The plantation, the prison farm, the police academy: it sounds like a history of America.
Politics
Surely it’s possible to say two things at the same time— to dwell in the uncertainty.
Acts of Human Will
October 11, 2023
Have We Learned Nothing?
The comparison is apt
There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11.
October 10, 2023
The other side beckons.
A Hole in the Limits of the World
Prelude to a Coup
Revolution and counterrevolution in Sudan
Now, two years on, the transition was ailing. The economy was in free fall, partly due to austerity measures imposed at the IMF’s behest. Street protests were calling for the resignation of Abdalla Hamdok, the soft-spoken former UN economist who was serving as the prime minister in the transitional government, and a number of political parties had withdrawn from the FFC.
September 1, 2023
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.
August 18, 2023
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.”
May 1, 2023
In Gaziantep
“Let me dig, let me dig! If I die doing it, at least I’ll die with them!”
I notice Islahiye’s clatter when a hundred bystanders are told to go quiet so the volunteers can listen. You can tell who is tearing a wrapper or ruffling their puffy coat and where the caution tape flaps. The ambulance that recovers one life interferes with the search for another.
The government’s primary focus was not on relieving suffering but on punishing dissent.
The Catastrophe in Turkey
April 20, 2023
By exceptionalizing his origins, he exceptionalizes himself.
J. D. Vance Changes the Subject
February 21, 2023
The government’s primary focus was not on relieving suffering but on punishing dissent.
Constructing Fate
Three Times
The pregnancy was the crisis, not the abortion
One was OK: a mistake. But two was a pattern. I knew at an early age that I never wanted to have kids but I didn’t think I was the type of girl who would have an abortion, certainly not more than one. Not because of adherence to a religious or natalist ideology but because I was too educated, too responsible—which is an ideology, too.
