n+1 Foundation

By December 1999, the feeling at the Conglomerate’s Y2K office was that nothing more could really be done. This is a common enough cliché on the approach of any moment of finality, but was particularly apt in our case, since nothing really had been done.

The girls accepted me as one of their own. We often turned into a single many-armed, many-legged creature, jubilant, all-powerful, devastating. In those moments, I no longer felt my own powerlessness or the weakness in my knees.

I am the roof of my mouth And more: meshed complex of various Hardbound moistures whose syncing concert, Fires and contractions, writ sixty-four inches large, Wins bread. How strange. How hinged on organs Clacking along, on thought’s mostly lost Steam, and this is how the barn stays raised?

The US’s biggest infrastructure project — bigger than the New Deal–era dams and the Erie Canal — was the highway system, which destroyed the American city and, arguably but I think not that arguably, American society itself. The country’s midcentury racist spatial self-destruction is a crime that will never be sufficiently atoned for. Whenever a child walking along a four-lane exurban road is killed by a driver who swerves into the shoulder, whenever someone can get away with driving 98 miles per hour in a 55 zone, whenever a family of seven in an ostensibly safe minivan is killed despite the self-evident technological ability to limit speeds, redesign roads, and enforce existing regulations, it seems reasonable to infer that car culture isn’t really about sexy concept cars or futuristic taillights. Car culture is really about death.

But to say that “if this technology is left unchecked, it will radically reshape the field of journalism” is to paint a rather rosy picture of the field. The dystopian future Mazria Katz and Crabapple fear will come to pass if GenAI is left unchecked — the one in which “only a tiny elite of artists can remain in business, their work selling as a kind of luxury status symbol” — is, unfortunately, already here.

It feels good to be a role model, she reflects. Young people need examples they can emulate, otherwise they risk nihilism. Melancholy historicism, as has been documented by several big-data projects on the counterintuitive ratio between happiness and hunger in the Global South, is an obstacle to upward mobility and success. The morality tale about her crackhead sister, her cousin Pookie, and her death-dealing nephew Bar-b-que goes over well with the conservatives. On special occasions, at a Juneteenth celebration or a mass funeral, she might even hum a few bars from “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” or sing off-key “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” in homage to her community.

It’s not surprising that Biden — longtime member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, interlocutor with world leaders, international legacy burnisher — would leave his biggest mark in foreign rather than domestic policy. His greatest impact will be felt not in Afghanistan or in Ukraine, however, but in Gaza. Any assessment of Biden’s presidency is stained by Gaza, where for almost a year he has supported, defended, armed, and funded Israel’s genocide. It is in Gaza that Biden has abandoned his passivity, where he has been least reactive and most active.

On Monday, September 9, join n+1 senior writer Richard Beck in conversation with former n+1 coeditor Nikil Saval at McNally Jackson in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The way I’ve begun to think about this is that it’s just not possible to have a US imperial fortress state with Rainbow Coalition characteristics—the most multiracial genocidal coalition in the history of the world. It’s a strange fact, and it can’t be resolved.

When Jane McAlevey died on July 7, aged 59, the left lost a brilliant organizer, author, teacher, and comrade. After early experience in environmental justice and anti-apartheid activism, McAlevey found her calling in the labor movement, starting in the 1990s.