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www.nplusonemag.com

Literary criticism and political theory from a Brooklyn editorial. Long, often combative essays; the founding generation of millennial editors.

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Three Stories | Laurie Stone

Four billion years ago, amino acid molecules set loose by a dying star gathered into macromolecules, matter having a tendency to become more complex. Who asked it to? During the next half billion years, macromolecules evolved into living cells, first without nuclei, then into cells that could reproduce. One minute you’re matter and the next, poof, you’re alive! Has that ever happened to you? You need soup and the right temperature, things your grandmother would know about, but she hasn’t evolved yet. It’s all guesswork in the dark, the serious, falling-in-love dark. These cells develop DNA, a long molecule that encodes all the information an organism needs to survive. Then they go on a rampage. They do not take no for an answer. This is not some ex-boyfriend who keeps calling or Jessica Walters in Play Misty for Me, who has one date with Clint Eastwood and tries to kill his girlfriend. These cells print themselves like money.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/rcossipgmail-com/Aug 20, 20181 min read

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Bad Atrocity Writing | Bruce Robbins

Why does writing well about atrocity matter? Because the history of the world, a history that is morally unimaginable without atrocity, needs to be written, rewritten, well written. To know what really happened, to know what it really felt like, we need more sentences that are capable of opening readers to events so horrible that the senses and the memory close down; sentences that open multiple perspectives on those atrocities, even if they seem to allow for only one perspective — sentences that do all this without losing their hold on logic and grammar and, for that matter, their rhythm

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/rcossipgmail-com/Aug 20, 20181 min read

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Society as Checkpoint | Gregory Afinogenov

The constant document checks on buses and trains, whose racialized criteria are evident in cell phone videos, build on the methods of Joe Arpaio to paint crosshairs on people of color regardless of documentation status. Digging up decades-old legal troubles—once a practice cited with horror by anticommunist critics of Stalinism—grows more popular as a deportation technique. More such disruptive innovations are undoubtedly forthcoming.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/rcossipgmail-com/Aug 20, 20181 min read

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Issue 32 Reading Party at Ace

A night of drinks and readings from the latest issue.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/rcossipgmail-com/Aug 22, 20181 min read

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Piss Trump

Hannity mimes surveillance footage from eight separate cameras in the bedroom of the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton, Moscow in November 2013, Trump in suit and tie clapping his hands twice smartly to begin the festivities, a pair of dancers entering the bedroom to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s “Sugar Plum Fairy Dance” . . .

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Aug 17, 20181 min read

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<em>Notes on an Appearance</em>

n+1 contributor Ricky D’Ambrose’s debut feature film, Notes on an Appearance, opens this Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A 2018 New Directors/New Films selection, Notes on an Appearance also features appearances by n+1 film critic A. S. Hamrah and n+1 publisher Mark Krotov.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Aug 14, 20181 min read

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The Distracted State of the Union

I began writing nonfiction in the wake of September 11—and was published in print, in hard copy, by newspapers and magazines that would go on to cut pages, wages, and staff, if they didn’t fold altogether. Meanwhile, online was busy revising responsibility for the attacks: Bush II ordered them, Cheney let them happen, the American Deep State colluded with the Israelis, the Israelis colluded with the Saudis.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Aug 14, 20181 min read

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On My Way Again

April on the motorway, the sun’s red streaks across the asphalt, the world all delicately decorated with a glaze from the recent rain—an Easter cake. I’m driving on Good Friday, at dusk, from the Netherlands to Belgium—I don’t know which country I’m in now, since the border has vanished; unused, it’s been expunged.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Aug 13, 20181 min read

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Keith Gessen on tour!

August 6, 2018 Keith Gessen and Susanna Kaysen 7 PM Brookline Booksmith 279 Harvard Street Brookline MA 02446 August 7, 2018 Keith Gessen and Olga Oliker 7 PM Politics and Prose Bookstore 5015 Connecticut Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20008 August 8, 2018 Keith Gessen and Paul Constant 7...

