Category: Culture

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11265 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-10-29 23:43:13 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-10-29 23:43:13 [post_content] =>

A fun and feminist debut horror novel that's equal parts delectable and disgusting.

From the moment I picked up a copy of the one-of-a-kind Carrying, I had a feeling it would be equal parts gaudy, sincere, and gross: The debut novel’s neon green cover is taken up by a perfectly plump roast chicken, its legs splayed, an egg cradled between them, almost like an invitation. To what, exactly, I couldn’t yet know.

After finishing it, I wasn’t surprised to learn its author Samantha Josephs is passionate about cooking and baking. “I own a blowtorch for crème brûlée and a cast iron weight to get the perfect sear. I’m not messing around,” she declared in a recent interview. In her novel, Josephs takes that love of food and channels it into her main character, Martha, an all-American fantasy of the beautiful, doting, husband-pleasing housewife. “I wanted to turn that on its head and write about something disgusting that’s somehow completely delicious,” Josephs said.

Carrying may be delicious to the reader, but not to poor Martha. Only a few pages in, we find out her life is less than picture-perfect: Her husband and teenage step-daughter have no idea that she is trans. She is deeply insecure, obsessed with her image and with keeping up with the Joneses. Afraid that her husband Leon will leave her (or worse) if he finds out she isn’t biologically female, Martha feigns a miscarriage and pretends to get her period month after month. She also knows she can’t conceive the child Leon desperately wants, so when her husband asks her to consider a fertility clinic, she plays along and appeases him, enlisting the help of her longtime friend Roger, who also happens to be her gynecologist and the only person who knows the truth.

Martha is precariously navigating this increasingly complex web when she starts getting sick, feeling sluggish, and acting moody, until one day—surprise!—she finds out she is pregnant. Leon is thrilled, yet Martha refuses to believe it until Roger confirms it is, indeed, a medical miracle. What’s even more surprising is when Martha discovers that the only thing that seems to keep her from feeling nauseous is a strange diet of rotting meat. By day, she continues cooking perfect meals for her family; by night, she drives around the empty streets of Los Angeles, looking for her next hit.

The anxieties in Martha’s story start early on—long before we find out she is carrying or trans. At times, they are painfully funny: “She’d give anything to be completely content wrinkled like a walrus, bramble-bush tangled mane, flab flying wildly in the wind.” For the most part, though, Martha’s internal dialogue is just plain painful. “Martha feels zero guilt for waiters, coworkers, friends, strangers, anyone else, assuming she’s a cis woman—that’s the entire point. She does not want to live life on the margins, forever, marked by some cruel joke at birth. By passing, she undoes her own monstrosity. Nobody looks at her differently, as less than, as a perverted freak, as something to spread scary stories about,” Josephs writes.

In a sense, Martha is a symbol for all women; for anyone who has existed in a female-identifying body seeking male approval. What else can we call the pressure to be conventionally feminine, to keep up with beauty standards, if not horror? What about the financial and emotional dependence on a spouse, the feelings of jealousy for one’s imaginary competition, the awareness of being seen as little more than a vessel?

For every patriarchal monstrosity experienced by cis women, the stakes are always multiple times worse for our trans counterparts. “Passing is seen as the goal by many trans women, not just for being seen as who you are, but also that it may promise freedom from the hardships of trans life,” said Josephs, who is also trans, in an interview. A semi-retired drag queen-turned-writer of podcasts, video games, and erotica, Josephs infuses her main character’s past with much of her own. “As I’ve experienced it myself, I’ve found that passing is also completely stressful and anxiety inducing. While it was hard before when I didn’t pass to not be seen for who I am, there is a new stress in passing and fearing that people will find out.”

Likewise, the better Martha gets at passing, the more she is afraid of being found out. Her perfect body has a creature growing inside of it, as an undiagnosed chronic illness takes hold, further transforming her body in ways out of her control. Experts on transgender medicine examine her, unbeknownst to her family: “Martha gets poked, prodded, and probed. They take samples of her blood, urine, feces, sweat, mucus, throat, hair, and vaginal discharge… She feels like a two-headed calf, groped and gawked at under a microscope,” Josephs writes. She also (secretly) seeks out alternative treatments for her undiagnosable illness, which her husband believes to be morning sickness; and increasingly indulges in her bizarre and outright disgusting cravings until all of it is too much to bear. Her seemingly perfect life unravels.

Carrying may be fiction—a particular kind of surrealist horror—yet it is also the stuff of study and analysis, and deeply rooted in reality. In 2019, Spanish trans philosopher and writer, Paul B. Preciado, wrote about the experimental nature of trans bodies, for better and worse, and about the right to their reproduction in his chronicle of his own crossing, An Apartment on Uranus. “Until now, we have paid for our gender, sexual and bodily dissidence with the genetic silence of our chromosomes. We have not just been deprived of the transmission of economic patrimony: our genetic patrimony has also been confiscated. Homosexuals, transsexuals, and bodies regarded as ‘handicapped,’ we have been politically sterilized or else we have been forced to reproduce with heterosexual techniques. The present battle to extend MAP (Medically Assisted Procreation) to non-heterosexual bodies is a political and economic war to depathologize our forms of life and to maintain control of our reproductive cells.”

Martha is as complex a character as any in literature. Like Madame Bovary, she is facing the realities of what it means to be a woman. The costs of becoming a mother, too, are excruciating, yet with the help of medicine and technology, she is able to reinvent herself into a life that’s equal parts fairy tale and horror movie. She is a human beset by the pressures of late stage capitalism, living beyond its structures of gender and power in all their messy glory. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that only the reader—and not Martha herself—get the privilege to see it.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Carrying" by Samantha Josephs [post_excerpt] => A fun and feminist debut horror novel that's equal parts delectable and disgusting. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-carrying-samantha-josephs-debut-novel-trans-motherhood-horror-recommendations-botm [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-10-29 23:43:15 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-10-29 23:43:15 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11265 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 29, 2026October 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “Carrying” by Samantha Josephs

by Ruxandra Guidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11228 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-10-28 00:44:33 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-10-28 00:44:33 [post_content] =>

Some spooky seasonal appreciation for Ahmed Saadawi’s "Frankenstein in Baghdad."

Who alive on this Earth needs to deliberately seek out a fright? Horrors persist in great abundance throughout news outlets and social media feeds. One might think it obscene to pay over $20 and sit through a Nicole Kidman monologue to be spooked. Or to spend $30 or more on a hardcover Stephen King reissue. However, like brains to a roving pack of zombies, bad times are the foodstuff of horror. Its popularity spikes during recessions, wars, and other global crises by creating a space into which the audience can safely project its worst fears. Horror, as a genre, has the distinction of being both allegorical and metonymic, which is a pretentious way of saying that its themes and plots play out the deep-seated fears and anxieties that shoot through our societies, thus enabling the viewer or reader to be gripped by the drama of said fear—all while remaining far from any real danger. Paradoxically, this process is soothing; its psychological effect is said to be akin to the thrill of a roller coaster ride. But, I write this not long after a 42-year-old man was fatally ejected from one in Georgia, which, to me, is an apt metaphor for what consuming fictional horror feels like in 2026.

Horror allegorizes problems; it sorts problems; it describes problems; it plays out problems. What it does not do is solve them, and this intractability is the main theme of the most gripping book of horror I have read as an adult. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is a triumph of the genre, but it is also one where the monster, if allegorical, is also very real. Set in 2005 in the depths of chaos and terror of the US invasion of Iraq, Frankenstein in Baghdad gives us no scientist striving to know the nature of the human soul, toying with fate, daring to play God. Its creature—known as Whatsitsname—is likewise not a science experiment, but a metonymic tour guide through a sort of magical realist house of horrors—the sort of inane horrors that could only ensue from an American invasion in the name of “democracy.” (Here, we might pause to note that the acknowledged masterpiece of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, was also inspired by a US-backed atrocity.) The fright is not merely a fun spook on the pages, but rather a stand-in for death, rage, tribalism, pain, gore, and the absurdities of fate.

Published nearly 200 years prior, Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein was subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” after the Greek myth about the god who, punished for giving fire to humans, was tied to a mountainside, doomed to have his liver devoured by raptors each day. The Greeks knew the liver regenerates, so accordingly this punishment would be eternal: Prometheus’ liver regrew every night. (A fair bit of body horror!) Sadaawi’s book, on the other hand, begins with a shady junkyard dealer named Hadi, whose main passions are whoring and ouzo, when he can afford them. Despite—or perhaps because of—his knowledge of his own degeneracy (is there ever really a difference?), he muses that the many dismembered body parts around town—thanks to both the US invasion and the vicious sectarian violence in its wake—deserve a proper burial.

A tinkerer, Hadi is quite handy with needle and thread, and, for those of you familiar with the source material, you can guess what happens next. Once enough body parts have been stitched together, the timely (or untimely) demise of a local security guard in an explosion renders his body a vaporous “pink mist” devoid of solid pieces, thus delivering a Shelleyan soul to the oozing, squishy, rotting patchwork of flesh. Whatsitsname is born. It’s alive!

It’s worth noting here that those words were never spoken by a character in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel (or the 1823 version): That line was pure Hollywood. Shelley’s language is decidedly longwinded and flowery, unlike her novel's many, many movie versions, which never seem to stop reanimating. In the last few years alone, two major Hollywood adaptations have garnered critical attention (Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein), while this spooky season’s lead up has been dominated by Tim Curry’s immortal Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, following the actor’s passing. Screenings of the scores of various film adaptations of Shelley’s novel are legion this time of year, including my absolute favorite of the lot, which I would be severely remiss without recommending, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Like florals for spring, the book’s plot never goes out of style—no matter how one pronounces Frankenstein (or Frahhhnkensteen).

While the original novel is subtitled for an actual god who gifted fire to mankind, the idea of human daring so sacrilege as to generate life (outside of, you know, fucking) is endlessly fascinating (like fucking). The ghost story is undoubtedly as old as camp fires, Promethean and otherwise. But gothic horror has its roots in a very particular moment in history, relevant to Shelley in a different (if also very scary) way compared with the historical context that informed Saadawi.

Apropos of fucking, the summer Mary Shelley started writing the book featured one hell of a Regency romp. After absconding to Europe in the wake of sex scandals too numerous and incestuous to list here, Mary Shelley, her new husband, Percy, and Lord Byron, among others, found themselves in Switzerland.

Instead of frolicking in abundant sunshine and mountain flowers, the group was trapped indoors due to a climate catastrophe: Unbeknownst to them, on April 5, 1815, Mount Tambora had erupted so violently that it blocked out the sun across the world for the better part of the following year. This meant, apart from their infamously preferred pastime, they had to find other ways to entertain themselves. They resorted to ghost stories, which is how Mary Shelley came up with a doozy (and, many have argued, a retelling of the Golem myth). Also present was John William Polidori, who would soon thereafter publish The Vampyre.

