May 1, 2023
“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.
April 20, 2023
By exceptionalizing his origins, he exceptionalizes himself.
February 21, 2023
The government’s primary focus was not on relieving suffering but on punishing dissent.
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.
Most doctors don’t know how to do abortions. Why not?
The fact that most doctors like me—my colleagues in obstetrics and gynecology very much included—don’t know how to perform abortions is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medicine in the US.
September 13, 2022
Godard never forgot that in art, as in life, beauty persuades
“Art today is Jean-Luc Godard,” the French poet Louis Aragon wrote in 1965. “Godard is not satisfied with the world as it is, he remakes it in his own manner . . . in Pierrot le fou red sings like an obsession.” It would again, decades later, in The Image Book. Godard has long been one of the few who believe that color is not a given, that it is a craft like any other. If his movies—the ones with Belmondo, with Gorin, with Miéville—have staying power, it is because he never completed his own search, for color or anything else. It is customary for any legendary artist to lapse into an academicism of the self. They have figured out how to do what they do and do so indefinitely. Godard wasn’t like that.
“Those boys were just cannon fodder. And for what?”
The movement to criminalize abortion
Those who wish to ban legal abortion are not “pro-life”; they are pro-criminalization. Those who wish to protect the right to abortion are not “pro-choice”; they are anti-criminalization. Reframing the conflict in these terms clarifies the stakes. At issue here is not a principled attachment to “life” or to “choice” but the practical question of whether terminating a pregnancy should be considered a crime.
April 21, 2022
Sorokin deserves credit for bothering to skewer such a marginal figure
This rhythm in Russia, of repression and violent revolution, is well known to Sorokin, who first emerged as a writer under Soviet rule in the 1980s, when he was no less irritating to the Kremlin. He’s not just a satirist but also a speculative fantasist, and he became angrily political after Putin came to power.
Everyone on TV was just going through the motions. It felt like watching the death spiral of civilization.
Who did neoliberalism?
The extent to which the iconic movements of the ’60s United States fed on existing liberalism and fed into neoliberalism is, however, all the more reason not to isolate the New Left as a singular cataclysm that destabilized the New Deal order. Far from a gently humming machine that could have kept operating indefinitely were it not for the intervention of a new generation of radicals, the United States’ simulacrum of social democracy was a fragile assemblage of competing intellectual tendencies and political coalition partners that was always threatening to fall apart.
