January 3, 2020 Best of 2019 They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi By Rowan Ricardo Phillips We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Lionel Messi. Photo: David Ramos. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville. On an overcast morning in New York. Sometime past midnight in Tokyo. A Saturday in Abidjan. This is how you live now. This is how you have lived for nearly half of your life. You’re in one place, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places; at times encircled, at times cursored, at times turned into a digital shroud of statistics that mark how fast you’ve run at your fastest. The shorn-smooth grass you walk on—you mostly walk, like a painter let loose on a meadow, while everyone else runs as though late for a meeting—is black ice for the rest of us. We see you there, infected with data. We watch you in the simulacrum. We love you because the simulacrum tells us to love you. We hate you because the simulacrum tells us to hate you. The pontificators and the screamers have their say. Some of us have no interest in you, but the simulacrum makes sure we know who you are. We parse from all of this what we consider pleasure: love, hate, indifference. You’re standing in one place, one patch of grass on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. A ball floats in the air toward you. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places. Your name is stamped between your shoulder blades. You turn your back away from the ball. We all know who you are. You balance yourself and focus. What you’re about to do has no name. Read more >>
January 3, 2020 Best of 2019 The Empty Room By Lucy Sante We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! The more empty the photograph, the more it implies horror. The void that dominates an empty photograph is the site of past human activity. It presents itself as a hole in the middle of the picture. The beds, tables, chairs, lamps are not the subject; they are the boundary. Some empty images tease the eye, suggesting clues that may dissolve upon closer examination. More often the scene is as near to a blank canvas as it can be without fading into nothingness. But then we, as habituated viewers, tend to brush a dramatic gloss upon such pictures. What we see cannot be as perfectly banal as it seems. The lighting and composition awaken unconscious memories of crime-scene photos; the drama comes from what is missing. It’s a bit like Sherlock Holmes’s dog who did not bark. What is missing is an apparent reason for the picture to have been taken. Read more >>
January 2, 2020 Best of 2019 Motherhood Makes You Obscene By Marguerite Duras We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Marguerite Duras. My mother had green eyes. Black hair. Her name was Marie Augustine Adeline Legrand. She was born a peasant, daughter of farmers, near Dunkirk. She had one sister and seven brothers. She went to teachers college, on a scholarship, and she taught in Dunkirk. The day after an inspection, the inspector who had visited her class asked for her hand in marriage. Love at first sight. They got married and left for Indochina. Between 1900 and 1903. A sort of commitment, adventure, a sort of desire, too, not for fortune but for success. They left like heroes, pioneers, they visited the schools in oxcarts, they brought everything, quills, paper, ink. They had succumbed to the posters of the era urging, as if they were soldiers: “Enlist.” She was beautiful, my mother, she was very charming. Many men wanted her over the years, but as far as I know, nothing ever happened outside of her marriages. She was brilliant, and had an incredible way with words. I remember her being fought over at parties. She was one of a kind, very funny, often laughing, wholeheartedly. She was not coquettish, all she did was wash herself, she was always extremely clean. She had a sewing machine but she didn’t know what to have it make. I, too, until I was fourteen or fifteen, dressed like her, in sack dresses. When I started to become interested in men, I picked out my outfits more carefully. Then my mother had me sew incredible dresses, with frills, that made me look like a lampshade. I wore it all. I’ve written so much about my mother. I can say that I owe her everything. In my everyday life, I don’t do anything that she didn’t do. For example, my way of cooking, of preparing a navarin of lamb, blanquettes. My love of ingredients, she had, too. I bore everyone at home with that. When there’s no extra bottle of oil on hand, it’s a problem. That’s normal. What’s abnormal is buying only one bottle of oil. What can you do with just one bottle of oil? What a disaster! What I’ve also inherited from my mother is fear, the fear of germs, along with the constant need to disinfect. This stems from my colonial childhood. Although my mother was very smart about practical things, she didn’t concern herself at all with the domestic realm. As if it didn’t exist. As if the house were a temporary thing, a waiting room. But the floors were washed every day. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more clean than my mother. Read more >>
January 2, 2020 Best of 2019 More UFOs Than Ever Before By Rich Cohen We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! America had its head broken open during World War II, and out came the visions. Visions of global power, infinite markets, ideological struggle, and exotic flying machines. It’s not clear if the number of UFO sightings actually spiked in the years that followed or if it was just our imagination, but something changed. What had been a trickle of encounters dating back to the pioneering days of aviation became a torrent. Often described as saucers, these noiseless, shimmery machines were seen above highways and wheat fields and supermarkets in Forth Worth, Texas; Great Falls, Montana; Monmouth County, New Jersey; Salem, Massachusetts; Carson Sink, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; Miami, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia—the list goes on and on—in the late forties and early fifties. The timing makes it impossible to consider such phenomena without also considering the cataclysm that, more than any set of founding documents, gave birth to our colossal, unknowable, world-striding modern nation. In other words, before you can grapple with UFOs, you have to ask yourself: what the hell did that war do to America? Read more >>
January 2, 2020 Best of 2019 Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage By Lina Mounzer We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! When we speak of translation in these end-of-days, it is often in the loftiest of tones, as though it were a sacred duty undertaken by devoted adepts prostrating themselves before the altar of language. The self is renounced, the greed for authorship forsworn in service of a greater calling, which is no less than bridging the gaps between the peoples and cultures of the world. This is certainly true if you’re translating, say, Don Quixote, or Heian-period Japanese poetry, or a new novel by Senegal’s latest rising star. But only a small minority of translators have the skill, opportunity, and financial security required to take on such labors of love. The rest of us, to earn a living wage, will have to make do with whatever garbage we can get. By garbage I mean any or all of the following: corporate-speak, brand manifestos, NGO reports, think tank reports, letters from government agencies replying to American oil companies, letters from government agencies replying to human rights organizations, prose written by self-professed wunderkinds whose trust funds and unearned self-confidence are paying for the translation, and that vilest genre of all, the art text. Read more >>
January 1, 2020 Best of 2019 Loitering Is Delightful By Ross Gay We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Ross Gay. Photo: Natasha Komoda. I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over. Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight. Read more >>