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Jul 30, 20181 min read

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The Death of an Entire System of Political Rule

It became increasingly clear, in fact, that PRI rule was little more than a PR façade, behind which the orgy of elite self-enrichment went on as usual. Whatever legitimacy the party had possessed had quickly eroded. But still more crucially, the mechanisms through which the party secured and wielded power had also been hollowed out over time. Clientelism no longer worked in the old ways. An early warning came in the gubernatorial elections in Mexico state in 2017, where the PRI nominee—tightly connected to Peña Nieto’s political clan, and therefore able to use its considerable resources—only just managed to defeat MORENA’s candidate, despite extensive fraud and widespread violence and intimidation. At the time, this was seen as a major political shock; but if anything, it understated the reversal that lay in wait for the PRI.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jul 27, 20181 min read

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What is Energy Dominance?

Trump’s national security strategy, published as a 68-page booklet in December of 2017, stated that one aim of “energy dominance” was to “help our allies and partners become more resilient against those that use energy to coerce,” in effect a realignment of the global energy order away from OPEC and Russia and toward the US. Though this policy rhetoric seemed to dovetail nicely with the call to consider “America First,” it was hardly isolationist. Economically, it was imperialist, encouraging dependence by smaller and developing countries, India in particular, on US fossil fuel supplies, and aiming to shore up our trade deficit with China, which has historically relied on others for their fossil fuels. When Trump recently opened the NATO conference—this even before the apparently meager breakfast of only cheese and pastries was officially served—by rebuking Angela Merkel for approving the Nord Stream 2, a proposed gas pipeline that would run from Russia under the Baltic Sea to Germany, he was in effect accusing her of betraying the alliance.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jul 23, 20181 min read

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Objective Clarity in Our Visions of Each Other

In an essay from 1988 called “The Joy of Marginality” Piper made explicit the scope and purpose of her own political and socially-critical art. “My work is an act of communication that politically catalyzes its viewers into reflecting on their own deep impulses and responses to racism and xenophobia, relative to a target or stance that I depict,” she wrote. To achieve this goal (or any goal of effecting psychological change through art), Piper thought it was essential to engage the viewer in what she called the “indexical present” of the work of art: a here-and-now created in the transaction between artist and audience. (Conversely, she expressed skepticism about the efficacy of “global political art” that attempts to educate or persuade the viewer concerning a situation represented as being external to the viewer’s own experience). In another text, “Performance: The Problematic Solution,” Piper championed the didactic and the confrontational as central aspects, or modes, of this form of artist–viewer engagement.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jul 18, 20181 min read

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Subprime Day

The way to build the world’s most successful bookstore has nothing to do with knowing your customers or recommending the “best” books or even making money, and everything to do with developing software, recruiting investors, and hiring a bunch of people who used to work at Walmart.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Jul 16, 20181 min read

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Corruptions and Duplicates of Form

This post-Wonka kid’s movie about future videogame competition in dystopian cyberspace contains every pop 1980s reference imaginable, including “Blue Monday,” and stuffs them by the handful into a recycling bag like cans worth five cents each. The movie is cynical and manipulative because the ’80s it exploits means nothing to Spielberg. He uses items from that decade because he noticed that’s what kids are into, even though the movie takes place three decades from now. To Spielberg, the digitized fodder of Ready Player One is not truly classic, and can therefore be further trivialized for any reason. If money can be squeezed out of it from an undiscerning audience of nerds, so it should be and must be. Here, Spielberg has truly become Disney.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jul 16, 20181 min read

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Revelation

Suddenly everything I had been looking at—not just over these past months in Moscow, but over the past few years in academia, and over the past fifteen years of studying Russia— became clear to me. Russia had always been late to the achievements and realizations of Western civilization. Its lateness was its charm and its curse—it was as if Russia were a drug addict who received every concoction only after it was perfectly crystallized, maximally potent. Nowhere were Western ideas, Western beliefs, taken more seriously; nowhere were they so passionately implemented. Thus the Bolshevik Revolution, which overthrew the old regime; thus the human rights movement, plus blue jeans, which overthrew the Bolshevik one; and thus finally this new form of capitalism created here, which had enriched and then expelled my brother, and which had impoverished my grandmother and killed Uncle Lev. You didn’t have to go and read a thousand books to see it; you just had to stay where you were and look around.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jul 10, 20181 min read

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What a Long Day, Now Pizza!

