Using state money to criticize the state and its scribblers isn’t contradictory—it’s punk.
February 21, 2020

Pollito, Chicken; Gallina, Hen
American Dirt in Mexico
Notice how the register of the prose, with its figures and rates, evokes the rhetoric of nonfiction. The use of general, declarative sentences about Mexico, in particular, makes me think of what my journalism professors used to call the nut-graf—the paragraph in the article where the journalist briefly pauses her account of the news to establish, in the most efficient way possible, the context for the events on which she is reporting. The result is that Cummins’s book often slips into didacticism.

An American Education
No fiction could be more false, or more dangerous
My ears rang. My rage evaporated and in its place there arose an ugly combination of hope and fear. My body lifted itself from the chair. The world sharpened, as if I were wearing new glasses. I took a step, then another, taking care to avoid the eyes of the other foreigners. My legs moved. I advanced. What would I be willing to do for a green card? For citizenship? In that moment, I realized, I was ready to do a great deal of betraying.
You spy the owner of the telecom monopoly, holding an iPhone above his head, trying to find a signal.