“They messed with the wrong city,” mystery author Dennis Lehane wrote in the New York Times following the bombings, and the sentiment traveled quickly, coloring the more popular reactions to the crime. Alongside this blinkered view, sports references proliferated: according to The Atlantic, a publication far-removed from its Transcendentalist roots in both sentiment and location, sports “rally” the city and tragedy “often show us how powerful sports can be.” The President, too, couldn’t resist invoking “the Sox and Celtics and Patriots [and] Bruins” in his April 18th address. Even Brooklyn loves us, if only momentarily: the popular “New York Hearts Boston” light installation projected on the Brooklyn Academy of Music used Yankee and Red Sox logos and fonts in lieu of city names. But a certain kind of flag-waving jingoism too often goes hand-in-hand with sporting events, and, in our national rush to condemn Tsarnaev and support Boston, we as a city and a country threaten to forget our democratic ideals.

I live in Cambridge. 410 Norfolk Street, where the Tsarnaevs lived and stored their explosives, is mere blocks from my apartment. I was in downtown Boston the day the bombings happened; the next morning, soldiers searched my handbag in the Central Square T station as over the loud speakers my fellow passengers and I were warned that “now more than ever, if you see something, say something.” A certain Orwellian suspicion pervaded the city, and though I tried to brush my fears off as mere paranoia, I now question whether this was unfounded. No doubt about it: Tsarnaev should be tried for his crimes. But he should also be tried fairly. Sentiments such as those expressed by Senator Lindsey Graham, calling for Tsarnaev to be tried as an “enemy combatant,” play into this atmosphere of general distrust, in which any neighbor, no matter how homegrown, might be a terrorist, an other, a foreign entity. Surprise! – And with that, it becomes that much easier to suspend civil liberties to all Americans, not just criminals. If groupthink and revenge are the order of the day, perhaps we have indeed become the “wrong city” – an immoral one.

Sure, sports hold an important place in Boston’s heart. I’ve seen enough Bruins paraphernalia on my morning commute to convince me of this fact. But we as a city are so much more, culturally, intellectually, and morally. Increasingly, this is not about Tsarnaev, who will now, to Senator Graham’s chagrin, be tried in a civilian court, but how far we are willing to sacrifice the rights of the American public in order to guard ourselves against terrorism – in this case, a threat that the FBI may have been aware of as early as 2011. Rather than collectively justifying our anger through the assuage of corporate sports teams, where strength overrides intelligence and make-believe rivalries are crucial, perhaps we should remember other famous Bostonians, such as founding father and lawmaker John Adams or the poet and pacifist Robert Lowell. Perhaps, too, it would be useful to remember Ralph Waldo Emerson, another native son, and his belief in concord: “Peace,” he wrote, “cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.”

. . .

I approached How Should A Person Be? eagerly and ended it disappointed. What I wanted – and perhaps this was my fault – was an honest account of the relationships between women artists, and women artists and male artists, and men and women; for the heterosexual amongst us, how to balance the simultaneous sense of competition and companionship that arises. Essentially: I wanted a handbook, or at least an exploration, of the odd overlap of self-consciousness and self-awareness that seems to characterize so many of my interactions with the men of my age group. On an individual level, we are all feminists, we are all equals; as a group, as two distinct groups – men and women – we have over a millennia of inequalities and expectations with which to contend.

HSAPB? avoids these questions in favor of naked attention-grabbing in the form of pseudo-confessionalism. I say “pseudo” because there is nothing particularly dangerous about the kind of confessionalism that Heti engages in, which is the equivalent of the drunk girl at the party talking loudly about her blowjob skills.