That climate catastrophe which gifted the world the gothic genre would also decide the fate of nations. Its global ramifications lasted for years. There was no summer of 1816. Europe, already reeling from the destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, sank into crop failure and misery that crystallized lower class discontent into political radicalism and revolt in the coming decades. In New England, the following winter after the lack of summer was dubbed “Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” The region was so cold, it partly depopulated, driving the westward migration that would soon anoint itself “Manifest Destiny.” In South Asia, cholera killed at unprecedented rates, weakening empires and making way for total British conquest and greater European colonial incursion into Asia. That legacy and the United States’ subsequent 20th-century rebranding of empire set the stage for the horrors of Frankenstein in Baghdad, even if Mary Shelley provided the plot.

Caitlin McCormack

Sadaawi first published his update of Shelley’s tale, replete with djinns, genie folklore, and American incompetence, in 2013. It won a brace of major awards before Jonathan Wright translated it in 2018, winning it many more.

All that time—and still to this day—the book is wretchedly timely. Whatsitname initially seeks revenge upon evil, but that task in and of itself is a mire of gray areas and contradictions. Beyond the murky, moral ambiguity of seeking revenge in a sectarian conflict set loose by a brutal invasion, Whatsitsname is plagued by “serious putrefaction problems.” These, in turn, force it to be more indiscriminate in picking its victims simply to harvest body parts he needs to replace.

The violence literally feeds on itself and the moral imperative doubles back. The wacky plot descends into the Pynchonian (e.g., a “Tracking and Pursuit Department” becomes a focal point); Whatsitsname grows media savvy and gives the following soundbite: “Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen.”

Though it is perhaps implied, one reason I hastened to name-check Young Frankenstein is that there is no describing Frankenstein in Baghdad without emphasizing its hilarity. The absurd premise of the book careens between horrors, but it never strays far from the sense of humor that, as the book suggests, is the next best thing to a moral compass. Sometimes, it’s all you’ve got left.

Rare is the book that will make you tear up, throw up, and crack up in a single chapter. Like Whatsitsname, it’s stitched together of too many parts to be identifiable as any single genre other than human. Whatsitsname is a metaphor for messes left behind, vendettas at tragic cross purposes, hopes of coexistence wrecked and rotting, but it is also a metaphysical mystery to behold, a sign of faith and of ruin. The “monster”’s name is dead-on.

In the original, Mary Shelley herself wrote an admonishment that could easily be applied to Western Imperialism: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow." Perhaps the United States itself is the closest thing to an arrogant mad scientist forcing both its beliefs and its hierarchies on the ancient city of Baghdad—daring to play God by wanting to remake a country in its own image and, in the process, unleashing every demon from the depths of hell.

Ahmed Sadaawi rips out the soul of a Western metaphysical classic to attempt to describe the horrors that a soulless, thoughtless Western invasion unleashed. It’s alive: The elegance and grotesque totality of the metaphor are complete.

[post_title] => The Monster Mash of Imperialism [post_excerpt] => Some spooky seasonal appreciation for Ahmed Saadawi’s "Frankenstein in Baghdad." [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => frankenstein-in-baghdad-ahmed-saadawi-book-review-essay-iraq-war-united-states-imperialism-novel-fiction-mary-shelley [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-10-28 17:12:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-10-28 17:12:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11228 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 28, 2026October 28, 2026

The Monster Mash of Imperialism

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11193 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-10-22 22:28:55 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-10-22 22:28:55 [post_content] =>

Meet the community of survivors and activists behind South Korea’s first national war memorial for civilians.

I was summoned to Korea by an uncle who died 19 years before I was born. Through a series of chance encounters and unexpected opportunities, I was led by his ghost from my home in New York City to the central lowland city of Daejeon. From there, I traveled 20 minutes southeast to the remote valley where I am nearly certain he was killed, according to family members, news articles, and historical accounts.

Arriving on a bitterly cold winter day in 2024, I saw hundreds of white ribbons fluttering handwritten messages into the wind; they marked the barren clearing as a site of active mourning. A painting tied to the bare limb of a maple tree depicted a defiant young woman wearing a white minbok, standing beside a river of blood. Black letters tumbled down the right edge of the canvas: Who is it? In the heart of the nation, black-bullet gunners.

A tour bus to transport the grief keepers to the Golryeonggol massacre site.

Once called Golryeonjae for the dragon-shaped ridge along its northern edge, this valley held a hideous secret for decades. At the beginning of the Korean War, U.S.-backed South Korean troops and local police executed between 4,900 to 7,000 civilians here in a 10-day frenzy of anti-communist violence. The victims included thousands of political prisoners who’d been held at Daejeon Prison.

In recent years, the 1.5-kilometer stretch of pit graves has come to be known in Korea as “the longest grave in the world.” But family members of the victims and local organizers call it Golryeonggol (骨靈), the valley where the spirits of the bones dwell.

They would know. In 2020, they dug through the earth with their own hands to retrieve bones, teeth, shoes, buttons, and U.S.-made bullet casings. It was the third exhumation—and the first organized by civilians, who’d become frustrated by the slow progress of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Exhumed remains at Sejong Memorial House.

Digging was their visceral initiation into the highest order of han (한): the embodied anguish and rage accumulated in the collective soul of my people, who have survived colonialism, a proxy war that killed an estimated 3.8 million Korean civilians in three years, and the cleaving of our homeland in rapid succession. It’s no wonder family members of the victims and local activists tend to this land as if it were a living being. They are its grief keepers.

Over the years, they’ve developed an elaborate communal practice of han puri—an externalized expression of han to release it from the body. By publicly healing a historical wound, they’ve also nurtured a fragile sense of possibility. After 26 years of organizing and six mass exhumations (the most recent in 2024), the Golryeonggol grief keepers are on the cusp of achieving their shared dream. In November, the South Korean government will prepare the mass grave site for the construction of Daejeon Peace Park, the country’s first and only national memorial to civilian victims of the war.

I made that first trip to Golryeonggol, accompanied by an interpreter and a friend, six months after my uncle first made himself known to me. I brought a suitcase full of fresh fruit, three gift boxes of dried persimmons, two bottles of makkgeolli, and a platter of fried fish. I’d come to perform a jesa, the ritual offering of food and drink Koreans do to care for the spirits of their ancestors.

Chun Mi Kyung (Chun Imo), President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association.

An offering of makkgeolli.

We were greeted outside a small building by an elegant matriarch named Chun Mi Kyung, whose father was killed in the massacre. Though her official title is President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association, I’ve come to think of her as the head grief keeper of Golryeonggol. Within minutes of our arrival, she and two other members of the association had washed the fruit, stacked the food on platters, and arranged carved wooden vessels on the floor.

When she noted the uncertainty in my face, Chun Imo (a respectful and affectionate word for maternal aunt, which she invited me to call her) gestured for me to kneel on the floor. She wrapped my hands around one of the vessels, filled it with makkgeolli, and moved my hands in three counterclockwise circles around the incense. Like an orchestra conductor, she guided me through two full prostrations before she, the other elders, and my companions paid their respects. After we concluded, the aunties cut up the fruit and passed the plates around as we shared our stories.

“Your uncle and all the people who were killed here, they are all my fathers,” Chun Imo said. “We take care of all of them just like we do our own dads.”

A jesa table at Sejong Memorial House, a forensic mortuary where the association performs regular ceremonies. The remains of 1,441 Golryeonggol victims are held here, as well as the remains of thousands of war crime victims from around the country.

During the 2020 civilian exhumation, Chun Imo and other members of the association discovered that many of the remains had been waterlogged and broken by construction.

“I slept alone in this house with the bones for days,” she said, sweeping her hands above the altar table to show where they had spread the fragments to dry. “But I was not afraid. At night I walk the grounds here with only the light from the moon. I take care of the spirits, and they watch over me.”

Prostrating before the spirits of the ancestors.

Later, as we said our goodbyes, Chun Imo grasped both my hands in hers and told me to come back for the community memorial ceremony, held annually at the end of June.

“I will see you here next year,” she said.

I traveled again to Daejeon this past June for the memorial, arriving at the clearing to find hundreds of people sitting under a massive white tent. Most were elders whose shrunken bodies told the story of wartime starvation. Paper lanterns dangling from surrounding trees cast a warm glow on faces ravaged by sun, time, and grief. Beneath the lanterns, a row of wooden easels held framed black-and-white portraits of the dead.

Son Bok Seong, whose husband's older brother was killed at Golryeonggol.

The opening ritual was a sangyeo procession, a Korean funeral bier. Four men carried a palanquin with a symbolic corpse of paper-cut chrysanthemums. A fifth man led them in a call-and-response song with a melancholy, strident melody. Late into the night, we sat with our restless ancestors through music, poetry, and shamanic rituals, plus a drum dance to accompany wandering spirits to the afterlife.

The next morning, we reconvened for Buddhist death rites, a Catholic sermon, and the formal jesa ceremony. I found my uncle in the center of the banner inscribed with the names of victims. Below it, a massive table sagged under dozens of platters piled high with traditional altar food.

A feast of plenty to remind the dead we know how they suffered.

It wasn’t safe to speak on the Daejeon Massacre publicly until the mid-2000s, let alone grieve its victims openly. In the absence of a formal peace agreement, the South Korean government waged an ideological war within its borders. It continues to this day under the banner of national security. Surveillance, disappearances, torture, and blacklists of anyone associated with leftists were once common enough that a generation of South Koreans blotted “red” relatives from their family histories.

A mourner covers his face.

The 1950 Daejeon Massacre was the largest in a vicious spree of civilian executions during that first summer of the war. It was carried out by President Syngman Rhee's military police, formally under U.S. wartime command beginning July 14. They targeted known leftists and people suspected of being sympathizers simply for being poor; the government had registered hundreds of thousands of them in a “political rehabilitation program” called the Bodo League in 1949. All told, the South Korean military police killed between 100,000 and 300,000 of its own civilians.

For decades, relatives of the victims, including my own, grieved in secrecy to avoid the scrutiny of successive right-wing dictatorships installed by the United States after the 1953 armistice. I understand why after meeting Chun Imo: Long after her father was executed, her eldest uncle was abducted by police and her brother poisoned by right-wing assailants. After years of being blacklisted, her youngest uncle died by suicide, her grandfather eventually lost his mind from repeated shocks, and Chun Imo herself moved to another town where no one knew her family.

Chun Mi Kyung (Chun Imo), President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association.

The long silence finally broke in 1992, when a left-leaning magazine called Mal (말, translated literally as Word) published the first exposé about the massacre. A novelist writing under the pseudonym Noh Gah-won interviewed a former police officer who had participated in the killing. He described how soldiers and policemen shot row after row of people until the valley was “a sea of blood.” Among the scenes he described, corroborated in subsequent years by eyewitness accounts, one detail roiled the magma of my han: U.S. soldiers had watched from the ridges surrounding the massacre site. One of them, Major Leonard J. Abbott, got close enough to take 18 grisly photos of the massacre in progress (declassified by the U.S. in 1999). They include a few shots of victims who look like teenagers, staring into the camera—immortalized on the threshold of death in the archive of a U.S. proxy conflict my high school teachers called “the Forgotten War.”

The Mal exposé might have also been forgotten if not for Sim Kyu Sang, an activist from the Daejeon region who was serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence at Andong Prison. Sim, who’d been incarcerated for participating in a building takeover during the 1990 Seoul student protests, grabbed the magazine from a pile of periodicals delivered to the prison when he saw the headline. Following his release a year later, he went to a senior center in the area and asked people who were old enough to remember. They refused to speak, other than to tell him they’d been warned by local police officers to report anyone who asked questions about the massacre.

