The Claims of Close Reading bostonreview.net

To make sense of a foreign language, or indeed any language, Davidson argues, a listener must begin with a stance of good faith by assuming that the person they’re listening to has rational beliefs and is making meaning.

The dawn of the post-literate society jmarriott.substack.com

In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

You don't have to swallow frogs degenerateart.beehiiv.com

How does a person convince themselves they need to swallow live frogs? They see themselves as being pragmatic in difficult times and willing to make difficult choices. They imagine that doing something unpleasant is the same as doing something effective. They think it will save them. But developing a rational theory of eating live frogs is not going to save anyone.

The Solidarity of the Hopeful nybooks.com

When I was writing White Teeth, the comedy of the novel in my mind was that it was about some very religious people: Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and another, third type of very religious person—rationalist liberals. That was the comedy of it: the third party didn’t think they had a faith, they felt that they were being extremely rational about life, but of course rationalist-liberalism was a philosophical system that dominated their lives and structured their reality as surely as any faith. The thing about rational liberals is they do not know what they do not know. Their map of the world is complete, defended, and impenetrable, and applied to every situation, in every country, and to all peoples. This way of thinking was one of the animating spirits of colonialism, and as comic as it is in White Teeth, in the world its consequences have often been tragic.

The wedding wars samirvarma.substack.com

Indian wedding guest lists are geopolitical documents. Every invitation is a statement of alliance, hierarchy, and carefully calibrated obligation. The average Indian wedding hosts 300-500 guests. The big ones hit 1,000+. But it's not about feeding people — it's about feeding relationships.

Peep Show: The Most Realistic Portrayal of Evil Ever Made mattlakeman.org

This is what makes Peep Show so brilliant. It doesn’t just portray evil realistically, it portrays the root of evil realistically. Mark and Jeremy cause bad things to happen to their acquaintances, co-workers, friends, loved ones, family members, and most of all, themselves, because they are consumed by their vices.

Who goes Nazi? harpers.org

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Nobody Has A Personality Anymore freyaindia.co.uk

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal.

The Death of the Middle-Class Restaurant nytimes.com

Once rapidly growing commercial marvels, casual dining chains — sit-down restaurants where middle-class families can walk in without a reservation, order from another human and share a meal — have been in decline for most of the 21st century. Last year, TGI Fridays and Red Lobster both filed for bankruptcy. Outback and Applebee’s have closed dozens of locations. Pizza Hut locations with actual dining rooms are vanishingly rare, with hundreds closing since 2019.

Silence is a common davidtinapple.com

Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting maalvika.substack.com

The things that matter most — love, wisdom, skill, character — resist compression for the same reason great literature does. They exist in their full particularity, in the accumulation of small moments, in the patient repetition that looks like nothing from the outside but is everything on the inside. The athlete knows that strength comes from the ten-thousandth repetition, not the first. The parent knows that trust builds through bedtime stories read with the same enthusiasm for the hundredth time. The artist knows that mastery emerges from the willingness to fail beautifully, repeatedly, until failure teaches you something failure alone can teach.

Why are we lying to young people about work? maalvika.substack.com

Everything good requires tending. Everything beautiful demands maintenance.

How To Understand Things nabeelqu.substack.com

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.

On The Death of Daydreaming afterbabel.com

In everyday life, we can all try, however modestly, to shift our individual perceptions and behavior by embracing a more generous sense of anticipation and a healthier attitude about delay, by reframing waiting as an opportunity for daydreaming and idle time rather than an excuse for distraction, and by trying to be more patient with one another.

Coglioni, di Raffaello Baldini paolonori.it

Ecco, i coglioni fanno le cose alla rovescia, e tu li vedi che sbagliano, tu lo sai come andrebbero fatte, provi a dirglielo, anche con le buone maniere, ma loro niente, tirano dritto, tu cerchi di dargli una mano, di metterli sulla buona strada, loro ti guardano con un’aria: adesso cosa vuole questa testa di cazzo? e allora va a finire che t’arrabbi: Sono dei coglioni! Ti sfoghi in piazza, e in piazza c’è anche qualcuno che ti ascolta: Hai ragione, sono coglioni, però. Però? Cosa si può fare? sono tanti, comandano loro.