Though he can come across as unhinged, Salvini knows exactly what he’s doing—unlike Trump, who only seems to stumble, periodically, into a message that resonates. Trump would never repeat criticism of himself without distorting it beyond recognition. Salvini, a fan of the suggestive retweet, confronts his haters head-on: last month he retweeted a La Repubblica piece that declared him “racist and a populist” and “like Mussolini” and a remark by a Democratic Party politician who said that “[Salvini’s] words sound like HITLER’s.” “Unbelievable! He should be ashamed,” Salvini replied, fully aware that his fans enjoy the frisson of the comparison. He used the hashtag #ècolpadiSalvini—“it’s Salvini’s fault”—when he retweeted a newspaper article titled “migrants revolt against Salvini.” Salvini understands the political utility of smug irony. The best way to persuade Italians that he is the uomo forte—the strong man who’s come to do the dirty work—is to be above it all while not being above anything.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Jul 9, 20181 min read

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The Logic of Militant Democracy

The pervasive fears over existential threats, the belief that foreign enemies were supported by internal subversion, and the sense that victory required the total destruction of our foes all fueled the conviction that “foreigners” were enemies and thus had no rights. The American concentration camps of the 1940s exemplified the logic of such war. Foreigners were guilty until proven otherwise.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Jul 6, 20181 min read

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The Monks

It’s not that I don’t like the monks. Some are chill. Two of them split cigs with me in the mornings, after our prayer sessions and before our chores. I call them Monk B and Monk C because we don’t talk or share things about ourselves, like our names. We smoke out by the fountain, away from all the statues of Buddha in the garden. I think the monks are trying to hide their smoking habits from all those Buddhas.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Jul 13, 20181 min read

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Check Out the Neymar Rolling Meme

Uruguay vs. Portugal brought us, mercifully, to the point where Ronaldo was also gone. Nothing against either of them, but their presence is such that even having one of them involved means the epic Messi–Ronaldo debate eats up all the air time and “analysis.” Men who know nothing pontificate. Good and evil are spoken of in utter seriousness. 7 percent of the internet is devoted to this debate, so let me take a moment to end it. They are both utterly amazing! And brace yourselves: they are equally amazing, and they are differently amazing. I don’t know why this is so hard for people to accept. There is no way, in a team sport, to bring the issue to further clarity, so I recommend everyone drops this line of debate. Please, take the fact that the universe put them out in the same round as a sign.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jul 5, 20181 min read

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Maybe Nothing Had Happened

Like many people my age, like Molly, I’d been deeply in love with this man, and had spent hours hurling myself spastically around the house to his songs, and I’d continued to be a partisan of his music and, what, brand, until the music got so boring that it wasn’t worth the energy anymore. Whatever bad shit he was into, I probably would have stayed loyal if there’d been worthwhile product. The sadness I felt watching the movie had something to do with a person’s art betraying them, of watching a man who has grown bored with the possibilities of his craft attempting to find, somewhere in his past, something worth preserving, and finding nothing.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jul 3, 20181 min read

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Revolutionary Posters

We’re in a revolutionary moment, so we went straight to the history of grassroots, civil rights, and social justice movements in search of a common language we could participate in. One that Ocasio-Cortez could participate in and that she belongs in. The most inspiring figures to us were Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, the cofounders of the National Farmworkers Association. They had a positive, uplifting message about bringing power to the people. It resonated so deeply with who Sandy the person was, and who Sandy the candidate became, that it was a good fit.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/rcossipgmail-com/Jun 30, 20181 min read

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The Rising of the Women

Direct action works as a catalyst: It sets things in motion, in ways you can’t predict. Before the Capitol police had even finished gathering up the space blankets and processing the hundreds of arrestees, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who came down from her office to greet the protesters while the action was underway, issued a statement calling for the abolition of ICE.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jun 29, 20181 min read

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Ordinary Faithfulness

Philosopher Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, who died on June 19 at age 91, published his first book, Must We Mean What We Say?, during the strike. The book’s essays cover a broad range of subjects, from modernist music and Beckett’s Endgame to Kierkegaard and King Lear. But one area—political theory—is noticeably absent. And yet, two essays, which were composed over the course of the ’60s, speak directly to the most pressing political issues of the decade: civil rights and the war in Vietnam.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jun 29, 20181 min read

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Nights of Rage

The sexual revolution is cresting. Men have been riding it like the perfect wave, with women newly eager yet still reliably abject. Now, however, the women’s movement is riling that perfect wave with confounding currents: both extolling the vast potential of female sexuality (multiple orgasms!) and demanding that men fulfill it, now. To many men feminism is a betrayal, a threat, or a joke; to others it is a challenge. They are excited and wary, aggressive and cowed, all at once.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Jun 25, 20181 min read

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A Party in London

n+1 is crossing the pond once again for our fourth summer party with The White Review! Join us at Bold Tendencies on June 28 for readings from - Chloe Aridjis - Julia Bell - Jill Crawford - Lucy Mercer - Sophie Robinson - David Wingrave Issues of n+1 and The White Review will be...

