A Pillar On Its Side | Amit Chaudhuri What we saw as shrines were remnants of a home, a bit of a lifetime or several lifetimes that still had some of the magic of the everyday in which the gods had for long happily existed.

Amit Chaudhuri on monuments at @nplusonemag.com

A Strange Pattern in the Middle | Bela Shayevich In a 250-word takedown sent to me over text, the brain trust of my father and Anthropic LLM Claude (which was, incidentally, trained not only on my father’s critical tendencies but also on my stolen w...

“I’ve always had trouble translating the terms Russians use for their law enforcement. First of all, there are a lot of different law enforcement officials in Russia. It was hard to keep them straight.” www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

A Strange Pattern in the Middle | Bela Shayevich In a 250-word takedown sent to me over text, the brain trust of my father and Anthropic LLM Claude (which was, incidentally, trained not only on my father’s critical tendencies but also on my stolen w...

So the results of the @nplusonemag.com translation contest featuring my poem have been announced in Bela Shayevich's column. I had entirely forgotten that I had promised the winner a cookie, so I need to get on that.

Also, there's a new translation puzzle for you to have fun with.

Something From the Outside Coming In | Maggie Millner By channeling the Delphic spirits of his mentors, Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits: finding the sense and nonsense in natural speech; intersplicing shards ...

“Few books so aptly capture the weirdness of being flanked by two mutually incomprehensible generations—tech-illiterate elders on the one hand and digital natives on the other—and the mental gymnastics involved in liaising between them.” On TRANSCRIPTION: www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Night of the Two Suns | Iman Ganji and Bahar Noorizadeh As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center.

Trump’s own stated reasons for initiating the war may change by the hour, but the strategic goal of Israel and its Western allies is to ignite a permanent civil war that ensures no authority in Iran can rebuild itself for the foreseeable future. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

A Strange Pattern in the Middle | Bela Shayevich In a 250-word takedown sent to me over text, the brain trust of my father and Anthropic LLM Claude (which was, incidentally, trained not only on my father’s critical tendencies but also on my stolen w...

🔔🔔 new Bela www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Something From the Outside Coming In | Maggie Millner By channeling the Delphic spirits of his mentors, Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits: finding the sense and nonsense in natural speech; intersplicing shards ...

“What kind of verbal machine is an elegy supposed to be, let alone one for intellectual giants like Waldrop or Kluge?” New online: Maggie Millner on Ben Lerner and his mentors.
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

I ask that you read this piece in full, especially if you know little about the Prairieland trial.

Negative Tennis | Owen Lewis Any intrigue is not over a win or loss, but tiny details: Can the opponent break Sinner’s serve? Reach a break point? Win more than two or three points against Sinner’s first serve? Get that first ser...

“Djokovic has always drawn power from a raging well of spite, while Alcaraz draws from a fountain of joy. Sinner doesn’t derive his success from any emotion that I recognize.”

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

The State vs. the Emma Goldman Book Club | Sara Van Horn The prosecutorial strategy is a puerile one: completely overwhelm the jury with unrelated images of leftist protest—for ten full days!—and then hope for guilt by association.

this is very good.
"It is a bitter irony that in a case in which prosecutors— pointing to Signal chats, text messages, and crowdfunding sites—were desperate to evidence nefarious connections, more nefarious connections might have changed the verdict."
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Whoa. Recommend reading article in its entirety.

Finding the Cattle Queen | Rachel Ossip Today, the poster is rarely, if ever, remembered for its relationship to the Cattle Baron, despite the name printed prominently in the bottom right corner. Instead, in museums and academic papers, Fac...

“Somehow, my well-loved grandfather provoked the creation of an undeniably compelling yet undeniably bigoted image.” New, and co-published with Cake Zine: Rachel Ossip’s quest to find “steakhouse royalty, feminist icon, fungible tourism graphic.”
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

a detailed and informative article from a journalist who attended the federal trial last month.

please read and share!!! it walks through many of the discrepancies of the state's narrative and the challenges faced pre-trial

The State vs. the Emma Goldman Book Club | Sara Van Horn The prosecutorial strategy is a puerile one: completely overwhelm the jury with unrelated images of leftist protest—for ten full days!—and then hope for guilt by association.

