IN 2013, TWO OF the biggest publishers in the world — Penguin and Random House — merged into one behemoth. At the time one might have read the merger as a defensive consolidation against Amazon’s monopsony, a scenario in which one buyer controls the majority of the market. But instead the Penguin Random House merger delivered efficiencies of exactly the kind cynics expected. Layoffs have hit PRH in discrete waves, each of them damaging to the diversity and range of the publisher’s books and the people who publish them. Editors, publicists, sales reps, and warehouse workers have been let go. Imprints — many of them already on their last legs, half-hearted relics of mergers past — have shuttered. Amazon, meanwhile, didn’t notice a thing, except that books probably arrived at its warehouses in more efficient batches. Any leverage PRH might have had — and still has — is unlikely to be deployed by current management, who are masters of the permanent defensive crouch.

MARVEL: The potential of guilt to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is basically zero. I’m not going to police how anybody feels, but I’m not convinced of the efficacy of guilting or shaming people. Whether or not you have a kid, your moral responsibility is to the children who exist in the world. And even though presumably none of our children are being separated from us at the border, none of them are being mistreated, we each have a responsibility to those children. I feel that way about climate change as well.

PURDY: One thing that’s struck me so far about the parenting frame is how the appeal to protect one’s own children can play into what you could call ecobarbarism.

On the one hand, there’s a political pressure to share out the burdens and the good things of a finite and stressed world, and find new modes of solidarity and cooperation—the ecosocialist model. On the other hand, there is the raising of walls and militarization of borders as a way of demarcating whom you’re responsible to in a climate-changed world.

Climate denial used to only be about denying the facts; now it’s also about denying that people who are carrying the burdens of it are your problem. That denial is very powerful and is connected, I think, with the new or resurgent nationalism. And it’s somewhat like that in a household. I care about the future, I care about my child’s future, and when I look at his future I know he’s going to enter the economy afraid and encouraged to see other people as his competitors and his problem, and that the world he’s entering isn’t organized as if it cares whether it goes on. I want to protect him from that, and I want to protect everyone from that. But protecting his interests and the interests of people all over the world are not always the same project.

Somehow, I doubt the new people worry about dying that sort of death. They know they won’t be trapped here. They have other places they can go. But if they don’t worry like New Yorkers worry, can they dream like New Yorkers dream? While they sleep, do the walls of their apartments miraculously open into extra rooms for them the way they do for us, or do the new people have all the space they need and so they are free to dream of other wishful things? Hashtag abundance. Hashtag gratitude.

After she died and her furniture was removed, my neighbor’s apartment was quickly gutted and renovated, the rent jacked from hundreds to thousands, decontrolled. The man next to her died a year later. He was born on the block and never lived anywhere else. A hoarder who once infested us with bedbugs, he was also a kind person and a talented whistler. He would walk up the stairs, slowly, while whistling classic songs. Rodgers and Hart. Irving Berlin. The Gershwins. Tunes that would stay in my head all day. “We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island too.” When he went, I watched the paramedics pump his heart and lift him onto a stretcher, his eyes open but empty, not seeing the hallway he’d whistled through for decades. When the police officer asked me his name, I could only come up with his first. It bothered me that I could not remember the last name of this man who’d greeted me nearly every day for twenty-five years, talked to me about the weather, told me to “be careful” each time I went out. How could his last name be gone from my mind? Later, I understood it was because of the mailboxes. Our last names used to be printed on the slots for each mailbox, handwritten and enduring, never changing because no one ever left. I saw them every day, a reminder of the people I lived among. My people. But the new owners covered them over, replacing names with numbers, wiping us from each other’s memory.

The Great Invasion began sometime in the late 1990s but didn’t really take shape until after September 11. That’s when the new people found the East Village. The new people, the emphatically normal, come from someplace else, the Midwest, the South, but that’s not what makes them invaders. Many of us come from someplace else. I come from someplace else. Move anywhere and you’re potentially interloping. So what is it? How can I talk about the new people and their superpower of invasion? I’m forever grappling with this question, reducing, stereotyping, and then struggling not to be reductive. What I keep coming back to is their apparent belief that their way of living belongs everywhere, that it should trickle down the ladder of power and fill every lower space, scouring and purifying as it goes. Spaces of queerness. Spaces of color. Spaces of marginalization. Spaces of This is our little scrap of somewhere, can’t you just let us have it, oh you who have everywhere? With good reason, colonization and Manifest Destiny are the enduring metaphors of gentrification.

I GO FOR DRINKS with another writer friend and we argue about the new East Villagers. I tell her they’re boring and don’t belong here and she tells me I can’t know that, not really, not without talking to them. Maybe they’re fascinating people. This reminds me of an op-ed I once read in the Times. Ada Calhoun, author of St. Marks Is Dead (in which she concludes that it’s not), writes, “Who deserves to be here? Who is the interloper and who the interloped-upon? Who can say which drunk NYU student stumbling down St. Marks Place will wind up writing the next classic novel or making the next great album? It’s hubris to think you can tell by looking at them.” What if Calhoun and my friend are right? What if I’m being judgy about the next Patti Smith, the next Frank O’Hara? Or some kid who’s simply the next me?

