Benjamin Nugent sends a postcard from the fraternity scene. 

Last week, I drove to my hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, to see if the frat boys were following the university’s social distancing rules. It was a breezy Thursday evening, cool enough that you could sit out on a porch without pouring sweat. In a normal year, on a mild, late-August night like this one, I would have seen dense crowds of hundreds of UMass Greeks, happy to be reunited, milling through the streets surrounding the Alpha Sig fraternity and the Iota Gamma Epsilon sorority. I would have seen them scream greetings and profanities at each other, spill down the steps of the wooden porticos, stumble to the ground, sip from Solo cups, and dance to music blasted from weatherproof speakers, while cops monitored the scene from their cruisers, blue lights spinning as the mob flowed around them. It’s a harvest-season ritual familiar to anyone who grew up here, a marker of the end of summer.

This year is different, of course. All over the country, local authorities have traced COVID-19 outbreaks to fraternity parties, and colleges that have tried to resume in-person classes have struggled with students’ refusal to observe protocol. Over at Syracuse, the day before I arrived, hundreds of newly arrived first years had gathered on the quad and roved the campus in open mockery of the required safety measures. Through July, UMass had insisted it was going to bring its twenty-one thousand undergrads back to campus, even though most classes would be taught online, only to meet stiff resistance from locals and staff; the RA union called the plan “suicidal.” In early August the administration reversed course and instructed the students not to come back after all, unless they were taking studio, lab or captstone classes, the only courses that would be taught face-to-face. That meant that only a little more than a thousand kids would be allowed to live in the dorms. Those who lived off-campus—like frat boys and sorority girls—were discouraged from returning to Amherst. And if that wasn’t enough to put Greek life on pause, a movement to ban fraternities, driven by former members, Black students, and students of color, had gained followers through the summer. But nobody could force the Greeks to stay home with their parents. Would they come back to Amherst and try to throw the usual back-to-school rager, despite its potential lethality and despite the political headwinds? The only way to find out was to stalk them after nightfall. Read More

Beirut sunset, with port in the distance (© Adobe Stock)

This is not Beirut.

But no—this is Beirut! A city broken and wounded, whose blood spreads like glass over the eyes. A city paved with glass, as though glass had turned into eyes, plucked out and filling the streets. In Beirut, you must tread on your eyes in order to see. And when you see, you are struck blind. A city of glassy blindness, of ammonium nitrate, and of the searing blast that swallowed the city and split the sea.

This is not Beirut.

For forty-five years we have been saying of Beirut that it is not Beirut. We lost Beirut while searching for it in the deficient past. “The City of Is-No-More”—that is the name we gave it, for, starting with the destruction of the civil war, we have attributed everything in Beirut to its past. This week, however, as we fell to the ground before the monster that exploded at the city’s port, we discovered that it was the destruction itself that was our city, these houses stripped naked were our houses, these groans were our groans.

This is Beirut! Everyone, tear your eyes away from the ground and behold your city reflected in these ruins! Stop searching for its deficient past! Do not stand and wonder, for the explosion that turned your city to rubble was neither coincidence nor mere accident. It was your truth that you have tried so long to hide. A city handed over to thieves to violate, a city where the authority of idiots holds sway and which has been ripped apart by warlords working for foreign powers.

Read More

A postcard from Chile, amid the weeks of nationwide protests in response to a subway fare hike, rising inequality, high cost of living, and privatization. 

Busses on fire in Santiago (photo: Agence France-Press)

I’m writing these words in clothes that reek of tear gas. Trying to process the pulse of the street while still part of it, while our feet are still there on the ground, fleeing water cannons, not knowing where to go, hiding in the crowd, among people just like us, groups of us marching, dodging smoke and soldiers. This is a celebration, a protest, a demand for change that began with students jumping turnstiles in the metro after fares were hiked. Without any organizer, without petitions, leaders, or negotiations, the whole thing escalated and then exploded into chaos in the streets. And there is yelling, and singing, and banging on pots, and fire, and beatings. In front of the palace of La Moneda, near the theater where I work, a man tells a soldier that he doesn’t understand why the soldier is protecting privileges that will never be his. A woman screams that we’re killing ourselves, we’re committing suicide, with all this inequality.

I walk home from the heart of Santiago. Hours of walking. The metro is closed, streets are occupied, no public transportation is to be found. Thousands of us are on the move. I see young men with their faces painted like the Joker yelling that this uprising is the ultimate punchline to the biggest joke. I wonder what big joke they mean. The fare hike? The minister of the economy’s advice to take advantage of cheaper early morning fares and get up at 6 A.M.? The pizza that President Piñera is eating right now at an upscale Santiago restaurant, deaf to the voice of the city? The pathetic pensions of our retirees? The depressing state of our public education? Our public health? The water that doesn’t belong to us? The militarization of Wallmapu, the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people? The incidents apparently staged by soldiers to incriminate Mapuches? The shameful treatment of our immigrants? The hobbling of our timid abortion law, due to government approval of conscientious objection for conservative doctors? The ridiculous concentration of privileges in the hands of a small minority? Persistent tax evasion by that same minority? The corruption and embezzlement scandals within the armed forces and the national police? The media monopoly of the big conglomerates, owners of television channels, newspapers, and radio stations? The constitution written under the dictatorship that still governs us to this day? Our mayors, representatives, and senators who once worked for Pinochet? Our pseudodemocracy?

Read More

Vyshali Manivannan has written extensively about the decades-long ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, her parents’ home country. Having spread her father’s ashes a year ago to the day, Sunday’s bombings came as a reminder that the cycle of violence continues, along with the trauma it leaves in its wake.

Sun setting over Kandalama Lake, Sri Lanka (photo: Steve Weaver)

Today is loss that isn’t loss. It’s loss that’s become as acceptable as the parallelogram of skin on my ankle that I perennially shave off. I didn’t even notice the first time, stepped out in my towel tracking rivers of blood, Amma pronounced, all over the clean floor. We’ve known this floor since 1983, which is to say there never was a time I didn’t know it, right up to the end of the war, which retrofitted the foundation of what a war story could be, it seemed, across the Tamil diaspora. The story of how we learned of it, if we weren’t there.

Nearly ten years ago, I fled my apartment for a friend’s downtown, then abandoned their air mattress for higher ground, crouching on the back of their sofa with a laptop balanced across my knees. No one had yet taught me it doesn’t matter that the floor isn’t lava, the earth needs no heat to swallow you whole. How many times must I relearn? I found out the war ended by the way I was labeled with vicarious trauma: two people, out of everyone I knew in proximity, were willing to engage, while others politely checked their empathy larders for an I’m so sorry, you and yours are in my thoughts. Every simpering thank you I performed restocking their shelves. Read More