n+1

Stupidology | William Davies The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as...

Here’s one I prepared earlier www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...

Iran’s Three-Body Problem | Iman Ganji and Bahar Noorizadeh The ongoing uprising is rooted in the political economy of structural adjustment, which forms the unstable medium through which revolt becomes contagious.

On political economy, look up the work of Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi (he has been publishing in LRB) and Arang Keshavarzian (he just published in NY Review), plus this astonishingly good piece by Iman Ganji and Bahar Nourizadeh that I learned a tonne from:

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

n+1 is heading to Los Angeles! Join our editors for a happy hour hang at Everson Royce Bar on Sunday, March 29 to celebrate our readers, Issue 52, and over two decades of the magazine.

secure.givelively.org/event/n1-fou...

Text Reading: With Trump as the messenger—rather than some generic general or RAND Corporation bureaucrat—we can clearly see that this apocalyptic solipsism feels like a familiar American story. It’s James Cagney at the end of White Heat, immolating himself by firing a gun into a gas tank: “Made it, Ma! I’m on top of the world!” Or Michael Douglas in Falling Down, that archetypal Angry White Man Who’s Finally Had Enough, whose rampage audiences cheer even as, or precisely because, they know it will end in a bloodbath. This last filmic icon gets at another type—the Family Annihilator, that all-too-real culture-specific disorder of the failed patriarch who, facing financial ruin or other humiliation, decides on suicide while taking his wife and children with him like so many ritual objects he can throw on his own funeral pyre out of spite. “There will never be a time that I am not the best father, with the happiest family, and the finest lawn,” sobs the annihilator as he loads his rifle in the den. For such selfishness, a world unworlded is self-evidently preferable to a world in which you are not the best, the most special, the most praised. America (and I) Will Be The Greatest Forever, Or We’ll Burn The World To Ashes.

The deaths of other people may truly be a matter of utter indifference to Donald Trump. But how does he think of his own death, if he does at all? Certainly his body will fail him, eventually, as it must. And, contra the protestations of his muppet of a doctor, Trump must already feel its growing limits, the indignities of age. But I am hard pressed to think of an occasion where he has spoken of what he hopes his posthumous legacy will be, of how he hopes to be remembered. Trump’s care for the regard of others appears to be confined to the timeline of the news cycle, not history. Even his proud boasts of personal impact seem wholly concrete, woefully short-term: “I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve done, I’ve had tremendous success.” Trump must know that these “great structures” are no pyramids or triumphal arches, just casinos and condos, shoddy and ephemeral, some sinking into rising seas even now. And he certainly knows, as his leaked diplomatic calls reveal, that even his signature “great wall” will likely never happen—if not thanks to the laws of physics, but because he can’t face the political consequences of being unable to make the Mexican government pay for it.

reupping this I wrote for @nplusonemag.com six years ago now
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

This time around, nobody in charge has seemed to bother to care about going through the motions. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

What differentiates Trump from his predecessors is his total inability to conjure the pretense of at least pretending to publicly care about pretense. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Patrick Blanchfield always gets right to the heart of the matter with painful eloquence. Read him!

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

Is it really such a shock that a man who’s bragged about sexual assault doesn’t give a shit about the tedious rituals of manufacturing consent from a populace he despises before getting violent? If you’re President Trump, you can just do things. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Always, always read @patblanchfield.bsky.social

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

my latest column in @nplusonemag.com: on Iran, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, why no one wants to learn anything, and how the repressed returns regardless www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

The Second-Term Aesthetic | Dushko Petrovich Córdova So, in the cramped airplane’s limited sightlines, I looked for clues about whether these were just regular Midwestern dads, like me, flying for work, or whether they were regular Midwestern dads, flyi...

There I was, perusing this “Star Wars Trump” picture a few months after he posted it, when I finally saw the cleavage. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-52/ess...

Traps and Prisons | Evangeline Riddiford Graham Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the pr...

Excited to see this deep dive into Pip Adam's oeuvre over at @nplusonemag.com! Hi @pipadam.bsky.social

If you live in Baltimore, or are headed there this week for AWP, stop by the Pratt Street Ale House on Friday evening for drinks with n+1, New Directions, @yalereview.bsky.social, and @dorothyproject.bsky.social!
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

You’ve Done It Again, Michael | Jynne Dilling Even as the pace of work life quickened exponentially across the next two decades, email inboxes overflowing, media outlets proliferating and then contracting, websites and newsletters dominating and ...

