The chief comfort of the X-Files lies in its axiomatic starting point, that the truth is out there, not, as we came to learn in 2001, in here. That is, there is an underlying presumption of comfort and passivity that makes the show’s paranoia so compelling: if everything here seems to be okay, there must be a serious problem somewhere else.
Category: micropost
In “Nina & Irena,” a Holocaust Survivor Breaks Her Silence After Eighty Years | The New Yorker
Amid rising antisemitism, the filmmaker Daniel Lombroso turns the focus to his grandmother, in a film presented by Errol Morris.
“[T]he way late capitalism—or, as I’ve taken to calling our current moment, late pandemic—is used colloquially isn’t making a claim but attempting a manifestation. We think—we hope—that we are nearing the end, because we goddamn can’t take it much longer.”
Today we have tools to automatically identify dogs and cars in photos, but we don’t see the thousands of people paid miserly wages to perform the millions of tedious tasks necessary for the tool to do its purported magic.
Seems like I should have heard of this a while ago.
Beyond the Myth of Rural America | The New Yorker
Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.
(via Austin Kleon)
A Slip of Paper
Today I went to the doctor—
the doctor said I was dying,
not in those words, but when I said it
she didn’t deny it—
What have you done to your body, her silence says.
We gave it to you and look what you did to it,
how you abused it.
I’m not talking only of cigarettes, she says,
but also of poor diet, of drink.
She’s a young woman; the stiff white coat disguises her body.
Her hair’s pulled back, the little female wisps
suppressed by a dark band. She’s not at ease here,
behind her desk, with her diploma over her head,
reading a list of numbers in columns,
some flagged for her attention.
Her spine’s straight also, showing no feeling.
No one taught me how to care for my body.
You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.
Once you’re free of them, your wife takes over, but she’s nervous,
she doesn’t go too far. So this body I have,
that the doctor blames me for—it’s always been supervised by women,
and let me tell you, they left a lot out.
The doctor looks at me—
between us, a stack of books and folders.
Except for us, the clinic’s empty.
There’s a trap-door here, and through that door,
the country of the dead. And the living push you through,
they want you there first, ahead of them.
The doctor knows this. She has her books,
I have my cigarettes. Finally
she writes something on a slip of paper.
This will help your blood pressure, she says.
And I pocket it, a sign to go.
And once I’m outside, I tear it up, like a ticket to the other world.
She was crazy to come here,
a place where she knows no one.
She’s alone; she has no wedding ring.
She goes home alone, to her place outside the village.
And she has her one glass of wine a day,
her dinner that isn’t a dinner.
And she takes off that white coat:
between that coat and her body,
there’s just a thin layer of cotton.
And at some point, that comes off too.
To get born, your body makes a pact with death,
and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—
You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.
But for a long time you hear every sound.
It’s a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.
– Louise Glück
How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News | The New Yorker
The Israel-Hamas war has displayed with fresh urgency the perils of relying on our feeds for updates about events unfolding in real time.