The Best of n+1

Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pulled by ugliness toward a gentrified retail strip. Here the violence of the new ugliness comes more fully into focus. The ruling class seized cities and chose to…

«The environment this concatenation of forces has produced is at once totalizing and meek — an architecture embarrassed by its barely architected-ness, a building style that cuts corners and then covers them with rainscreen cladding.»

Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pulled by ugliness toward a gentrified retail strip. Here the violence of the new ugliness comes more fully into focus. The ruling class seized cities and chose to…

Writing fiction hadn’t been false, for nonfiction isn’t truer than fiction; but I’d seemed to row at the shallowest region of the narrative stream, where the water wouldn’t reveal its deepest enchantments. I needed to allow the subject to change the form as I progressed. Where I began with curiosity about my uncle’s fate, my travels made me aware of how little of the war had been monumentalized in the Nigerian landscape, ultimately making it necessary for me to define the shape of my work as a reconciliation with the fragmented nature of the past.

She is cutting, wary, funny, and wise. Her style is what I wish I had instead of the chipper inner voice I’m stuck with. Nothing in Malcolm’s writing is dull or amiss unless she’s quoting somebody else. Her lines put me in mind of the painter Agnes Martin—everything so even and tight.

He designed a fridge-magnet poem-kit (which, I believe, has now had a software program based on it). He wrote a skeptical book about Europe in 1987, before Europe was really a subject (Ach Europa! was…

As I plunged into the squall of messages, the landmarks of my own world receded. I was no longer a person but a great, universal ear receiving the worries and doubts of those in search of housing—that…

For most of us, our cars, no matter how much we cherish them, hold us in social and economic custody. As more and more vehicles are financed, and with higher loans and interest rates, creditors exert a carceral pull over our ability to earn a sustainable livelihood. Perhaps the most telling evidence of this servitude is that, in times of financial stress, households will prioritize their monthly car payments over all others, including basic necessities. Surely it is the mark of our perverse civilization when food, medical care, and housing have to take a back seat to our need to keep wheels on the road.

How tragic, I thought, to reduce life to a procession of microtransactions or contracts. How naive to believe that some agreed-upon set of values could be formalized into code, or that the problems of…

Ehrenreich’s work has always acknowledged that power operates at the intimate level, and that this is part of what makes it difficult to resist. To engage in political struggle is not just…

Facts, in Latour’s view, don’t exist “out there,” waiting to be discovered or understood. They are the hard-won products of scientific work, the result of a long and often contentious process of…

The show affords epistemological priority to Emily by focusing on her enchanting romantic dramas, sure, but it also lingers on sequences where French people berate her for being corny and basic,…

The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing country in the late 19th century could be brought together by open…