A brilliant piece of literary criticism for a novelette I loved and am looking forward to the next installment of. As a metaphor for acculturation into empire, this works almost too well. You can walk in the halls of empire, yes, as long as you're willing to accept invasive alien tentacles into your mind, to put alien needs above your own, to allow yourself to be instrumentalized.

The ability to use “white” to mean “middle-class” to such an overwhelming extent that you actually start to misidentify people—all so that race itself, not class or background or culture or manner, can still remain the difference, the Other. There’s an odd habit here.

On Katy Perry covering ‘N***** in Paris’. The dumb, tee-hee transgression of saying the edited-for-television version sort of obscures what’s interesting and daring about this performance, which is that under the guise of tribute/ironic cover tune (it feels about half-and-half) it’s a girl refusing to let this song’s imaginary world of swinging-dick privilege be off-limits to her. But that’s all that’s happening here; she puts the word on like a piece of borrowed jewelry and parades in front of the mirror.