Human rights activist Sim Kyu Sang, who now serves as the Daejeon bureau chief of Oh My News.

Sim Kyu Sang with Im Jae Geun, executive chair of the Daejeon Sannae Golryeonggol Countermeasure Committee and director of the Research Institute for Peace and Unification Education.

Sim wandered through the mountains for weeks until he identified the silhouetted mountain in one of the Mal magazine photographs. He walked into the valley and saw human bones and teeth scattered everywhere. The subsistence farmers who owned the land admitted they’d thrown out piles of human remains they’d found while plowing.

Hoping to halt the continued desecration of the victims, Sim attempted to publish a new story about the massacre for the next four years. No outlet would touch it until 2000, when both Mal and Oh My News published his citizen journalist report. Thereafter, he was inundated with phone calls from family members of the victims, who beseeched him to show them the site. In July 2000, he gathered the members of 16 families at Golryeonggol for the first time. They howled and wept for three hours.

In the years that followed, more people joined their kinship of grief, confronting together what no one person could bear to face alone. They became a living embodiment of jeong (정)—the Korean relational ethic of deep collective care, powerful enough to soothe our han. After incorporating as an NGO in 2007, the group evolved into a hub of local organizing for government accountability. Working in solidarity with similar associations across Korea, the Golryreonggol grief keepers have traveled to Seoul on numerous occasions to push forward the government’s tepid Truth and Reconciliation process. After a 2010 investigation, the commission concluded the state had acted illegally, holding itself and Syngman Rhee responsible for executing “incarcerated prisoners without due process solely on the grounds that they had a history of leftist activity or were suspected of sympathizing with the Korean People’s Army.”

Mourners gather to pay their respects at the Golryeonggol massacre site.

In 2016, South Korea’s government announced it would create a memorial peace park for civilian victims of the state from before, during, and after the war. It invited applications from local governments nationwide to host the project. Of the seven cities that submitted bids, Golryeonggol made a compelling case due to the scale of the massacre and the geographical range of the victims held at Daejeon Prison. Its team, led by Sim, was eventually selected by the national evaluation committee.

Like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself, progress on the memorial has depended on whether the national government leans right or left. In 2021, a large-scale excavation unearthed the remains of nearly 1,000 victims at Golryeonggol, lending new momentum to the project under the left-leaning administration of President Moon Jae-in. This came to a grinding halt under the far-right President Yoon Suk-yeol, who wanted to destroy the remains—a plan foiled by his impeachment.

Park Jun Su, whose father was executed at Golryeonggol.

Given their tumultuous journey, the grief keepers are understandably skeptical that they will live long enough to see the memorial. But Sim is confident construction will begin in December, now that the government has made a formal announcement and appropriated more than $48 million USD for it.

In the meantime, thousands of tormented spirits still need care. Knowing my uncle died violently and far from home, I feel deep gratitude for Chun Imo’s jeong with the souls of so many victims.

“Sometimes they cry out to me from hunger and sadness,” Chun Imo says.

When they do, she cooks an elaborate meal, sets the altar table with plates piled high, and invites the wandering spirits to eat.

A traditional ancestor table at Golryeonggol to mark Chuseok (Full Moon Harvest).

[post_title] => The Grief Keepers [post_excerpt] => Meet the community of survivors and activists behind South Korea’s first national war memorial for civilians. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => grief-keepers-daejeon-massacre-korean-war-memorial-south-korea-golryeonggol [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-10-22 23:08:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-10-22 23:08:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11193 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 22, 2026October 22, 2026

The Grief Keepers

by Jungwon Kim

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11171 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-10-20 12:29:20 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-10-20 12:29:20 [post_content] =>

My father left Somalia in 1982 to study engineering on a scholarship in Washington D.C. Then, a war began in his absence and changed the course of his life.

In the winter of 2021, forty years after his departure, I boarded a flight with him ready to see Mogadishu for the first time. My grandmother gone, my father wanted to track down his childhood home and divide the proceeds from its sale among his siblings.

The house was in poor condition, the concrete and stone badly damaged. My father was disoriented. He lamented that he did not recognize the neighborhood—the Hodan District—or the route we took there. So much had changed, been leveled or lost. What remained was in ruins.

I grew up in Portland, Oregon. I spent my days daydreaming in class and my evenings on the internet where I befriended other Somali girls from around the world. We were young and earnest and thought our angst made us exceptional. We were embarrassingly self-fetishizing. We didn’t want to be reduced to our identities, yet secretly feared they were the most interesting thing about us. We were raised on nostalgia, took it into our bodies like milk from our mothers.

We were born in the rupture of the archive, in its lapse.

Two weeks before our trip to Mogadishu, I stumbled down a staircase and hurt my ankle—a hairline fracture caused by repetitive strain, as opposed to a single discrete injury. The importance of strong ankles is basic physics: they dictate the force with which one can meet the world.

Traveling with my father, I walked with a limp; I could not bear my own weight. I took pictures of everything in an attempt to find my place in the rift between him and his fate, between his history and the history of his country.

To this day, my ankle buckles beneath me if I step the wrong way, instability no longer a condition but a fixture of my body.

Somalia’s borders were not drawn by clans, but through colonial contracts. Italy claimed the south, England the north, but in Djibouti, it is France’s legacy that lives on.

The proof of these colonial horrors can be found in the museums of Europe, alongside much of Africa’s plundered heritage. In 1923, Benito Mussolini inaugurated Rome's Colonial Museum in the Palazzo della Consulta which housed, at its height, over 12,000 artifacts stolen from its African colonies—Somalia, Libya, and Eritrea. In 1940, it was moved to a larger location and renamed the Museum of Italian Africa. With the outbreak of World War II, the museum fell into neglect. A damning relic of a defeated regime. Its archives were boxed away.

The history of the modern museum cannot be separated from the history of empire. Almost eight decades later, Italy’s colonial archives were transferred to the Museum of Civilizations in Rome which curated a project titled “The Museum of Opacities” in an attempt to critically examine Italy’s colonial past as it absorbed thousands of artifacts. The exhibit invoked French philosopher Édouard Glissant’s assertion that a people have a “right to opacity.” That is, something in each of us and our histories that cannot be translated, easily understood, catalogued, or contained.

When my father took me to see Somalia's national monuments, my uncle and cousin joined us. We started at the Somali Youth League memorial, a plaza dedicated to the young activists who played a key part in the movement for independence. Next was Daljirka Dahsoon, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Hawo Tako, a woman who watched over the city with a torch in her hand and an arrow through her heart. Then we saw the Seyed, father of the Dervish Movement, disparagingly called the Mad Mullah by the British, seated atop his famed steed in Mogadishu’s city center. A short distance away was Taalada Dhagaxtuur, the statue of an anonymous stone-thrower, symbolizing the brave men who fought the British with nothing but stones and the steel in their spines.

None of these statues are the originals, all of which were destroyed at the start of the Somali Civil War, their bronze and stone limbs reduced to scrap and sold to neighboring countries. We took pictures in front of their doppelgangers.

We wandered the streets of Mogadishu and the streets of memory. Our last stop of the day was the Somali National Museum, but it was closed to the public. Built by the Sultan of Zanzibar, the building dates back to 1872 before it was converted into Somalia’s first public museum, the Museo della Garesa, by the Italian colonial administration in 1933. Its collection included roughly 3,000 items, serving as an archive of Italian military history. For the colonial administration, it also served as proof that the Italians had created order out of chaos, and preserved what would have otherwise been lost.

It would not be the building’s last transformation.

In 1960, seventeen African countries, including Somalia, gained independence from colonial rule. Less than a decade later, General Siad Barre seized power in a military coup and the Supreme Revolutionary Council adopted Scientific Socialism as Somalia's state doctrine.

As political, economic, and cultural ties between Somalia and the USSR deepened, a team of Soviet scholars arrived in Mogadishu in 1971 for an archaeological expedition aimed at decolonizing Somali history. The scholars sought to forge a continuous chain of rebellion by linking the Dervish Movement in the late 19th century to Siad Barre's 1969 coup, casting Somalis as both victors of an unbroken struggle and heirs to its liberation.

The construction of a new national museum and the preservation of the country’s cultural heritage became top priorities for the new government, and the 1987 completion of the Somali National Museum was hailed as a great achievement by UNESCO.

But the promise of the young republic was usurped by a ruinous civil war. The museum was looted, its collection stolen and sold, then scattered as far and wide as Somalia's people.

In the fall of 2024, my friends Aziz Farah and Ibrahim Hirsi, cultural workers with no formal training in art history or curation, joined forces with Asha Noor, a higher education professional, and Idel Rasheed, a researcher and curator, to launch Koor Archives, a traveling exhibition dedicated to preserving Somali heritage. Though they live in four different countries— Canada, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom—they are bound by their shared commitment to the tangible and intangible elements of Somali culture.

Aziz and Ibrahim met earlier that year at Piasa, a French auction house that was selling the lifetime collection of Pierre Loos, a Belgian “tribal art dealer.” They successfully bid on 45 Somali headrests. The next day, they spent hours wandering through a Parisian flea market and stumbled upon a Brazilian dealer of East African art. After some haggling, they acquired a cache of books and a traditional Somali amber necklace. Their collection has since grown substantially, culled from galleries, private collections, estate sales, online auctions, street vendors in Somalia’s back alleys, and donations from families and friends.

Their search has exposed them to the political economy of antiquities, an underworld built on expropriation and dispossession. They spend time on Facebook forums where people clash over what constitutes art, where African artifacts are described as primitive, even as they exchange hands for thousands of dollars, buying Somali artifacts from non-Somalis, often at exorbitant prices, and haggling with strangers over the right to their own heritage.

In Somalia, the buying and selling of antiquities is unregulated. There is a network of impoverished residents who steal items from graves and sell them to local dealers. And while most of Africa’s cultural heritage remains in Europe due to centuries of colonialism, Turkey and the UAE’s increased influence in the region has resulted in what Aziz calls a “second plunder.” One antique seller in Mogadishu tells Ibrahim that Arabs and Turks are now his most frequent customers.

Some of the items in the Koor Archives’ collection make Aziz and Ibrahim uncomfortable, like the taxidermy mounts of gazelle and antelope heads, their faces frozen since they were hunted in 1910. “Europeans loved their trophies,” Aziz says. The duo dream of returning them to Somalia where they can be properly laid to rest.

In many ways, Koor is what Françoise Vergès, the French postcolonial scholar and curator, calls the anti-museum: a space that uplifts a poetics of ordinary life and invests in communal stewardship, both the tangible and intangible elements of Somali culture, including oral traditions, poetry, music and song, and collective memory. In Frantz Fanon’s theory of decolonization this kind of rupture is “a program of complete disorder.” The anti-museum, then, might be understood as an attempt to reconstitute what Fanon describes as a world “cut in two”: a world of buyers and sellers, objects and owners. A program that dares to emancipate both the imagination and archive.

Koor is a project of love and disorder, the only forces strong enough to upend “a world of statues" and bring into being a world with no masters and no marble gods.

