Is it really that bad? You know, and so there's this like militarized uncertainty machine that's being directed at us and our peers and our friends and various vulnerable communities. fight against that. At the same time, one wants to create all kinds of interesting space for uncertainty that exists within all of us, right? And that we want to give voice to. And that that kind of like first person project that you were talking about, Patrick, is to some extent also is designed to occlude, right? Because a lot of, like, obviously we publish a lot of first person writing. We're very interested in it. But when we talk about the kind of memoir industrial complex i think that like one of the things we're talking about is a kind is an absence of journey you know between this the beginning and the end right it's like not only are lessons not learned or not only are the lessons so kind of like cliched and stylized as to be not non-lessons at all. We're just like, there's not that sort of first person does not do what you want the first person to do is just to really kind of ask itself serious questions, right? So we sort of, we publish a lot of stuff that superficially is quite similar. You know, it's memoir. It's kind of like creative nonfiction to use a term I don't really like. But ultimately, I think we're in a very different business because our goal is not to kind of like manufacture that kind of sort of self-certainty, but really to create space for discomfort and that then we can hopefully help the writer out of or through or, or avoid, you know, avoid, what we really want to avoid is a, is a kind of discomfort that then makes its way all the way to publication. And suddenly that writer is like besieged, which happens a lot with the most kind of like certainty voiced kinds of first person writing, you know, right. Somebody will write something and they, they're like, my colloquial is a great, uh, you know, whatever model for society. And like, and also I like killed my cat and I love that. And I'm so certain about it. I have no hesitation. And suddenly like everyone is up in arms and the writer is really in a very, very vulnerable position. That's the kind of thing that we want to avoid too. And so the more that we can kind of think through it together in the process of editing, the way that we can kind of like locate, you know, like what's the most vulnerable thing? What's too vulnerable to actually put on the page? What's the relationship between certainty and uncertainty here? That feels like kind of very like a constituent part of the project.

Yeah. And one that I think certain political struggles stop in their tracks. I think I've been thinking a lot about this kind of emergent style that I, that I've been noticing, like unconsciously noticing in Unplus One since, since October 7th, which is this sort of extremely straightforward kind of record keeping, ultra chronological mode, always like about the genocide. The sort of, the big example, I think, is this piece by this writer, Rosina Ali, who put together a list of quoted superlatives she'd read in the media about the genocide and the sort of rising death toll. It, you know, in another context, I think could read as a sort of like creative nonfiction prose poem experiment. But in fact, I think in its political context, just feels like the most straightforward, sort of almost non-analytical kind of writing there is. And I think that, you know, that's a really marked difference from our usual style of having pieces ask questions. Maybe sometimes they resolve them off and they don't. But I think when it's come to the genocide, which I think is like a sort of, you know, has produced a lot of facile uncertainty on the part of, you know, like liberal Zionists, I think we've been particularly interested and our contributors have been interested too in basically not letting that sort of uncertainty in because I think it's a really weaponized kind of uncertainty that opens up nothing good.

Just to say, as with the Iraq war at the founding of the magazine, we were never going to, the founding editors were never going to publish a piece in, you know, whatever, tentative defense of the Iraq war because there had been some kind of upside, right? That was just, it was a line that was clearly drawn. It was like a foundational line drawn. And there are certain occasions that call for a similar, that call for like a similar intensity. And yeah, for us kind of unambiguously, the genocide is one of them. I'm

thinking so much about this. Yeah. And about, about what you were just saying about this, this is the recent work that sort of tracks what's happening. Like we're literally, really logging body counts or like being, I'm, by God, forgive me. I completely forgot the author, but there's a piece, this is. The

