Archive for October, 2020

“How could the person who promises a secret to a ghost still dare say he is a historian?” —Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” On her first work trip to…

Severance is so fun — and funny — that it’s easy to overlook how much it’s also about sustained, ongoing, and eminently ordinary loss. This fact is surprising given the…

[P]erhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past. -Bob, in Ling…

The start of COVID-19 also marked a return to Ling Ma’s 2018 Severance — a historical novel set in the recent past, in which a deadly virus originating from China…

Candace Chen recognizes the photograph immediately. It’s one of the best-known portraits from Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980-1986), and its two figures are drenched in a yellow-orange…

“After the End came the Beginning.”1 So starts Ling Ma’s Severance. But before the End came a party in New York City. In the summer of 2006, before the viral…

On April 19, 2020, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, Kelly Davio tweeted, “What zombie movies got wrong about the actual apocalypse, part 1,487: they…

I can trace the beginning of the end to March 9. On that date, I started receiving last-gasp emails from retail stores that had me on record as a customer….

There’s a moment in Severance, before the beginning of the end, when Candace Chen finds herself crying on the fire escape of her East Village apartment. It’s an in-between moment,…

Shortly after the US began its waves of lockdowns, academics took to Twitter to scold one another about working. “Productivity in a crisis,” in Summer Kim Lee’s characterization of leftist…