Is America Good? On Shadi Hamid’s The Case for American Power

I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing American flag-themed apparel, let alone flying the flag in public. I go out of my way to make sarcastic, biting jokes about America’s hypocrisy on national holidays, and scoff at my parents — loyalists to the Democratic Party — when they repeat the well-known bit about how “despite its many flaws, this is still a great nation.” Yes, I’m a millennial. How could you tell? Like many of my peers, I’m prone to a deadly combination of pessimistic cynicism and utopian idealism.

The Woes of Slight Autism: On Emmett Rensin’s The Complications and Life on the Spectrum

During my senior year of high school, a friend of mine — let’s call her “Mary” — told me that she liked a guy, “Jack,” in our class. I didn’t think much of it. People have crushes on each other, they catch feelings, sometimes the feelings are mutual, and sometimes they’re not. I shifted the conversation away from her confession toward asking her what grade she got on the biochem test. She claimed that she forgot. Later in the day, I went to tennis practice, where I started making small talk with one of my teammates. He mentioned he just found out that his ex was going out with Jack.

Longing for Something Sacred: On Rumaan Alam’s Entitlement

In his seminal 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, the American historian Christopher Lasch warned of the increasing normalization of pathological narcissism. Though he was hailed as a “biblical prophet” by Time magazine, his was far from a purely moralistic diatribe. Rather, he aimed to demonstrate that this anxious focus on the self was primarily a psychological condition more so than a mere moral failure, arising from certain sociological factors tied to the expansion of neoliberal economic policies. Lasch — formed by the material approach of the “Old Left” — pointed to the impact that over-bureaucratization and the decline of institutions that banked on mutual responsibility, respect, and the forging of thick social bonds had on our collective psyche.