Go ahead - fascinate me!

Posted by Carlos Greaves

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ices-training-manual-for-determining-who-to-terrorize

“The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order prohibiting government agents from making indiscriminate immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area that challengers called ‘blatant racial profiling.’” — New York Times

Welcome to your first day on the job as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. We hope you enjoyed your $50,000 signing bonus and were finally able to pay off your legal fees related to January 6 and/or your divorce.

As an ICE agent, you’ll be responsible for detaining undocumented immigrants, who have completely overrun American cities, like Boston, Massachusetts. Because when people think “Boston,” they think “city with too many Brown people and not enough White people.”

As you’re smashing car windows and pulling people out of their cars, you might be wondering how to determine whether the person is undocumented or not, or even whether you should be violently detaining them in the first place. That’s why we’ve put together this simple guide to help you determine who to target.

The first step is to filter out the people ICE is clearly not targeting. You can do this by asking the person simple questions, like:

“Do you know who Father John Misty is?”

or

“What is your favorite Era?”

If they answered yes to the first question or named a Taylor Swift album for the second question, no further interrogation is needed.

Next, you should determine whether the person could be undocumented. Keep in mind, it can be tricky figuring out who is or isn’t from another country. For example, all of these men are from Latin America:

That’s why it’s always safer to assume the person is undocumented, even if they later turn out to be a US citizen. When in doubt, arrest anyone darker than this paint sample:

Of course, there are many other signs that may indicate a person is undocumented. Any of the following activities could be considered suspicious:

• Standing outside a Home Depot
• Standing inside a Home Depot
• Shopping at homedepot.com while sitting on the couch at home
• Picking apples
• Apple picking
• Picking up a few apples at the grocery store
• Shopping at an Apple store
• Typing on an Apple computer while sitting at a coffee shop
• Looking poor
• Dressing poorly
• Dressing so poorly it’s clear you’re actually rich because you have so much money that you don’t even have to try.
• Speaking Spanish (if you live in Los Angeles, you should be speaking English)
• Speaking any language other than English
• Speaking accented English (excluding posh British, Irish, or Scandinavian accents—those are fine)
• Speaking perfect English (you just never know)

These guidelines might make it seem like ICE agents have full license to interrogate, harass, and detain anyone, including US citizens, for any reason, without due process. And that is absolutely correct. Whether a person is undocumented or not is anyone’s guess, which is why the safest bet is to question everyone.

In fact, as ICE expands its operations in cities like LA, Chicago, and Boston, a key part of ICE’s efforts will be setting up random traffic stops and checkpoints throughout the city and making educated guesses about who to detain and who not to detain. These “Guess Stops” will be staffed by special agents known as Guess Stop Officers, or “Guess-Stop-O” for short. The Guess-Stop-O will make crime disappear by making undesirable people disappear.

But don’t worry, most of you will have nothing to fear. Unless you’re darker than that paint sample. Then you’d better have your papers handy.

IMAGE CREDITS:

Top left (Guillermo del Toro): Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Top right (David Ortiz): Photo by Arturo Pardavila III, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Bottom left (Alberto Fujimori): Photo by Christian Lambiotte, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Bottom right (Lionel Messi): Photo by Кирилл Венедиктов, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ices-training-manual-for-determining-who-to-terrorize

Posted by Amanda Goble

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-you-ended-up-with-fourteen-email-accounts

1. The Only One
Before you thought about work-life balance, professionalism, or online security, there was just one email. You were a simple, blissful idiot.

2. Personal
You learned that only a baby fawn mixes all aspects of existence into a single stew of email chaos. So you created an account just for family and friends—memes, photos, and half-hearted attempts to meet for coffee. You marveled at your newfound organizational prowess. Then it dawned on you that you had no idea which email to use for logins, work emails, and subscriptions to your friends’ newsletters.

3. Sensitive
Next came an address for accounts and institutions holding your most sensitive data. You used this to log in to your very secure bank’s website. Then you had to decide whether or not you’d also give it to the neighborhood dentist, who stowed your intake packet in a translucent plastic bin that sat in the corner of their office/exam room—where anyone could stroll in and find your Social Security number emblazoned on page one. Your choice haunts you.

4. Work
Your employer set this up. It was beautiful. Because when your bedtime reading was an email from your best friend about her new bunny’s adorable hijinks, you were never interrupted by an after-hours request that you hop into a meeting at sunrise.

5. Side Gig
Full of hope, you shared this email with friends and family in case of referrals. Then you learned that your aunt didn’t understand why she shouldn’t give your personal email address to anyone looking for someone who “does something with the internet.”

