#Issue49

Just once in her life she shot a gun, when she was in the Venture Scouts, aged 16. It was at the Thiepval Barracks a few months before she took her GCSEs. The army must have been trying to recruit them or something. As if.…

Let me just finish disinfecting a table number marker and then off I go, I just have to put down what I’ve got in my hands to serve, I tell her that with my eyes, yes I’m coming, I’ve seen the whole thing, I saw you adding the sauces, the napkins, I know…

“I only love swimming,” I said. And it was true that I’d always felt awkward on land. Sometimes I wondered if that was why I was so unsuccessful at online dating: technology was incompatible with the water. “The monk thing does appeal.”

A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses.…

Nowhere did I witness the guardsmen at the gates of the mind — those responsible for self-consciousness and self-doubt — more swiftly outsmarted, pacified, or outright killed than in that room.…

As Sheehi recently argued, “It will be the university that enacts the violence of fascism. The fascist just sends off a letter.” To this story we can add the psychoanalyst, who also seems all too willing to post.…

You were an organic intellectual if you were an intellectual who organized. That was news to me.

Postcommunist Romania is manifestly a postcensorship society, a society in which everything is permissible and therefore explicit, lurid, cheap.…

For years now, commentators like Mounk have singled out the Democrats’ alleged fealty to “wokeness” as the reason for their electoral underperformance.…

George Floyd’s murder made being black at the university significantly worse. When I try to understand how, I can’t help but look back on the chancellor’s words, ostensibly full of hope that the “national crisis” could “catalyze powerful change” — and how…