Social media didn’t invent apathy, but it has a particular genius for reproducing it. At times, scrolling through one’s feed feels like reading a rollicking, absorbing social novel, but in fragments, disordered, and with the reverse effect, since when you lose yourself in it, your interest goes too, and everything is vaguely similar: what you buy, what you owe, what tragedy befell someone else. Nestled among your preferred ideology, drama,...
With Trump finally, dramatically out of office, the efforts to historicize his tenure have already begun. What is his legacy? How did we get here? What’s next? Long an astute commentator on race, imperialism, and the history of American political struggle, Nikhil Pal Singh has been an essential scholarly voice amidst the chaos that defined the Trump era, and the online noise that continues even in his absence. Singh is...
Even before he was elected, CNN reported, Donald Trump had “awakened a feminist revolution in America.” The Access Hollywood tape in which he uttered the phrase “grab ’em by the pussy” was greeted as the end of the election, almost universally expected to spark the backlash that would ensure his defeat and usher in a new era for women. The future was female, and for a brief moment, even Fox...
There is no one in American government — or perhaps any government — quite like Dr. Anthony Fauci. His position, with its mixture of informal power and public visibility, scientific authority and beltway influence, is sui generis. Few other unconfirmed civil servants have access to as many rooms in the executive interagency; no public official commands as much respect in the world of science and medicine. As director of the...
With Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, the recent surplus of James Baldwin features has grown another monograph larger. Begin Again quickly climbed bestseller lists, earning a number of glowing reviews — hardly surprising, given that, over these past few years, Baldwin has certainly been back in vogue. This summer, we may have reached peak Baldwin: Instagram was rife with the...
I thought learning about DC’s Covid-19 response would help me regain the sense of control I lost in March. I’d been inside for three months, court closures had made my day job as a paralegal largely irrelevant, and DC’s Covid-19 dashboard updated daily around 10:30 AM. I started waiting in bed every morning until the latest infections and deaths were posted, in some version of the strategy people use to...
In late August, before dawn broke on a foggy California morning, I marched with a crew of wildland firefighters through a redwood forest. We crossed a small farm, the jostle of our footsteps joining the cries of sheep and chickens as a man and woman paused to watch us pass. A mile in, we found the Dolan Fire creeping close to the ground through the underbrush, as if lying in...
From day care to graduate school, teaching and learning have been upended as never before. Schools closed in March, teaching was relegated to Zoom, and parents became reluctant homeschoolers. While the wealthy assembled pods to avoid the risks of ordinary in-person schooling, the poor juggled full time childcare with essential work. Now, we’re seeing a patchwork of half-measures and ill-advised, staggered reopenings as another year begins — and rising rates...
On March 16, Madagascar’s state-owned TV station aired an 18-minute documentary. Narrated by two airline pilots, it re-enacts a November 2019 visit to the island nation by an anonymous Brazilian woman purported to be a prophet. “Joana,” as she is dubbed in the film, crosses the island in two flights, one south-to-north and the other east-to-west, tracing the shape of a crucifix. She has been sent by God, she confides...
In 1967, a budding art critic and PhD student named Michael Fried published the essay in Artforum that would make him famous. “Art and Objecthood” was on the surface a piece that took aim at the Minimalists, then a group of up-and-coming artists led by Donald Judd. But embedded in the critique was a fully-fledged theory of art — in many ways the last of its kind. In the years since,...