it’s been a slow education.” When country songs are successful, it is because their outward simplicity, their plain-spokenness, their colloquialisms emerge out of enormous and delicate efforts of emotional compression. You can tell when a country song is just simple—when the necessary effort hasn’t been made—and you can tell when a songwriter hasn’t pulled off the compression, because then the song sounds mannered. But when both elements are working, a country song can shimmer, throb, or glare at you with an uncomfortable intensity.

This time around, magical forces (that is, children) were supposed to save us from the gun control debate. There was something unsettling or self-serving about the excess of praise adults heaped on the Stoneman Douglas students who boarded charter buses bound for the Tallahassee statehouse just a few days after watching their classmates die. “This shooting is different from the other ones,” a 16-year-old boy told a Times reporter. “I just have a gut feeling—something is going to change.” It’s understandable that he should feel this way; insofar as no previous school shooting had happened in his school, to his friends and teachers, this time was different. But his representatives quickly demonstrated that it was not different enough. Florida’s legislature voted down a motion to debate an assault weapons ban.

Faced with political instability in the developing world—often a region of the developing world in which the US and its allies have at least some interest in resource extraction—the US advises weak governments to fight “terrorism,” providing training and material assistance as needed. When the government proves unable to stand on its own two feet, the US sends in troops of its own.