READ MORE AT CASE MAGAZINE

American feminism, in all its various waves and iterations, has long held an uneasy truce with pop culture, but these days it’s us, not them, that are doing the co-opting. The era of de-fanged riot grrls and empty invocations of “girl power” has come to a close; in its place, the third wave’s relationship with mainstream pop culture, particularly pop music, is that of fawning adulation – or Stockholm Syndrome. “Subversion,” a term borrowed from the ivory tower, is now ascribed to every female singer with a 4/4 beat and a hook about drinking, though it is in the context of one figure that this particular hypocrisy stands out the most: the oft-mentioned Lady Gaga. As a twenty-two year old woman – a member of the exact demographic that so many older third wavers try to pander to – I fail to see anything revolutionary about a thin, blonde, upper middle class white woman with a penchant for ripping off Madonna (herself an earlier example of this trend.) But don’t tell this to Jezebel. Don’t tell this to Salon. And whatever you do, don’t tell this to the theorist J. Jack Halberstam, author of the recent Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal.

READ MORE AT CASE MAGAZINE.

- But it was never really about “you,” was it?

A pox upon the second person, the point of view seemingly favored by so many Millennial bloggers – or perhaps simply promoted in particular by one blog, a purported voice of the Millennials. I am talking, irritatingly enough, of Thought Catalog, a blog that likes to think of itself as “in some small way…the future of journalism,” though if meandering personal accounts of breaking up with one’s college girlfriend or top ten lists liberally peppered with the word “twentysomething” are the genre’s future, maybe it really is time to let it die. No matter: for a true dose of narcissism, check out any of the posts that use the second person, that mark of self-obsession disguised as authorial immediacy.

READ MORE AT CASE MAGAZINE.

Summertime, and I spend my days working in a museum located in downtown Boston. Over the months, I learn how to count a cash drawer, teach Italians the meaning of a state sales tax, and struggle with how exactly to break the news that the Old Corner Bookstore is no more.

“Well?” The older couple across the counter brandish their map and press on, looking expectantly at first me and then my manager, to whom I have turned for help.

My manager grimaces. “You’re not going to like the answer.”

READ MORE AT THE MILLIONS.

Half-awake. I am trying not to fall asleep. I am trying not to drift away. I am trying not to fall asleep. I do not want to dream.

Late nights. Though I do not want to sleep, I wish that I could fall. Instead of falling I am watching: Youtube flickers out across my screen, a link and then another link, and this is a different sort of descent. I love the sidebar; I love the element of chance, the die roll that accompanies every blue-lit sentence. Lying in my bed alone at night I put off sleep, push off dream: I want to read, and watch, and learn.

The Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is dead. He died at sea; a victim of the wind. Of water. There is a kind of purity to his videos, his art: his falling. Empty air, and then the space is filled.

Breaking.

In his most famous series, he films himself falling. From his roof, from his bike, from a tree – there is no resistance, no rethinking. The pretense of control is discarded, and instead the inevitability of gravity takes hold. All ego vanishes. Sometimes, a body is simply that: a body.

To fall – metaphorically, literally – is to force oneself to enter a moment of vulnerability.

Nighttime. I wish that I could fall.

The fur found its way studded through my fingertips.

There was a cry. In the corner of the room stood the crib. In the corner of the crib lay the baby. Red was the mouth and stubbed were the teeth; the child cried louder, louder still. Nothing, said the mother; the mother said nothing. A beautiful baby. A child, a beautiful child -
The baby, that was me.
The mother, that was me.
Sometimes it is difficult to remember the difference between the child and the wolf.

Tell me that you believe me. Tell me that you know that I remember nothing – that I did nothing – was nothing: a void. Years ago – too many years, the days of teeth, the days of fur, the days in which I was a girl – once, I desired only space, and room to grow. Now? Now I am content to be only the air, invisible as glass, transparent as a sieve.

Pass through me.

Immediately I felt ashamed. This is not a helpful response, I chided myself – women are assaulted and hurt on your alma mater’s campus, too; there are plenty of kind-hearted, feminist men that attend Amherst. I took three classes at Amherst during my time in the Pioneer Valley, and served as editor-in-chief for a Five College literary journal I co-founded. A good portion of my life, in short, was willingly spent across the river, or passing time on the B43. And yet: when I think of Amherst, and when I think of co-ed schools on the whole, I cannot help but remember the male student junior year who told me that he thought Adrienne Rich was “silly.” That for a woman to be concerned that her voice would not be heard, that her work would be dismissed on account of her gender – well, we all live in the twenty-first century nowadays, don’t we? Times have changed. Women who talk of being women – oh, we are silly.

