n+1 Â» Articles

Best! Launch Event at Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 17:23:54 GMT

Editors Christopher K. Ho and Daisy Nam will lead a conversation with Mel Chin, Aruna d’Souza, Hyperlink Press, and Patrick Jaojoco, all contributors to Paper Monument’s new anthology, Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts. Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, the seventy three letters collected in Best! ignite new ways of being […]

BLM in the Billionaire Wilderness

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 18:19:41 GMT

Our new group joined around a hundred people who stood on the grass and the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. A counter-protest formed on the sidewalk across the street—they numbered around ten, all men, all white, some with assault rifles strapped across their chests. Together they held one sign, a large piece of cardboard with Sharpie letters that read ALL LIVES MATTER FCK SOROS AND ANTEFA [sic]. It was mostly silent—a modern-day Western standoff, with two opposing factions staring each other down and a man in a MAGA hat on horseback circling both groups.

The Most Exciting Time in the History of the World to Be Alive

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 17:57:05 GMT

They were living in an era that prized blithe superficiality. For the second straight month, the Billboard Hot 100 was dominated by a song about a woman named Macarena who cheats on her boyfriend after he’s conscripted; delegates at that summer’s DNC had famously danced to it. The reigning box-office champ was The First Wives Club, in which three well-heeled divorcées vie for the fortunes of their adulterous ex-husbands. “It’s the ’90s,” says Goldie Hawn’s character, “plastic surgery is like good grooming!” (Characters in the ’90s loved to talk about how they were living in the ’90s, the ultimate decade.)

On Anthony Veasna So

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 15:20:54 GMT

September 5, 2018 Ariel: I feel like every time I read something by a queer Asian woman, some part of me is like “every original thought you’ve ever had is just you tapping into a cultural consciousness you only vaguely have access to” Anthony: I’m reading apparently what is the definitive queer cult classic by […]

Watch: Nan Z. Da, Jane Hu, and Elaine Auyoung in Conversation

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 15:33:31 GMT

On Thursday, February 11, n+1 contributor Nan Z. Da discussed her essay “Disambiguation, A Tragedy” with scholars Jane Hu and Elaine Auyoung. A recording of the conversation is below.

A Breakup Letter to My Writing Career

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 15:27:04 GMT

Every reader is a reader of crime novels. They want the criminal to succeed because they want to escape, and they want the police to catch the criminal because they want to restore order. The reader has the same attitude toward writing in general. She wants it to be free, and then she also wants to say that the third act was all wrong, or that the story didn’t deliver, or that this time around its heart wasn’t in the right place. But whenever a story seems off, that’s when you know that the author was free. A story isn’t a fucking chair. This isn’t Bauhaus.

Argument Without Argument

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 19:57:37 GMT

The more time one spends in Gates’s head, the more one is struck by the increasingly nihilistic quality of the American exceptionalist creed. Gates and his ilk remain committed to the idea that when there are problems in the world, the United States must “do something.” What is that something? It usually doesn’t matter much.

Dispatch from the California Stripper Strike

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 16:33:00 GMT

In all radical labor movements, history is made when ordinary workers disrupt the system that seeks to exploit and silence them. Because of social stigma, wage theft, and sexual assault, the strip club has always been a difficult and dangerous work environment. Today, the stakes have reached a desperate tipping point, even though, technically, thanks to a recent court ruling, we have more legal rights than ever: we have the right to discuss the job while on the job, the right to organize and gather, and the right to unionize, which will give us a voice in the workplace—instead of only a body to be gazed at.

A Family Affair

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 16:55:16 GMT

Sex work has helped me define and enforce so many new boundaries I have set up for myself: physical, sexual, emotional, and mental. I did not have these facilities when I was younger, but as I began working as a Domme, I saw that such boundaries were vital to this industry. Even in the realm of fantasy, so much of what we do feels real to our clients. Oftentimes, it feels real to us too, even when we know that it is happening in a small compartment of fantasy—even if that small compartment is on display to a consenting audience witnessing a full-on shit storm inside of adult diapers.

