What’s the word for that tendency to initially dismiss forecasts of great calamity, followed by a gradual, quiet, and generalized acceptance of their conclusions, such that it undercuts the impact for which a sudden dramatic revelation might once have held the potential? We disbelieve the signs of the approaching
For the record, and contrary to my more extremist instincts, I do in fact believe that incremental changes are meaningful and worth celebrating. The quantitative can decisively shift towards the qualitative, as the effects of many dispersed, tiny actions accumulate over time, slowly but surely chipping away at the defences
Of course it’ll always be necessary to try and define where and when one thing ends and another begins, but nothing just drops out of the sky: the characteristics of any given phenomenon – ideologies, institutions, subjectivities – are never going to be wholly discrete or self-contained, but will always be
Don't confuse the way things have happened for the way things happen. It's a little axiom I've tried to keep close to my heart over the years, shoring up my resolve against all that pressure towards determinist metaphysics and "political science." Nothing
If anything positive can be said to have come out of the horror of the last couple of years, it’s that the West’s inability to reconcile its liberal fantasies about itself with the exigencies of maintaining a settler-colonial empire has been laid bare with shocking clarity and detail,
"You don't win just because you're right.” - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor I've put a content filter on what's left of my social media feeds, blocking anything related to future Democratic presidential candidate Jon Stewart. Obviously I, too, crave that sense of smarmy
We’ve all known for a minute now that Spotify is, broadly speaking, evil, but Liz Pelly’s excellent Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist goes well beyond a retread of the familiar arguments. There’s plenty of fuel in there for righteous
“Being able to sing good ain’t all about having a good singing voice a’tall. A good singing voice helps. But when you come up in the Hard Shell Baptist Church like I did you understand early that the fellow that sings is the singer. Them that waits for
Of all the dualities constantly rattling around in my brain – form and content, structure and agency, ideal and material – the tension between individual and collective feels among the most foundational, the most likely to cast its shadow over conversation and filter the ways I’m weighing things. We can’t
It’s all base and superstructure again these days in the group chat: the material versus the discursive, the economic versus the cultural, whether a clear delineation between them is ever actually possible, or if either can ever be understood without the other. I think we can all agree that
Soon it will have been a year. Of course, it had already been sixteen, and seventy five, and one hundred, and neither had those accretions crossed the threshold we’ve all nonetheless been holding out for – that elusive enough, khalas, ya basta that could finally turn the tide. We'
I seem to be meeting a lot of new people these days, and thus fairly frequently testing out little nutshell explanations of what I’m doing with my life. Being asked “Qu’est-ce que tu fais dans ta vie?” has always struck my WASPy neural pathways as a little abrupt,