Benjamin Kunkel’s essay “Argentinidad” from Issue 11: Dual Power is now available as a Kindle Single!
“I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me. The way they enlighten me about Stalin, Lenin, Bolshevism. Or the way they keep hammering away at their “Market! Market! Free market!” But we—we who were raised in a world without Chernobyl, now live with Chernobyl.”
from “On Chernobyl” by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen
At first the question was whether he was a lone wolf or a Tea Party operative, or at least influenced by the Tea Party, or perhaps just by our culture of hate, the vitriolic rhetoric of our culture of hate, for which either the former vice presidential candidate-turned-reality-television-star or people on “both sides” are to blame. It mattered what we called him because the shooting was rapidly becoming “a tale of two moralities,” or even “a tale of two Americas,” in which the shooting’s heroes and victims were our “best,” and the killer was supposed to be our “worst.” So what was our “worst,” exactly? Like everyone, I went to the internet to find out.
from “Notes on a News Cycle” by Kristin Dombek
On September 11, 2001 Megan K. Stack, the 25-year-old Houston bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, was in Paris visiting her sister. After the terrorist attacks on that day, the Times asked if she would be willing to go to Afghanistan. For the next six years, before becoming the paper’s Moscow bureau chief, she reported on Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel and the West Bank. Her new book, Every Man in this Village is a Liar, describes all these places with a unique comparative perspective and moral engagement. n+1 spoke to her over Skype from Moscow.
The closer we get to the top, it seems, the more likely we are to believe, or pretend to believe, that the ladder we’ve been climbing leads nowhere—is meaningful only to those who stare at its innumerable rungs from below. Self-improvement, we discover, is a sham.
from “How to Behave in an Art Museum” by Timothy Aubry
My parents returned to Milwaukee early last Tuesday after spending six days at my aunt and uncle’s condo in Hollywood, Florida. My parents aren’t wealthy enough to buy their own Florida condo—and they probably wouldn’t buy a condo in Hollywood, Florida if they had that kind of money, anyway—but they do, after a combined sixty years working in public education, have enough money and security to head down there on a whim.
“He drives a glistening Bentley, rocks a ponytail, and lives comfortably in the land of hype. Indian novelist Siddhartha Deb’s n+1 profile of businessman Arindam Chaudhuri, who runs a chain of hugely successful management schools in India, lays bare a larger-than-life character who’s the stuff of Bollywood dreams.”
n+1’s new Kindle Single is out!
The symmetry is powerful, if accidental. Both factions are marked by recognizable hairstyles and unusual modes of dress. Where the hipster wardrobe is ever-changing — one day it’s trucker hats, overalls, and chin straps, the next it’s fedoras, onesies, and bangs — the Satmar uniform has proven stable over 70 years: white shirts, pants, three-piece suits, shtreimel fur hats, and payes side braids for the men; shin-length dresses and sumptuous wigs for the women. Both groups are resented by their near relations (ordinary bourgeois youth, mainstream Jews) for their economic dependence on others — hipsters on their parents and/or arts and non-profit funding, and Hasidim on charity: despite pockets of wealth, one third of Hasidic families in Williamsburg receive some form of public assistance.
Both groups live in configurations unusual for the advanced capitalist west. Hipsters often live with multiple roommates, encouraging a wide variety of romantic, or worryingly platonic, entanglements. Hasids live in enormous families. The average size of a Satmar family is nine people. It would not be unusual to enter either a hipster or a Satmar apartment and see a cot in the kitchen.
"