An appreciation of Michael Silverblatt, one of the best literary podcasters before @davidnaimon.bsky.social, at n+1. Silverblatt died in February, but you can still listen to his back catalogue at the Bookworm (KCRW) podcast
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Iran’s Three-Body Problem | Iman Ganji and Bahar Noorizadeh The ongoing uprising is rooted in the political economy of structural adjustment, which forms the unstable medium through which revolt becomes contagious.

This is the smartest thing I've read about Iran's post-Shah political reality, maybe ever. A must-read, especially today.

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Traps and Prisons | Evangeline Riddiford Graham Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the pr...

An incredible review of Pip Adam's work over at n+1, including the phenomenal AUDITION. @pipadam.bsky.social www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Surprise on Ice | Alan Dean Obviously Canada considers the US its biggest rival. They’re playing in the gold medal game, and the Soviet Union no longer exists.

“The real winners weren’t even on the ice: they were the hockey- and Olympics-watching public.” New: Alan Dean on the NHL’s return to Olympic hockey.
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Great to see a substantial essay on @pipadam.bsky.social's work, "Audition" (her latest) in particular.

"Her work is now beginning to reach the US audience it deserves..."

Traps and Prisons | Evangeline Riddiford Graham Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the pr...

“This is science fiction besieged by the banality of its astronauts.” New: Evangeline Riddiford Graham on Pip Adam. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

MFA vs. NYC | The Editors Two years spent in an MFA program, in other words, constitute a tiny and often ineffectual part of the American writer’s lifelong engagement with the university. And yet critics continue to bemoan the...

MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-10/the...

n+1 and Boston Review Bundle A year of n+1 and Boston Review!

There are only a couple days left to take advantage of our joint subscription deal with @bostonreview.bsky.social! Get a year-long subscription to both magazines for the steeply discounted price of $65.
www.nplusonemag.com/n1-and-bosto...

An Age of Hyperabundance | Laura Preston Everyone at this conference kept invoking loneliness and claiming the antidote was conversation. That didn’t track with my own experience. My most desperate moments of loneliness have been in conversa...

“In a society that reserves psychiatric care for only its wealthiest members, was there any reason to automate mental health assessments if not for the purpose of mass surveillance?”

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/ess...

Import the War, Export the Border | Dylan Saba If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes of this conjuncture, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overs...

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/... If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overseas empire. Critically, that means fully abandoning Israel.

New Novel by Chad Harbach Coming This Fall | Kirkus Reviews Little, Brown will publish the author’s follow-up to ‘The Art of Fielding’ in October.

Chad Harbach has a follow-up to "The Art of Fielding" coming in October. We've got the exclusive at Kirkus: www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-fea...

The Brightness, by Chad Harbach The follow-up to n+1 founding editor Chad Harbach’s beloved and bestselling debut novel The Art of Fielding—coming this October!

Very big news: n+1 founding editor Chad Harbach’s new novel—his first since 2011’s beloved and bestselling THE ART OF FIELDING—is coming soon! THE BRIGHTNESS is out in October from @littlebrown.bsky.social. Read all about it—and preorder your copy—here: shop.nplusonemag.com/products/the...

Import the War, Export the Border | Dylan Saba If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes of this conjuncture, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overs...

Very sharp analysis by @shaabiranks.bsky.social in @nplusonemag.com
"Import the war, export the border: Trumpian foreign policy is less a mode of remaking the world than a crude (re)incorporation of the world, or as much of it as possible, into American dominion."

A Pillar On Its Side | Amit Chaudhuri What we saw as shrines were remnants of a home, a bit of a lifetime or several lifetimes that still had some of the magic of the everyday in which the gods had for long happily existed.

“It’s easy enough to say that the creation of the monumental implies the erasure of the everyday or the ordinary but this is often true.” New: Amit Chaudhuri on “not being a monuments person.” www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

You’ve Done It Again, Michael | Jynne Dilling Even as the pace of work life quickened exponentially across the next two decades, email inboxes overflowing, media outlets proliferating and then contracting, websites and newsletters dominating and ...

This essay by Jynne Dilling for @nplusonemag.com is a lovely homage to the late and deeply lamented Michael Silverblatt ... and to serious, patient literary culture generally.

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Import the War, Export the Border | Dylan Saba If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes of this conjuncture, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overs...

Trump’s second-term foreign engagement amounts to a rejection of even the fiction of US moral leadership, or of an “international community” to be led. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

You’ve Done It Again, Michael | Jynne Dilling Even as the pace of work life quickened exponentially across the next two decades, email inboxes overflowing, media outlets proliferating and then contracting, websites and newsletters dominating and ...

“In the face of the Brian De Palma–level horror film that was 23-year-old me trying to ‘work the phones’ came a single, solitary respite: Michael Silverblatt.”
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...