Early in the year I realized how I had read several pieces that were not only great reflections of their moment in time, but had actually in some small way changed how I see the world. Armed with this revelation I did what I would do — write a blog post about it. The superficial theme you might notice is that these articles are "depressing." I concur with this assessment with two important rebuttals. One, things are objectively depressing and worthwhile prose is going to reflect that. Two, I think that most if not all of these articles share a fundamental hope that things can be different. After all, only by diagnosing the rot can we find a cure. Below, in no particular order, are the best pieces of the year.
Death Drive Nation - Patrick Blanchfield
"From the very start, even in the first months of the year, the ubiquitous cry for a return to “normal” clearly expressed a demand to return to a status quo of working people to death and otherwise destroying their bodies as the cost of doing business. That the “new normal” meant they might have to die a little quicker was something the rest of us could apparently learn to live with. But not just that: from the dismissal of concerns over childhood infection rates to the casual, matter-of-fact indifference to the deaths of America’s elderly, to the very idea of “herd immunity,” many Americans apparently embraced a fatalism whereby even their own deaths and the deaths of those they loved were more tolerable than having to contemplate the discomfort of social reorganizations that would make life different."
The Whole Country is the Reichstag - Adolph Reed, Jr.
"A key practical reason to stress the danger on the horizon is the possibility that the national and global political-economic order we’ve known as neoliberalism has evolved to a point at which it is no longer capable of providing enough benefits, opportunity, and security to enough of the population to maintain its popular legitimacy."
"Concretely, that means taking advantage of the openings—ambivalent and limited as they may be—to press where possible, in our own networks, workplaces, civic engagements, and institutional affiliations, in the public realm for those with ready access to it, for the administration’s infrastructure plans to reinvigorate the public sector, not simply stimulate private investment opportunities. It means similarly working to anchor climate change policy to job creation and a serious commitment to make whole those workers who are displaced in the economic and social reorganization that addressing climate change requires. It means also agitating and building public support for initiatives like postal banking and eliminating the income cap on social security tax, even though the latter may produce little more than a holding action against Biden’s long-demonstrated proclivities regarding “entitlements.”"
Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture? - Bertrand Cooper
"There is a real need to diversify pop culture, but it has to happen on more than one axis of oppression. As it stands, popular culture has been prioritized as a site heavily in need of racial change: it is the first and often only industry we expect to respond immediately to the oppression of the Black poor. That these efforts at diversification have not resulted in the Black poor gaining the opportunity to represent themselves in popular culture is a gross perversion of the stated goals of representation. Worst of all, we seem to be gaining in complacency with the status quo. Ibram X. Kendi, the prevailing Black consciousness of white liberals, gave popular culture as is his official sanction in February of this year, writing: “We are living in the time of a new renaissance—what we are calling the Black Renaissance—the third great cultural revival of Black Americans.” Kendi names nearly every Black creator mentioned in this piece but only to cite their existence in popular culture as proof of a race-wide achievement. The exclusion of the Black poor is never mentioned."
History As End: 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past - Matthew Karp
"Whatever birthday it chooses to commemorate, origins-obsessed history faces a debilitating intellectual problem: it cannot explain historical change. A triumphant celebration of 1776 as the basis of American freedom stumbles right out of the gate—it cannot describe how this splendid new republic quickly became the largest slave society in the Western Hemisphere. A history that draws a straight line forward from 1619, meanwhile, cannot explain how that same American slave society was shattered at the peak of its wealth and power—a process of emancipation whose rapidity, violence, and radicalism have been rivaled only by the Haitian Revolution. This approach to the past, as the scholar Steven Hahn has written, risks becoming a “history without history,” deaf to shifts in power both loud and quiet. Thus it offers no way to understand either the fall of Richmond in 1865 or its symbolic echo in 2020, when an antiracist coalition emerged whose cultural and institutional strength reflects undeniable changes in American society. The 1619 Project may help explain the “forces that led to the election of Donald Trump,” as the Times executive editor Dean Baquet described its mission, but it cannot fathom the forces that led to Trump’s defeat—let alone its own Pulitzer Prize."