The Physics of Sunsets science-and-fiction.org

I've long been interested in why sunsets look the way they do - I've discovered the topic by trying to re-create them in real-time 3d rendering in Flightgear and have been admiring, photographing and filming sunsets ever since, trying to figure out more and more of the intricate details one sees.

The Painted Protest harpers.org

The unreality of the present moment should be a boon for artists and all who deal in the imagination. I don’t particularly care to have my awareness raised; I’d rather view art that tears open my consciousness, that opens portals into the mysterious. I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject. Stop making so much sense. Art should do more than communicate: it should move us; it should make us weep; it should bring us to our knees. It is, along with music, the purest expression of the human spirit. It is an important part of what makes us human—the most important part—and constitutes a continuum of yearning passed down the centuries that can be felt in every great museum or Renaissance chapel. Art is often best when it’s absolutely deranged. We are irrational, incoherent beings, and artists and writers should embrace this once more. If you believe that artworks cast spells, you should use that magic for greater causes than propagating a polite, liberal American sensibility or evading the effects of modern technology. You are free to dream anything. To build different worlds, to whisper enticements in many ears, to try to destroy reality; these are prospects that artists have dreamed of for centuries. There is still so much to imagine.

On Pilgrimage and Package Tours hedgehogreview.com

If there is a spiritual good to be found in modern travel, we would do better to identify it not in the act of travel but in the specificity of place traveled to.

Why Don’t Men Text Other Men Back? theatlantic.com

Responding to messages becomes “this looming thing that I have to do,” he said. “It turns into a source of anxiety, honestly, that I’ll always be like, I’m in text debt.” So these friendships, untended, don’t blossom.

Against Optimization forkingpaths.co

We often call such inefficiency slack. But the obvious lesson we too easily ignore in the modern world is this: slack is often both necessary and desirable. Our ability to predict the future is limited, and in an era of hyper-uncertainty, relying on ever-more precise past data only yields ever-more misguided certainty that the patterns of the past will be a reliable guide to our future.

Should You Just Give Up? newyorker.com

“Never mind what you want. What does life want?” he asks. A life task is less exalted, and more grounded, than your “calling” or your “destiny.” You may dream of becoming a director or a C.E.O. But, “if you only have a hundred dollars in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of dollars’ worth of moviemaking equipment,” Burkeman writes. “If you’re the single parent of three small children, it won’t involve working eighteen-hour days for a tech start-up.” Your life task, right now, might be smaller and more obvious—writing a song, raising a child, getting a new job, or continuing in the one you have. Think of the contribution you can make “in the place where you actually find yourself”.

Eastern Promises thebaffler.com

The tourist acts as though they are among staff members in a grand resort or actors in a stage show; the whole hospitable nation is at their service.

How Do You Faithfully Tell the Story of a Divorce, Including Your Own? thewalrus.ca

There are three kinds of marriage. There is my marriage, which is special: distinct, complex, it defies easy categorization. There is your marriage, which is evidence: of how, as seen by me, your values have served or failed you. Then there is marriage: the category that presumes an ideal exists at all. But every marriage is turned into stories. There are the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell our families, the ones we tell while the marriage is intact and the ones we tell after a divorce.

This Is the Age of the Coward theindex.media

The brazen hypocrisy staggers the mind. Disney, which commands a market cap larger than the GDP of many nations, can't find the courage to even wait for court challenges? Meta, which regularly boasts its power to connect billions, suddenly can't muster the strength to defend its own policies and users? These aren't businesses making tough choices – they're paper empires run by moral cowards—simpering, whimpering, and weak. 

Trump Purged These Watchdogs From Government nytimes.com

President Trump has sworn to root out corruption within the government, yet one of his first acts as president was to fire over a dozen independent watchdogs who did exactly that. We spoke to seven of them about the abuses they uncovered, what they really think about DOGE and what all this means for the future of American democracy.

50 Years of Travel Tips kk.org

Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places.

Big Tents and Best Versions meditationsinanemergency.com

I want to take an unscenic detour to talk about what I've noticed on social media lately, and doing so is a reminder that being on social media is forever derided and dismissed, but it's where a lot of us connect with each other, gather (reliable or corrupt) information, connect, and express ourselves. I've often found it useful as a sort of laboratory for opinion. And what I've seen lately — and really all along — is a focus on morality and taste rather than strategy and possibility.

