IS THIS WHAT IT FELT LIKE, living through 1975, the months before everything came apart? Or fell into place, depending on—relative to the chess pieces, people’s lives—your position. That year, a leftist politician named Maarouf Saad was assassinated in Saida, the northernmost tip of southern Lebanon, while leading protests against a scheme to monopolize the […]
SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE THERE ARE THREE TRUE OUTCOMES FOR MILITANTS. You run, you’re imprisoned, or you die. Sometimes it’s all three. The Weather Underground (WU), perhaps the most notorious of the late-1960s American radicals, met all these fates—including, most famously, accidentally blowing up three of their own. Born locally out of the violent splits […]
TOWARD THE END of his life, Edward Said liked to call himself the last Jewish intellectual. It is an excellent and, I’m tempted to say, quintessentially Jewish joke. I have thought of it often since October 7, 2023, as I’ve watched the unfolding of the most intense and urgent propaganda war over the question of […]
FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN TURNED FORTY-NINE WHILE HIDING FROM THE FBI IN THE SPRING OF 1970, though pictures from that time suggest the playfulness of a younger man. In shots taken by civil rights movement photographer Bob Fitch, Berrigan mugs at the camera from under a rat’s-nest wig and sombrero, a lampoon of disguise. Beanie-clad, he […]
SUFFERING MAKES FOR A GOOD STORY. A certain reader likes when it feels far away. The task of the storyteller is to make it seem so. Consider a fan favorite: the drawn-out mental breakdown. At the beginning, there are all the ways I could have been you, and as I string you along my unraveling, […]
WE’RE IN THE HOLYOKE MALL, and I need to go to the bathroom. Although the divorce is not so recent, some activities with my father still stretch him beyond his inclinations or means, usually both, which he devises to suit my older brother and me to make up for “it.” Shopping at the video-game store […]
JULIA IOFFE’S Motherland is a book about Russian women written for American women. The book, which identifies itself as a feminist history of modern Russia, condemns American feminism for its toothlessness, its inability to see beyond the safety that has shielded America’s women from the ordinary horrors of Russian life. Ioffe was born and raised […]
WHAT DO BABIES SMELL LIKE? The correct answer is Johnson & Johnson. The company put a lot of money into creating its signature scent—which consists of more than two hundred ingredients and is among the most recognized fragrances in the world—because of the well-established hold of smell on memory and memory on behavior. In more […]
WHEN SARAH SCHULMAN WALKED INTO MY APARTMENT, a month or so after Artforum magazine fired me in October 2023 for publishing an open letter in support of Palestinian liberation, her first words were, “How can I help?” I think this is the most ethical sentence in the English language. She said it like she meant […]
HISTORICAL FIGURES re-emerge into public attention according to a quasi-astrological logic. Before she fell into relative obscurity, Andrée Blouin was a luminary of the African decolonization movement of the 1950s and ’60s—beautiful, glamorous, and gifted with an acute understanding of power. She was in the right places at the right times: she first became politically […]
There is by now a vibrant and contentious literature on the relationship between political change and mental illness. Does despair breed compliance, or can you fight back harder the less you have to lose? Could a shared cause of psychological suffering become a cause, rallying and even sustaining the sufferers? Must a mind unhinge itself […]
AN OVERPOWERED REBEL casts his eyes up in terror at the warrior ripping him away from his grieving mother. Survivors on a corpse-covered raft at sea, dispatched by a vicious colonial government and abandoned by their superiors, stretch desperate hands toward the horizon, where a rescue may or may not be approaching. A peasant rebellion […]
GUY DEBORD PUBLISHED The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 while shepherding the original Situationist International in Paris, a collective shimmy that tumbled into the protests of May 1968. This era has become a frozen plot point in the Wiki of the left while its theoretical leader remains, somehow, under-consulted. British art historian T. J. […]
AS NEWS BROKE that a ceasefire agreement—tenuous, immediately delayed by Israel—had been signed, celebrations filled Gaza’s streets. People allowed themselves to take in this victory: the naked force of the entire West had failed, for over a year, to break their will. When news of the ceasefire reached me, via phone notification, I started crying. […]
ISN’T MODERN SOCIETY A FUCKING DRAG? Don’t you want to smash it? Don’t you want to create your own life instead of slogging to a job you hate, watching the rich live more vibrantly on tiny screens? There are people in history who did precisely that. They usually ended up shot in the streets, but […]
SIX MONTHS AGO, I was sitting in the San Jose kitchen of a woman I was trying to like. We were new friends, and I had been invited to dinner. As she flitted around me cooking, her young son would occasionally appear at my elbow and then disappear into the living room in a peal […]
RICHARD BECK WAS FOURTEEN WHEN THE PLANES HIT, the impact sites in Manhattan, Arlington, and Shanksville forming a triangle surrounding the Philadelphia suburb in which he grew up. In early October 2001, on a school choir trip to Manhattan, he saw two young women in the alto section tearfully embrace at the announcement of the […]
JAMIE HOOD: Hello! CHARLOTTE SHANE: Hi! You look gorgeous—make sure to put that in. HOOD: Oh, I will. An Honest Woman (Simon & Schuster, $26) is a sort of origin story, about the boys you grew up with and the cultural milieu of your youth, as well as an erotic Bildungsroman that eventually traces your […]
FOR A YEAR, ISRAEL HAS TARGETED doctors, mosques, mothers, fathers, churches, journalists, hospitals, toddlers, cats, horses, apartment complexes, and universities in Gaza. It has aired the torture of Palestinians on national television. Many have articulated this point: we are witnessing the first live streamed genocide. I come across a photo of a man bursted under […]
“IF YOU WANT A HAPPY ENDING,” Orson Welles once quipped, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” But sometimes, it’s not that the story stops so much as that the audience stops paying attention. This might be one way to think of #MeToo, which, in the years since it has faded from […]
