Columbia University shut down all in-person classes on Monday, and faculty and staff were encouraged to work remotely. “We need a reset,” President Minouche Shafik said, in reference to what she called the “rancor” around pro-Palestinian rallies on campus, as well as the arrest—with her encouragement—of more than 100 student protesters last week. Also on Monday, Columbia’s office of the provost put out guidance saying that “virtual learning options” should be made available to students in all classes on the university’s main campus until the term ends next week. “Safety is our highest priority,” that statement reads.By moving its coursework online, the administration has sent an important set of messages to the public. In the midst of what it says is an emergency, the school asserts that it is still delivering its core service to students. It affirms that universities share the public’s perception that education, per se—as opposed to research, entertainment, community-building, or any of the other elements of the college experience—is central to their mission. And it implies that Columbia is carrying out its duties of oversight and care for students.But those messages don’t quite match up with reality. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that “moving classes online” isn’t really possible. A class isn’t just the fact of meeting at a given time, or a teacher imparting information during that meeting, or students’ to receiving and processing such information. A university classroom offers a destination for students on campus, providing an excuse to traverse the quads, backpack on one’s shoulders, realizing a certain image of college life. Once there, the classroom does real work, too. It bounds the space and attention of learning, it creates camaraderie, and it presents opportunities for discourse, flirtation, boredom, and all the other trappings of collegiate fulfillment. Take away the classroom, and what’s left? Often, a limp rehearsal of the act of learning, carried out by awkward or unwilling actors. If the pandemic gave rise to hygiene theater, it also brought us this: pedagogy theater.The pandemic emergency, at least, offered a reasonable excuse for compromise. A plague was on the loose, and avoiding death took precedence over optimizing teaching quality. But now, with COVID-19 restrictions lifted, the technologies that allowed for pedagogy theater remain. The ubiquity of Zoom and related software, along with the universal familiarity they built up during the pandemic, have made it easy for a provost or a teacher to just shut the doors for any given class—or on any given campus—on a whim, for any reason or no reason. If a professor should get sick or need to travel, or if there is a blizzard, meetings can be held on the internet. In 2023, Iowa State University moved classes online after a power-plant fire shut down its air-conditioning.[Read: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]Columbia’s decision to go virtual because of campus unrest shows the breadth of emergencies that now justify this form of disruption. “Moving classes online” for everyone is a decision that universities can make whenever things go even slightly awry. A pandemic or a deranged gunman could be the cause, as could civil unrest, or just the threat of ice from an anticipated winter storm. Because this decision is portrayed as both temporary and exigent—because Zoom is treated as a fire extinguisher on the wall of every classroom, just in case it’s ever needed—schools are able to maintain their stated faith in the value of matriculating in person. In my experience as a professor who teaches at an elite private university, virtual learning is discouraged under normal circumstances. But as Columbia’s case shows, it might also be used whenever necessary. It’s the best of both worlds for colleges, at least if the goal is to control the stories they tell about themselves.Online classes are supposed to occupy a middle ground. They are almost always worse than meeting in person, and they may be somewhat better than nothing at all. But that in-between space has turned out to be an uncanny valley for education. If online classes really work, then why not use them all the time? If they really don’t, then why bother using them at all? Answers to these questions vary based on who you ask. Accreditors, which enforce educational standards, may require courses to convene for a certain number of hours. Teachers want to stay on track—but also to take a sick day from time to time, without the pressure to keep working via laptop camera. Students want to be in class so that they can get what they came to college for—except when they want to live their lives instead. And now, amid political turmoil, university leaders want to control the flow of people on and off campus—while still pretending to carry on like normal.

