The Intellectual Situation
In the Maze by Dayna Tortorici
Behind every brave outing I saw a legal liability. I suppose that’s what happens when you know enough men with money. Such men are minor kings among us, men with lawyer-soldiers at their employ who can curtail certain kinds of talk. While I do believe in false allegations, and I do believe that women can be bullies, it’s hard, sometimes, not to be cynical about the defense. Some men love free speech almost as much as they love libel lawyers.
Politics
When a Person Goes Missing by Dawn Lundy Martin
It strikes me that to miss or be missing, in my brother’s case, requires a part-of-speech modification, too—one that could perhaps help me, at least, understand his particular condition, meaning the Condition of Bruce as it intersects with the subjugated identities we know are related, race and gender. To be missing, as a noun, would be the designation itself, like a black, the racial category without the noun person. A failed sight. A passed by without touching. A failed inclusion. An unattended. A missing.
Goodbye, Cold War by Aziz Rana
Democrats and many Republicans continue to reaffirm the moral distinctions between America and its enemies, regardless of who occupies the White House: the United States stands for liberal equality and uses force to serve the world’s interests; its adversaries are threats to democracy that must be contained, undermined, or forcibly confronted. This is a movement to reassert the terms of the cold war, and with those terms, a previous status quo. Although it is hardly the first time politicians have sought to revive cold-war presumptions for their own political purposes, the difference today is that the old-time religion can no longer be revived.
Trolling and Taboo by Nausicaa Renner
Taboos are charged with emotional energy: you’ve hidden these thoughts away because they were, likely, too much to bear. When you uncover them, they can feel so intensely real, the most real, because they reveal an emotional, not literal, truth for you. There is a reason right-wing trolling is more effective than its left-wing equivalent: trolling that harnesses the power of taboo—the most ancient, retrograde, collectively unconscious stuff of sex, the family, the species—is more effective than trolling toward enlightenment.
Fiction
The Keeper by Christine Smallwood
When the worrying got too intense, Dorothy had a choice of palliatives arrayed in pouncing distance of the saggy patient sofa: stress balls, beads, figurines for rubbing and handling, various-size pillows for pounding and embracing, and the eternal tissue box, draped in its hand-knitted elephant-gray cover. The box was always full. The therapist must be keeping watch on the box’s levels. Dorothy respected her attention to detail. Fullness, plenitude, preparedness, a material well of empathy—excellent clinical values all. But where did the therapist hide the half-full boxes? Or did she cram new tissues into the same old box between sessions?
Estación Origen MADRID by Thomas Bolt
The night romance of the city made little differences sparkle. I kept encountering things I didn’t quite know how to see: suet studded with cloves? A row of shuttered windows painted crimson. A toy store lit only with candles, crowded with grown-ups moving and talking among dolls and dinosaurs, stickers and blocks, potholder looms and simplified puzzle maps. I thought I saw reflected water flickering: the bay so close you hear it slap the boat ramp. For a moment I stood near dripping stacks of traps, an overlooked crab still struggling in one.
Essays
On Liking Women by Andrea Long Chu
What’s striking is not Solanas’s revolutionary extremism per se, but the flippancy with which she justifies it. Life under male supremacy isn’t oppressive, exploitative, or unjust: it’s just fucking boring. For Solanas, an aspiring playwright, politics begins with an aesthetic judgment. This is because male and female are essentially styles for her, rival aesthetic schools distinguishable by their respective adjectival palettes. Men are timid, guilty, dependent, mindless, passive, animalistic, insecure, cowardly, envious, vain, frivolous, and weak. Women are strong, dynamic, decisive, assertive, cerebral, independent, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, freewheeling, thrill-seeking, and arrogant. Above all, women are cool and groovy.