6. Side Gig Sensitive
You remembered not to use your public-facing address for the separate bank account you set up after you decided to test out a business monetizing your ability to write listicles.

7. Second Side Gig
Branding.

Back to 2. Second Side Gig (Barbara-Specific), Formerly Known as “Personal”
Naif no more, you repurposed your personal account when your aunt’s friend, Barbara, flooded it with urgent requests that you edit her ex-friend’s casserole out of every picture in her cooking club’s online scrapbook.

8. New Personal
You shared this with your friends—and the members of your family who vowed not to reveal it to your aunt, her loose-lipped kids, or Barbara.

9. Junk
You realized you needed an account just for coupons, offers, and marketing freebies you may or may not ever look at. You read that you could use this one for online shopping, too, if you were to check out as a guest, but dismissed this as hogwash. Paying with a credit card would have created an unacceptable crossover between junk and sensitive information.

10. Shopping
An online retailer seemed trustworthy enough to open an account with. Since a credit card was involved, you considered using your banking address. But this was an unacceptable slippery slope that could have only ended in the complete undoing of your entire email ecosystem.

Back to 9. Junk/Shopping Hybrid, Formerly Known as “Junk”
You got sloppy and used your junk email address to create an account with a retailer instead of checking out as a guest. This impulsive compromise of protocol was prompted by a lucrative coupon, and it felt, for a moment, like a worthy trade—your data for five dollars off sea salt caramel protein powder.

11. New New Personal
This newer new personal account began when family members cc’d you on chain letters, and a gym friend sent a series of dubious blog posts about nutritional supplements.

12. Personal/Junk Hybrid
You received an invitation to your high school reunion, created this account, and shared it with old acquaintances you unilaterally nominated and named ‘Most Likely to Nonconsensually Subscribe You to Their Newsletter.’

13. Personal/Work Hybrid
You made this one to plan a social outing on a weekday with colleagues you didn’t want to hear from on weekends—colleagues who, you were certain, did not have newsletters.

14. Personal /Side Gig / Second Side Gig / or Third Side Gig? / Barbara Hybrid
You created this address in order to launch your newsletter.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-you-ended-up-with-fourteen-email-accounts

Posted by Shruti Swamy

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/heartstopper

Her guru was strong enough to stop his own heart—but was there a more frightening aspect of his power?

DISCUSSED:

Swami Rama, Living with the Himalayan Masters, Biofeedback, The Menninger Foundation, Exquisite Control, Sanskrit, Guru-hood, Child-Memory, The Smell of Cigarettes and Cologne, Palo Alto, Ayurveda, A Fucked-Up Zen Koan, Yoga Journal, Katharine Webster, Sexual Violence, Shiva, Logical Contortions, Pandits, The Rubric of Desirability.

Baba didn’t want it known where his ashes were scattered when he died—he didn’t want anyone to make a shrine to him. But when he died we didn’t call it that: we said “left his body.” He had done it before, when he was younger: had changed bodies while keeping his soul intact. “When you tear your shirt, do you cry? Get a new shirt,” he said. He didn’t worry about mending it. He wore a white T-shirt under the rough maroon robe of an enlightened one; the robe smelled like cigarettes because he could control every aspect of his body and could choose not to die of cancer. He died—left his body—in India, because he did not want to return to America. Of the allegations that surrounded him, one had led to a lawsuit against his organization, and he refused to heed the summons to appear in court. In exile, he maintained his silence around the subject, into death.

I have no memory of meeting Baba for the first time, of not knowing him. Likely because I was so little—only five—and because I grew up hearing and believing stories about him that elevated him to the level of myth, the times I actually spent with him stretched over the times I didn’t. Baba, we all called him, which means “father.” When I was nine, he initiated me in India at his ashram. In my family, the honor of becoming my guru was one he bestowed only on me. On the balcony of his suite I offered him fruits and flowers that my parents had bought for the occasion. In Sanskrit I repeated back the words he offered to me, promising in my heart to be obedient to him, to follow his teachings, to trust him with the care of my soul. He gave me a mantra in my ear. He wrote it down for me but it was secret, and I told it to no one. I still remember it, though it has been at least a decade since I reached for it.

Baba visited me in my dreams, could read my thoughts, wanted only what was best for me. He was the symbol of a world that made sense, one in which our family was chosen, special, protected. But there was another side to Baba, or there was another world, one less magical, at once more dangerous and mundane. For years, I lived joyously in the first world, until slowly, then all at once, I arrived in the second.