Silly.

The word stung. I didn’t quite know what to say. For the rest of the class I defended Rich’s words, and my professor backed me up – this shut the student up. But I did not feel triumphant. I did not feel secure. I retreated to my campus, disturbed and yet also relieved – I was not crazy. These feelings existed. When I returned to Amherst two days later I felt keenly aware of the fact that I was a woman, and that the school, upon its founding, was not meant for me.

We express our politics through our choices. I chose to attend a women’s college, a decision that occasionally drove me crazy during the midst of it but that which today I look back on with enormous gratitude. A part of me thinks that every woman should go to a women’s college; a part of me thinks that men would benefit from a single-sex atmosphere, too. Another part of me wonders if that is simply avoiding the problem. Then I think of my classrooms, my lectures and my seminars and my time tempered by books: no one ever called me silly.

Enough of thinking, enough with thought: the end of words. Why is the red line always deafening towards Boston, never away? I sit on the train on my way to work and I listen. A deluge of information: two girls discuss the Emmys, a mother coos at her infant son. Smart phones everywhere. Enough! On go the headphones, and on my iPod I listen to one album and one album only: the Goldberg Variations, recorded nineteen fifty-five, and played by the pianist Glenn Gould.

Like every classical novice I approach the music with all the wonder of an enfant sauvage. Without the clutter of words and the strain of their distraction, my reactions turn emotive. What is this key, what is this notation – da capo al fine, da capo al coda – it doesn’t matter. The music is not in front of me; thank God. I am not creating; I am listening. I am the audience, and so I am the receiver: in my innocence the listening experience turns bodily. Listening, lacking the self-consciousness of creation, requires only a sieve-like concentration: I sit and I absorb. I observe: in my ears, a private world, and outside of them, all the rest. Who cares. There is no action needed, no interpretation necessary.

Glenn Gould was a genius. His mastery was such as to be ubiquitous; those in tune with the classical music world are undoubtedly rolling their eyes at my discovery, so well-known and well-regarded is he. For the rest of us: a documentary on Netflix (Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould), an art film on the same (32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.) He was a Canadian and an eccentric; this is how we like our artists. It makes them easier to understand – an idea to be pinned down rather than a living, breathing human being. Gould sang as he played, sat on a special wooden stool, and wore wool gloves even in the summer.

But artists are not butterflies. Gould, at surface level, is easy to categorize: the odd youthful genius who grows odder still with age. But when I listen to the music I forget. When I listen I dissolve. I tune out, in a sense – a terrible turn of phrase, with all its implications of ignorance. When I listen to Gould play Bach I am paying attention, and yet I am also not: I am blissfully detached.

The performative arts exist, in a sense, wholly separate from the literary. While literature relies on the interpretation of the world, music and dance exist as an absorption – an emotion. This is why I can listen and engage and yet also emerge without a thought in my head beyond the self-knowledge of the feeling. I do not categorize – I do not analyze – I do not make sense of the world. Rather, I enjoy it.

I got a Facebook account in the early spring of 2007, my junior year of high school. This was big news in the halcyon early days of the post-Myspace era; previously, Facebook had been the domain of college kids, a rite of passage obtained as soon as the eager high school senior received his or her hotly-anticipated “.edu.” On behalf of my peers, sorry: with the influx of under-eighteens, Facebook became annoying in a whole new way. But there was still a level of privacy, a mark of secrecy that was extinguished as soon as it opened up to anyone over the age of thirteen, and the decidedly over-thirteens signed up in droves; suddenly, my peers and I were confronted with the peculiarly generational problem of etiquette in the face of the dreaded mom-request.

At first, I didn’t quite know what to do – accept? Deny? – And risk offense? My solution was to accept – first the “hip” relatives, then the teachers interested in how their former pupils were now doing, and then finally anyone who could prove any sort of personal connection to me – but I did this with the private caveat that I would not censor myself, that whoever was so desperate to connect with me over the digital ether would have to take me as I was, warts and all. But I didn’t have much to worry about; by the time I got to college, the purpose of Facebook had changed, and turned professional.

