Page 2 - Issue 42 News Today

Arctic eco-heist! Did the New Left do neoliberalism? Digital projection: the phantom menace. The paranoid style in American politics, the narcissistic style in American podcasts. Haley Mlotek reads Deborah Levy. Sarah Resnick visits the cryptosphere.

Arctic eco-heist! Did the New Left do neoliberalism? Digital projection: the phantom menace. The paranoid style in American politics, the narcissistic style in American podcasts. Haley Mlotek reads Deborah Levy. Sarah Resnick visits the cryptosphere.

How tragic, I thought, to reduce life to a procession of microtransactions or contracts. How naive to believe that some agreed-upon set of values could be formalized into code, or that the problems of politics could be made irrelevant by computation.

What I’m saying is that when you grow up here it’s harder to take the shit you see on social media seriously. Like, for real, who the fuck cares about your big sushi date night in Dallas or whatever? What’s crazy too is that everybody knows they’re creating a false image of themselves, so everybody has to know that everyone else is doing that too.

In just a couple of weeks I cycled all the way from love—listening to episode after episode on long, meditative walks with a stroller and hearing Zahedi’s voice in my head at all other times of day—to the other side. I managed to get my husband hooked in the process. He continued to listen every day as the episodes came out, whereas when I caught the distinct cadence of Zahedi’s voice coming out of the fuzzy iPhone speaker from the kitchen, I began to feel embarrassed. For me? For Zahedi...

I can’t tell how paranoid I’m being when I wonder if we’re at the beginning of a civil war. When we feel paranoid, we project our fear outward, locating it in details and experiences that would seem otherwise benign. Sometimes this fear is justified; the paranoid fantasy is not always implausible.

On May 29, 2020, the largest fuel storage tank at Norilsk Heat and Power Plant No. 3 (HPP-3) burst at the bottom and spewed 6.5 million gallons of diesel fuel into the Daldykan River. From there it seeped into the Ambarnaya River, Lake Pyasino, the Pyasina River, and finally into the Kara Sea. It was the largest oil spill in Arctic history.