In their first public exhibit in Toronto of over 100 rare Somali artifacts back in the summer of 2024, three generations of a single family—a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—stood around a loox, a wooden tablet used to read and write the Quran. Elders shared memories of learning the holy book this way. Someone recalled the process of making ink. Another spoke of trees sprouting from the dirt where the ink of sacred verses had been rinsed. The verses they first read on the loox were inscribed not only on wood, but on their hearts.

Long before I met Aziz and Ibrahim, I took my grandmother to the only Somali Museum in North America, in Minneapolis. I expected her to share my excitement, but she was dismissive. “We have these things at home,” she said.

It was true: In our garage in Portland were several xeedho, woven containers central to her tribe’s wedding customs, which she’d lovingly protected from dust in hopes of saving them for my own wedding.

She looked at the wooden fandhaals on display and said: “This is a spoon. Why is a spoon in a museum?”

I did not yet know to question the museum’s logic, its bureaucratic and lifeless classification of the world. My grandmother was impervious to this conditioning. To her, these items were ordinary, pedestrian staples of everyday life.

Years later, wandering the Africa collection at the British Museum, I marveled at the Somali artifacts sealed behind display cases. I knew there were even more hidden within the museum’s bowels. I pressed my hand to the glass that separated me from them and them from the world—a checkpoint I could not cross. Each artifact bore a date of acquisition wed to the name of the donor, the seller, the excavator, the field collector.

I thought of the feet that once wore the leather sandals on display, imagined the roads they tread. The woman who held her long hair over the smoke of a glazed incense burner. The fingers of the blacksmith wrapped around his iron hammer. The shield of hide and wood and the human heart it once protected from harm.

I look at the pictures from my 2021 trip to Mogadishu, I see our smiling faces, our skin glistening with sun and sweat. My uncle has since died, but he is immortalized in these photographs. In my favorite picture, we are posing in front of the Somali flag and underneath a banner that says, “Soomaliya Soomali baah leh.”

Somalia belongs to Somalis.

I lay claim to all that lays claim to me. My living and my dead and the dirt from their graves. My father’s childhood home. His schoolbooks and the sins of his youth. The grief that beats inside him like a second heart. I inherit the echo and the trace and the blue that binds us—the flag, the sky, the sea.

[post_title] => A Somali Archive of Our Own [post_excerpt] => When memory in the aftermath of war meets nostalgia for a place and time that no longer exist. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => a-somali-archive-of-our-own [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-10-20 19:09:58 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-10-20 19:09:58 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11171 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 20, 2026October 20, 2026

A Somali Archive of Our Own

by Jamila Osman

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11044 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-10-15 12:22:02 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-10-15 12:22:02 [post_content] =>

Why I think looksmaxxers have more in common with trans people than they'd like to admit.

“Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Allison.” This is a sentence I have fought to say, yet despite my warm intentions, occasionally, what the other person hears is an out of tune piano. Their confusion doesn’t typically last for more than a breath, but to me, that brief pause can feel like an eternity.

I don’t believe this apprehension is always derived from hate; as humans, we constantly look for boxes to put people in, to help us understand one another. Maybe that momentary hold is from the contrast between my feminine name and my “masculine” voice. Maybe it’s simply my own internal struggles. But on days where I am not busy questioning if my rights have been taken away yet, I have a peculiar thought: Are trans people the only ones who experience this introduction anxiety, or do cis people feel it, too?

In previous decades, there were aesthetic archetypes—such as the tomboy, the metrosexual, or even the neon-racoon-striped-hair scene kids—that bent the gender binary, allowing room for desperately needed gradients of self-expression. Each of these have lost their cultural tether over time. Twenty years ago, what made a man and what made a woman appeared to be looser. Today, the culturally dominant aesthetics are the “clean girl,” the “gym bro,” and “stealth wealth.” The diversity of self-expression has been snuffed out.

This cultural shift has taken place alongside American politics using trans existence as an attention-diverting scapegoat. The societal pressures and heightened scrutiny placed on trans bodies has had some unforeseen consequences: Cisgender people are now suffering from more rigid standards of gender, too. Women athletes are being subjected to invasive sex testing for not fitting what society deems “woman enough.” The WNBA is being targeted as a political hotbed of discourse centered around the league not having a clear enough definition of what a woman is, resulting in routine harassment both on the court and off of it. Heterosexual dating has increasingly been framed by influencers and “experts” alike as something transactional, asking how the man can provide and what the woman can offer in return.

Over the past several years, there has also been a rise in lifestyle content targeted towards men centered around hustle culture, exuberant wealth, and extreme fitness—broadly referred to as the “manosphere.”

Within this sphere of influence is the “looksmaxxing” community, a collective of individuals who have game-ified their appearance and, nonconsensually, the appearances of everyone else. Originally a cross-section of manosphere and incel (involuntary celibate) content, this collective of mostly men is fixated on making themselves as attractive as possible, as determined by what looksmaxxers deem to be a “mathematical” formula. Their scale ranges from zero to eight (“chud” to “chad”), but the online forums are very quick to tell you that an eight is almost impossible to achieve—only one in twelve billion will ever reach that score. Do these men fear being a 4.5, I wonder? When they say “nice to meet you,” do they worry that someone might notice their canthal tilt is slightly out of the ideal five-to-seven degree range?

I find a strange amount of empathy for these fears: I am always working towards having people perceive me how I see myself internally. The journey of self-actualization is not an easy one, but whether looksmaxxers want to admit it or not, it's also one that we share. Looksmaxxers message each other on forums asking where to get a reliable peptides dealer, or what methods they can use to ascend the scale. Trans women flock to forums to do much of the same, seeking advice on how to do their makeup, or tips for passing. Passing and ascending might as well be synonyms. To “pass” is the coveted goal for many of being perceived as a cisgender woman, to “ascend” is to get one step closer to becoming the ideal man. There is more in common between us than even I’d like to admit. (Maybe if they weren’t so hateful, we could even form a union one day.)

I struggle to share this empathy willingly, as the poster boy for this culture is a 20-year-old influencer named Braden Peters, who goes by the name “Clavicular.” Peters currently has over one million followers on TikTok, and was even profiled by The New York Times earlier this year, where he was referred to as a “social media sensation” and “a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed young men.”

This profile feels especially frustrating, in part for the legitimacy it has afforded both Peters and the looksmaxxing movement. In it, he does not shy away from expressing his belief that he is above the law. (A belief underlined by an image he posted to Twitter/X stating “men’s facial features may sway criminal sentencing.”) There is even a subsection titled “No More Politics" where the reporter dives into Peters’ use of racial slurs, as well as all the time he has spent with self-proclaimed white supremacists and influencers charged with rape and human trafficking, including brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, arrested in Miami last July.

In September 2026, Peters—like his friends—was also charged with rape, after allegedly drugging and raping a 17-year-old girl. These charges are connected to a separate sexual battery charge from earlier this year.

The looksmaxxing movement sits comfortably nestled under the manosphere umbrella alongside other hateful movements, such as blackpill and incel cultures. (In fact, many looksmaxxers often post using the same hashtags.) Like its sister movements, there is also a consistent pattern of violent escalation and dehumanization of anyone who doesn't fit within the system that looksmaxxers follow, ranging from cyberbullying to explicit forms of interpersonal physical violence.

This is, perhaps, the most crucial difference between transgender people and looksmaxxers. While arguably victims of the same cultural pressures, looksmaxxers are able—and choose—to identify with the aggressor. The most horrifying part to me in all of this is that Peters’ act of violence might not be a disqualifier for adoration, or continued participation in the most problematic aspects of the looksmaxxing movement. As looksmaxxing has unfortunately made its way into the cultural zeitgeist, I personally refuse to allow it to separate from its hateful, racist, misogynistic origins. But to create fundamental change, all of us must do the same: Peters’ case must be a wake up call to not de-sensitize ourselves to this movement, including the inevitable harm it has already caused, and the harm it will likely continue to cause if left unchecked.

Looksmaxxers’ relationship to gender expression and identity hasn’t ultimately protected them from judgement (and depending on how Clavicular’s case plays out, perhaps neither from consequence): The brutal scrutiny they’ve placed onto others has ended up reflected back toward themselves. Although most looksmaxxers are born male, society's expectations of men have gotten more extreme. Within manosphere culture, you must be fit, tall, and disciplined. So if you’re a short man who experiences joy, you might feel incongruent with your gender. Like many trans people, they, too, are experiencing a form of gender dysphoria, a psychiatric diagnosis that refers to the psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s perceived gender identity. Rather than an internalized journey, however, looksmaxxers continuously take in these negative external pressures and fire them back at each other—along with everyone else. Peters himself has stated that “men aren’t supposed to be happy.” The difference is that looksmaxxers believe others should suffer alongside them, and that often, they should ultimately suffer worse.

It's important to acknowledge that trans women are not immune to toxicity. There are niche corners of the culture centered around categorizing each other as “doll” or “brick,” which to some, simply translates as passing or not passing. Thankfully, this is not the dominating narrative for the trans community—it's actually the opposite: No matter where someone is on their self-actualization journey, whether day negative ten or day one hundred, our appearance doesn’t change that we are women. Anyone who says otherwise is rightfully shamed, quite the opposite approach to the one that looksmaxxers take, where it doesn’t matter how far on your looksmaxxing journey you are, god help you if you are 4.5 on their scale—or worse, a woman.

Still, the perpetual burden of incongruence isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy. We are all dolls, and deserve the grace of autonomy and self-expression. I hope looksmaxxers can also feel that warmth—from each other and themselves—soon. But to get there, they must first reckon with the collective trait at the root of their ugliness: hate. Because no matter how effective their peptides or hard the hammer hits their jawline, the only true path to their ascension to chad-hood might just depend on their finally embracing the opposite.

[post_title] => A Letter to the Chads from a Doll [post_excerpt] => Why I think looksmaxxers have more in common with trans people than they'd like to admit. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => a-letter-to-the-chads-from-a-doll [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-10-20 12:37:42 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-10-20 12:37:42 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11044 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 15, 2026October 20, 2026

A Letter to the Chads from a Doll

by Allison Baker

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11080 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-10-01 16:49:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-10-01 16:49:31 [post_content] =>

Conflict is inevitable. Parker's latest book is a helpful guide on how to better navigate it.

There are plenty of self-care books out there, but what about group-care books? Who’s looking out for the health and wellness of friend groups, work colleagues, neighborhoods, families, and other communities that fill our cups and sustain us in our personal and professional lives?

I think about this topic a lot. As the director of our small but mighty team at The Conversationalist (itself a global network of writers and artists!), as well as a neighborhood potluck organizer, a dedicated friend to my long-distance besties, and a mom/wife/sister/daughter/cousin who doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with loved ones, I know that conflict is inevitable for any group. But I also know how hard it can be to actually address conflict when we’d rather run for the hills and pretend it’s not happening.

Priya Parker’s new book, The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, is a manual to help us navigate those inevitable bumps, kerfuffles, and painful rifts. It’s a collection of anecdotes and prompts that remind us that conflict is not only natural but essential for healthy, long-lasting groups. Parker also provides some other useful tools—often in the form of asking open-ended questions and really listening to the answers—meant as guides rather than prescriptions. Because even if we know that conflict is inevitable, it can be hard to know what to do with that awkward energy that seemingly comes out of nowhere in a work meeting or family holiday gathering or group chat with friends.

