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Ben Parker

All articles by this author

On Adam Phillips

On Adam Phillips

Is psychoanalysis a path to change, or a way of avoiding it?

It is significant that conversion, in its extremist form, comes on the scene when frustration is no longer bearable, as a failure of tolerance—the preeminent virtue of political liberalism. Phillips’s other watchwords are the familiar liberal ones of sympathy, negotiation, compromise, and collaboration. “Liberals,” he says in On Wanting to Change, “prefer conversation to rote learning, multiple perspectives to exclusive explanation, [and] dissent to conformity.” For those reasons, “Liberalism is by definition not something one is converted to.”

Night’s Nirvana

Night’s Nirvana

On Norwegian Black Metal

A lot of the posed photos are about what you would expect: pig heads set on fire, shrouded band members looming in churchyards at night, or wielding chainsaws, or covered in prop blood. It’s either extremely silly, or very morbid and unholy, depending strongly on whether you also are a teenage boy.

Age of Quarrel

Age of Quarrel

On New York Hardcore

Regrettable trends and eccentricities, which ought to have been lethal, instead became defining and enduring aspects of the scene. And some of the most noxious elements of New York hardcore—its reactionary ideology, the awkward mingling of skinhead and straight-edge versions of male aggression, the detours into religious mysticism—were not symptoms of decline but present from the beginning.