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Sixteen years ago, the theorist Wendy Brown diagnosed this malaise. In her essay “Resisting Left Melancholy,” she described “a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginali…

What better represents Berlant’s archaic “good life” fantasy than homeownership? At the core of the 2008 financial crisis we find this contradictory arrangement: American society is unwilling to pay enough to significant numbers of its citizens for them to buy houses, yet also unwilling to live wit…

There is a world in which the story is this: you commit yourself to one person after another, a man and then a woman, a woman and then a man, for balance, and when you are with a man, you cheat with a woman, and when you are with a woman, you cheat with a man. And then you find this woman, and some…

This is massively unhelpful, of course. Since even if there is a universe for each possible version of your life — the one in which you make a singular marriage, the one in which you’re restless and wild and free, and all the others — you’re trapped in this one; knowing they’re happening, right now…

It was hard to make out the lines by candlelight. I held her hand close to my face and touched the inside of her palm. She giggled. Carla has always been ticklish. Once I saw her kick a Korean lady in the face during a pedicure. She didn’t mean to do it, but when the lady started scrubbing the sole…