The lockdown is uncompromising only because the virus is uncompromising. I can’t help but admire the virus for its stubbornness, its refusal to cooperate.

The more I read, the more I find myself wondering if the rejection of hierarchical power, grounded as it was in a righteous critique of capitalism and patriarchy, ultimately contributed to a missed opportunity for action.

My T-shirt did nothing to politicize me around issues of race or class. It did not alert me to who my enemies were, nor did it alert me to the many ways in which I was the enemy of the things I purportedly believed in.

Instead, it made me feel like everyone could be friends.

In LARB’s Best Humanities Essays of the First 10 Years

On the outside, they may be small, defiant, and cute, but inside they are one step weaker: they are dry, uninspired, and compliant.

Picture this: the avant-garde lies on a bare cot in a windowless room, limbs like fragile twigs, eyes sunken, skin dry and cracked, waiting for someone to notice its absence. All the while, its former friends sit and reminisce together over beers at a local bar. They shake their heads, murmuring vaguely wistful remembrances.

To be done with polarization, to see formal techniques, old, new, estranging, intimate, experimental, conventional, as a mere grab-bag of neutral tactics waiting to be marshaled for the success of the individual work, to forge an indefinite truce with the demands of mainstream expectations, is, in this context, just another mode of capitulation to a form of domination that scripts itself as neutral, permissive, and permanent.