“The” is a suspect word. It’s small and ubiquitous, but there’s something presumptuous about it. It aggrandizes and abstracts. Unlike “this” and “that,” which also indicate specificity (“this word,” ...
Tag: Violence
Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t ...
Bleached Atmospheres of Dread
Myles McRae MLA was a monster of male entitlement. Any person who read the Australian newspapers in the year 1891 would have thought so. Six feet tall ...
Borders, Guns, and Freedom
Like the pioneers two hundred years before him, Mark Romano recently decided to head West. Like those pioneers, Mark—a white, unemployed electrician ...
Jewish Fragility
When I receive appeals from Jewish organizations exhorting me to fight antisemitism—which, they claim, is on the rise here and abroad—I tend to toss them away. During many periods of time, and in ...
Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t ...
Female Futures, Future Females
In the midst of an intergalactic war between Earth and an empire of cyborg machines, a mother desperately uploads the consciousness of her dead daughter ...
“Remembering and Forgetting”: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen ...
Disaster Capitalism Strikes Puerto Rico
It has been a year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving a trail of destruction: ruined infrastructure, destroyed homes, and thousands ...
Public Thinker: Issa Kohler-Hausmann on Misdemeanors and Mass Incarceration
While most critics of the American criminal justice system condemn mass incarceration, fewer have ...
B-Sides: Ivan Olbracht’s “Nikola the Outlaw”
Some of Central Europe’s greatest political novels have been meditations on disillusionment. Many of them—from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to ...
How the “Omega Male” Becomes a Psychopath
Among the many prurient pleasures offered by contemporary literature are thrillers hawking creative mistreatments of women. The subgenre’s prime was the ...
In Memoriam: Philip Roth
The obituaries are striving to strike the properly respectful note, but with Philip Roth that was always going to be a challenge. The New York Times highlights Roth’s interest in masturbation, and ...
Gun Studies Syllabus
In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control ...
The Big Picture: Violence and Free Speech
On August 11 and 12, white nationalists came to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live and work. The rally exposed many things, among them some of the challenges that Trumpism poses for ...
The Big Picture: Gun Culture
The day after the Las Vegas shooting, Mark Romano called me up to tell me that Donald Trump was bad for his business. “Don’t get me wrong, I love him,” Mark clarified, reiterating his earlier ...
The Big Picture: Protest, Violent and Nonviolent
Contemporary protests renew debates about whether or not violence is justified, raising questions about what even counts as violence. The demonstrations planned by right-wing groups for late August ...
The Bingewatch: #Resist
After November’s election, I only wanted to watch normporn. Craving fallible yet manicured characters whose gaffes—provoked by pain mired in class privilege—always culminated in tear-jerking ...
The Fog of the Drug War
It is almost impossible to know exactly what happens when a crime is committed in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. The basic questions often cannot be answered: Who is the victim? Who ...
B-Sides: John Galt’s “Annals of the Parish”
For 30 or 40 years a book has been lurking on my shelves, a beautiful little Everyman’s Library edition published by Dent and Dutton, undated, with red fake leather binding …