United in Rage - Tarence Ray
"I’ve become fixated on those crucial minutes between when the paramedics received the call and when they alerted the police. Tens of thousands of incarcerated people, millions of dollars in carceral infrastructure, and untold amounts of pain and misery reside in those few minutes. They dictate the stories we tell ourselves about the epidemic: that people are whole until they take a specific substance, after which they are irreparably transformed into something else. If they die they become a martyr; if they live and get sober they become a trophy; and if they keep using, or help others obtain the drug, they become a public enemy. Regardless of their fate, they are never seen as fully human again—they are not quite like us, and they never will be. We may tell ourselves that we are humanizing victims of the crisis by telling their stories, but until the social nature of drug use is acknowledged—until we can honestly account for the process by which one substance (opioids) is transformed into something illicit while the use of another substance (alcohol) is licit—then the epidemic’s true nature will remain mystified."
You Have Every Right To Be Angry - Ed Zitron
"All of this is makes me so angry. It fills me with full of rage. I read these things multiple times, trying to find a way to see where the writer may have been going and only finding more reasons to be angry. And I think others are angry too, because there is such a nasty, thorough and vast body of work specifically built to suppress workers, masquerading as an analysis of a moment in time.
One day I imagine I’ll dig through old workplace articles and find this is a pattern rather than a new event, but seeing it in real time is truly upsetting. I like writing about these things and find the analysis intellectually stimulating, but I also absolutely hate every person involved in this process. When I started writing about these workplace issues, I saw each one on their own as some goof - that these were just moments in time where someone had done a half-baked analysis - but now have reached a point where I well and truly believe that there are editorial remits to create more and more content that stops explicitly remote work from becoming standardized.
And the one feeling I can’t shake is that it isn’t because of money - it’s because decentralizing a workforce makes it harder to crush and manipulate. The office is built to suppress and contain, and to establish power dynamics - you are here because I tell you to be here, and you will be here as long as I or my wards tell you to be."
Only In Germany - Fabian Wolff
"Against this background it is obscene that empathetic and deeply theorized attempts by scholars and activists to understand the Shoah as part of a history of colonial violence are vilified as trivialization and relativization. The opposite is the case. If the Shoah is understood not as the most radical consequence of violent segregation and subjugation, not as part of historical processes that did not begin in 1933 or end in 1945, but instead as some hermetically-sealed expression of ontological antisemitism that occurred outside history and even outside time itself, then its memory cannot do anything to assure that Auschwitz will never happen again. For anyone."
How Twitter Can Ruin a Life - Emily St. James
"But in any internet maelstrom that gets held up as a microcosm of the Way We Live Today, one simple factor often gets washed away: These things happened to someone. And the asymmetrical nature of the harm done to that person is hard to grasp until you’ve been that person. A single critical tweet about the matter was not experienced by Isabel Fall as just one tweet. She experienced it as part of a tsunami that nearly took her life. And that tsunami might have been abated if people had simply asked themselves, “What’s the worst that could happen if I’m right? And what’s the worst that could happen if I’m wrong?”"
We Live in a Society - Gabriel Winant
"In the moments of celebration after Biden’s victory was announced, however, one could faintly glimpse a new level of unity emerging. As people filled the streets both to defend the election result and to exult in it, a new bloc began to show its face. Trade unions, largely absent from the year’s earlier movements, figured centrally in demonstrations in Philadelphia, as they had done in the election campaign beforehand. The energy and solidarity of the summer uprising were present as well, transposed into a more joyful key. The decisive role of cities like Philly, Detroit, and Minneapolis in the defeat of the right points toward the possibility of leadership for the emerging socialist and abolitionist politics based in the young activist centers of those cities, and embodied on the electoral stage by Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and of course Nikil Saval. A socialist program that confronts white supremacy as its immediate object—rather than trying to find a majority by navigating around the edifice of white supremacy—is the principle of unity for this bloc. Its social basis lies in an alliance of low-wage workers and high-debt workers, disproportionately young, who are concentrated together in cities and increasingly in suburbs. It is not that such an alliance on its own constitutes a majority; it is that it forms a potentially solid social foundation from which to provide rational answers to the structural problems of American society, and thus to recruit the more disparate elements needed to resolve the crisis. Join together these parts, and you have a big enough resonator."