We could just take the easy route and try to ignore it. Let it simmer and deal with it later, or hope it goes away on its own. Because who has the time and energy to navigate complex social dynamics?! I’m too tired and you probably are, too. (Everything is on fire and somehow we still have to cook dinner tonight, am I right?)

But if we really want long-lasting relationships, and to build vibrant, diverse communities like we say we do, then we have to do the work. And in order to do that work, we need to have tools in our collective pockets to move through the inevitable conflict that comes with being a part of living, breathing, and ever-evolving groups of people.

“Healthy heat” is a term and idea Parker uses in the book that really stuck with me. “Healthy heat is the willingness and ability to hold tension, with care, long enough for it to become clarifying and generative. Heat is energy. It is information. It tells us that something, or someone, matters,” Parker explains. “Hold it long enough, with care and without judgment…pause before deciding whether it is good or bad.”

For starters, we can name this heat when we notice it. When we validate what we’re seeing, it often helps other people feel validated in what they’re seeing, too. This alone can help diffuse some of the heat.

From there, Parker says we usually need to take a step back and consider what she calls the “us-ness” of the group, as a way to bring the group back to itself. What makes us us?

“It can be helpful to tap back into your group’s central motivation force,” she writes. “Set aside the particulars of the conflict at hand. Step back and do a check-in with yourself and your sense of the group: When it gets bad, is there still juice here? …Is there still relevance and energy that comes from this collection of individuals contributing their time and energy to one another?”

Parker offers questions to ask yourself to get to the heart of the underlying issues causing the group tension. (Is this conflict touching on a core value of mine? Do I care enough about this group? What are we not saying right now? How might not facing this conflict hurt the group?)

Sometimes, this can help a group reach a resolution. But sometimes, the answers might reveal it’s not worth facing the conflict at all. You might still be able to lighten some tension, but as Parker attests, there’s also validity in strategic conflict avoidance.

“Sometimes fighting happens because, if we’re honest, the group has reached the end of its natural life,” she writes. (She recommends hosting a funeral event for the group in this scenario.) Other times, individuals don’t have the emotional infrastructure to process what’s actually happening in a group conflict. A conflict might even point to deeper clashes in worldviews or inherent racism and other bigotry, which of course is not a small or quick fix.

Parker points to another book, Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution by Louis Kiesberg and Bruce W. Dayton, to provide a framework for whether a conflict even can be addressed. “First: More than one person needs to see a problem. The second: They need to be connected to each other. Third: There needs to be an addressable party, responsible for that grievance, that can be changed. The fourth: They need to believe that they could actually bring about that change.”

If you believe you can bring about the change, and decide to face the conflict, good for you and buckle up! You’re not alone, and this book will be your friend, so keep it handy.

I already know this won’t be a one-time read for me. Parker’s first book, The Art of Gathering, is another one I keep on my shelf and flip through when I’m looking for inspiration and guidance. Confronting conflict and hosting gatherings like my weekly potluck are two muscles I try to exercise on a regular basis. They also work hand in hand — in order to create vibrant gatherings within our communities, we need to navigate the inevitably bumpy roads that come with group dynamics. This takes practice just like anything else, and often, a little sense of humor can go a long way.

Parker shares an example of a leadership summit where employees practiced “healthy heat” through some “heavy topics.” They started with one guaranteed to get people riled up.

PINEAPPLE ON PIZZA. YES OR NO?

The group of colleagues divided into smaller groups and debated, then presented their arguments to the bigger group. Parker says “to grow heat, grow warmth.” If you want to get better at fighting, start with getting better at banter. “Banter is the secret sauce of pro-social conflict,” she writes. “It gives people a way of fighting with each other that feels playful rather than fatal.”

So your homework—whether you read Parker’s book or not, and if you’re ready for some healthy heat—is to do some bantering, a.k.a. some low-stakes fighting, and keep growing your own conflict resolution muscle. The communities we love depend on it.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "The Art of Fighting" by Priya Parker [post_excerpt] => Conflict is inevitable. Parker's latest book is a helpful guide on how to better navigate it. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-the-art-of-fighting-transformative-power-conflict-priya-parker-botm-healthy-arguments-community-relationships-recommendations [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-10-06 07:17:40 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-10-06 07:17:40 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11080 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 1, 2026October 6, 2026

Book of the Month: “The Art of Fighting” by Priya Parker

by Erin Zimmer Strenio

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11069 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-09-29 17:27:36 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-09-29 17:27:36 [post_content] =>

Overnight, I lost some of my capacity to think and write. After fighting to get it back, I cannot imagine choosing to give those faculties over to a machine.

It started with a pain that felt—and sounded—like a crack of thunder at the base of my skull.

I had been prescribed a medication by my cardiologist that was meant to raise my blood pressure, which it did; so much that when I went to bed that night, I experienced a dangerous bout of supine hypertension, or raised blood pressure from lying down. Unaware of what had happened, I took my migraine medication as normal and went to sleep, not knowing that staying horizontal was the worst thing I could have done.

The next morning, I found myself unable to speak. I felt weak in my body, and even sitting up in bed took enormous effort. I lift weights regularly, but just bringing my hand to my head felt heavier than any deadlift. I have had migraines for almost 30 years, so I assumed I was just having one that was presenting differently. Over the days and weeks that followed, however, I felt progressively worse. I don’t remember the details well, but in my health diary, I diligently tracked every detail: My body was numb, my right side hurt, and I spent more time lying down than not. I also continued struggling to speak or even think. When I saw my headache nurse a month later, she was shocked by the state I was in. I was shaking and sobbing, trying to convey to her just how sick I felt. But while I have always had some difficulty with translating my thoughts into speech, all of a sudden, I found that my thoughts weren’t there, either. They were no longer trapped in my brain—I just didn’t have anything to say.

It took a few weeks for me to realize that the medication was to blame, and when I did, I stopped it cold turkey. Still, it took many months to recover. I wasn’t able to work or write unless the tasks were very straightforward and required no creative input, but even then, everything took me far longer than it once had. More than that, I suddenly couldn’t enjoy the things that had always made life worth living—reading, listening to music, watching movies. If an activity required any degree of focus or interpretation, it felt impossible.

After weeks of struggling to get out of bed or talk, I went to the doctor and asked for an MRI, which showed a white patch indicating brain damage. I took the results to my neurologist, who I regularly see for migraines and related disorders. He suggested that, based on the MRI and my symptoms, I may have had a transient ischemic attack (TIA), or “mini-stroke.”

In the months that followed, with aspirin and support from my medical team, I worked hard to be able to do the things I had previously loved, but still found no joy in them. Things that were once intuitive and essential felt insurmountable, like writing about how I felt or what I was experiencing. Reading—something that had provided escape and pleasure for my entire life—was newly boring. Relating things to others, even things I was ostensibly interested in, felt torturous; every conversation was excruciating.

My recovery has now taken years, but I am finally at a point where I feel almost as strong as I once did and as confident as I used to in expressing myself. Coincidentally, it is over these last three years that I have seen many people around me, even those I respect, struggle with the same things I found so difficult when I was re-learning how to think for myself.

Rather than being struck down by a neurological event, however, the main reason they have struggled with these things is because they have outsourced their faculties to AI.

There may be some application of so-called Artificial Intelligence, sometime, that benefits the lives of everyday people. Yet it is currently being forced into every area of art, marketing, and education, none of which have seemed to benefit. The Atlantic recently reported that film students (I studied film for both my BA and MA) now struggle to sit through entire movies. Many schools don’t believe that students can, or should, be assigned to read full novels. Many office workers increasingly use AI for every little task, while professional writers admit to using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Gemini to generate text instead of actually writing it themselves. (Not just ones you haven’t heard of, either: Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk recently gushed about the benefits of AI, too.)

Advocates for LLMs promote them on the basis that they make everything easier, friction-free. But art is not supposed to be friction-free, nor the same as something anyone else could have produced with access to the right program. This is part of why it was so painful to lose my own ability to write after my TIA. Writing is how I make sense of the world, of my own thoughts, of what has happened to me. It is that combination of my own experiences, perspective and cultural input that makes my work unique. You might not like my work, or relate to it, and that’s OK: Nobody will ever write or create or interpret from the exact same place as another person. That is what makes writing worth reading, and what makes it worth the time and effort, not a randomly generated string of words. Learning and education, too, should be somewhat challenging, because the challenge is a significant part of what makes it so rewarding—something I would soon experience firsthand throughout my recovery.

At some point during the slow crawl through this period, I realized that the skills I’d lost might not come back to me without intervention and tremendous effort. I started to read books and articles again, very slowly, despite struggling to retain any information. I wrote just for the sake of it, even though it wasn’t as easy, rewarding, or even readable as it had once been. I started playing the piano, hoping that learning something new would spark something in me. I focused on studying Spanish. None of these things came easily, but they felt essential if I was to return to the person I had once been. Without my memory, without the capacity to be curious about the world, I was not myself. To come back to her, I had to force myself to do those things, no matter how difficult.

Maybe there were easier routes to normalcy, or at least a facsimile of it. Early in my recovery, if I had turned to AI, maybe I could have given the impression to my editors and friends that I was working at full capacity. But even when I was struggling most—even before I fully understood what had happened to me—it never occurred to me to use it. If anything, my experience made me double down on my aversion to LLMs, particularly in my line of work.

I personally boycott AI for a few reasons; the environmental impact is one. As an author, the wholesale theft of artists’ creative output is another, and something I find abhorrent. The end result of AI-generated text and images pretty much always sucks, and as a person who likes to look at and read things that don’t suck, that’s important. But I’m also old-fashioned: I write by hand, I paint, I take film photos, I listen to vinyl. I like things that are made by people, things that I can touch. I also think art matters, even when it’s imperfect or when it isn’t something I personally enjoy, because it was made by a person transmogrifying their experience into something that we can all share. “Art” made by a machine, then, is not art.

What I find most worrying, though, as a person who shares the world with so many heavy LLM users, is the impact on their brains’ ability to function—especially as someone who temporarily lost a degree of mine. In 2025, a study by MIT found that people who used ChatGPT to “write” showed less brain activity in neural networks associated with cognitive processing. The study divided 54 18- to 39-year-olds into three groups, and asked each to write SAT-level essays using ChatGPT, Google, or nothing. Using an EEG, the researchers found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at “neural, linguistic and behavioral levels.” This isn’t really surprising news—after all, the LLM users in the study didn’t actually use their brains for the study. What is far more alarming is that their level of effort degraded over the course of several months, and they got lazier with each essay.

If you stop doing something because it’s hard, you will eventually lose the ability to do it entirely. Maybe turning to ChatGPT as a one-off for a late assignment won’t affect you, but the science shows that turning to it time and time again will. Think of other technological leaps, like the shift from writing by hand to typing on a typewriter or computer. Studies have found that handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. While I type for work, I have kept a handwritten diary since 2004, because I don’t want to lose that skill. In almost every area, doing things the hard way enables you to think and engage with ideas more deeply. Reading an article or a book yourself and determining its point will help you to remember the information in a more meaningful way than looking at a summary on Google.

