flâneur

Megha Ilango

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on the atlas — 15

highlights — 29

  • But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
    How to Do What You Love
  • Your courageous ones whose voices won’t rattle when they demand what is due what to do in this nation of cages and well-explained blood
    Poem: Note to Black Women in America - The New York Times
  • I find a lot of religion to have all of the proscriptions and not openness and acceptance of other people’s legitimately held faiths. That is why I describe myself as a Buddhist. Buddhism, we don’t even have a book. It is a way of living and being, which is to be compassionate and kind. I think those are two good things to try to follow.
    Sen. Mazie Hirono Wonders How Some Republicans Live With Themselves - The New York Times
  • frankly, I’m a Buddhist. I’m not even a daily-practicing Buddhist because I find all religion to be very — Buddhism accepts other religions more so than many other religions I can think of.
    Sen. Mazie Hirono Wonders How Some Republicans Live With Themselves - The New York Times
  • I don’t know how they live with themselves. Then you have people like Lindsey Graham: When you enter the moral dead zone that is the Trump ambit, you’ve lost your soul. So I am pretty much just transactional with them. Some of them can be nice. But then when they vote en masse to screw people over, it’s hard to be all warm and fuzzy — and I’m not a warm and fuzzy person to begin with.
    Sen. Mazie Hirono Wonders How Some Republicans Live With Themselves - The New York Times
  • Out of the people I still talk to every day and am close with, nearly all of them have lost at least one close friendship, because it’s unfathomably difficult to look past your loved ones being callous about human life. After this is all over, what will our social lives be like without those people? Will we be able to look at them and not think about the fact that when all the cards were down, they folded?
    The Hermits, the Deluded, and the Lost - Healthcare Declassified
  • I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.
    I Know What You Think of Me - The New York Times
  • We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.
    I Know What You Think of Me - The New York Times
  • It is simply not pleasant to be objectively observed — it’s like seeing a candid photo of yourself online, not smiling or posing, but simply looking the way you apparently always do, oblivious and mush-faced with your mouth open. It’s proof that we are visible to others, that we are seen, in all our naked silliness and stupidity.
    I Know What You Think of Me - The New York Times
  • Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in the world, and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light that you hope they do, making all allowances, always on your side. There’s something existentially alarming about finding out how little room we occupy, and how little allegiance we command, in other people’s heads.
    I Know What You Think of Me - The New York Times
  • Some have wondered if these horrific, viral videos constitute a wave, or if they were just random incidents. When your concerns have gone unrecognized for decades, it’s understandable why some within the Asian-American community remain so invested in using these highly visible moments as an opportunity to call attention to hate, even if the incidents seem more varied than that.
    The Muddled History of Anti-Asian Violence | The New Yorker
  • the needs and disadvantages of refugee communities and poor Asian Americans have been obscured as much by the myth of Asians as the “model minority” as by the movements, particularly among the professional class, to resist this myth.
    The Muddled History of Anti-Asian Violence | The New Yorker
  • It’s difficult to describe anti-Asian racism when society lacks a coherent, historical account of what that racism actually looks like. The parameters of activism often get defined by hashtags—#StopAAPIHate, #ProtectOurElders, #NotYourModelMinority—rather than a sense of history. In the age of Black Lives Matter, the desire to carve out a crisp, pithy position is greater than ever. But the past weeks’ conversations have illustrated how the Asian-American experience doesn’t always fit neatly into conventional understandings of victimhood.
    The Muddled History of Anti-Asian Violence | The New Yorker
  • If left to fester, this reactionary anger will only harden into a reactionary nationalism that will threaten vital community and organizing work and turn one race against another.
    Opinion | We Need to Put a Name to This Violence - The New York Times
  • There is an opportunity to reshape that language to address the contradictions inherent in the lives of millions of immigrants and to create a reality that acknowledges the size of the rift between Asian and Black Americans, but does not fall into a zero-sum game in which everyone loses.
    Opinion | We Need to Put a Name to This Violence - The New York Times
  • these past months have also shown the limits of the rote progressive language about race and its assumption, in practice, of a binary between Black and white Americans.
    Opinion | We Need to Put a Name to This Violence - The New York Times
  • But I recognize that in this time of crisis for Asian-Americans, this message of nationalism and self-protection, with all its implied calls for law and order and incarceration, will be heard by millions who are still trying to figure out what “Asian-American” even means. Who will sound like the truth-teller, and who will sound like the out-of-touch liberal who talks vaguely about the need for unity?
    Opinion | We Need to Put a Name to This Violence - The New York Times
  • The relative truth of this tension can be excavated, debated and examined. The usual explanations, invoking the history of this country, the model minority myth, and the need for solidarity against white supremacy, can be forcefully stated. All these are true and necessary, but they do not tell us why nobody seems to care when Asian people get attacked.
    Opinion | We Need to Put a Name to This Violence - The New York Times
  • But the answers to the question “Why does nobody care?” has unearthed a series of contradictions that always lurked right beneath the surface, unmentioned in polite company: We are not white, but do we count as “people of color”? (Not according to the newer literature around school equity, which increasingly doesn’t include Asians when discussing diversity.) When people say “Black and brown folk” do they also mean yellow? (Probably not.)
    Opinion | We Need to Put a Name to This Violence - The New York Times
  • And there are writers who argue that Asian-Americans fall outside the accepted discourse about race in this country — that there’s just no available language to discuss bad things that might happen to them.
    Opinion | We Need to Put a Name to This Violence - The New York Times
  • Perhaps that’s the only way out — to paint the picture of our parents before our memories of ourselves arrive; to show them as strangers to us, before the context settled in. And if we can strip them down and see them without the weight of identity and its spiraling neuroses, perhaps we can also see a better version of ourselves.
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
  • This, of course, did not mean our lives were free from prejudice, but rather that part of the immigrant optimism about the new country comes out of a deep unfamiliarity with the subtle ways people let it be known that the immigrants’ dreams aren’t particularly welcome. We children are aware of all this, of course, because we are American.
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
  • And Chung’s light touch in these scenes, without the tears or hysterics, resembles the way so many new immigrants experience racism. Often, you might not even know it’s happening. And even if you do, you lack the time and the context to turn it into a crying matter.
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
  • “We, the second generation, are pretty indoctrinated,” Yeun told me. “The American gaze is also part of us, where we remember our parents, and collectively talk about our parents in the ways that we saw them from our vantage point.”
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
  • I witnessed his frustrations, of course, but I can only see them today through an inoculating hindsight that tells me that while our situation might have presented us with difficulties, our struggles matter less than other struggles.
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
  • “Sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you,” Yeun said.
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
  • Or do you try your best to document the neuroses because you feel them within yourself — and while you understand that there are certainly worse forms of oppression in this country, there’s some personal or, perhaps, therapeutic value in expressing yourself in front of an audience? But who is the audience? And is there any real value to the narcissistic self-expression of an upwardly mobile immigrant who has nothing else to worry about?
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
  • There’s something I’ve realized over the past decade of writing about race and Asian immigrants. Not everybody cares about our obsessing over belonging and not-belonging and displacement.
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun
  • What, exactly, is a typical immigrant story? And is the transcription of a person’s traumas and “truth” — which in literary terms usually means explaining all the nuances of the immigrant struggle to a presumed white, upper-middle-class audience — the only thing that qualifies as “literature”? And if not, what then clears the bar? And if you consciously try to write the exact sort of work that might appeal to serious literary types, aren’t you just tap dancing for those who never wanted you around in the first place?
    The Many Lives of Steven Yeun