I’ve written in many places, some wonderful, others makeshift or uncomfortable. I’ve written on trains and in hotel rooms, at ergonomically perfect desks and on laptops balanced on my knees.…

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“The American political scene,” wrote Perry Anderson in 2013, “is conventionally depicted in high colour.” According to conventional—that is, liberal—observers in the Bush and Obama years, America “cartwheeled from brutish…

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For all those involved in the publication and dissemination of ideas, freedom of expression is the foundation on which our work depends. Like many writers, I have campaigned to defend…

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On a damp, gray afternoon in April, I took my daughter with me to vote in the New York Democratic primary. After a long Tuesday, she was keen to get…

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On March 14, 2010, the artist Marina Abramovic sat down at a small table in the center of a gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Visitors were invited…

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“How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them,” lamented Marian Evans in 1856. She had reason to feel she knew better. The…

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In bookstores in Rome, you can buy a poster headed, in English, i have a dream. It has nothing to do with Martin Luther King Jr. or the civil-rights struggle, instead…

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On the Friday night before New Year’s Eve, my boyfriend and I were in line for the toilets at the techno club Berghain, in Berlin, discussing Buddhism. I’m usually skeptical…

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If you had asked ten-year-old me about my favorite author, I would have replied unhesitatingly that it was J.R.R. Tolkien. The experience of reading The Lord of the Rings had been…

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A French activist I know, a person with a flair for assailing the idiocies of modern life, someone who pines, though not romantically, for a trapdoor to a better world,…

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For some months I’ve been living in Rome, up on the hill called the Gianicolo, which slopes down to the western bank of the Tiber. In antiquity it was the…

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Al Gore once leaned in close, in a kitchen, late at night, at a party at a film festival, as someone snapped a photo of us. I never circulated it;…

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Some years ago, before I became an American citizen, I held a visa that prompted immigration officials to quiz me about my work. These exchanges often went badly. If you…

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The original Anthology Film Archives, on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, was designed with high black partitions between each seat, so that viewers could wall themselves in to the screen like…

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“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.” I first read the famous opening lines of “Burnt Norton”—the first of T. S. Eliot’s…

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When Roxy Music was recording “Street Life” for the 1973 album Stranded, they hung a mic out the window of AIR Studios above Oxford Street, but they didn’t like the…

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My grandfather was a man who didn’t like to compromise. A rural Welsh boy who had made it to Cambridge University and then on to a career as a scientist,…

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In the fall of 2014 I began attending hearings, some of them banal and procedural, others more emotional, for a Los Angeles murder trial that was cranking its way through…

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“Let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today,” a voice-over invites near the beginning of Design for Dreaming, a General Motors promotional film from 1956.…

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There was a football game that afternoon at Buckley and though I can remember who I masturbated about on that early October day (I wrote it down—I kept lists, a…

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After he finished medical school, my father left India, moved to the United Kingdom, and became a surgeon in the National Health Service. He specialized in orthopedics, which made Christmas…

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Los Angeles is not “Hollywood,” and those who confuse the two should be banned from visiting. One quarter of California’s forty million residents live in L.A., which is the most…

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In the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as…

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A few months ago I introduced a screening of Robert Frank’s rarely shown and somewhat notorious film Cocksucker Blues at a cinema house in Los Angeles. Legally, the film can…

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As a small child, I would sometimes sit with my parents in our suburban London living room and watch the six o’clock news on the BBC. One evening, I saw…

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When I was a kid, we played a game: would you rather be given eternal happiness or told the secrets of the universe? I always chose secrets. In Eugene, Oregon,…

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On May Day 2000, I participated in a “guerrilla gardening” action in London, digging up Parliament Square to plant crops. It was a utopian gesture—one of many made in those…

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In June 1997, I boarded an all-night bus from the Port Authority to Asheville, North Carolina, with my friend Cynthia. We had no plan but to live there for the…

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