When Prospero is destroyed.

Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural.

In recent years, [Dubai] has even begun to transcend its status as a prime example of a Koolhaas-style generic city, instead veering into an actual simulacrum of other “real” cities, becoming as referential as Las Vegas. Doesn’t postmodernism already posit that everything is simply a copy of everything else? (It is extremely fitting, then, that there are two different hotels in Dubai named The One & Only).

Upon my word, there is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure – it is, after all, what every body does all the time.

Writers tend to have two great topics, on heavy internal rotation, a very abbreviated playlist. Their careers, their ailments. There’s a famous story, about the party where James Joyce ran into Marcel Proust. You expected heavyweight-champion banter. Joyce said, “My eyes are terrible.” Proust said, “My poor stomach, what am I going to do? In fact, I must leave at once.” (Joyce topped him: “I’m in the same situation, if I can find someone to take me by the arm.”)

Suicide is such a powerful end, it reaches back and scrambles the beginning. It has an event gravity: Eventually, every memory and impression gets tugged in its direction.

Although we think of it primarily as a veteran’s ailment, the most common cause of PTSD in the U.S. is violence against women. Absurdly, being female is considered a risk factor for developing the disorder, as if women’s bodies, and not the world we live in, made us vulnerable to it.

He wrote with eyes and a voice that seemed to be a condensed form of everyone’s lives—it was the stuff you semi-thought, the background action you blinked through at supermarkets and commutes—and readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

Love is an abstract quantity and we’re jaded to much of its language. This is partly because of its massive commercialization, of course: rage and bitterness don’t appear on greeting cards so often, though there’s a minor, cheeky sideline there. The language of rage isn’t widely used by ads hawking drugs, food, baby products, clothing, insurance, financial institutions and cars, unlike the language of love. Love is a mainstream currency and inflation is sky-high—so high that its referents have come to inspire approximately nothing.

I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.

. . . nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord, automatai, to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly thirty centuries the automatic garage door. [. . .] In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi regime saw an opportunity to rid itself, however temporarily, of the holy warriors it had nurtured for nearly a century. With economic and military support from the United States and tactical training provided by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the Saudis began funneling a steady stream of radical Islamic militants (known as the Mujahadin, or "those who make jihad") from Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East into Afghanistan, where they could be put to use battling the godless communists. The intention, as President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, famously put it, was to "give the USSR its own Vietnam" by keeping the Soviet army bogged down in an unwinnable war in hostile territory. The United States considered the Mujahadin to be an important ally in the Great Game being played out against the Soviet Union and, in fact, referred to these militants as "freedom fighters." President Ronald Reagan even compared them to America's founding fathers.

There is no doubt that, along with black enslavement and the black slave trade, the rise of the two liberal countries either side of the Atlantic involved a process of systematic expropriation and practical genocide first of the Irish and then of the Indians.

The self-styled champions of liberty branded taxation imposed without their explicit consent as synonymous with despotism and slavery. But they had no scruples about exercising the most absolute and arbitrary power over their slaves. This was a paradox: ‘How is it’, Samuel Johnson asked, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?’

Merely to survive requires an adequate set of public spaces, and even those are being eroded by austerity measures. After all, the neo-liberal mentality sees them as a ‘luxury’, in that they do not contribute directly to output or economic growth. Only if the precariat becomes a threat to stability will that arithmetic be reassessed.

One embittered jobless graduate (Hankinson, 2010) wrote, ‘Baby boomers had free education, affordable houses, fat pensions, early retirement and second homes. We’ve been left with education on the never-never [student debt] and a property ladder with rotten rungs. And the financial system which made our parents rich has left us choosing between crap job or no job’.