Periodic cooking of eggs nature.com

In the present article, we find that it is possible to cook albumen and yolk at two temperatures without separation by using periodic boundary conditions in the energy transport problem. Through mathematical modeling and subsequent simulation, we are able to design the novel cooking method, namely periodic cooking.

If Jeff Bezos doesn't eat the Mona Lisa, who else will? diggitmagazine.com

From a purely material perspective, it is difficult to imagine how Bezos and da Vinci's Mona Lisa could be more different. The Mona Lisa is a more than five hundred year old poplar wood panel covered with oil paint, that is now hanging in the Salle des États in the Louvre. Bezos is a white, middle aged man, who moves between multiple homes, but mainly resides in Seattle (Chen, 2024). The Mona Lisa has not left Paris since 1973, and will probably remain there, as transporting the painting poses significant risks, and its surface and structure increasingly crack and craze (Neuendorf, 2018). Bezos, on the other hand, "isn't close to death", and is both willing and able to 'leave' for his own benefit (Freedom Foundation, 2023). From socio-cultural and economic perspectives, however, both dominate their fields — be it the international art world or global tech industry —, and their 'net value' is eye-wateringly high. Symbollically, their positions might be comparable. They are both icons within their concerning spheres, and a 'final showdown' between the two might thus easily spark people's imagination and enthusiasm.

The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial ribbonfarm.com

Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.

The Logic of Destruction snyder.substack.com

Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.

Elon Musk’s Bureaucratic Coup theatlantic.com

This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.

Elon’s Twitter Destruction Playbook Hits The US Government techdirt.com

The parallel to Twitter is striking and terrifying. At Twitter, Musk’s “reform” strategy transformed a platform used by hundreds of millions for vital communication into his personal megaphone, hemorrhaging somewhere between 60-85% of its revenue in the process. But Twitter was just a private company. Now he’s applying the same destructive playbook to the federal government, where the stakes involve not just user experience or advertising dollars, but the basic functioning of American democracy.

Inside the Capitol Riot: A Video Investigation nytimes.com

The Times analyzed thousands of videos from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building to understand how it happened — and why.

Africa Has Entered a New Era of War wsj.com

Africa’s current conflicts haven’t prompted the outpouring of sympathy in the West that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the outrage ignited by Israel’s war in Gaza. There has been no equivalent to the Live Aid concerts motivated by the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, the protest marches over the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s or even the #BringBackOurGirls campaign linked to the abduction of 276 schoolgirls from the Nigerian town of Chibok 10 years ago.

Modern Work Fucking Sucks joanwestenberg.com

This isn’t really about work anymore. It’s about the performance of work. These tools don’t exist to help you do your job better; they exist to create the illusion of progress. The endless tracking, updating, and syncing isn’t for your benefit — it’s for your manager, or your manager’s manager, or some faceless stakeholder who insists on seeing colorful progress bars that inch forward even when nothing is actually happening. The tools create data, and the data creates reports, and the reports create a sense of momentum, even if that momentum is just you running in circles inside an endless hamster wheel of productivity software. The tragedy is how much time gets sucked into this vortex of fake productivity. Real work — the kind of work that builds things, solves problems, or pushes ideas forward — needs, craves, demands focus. It requires uninterrupted stretches of time to think deeply, experiment, and iterate.

If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention theconvivialsociety.substack.com

In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?

Chicken gun en.wikipedia.org

A chicken gun or flight impact simulator is a large-diameter, compressed-air gun used to fire bird carcasses at aircraft components in order to simulate high-speed bird strikes during the aircraft's flight.

Pull-Up Diary theparisreview.org

Going to the gym is mostly a slog, drudgery in service of vanity. It is stultifying to lift objects surrounded by mirrored walls. In my earbuds a vapid podcast plays and beyond that, on the gym’s speakers, Pitbull.

Some scientists think diagrammonkey.wordpress.com

When an article says “some scientists think” then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn’t given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.

A unified theory of fucks aworkinglibrary.com

This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t. Don’t give a fuck about your work. Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the people you work with, and the people who receive your work—the people who use the tools and products and systems or, more often than not, are used by them. Give a fuck about the land and the sea, all the living things that are used or used up by the work, that are abandoned or displaced by it, or—if we’re lucky, if we’re persistent and brave and willing—are cared for through the work.