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Jun 23, 20181 min read

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A Disharmony of Powers

What leftists usually call the AKP’s “neoliberalism” may be better described as a religious corporatism. Having sold state-owned industries to its friends and allies, the government now seizes the businesses of political undesirables, and plans to pool the profits of industry through a sovereign wealth fund whose investments will benefit favored companies. Facing a patrimonial state that blocks proletarian agency while rewarding loyalty with favors, workers are encouraged to seek the party’s good will while accepting that ultimately their lives are expendable: playthings of fate. Appeals to religion cement this resignation, spiced with a resentful dig at the old professional and bureaucratic class, i.e. “the secular elite.”

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jun 22, 20181 min read

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Workers Full of Poems

Sadlowski embodied the wish for organized labor to wake from its postwar slumber and again throw its weight behind a great movement for a different country, as it had done in the 1930s and before. The AFL-CIO had shamefully backed the Vietnam War; Sadlowski opposed it and denounced the growth of “the weapons economy”—of which steel was very much a part. Many of the unions in the federation, including the USWA, had dragged their heels at best on racial integration of their workplaces; Sadlowski called for strengthening the union’s civil rights apparatus, attracting the support of Jesse Jackson and members of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Much of organized labor met environmentalism with hostility; Sadlowski dissented. “It’s one hell of a thing for me to say—we just don’t need any more steel mills. We don’t need that kind of industrial growth, at the expense of what the environment should be.” He followed the thought where it led: “Enough with the car!” What more radical claim could a blue-collar worker make about postwar society than to doubt the automobile?

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jun 20, 20181 min read

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The Globalist

From his earliest days as a banker in postwar London, Soros believed in a necessary connection between capitalism and cosmopolitanism. For him, as for most of the members of his cohort and the majority of the Democratic Party’s leadership, a free society depends on free (if regulated) markets. But this assumed connection has proven to be a false one.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/mark-krotovgmail-com/Jun 18, 20181 min read

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Anything Else Would Not Be Good Enough

At Dublin Castle, several of those politicians took the stage to rapturous cheers. Crowds filled the courtyard of the building to celebrate and observe, as they had at the announcement of the referendum on marriage equality three years previous. Some of the politicians on stage had only had their moments of conversion weeks or months before, and yet were ready to take the applause as if it was they who had given up their time and energy to pound pavements and tell stories of women’s experience for years and decades. “I was warned about this, that it will only be politicians’ names in the history books, and there is only so much room on the stage at Dublin Castle,” Kavanagh said. “It’s something you have to adjust to. As grassroots activists, we know that we won't get the credit we deserve and we have to just live with that. It's why it's all the more important that we take care of each other afterwards.”

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jun 15, 20181 min read

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The Church of Food

The episodes about regions of great migration, which frequently covered cities outside of Europe, revealed that Bourdain’s sense of food could follow a people beyond their national borders and recent history. In an episode on Tanzania, a snack of Mandazi (a fried dough Swahili dish) and Bagias (a fried lentil dish) became a way of describing Indian migration and Zanzibar’s multi-ethnic history. In Houston, conversation over a meal at a restaurant that blends Indian and Pakistani food transitioned smoothly to a portrait of Houston, as a city in which people from all over the world are co-mingling. The mixing of culinary cultures for Bourdain was the best record we had of ethnic migration and mixing. In this, Bourdain was like Hortense Spillers in “Peter’s Pans.” After pages of dense criticism attempting to reckon with a history of physical, economic, and epistemic violence against African-Americans, Spillers sketched a culinary tour of the food of African-derived people as evidence of the past’s lingering, far-reaching and ever-changing grasp on the present. For Spillers and for Bourdain, the blending of flavors on a plate was history in motion.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/author/nikil/Jun 12, 20181 min read