In the spring of 1989, my father had a spiritual revelation. He had been in the Santa Cruz Mountains attending a talk by Dr. Usharbudh Arya, the founder of the Meditation Center in Minneapolis, who was on a national lecture circuit to spread his knowledge about yoga. Dr. Arya was a serious scholar, fluent in not one but two ancient languages—Pali, the language of the Buddha, as well as Sanskrit—and was a former professor of South Asian studies at the University of Minnesota. An autodidact, he received no formal schooling until enrolling at the University of London, where he earned his BA and also an MA; he then earned a LittD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. To me, he always looked a little like a brown Robin Williams, with a square, friendly face bedecked with ’80s dad-glasses, and, for much of my childhood, a white beard that also reminded me of Santa Claus’s. When my dad approached Dr. Arya after the lecture was finished, they looked at each other. My father, deeply moved by the power of this gaze, vibrating with the distress from the conflicts that had driven him to seek spiritual solace, laid his head on the shoulder of his future guru, and began to cry.

This encounter, of two souls meeting in a state of immediate, profound knowing, is reserved for romantic love in Western culture. In our spiritual tradition, however, the instant connection felt between guru and future disciple pointed to a spiritual certainty: that the two had known each other in different lifetimes, and that they had work to do together in this one. Dr. Arya was a disciple of Baba—Swami1 Rama—whom he had met years earlier in a similarly dramatic encounter. Already an accomplished scholar of Sanskrit and a meditation teacher, Dr. Arya took Baba immediately as his guru when they met in 1969.

The guru–disciple relationship is a bond of intense spiritual significance, formalized by the initiation ceremony, after which the disciple is “their guru’s responsibility,” says my mother. “You make this resolve that this is the person who will guide you, and you will follow him unquestioningly. And the guru will do whatever is necessary for your spiritual well-being, which might involve putting you through difficulties and pain. Just like parents, who might ground you for your own good, which you might not like.” The guru figure can be both parent and trickster, someone whose antics would disturb their disciple’s complacency with the illusion of the material world, their attachments, or their self-conception. My mother remembers this aspect of Baba and Dr. Arya’s relationship: times when Baba would belittle Dr. Arya in front of their disciples, cut him down to size—acts that Dr. Arya always took with good humor, my mother reports, accepting them as lessons in shrinking the ego. No matter what: the disciple owes her guru absolute obedience. The guru owes his disciple nothing less than the safeguarding and the development of their soul.

When Dr. Arya took Baba as his guru, he joined the ancient lineage Baba represented, and began to see himself as a vessel for its knowledge. In the dedication to a book about the Yoga Sutras, Dr. Arya writes, in Sanskrit (as translated by my mother): “The tradition that started with the golden source of the creation, continued by Ved Vyas and other sages, and ending at the feet of Sri Swami Ram[a], I bow to that unbroken guru lineage.” When my parents were initiated by Dr. Arya, he echoed this idea: “It is not me who is initiating you. This is the lineage of Swami Rama that comes straight through me,” my mom reports him saying. If my parents’ guru was the most significant spiritual leader in their lives, then the guru of my parents’ guru, Swami Rama, was ever more powerful, almost unimaginably so. Even in absence, even before we met him, he was a constant presence in our lives. I didn’t dream then that the honor of initiation that had been bestowed on Dr. Arya by Swami Rama could also be given to a child—to me.

Read the rest over at The Believer.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/heartstopper

Posted by Walter Carson

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/other-quotes-from-ai-generated-founding-fathers-at-the-trump-commissioned-founders-museum

“A new history exhibit commissioned by the Trump administration has some historians perplexed…. The museum features over 40 AI-generated short videos of these historical figures coming to life to share their stories…. In one video, an artificially generated John Adams says, ‘Facts do not care about your feelings’—a phrase often used by conservative commentator and PragerU presenter Ben Shapiro.” — NPR

“A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’” —George Washington

“You also had some very fine people on both sides.” —John Adams

“You go to the hospital. You have a broken arm. You come out, you are a drug addict with this crap.” — Benjamin Franklin

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” —Alexander Hamilton

“I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.” —Elbridge Gerry

“Look at these hands. Are they small hands?” —James Madison

“I am much better looking than Kamala Harris.” —Abigail Adams

“Horseface.” —Betsy Ross

“Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” —Thomas Jefferson

“People are flushing toilets ten times, fifteen times, as opposed to once.” — John Jay