All The Right Words On Climate Have Already Been Said - Sarah Miller
"I could end this story by saying “We kept swimming and it was beautiful even if it will all be gone someday or some shit” but I already ended another climate story that way. I have, several times, really nailed that ending, sad, wistful, something like pining for lost love but worse because larger in scope, but not worse, because not totally immediate. Writing is stupid. I just want to be alive. I want all of us to just be alive. It is hard to accept the way things are, to know that the fight is outside the realm of argument and persuasion and appeals to how much it all hurts in every way. It is terrifying to know that the prize for many who care may be prison or worse. But all the right words about climate have already been deployed. It’s time for the right weapons."
Reopening - Erik Hane
"That in mind, I think what I find wrenching about a player in possession of such colossal potential as Jannik Sinner is the simple fact of his youth. Say he plays for a decade, which feels conservative—where will we be by the end of it? When he’s defending an Australian Open title in 2035, will the Melbourne air have become more breathable, and will the already often-unplayable temperatures have cooled? Someone like Sinner reminds us that the world will not deteriorate quickly. It will happen slowly, and a lot of people will live to see it, and along the way there will be breathtaking flashes of talent and artistry and skill that show us what we stand poised to lose. Think of Jakupovic, conceding a match critically important to her livelihood because the atmosphere wouldn’t allow her to play—it’s already begun."
The Centre Can't Save Democracy - Grace Blakeley
"Liberalism has ceased to be a living political philosophy, and has instead morphed into an ideological appendage of the status quo. It is the means by which conflict is suppressed but not assuaged, and contradictions subdued but not resolved. It allows the very same American corporate elite whose policies caused Donald Trump to celebrate his defeat — and proclaim their own virtuous role in bringing it about. But it will never force them to concede their power."
Men in Dark Times: How Hannah Arendt's fans misread the post-truth presidency - Rebecca Panovka
"Trump’s loudest critics spent his time in office wringing their hands over “alternative facts,” worshipping fact-checkers, and fetishizing factual truth—declaiming Trump as an exception and yearning for a return to normal. But amid the criticism, they did little to examine the status of truth under previous administrations. Trump was not the first liar in the Oval Office, and unlike some of his predecessors, he was fiercely challenged by an adversarial press and an opposition party keen to decry his every statement. Rather than a calculating liar with an all-embracing plan, Trump was an opportunist able to exploit a lack of public trust in the institutions charged with disseminating facts. The journalists who nitpicked his statements managed only to preach to the proverbial choir, while his most ardent supporters shrugged off authoritative facts altogether, convinced that the media was aligned with the “deep state.” The press, after all, had already proved itself unequipped to dismantle the fictional reality constructed by the architects of American empire."
"Consent" is the Wrong Framework For Experiencing Art - Gretchen Felker-Martin
"In a 2020 study in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, researchers found that trigger warnings also encouraged people to view trauma as an essential part of their personhood, a belief which correlates with increased symptom severity and poorer overall mental health outcomes. The trigger warning, a hot-button topic entrenched in liberal and progressive circles by years of sneering neoconservative mockery, has become a cudgel in the hands of people who view their own knee-jerk upset as a moral imperative for those around them, and even the people who make the art they engage with. That trigger warnings don’t work is beside the point, which is the exercise of power in a world where so much actual oppression is immovable. We know instinctively that we can’t oust a president or bring down an oil conglomerate, but we can sure as hell make a tiny video game studio pay for the fact that while playing their game — or listening to someone else talk about having played it — we felt something we didn’t want to feel. If you can’t make the world safe, at least you can punish the people who remind you it isn’t."
The Other Afghan Women - Anand Gopal
"The journey would entail cutting through a barren plain exposed to abandoned U.S. and British bases, where snipers nested, and crossing culverts potentially stuffed with explosives. A few families started off. Even if they reached Lashkar Gah, they could not be sure what they’d find there. Since the start of the Taliban’s blitz, Afghan Army soldiers had surrendered in droves, begging for safe passage home. It was clear that the Taliban would soon reach Kabul, and that the twenty years, and the trillions of dollars, devoted to defeating them had come to nothing. Shakira’s family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. The gunfire sounded closer. Shakira spotted Taliban vehicles racing toward the bazaar—and she decided to stay put. She was weary to the bone, her nerves frayed. She would face whatever came next, accept it like a judgment. “We’ve been running all our lives,” she told me. “I’m not going anywhere.”"
A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department - Cerise Castle
No pull quote here because this is a fifteen-part piece of in-depth reporting. If you think there is anything redeemable about the state of American policing, read just some of this to be disabused of that notion.
