If the government is good for business, why destroy the government? It’s possible Musk really believes he is saving the American economy. By all accounts a fervent believer in whatever he currently believes in — stopping climate change, colonizing Mars, juicing up global birth rates — Musk may be speaking in earnest when he claims that government bloat is ruining the country.

What is the function of demanding that the entire federal bureaucracy search itself for traces that it might be funding programs to which the Leader might object? Plainly, to dement it. Or make it paranoid, make it pusillanimous, make it humiliated, and bring to the forefront the narcs, toadies, informers, and eager collaborators who can be promoted to replace those who continue their jobs and assert the law.

Today anti-China policies are a rare point of bipartisan consensus. Popular opinion on China has steadily soured since the 2000s, first among business owners, then the public. Pew polling shows that some 80 percent of Americans view the country unfavorably, a historic low. Enrollments in Mandarin courses at US universities, which climbed steadily after 1978, have been falling since 2013.

I saw the outline of the Americas from space. North America was belching out strands of fat pearls, diamonds, gold and silver coins, swimming pools, cars, high-end watches, like the whole landmass was a slot machine with thousands of volcano-size receptacles. The coastline was rimmed with mounted machine guns, thousands of them, pointing outward. South America was made of mud, and I could see all layers of Earth, and the bones and skulls in it. The raised line of the Andes was not mountains, but enormous fountains of blood.

“Don’t write about me. Write about Korea, about the issues,” Mom has told me multiple times. Dad: “You seem to write about our family when you run out of topics.” I am embarrassed by memoir and simultaneously drawn to the form. I am always reading books by sons and daughters. 

Delivered Youssef to the place in Maine. I say “the place,” because I don’t know how to describe it. Is it a camp? A hospital? An asylum?

Young recruits make ideal pupils: their minds are curious, their bodies likely tireless (and later, strong, for armed struggle), and their pasts, by definition, brief: no one needs to worry that much about a 12-year-old’s commitment to her bourgeois life, let alone about her being a Fed. (The memory of COINTELPRO was not distant for RevCom, and the group was serious about security culture.) The Party’s “Central Task,” according to the Draft Programme, was to “prepare the masses,” psychologically and organizationally, to seize power when the moment of revolutionary crisis arrived. Young people were the easiest demographic to prepare — hence the Youth Brigade.

He wouldn’t be thinking of my daughter, but then I also hadn’t been thinking of my daughter. Now I brought to mind her classroom, which I’d seen only once, during parents’ night. I brought it to mind deliberately and placed her at a little round table, reading a book, eating a snack. I imagined her hands, which still looked like the hands of a toddler. My son had elegant hands.

The thing about novel people
is they think they are characters
in novels. Or novelizable life.
What is life. Round
characters of course | who would ask to be
flat a mere
device to get us
from one identifiable event
to.

It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at least one genre-disorienting tour through the facades of a studio lot, like the masterpiece sequence in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and plenty of languid musing about the vicissitudes of fame, often delivered poolside.

As for me, my mind was blown open by Blue Velvet when I saw it college-aged in first run in 1986 at the Nickelodeon Cinema in Boston with my then-girlfriend. We could not speak when we left the theater, so rattled were we by this terrifying new thing that had come into the world (the same summer and fall as Down by Law, She’s Gotta Have It, Big Trouble in Little China, and Something Wild). This filmic world of smashed TVs, diners, wood paneling, the ominous hum of electricity, and rose-pink wall-to-wall carpeting was not, as some viewers may now think, an alien place. It was the actual America of that time, put on screen by David Lynch in a way no one had ever seen before.

None of the following receives a substantive assessment in When the Clock Broke: NAFTA, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America,” Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s political career, George W. Bush, the 2000 election, September 11, the war on terror, the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, the 2008 global financial crisis, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, the legalization of gay marriage, the presence of the Minutemen on the country’s southern border, the rise in mass shootings, Occupy Wall Street, Senator Mitch McConnell’s lengthy effort to enable minoritarian rule by packing the courts with right-wing judges, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, or Citizens United.

The fog that drifts over Oslo’s fjords and “comes down like a low ceiling” is “gray,” dawn is “gray,” hair is “gray,” Trondheim is “gray,” birds are “gray,” mice are “gray,” trees are “gray,” clouds are “gray,” suits are “gray,” sweaters are “gray,” scarves are “gray,” underwear is “gray,” old people are “gray,” faces are “gray,” Saturday morning is “gray,” November is “gray,” December is “gray,” spring is also “gray,” the sky is often “gray” and sometimes it is even “grayer than it usually is when it rains.” “Finally,” Long Live the Post Horn!’s Ellinor remarks as the fog descends, “everything was covered in gray.”

Anyone who has ever emerged from a multiday academic conference will recognize this truth: as the sun sets on the jetsam of crumpled programs and the custodians vacuum the carpet, you set out for the bus station or the airport and wonder what, and whom, it was all for. Our alternative ecologies, our archives of resistance, our insurgent epistemologies — what do they do, except make a living for ever fewer people every year?

Maybe it’s the case that younger readers — always a sizeable faction of n+1’s audience — associate email with school or work, and don’t think to sit down and compose, for fun, corrections or admonishments about, say, the misuse of Bourdieu in the latest Intellectual Situation (Issue 16, inspiring four letters in Issue 17). Maybe our email address (editors@nplusonemag.com!) is poorly publicized?