Adrian West

Jan 6, 2025 | thebaffler.com | Adrian West |Rafia Zakaria |Jessa Crispin

One in a thousand people has six toes or fingers. Twenty-six percent of young people lack a gag reflex. And about two in seven dudes, according to my own research as a participant observer, will say something skeevy about women in exclusively male company. Case in point: a recent Saturday after jiujitsu practice, when a panting and sweaty group of guys, some regulars and some newcomers, were gathered at the edge of the mat getting to know each other.

Nov 24, 2024 | nybooks.com | Adrian West

In Spain, the centuries have tended to overlap rather than to glide past in smooth succession. The subject of Velázquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs, painted in 1618, would hardly have changed her dress or used different utensils had she lived two or three hundred years later. In the 1950s, at a construction site in Leon, the engineer and novelist Juan Benet recalled a horse trader teaching him the old trick of pouring oil into a recalcitrant donkey’s ear to drive it uphill with its burden.

Nov 20, 2024 | unherd.com | Adrian West

America is the greatest democracy in the world: a place where an incoherent system of contradictory beliefs has produced an equally incoherent politics. In the irrational ferment of what it may be best to call simply the thing that happened — the confluence of Trump and QAnon, the pandemic, Defund the Police, moral panics about gender and migrant caravans, and so on — Americans became inured, in a way rarely before seen, to the spectre of the counterintuitive miracle.

Nov 11, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Adrian West

Politics—and electoral politics most flagrantly—is the projection of the illusion of competence onto the illusion of understanding. Its field of concern is what are called “issues,” a large part of which comprises the aspects of a society it refuses to recognize as its own and that it tells itself it can ameliorate without changing its most basic nature.

Oct 24, 2024 | shepherd.com | Robert Bringhurst |Jung Chang |Benjamin Labatut |Adrian West

Myfavorite read in 2024A polyphonic multilayered book. It describes Haida oral literature; it tells the story of the Haida people of the pacific Northwest; and how their works were retold by a US anthropologist in his 190-1901 fieldwork. At one and the same time an excavation of a colonial encounter, a literary study and an anthological detective story. The Haida stories are magical., disturbing and weird. Impossible to classify and difficult to put down.