Photograph of "The Baltic Way," a human chain protest on August 23, 1989, against Soviet occupation of the Baltic states via Macguffin Magazine. About two million people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined hands from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius to create one of the "longest unbroken human chains in history."
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Lena Samoilenko, an activist and journalist in Kyiv, Ukraine, describing her family's preparations for war to Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 2/25/2022.
Yevgenia Belorusets, "The Stars." Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky.
Jackson Arn, "Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot: Against the Contemporary American Essay," The Drift, January 31, 2022.
Danielle Carr, "Don't Be So Attached to Attachment Theory." Gawker, 1/25/2022.
Zadie Smith, "Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking." The New Yorker, 12/24/2021.
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Artie Vierkant, Beatrice Alder-Bolton, and Death Panel, "'The Beyblade Strategy' or: How we Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection." The New Inquiry, 2/22/2022.
Ursula Le Guin, "The Next War."
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Once we knew that we were all staying, we started playing games and fortifying the house. We played hide-and-seek. As we ran around the house, we taught the kids how to fall while opening their mouths—that helps protect your lungs during an explosion. I told them that Russia had attacked us—I couldn’t hide that—but we did it in a way that wasn’t scary.
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I don’t understand who these people are: the ones I consider my friends, the ones I get together with every Thursday to play cards for small change while consuming a mountain of cookies and candy. What scares me most is stability. It’s quiet, but an unsteady kind of quiet, giving way, like a bog or a swamp.
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Ambivalence at its best is good for lots of things—conveying the moral and epistemological complexity inherent to the human condition, say—but even at its worst it’s a great way of dodging criticism ... When the writer’s thoughts and feelings have been tastefully hedged, they become much harder to find fault with—particularly when the writer’s subject is the self, about which some iffiness is to be expected. Still it grates, the way so many of the highly intelligent, highly educated, highly observant essayists ... glance at the external world’s ills, shrug, and resume fingering the knot of first-personhood.
Jackson Arn, "Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot: Against the Contemporary American Essay," The Drift, January 31, 2022.
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To simplify and evade excessive philosophizing, it is not necessary to speculate about destruction—moral, social, political, ideological, artistic, et cetera—it is happening quite vividly and aggressively before our eyes. Also, we see how history is repeating itself, how its monstrous face is surfacing.
Dasa Drndic, interviewed by Dustin Illingworth for The Paris Review, 8/21/2017.
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[T]o those tortured by uncertainty, any explanation, however simple, comes as a balm. Seen in this way, certainly, attachment theory offers the consolations of the heuristic. This is true of almost any Grand Theory of Everything that explains the unknowable—in this case, the interiority of the other—using a few rough-hewn concepts. Other examples that spring so immediately to mind that ignoring them requires active cognitive suppression include astrology, early modern witchcraft trials, structuralism, Myers-Briggs, and men at their dude’s night poker game complaining that their wives are “crazy.” The problem is that you get what you pay for, analytically. While it may be comforting to make sense of the world and others’ motivations by resorting to immutable identities to provide a causal deus ex machina for complexity, the danger is that this tends to spit out answers that only confirm your priors. This type of thinking feels good to exactly the same extent that it buffers you from the terrifying unknowability of reality.
Danielle Carr, "Don't Be So Attached to Attachment Theory." Gawker, 1/25/2022.
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It is a peculiarity of Joan Didion’s work that her most ironic formulations are now read as sincere, and her sincerest provocations taken with a large pinch of salt. Perhaps when your subject is human delusion you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it. How else to explain the odd ways we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. A sentence meant as an indictment has transformed into personal credo.
Zadie Smith, "Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking." The New Yorker, 12/24/2021.
The pandemic briefly widened our aperture for reckoning with the pain and vulnerability of others, many of whom were suffering long before COVID-19 struck. Epidemiologists, meanwhile, encouraged us to take some responsibility for protecting them. But this created a problem. Such thinking chafes with American moral common sense. To maintain sanity in a country as bafflingly unequal as ours, you must convince yourself that your own comfort is causally (and morally) unrelated to the suffering of less fortunate strangers. The alternative is an acknowledgment of our interdependence that is, frankly, incompatible with our social order. In this sense, people who continue to insist on safeguarding the medically vulnerable are irrational, beset by a kind of madness.
Sam Adler-Bell, "The Pandemic Interpreter." New York Magazine, 2/24/2022.
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More than 60,000 people died of covid in January alone; as of this writing, the U.S. has recorded more than 2,000 daily covid deaths for each of the last 30 days. Daily covid deaths have been above 1,000 for over 180 days (roughly half of an entire year).
In this context, what could possibly justify the impending declaration of the end of the pandemic?
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Arguments for returning to normal—and, subsequently, letting the virus rip—hinge on the assumption that those who aren’t vaccinated have made informed, ideological decisions not to vaccinate. (In other words, the vaccinated can ethically expose them to the consequences of their actions by returning to normal life.) That assumption is not accurate. 'When they say highly vaccinated communities, what they really mean—and this is backed by data—is highly vaccinated white communities,' Ganapathi said. 'They are actually talking about highly privileged, very select communities.'
Melody Schriber, "Why Is This Group of Doctors So Intent On Unmasking Kids?" The New Republic, 2/22/2022.