Potsdam Giants en.wikipedia.org

The king trained and drilled his own regiment every day. He liked to paint their portraits from memory. He tried to show them to foreign visitors and dignitaries to impress them. At times he would try to cheer himself up by ordering them to march before him, even if he was in his sickbed. This procession, which included the entire regiment, was led by their mascot, a bear. He once confided to the French ambassador that "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness".

The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates nymag.com

“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”

I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is theatlantic.com

The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Literature Without Literature granta.com

These warped views of literature reflect a shared tendency to explain art with minimal reference to the art itself. Novels are instead considered as commodities and demographic specimens, the products of structures, systems, and historical forces. They become expressions of brands, their authors threadbare entrepreneurs. Fiction recedes behind the chatter it generates and is judged according not to its intrinsic qualities but to the sort of reader whose existence it implies. Authors are turned into role models and style icons, mythologized for their virtues, and crucified for their sins. The numbers, as if they have meaning, are counted. The dream is of literature that can be quantified rather than read.

How to Know What’s Really Propaganda theatlantic.com

Being super cynical doesn’t make you free. It actually makes you more dependent on propaganda.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing syllabusproject.org

This syllabus explores the concept of fake objects, defined as material replicas of originals that are absent, fictional, immaterial, or otherwise unobtainable. Fake objects are created to satisfy the desire for things that never were. Their worth is not necessarily tied to the rarity of the original or the fidelity of reproduction. Value is found through fakeness, not in spite of it, giving the fake object the potential to be even better than the real thing.

The War on Genius rosselliotbarkan.com

I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope of the lone genius and the trope of systems. One held very long in the culture before being defenestrated, in academia at least, over the last several decades. The other is now dominant—at least, among those in the know, those who still analyze literature. In a systems conception, the genius of creation is disregarded and dismissed; no lone spark could truly emerge, no individual could labor, by herself, to write the novels, poems, or plays that endure across the ages, or even get remembered a decade after publication. [...] The primary change in publishing, I’d argue, that has come in the new century is the diminishment of risk-taking on the side of literary fiction, the abandonment of the concept of a publishing house propping up and nurturing a young literary career, and the end of a certain trust that was invested in individual editors—Sonny Mehta, Gordon Lish, Gary Fisketjon, and a young Toni Morrison come to mind—to curate lists to their taste.

How to Spot Corporate Bullshit currentaffairs.org

Over the past century and a half, on a broad range of issues including the minimum wage, workplace safety, environmental regulations, consumer protection—even on morally indisputable issues like child labor and racial segregation—the people and corporations who profited from the status quo have effectively wielded a familiar litany of groundless ‘economic’ claims and fear mongering rhetoric in their efforts to slow or quash necessary reforms. As even a cursory examination of the quotes we’ve included in this book will show, the wealthy and powerful are willing to say anything—even the worst things imaginable—to retain their wealth and power. But while there is simply no bottom to this well of shamelessness, there is a pattern.

The Fight For Free Time thequietus.com

There’s no pointing in reforming work or creating better jobs then: an oppressive system of total domination remains an oppressive system of total domination no matter how much you ameliorate it. As Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek put it: “Beyond the personal domination exhibited by managers and bosses, wage labour is also unfree by virtue of this impersonal domination of capitalism’s imperatives. For the vast majority of humanity this translates to the fact that subjecting ourselves to wage labour is necessary for survival […] Contemporary post-work positions […] represent a proactive response to this imagined end of job-based cultures; they eschew a celebration of work, emphasizing instead the possibilities that are opened up when we no longer centre our lives and societies around wage labour”.

On Chicken factoryinternational.org

The modern domestic chicken is descended from a jungle fowl, a territorial, ground-dwelling, non-migratory bird. Powerful short-range flyers, they roosted in trees to escape predators at night, but they were themselves omnivorous, and perhaps might look to us more like dinosaurs than fat, pillowy hens. Our own chickens, loving and affectionate to us, were capable of violence, too. When a rat tried to steal their corn, they hunted it down, killed it, and devoured it. The Ancient Romans began to take chicken out of its habitat: no more jungles, but sacrificial altars. In the imperial Roman army, the worship of Mithras was the most popular religion, and cocks were sacrificed and eaten as part of his worship, because of their association with the dawn and that of Mithras with the sun. To eat a chicken is to eat light.

Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities newyorker.com

There’s a broader issue here. People’s symptoms frequently evolve according to the labels they’ve been given.

The Katsuification of Britain vittlesmagazine.com

The katsu curry craze is a specifically British phenomenon; it isn’t derived from a larger international trend. American supermarket shelves are not laden with katsu curry products. Burger King never sold their Katsu Range in Canada or Australia, and McDonald’s didn’t release their katsu curry nuggets anywhere else either. The trend is also a recent one – the ubiquity of katsu curry feels sudden and unprecedented. Unlike chicken tikka masala, it does not derive from a major wave of immigration to the country; unlike burgers, it is not inspired by a country that wields global cultural hegemony. But while the trend seems to have come out of nowhere, perhaps it should come as no surprise. After all, katsu curry is British food. Or, at least, it was.

Boundary Issues parapraxismagazine.com

People use the language of boundaries first and foremost to communicate hurt: the word shows up after something painful has happened, usually as a retroactive narrative to make sense of the damage: a boundary was crossed. Renaming the event this way redescribes the hurt as a violation, a form of emotional trespassing. This lets me off the hook, in some ways: “there is a boundary here” gives me something to say to the offender without having to describe my woundedness. And then, if they respect it, the two of us get to bask in our new, shared optimism that changing our relationship is as simple as drawing a line.

No good alone internetprincess.substack.com

The relationship between you and your therapist is transactional and safe, free of the messiness of attachment or stakes or love. And there are times, to be sure, when that can be a very useful relationship to have. But a serious issue arises when professional, unattached relationships are positioned as a replacement (or a requirement) for fulfilling, challenging, passionate ones. When people say that one ought to go to therapy to become a perfectly stable, functional, “healed” individual before they dare try to experience love or community, they are imagining a world in which a fundamental purpose of human connection has been replaced with a capital exchange.

You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to aeon.co

Such judgments can imply that believing is a voluntary act. But beliefs are often more like states of mind or attitudes than decisive actions. Some beliefs, such as personal values, are not deliberately chosen; they are ‘inherited’ from parents and ‘acquired’ from peers, acquired inadvertently, inculcated by institutions and authorities, or assumed from hearsay. For this reason, I think, it is not always the coming-to-hold-this-belief that is problematic; it is rather the sustaining of such beliefs, the refusal to disbelieve or discard them that can be voluntary and ethically wrong.

Unhooking: On the Gigification of Intimacy lareviewofbooks.org

The philosophy of gig work—in which people move from situation to situation, in which short-term gains are more important than long-term investments, and in which individuals are disposable the moment they’re no longer useful—has seeped deep into the pores of human relationships both inside and outside of “work.” [...] Today, we’re not only free but also encouraged to remove ourselves from relationships that, albeit often only temporarily, are taxing or unpleasant.

Work Sucks. What Could Salvage It? newyorker.com

Anderson argued that Americans have essentially outsourced totalitarianism to the private sector. For all our talk about the sacrosanct values of freedom and democracy, she pointed out, most of us spend our days toiling in subordination to bosses who wield control over many aspects of our lives.

101 Additional Advices kk.org

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. To get the important stuff done, avoid the demands of the urgent.

Nasciamo Vannacci, è il dopo che conta wittgenstein.it

Cosa diavolo sto farfugliando? Sto farfugliando che la regressione civile a cui assistiamo, e di cui una parte di noi si duole, deriva da un’inversione di valori che ha portato a screditare la conoscenza, l’informazione, la cultura, a favore dell’ignoranza e della sua rivendicazione. Le persone – noi – diventano rispettose e amanti del prossimo, con tutte le sue differenze, man mano che si allontanano dall’ignoranza: ignoranza che oggi è fatta di due cose, non è più l’ignoranza vuota di analfabetismi e di assenze di informazioni di un tempo. È fatta 1) di riempire la propria conoscenza di cazzate, e 2) di disprezzare la conoscenza che ci manca per non sentirsene umiliati.

Shibboleth newyorker.com

The person who says "We must eliminate Hamas" says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word "Zionist" as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920 — that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us — while we do all that, bloody murder. And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein — by my stating of a position — you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place — built with words — where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.