What does it mean to live in an era whose only good feelings come from coining names for the era (and its feelings)? On one hand, perhaps our surfeit of coinages, many inspired by various resurgent Marxian traditions, suggests an intellectual ecosystem in which, as Jameson wrote, “everyone” — well, not Brooks — “is a Marxist and understands the dynamics and the depredations of capitalism,” albeit “without feeling it possible to do anything about them.” What the left lacks in organization we make up for in analysis . . . surely a good sign?

For years now, commentators like Mounk have singled out the Democrats’ alleged fealty to “wokeness” as the reason for their electoral underperformance. Never mind that no nationally visible Democratic politician actually uses abolitionist jargon or gender-fluid pronouns; unlike the economic pain felt by a plurality of voters, the wokeness backlash really is mostly vibes.

As Sheehi recently argued, “It will be the university that enacts the violence of fascism. The fascist just sends off a letter.” To this story we can add the psychoanalyst, who also seems all too willing to post. The university and its thinkers, and mainstream psychoanalysis and its analysts, have extended the Palestine Exception into the hollowed-out zones of purported free speech on the one hand and free association on the other.

Nowhere did I witness the guardsmen at the gates of the mind — those responsible for self-consciousness and self-doubt — more swiftly outsmarted, pacified, or outright killed than in that room. And the children seemed to inherently grasp the complex psychodramatic relationship they shared with their dummies — they were not sidekick, nor instrument, nor prop, but extension of brain and self.

A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer meant fewer shipping costs for Netflix, and fewer DVDs for the company to manage and store. Netflix tracked heavy users of its service — labeling them internally as “pigs” — and secretly throttled their deliveries. It didn’t matter if Netflix rented fewer DVDs than Blockbuster, because the company would keep collecting its monthly fee. The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was this: Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.

George Floyd’s murder made being black at the university significantly worse. When I try to understand how, I can’t help but look back on the chancellor’s words, ostensibly full of hope that the “national crisis” could “catalyze powerful change” — and how those words did nothing. After all, the scholars and writers I’m drawn to are in the business of shedding light on linguistic and other structures that pretend to be something that they are not.

“I only love swimming,” I said. And it was true that I’d always felt awkward on land. Sometimes I wondered if that was why I was so unsuccessful at online dating: technology was incompatible with the water. “The monk thing does appeal.”

Let me just finish disinfecting a table number marker and then off I go, I just have to put down what I’ve got in my hands to serve, I tell her that with my eyes, yes I’m coming, I’ve seen the whole thing, I saw you adding the sauces, the napkins, I know the order’s complete and besides that’s all I’ve got to do, serve, I’m available, I’m capable of taking that initiative. The crewmember calls for me all the same, she’s looking right at me and she calls for me.

Just once in her life she shot a gun, when she was in the Venture Scouts, aged 16. It was at the Thiepval Barracks a few months before she took her GCSEs. The army must have been trying to recruit them or something. As if. The army guy, who’d shown her how to shoot the gun, looked like Travis Bickle prior to the mohawk. She’d fancied him slightly. They didn’t converse.

What is the tone of this literary-theoretical tone? Take away anything from reading these books together and it’s their similar vibe: something quietly persistent, invested in its own disinvestments, obsessive rather than obsessed; something that can’t notice without feeling implicated in what’s been noticed and so isn’t prone to anger. Hard as it is to wrap one’s hands around the vaporousness of tone, I’d still risk a label. The tone of the moment, if you take these books as a guide, is a habitual mordancy.

This is how Amel is remembered today: charismatic, courageous, defiant. Walking in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, you’ll likely encounter a stenciled image of Amel’s face, looking out with a beaming smile, with graffiti urging passersby to read his work. As a friend once remarked to me, the combination of Amel’s martyrdom and his difficult prose makes him a perfect object for cultish fervor. But the renewed interest in his work — in the streets, in movement spaces, in academia — is real and widespread.

Postcommunist Romania is manifestly a postcensorship society, a society in which everything is permissible and therefore explicit, lurid, cheap. Watching Bad Luck Banging, a film as pornographic as the society it critiques, it feels as if every line or image is a double entendre, even as the fucking is right there in front of us.

You were an organic intellectual if you were an intellectual who organized. That was news to me.