The year was 2006. Popular music was, for women, a pretty desolate landscape. Songs such as “My Humps” and “Buttons” served up shimmering, grinding strip-pop, while dull, minor-key objectification infused “Smack That,” “Money Maker,” and similar tracks. In the video for “London Bridge,” the singer and former child star Fergie gave a lap dance to a silent, immotive King’s Guardsman, barely pausing to lick his uniform. For “Ms. New Booty,” the rapper Bubba Sparxxx staged a mock infomercial for a product offering women “a little more frosting in your cakes … cantaloupes in your jeans,” before proselytizing the message of the era: “Get it ripe, get it right, get it tight.”Against this backdrop, late in the year, a 16-year-old ingenue arrived who radiated not sex appeal but feeling. Taylor Swift at this point was a country artist, welcomed into a genre that embraced the kind of romantic imagery she played with in her lyrics: small towns, broken hearts, blue jeans, innocence that’s bruised but not shattered. Her self-titled debut record was full of diaristic songs that courted intimacy with her listeners, sharing adolescent dreams and secrets (“In a box beneath my bed / Is a letter that you never read”). But it also introduced motifs that Swift has returned to over and over since then: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love.Every song on that record except two, in fact, deals with love, but in terms that make it feel more like a subject she’s intent on exploring than a consuming personal affliction. This is a novice storyteller’s idea of emotion, patchworked together out of movie clips and imaginative sincerity. On “Cold as You,” Swift compares an emotionally unavailable love interest to a rainy day: “You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray.” In “Picture to Burn,” furious after a betrayal, she declares, “Watch me strike a match on all my wasted time.” The album is softly romantic but also notably sharp. Listening to these early songs now, I sense the initial construction of a character who’s already constrained by archetype, unsure of who she might actually be outside the apple-pie conventions of a genre.Almost 20 years later, the same metaphors and frustrations are present in Swift’s new record, The Tortured Poets Department, but they’ve calcified into a mode that, in lyrical form at least, feels like it’s suffocating her. Over 31 songs—the last 15 added in the early hours of the morning as a surprise drop—Swift portrays herself as a woman stuck in a spiral of obsessive overthinking, with new cuts seeming to open up old wounds. The pain seems realer now, more lived in, but the imagery she uses to describe it is the same as it was when she was 16. “If all you want is gray for me / Then it’s just white noise, and it’s just my choice,” she sings on “But Daddy I Love Him,” barely animated by chilling fury. Time, again, taunts her; on “So Long, London,” she sighs, “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”This is the saddest album I’ve heard in a long time. And I’m fascinated by how jarringly it strikes down public perceptions of Swift from the past few years: the golden girl swept into a jubilantly triumphant romance with the football star, the impossibly beloved auteur of women’s emotional lives, the billionaire savior of entire economies, the lyrical subject of study at Harvard. The song that feels the most revelatory is “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” which tears down the curtain to reveal the truth behind it, scored to a frantic, pulsating, almost obscenely jaunty beat. “There in her glittering prime / The lights refract sequin stars off her silhouette every night / I can show you lies,” she sings, numbly. “I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art / You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.”What are we to do with all this pain? People wanted a boppy summer soundtrack, and they got an exorcism instead—a messy, sprawling litany of musically familiar grievances. The immediate reviews have not been kind, pointing out the clunkiness of certain lyrics and accusing Swift of solipsism bordering on self-obsession or of digging up old grudges better left buried. Critics both amateur and professional have rushed in to excavate which songs seem to be about which real people, turning a creative work into confessional fodder for the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame—a habit that Swift herself has seemed to encourage. (“I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019. “So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy.”)I can agree with my colleague Spencer Kornhaber, who described much of The Tortured Poets Department as “a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic.” Yet the album is also intriguing to me as an autofictional work that’s chafing at its own layers of lore and artifice. Swift has long constructed her identity out of archetype, cliché, and torn-up fragments of Americana. She’s a people pleaser, a perfectionist, an eldest daughter, a dreamer, a schemer, a wronged woman, a vengeful gorgon, a cat lady, a girl next door. But at 34, she seems to be butting up against the reality that there are no cultural models for what she’s become. Too earnest to be a diva, too workaholic to retreat into reclusion or retirement, she’s stuck being an extraordinarily rich, influential, and powerful woman who still, somehow, feels like she has no real power at all.