Sarimak DC pieces have had this quality too, I think. Yes,

that's what I was like. Yeah. There's, and these are like very almost clinical statements of these are the technologies that we're seeing deployed. This is what they're going to do. It really is a, it's bracing in its clarity and sort of grounding. And it's so vital to have that because what I'm also trying to think about here is the way in which like uncertainty is both like cultivated and then or manufactured in certain ways. It's uncertainty coming and going, right? In the sense that it's like, and how that relates to, again, tracking. Well, forgive me. I don't want to be too glib about this. between this is the same old horrible shit, or this is a radically new thing, or this is an intensification in the thing that even though it is a intensification of this ongoing longstanding thing still represents a significant transformation or acceleration or whatever it is, it's an intensification that may be a change in degree that becomes a change in kind, right? And so much of what passes for opinion making or opinion production, or even just like, you know, straight journalistic reportage seems to be all about like, here is a thing in the world that is making you feel a little uncomfortable, right? There's an event that's happening out there that you're going to have some difficulty metabolizing. We're going to, through just the right combination, depending on, you know, how high, middle, or low the brow is sort of like being pitched at here, the audience is sort of constructed by this. I'm not actually selling people in these categories. It's about like creating a readership. We're going to either reassure you that this was always what you thought it was, or we're going to bring some new terms to be like, well, actually, like, here's a, you know, we're going to like, we're going to black swan freaking omics it a little bit, but don't worry. Now you're going to get to feeling a little more certain about it again. Or you're going to be like, oh yeah, this conflicts in that ancient land truly have been ancient. It's just enough discomfort, just enough sense that maybe you're learning something or that you're feeling flattered in your tolerance or what you perceive to be your tolerance a capacity to like deal with complexity or uncertainty or emotional or moral distress and it's so like hard to to pitch the value in some ways of like no like apart from obviously it's morally imperative right like dragon genocide right it's importantly to stop the genocide but like to simply to like to work against like the category error of like people being like, I just want to be reassured about something. Like I'm having like a moral tummy ache with my coffee. Can you please, in the time in which it takes for the coffee to kick in. Yeah. Like just give me like a, like a spiritual tums or something, right. Just enough that I can like keep going. And it, it is striking going back to like these questions, like what institutions do their entire outlets, right? That seem to produce like reliably, there will be a take there to do this thing, right? There is going to be some, I hate to do this, but it's true. After 20 years, like I feel comfortable saying this, like our 30 years of reading, like there's going to be some guy at the Atlantic who's like, don't worry, I'm like a liberal college professor, but all of us hate immigrants too, right? Or like, don't worry, I'm here to tell you that this is all, if you were starting to question your own intellectual presuppositions, don't worry. Here's someone from central casting who's with just a frisson of difference enough to let you know it's okay to think what you always did. And that's, I mean, it goes against the grain of financial incentives or of like emotional parsimony to be like, no, maybe actually we should really track this genocide that's happening, right? Because in order to acknowledge that it's happening, you then have to do something about it. But just to tie one other thing here, because I think this is something that came up that, in what you were just saying, Mark, I don't know if I told you about this at the time, but after writing one of the Trump pieces that we did, which is sort of about this problem, right? This is actually, I think, right after the inauguration, it was like trying to think about, like, people were already calling him a fascist, right? And like, what does it mean to have a fascism that is, you know, not related to something like, you know, collective experience in the trenches, right? It's not a, he may have Mussolini-esque characteristics as a person, but we don't live in like the trenchocracy or whatever, you know, he called post-fascist Italy, right? Or how do we deal with the fact that there aren't mass mobilized paramilitaries and instead of stochastic environment, et cetera, right? And so I sort of like work through these things. I'm like, this is a sui generis fascism. If we want to use a term, it has certain features, but also it harnesses the american militarism sort of continual and our civic religions continual fascist overtones right i got an email from somebody and they got themes here certainty uncertainty like being bothered not wanting to be bothered by a guy and i looked it up i forget specifically which institution it was but he was like i retired from the cia last year after 40 years of proud service. I think it was your CIA or Naval Intelligence with an extended- I don't

think it was the CIA. I think it was a different intelligence agency. I remember this. It was not on the Jonathan Safran Foer account. No, no,

no. This guy was a straight up like, I've been following him. Even when posted in Beirut, I've been following all the inauguration speeches of every president since. And if you think Donald Trump is some kind of fascist, well, then you'd obviously have to say that about Ronald Reagan too, wouldn't you? What a joke. And that was the end of it, right? And again, it was like, there was so much going on there, right? One, which is like this- A rich text. One of the things I always love online, where it's like, someone will be like, I can't believe you just waste, oh, this is all gibberish. This is such bullshit, right? No one understands what you're saying here. Where it's like, well, no, clearly you understood it enough or something in it was bothersome enough to you that you felt like an impulsion, like a need to go out publicly and be like, I have no idea what you were talking about in this kind of way that protests too much. Right. And I'm like, why do people do that? It feels very like reflexively symptomatic, but coming from this guy and I'm like, I mean, maybe he was just trying to fuck with me or whatever, but on another level, I'm like, what if we can think about the american yes for the record i would say ronald reagan was super fascist in all sorts of ways but also i would ask us to think about the fascist dimensions of the american project particularly after 1945 and all the more so once you know win the cold war while also being able to think sort of toggle flexibly to maybe this trump guy is fascist in a unique way and that maybe there's a synergy between those two that is bad. And that we can kind of like, without being like, yes, he is a fascist check or like, no, he is not a fascist check. Or let's spend forever debating whether or not he's a pure fascist of some variety. We can like think about these things simultaneously and deal with how uncomfortable it makes us feel. But then at least we could do something about it or envision something different.