Aren’t the forces of order supposed to be better at this by now?

 One month ago, Columbia students set up an encampment on the university’s lawn and demanded that its administration divest from Israel, kicking off a wave of student occupations at schools around the country. Deeva Gupta, a graduate student at Columbia, reported on the encampment over the course of April. “The student movement is committed to an embodied revolution, one which implicates them as well,” writes Gupta. “For many, supporting the encampments has come to stand in for rage at the depoliticization of academia, at the surveillance of student life, at the managerial conquest of the university, and at the impossible, deadening sense that people with moral conviction can wake up every day and witness something horrific—but be unable to do anything about it. These disgruntlements have coalesced in the sentiment ‘Palestine is the vanguard for our collective liberation,’ which universalizes the particular. This is what revolutions do.” 

For further reading on the student encampments: A. C. Corey (who’s previously written for n+1 about the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta) wrote about the brutal police responses to student protesters. “It’s been a while since cops have been this rough with this many of the children of the comfortable middle classes—not to mention those classes’ professionally established adults.” Why, Corey asks, have police “stoked what could’ve been a very familiar type of peaceful demonstration at a single university into a nationwide, high-temperature resurgence of the Palestine solidarity movement?”

Also recently published on nplusonemag.com: an excerpt from Justin Taylor’s novel Reboot, out now from Pantheon. “On a long enough flight you could screen the whole movie of your life, director’s cut and all the bonus features,” writes Taylor. “But the Portland–LA flight was barely two hours, and I wasn’t looking to root around in the archives of my memory palace. I was mulling and brooding, yes, but not over ancient history.” 

And from the archives: Andrew Liu on Steph Curry, Moira Donegan on Maggie Nelson, and fiction by Mark Doten.

PS: If you enjoy the work n+1 publishes, you’ll likely also be a fan of our comrades at Jewish Currents. For the next two weeks, subscribe to both magazines at the special discount price of $93 $54—that’s more than 40% off the price of each!