“In what has become a grotesque pattern of overreach, the government charges left-wing protestors engaged in protected First Amendment activity with the most serious felonies available.” New: Sara Van Horn reports from the Prairieland trial in Fort Worth.
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Night of the Two Suns | Iman Ganji and Bahar Noorizadeh As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center.

"it is imperative to recognize the present moment not as a rupture but a repetition under new conditions: the same geography of extraction and control, the same fantasy of white imperialist domination of trade chokepoints, "

Great essay by Ganji & Noorizadeh
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

The Martian Ideology | Matthew Porges The story of humanity in space is not over, but the reality is that Musk is probably already yesterday’s man. The apogee of his arc was most likely the chainsaw tableau onstage at CPAC — and what a pa...

“We” went to the moon in the same sense that “we” are seven feet tall, or have a PhD in astrophysics, or were born in Luxembourg. Someone did; not me. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-52/rev...

Absolutely loved this

Negative Tennis | Owen Lewis Any intrigue is not over a win or loss, but tiny details: Can the opponent break Sinner’s serve? Reach a break point? Win more than two or three points against Sinner’s first serve? Get that first ser...

“Tennis is about more than simply destroying your inferiors as ruthlessly as possible. It’s also about how you perform against players just as good as you, players who can reveal the precise depths and limits of your talents.”
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Negative Tennis | Owen Lewis Any intrigue is not over a win or loss, but tiny details: Can the opponent break Sinner’s serve? Reach a break point? Win more than two or three points against Sinner’s first serve? Get that first ser...

As Jannik Sinner has made extreme improvements to his game over the past few years, he's gone from a player I enjoyed watching to one whose tennis inherently drains the tension from his matches. I wrote about that, and lots more, for n+1:

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

literary essay about tennis are BACK and I love to see it

I love reading about tennis and I love N+1. Excited to peruse this Adorno-esque take on my favorite sport.

Negative Tennis | Owen Lewis Any intrigue is not over a win or loss, but tiny details: Can the opponent break Sinner’s serve? Reach a break point? Win more than two or three points against Sinner’s first serve? Get that first ser...

“Sinner’s mastery is staggering; it also, to my mind, effectively defeats the purpose of watching tennis.” New: @owensports.bsky.social on Jannik Sinner.
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Night of the Two Suns | Iman Ganji and Bahar Noorizadeh As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center.

“a long durée of imperial governmentality in which technologies of surveillance, classification, and control are first tested on colonized and occupied populations, only to be later reimported into the metropole.”

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Night of the Two Suns | Iman Ganji and Bahar Noorizadeh As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center.

“As always, colonial knowledge proceeds through destruction: Where missiles fall, epistemic curiosity belatedly follows.”

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

“One after another, bomb after bomb, imperial fictions have burst into powder & dust. Precision strike, human shield, necessary casualties. On March 7, one of the most horrifying nights in Tehran so far, a resident wrote that ‘two suns rose in Tehran … night became day and day became night’.”

Ganji and Noorizadeh are brilliant. Their previous piece (Iran's Three-Body Problem) was equally imaginative and insightful.

"The imperialist’s fallacy has always been to think that simply by imposing suffering, he can impose his will. Yet this pure negation cannot produce any durable dominance; the Strait of Hormuz bears witness to this. Nonetheless, the destruction is real. Israel and the US are deindustrializing Iran."

A Cloud That Looks Like a Bird | Mark Krotov For my part, I knew that I had fallen in love with Dry Leaf when another cow—or was it a horse?—ambled through the frame enfolded in a pixelated outline distinct from the rest of the sky behind it. I ...

“If you can, see Dry Leaf at a theater. That Alexandre Koberidze shot the film on a phone is not a pretext to watch it on one.” www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

A Cloud That Looks Like a Bird | Mark Krotov For my part, I knew that I had fallen in love with Dry Leaf when another cow—or was it a horse?—ambled through the frame enfolded in a pixelated outline distinct from the rest of the sky behind it. I ...

“From the film’s first frame, we know how we’re seeing, even if we often don’t know what it is we’re looking at.” New online: @markkrotov.bsky.social on Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Night of the Two Suns | Iman Ganji and Bahar Noorizadeh As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center.

“Iran must be saved from imperial capture; the conditions of life must be preserved, in the face of an enemy whose murderous ‘Gaza doctrine’ aims to destroy those conditions.” www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...