One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words.
“Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white.
In his 2023 Netflix comedy special, Selective Outrage, Chris Rock identified one of the core contradictions of the social-justice era: “Everybody’s full of shit,” Rock said, including in the category of “everybody” people who type “woke” tweets “on a phone made by child slaves.”
I was reminded of that acerbic routine while reading Musa al-Gharbi’s new book, We Have Never Been Woke.
There is no single explanation for Donald Trump’s unambiguous win. But if, as we were constantly told, this was in fact the most important election of our lives, in which the future of democracy really was at stake, Democrats never conducted themselves that way.
For the past month, up until Sunday’s parliamentary election, most French voters had been dreading the predicted victory of the far-right National Rally party. But then—in stark contrast to Americans who claim to be alarmed by the return of Donald Trump—they actually did something to prevent it.
Emmanuel Macron had called for the snap elections on June 9.
For my 34th birthday, in 2015, I received two tickets to the men’s quarterfinal of the French Open. I’m a Rafael Nadal loyalist, and I hoped to cheer for the King of Clay. I ended up seeing the Swiss-on-Swiss pairing of Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka. This turned out to be a mercy, because I missed Novak Djokovic become only the second man ever to defeat Nadal at Roland-Garros, and was treated instead to some of the most beautiful groundstrokes I have ever seen.
We’d gathered that day at the cafeteria’s “Black” table, cracking jokes and philosophizing during the free period that was our perk as upperclassmen. We came in different shades: bone white, tan and brownish, dark as a silhouette. One of my classmates, who fancied himself a lyricist, was insisting that Redman, a witty emcee from nearby Newark, New Jersey, was the greatest rapper ever. This was the late ’90s, and for my money, no one could compete with Jay-Z.
One day in the early ’90s, my father came home with a used, champagne-toned Mercedes-Benz 300D four-door sedan. I was 9 or 10 and didn’t know anything about cars. But I was drawn to the luster of the diesel-powered slab of metal, the way the perforated leather smelled as it enveloped me, and how the wood grain on the dashboard and door panels made me feel as if I was involved in something far grander than merely commuting.
In his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, André Breton wrote, “The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” That line came to mind when I stood before Mother Nature, a giant canvas depicting a killer whale lifting a naked man into the air, eye level with a flock of gulls. The image was a highlight of “The Bathers,” Chase Hall’s standout debut at the David Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea this fall.
Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched.
It took me a moment to register the sound of scattered hissing at the Tocqueville Conversations—a two-day “taboo-free discussion” among public intellectuals about the crisis of Western democracies. More than 100 of us had gathered in a large tent set up beneath the window of Alexis de Tocqueville’s study, on the grounds of the 16th-century Château de Tocqueville, in coastal Normandy. I couldn’t remember hearing an audience react like this in such a forum.
My first true Christmas in France, 12 years ago, almost didn’t happen. The day before flying to meet my fiancée in Paris, I’d gone to a Walgreens near my parents’ house in central New Jersey to get a flu shot. Though I trust the science, and had been assured this was impossible, within 24 hours of getting jabbed I was convulsing on my mother’s couch with one of the severest fevers and respiratory infections I had ever experienced.
On October 14, the mutilated body of a blond-haired 12-year-old named Lola was found folded up in a plastic suitcase in the courtyard of her family’s housing project in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. The official cause of Lola’s death was asphyxiation, but investigators also found signs of torture, including cuts on her neck and face, and the numbers 1 and 0 scrawled, inexplicably, on the soles of her feet. She may have been sexually abused.
In a rematch of the 2017 election, France will decide tomorrow between the erstwhile centrist disrupter Emmanuel Macron and the far-right fixture Marine Le Pen. Although this contest once seemed inevitable, the emergence last fall of the wild-card extreme-right media personage Éric Zemmour—whose campaign outflanked Le Pen’s and threatened to cannibalize it—meant that Le Pen had to struggle just to remain this cycle’s challenger.