* * *In an Instagram post announcing the release of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift described the record as: an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time—one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. Swift is asking us to read the album as a metamorphic bid for catharsis—the idea, espoused by Aristotle (whom Swift name-checks on TTPD), that staging pain and tragedy as artistic spectacles can help purge us of their effects. As someone once inexplicably compelled to write about the worst time of my life, I can empathize. But the finality with which Swift declared matters to be closed for debate is striking. This is what having an arsenal without authority looks like. Swift knows, at the end of the day, that there’s actually very little she can do to influence what people make of her.[Read: Fans’ expectations of Taylor Swift are chafing against reality]And yet, the simple existence of the record is an assertion that her version of events will be the one that endures, the one we remember. History, even recent history, has not been kind to women who attempt to reify their side of the story. In ancient Rome, a woman named Gaia Afrania who tried to argue for herself in court was enshrined by the writer Valerius Maximus as a “monster.” For speaking honestly in King Lear, Cordelia is disinherited and then executed by her lying sisters. Nora Ephron was likened to a child abuser in Vanity Fair for lightly fictionalizing her husband’s infidelity while she was pregnant with their second child in Heartburn. And when Rachel Cusk wrote about her divorce in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, one critic branded her “a brittle little dominatrix and a peerless narcissist.”Still, writers keep trying, possibly inspired by Ephron’s assertion, via Heartburn’s narrator, that “if I tell the story, I control the version.” Swift’s mission with her new album seems testimonial; she wants to have certain facts entered into the cultural archive. “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on,” she states on the title track. It’s the weakest song on the whole record, with a jangling, Bruce Hornsby–like piano riff in the background and lyrics that feel half-baked. So why is it here? I would argue, for context: It documents all the particular texture of a betrayal—the grand emotional duplicity and the intensity, the beauty of flashing-neon warning signs. In the following song, “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” there’s the inevitable follow-up: “He saw forever, so he smashed it up.”Illusion also plays a big role on this record; events blur and coalesce into a fuzzy narrative wherein the clearest emerging thread is Swift’s own pain. Autofiction is a particular example of writing that performs “a push-me, pull-you of cloaking and revelation,” the critic Alex Clark wrote in a 2018 analysis of recent works in the genre. Women writers and writers of color, she argued, are the ones who are most “bedevilled by the expectation—from readers and critics—that their work is based in the reality of their own lives; what follows is a treasure hunt for the ‘real’ in their imagined worlds, and a diminution of its importance.” Since the beginning, Swift has dropped breadcrumbs throughout her albums that have been analyzed fervently by her fans. Never has it felt less like a rewarding practice than it does now, with her lyrics hovering awkwardly between the neatness of legend and what the French writer Marie Darrieussecq described as “the authentic cry of the autobiography.”Swift seems to think that if she’s not keeping us busy, we’ll get tired of her. But this mentality, too, is a trap. “The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves 20 more times than the male artists,” she explains in Miss Americana, a 2020 documentary about a tumultuous period in her career during which she dealt with backlash for the first time and became more open about her politics. “They have to, or else you’re out of a job … I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” In another scene in that movie, she responds to perceived failure by saying, “This is fine. I just need to make a better record.” The perfectionist’s impulse is to just do more and work harder, to try to annihilate failure with relentlessness. That narrative is a particularly American one too—as familiar as Johnny Appleseed or standing by your man. Swift loves storytelling. So why is it hard to shake the feeling that it’s ruining her?She seems, on her new album, like a woman stuck in a fairy tale, who escapes one gilded cage for another, and then another, and then another. This possibly accounts for the music feeling so static—it’s the first record she’s made that hasn’t shifted musical modes, the first whose lyrics lack methodical precision. My hope is that this album is catharsis for her: the purging not just of an emotional moment in time but also of a preoccupation with the motifs that are holding her back. On “Mastermind,” my favorite song from 2022’s Midnights, Swift herself observed how limiting romantic tropes are for women, how they have to plot with intention not to be “the pawn in every lover’s game.” The legends and stories that both her music and her persona are built on simply don’t contain enough substance for her anymore. Swift is going to have to write her own way out.