“What would happen if the boat sank, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately ten yards over there—by the way, lots of shark attacks lately, did you notice that? A lotta sharks—I watched some guys justifying it today, ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was’—these people are crazy.” —John Hancock

“I think it’s all a witch hunt.” —Benedict Arnold

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/other-quotes-from-ai-generated-founding-fathers-at-the-trump-commissioned-founders-museum

Posted by Walter Carson

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/other-quotes-from-ai-generated-founding-fathers-at-the-trump-commisioned-founders-museum

“A new history exhibit commissioned by the Trump administration has some historians perplexed…. The museum features over 40 AI-generated short videos of these historical figures coming to life to share their stories…. In one video, an artificially generated John Adams says, ‘Facts do not care about your feelings’—a phrase often used by conservative commentator and PragerU presenter Ben Shapiro.” — NPR

“A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’” —George Washington

“You also had some very fine people on both sides.” —John Adams

“You go to the hospital. You have a broken arm. You come out, you are a drug addict with this crap.” — Benjamin Franklin

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” —Alexander Hamilton

“I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.” —Elbridge Gerry

“Look at these hands. Are they small hands?” —James Madison

“I am much better looking than Kamala Harris.” —Abigail Adams

“Horseface.” —Betsy Ross

“Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” —Thomas Jefferson

“People are flushing toilets ten times, fifteen times, as opposed to once.” — John Jay

“What would happen if the boat sank, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately ten yards over there—by the way, lots of shark attacks lately, did you notice that? A lotta sharks—I watched some guys justifying it today, ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was’—these people are crazy.” —John Hancock

“I think it’s all a witch hunt.” —Benedict Arnold

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/other-quotes-from-ai-generated-founding-fathers-at-the-trump-commisioned-founders-museum

Posted by Mike Langley

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/if-i-cant-hang-the-ten-commandments-in-my-classroom-how-the-hell-am-i-supposed-to-get-my-students-to-stop-coveting-their-neighbors-wife

These days, it seems like the only qualification someone needs to opine on what’s best for our nation’s schools is their own dimly remembered time as a student. Combine that with volatile, emotionally charged topics like politics and religion, and suddenly, everyone’s an expert and no one will listen to anyone else.

Well, listen up, smartasses: I’m a teacher. I’m in front of kids every single day. And if I can’t hang the Ten Commandments in my classroom, then how the hell am I supposed to get my students to stop coveting their neighbor’s wife?

Being an educator has always been tough; in today’s environment, it’s nearly impossible. So, when red-state governors proposed mandating that a poster displaying the Ten Commandments be hung in every classroom, I let out a huge sigh of relief. Finally, someone who gets it. Someone who gets that, yes, smartphones are a problem, artificial intelligence is concerning, the growing politicization of curriculum is alarming, and pandemic-related learning loss still presents challenges. But the biggest issue in K-12 education today, bar none, is our students’ constant, invasive daydreams about a new life with their neighbor Brian’s underappreciated wife, Denise.

Go ahead. Walk a mile in my shoes. Enter my classroom, with my students, and try to teach my lesson about the rise of prairie populism in the late nineteenth century. Floor is all yours. The second you utter the name “William Jennings Bryan,” you’ve lost the class. “He doesn’t treat Denise right,” mutters one student. “She’s an angel,” says another. Still others simply gaze listlessly out the window, sketching themselves and Denise in a two-seat convertible, zooming down the open highway.

Um, sounds like we’re thinking about a different “Brian,” guys.

And look: This isn’t a religious thing. Separation of church and state? No one’s a stauncher advocate than I am. In fact, like most of America’s teachers, I am a godless communist (well, I try to be—it can be tough to make all of the meetings). But the real world has a funny way of challenging ideology, and frankly, I can’t think of a text more relevant to today’s classrooms than the Ten Commandments.

Oh, you got them to stop coveting Denise for a couple of seconds (good luck with that) and think you’ve got the classroom running smoothly? Try and take a beat to review your lesson plan or—god forbid, have a sip of your coffee—and the moment you look up, the students are smelting a golden idol to Mr. Roberts, the physical education teacher. Is Mr. Roberts in great shape? Sure. Is he—when you think about it—probably the most logical person in the school community to make a false idol of and worship as a god? No question. But as I tell my students constantly, it’s about context, and every second spent lovingly sculpting Mr. Roberts’s biceps or sharpening the line of his jaw is a second we don’t get to spend on civil service reform under the Chester A. Arthur administration.