In my defense, I was not alone. Most members of the bourgeoisie experience history as they do their heartbeats: they know it’s there but only become aware of its presence when something goes wrong. Neither I nor my peers in the “creative class” of that faux-meritocratic New York understood that the Obama years were precisely that — years, an era among others, a period with a beginning and an end. The time that I spent as one of New York’s half-million aspiring writers was the product of a wild confluence of improbabilities — the financial crisis was over; Facebook’s algorithms began favoring news stories; a vacancy opened in a rent-stabilized building in South Slope; the United States government approved some three hundred thousand work visas — and yet I rode the subway twice a day believing that these coincidences were as unremarkable as the coming of spring after winter.

In the previous weeks and months I had begun to wonder whether my profession, for all its insistence on the value of facts, was not in the last instance dependent on dishonesty. If I pretended to care about the boy’s discovery of parkour and death metal, it was because I hoped that my kindness would lull him into feeling comfortable enough to tell me about the most painful moments of his life. I had told him and his guardian that I intended to write an article based on our conversations, but my disclosure, though accurate in a strict sense, obscured the nature of my intentions. What I should have said was that I intended to repackage the boy’s trauma into a digestible narrative I hoped would capture the attention of some hundred thousand internet users, who would then surrender valuable information about themselves to one or another technology baron, who would then reward the website for which I worked with a better starting position in the algorithmic rat race, which would allow the website’s owners to convince a handful of investors to keep funding the company, which in turn would allow my editors to pay me a salary, earn me accolades, and, eventually, if all went well, convince the US government that I deserved to live and work in this country. The boy was for me not an end but a means, and lately thoughts of that nature had been bothering me often enough that I wondered whether I shouldn’t do something else with my life.

I sank into the thought as into a pool of oil-slicked seawater. All of a sudden in place of the boy with the spiked hair I saw hundreds of faces, some of which I recognized from the photographs that accompanied the earliest press reports on the concentration camps: children, multitudes of them, some too young to walk, others old enough to understand what was happening, torn from their parents, kept in cages, confined for months on end to makeshift cities where every room was windowless like the room where I sat, where they were neglected, treated like cattle, injected with antipsychotics, expected to follow orders and sign papers in a language that they didn’t understand, lied to, misfed, kept away from fresh air, from joy, from beauty, from the petty miseries that are the daily bread of lives that have not been destroyed by imperialism—the quotidian unhappiness, the vague dissatisfaction, the boring, benign, intolerable anxiety that is the privilege of white people.

Told to BREAK THE SILENCE.

Told to REPORT CONFIDENTIALLY.

Told to GET HELP.

Told to KEEP DETENTION SAFE.

I saw their faces, and the faces of their parents, their uncles and aunts, their siblings, their cousins, their friends, the lovers that some of them would have, the children that some of them would have, the multitudes who had been touched and would be touched by the horror of that crime, and the sight made me furious, because along with the faces I saw with perfect clarity that none of it was preordained, that none of it was necessary, that the destruction of all those lives had been the product of a choice, a conscious one, made by a handful of hateful people empowered by a hateful nation and carried out by an army of uniformed nobodies who had credit card bills to pay. The knowledge that those responsible did not know what they did offered no consolation. If anything, it made the crime more painful to contemplate, because it made it absurd. The world teetered between redeemable and irredeemable tragedy; the stakes were nothing less than life’s worth; every new horror risked plunging humanity into a desert with no way stations at all.

What was this desire I felt to kiss her hands? She was declining to subject me to petty humiliations, it was true, but if that was my definition of kindness then I had lost most of my self-respect. No, I thought, this was not gratitude; it was Stockholm syndrome. I should never have been detained, not even for an hour. In fact, nobody should ever be detained. I lived on a continent shaped by genocide, slavery, and the forced displacement of millions. In light of that history, no fiction could be more false, or more dangerous, than borders. The countries that tried to prevent people from crossing the arbitrary lines between them were acting on no justification beyond brute force, the basest sort of power, that which is born from the jawbone of a donkey or the barrel of a gun.

The story now seemed simple: I had remade myself in the image of the rulers of the empire, hoping that if I came to resemble them closely enough they would welcome me as one of their own. With the years, even I had come to believe my own charade and convinced myself that I had more in common with white Americans than with most Mexicans. As it turned out, I had fooled no one but myself—not the Mexicans, not the white Americans, and certainly not the US government. There was no denying it anymore: I loved America more than myself, but America did not love me back. And yet there I was, standing at the inspection desk in the secondary screening room at the San Francisco International Airport, hoping that America would change its mind.