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Trap is the only music that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like. It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made. It is the funeral music that the Reagan revolution deserves.

There is no recipe for good writing, it hardly needs to be said, and this is as true for writing about atrocity as about any other kind. That is why it is so odd that literary accounts of atrocity so often resort to prolepsis, as in the “years later” that Arundhati Roy makes use of in The Ministry …

In short, prolepsis looks like evasiveness. Compared with the simplifications of melodrama, however, prolepsis has its virtues. Consider again Shamsie’s first sentence. The sentence does some unexpected negotiating: the cloud of smoke from the munitions factories that ends the sentence may foreshad…

[...] To make atrocity into a random, meaningless spectacle is to argue against any taking of sides and indeed against political involvement as such. Any attempt to find meaning by assigning causes, by generalizing about those causes, and by organizing politically so as to do something about those …

More broadly, our task is now to make a single, simple point. There is no humane border regime, just as there is no humane abortion ban. The border will always tear parents from children, caregivers from charges, longtime residents from the only communities they’ve ever known. It may do it faster o…