Of late, Tesla’s cars have come to seem a bit hazardous. Their self-driving features have been linked to hundreds of accidents and more than a dozen deaths. Then, earlier this month, the company recalled its entire fleet of Cybertrucks. A mechanical problem that trapped its gas pedal, as InsideEVs put it, “could potentially turn the stainless steel trapezoid into a 6,800-pound land missile.”Along the way, Tesla—which did not respond to multiple requests for comment—has defended its cars and autopilot software. As of last week, the company told federal regulators that the Cybertruck malfunction had not been linked to any accidents or injuries. But even resolving every safety concern may not stop Tesla’s entire EV business from becoming a hazard. Yesterday afternoon, the world’s most valuable car company released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2024, announcing that its net income had dropped 55 percent from a year ago. On an investor call shortly after, Elon Musk could offer only a vague euphemism to describe what has become an especially disastrous month: His car juggernaut “navigated several unforeseen challenges.” Just in April, Tesla has announced its first drop in sales since 2020, recalled one line of vehicles and reportedly canceled plans for another, and begun mass layoffs. There are still, somehow, six days left for the month to get worse.Whether Musk can sustain his EV empire is now in doubt. He told investors that Tesla’s primary focus is now on AI and self-driving cars. But even if that pivot fails, the company has positioned itself to be on the edge of another, perhaps more crucial part of the green transition: delivering and storing America’s power. Tesla’s EV chargers are ascendant, if not dominant, as are its huge batteries that store renewable energy for homes and even entire neighborhoods. Profits from Tesla’s energy business were up 140 percent compared with the same period last year, and Musk asserted yesterday that the division will continue to grow “significantly faster than the car business.” The company’s future may not lie in following the footsteps of Ford, then, so much as those of Duke Energy and Con Edison. Tesla, in other words, is transforming into a utility.Tesla’s core problem has been that its cars are falling behind the curve. Even with sagging sales, the company remains America’s biggest EV manufacturer, and its car sales still far outweigh the revenue it gets from energy storage. But Tesla’s models, once undeniably high-tech and cool, are aging.The Cybertruck debuted in November, but Tesla has sold only about 4,000 of them, less than the number of F-Series trucks that Ford sells on average in two days. Otherwise, Tesla hasn’t released an entirely new passenger model in more than four years. Its competitors have used the time to catch up. The Chinese brand BYD is pumping out dirt-cheap, stylish cars and recently surpassed Tesla as the world’s leading seller of EVs. BYD’s cars aren’t available in the U.S., but automakers such as Rivian, Hyundai, and Ford are selling high-tech electric cars. Americans now want affordable EV models, not just high-tech ones—and even Tesla’s push to incrementally cut sticker prices hasn’t achieved that. In yet another April debacle, Reuters reported that the company had scrapped a long-anticipated, more affordable model that would have sold for just $25,000. Musk did tell investors yesterday that the company is speeding up the timeline for more affordable vehicles built “on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle lineup.” But he did not specify prices and declined to answer a direct question about whether the cheaper cars will be entirely new models or tweaks to existing ones.[Read: America is missing out on the best electric cars]The company still has one big advantage in the EV game. No matter their manufacturer, nearly all future EVs in America will rely on Tesla. Just as gas stations were necessary to make the highway system usable, electric charging stations are a key hurdle to wider EV adoption. Tesla’s Superchargers are much faster and more reliable than those of many of their competitors, which is why most major auto manufacturers have declared that they will adopt Tesla’s proprietary charging port in future vehicles. The number of Supercharger stations across the country has increased steadily for years, and is expected to take off this decade.In a few years’ time, those Tesla Superchargers might all also draw power from Tesla’s batteries, which are the little-known core of the company’s transformation into a power provider. As America continues to pivot to clean energy, storage will become crucial: Solar and wind are and will continue to be the country’s fastest-growing renewables, but the energy grid can’t just turn off at night, on a cloudy day, or when the breeze dies down. Just as Tesla was ahead of the EV-adoption curve more than a decade ago, it is set up to be king of the battery boom.Since 2019, the company has been selling “Megapacks”—huge batteries that hold enough electricity to temporarily power thousands of homes—to grid operators in New York, Massachusetts, California, Dubai, Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, as well as to private customers, including Apple. Tesla is continuing to ramp up the factory in California that manufactures these batteries, as well as building another in Shanghai. Until recently, there hasn’t been much competition, and some analysts have predicted that the Megapack business could one day be worth “substantially more” than Tesla’s cars.[Read: Tesla’s magic has been reduced to its chargers]Tesla also sells Powerwalls, large batteries designed for home installation. Powerwalls have made up roughly half of all home-battery installations since 2018, and demand is set to explode. The company deployed more than twice as much energy storage in 2023 as in the year prior. Tesla also has a line of solar panels, and though that business has proved fickle, it is yet another way for the company to provide the raw power that an electrified world will require. With its chargers and batteries, Tesla’s main products are becoming infrastructural, a step removed from consumers but no less essential. Vaibhav Taneja, the company’s chief financial officer, said yesterday that energy-storage deployment should grow by at least another 75 percent this year and begin “contributing significantly to our overall profitability.”That future, of course, is far from preordained. Tesla’s auto business remains one of the few profitable EV operations in the country; Ford and GM are losing billions of dollars on EVs as they retool their companies away from the internal-combustion engine. And, to say the least, Musk is hardly a predictable executive. Yesterday’s earnings call suggested he is more infatuated with self-driving robotaxis than electrifying the grid: He’s doubled Tesla’s AI-training resources in three months. But self-driving cars are the opposite of a safe bet, and semiautonomous vehicles, which have become the industry standard, will no longer set Tesla apart. Clean energy is a highly competitive, capital-intensive, and rapidly changing industry. Just like its massive head start in the EV field, Tesla’s battery and charging advantages will not be self-sustaining.But absent a far more catastrophic collapse, Tesla appears to be successfully jumping from one wave of the clean-energy revolution to another—from providing cars to providing the electricity that will power not just cars, but also homes, offices, and more or less everything else. A decade from now, even as Tesla vehicles slide in popularity, the company’s influence may prove stronger than ever.

Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X, “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia. (Both men, as it turns out, are in favor of some quarter for “insurrectionists” who happen to be on the right side.)Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’What Cotton and Hawley are doing is simple demagoguery. When Donald Trump was inaugurated president, he spoke of an “American carnage” that he would suppress by force. Trump’s attempts to apply the maximum level of violence to every problem did not solve any of them. Migration at the southern border surged in 2019 until a crackdown in Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic brought it down; Trump’s presidency ended with a rise in violent crime (another likely pandemic effect, among other factors) and with widespread civil-rights protests. The protesters at Columbia and other college campuses around the United States are voicing opposition to U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas, which began in retaliation for a Hamas raid that killed some 1,200 Israelis last October. Since then, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, about 2 million displaced, and many driven to the brink of starvation. No sympathy for Hamas or anti-Semitism is necessary to believe, as I do, that Israel’s conduct here has been horrifically disproportionate; the U.S. government itself has acknowledged substantial evidence of human-rights violations by Israeli forces as well as by Hamas. There have been documented instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment surrounding the protests; a rabbi associated with Columbia University urged Jewish students to stay away for the time being, and the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, recommended that students not living on campus attend classes remotely for the time being. In the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters. As of this morning, the National Guard had not been called in, but hundreds of students participating in demonstrations across the country had been arrested.If the campus authorities need to act to protect the safety of any of their students, including from threats, discrimination, and harassment, then they must. But the university is facing pressure from pro-Israel donors and elected officials to shut down the protests, less because they are dangerous than because these powerful figures find the protesters and their demands offensive.Yet the kinds of mass violence and unrest that would justify deploying the National Guard are currently absent, and the use of state force against the protesters is likely to escalate tensions rather than quell them. The New York Times reported that after Shafik asked the NYPD to clear the protesters’ tent city located on a campus quad, the “decision to bring in the police also unleashed a wave of activism across a growing number of college campuses.” As for Columbia, NYPD Chief John Chell told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” Nor did the arrests end the protest.The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer. The most likely outcome based on past precedent would be an escalation to serious violence. Which might be the idea.Conor Friedersdorf: Against the Insurrection ActAs we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters. Social-media bubbles can suffice to maintain this sense of siege among the extremely online, but cultivating this perception among most voters demands constant reinforcement.This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose as a matter of principle, but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems, they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.

Why Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez wants to rescue the speaker from his own party

because I’d deemed the book complete,the last pages written, end notes done.Because the pages seemed armoredagainst me. Needful of nothing. Smug.Because a day passed. Because I got a call;a heart had faltered. The person the protagonistwas drawn on: gone. Because it wasmy father. Because was. Because my father is,in the book, alive. Because alive now seems a lie.Death, the missing letter. Because his heartpumps through the pages’ veins, throughtrees felled for their pulp. Because artcan’t match life’s stride, or death’s.Because my book has shorter legs.Because it lags like a video streamedon unstable internet. Because I couldn’tfinish the bowl of chicken soup I’d startedbefore the call. Because my father’s flesh was warmwhen I heated the broth. Because I thoughtof the chicken my father saw as a pet, as a child.Because he learned it wasn’t. Because he ate it,learned, then cried. Because I need to edit.Because death is absent, but death isthe absence that can’t be revised.

Why did I cry for my yellow Lab but not my mom?

Challengers has plenty of moody intrigue, and it doesn’t skimp on the sports, either.

Running a marathon has become a milestone for a growing number of young adults.

Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as Furnald Lawn on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”[Michael Powell: The curious rise of ]settler colonialism and Turtle IslandPrivacy struck me as a peculiar goal for an outdoor protest at a prominent university. But it’s been a strange seven-month journey from Hamas’s horrific slaughter of Israelis—the original breach of a cease-fire—to the liberated zone on the Columbia campus and similar standing protests at other elite universities. What I witnessed seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive.Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students, who are Jewish and pro-Israel.Jessica Schwalb, a Columbia junior, is one of those labeled an intruder. In truth, she does not much fear violence—“They’re Columbia students, too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us,” she tells me—as she is taken aback by the sight of fellow students chanting like automatons. She raises her phone to start recording video. One of the intruders speaks up to ask why they are being pushed out.The leader talks over them, dismissing such inquiries as tiresome. “Repeat after me,” he says, and 100 protesters dutifully repeat: “I’m bored! We would like you to leave!”As the crowd draws closer, Schwalb and her friends pivot and leave. Even the next morning, she’s baffled at how they were targeted. Save for a friend who wore a Star of David necklace, none wore identifying clothing. “Maybe,” she says, “they smelled the Zionists on us.”As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state.Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”Of late, at least one rabbi has suggested that Jewish students depart the campus for their own safety. Columbia President Minouche Shafik acknowledged in a statement earlier today that at her university there “have been too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior.” To avoid trouble, she advised classes to go virtual today, and said, “Our preference is that students who do not live on campus will not come to campus.”Tensions have in fact kept ratcheting up. Last week, Shafik called in the New York City police force to clear an earlier iteration of the tent city and to arrest students for trespassing. The university suspended more than 100 of these protesters, accusing them, according to the Columbia Spectator, of “disruptive behavior, violation of law, violation of University policy, failure to comply, vandalism or damage to property, and unauthorized access or egress.”Even some Jewish students and faculty unsympathetic to the protesters say the president’s move was an accelerant to the crisis, producing misdemeanor martyrs to the pro-Palestinian cause. A large group of faculty members walked out this afternoon to express their opposition to the arrests and suspensions.As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags, embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza, are planted in the grass.[Theo Baker: The war at Stanford]During my nine-hour visit, talking with student protesters proved tricky. Upon entering the zone, I was instructed to listen as a gatekeeper read community guidelines that included not talking with people not authorized to be inside—a category that seemed to include anyone of differing opinions. I then stood in a press zone and waited for Layla Saliba, a social-work graduate student who served as a spokesperson for the protest. A Palestinian American, she said she has lost family in the fighting in Gaza. She talked at length and with nuance. Hers, however, was a near-singular voice. As I toured the liberated zone, I found most protesters distinctly non-liberated when it came to talking with a reporter.Leaders take pains to insist that, for all the chants of “from the river to sea” and promises to revisit the 1948 founding of Israel, they are only anti-Zionist and not anti-Jewish. To that end, they’ve held a Shabbat dinner and, during my visit, were planning a Passover seder. (The students vow to remain, police notwithstanding, until graduation in May).“We are not anti-Jewish, not at all,” Saliba said.But to talk with many Jewish students who have encountered the protests is to hear of the cumulative toll taken by words and chants and actions that call to mind something ancient and ugly.Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”A few minutes earlier, I had been sitting on a stone bench on campus and speaking with a tall, brawny man named Danny Shaw, who holds a masters in international affairs from Columbia and now teaches seminars on Israel in the liberated zone. When he describes the encampment, it sounds like Shangri-la. “It’s 100 percent love for human beings and very beautiful; I came here for my mental health,” he said.He claims no hatred for Israel, although he suggested the “genocidal goliath” will of course have to disappear or merge into an Arab-majority state. He said he does not endorse violence, even as he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II.Shaw’s worldview is consistent with that of others in the rotating cast of speakers at late-night seminars in the liberated zone. The prevailing tone tends toward late-stage Frantz Fanon: much talk of revolution and purging oneself of bourgeois affectation. Shaw had taught for 18 years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but he told me the liberated zone is now his only gig. The John Jay administration pushed him out—doxxed him, he said—in October for speaking against Israel and for Palestine. He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot.Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.”A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.”We parted shortly afterward. I walked under a near-full moon toward a far gate, protesters’ chants of revolution echoing across what was otherwise an almost-deserted campus. I could not shake the sense that too many at this elite university, even as they hoped to ease the plight of imperiled civilians, had allowed the intoxicating language of liberation to blind them to an ugliness encoded within that struggle.