But maybe this isn’t actually about the kids. Maybe our nation’s classrooms are just another political football you’re using to try to score points. That’s fine. That’s the way these things go. But don’t pretend you actually care about our nation’s children, or our nation’s children’s neighbors’ wives.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/if-i-cant-hang-the-ten-commandments-in-my-classroom-how-the-hell-am-i-supposed-to-get-my-students-to-stop-coveting-their-neighbors-wife

Posted by Aarushi Ahuja

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-got-tenure-and-now-i-cant-seem-to-form-simple-declarative-sentences

When I received the email, I was holding a piece of toast. Dry, no butter. I remember this vividly because it was the last thing in my life with a clearly defined purpose.

“You got tenure!” my partner said, beaming.

“Oh! That’s… great,” I replied. “I think?”

And so it began.

In the weeks since, I’ve found myself unable to commit—grammatically, affectively, institutionally. Where once I might have said, “I teach,” I now say, “There are moments in which I find myself adjacent to pedagogy.” Friends have grown concerned. My dog, unfed.

I went to text my partner: “Be home soon.” Instead, I wrote, “Circling back into the infrastructural imaginary of shared dwelling—if, indeed, dwelling can be shared.” They replied with a thumbs up, which I interpret as either affirmation or resignation. Or both. Or neither.

Soon, everyday phrases became impossible. “I’m hungry” became “There emerges, within this organismal enclosure, a not-unfamiliar sense of lack—interpretable, perhaps, as nutritional, though not necessarily limited to metabolic vectors.”

I have begun chewing paper.

My lectures, once widely engaging, are now transcribed by AI and flagged for incoherence. Last Tuesday, I opened class with:
“If we are to approach the concept of ‘knowledge’ not as a static repository but as a contested site of epistemological re-inscription, then what does it mean to ‘learn’—and indeed, to ‘teach’—within the biopolitical constraints of the neoliberal university?”

A student raised their hand and asked if the midterm would still be multiple choice.

I told them, “Choice is an illusion constructed by the pseudo-industrial complex.”

Their hand lowered. Their spirit, too, perhaps.

Email has become a crucible. I can no longer say “Attached is the draft.” I must instead write, “Enclosed—though, of course, enclosure itself is a problematic modality—please locate a text-in-process, emergent rather than concluded.”

My signature is now required to include a content warning.

A colleague invited me to give a talk. I responded, “While I’m open to the performative potentialities of ‘giving’—insofar as knowledge can be gifted, rather than problematically imposed—I hesitate to endorse the teleology implied by the word ‘talk,’ especially when situated within extractive academic economies of listening.”

She replied, “Cool! Just let us know by Friday.”

I haven’t. I can’t.

Hence, resultantly so, as forth, conferences have become a nonzero variant of impossible. My last presentation was titled: Re-Reading the Readings: Toward a Non-Linear Lexicon of Deferred Legibility in the Wake of the Wake of the Wake. I read directly from a shattered mirror.

My partner recently asked, “Do you love me?”

I said, “I think it’s worth troubling the verb.”

They have not asked again.

Following a breakdown in domestic consensus—rooted, perhaps, in divergent interpretations of “emotional labor”—I’ve been spatially reallocated to the couch.

I sleep, but not where I once was legible. I dream of saying, “The cat is on the windowsill.” But even in subconscious nocturnal cognition, it emerges as: “The feline positionality vis-à-vis the aperture suggests a liminal domesticity—perched, perhaps, on the edge of knowability.”

Perhaps, then, the question is not what has been lost, but what remains articulable. Can one possess tenure and still say: The cat sat on the mat?

Or must it forever become: The feline subject, as situated in relation to the liminal textile geography of its domestic enclosure, performs a politics of stillness that refuses legibility within traditional narrative structures of action and intention?

Or, not become, but rather, hover—inhabit—subtend. The mat, no longer substrate, but site. The sitting, no longer action, but archive. The cat, of course, theoretical.

These are not rhetorical questions. They are, at best, para-utterances enacted at the jagged edge of discursive thresholding, within what Glissant might term opacity, or what Foucault might name the gaze. Or the gaze’s gaze. Or the gazed.

As Watzlawick remarks, “One cannot not communicate.”

And so, I ask: Institutionally, interstitially, and perhaps, bacterially speaking—

Or rather: Structurally, psychospiritually, and under the lingering haunt of Enlightenment taxonomies—

Who among us is the subject, really

[EDITOR’S NOTE: At this point, the manuscript became illegible. The author appears to have footnoted a semicolon.]

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-got-tenure-and-now-i-cant-seem-to-form-simple-declarative-sentences