Benjamin Kunkel

Syllabus writing for my upcoming @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social
course on the theory and practice of dictatorship.

A few spots are still available—we start on March 3! (Link below)

love to see it

Anybody in or passing through northern Colorado, please think of coming to Perry Anderson's talk (with Tony Wood) here in Boulder on Thursday, February 19th. The event is free: magicmountaintalks.org/event/perry-...

Daniel Lefferts: “Terms and Conditions” A short story by Daniel Lefferts: “Last summer my friend Andrew and I spent a few days in Fort Lauderdale.”

An excellent, funny, and winningly bleak and nasty short story from Daniel Lefferts, in @yalereview.bsky.social yalereview.org/article/dani...

Particularly funny:

The, er, limitations of Updike's sexuality—scopophilia + the crotch shot in many cases—seem to me aligned w the limitations of his general POV: eidetically precise appreciation of the world as appearance, shallowness otherwise. Why his best characters are limited: boys, or Rabbit

James Wolcott · What you can get away with: Updike Reconsidered Betwixt and between is a strange place for any major writer to be more than a decade and a half after their death, and...

A great piece of criticism, both as an appreciation and for its genial wickedness about Updike's limitations www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The End of Cinema? | Los Angeles Review of Books Amid cinema’s decline, two new books by A. S. Hamrah resist defeatism.

Reviews like this make writing worth it. lareviewofbooks.org/article/as-h...

The Riotous Worlds of Thomas Pynchon From “The Crying Lot of 49” to his latest noirs, the American novelist has always proceeded along a track strangely parallel to our own.

Sure, you were sick of reading about Pynchon a few months ago—but now don't you miss it? Me on the new one @thenation.com www.thenation.com/article/cult...

For our winter issue, Granta goes to therapy. Read the issue for free online for the next five days.

granta.com/products/gra...

Whatever Creek Meadows ‘I had slept with her back in college and several times afterward, as presumptive grown-ups, only out of some masculine obligingness which I’ve never seen described in fiction’

New short story is up at @grantamag.bsky.social and in front if the paywall for the rest of the month granta.com/whatever-cre...

Did a TV Show Hurt You? ‘Fix-Its’ Offer Justice Beloved characters are killed. Romances, too. But a subset of fan-fiction writers are taking matters into their own hands, “fixing” perceived wrongs.

new frontiers in the demand for art to directly gratify and intolerance for representation

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/a...

Thank you!

Opinion | Trump is killing one of our strongest exports The president wants to balance U.S. trade deficits? He can’t do it without this industry he hates.

Last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined.
wapo.st/4luJyph

Trading in two stocks surged before Trump family appointments announced Experts view sharp rises in share price and turnover of Unusual Machines and Dominari as ‘clearly unusual’

www.ft.com/content/1d9e...

I don't suppose the SEC might want to look into this?

The Sameness of Different Things, by Benjamin Kunkel Reading a new translation of Capital

I wrote about an obscure German contribution to the critique of political economy, for @harpers.bsky.social harpers.org/archive/2025...

difficult to overstate how bad it would be for this effort to succeed

Some day we'll see the headline and people will cheer in the streets

Trump's Counterterror Czar Proposes Terror Charges for Political Opponents Either you love America or you don’t, he says

In which our old friend Sebastian Gorka, Senior Director for Counterterrorism, suggests critics of the Trump administration be charged with "aiding and abetting terrorism": “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.” www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-cou...

The Sameness of Different Things, by Benjamin Kunkel Reading a new translation of Capital

Benjamin Kunkel (@kunktation.bsky.social) reviews Paul Reitter’s translation of Capital.

“The task of reading Capital naïvely acquires a fresh jolt of plausibility in the case of Paul Reitter’s new translation of volume one,” writes Kunkel.

harpers.org/archive/2025...

Social Security Lists Thousands of Migrants as Dead to Prompt Them to ‘Self-Deport’ By placing migrants in Social Security’s “death master file,” the Trump administration is seeking to cut off their access to credit cards, bank accounts and other financial services.

“The list included a 13-year-old and seven other minors. . . For now the immigrants added are being given supposed dates of death.”

Team Trump Is Gaming Out How to Ship U.S. Citizens to El Salvador Donald Trump’s administration is talking internally about denaturalizing American citizens — and potentially sending some to El Salvador.

"Trump administration officials have discussed possibly denaturalizing and deporting activists and other individuals whom they label as having committed so-called 'fraud' on their applications for citizenship by subsequently supporting what Team Trump decides are 'pro-terrorist' causes or groups."

fucking monstrous

If you are
1) a federal civil servant/contractor ordered not to release scheduled data or reports, or
2) an academic who has lost access to government data in the past week
...please get in touch. I'm happy to keep our conversations confidential.
crampell[@]washpost[dot]com

Trump’s Immigration Threats Are Already Wrecking the Food Industry Immigrant farm workers are too scared to show up to work.

About 75% of immigrant farm workers did not show up for work this week in Bakersfield, California, as the threat of Trump’s immigration raids looms.

Apollinaire's great poem "The Little Car," about feeling an era end, and another begin, from one day day to the next www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/apo...