Editors The News Today

I remember learning NOBA in the eighth grade, where it was always the perfectly empty, emphatic solution for a sentence in a too-short paragraph.

A synchronous account of the war in Ukraine, then, would begin on February 24, 2022, with the invasion, and in 2014, with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine. It would take in Ukraine’s tumultuous post-Soviet transition, the movement in Maidan, and the 2008 NATO summit in Romania, when George W. Bush pressed for NATO expansion in Ukraine and Georgia — and also NATO’s absorption of the Visegrád Group and intervention in Yugoslavia.

Capitalism is blasting a fire hose of visual sewage at the world while the best visual thinkers are busy trying to impress the painfully shrunken circle of cognoscenti, carefully avoiding or underplaying questions of beauty, craft, and design in their work, lest they be labeled insufficiently intellectual.

For larger publications, the upside of newsletters is obvious. Email-bound readers can seamlessly swipe over from their Zocdoc appointment notification to their health insurance bill payment notification to their student loan payment notification to their local mass shooting notification to a Washington Post opinion newsletter about the biggest threat facing the nation (still, somehow, cancel culture). Of course, no one has pursued newsletters as zealously as the legaciest legacy-media operation...

For larger publications, the upside of newsletters is obvious. Email-bound readers can seamlessly swipe over from their Zocdoc appointment notification to their health insurance bill payment notification to their student loan payment notification to their local mass shooting notification to a Washington Post opinion newsletter about the biggest threat facing the nation (still, somehow, cancel culture). Of course, no one has pursued newsletters as zealously as the legaciest legacy-media operation...

In the late ’90s there was this trend toward blob cars that was probably seen as very ugly at the time, but now represents an infinitely more beautiful path lost to the auto industry by the late ’00s. Now all we have are cars that are soft and hard at the same time, like the swole AF backend coders we all apparently want to be.

Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pulled by ugliness toward a gentrified retail strip. Here the violence of the new ugliness comes more fully into focus. The ruling class seized cities and chose to turn them into . . . this?

For better or worse, dead people do rule. They rule because we love them, and they rule because, like many people over 65 today, they were late to retire and reluctant to surrender their reign.

N+1’s heroes (despite occasional attempts to diversify things) were often drawn from this Carveresque ethos — which seems to have also doomed the magazine to repeat the false binary of sellouts v. masochism. My point here isn’t that “selling out” is OK, but that the binary itself proved unsustainable and almost always led, as in Carver’s own case, to some form of seriously shitty, uncritical surrender to one of these strands or the other, or to both.

After Zahedi called himself the reincarnation of Kafka, an audience member yelled, “This is bullshit! You’re wasting my fucking time!” and stormed out. After the outburst, Zahedi stood silently, looking like a hurt puppy dog, until an audience member (or perhaps crew member) shouted, “We love you Caveh!” At that point he smiled and returned to narrating the play.