Gone was the youthful danger that Facebook once promised. “Isn’t it weird?” an old roommate asked early in the summer, reflecting back on this transition. “The stuff we’d post on each other’s walls – we’d just openly talk about drugs and alcohol and whatever. Everyone had a party album – that was what Facebook was for.” No one on my feed posts party albums, at least not the kind of 2 a.m. bacchanals that have since moved to other, less open social networks. Nowadays, Facebook maintains an air of best foot forward-optimism, an ambition-fueled innocence that leads to statuses filled with post-graduate humble brags and earnest political campaigning in the guise of AlterNet and Huffington Post link spam. (What are the trending stories for Republicans, I always wonder.) Save the dark moments, the late night moments, for the anonymity of Tumblr, that neurotic’s mirror of worried self-obsession. On Facebook, the narcissism has turned benign, even cheerful.

Enthusiasm, too, is the marker that divides the Facebook old from the Facebook young. Even in a post as mundanely informative as a simple news link, the difference between the Internet-native and the Internet-immigrant remains clear. The Millennial will pull a brief quote from the article in question and add a short affirmation at its end, a “YES,” a “good point,” a “fuck yeah!” Not true for their father, mother, grandparent: the pull-quotes are long, the commentary rambling. Sometimes when I look at my Facebook feed I feel like I’m looking at an onslaught of early-stage dementia: are these people really related to me? Do they blather on this much in real life, tacking on four paragraphs of opinion to a three-sentence news clip? And then I remember: oh, right. They don’t really get how the Internet works.

This might be the most salient realization, the sign that one either does or doesn’t really understand the function of an Internet persona: live-blogging on the Internet isn’t really live-blogging, unless the participant is in the midst of a nervous breakdown – and then it’s entertainment. I’m kidding, mostly; it’s true, though, that the self of the social media is the perfectly-crafted self. It is the product of editing: how many minutes have I passed in front of my computer screen, staring and re-reading each status, tweet, Tumblr post – is it witty enough, self-deprecating enough, wryly intelligent enough for my audience of liberal arts lit geeks? Know thy audience: unless the Millennial is drunk, everything that he or she writes will be self-edited.

The non-natives don’t always quite get this, and the results are the predictable mix of adorable and exasperating, overwrought and over-punctuated enough to truly earn our affectionate eye rolls and serious sighs of loving condescension. Perfectly respectable lawyers, journalists, and school teachers on my feed become wide-eyed innocents when faced with the challenge of a Facebook status update. “Is it just me, or…??” Yes, yes, it is always just you. Now let me introduce you to the first rule of the Internet…

Our parents’ reactions to the Internet are for the most part funny and for the most part harmless, except when they’re not. Since graduating, I’ve suddenly realized that most of my relatives tend to view our generation as essentially only good for updating Twitter. The self-service aspect of social media is indeed integral to the technology’s image of itself, but that’s certainly not all that it’s good for, and to believe that is to believe in a sadly-limited vision of the intellectual capabilities of the Internet era. My favorite Twitter, for instance, belongs to Open Culture, a website that links to free and open-source cultural and educational medias all day, every day. Open Culture, and sites like it, offer an alternative to the demurely capitalist image of success as self-interest promoted by so many of our elders’ thoughts concerning social media. No wonder industries such as journalism are supposedly dying if all they have to offer are top ten lists; the popularity of sites such as Longform and Longreads prove that what people want is information, not content.

Today we are entrenched in Web 2.0; what will Web 3.0 have to bring? Someday my own children will be laughing at me – but what will their Internet be? Anarchy and cat videos, I hope – and great ideas fermenting amidst the connective freedom of the Web. If we rely on Facebook, on Twitter, on Tumblr, on whatever future iterations of social media that the Internet will bring as merely mirrors of our own achievements, rather than the means by which to educate ourselves and others, than by 2020 even Maru might have a LinkedIn.