There are many writers who are not luddites like me. There are writers, filmmakers, and artists who once produced great works without AI, who now vouch for the technology. But as someone who, overnight, lost some of their capacity to think and write, I cannot comprehend why a person would choose to give that faculty over to a machine.

Your thoughts are all you have. Your experiences, your unique way of seeing the world, your tastes. These are hard-won, often over decades of exploration. You may have to read hundreds of books or watch hundreds of movies that you don’t even like to arrive at what you do. If you’re a writer or artist, you might have to spend years being bad at the thing you love before one day, you aren’t so bad anymore. That work is worth doing.

When I was in the midst of my recovery, I was accepted into an artists’ residency in the dry, water-starved mountains of southern Spain, in an area currently blighted by wildfires. I was to spend two weeks in a house that was so isolated it took 15 minutes just to drive off the property on a dirt path. It took even longer to reach anything that resembled a store. This meant I was trapped, for two weeks, with no excuse to do anything but write. I was still very unwell, struggling to get out of bed and get myself together. But I didn’t want to let the opportunity pass.

There were several people in my residency—a poet, three other longform writers, and a photographer—in addition to the two people running it, who were both visual artists. I found writing very difficult over this period, but I managed to start working on some pieces that I was close to proud of. Each day, I would spend hours chained to my laptop just to produce something, even if it was something that would be edited or scrapped wholesale tomorrow.

It was on this trip that I gained new respect for the craft of writing—the fact that it is hard and takes so much time is part of its value. That struggle is how we figure out what we mean, what we think, what we really believe. I became more cognizant than ever of the importance of processing thoughts, words, and emotions myself. Prompting an LLM to produce text, meanwhile, does not require any effort, insight, or cognition whatsoever.

Writers and journalists who rely on AI often say that they only use it for this or that: only research, only editing, only outlining, not the actual writing. But it is all the writing. The time I spend swimming and working over an idea in my head is also writing, even if there isn’t a laptop in sight. When I am lazily cuddling my dog on the couch and suddenly realize how I’m going to write the next part of a story, I am writing. When I am in the bath and remember the exact right word for a feeling, I am writing. The fact that writing—that any form of art—requires so much of us is a part of what makes it so valuable. The fact that it is by a person, with their own experiences of the world, makes it even more so.

There are parallels to be drawn between the loss of cognitive capability that I experienced and had to work hard to regain and the degradation that cognitive offloading can cause in people who are overly reliant on LLMs. The good news is that being a loyal ChatGPT user doesn’t give you brain damage—at least, as far as we now know. If you want to, there is nothing medically stopping you from regaining the skills you may have lost. If you once knew how to do something that you’ve since spent months handing over to LLMs, it is likely that when you try to do that work alone again, you will struggle without the support of the machine you’ve come to rely on. What worries me more is the people who have never learned to do the work themselves at all, such as students and young people, who may never develop the skills necessary to do anything on their own. Teachers and professors are fighting to change this, and to get students to think for themselves, even tricking them with hidden AI prompts in exercise briefs, but it’s not enough. People have to want to do things themselves, and we have to foster a culture that supports and encourages this.

Those months I spent not being able to read, write, speak, or otherwise communicate the way I had always been able to were frightening and isolating. It took a long time to claw myself back, and it could just take another neurological episode to set me back months, or worse, again. I don’t take those regained skills for granted anymore, because I learned firsthand how much is lost when we can no longer form our own opinions or share our perspective with the world. Finally, I can take great pleasure in reading, in watching movies, in talking and writing about what I think and feel again. Being able to do something yourself, even and especially when it’s difficult, is rewarding. Seeing a paragraph or a painting, however imperfect, and knowing that it came from inside you feels good, even if it’s not where you’d like to be right now. It’s never too late to keep trying—no matter how difficult it is to get to where you hope to be.

[post_title] => In Defense of Difficulty [post_excerpt] => Overnight, I lost some of my capacity to think and write. After fighting to get it back, I cannot imagine choosing to give those faculties over to a machine. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => personal-essay-artificial-intelligence-llms-brain-damage-transient-ischemic-attack-chatgpt-opinion-op-ed-recovery [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-09-29 17:27:38 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-09-29 17:27:38 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11069 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 29, 2026September 29, 2026

In Defense of Difficulty

by Marianne Eloise

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10985 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-09-04 01:15:56 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-09-04 01:15:56 [post_content] =>

For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool passed down through generations. It is also largely sustained by women like my great-aunt Nerissa.

I credit much of how I live my life to the wisdom of the women in my family. From my grandmother’s tip to drink chamomile tea after dinner ahead of an early morning, to my mother’s insistence on cleaning chicken with vinegar and lemon juice; from learning to grow aloe vera at home to heal wounds in an emergency, to knowing that blowing air into an infant’s face will stop them from choking. All this is part of my inheritance.

While the benefits of chamomile are easily found on the internet, in my family, such knowledge was passed by word of mouth. In some ways, that’s still common today: For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool that is sharpened, exercised, and passed down through generations. Encompassing stories, songs, beliefs, and customs that preserve history, memory, and cultural practices, this tradition influences the choices we make and how we navigate the world.

In Jamaica, where my family comes from, oral tradition was as much an old practice taken from enslaved Africans as it was an act of survival, because they were forbidden from reading and writing. “During slavery, enslaved people were denied literacy and formal education, so oral tradition became the most crucial tool,” says Mickayla Whyte, a library assistant at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. “Oral tradition is the oldest form of traditional preservation, and it allows communities to remember who they are, where they come from, and even where they're going."

These traditions from West and Central African nations blended over time with Indigenous Arawak practices on the island. The survival of folklore like Anansi the Spider—about a mischievous spider who creates and escapes trouble with his wit—alongside the use of herbal remedies, like cerasee tea to lower blood pressure, exemplify the intergenerational strength of oral tradition and the syncretism found across diasporas. Across the diaspora, as in my own family, this tradition is largely sustained by matrifocality.

“In its most simplistic form, matrifocality means mother-focused,” Dr. Leighan Renaud, University of Bristol lecturer and author of Mothering and Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Literature, tells me. “What that means is that women in their roles as mothers—not necessarily biological mothers—are central to the organization of families and therefore the organization of communities.”

Unlike patriarchy, matrifocality subverts modern ideas of familial and cultural hierarchy. Dr. Renaud notes that women are not so much at the top of a structure, but are instead the nucleus around which society operates.

In my family, this tradition was led by my late great-aunt Nerissa. She was witty, generous, and supportive, with a deep passion for sharing her faith with friends, family, and strangers. Born the fourth of 14 children and a mother to six of her own, Great-Aunt Nerissa was as beloved for her caretaking as she was for passing on family and cultural lore, like knowing not to whistle after dark for fear of attracting ghosts. Before she passed away this spring at 76, she took pride in knowing and sharing our history, and would always wrangle our large family together to tell us stories during holidays. She did this with little complaint, but now, in her absence, I recognize the enormous responsibility she held in carrying our family’s legacy for as long as she did.

Because of her, I learned how much my family sacrificed when they journeyed to the United States. I attended her naturalization ceremony when I was in middle school and remember hearing about all the preparation and studying she did in order to pass the interview and test. She was asked questions about American presidents, laws, and wars that I admittedly still don't know the answers to. As a first-generation American citizen, it left me with a profound understanding of the legal and cultural challenges so many immigrant families face as they attempt to embrace a country that doesn't always return the sentiment.

In the aftermath of grieving her, I also realize the important task of preserving tradition and passing on memory has now fallen to my mother, myself, and the rest of the younger women in my family. This is not a role that I take lightly: In the Caribbean, women like my great-aunt Nerissa are simultaneously regarded as family, community, and cultural pillars.

While they are revered as leaders inside the home, however, women and girls across the Caribbean still experience objectification in both pop culture and daily life, as well as violence, fewer leadership roles, and unequal power relations. Still, misogynistic and sexist ideals often clash with the values taught in many Caribbean homes, where maternal figures are respected for nurturing families. Through her research on child socialization in the region, Dr. Renaud found this paradox exists because “girls are socialized to become mothers, and boys are socialized to stay boys.”

“Even though there is this patriarchal ideology that's kind of pervasive everywhere, girls are being raised to parent,” Dr. Renaud says. “Not just to parent children, but also to parent everybody.”

This caretaking role has been thrust upon Caribbean women for centuries, persisting during slavery and beyond. As Dr. Renaud points out, for enslaved Africans, nuclear families couldn’t exist due to labor divisions that frequently separated men from their wives and children in the home. But the expectation that women should take on a more significant role in preserving and implementing cultural values and practices likely predates transatlantic enslavement altogether.

According to Dr. Renaud, some theories suggest that these truncated traditions derive from West Africa. “So much of who we were as Africans culturally was outlawed in slave plantations,” she says. “What that meant was that so much of the culture happened in the house, and if for whatever reason it's women who are in the house with the children, then it's the women who become responsible for making sure that the culture passes on.”

Whyte agrees, adding that historically, women’s sharing of a family’s oral traditions built community and combated oppression. Our ancestors persevered through stories, songs, and proverbs, using them to transmit lessons on survival, intelligence, and resistance. These practices have continued long after emancipation: When slavery was outlawed across the Caribbean by 1873, we still retained our oral traditions. Like other women across the region, my own foremothers bore the responsibility of remembering health needs, birthdates, and anniversaries, along with preserving skills like foraging, gardening, and cooking. All things necessary for remembrance and survival.

Take my mother’s mother, Grandma Carmen, Great-Aunt Nerissa’s immediate younger sister. Born in the south-central Manchester parish, she was raised in Kingston before emigrating to New York in the 80s at 30 years old. Like my great-aunt, Grandma Carmen has passed on adages like, “Make a friend before you need a friend,” instilling in me the importance of sustaining relationships. She also has shared stories about her childhood pet goat, inspiring me to imagine a slower, “country” life, which eventually led me to buy a pig that was raised on my grandfather's farm in Jamaica. Simultaneously, I’ve often noted her discomfort when telling stories about her childhood. Her life wasn’t an easy one: Grandma Carmen was raised apart from some of her siblings, and in addition to the oral traditions they inherited, they had to create their own form of play, teaching themselves most of the skills they needed to thrive despite limited resources and an unconventional upbringing.

After Great-Aunt Nerissa’s funeral earlier this year, I spent time with my grandmother and her sisters as they pieced together family stories I’d never heard of before, relying only on their memories to corroborate events. I was surprised to learn that some of my family members’ legal names were apparently misspelled on their registration documents when they were newborns. In a couple cases, the names I know them by turned out to be nicknames—my Great-Grandaunt Madgie is actually “Margarita” and my great-aunt Nerissa was legally “Norissia.” I also learned that my great-grandmother died of kidney failure and high-blood pressure around the age of 44 (though nobody seems to know how old she was for certain). It struck me how vital this information is to our family’s medical history, especially considering the ways we’ve combated illnesses since, often following tradition and our ancestors’ wisdom.

