The most essential passage in Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris’s new book on the “making of millennials,” does not appear until its 113th page and is not really about millennials at all. “When history teachers talk about government policy decisions, they tend to use the progressive frame: The government improves things over time,” he writes.
“Are you a one or a zero?” demands Mr. Robot in the eponymous TV series. “That’s the question you have to ask yourself.” My answer: neither, goddamnit—my hopes and dreams aren’t regulated by a motherboard, not quite yet. Or am I deluding myself, and identity is so shaped by the technologies we use that effectively they’re using us? Some version of this query lurks at the edges of Andrew O’Hagan’s The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age, a book dominated by secretive and truth-challenged men, among them WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous genius-creator
There is an essential arbitrariness to borders. Whether enforced by walls and fences or through less material means—visa requirements, travel bans—they are always at least partly abstract: imaginary lines. Kapka Kassabova’s travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe explores the spiritual, psychological, and emotional qualities of the area around the shared frontiers of Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria, roaming this “back door to Europe” in an effort to find out, up close, what borders do to people, and vice versa. Her book is a deconstruction of the looming, nonspecific anxiety that comes from continually having to justify your right
In the late 1940s, the poet Czesław Miłosz wrote to a Polish friend from the United States: “The spiritual poverty of millions of the inhabitants of this country is horrifying . . . The only living people—the ability to create art is a sign of living—are the Blacks and the Indians.” In contrast to the nation’s beleaguered minorities, it seemed to him, the “unfortunate American puppets move . . . with a depressing inner stupor.” Miłosz was then the cultural attaché of Communist Poland in New York. Within four years he would be persona non grata to the Stalin-installed regime
Richard Lloyd Parry’s very touching and thought-provoking book Ghosts of the Tsunami tells how the community of Okawa, Japan, was affected by the Great Tohoku Disaster: the earthquake and resulting tidal wave of March 11, 2011. On that day, the tidal surges struck Okawa’s primary school, killing seventy-four of the seventy-eight children present, and ten of the eleven teachers.
No statesman in living memory has experienced a more meteoric rise, and at his height enjoyed more universal esteem—or suffered a more precipitous fall, and thereafter more curious neglect—than Mikhail Gorbachev. When he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, few knew what to make of this bald-pated, purple-birthmarked former secretary of agriculture. His relative youth (he was fifty-four years old) immediately distinguished him from the dotard preceding him and the gerontocrats still surrounding him in the politburo—but no one could have anticipated the revolution that followed.
Quaint to think that not even fifty years ago—when network TV reigned supreme, the underground press flourished, and El Topo invented the midnight movie—there was an amorphous thing called the Counterculture. Now, of course, there are hundreds.
No one chases death like the young. Goth teens, sure, and kids on social media who ask the Pope to murder them with sex, and anyone for whom a death wish is mainly a style or a meme. But non-elderly Americans are killing themselves at a staggering rate, and it’s increasingly difficult to tell what’s accidental and what’s intentional. The November overdose of twenty-one-year-old rapper Lil Peep was exemplary in its ambiguity: His Instagram posts just before he died swung between resignation and struggle, between “fucc it” and “one day maybe I won’t die young.” His death was self-inflicted but
With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the highest it’s been since the Pliocene, there is no dearth of au courant theories explaining how nature and society do not in any sense compose distinct spheres. Nature cannot be distinguished from society because the former, no less than the latter, is “constructed”—a discursive figuration or trope with no independent external reality. Or they can’t be distinguished because nature now constitutes a hopelessly blurred hybrid with society. Or because nature has simply ended. Or because, as French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour declares, channeling his inner Thatcher, society does not
In August 2016, a widely circulated photograph showed armed police officers standing over a woman on a crowded beach in Nice as she awkwardly removed the top layer of her burkini. The confrontation was the latest stage in France’s decades-long struggle over certain forms of religious expression in public. Building on a 2004 law prohibiting head scarves in public schools, several towns in the South of France had banned “beach attire that ostentatiously displays a religious affiliation” in response to the 2016 Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice. Around the same time, a woman in Cannes was charged with defying
In his inaugural address as America’s forty-fifth president, Donald Trump invoked the image of a nation in crisis. From “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities” to “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones,” his speech portrayed a landscape of squalor and misery. Returning to a favorite theme of his campaign, Trump laid the blame for much of this devastation on the “crime and gangs and drugs” that, according to him, “have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” “This American carnage,” he promised, “stops right here and stops right now.”
