N+1 #9 BAD MONEY.
THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION:
THE EDITORS – The Intellectual Situation
Web 2.0 has been revelatory in lots of ways—user-generated naked photos, for one—but the torrent of writing from ordinary folks has certainly been one of the most transfixing.
THE EDITORS – Internet as Social Movement
“The Russian Revolution,” Wired founding editor Louis Rossetto once said, “was like a schoolyard game compared to the change that’s been driven by the digital revolution.”
THE EDITORS – Addled
Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow we’ll just watch the ads. The outlines of this can already be discerned in Gmail’s data mining of your emails.
THE EDITORS – Cave Painting
For the best writers on video games, games are not art and don’t need to be. Games are, by design, what Plato believed epic poetry to be: ethics manuals for inhabitants of the cave.
POLITICS:
BENJAMIN KUNKEL – Full Employment
Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least.
NARCOTERROR IN MEXICO:
ANONYMOUS – Under the Cartels
In the late ’90s, when I moved to the city of Monterrey, people made jokes about my origins: surely my father carried a gun, surely I was coarse and crude—I was from a border town.
JUAN VILLORO – The Red Carpet
It’s possible to distinguish the ‘signatures’ of the different cartels: some decapitate their victims, others cut out their tongues, others leave the dead in the trunks of cars.
ESSAYS:
EMILY WITT – Miami Party Boom
We were led to an elevator past tanks filled with pulsing jellyfish. The elevator went down to the basement area, and when the door slid open an impossibly tall drag queen greeted us.
ELIF BATUMAN – Summer in Samarkand, Part II
If there is one thing I heard a thousand times in Samarkand, it was how they have the greatest bread in Uzbekistan because of their amazingly clean water and air.
MARK GREIF – Octomom, One Year Later
The octuplets were supposed to be a distraction; instead, the camera teams camped on Nadya Suleman’s lawn got a living metaphor for the crisis.
FICTION:
SAM LIPSYTE – The Blue Newt Faction
The hand-scrawled sign over the door to the Happy Salamander preschool read: Closed indefinitely due to pedagogical conflicts. Please call 917 887 8884 for further information.
THOMAS LEVERITT – The Exchange Rate Between Lust and Money
Oh, the girls have panic buttons all right, and if one of them gets pushed it won’t be cops who’ll come running. That falls under “security,” provided by the landlord.
REVIEWS:
MARK MCGURL – Zombie Renaissance
Critics have been worrying about the death of the novel for decades. The publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is unlikely to change that.
CARLENE BAUER – Why Don’t You?
Because she wants to argue that having sex doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, Valenti insists on divorcing sex from emotional and ethical consequences altogether.
MOLLY YOUNG – Fake Food Triptych
One suspects a preexisting need to make food more interesting than it is, more beautiful, more strange—an impulse more fundamental than a flavor-tripping party.
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