“When you live in the Caribbean, usually instead of going to the doctor most of the time, they just practice what they learn from their foreparents,” my grandmother Carmen says. She is 74 years old and lives in New York. “Each generation, they look at life from a different point of view. But then, because you, as a parent, know what works for you, you try to pass it on to your children.”

Oral tradition is a living tradition. As culture evolves alongside technology and other discoveries, so can the ways we document our memories, giving each new generation space to adjust according to our own experiences. I realize now that some advice passed onto me was not always given in the name of custom. In some cases, they were suggestions based on lived experiences that were not mine, leaving me with the choice to take what I needed for my own life and leave the rest to our family’s collective memory.

Still, new technology and methods of documentation could disrupt oral tradition and storytelling as we’ve known it for centuries, potentially causing it to become obsolete. Women’s roles in communities have also changed, as has women’s labor, altering traditional storytelling avenues and frameworks that were once central to family and community life. But Whyte argues we’re still engaging in oral tradition when we use technology, we’re just doing it differently.

“I think we're still sharing stories, because I think social media is still a form of preserving stories,” Whyte says. “If you're to create a video and put it out there, the internet is forever, it's everlasting. That video is going to always be out there, the story is still being preserved, so regardless of women having to work more, we're still connecting.”

Growing up, my great-aunt Nerissa and Grandma Carmen did not foresee a reason to document their experiences beyond word-of-mouth in their small, tight-knit community in Manchester, where traditions were passed vertically. As the family grew and dispersed, my mother’s generation embraced analog recording methods, exchanging Polaroids with those who lived far away and making home videos on VHS tapes that were stored away for years at a time. My generation obsesses over documenting big and small moments with our smartphones and sharing them online instantaneously, with the hopes that others might relate or take interest. We may have a tendency to overshare, but I believe it is fueled by a desire to build community beyond physical limitations, giving more opportunity to spread oral traditions horizontally.

I may be living a vastly different life from the women who came before me, yet we are mirrors of each other. And as long as we keep finding ways to pass on tradition from one generation to the next, our memories and principles, and those of the many ancestors who came before us, will live on.

[post_title] => My Family's Wisdom Is My Inheritance [post_excerpt] => For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool passed down through generations. It is also largely sustained by women like my great-aunt Nerissa. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => oral-tradition-family-wisdom-matrifocality-african-caribbean-diaspora-storytelling-survival-tool-motherhood-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-09-04 01:30:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-09-04 01:30:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10985 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 4, 2026September 4, 2026

My Family’s Wisdom Is My Inheritance

by Amaya McDonald

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10980 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-27 21:42:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-27 21:42:46 [post_content] =>

A staggering and tender collection of short stories about Mapuche youth in modern day Chile.

Daniela Catrileo begins Piñen with an invocation. In a short preface, she asks the reader to imagine a river, powerful and pulsing; to imagine its sounds, its smells; to picture the way it moves, how the water snakes through the earth.

“Now come with me to the river,” she writes. “Give me your hand.”

For Catrileo, this invocation is both purposeful and personal. Piñen is a book of short stories about Mapuche youth, largely centered around girls navigating childhood and adolescence against a backdrop of othering: The Mapuche are the largest group of Indigenous peoples in Chile, where these stories take place. The author asks us to invoke the river as a path through “continuity and exile,” and chooses it, in part, for its significance to her family’s lineage and name. (In Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, Catrileo means “cut river,” a symbolism she interweaves throughout her work as a way of exploring how Indigenous people have been “fractured by dispossession” and displacement.)

Her request sets the tone for the rest of the book. “To understand the river, a sensory relationship with its body is essential,” she writes. “If we can manage to understand its song, its language, its movement, perhaps we can translate tomorrow.”

With Catrileo as our guide, we are pulled through Piñen’s currents, both gentle and violent. In one story, the narrator considers the death of a classmate, shot and killed just beneath her window. In another, a young woman remembers her brother, years after he’s disappeared, while stuck on the Santiago Metro. In “Warriache,” a woman reflects on her childhood friendship with another Mapuche girl, a fellow outcast named Yajaira, as a means of remembering and understanding herself. “When I imagine Yajaira, I have an easier time of seeing me, too,” she says. “I am trying to sketch my life, beginning with hers.”

Much of the book explores the idea of collective memory, and the deep wound that colonialism leaves behind. It is also an exercise in how we might begin to correct and defy colonial narratives by uncovering the truth hidden beneath them. (As Catrileo writes, “In the dance of writing, it’s important to open the wound.”) “Colonial shards produce colonial images: fragments that lodge like splinters,” she writes in the book’s preface. “The question of how to create images that fold and divert the colonial gaze runs through my creative practice. Though it may seem like an aesthetic question, it’s also deeply political. To interrogate the image is to interrogate the instruments of geopolitical domination that continue to operate.”

Piñen—which means “dust or grime stuck to the skin” in Mapudungun—is a book about identity and survival, and how they are inherently intertwined; how gender and race and class can change the shape of how a person perseveres. Specific to the Mapuche, it is about how a displaced people and culture can endure, even when forced out of their ancestral home to cities and other places unknown.

Yet while the stories are specific—all take place in Chile around the turn of the century, and follow characters trying and failing to shed the piñen that clings to them—the collection feels most universal in Catrileo’s deep understanding of the precarity of adolescence, and the feeling of gradually becoming who you are. Through this lens, its stories feel both exceptionally jarring and undeniably tender. Perhaps most unsettlingly, in “Pornomisery,” the narrator grapples with the violence that surrounds her: Next door, her neighbor Valeska—a girl around her age—suffers incestual rape at the hands of her father, who eventually kills himself after he learns his daughter is pregnant. Later, the narrator discovers her grandmother had been abused by her own father, and that her mother, too, had been abused by an uncle, something her mother only remembers much later in life.

Much of the story is about feeling helpless in the face of other people’s suffering, and for those who have suffered, domestic rage as a response to silence. “The kitchen was my mother’s place of liberation,” the unnamed narrator says. “I always imagined that instead of crying, she cooked… It was her way of escaping, of screaming.” As the narrator begins to go through puberty, she is hurdled towards something she feels both unequipped for and uninterested in. Still, she knows that the change is entirely out of her control. “Everyone went through the motions to make me a woman,” she says, resentfully. “But they never explained to us why, nor did they ask if I wanted to become one.”

Through all of this, Catrileo does not shy away from the darkest depths of her characters’ pain, particularly the pain of women and girls. But she also never abandons us in its pursuit: Just when you think you might be starting to drown, her hand is there to pull you out of the river, and back into the light.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Piñen" by Daniela Catrileo [post_excerpt] => A staggering and tender collection of short stories about Mapuche youth in modern day Chile. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-pinen-by-daniela-catrileo-translated-fiction-short-stories-mapuche-chile [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-27 21:42:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-27 21:42:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10980 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 27, 2026August 27, 2026

Book of the Month: “Piñen” by Daniela Catrileo

by Gina Mei

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10972 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-20 18:06:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-20 18:06:07 [post_content] =>

Why women around the world are building their own DIY computers.

In March of this year, TikTok creator Annike Tan started learning about cyberdecks from YouTube. Usually designed for a specific purpose, a cyberdeck is a custom-built mini computer, often in a maximalist, cyberpunk aesthetic that contrasts with the factory-made, minimalist look of traditional, mass-produced technology. For Tan, this was appealing: She and her partner had been trying to be less online, even switching to dumbphones for a few months in 2025. But both quickly realized many things still required use of the internet—QR codes to open digital menus, apps to navigate public transport—and eventually decided to switch back.

Frustrated with her overreliance on being so plugged in, Tan was inspired to build a device that could blend her need to disconnect with at least some of the technological advances she’d grown accustomed to. Originally a music business major at the SAE Institute in London, she says that while she doesn’t have formal training in engineering or coding, the knowledge she obtained from watching video tutorials online gave her the confidence to build a DIY, mermaid-themed computer out of a vintage clutch bag with a Raspberry Pi computing system, a tiny keyboard, and a mini screen.

“I thought, ‘That looks really fun,’” she says over a video call. “So I made my first cyberdeck and I loved it; I thought it was the cutest thing in the world. At the time I felt like a kid who had just built their first LEGO house.”

On the outside, Tan’s cyberdeck looks like a caramel-colored clutch, but inside, the tiny screen is framed by a faux stone border and decorated with gold trim, meant to evoke the feeling of being a “mermaid in Southeast Asia.” (This is a modification from her original design, which featured more wood and rattan, but which Tan felt represented too "Western" an interpretation of a mermaid.) The keyboard sits atop a clear acrylic sheet painted with nail polish to look like murky water, allowing Tan to easily access its computing system. Next to it is a broken compass in a bed of fake foliage, which also camouflages the on and off switch. During a more recent refurbishing, she also added a little shell next to the keyboard for SD card storage, and made adjustments to the design to allow the clutch to close with the keyboard and mouse tucked comfortably inside.

Known as Ube Boobey on social media, Tan posted a video of her cyberdeck to TikTok, where it went viral earlier this year. Some even credit her with kicking off the recent wave of cyberdeck content on TikTok, with an emphasis on videos spotlighting “girlier” builds. She is now one of hundreds of people, according to the very active cyberdeck community on Reddit, learning how to make their own tiny computers and posting about it online. Many of them are other women just getting started in electronics and coding.

Tan’s mermaid cyberdeck was designed to be an off-grid piece of technology—which means it doesn’t rely on having an internet connection. While it can’t read a QR code, the tiny computer is loaded with the top most searched Wikipedia articles; books on gardening, agriculture, health, education, and philosophy; an offline version of Google Maps; a few TED Talks; and Tan’s favorite music, including Thundercat and Erykah Badu. For Tan, it was trial and error using materials she had—a clutch bag from her closet, gold jewelry she already owned—and others she bought herself, including the Raspberry Pi system, keyboard, and screen. But ultimately, she feels that the process of building her mermaid cyberdeck was an “act of rebellion,” as she has made a piece of technology that is also a piece of art.

“From the moment you wake up to the minute you go to bed, you're always accessible to anyone who has your contact,” she says. “People yearn for freedom. Building this cyberdeck was a fun way to have something be off-grid. It’s still technologically advanced enough where it can fill a lot of holes if you were to get rid of all of your other technology, but not down to the point where you're completely analog.”

This is just one way that building cyberdecks is challenging mass-produced, Big Tech advances that, more often than not, feel imposed onto people without consent or consultation. In a world where artificial intelligence is being pushed in every industry, and data centers are being built without the knowledge or input of their neighbors, creating a device for under the radar, specific offline use—rather than one designed for overreliance, addiction, and overconsumption—is a clever way to fight back.

For many builders, cyberdecks are also an opportunity to repurpose electronic waste. According to the World Health Organization, there was an estimated 62 million tons of e-waste produced globally in 2022 alone, and only 22% of that waste was formally collected and recycled. Experts argue that much of this electronic waste can be repurposed into new builds—though there isn’t much data on the subject since currently, very little e-waste is collected for recycling, thus impeding proper disposal. Learning how to build a cyberdeck from old devices can teach people about the value of each of its parts, what makes a device run, and which parts can still be functional rather than thrown into a landfill.