The Chinese Diaspora and the Future of Literary Studies

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 15:52:58 GMT

Join n+1 contributor Nan Z. Da in conversation with scholars Elaine Auyoung and Jane Hu for a discussion about Da’s celebrated essay in n+1 Issue 38, “Disambiguation, a Tragedy,” which explores literary criticism and the Chinese diaspora. The conversation will be held via Zoom; register here. 7 PM Thursday, February 11 On Zoom Nan Z. Da teaches literature at the University of […]

How to Build a Hookers Army

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 19:32:18 GMT

Developing a self-defense system for sex workers requires more than compiling a list of techniques that can be performed in close proximity, in heels, with nails, or in a car. It requires a philosophy of self-love for sex working populations that asserts our right to bodily autonomy and self-protection in a culture that treats many of us in media and in law as disposable people.

Out of Options

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:07:54 GMT

That stocks might go down is a nice idea. Sometimes, for a while, a stock even does. But in the actual, real-life market, stocks, in the aggregate and over time, do not. This was crass and oversimplified internet logic, and yet: look at the charts! The United States’s astronomical, world-historical inequality could plausibly be summed up in three words: stocks go up. Economists knew it, historians knew it, rich people definitely knew it.

Regression

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:27:31 GMT

Other memories appear: the afternoon she accompanied Tamara to her iaia’s house. Every day, she’d see the grandfather, a yarmulke on his bald head, collect Tamara after English class. They didn’t attend a religious school, and when her friend confessed that her family was Jewish it gave her a strange feeling. There were so few Jews in Spain, it was as if her friend were special, a rare jewel.

From the Lockdown Protests to the Capitol

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 14:51:31 GMT

We cannot police our way out of authoritarianism. An increasingly authoritarian police state in the hands of the “right” bourgeois elites will not suppress the far right; it will instead train a new generation of far-right foot soldiers and target, disorganize, and destroy fascism’s most dogged opponents among the far left.

Can Democrats Fix the Senate?

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 16:42:30 GMT

The filibuster’s institutionalist defenders love to invoke the principle of unlimited debate. Yet it is nowhere to be found in the debates of 1787 or the Federalist. George Washington’s description of the Senate as the cooling saucer for the House’s coffee is as fake as the cherry tree story.

Silver Screen

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 18:26:54 GMT

If, as Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson wrote, the Godfather movies are uppercase filmmaking, the movie synonym for those Gothic friezes that one submissively admires before walking into the garish church that they adorn, then Hester Street is proudly lowercase.

Car Guys

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 18:40:46 GMT

The traffic stop is by far the most common site of police-initiated contact with the public. At their wide discretion, police may ticket, detain, and even jail drivers for many violations. Data shows clearly that African Americans are stopped, searched, and threatened with the use of violence at significantly higher rates than are white drivers. Although we never think of it this way, that means the inverse is also true: white drivers are let by, let off, and less harassed by police than Black drivers.

The Hour of the Barbarian

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 22:18:52 GMT

What happened on January 6 was profoundly American, emerging as it did from our long and very specific history. No one did this to us. But despite the geographic confusion, George W. Bush, Jake Tapper, and Meghan McCain correctly identified that nothing like this has happened here for a long time.

Lost Lost Causes

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 14:53:10 GMT

“This is not America.” That strange, contradictory phrase seems to descend like fog every time a legible and precedented event occurs in the United States. If it wasn’t America, it wouldn’t need to be said.

Salt Fat Acid Defeat

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 16:39:42 GMT

Pandemic-era restaurant culture extends and amplifies forces that were already apparent under the old regime: the numbing frictionlessness of delivery food, the retreat into private spaces, the appification of everything. By raising the cost of staying afloat online, Grubhub and Yelp have contributed more to the demise of Covid-era restaurants than their survival. Delivery workers’ bodies are now deemed essential, but their paychecks remain as murderously trivial as ever.