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April 20, 2026
A Confederacy of Haters
Sarah Brouillette
Here is a story about the public sphere. Hundreds of years ago, a class of newly wealthy people used a burgeoning print culture to bolster their anti-monarchical claims to a larger role in public affairs. The capitalism that generated their wealth immiserated many more, who formed a variety of proletarianized counter-publics. Not seeing their interests represented in the bourgeois public sphere, these people attacked its protocols of reason and decorum....
April 20, 2026
The Judgment of the Masses
Erik Baker
“Cultures unfortunately can be swept by craziness,” Noam Chomsky wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in December 2018, in response to one of many missives from his friend complaining of mistreatment at the hands of a sensationalist media. “Nazism for example. Or the Great Awakening.” A few weeks earlier, Chomsky had advised Epstein not to reply to the “disgusting” smears against him. “To 99% of people, who will never look into the...
April 20, 2026
Directing the Herd
Edward Ongweso Jr
Long before academics and pundits began mourning the loss of the Habermasian public sphere, Walter Lippmann, America’s dean of journalism, questioned whether such a sphere had ever existed. Writing in the 1910s and 1920s, Lippmann argued that the very notion of a civic society capable of understanding and advocating for the common good was a fantasy. The public was a “phantom” and society a “bewildered herd,” with individuals too trapped...
April 20, 2026
Thousands of Voices
Ismail Ibrahim
The world is full of forces that want you to believe the physical world is a problem to overcome — food delivery apps, cul-de-sac developers, automobile manufacturers, vitamin-hawking podcasters. Always the drive toward greater convenience, more atomization, a sense of security so total we forget the vulnerability of our flesh. But there’s also always the nagging proof that we’re interconnected. A virus, say. Six years ago, we stayed inside for...
April 17, 2026
Roman-Flood | Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Diabolic Realism
Max Norman
If you made it through the 3,600 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Min kamp, in the Norwegian), its conclusion could only inspire mixed feelings. Book Six — also known as “the Hitler one” due to its three hundred pages on the life of the dictator whose manifesto gave Knausgaard his title — records the precise moment (7:07 a.m., on September 2, 2011) that Karl Ove brought it to...
April 15, 2026
Devochka
Caroline Porter
My friend Ryan had stolen a virtual reality headset from the GameStop where he worked. He’d been using it for a week to alternately play a rhythm game called Beat Saber and jack off. I’m just out here living my best life, he texted me when I asked him what he was up to. This was followed by a clown emoji, then one of a guy in sunglasses. He was...
April 13, 2026
Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld | DHS’s Regime of Images
Mitch Therieau
In the video, the penguin waddles across a frozen expanse. He is heading away from his colony, into Antarctica’s vast interior, alone. Nothing can stop his solitary march: even if he were caught and returned to the colony, we learn from the sandpapery, Teutonic voice of Werner Herzog, he would set right back out toward the mountains. “But why?” Herzog asks. The video’s caption answers: “Americans have always known ‘why.’”...
April 8, 2026
The Blonde
Julia Kornberg
La Rubia lives here now. Even if we don’t talk about the events that led her to this place, she is here. Her back is straight and her chin points slightly forward. She is running her small finger over Tali’s old bookshelf. War: she reads one Céline title aloud. Next to it: War and War. La Rubia’s body is so unnervingly small that I can imagine it slipping between the...
April 2, 2026
Fraud with Benefits | How Breaking the Rules Makes Welfare Work
Maia Silber
In a viral video posted the day after Christmas 2025, Nick Shirley, a right-wing YouTuber in his early twenties, drives around a snowy Minneapolis aiming to expose what he alleged was the widespread misuse of federal funds by Somali-owned daycares. Shirley is accompanied by a local conservative lobbyist-cum-vigilante named David, who warns that the perpetrators of the scheme are “exceptionally violent”; Shirley declares that the money is being used for...
December 2, 2025
Be Grateful | Trump’s Latter-day Neoconservatism
Séamus Malekafzali
On October 13, international representatives gathered in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh in the southern Sinai Peninsula. Sharm el-Sheikh had been occupied by Israel from 1968 to 1982, and suffered a major al-Qaeda attack in 2005; now President Donald Trump was there to ink an agreement that would end what he described as three thousand years of conflict in the Middle East. In keeping with such a momentous occasion,...