Two Weeks in the Capital by Nicolás Medina Mora
Most of the drug lords who wanted to kill you are now dead or in prison. A decade ago, a generation of cartel bosses would have given their firstborns to dump your body on the steps of the ministry of justice. But your father doesn’t work there anymore. Still, the government assigns you bodyguards as a matter of protocol. The new guy is called Moises; he’s a midranking officer of the Federal Police. One day, you buy him breakfast. You discover he’s going to night school for a graduate degree in political theory. You ask who his favorite thinker is. He answers without hesitation: Gramsci.
Morbid Capitalism by Nikhil Pal Singh and Thuy Linh Tu
In Alabama and other parts of the American South, garment manufacturing never went entirely extinct. Instead, it disappeared into small shops—and behind prison doors. Lying 200 miles southeast of Florence in Wetumpka is the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, and 300 miles due south is Holman, a close-custody prison for men that also houses Alabama’s death row. Holman and Tutwiler are sites of thriving clothing-manufacturing operations. Here, there is no shortage of sewers. Working under the auspices of Alabama Correctional Industries (ACI), men and women are paid anywhere from 25 cents to 75 cents an hour for their labors.
Object Relations by Claire Jarvis
All mothers die eventually, but it doesn’t follow that motherhood is like dying, even if one almost dies—or does die—while becoming a mother. What makes the comparison inviting is that the work of laboring is such that the versions of yourself you held dear until labor begin to dissolve. There’s no quality to the thought or feeling while laboring or immediately after giving birth. One just is. No one thinks of Rilke in the recovery room. The child, once born, is human, no more, no less. No one is truly quiet giving birth.
Reviews
Cut the Kink by A. S. Hamrah
I don’t know how or where the Safdies find their actors. Even the unbandaged people in the movie look like they’ve been punched a hundred times. The Safdies’ genius is that they can fit Robert Pattinson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Barkhad Abdi into a cast that does not include actors I’ve seen before. Taliah Webster as a teenage girl who helps Connie for no good reason, maybe just to get him out of her house or because she’s bored; Peter Verby as a calm, strange psychiatrist; Buddy Duress as Ray, a just-out-of-jail rat fink who makes a series of idiotic moment-to-moment decisions the Safdies present with a demented, drugged logic—none of them is expected, and all are great.
Construct a Perfect Pentagon by Thomas de Monchaux
What distinguishes the reissue of the EPA manual from Standards Manual’s other publications to date is the inclusion, as an appendix, of forty-seven out of more than fifteen thousand photos that the EPA commissioned as part of its Documerica Project, which ran from 1971 to 1977 and sought to “photographically document subjects of environmental concern.” The captions tell the story: “Mary Workman Holds a Jar of Undrinkable Water That Comes from Her Well, and Has Filed a Damage Suit Against the Hanna Coal Company. She Has to Transport Water from a Well Many Miles Away. Although the Coal Company Owns All the Land Around Her, and Many Roads Are Closed, She Refuses to Sell. October 1973.”
The Plurality of Worlds by Justin E. H. Smith
The ontological turn in anthropology presupposes that we can live in different worlds, each marked by its own “doctrine of what there is,” even while all living on the same planet. According to Descola, in the modern West we have been living under the ontology of “naturalism,” which is peculiar among ontologies in its appeal to universal authority. Naturalism holds that other ontologies are not equal to itself, and it purports to show these other ontologies are mistaken, superstitious, ignorant. To some extent, anthropology has always been in tension with naturalism, since anthropology has been able to entertain “false” reports from native peoples of how the world is, of the entities and forces that make it how it is, as if they were true.
Not Every Kid Bond Matures by Gabriel Winant
The hidden hand that shapes millennials, producing our seemingly various and even contradictory stereotyped attributes, is the intensifying imperative—both from the outside and also deeply internalized—to maximize our own potential economic value. “What we’ve seen over the past few decades is not quite a sinister sci-fi plot to shape a cohort of supereffective workers who are too competitive, isolated, and scared to organize for something better,” writes Harris. “But it has turned out a lot like that.” Capitalism is eating its young. It’s only feeding us avocados to fatten us up first.
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