Magic Actions: Looking back on the George Floyd rebellion - Tobi Haslett
"It’s worth lingering here to note that the chief beneficiaries of civil rights legislation were those black people poised to scale the heights of class and meritocracy. (The rest were left to languish as a sociological “problem.”) But the path has been a swerving one, lined with prickling little ironies. Many of these people heaved themselves into white-collar employment just as the middle class began its crumble into neoliberal instability and launched their long march through the universities as degrees plummeted in value. A large chunk of this layer grew up within familial earshot of urban poverty and thus carries the vivid memory of what proletarian life actually looks like. Many of them know the pain of visiting family behind bars. So their middle-income existence is pressed up against the so-called underclass — a link to be minimized or insisted on, grateful for or raged against, brandished as cultural birthright or folded shrewdly into sensibility. But never fully severed. They still know the sting of condescension or outright hatred. And though abolition is still a shocking notion, their children are largely raised with blunt distrust of the police. With little wealth to inherit, these families possess far less property than their white counterparts, and even that prosperity seems to vanish with mortifying frequency. “White boys who grew up rich are more likely to remain that way,” pronounced a study published in the Times in 2018. “Black boys raised at the top are more likely to become poor than stay wealthy in their own adult households.”
For huge swathes of black America, Obama was a triumph and realized dream; for the middle class, he was a mirror. The fierce, conflicting aspects of their harrowing evolution were prettily reproduced in his image and political style. His centrist managerialism was cast as a triumph of civil rights; the old injunction to be “respectable” was softened by his much-touted love of rap. His speeches seemed to stream down from a place of unpretentious elevation, so he could lash out at poor black people and expect gratitude for his frankness. Drone strikes, deportations, and fealty to the banks were balanced by the moral prestige of the historical black struggle.
Ferguson ripped a hole in the middle of Obama’s second term. He lapsed into ambivalence: though sometimes sonorous about the forces arrayed against young black men, he lambasted the Baltimore uprising as a terror wrought by “thugs.” Those sympathetic to Obama saw him as having to placate irreconcilable constituencies — a position he also held as the recession disproportionately affected black families. The period between 2008 and 2016 saw black homeownership decrease at calamitous rates. Negative home equity shot up in the black community when the housing bubble burst and continued to skyrocket for years after it began to decline among whites, all observed from an astral distance by the first black commander in chief. So he was — at best — irrelevant to the fates of those who loved him most. No trill of rhetoric or stirring gesture could stop the tank of financial capital, or shield the fragile fortunes of the new black middle class.
It’s that part of the black world — their anger, their comfort, their belated conscription to the harried scramble for the American good life, their uncertain place beneath the fluorescent lights of the corporate office — that’s become a point of panicked fixation in the aftermath of last year’s riots. It was hard not to laugh at the official response to the rebellion, as every brand and elite institution rolled out the same manic public statement, declaring their love for their black employees and allegiance to BLM. But perhaps inevitably that daffy piety became the rule. One outcome of the uprising has been the expansion of a zealous antiracist discourse that remains silent about the street battles that gave it marvelous topicality.
This is not a new phenomenon. The past six years had seen the passions of Ferguson displaced by efforts to give white professionals moral lessons and a smattering of black people prestigious posts. Black professionals, after all, are the crown jewels of the liberal reformist mission: their presence on the campus or conference call performs a shining symbolic task. This is the only sliver of black America to feel the full effects of integration — so the shivering, conflicted existence of this minority within a minority stands as talismanic promise that the wound of history might be healed. In Obama’s first public statement after the events in Minneapolis — months before he intervened to break a strike by professional basketball players — he began by quoting an email sent to him by an “African American businessman.”
Any sign of this group’s ingratitude provokes perplexity and dismay. One of the most sensationalized early episodes from the riots concerned two lawyers in their early thirties who face decades in prison for their alleged actions in New York. One is Pakistani American and the other is black: raised working-class in Brooklyn, he was plucked by a nonprofit organization and spirited away to a bucolic boarding school followed by Princeton, law school, then a budding career as a corporate attorney, only to see this fantastic future evaporate when — for reasons breathlessly speculated on in the national media — he drove his friend around the demonstrations as she pitched Molotov cocktails at police vehicles. This may or may not point to something rustling through the spring, when quite a few young black people placed within this rickety middle class chose to cross the mystic threshold between “respectability” and dignity: they went out to meet the riots."
