fbpx

Online Only

Regular dispatches from our contributors.

On the Thai Elections

On the Thai Elections

The monarchy needs the army to safeguard the throne and the army needs the king to justify its role in politics.

The last years of Bhumibol coincided with the emergence of a new generation in Thailand, which grew up during a time in which the royal propaganda started to subside. Around this time too, the emergence of social media served to expand political horizons, showing young Thais how people fought for democracy in other parts of the world.

Toward Pop Literature

Toward Pop Literature

A polemic

Due to copyright laws that prevent its monetization (and in contrast to the careerism unsubtly promoted by MFA programs), fanfiction cannot technically be other than a labor of love—though Y/N demonstrates how easily legible thinly-veiled references to sufficiently famous celebrities can be. The real problem with fanfiction, from a mainstream literary perspective, is precisely that its authors not only love reading (movies, music, other books) too much, they also love writing too much. And it shows!

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.”

How to Touch Grass

How to Touch Grass

There will still be addictions, relapses, traumas, betrayals, interpersonal dramas, and sudden deaths the day after the revolution. Comrades will still let us down, and we’ll still hold grudges and harbor resentments. Parents will still be uncomprehending or oppressive or worse, and we’ll still wish that we’d never said that to her or walked away that night or gone home with him again or fought with them or failed.

Going Live

Going Live

We heard hoarse yellers, loud belters, even soft mumblers.

There were times when the drama in the lives of certain streamers conquered our interest in the show. One curator, after skipping from feed to feed, found a streamer who would go on to broadcast heroically for nearly the remainder of the night, and we stuck with her, too. She had brought her young child. At one point, the child asked: “Why are you crying?” “Because I’m having the best time with you.”

Who Was Barbie?

Who Was Barbie?

A symposium

My mind was racing with questions like, Why is there a transfemme Barbie but no transmasc Ken? Did I just pay $17.50 to witness the spectacle of capital subsuming dissent? Have the filmmakers deliberately cast “Weird Barbie” with an actress who dated Bari Weiss and played “Hallelujah” on the piano while dressed as Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election in order to politically center “weirdness”? Why is there no mention of doll materials designer Jack Ryan and his past employment engineering missiles for Raytheon?

Robert Moses! Jane Jacobs! Robert Moses! Jane Jacobs!

Robert Moses! Jane Jacobs! Robert Moses! Jane Jacobs!

What else was going on in the city, or the world, that might have enabled a figure like Moses to do what he did for decades?

Pinning the blame on Moses, or celebrating Jacobs, or vice versa is a way out of a big question that neither the political left or right in the United States has many clear answers to: how to resolve the tension between the benefits and pitfalls of large-scale planning and local control.