It’s hard to say exactly when her depression began, Lauren Slater tells us, but she has a memory from the summer of her sixth or seventh year. She and her sister were sitting on their stoop, sweltering in the heat, when they were approached by a sweaty man in a dark suit. “His face perspired heavily as he knelt by my sister and me and asked if we would like to see his monkey dance,” she writes. “He was so close I could smell his cinder breath and then I saw his hand, or rather his lack of a hand,
By the time the last tower at Cabrini-Green was demolished, in 2011, the notorious Chicago public-housing complex had become a national shorthand for anything “derelict or dangerous, from neighborhoods in other cities to a temporarily out-of-service elevator in a high-end apartment building,” as Ben Austen writes. In his new book, High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, Austen explains how the homes, built between 1942 and 1962, started out as a vision of what public housing could be and ended as an example of inner-city blight.
In a country whose literary heritage includes the likes of Gone with the Wind and Atlas Shrugged, it should come as no surprise that the most politically influential novel in America during the past half century is terrible. But the terror in this case is literal, too: neo-Nazi leader William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries has inspired multiple generations of white supremacist terrorists since its publication in 1978. Framed as the memoirs of Earl Turner, engineer and bomber, the Diaries tracks the exploits of the Organization, a revolutionary group devoted to the violent overthrow of the federal government and the global
So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his
Lately I’ve been preoccupied with a strange thought, what one might call a blip of cultural memory: The only human-made object that has reached interstellar space—the Voyager 1 probe, launched by NASA in 1977—is a record player. Though it carries mathematical formulas and graphs and drawings of human figures Voyager’s gold-plated 16 2⁄3 rpm record is the main event: It includes a selection from Glenn Gould’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Stravinsky conducting The Rite of Spring, Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,”songs played by traditional musicians of Benin and Australia, shakuhachi flute from Japan, and, second-to-last, Blind Willie Johnson’s recording of “Dark Was
Americans and Libya go way back. The opening lines of the “Marines’ Hymn” commemorate the First Barbary War (1801–05), one of the young republic’s earliest forays into international military intervention. During the Reagan era, Libya and its dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, became synonymous with terrorism for many Americans, after the Libyan-sponsored bombing of a West Berlin nightclub frequented by US soldiers. This mistrust was famously dramatized in Back to the Future, in which the panicked cry “The Libyans!” was intended to be both bloodcurdling and somewhat absurd. And during the last presidential election, the word Benghazi summarized the Republicans’ attacks on
As relations between Russia and the United States continue to worsen, one of the unexpected twists in the unfolding drama has been the dragging of each nation’s ambassadors into the limelight. Usually, these diplomatic figures spend most of their time hosting parties and attending state ceremonies. But the compulsion to conjure phantoms has made two recent ambassadors—Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, and Sergey Kislyak, Putin’s ambassador to the US from 2008 to 2017—into the public faces of their countries’ treachery.
A “Sy Hersh piece,” as readers of the New York Times and the New Yorker have come to know over the past half century, is often met with dread. A dense intrigue unfolds, the unpacking aided by unnamed spooks who unspool salacious quotes, in seeming competition with one another, while the stakes for the body politic build to fever pitch. The tales are arcane, obtuse, and, above all, dark.
The Marcellus Shale is a 575-mile-long stretch of sedimentary rock, most of it deep underground, that settled millions of years ago over the imprint of an ancient sea. It lies beneath much of Appalachia, extending up through western and northern Pennsylvania and a section of western New York. Trapped within the rock are vast stores of natural gas, and because it’s so close to existing gas pipelines and the cities of the East Coast, the Marcellus Shale has long been, for energy companies, an attractive prize—“like discovering an underground deposit of beer directly beneath Yankee Stadium,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben
