#n plus one

[somerabbitholes]

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-50/essays/creature-of-the-late-afternoon/

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-50/fiction-drama/the-other-route/

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-dirt-of-years/

These are interesting reads!

i haven’t read the dirt of years yet, but i loved the other two!

[chelmnik]

One paradox of the new ugliness is that it flattens the distinction between the rich, the very rich, the superrich, and the merely fortunate by ripping them all off in turn. These days housing at the most elite strata sucks nearly as much as the simply bourgeois kind. According to a parade of entertaining New York Times stories, residents of the toothpick-like towers on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row complain of elevator breakdowns, “catastrophic” flooding from poor plumbing, and “metal partitions [that] groan as buildings sway” in the wind. Shittiness is a big tent — and the tent is falling apart.

‘why is everything so ugly?’, n+1′s painfully good piece on urban life under neoliberalism

[girlbortion]

Coronavirus and Chronopolitics

The young are trying to save the old

“One manifestation of this generational imbalance of power is the immense difficulty of health-care reform, since major constituencies — not just profiteering corporations, but segments of the markets they’ve captured, and the people who compose those segments — are materially tied to the current system. This is the underlying social basis of the attempts to fend off Medicare for All through appeals to incumbent health insurance, in particular Medicare itself. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” is not — contra liberal snobbery — simply ignorance and false consciousness. It is rather, as Esping-Andersen would put it, the slogan of asymmetric chronopolitics. 

It is important to understand that chronopolitics is nothing more than the political and cultural modality in which class conflict in recent decades has appeared: the conflict between generations is not fundamental but is rather the outcome of specific historical developments, which have turned age into the medium of conflicts flowing from the relations of property. But this does not make generational conflict superficial, any more than the mediation of class through race makes race superficial. There is a genuine divergence in life chances and social power along the lines of age.”

[the-long-nothings]

The New Reading Environment

The irony of the op-ed’s depressing reemergence is that everything is an op-ed now. The op-edization of all writing should have rendered its traditional purveyors redundant. Why read a Times columnist when you can read the same opinion delivered with more style and energy almost anywhere else? But even as internet writers refine and defend and reiterate their opinions—an archipelago of converging takes—so-called traditional outlets have consolidated their influence.

Holy shit, this is good.

[aether--or]

source

[idkidecay]

The question of sharing these moments can evoke strong apprehension. Will these stories be appropriated or misrepresented? Will they be exploited or mocked?

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/you-can-ask-me-about-my-hair/

[forwhomthebenfolds]

Kristin Dombek: I feel like the thing that I spent most of my time doing in college when I wasn't studying or reading was watching guys play music.

Dayna Tortorici: Guys you knew?

Kristen Dombeck: Yeah.

Dayna Tortorici: I did a lot of that too.

Kristin Dombek: Just sitting around in living rooms...

Dayna Tortorici: "Jam Sessions."

Kristin Dombek: Sitting through jam sessions.

Dayna Tortorici: Yes.

Kristin Dombeck: I often find myself in this warehouse in Bushwick where people circle through and just play, for hours and hours. There are these 18-year-old boys who seem to almost live there and are really dominating, and then there are these girls who are sitting there -- now they're texting -- but they're listening to the boys play music, for hours and hours and hours. And I keep watching, you know, and I just...

Dawn Lundy Martin: Sara, your face.

Sara Marcus: What's my face?

Dawn Lundy Martin: Not a happy one.

Sara Marcus: It hurts! I'm sorry, it really hurts.

Kristin Dombek: They play the tambourine, you know? And they sit. I've been thinking about how much time I spent doing that.

Dayna Tortorici: How much time did you spend doing that?

Kristen Dombek: A lot of time! And I recently started playing bass, and so I'm not just sitting and listening anymore. But after so many years of not...I was thinking about these girls becuase I keep wanting to shake them and just say, "It doesn't matter if you fuck it up, if you fuck it up because you don't know the chord changes. It doesn't matter."

[housingworksbookstore]

Thanks, NYT, for featuring tomorrow’s event at HWBC launching Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973. Greif will be in conversation with A.O. Scott, film critic for the Times.

There are so many reasons to attend this event. We hear the book is a fascinating take on the evolution of culture and criticism in mid-twentieth century America. We also hear there will be charcuterie.