“Making cyberdecks educates people’s minds about technology,” says Giovanna Aguiar, a cyberdeck builder based in São Paulo, Brazil, known as @gio.yaml on TikTok and Instagram. In May, Aguiar, a trained programmer, noticed a gap in the digital cyberdeck community: most tutorials were in English and many of the necessary components were cost-prohibitive for people living in Brazil. Now, Aguiar makes content in Portuguese that teaches people how to refurbish their electronic waste instead of buying new parts, in order to create something completely new. “From the moment you create a cyberdeck with an old laptop that isn’t turning on, for example, you start to understand that that laptop is just a group of parts,” she says. An old device’s webcam can be disconnected and used separately, as can its screen. “You start seeing old electronics as objects with potential, and long-term, I think that can change the world,” she continues. “For me, sustainability is very connected to cyberdecks.”

Electronic waste is growing every day, with the United Nations estimating that by 2030, the volume of e-waste will rise by 32%, to 82 million tons. As a result of non-compliant waste management, e-waste continues releasing toxic and persistent substances into the environment every year. Hazardous materials like lead, mercury, and cadmium leak when discarded in landfills, poisoning water supplies. And even properly recycled e-waste often still harms the environment and the people in it: Around 75% of collected e-waste is shipped to “backyard recyclers” in the Global South where people and landscapes bear the brunt, according to EcoWatch.

For Matthew Lubari, co-founder and executive director of Community Creativity for Development, a youth-led organization that teaches young people in South Sudan how to reuse and recycle electronic waste, learning how to repair a device or reuse its parts for a new build is a great way to reduce e-waste.

“Recycling electronic waste is a way of fighting back against Big Tech, because every time they develop new technologies, consumers are abandoning old stuff,” Lubari says. He points to how Big Tech companies like Microsoft intentionally discontinue software updates, forcing consumers to buy newer devices. “There is a need for more awareness regarding that, so waste can be reduced. There's a need for more promotion of repair, reuse, and upcycling. We shouldn't jump into recycling before repairing, reusing, and upcycling.”

More generally, the tradition of repairing devices and electronics is making a comeback in industrialized countries where, for the last twenty years, the custom has been to throw away devices after they’ve broken. For many years, buying a new piece of technology was the cheapest, easiest option. But now, counter to the tech industry’s profit-driven approach, consumers are seeking repair cafes, organizers are lobbying for right to repair legislation—and the girls are making cyberdecks.

In addition to environmental impact, cyberdeck builders also cite growing concerns over online mass surveillance and sexual violence, as people—mostly men—increasingly use AI tools to create nonconsensual sexual images; join harmful, misogynistic communities where they teach each other abuse tactics; and utilize AI-powered surveillance to stalk women. For Aguiar, who got into tech as a child by taking apart any piece of technology she could find, this alarming trend is also why it’s so important that cyberdecks are getting more women interested in tech.

“Maybe if women had been in the tech field since the beginning, issues like surveillance and digital stalking could’ve been avoided,” Aguiar says. “When you have a more diverse team, there’s a higher chance someone will raise a problem that would probably go unnoticed by a more homogenous group.”

This is starting to happen in the rebuilding and repurposing space. Building cyberdecks, many off-grid, can allow women and girls to feel safe, because it allows them to disconnect from the online spaces where abusers most often reach them. For Afsaneh Rigot, founder and researcher at De|Center, an organization based across the US and Africa that works to reduce the mass-scale harms of existing and emerging technologies, creating access to technological tools—away from surveillance and gendered violence—makes a lot of sense as a path of resistance.

“For women and girls, it can be such a liberating feeling to be able to create your own modes of technology and communication,” Rigot says. “We’re seeing it with cyberdecks, but even with general tools, technologies, and devices, people are now navigating these systems of control and surveillance in their own ways.” Rigot teaches young people in marginalized communities how to protect themselves through workarounds and tools that increase privacy. For her, cyberdecks are a natural expansion and continuation of strategies people have used to “try and maintain their autonomy and privacy.” It’s about seeking less dependence on technology made to maximize the profits of Big Tech companies, instead of benefitting the people who use it. The easier it is to build the technology, Rigot says, the bigger the threat to these corporate models.

Unlike mass-produced technology, cyberdecks also have an element of exaggerated aesthetics that stand in stark contrast with the greys and blacks of laptops and cellphones most people use. Tan’s mermaid cyberdeck is only one example of how these homemade computers are aesthetically defying the boring, non-technicolor devices of Big Tech. There are cyberdecks made out of jewelry boxes, eyeshadow palettes, and clutch bags, bringing a camp-y, feminine vibe to technology that has been aesthetically sober and functionally masculine for decades.

“Because technology has been so minimalist and so sad in the recent decades, the pendulum's slowly swinging the other way,” Tan says. “And this is being pioneered by women. People want something that represents them. The physical things, the tangible things that we own should be a reflection of the user, and how can that happen when everything is made in a factory?”

Aguiar believes this particular aspect of building cyberdecks can motivate women to learn skills they’re not usually encouraged to learn in a male-dominated field—something that can change tech in the long term. And she’s right: Tan’s decision to build a cyberdeck became a gateway to building other projects without any formal coding experience or education.

“Through cyberdecks, you can motivate girls to understand a little more about building technology without them necessarily working in the field, because the point is that it’s fun,” Aguiar says. “It is something you can decorate with your personality, it becomes a hobby, and oftentimes you discover this is what you want to do. It’s about looking at this and being like, ‘I can do this.’”

The popularity of cyberdecks on TikTok and Instagram, particularly through content created by women, reveals a hunger for technology that serves our daily lives, but doesn’t dominate every single second of them, nor threaten our safety, our privacy, or our environment. Technology doesn’t have to enhance patriarchal rule or even create more profit for corporations—and in the right hands, it can even make cute, functional devices out of upcycled clutch bags.

[post_title] => The Politics of Cyberdecks [post_excerpt] => Why women around the world are building their own DIY computers. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => cyberdecks-politics-diy-computers-technology-tiktok-annike-tan-big-tech-electronics-waste-upcycling [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-20 18:06:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-20 18:06:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10972 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

The Politics of Cyberdecks

by Nicole Froio

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10961 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-18 19:09:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-18 19:09:53 [post_content] =>

As the genre continues to diversify, it's time for K-pop to reckon with its relationship to Blackness.

BTS’s long-awaited comeback was controversial from the start.

In March, following a year-and-a-half hiatus to fulfill their mandatory Korean military service, the seven-member boy group reunited with a short animated trailer teasing their new album Arirang. Inspired by a nationally beloved and UNESCO-recognized folk song of the same name, the album was positioned as somewhat of an homage to the group’s Korean roots. In the trailer, the group spotlights the “profound cultural significance” of the original song—believed to be over 600 years old—through a “modern reimagining” of the seven Korean students at Howard University who first recorded it in 1896.

But many fans noticed something strange: For a few seconds, BTS can be seen portraying the students while singing, on campus, to a mostly white audience.

“Who are [these] white folks at a historically Black college built so Black Americans could actually go to college because white people would not allow them into their schools?” one fan commented on YouTube. Others followed suit.

Upon release, the 14-track album followed the standard K-pop formula: a mix of Korean and English songs with a bit of AAVE slang thrown in, and a slew of high-profile Western producers and writers, including Mike-Will-Made-It, Tezzo Touchdown, and Diplo. In short, Arirang was less an homage to an unofficial national anthem than it was a catchy hip-hop album—a nod to the group's cultural influences, but not necessarily their Korean ones. Only the leading track (“Body to Body”) sampled parts of the historic song.

This wasn’t unusual: Over time, as the genre has diversified, K-pop groups have made music with expanding influences, ranging from house to trap. In recent years, the genre has only further loosened, often following global trends rather than strictly adhering to what’s popular in Korea.

It’s an identity crisis that’s been plaguing the genre since the beginning of the decade. While the earliest iterations of K-pop groups (also known as first generation K-pop) occasionally produced songs in English, such tracks didn’t determine a group’s popularity, nor did they dominate the genre like they do now. As K-pop reaches a critical mass of popularity among international audiences, with groups not only sometimes singing exclusively in English, but also branding themselves as “global groups” with members from around the world, the lines have started to blur on what specifically makes K-pop, K-pop. It’s also why it’s become increasingly necessary for the genre as a whole to reckon with its relationship to Blackness, both historically and today.

The word K-pop itself was a bit of an accident. Dr. Stephanie Choi, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that the label was “coined by outsiders, not by the K-pop industry itself.” Popularized in the 90s by Japanese and Chinese media, the term was used to refer to the global popularity of Korean dance pop, before Western media began using it throughout the decade. “Only by the early 2000s was the term introduced to Korean media,” says Dr. Choi.

It was around this time that Lee Soo-man, the architect of what's known as contemporary K-pop, created the idol trainee system that now defines the genre. Inspired by the assembly line approach of 60s Motown, Soo-man brought the same model to Korea, founding SM Entertainment in 1995, carefully crafting and turbocharging each trainee’s talents in dance, vocals, and visual identity through bootcamps notorious for their intensity.

This tradition has endured, eventually evolving into idol trainee reality TV-style competitions that have since produced some of the biggest K-pop groups in the world, including TWICE and Stray Kids. Like the rest of the genre, the success of these shows has now moved beyond Korea to the international stage, which is where The Debut: Dream Academy—the hit show behind the global girl group Katseye—was born.

In addition to commercial success, equally pivotal to defining K-pop is the loyalty of its fandoms, something that’s endured even as the genre has continued to diversify. All K-pop groups thrive on the intimate relationship fostered between idols and their fans, and through social media, this relationship has only intensified. But as the genre has globalized, this intensity has also proven to be a double-edged sword for idols of color. While there's, of course, virtue in national and ethnic representation, for idols, this has often manifested as overexposure to racism and bigotry—sometimes including from fans of color who project themselves onto what they believe an idol of their culture should look like.

It’s a part of why in late February, when Manon Bannerman, the only Black-identifying member of the global girl group Katseye, announced a temporary hiatus from group activities for unspecified reasons, the internet was abuzz with shock, confusion, outrage, and genuine concern on her behalf. Others, meanwhile, were suspicious.

“Definitely some anti-Blackness going on behind the scenes & you can’t tell me otherwise,” one fan commented on Reddit amidst all the speculation. “It’s very textbook.”

For an industry that has roots in Black entertainment, you’d think Black idols would be more common in K-pop. But while K-pop groups have always had members from other East Asian countries, having visibly non-Asian members is still rare. Alexandra Reid of girl group BP Rania was the first Black idol in K-pop history, debuting in 2015. After BP Rania disbanded and re-debuted as Blackswan in 2020, Senegalese-Belgian member Fatou joined her in the lineup. In 2025, Girlset (formerly known as VCHA) rebranded into a multinational four-person girl group, including a Venezuelan-Trinidadian member. But otherwise, Katseye remains the exception rather than the rule when it comes to racial diversity.

The Katseye girls hail from three continents and several different ethnicities and nationalities. Sophia, the group leader, is from the Philippines. Manon is Ghanaian and Swiss. Lara, Daniela, and Megan are all from the States, representing Indian, Cuban-Venezuelan, and Chinese-Singaporean heritages respectively. The only member born and raised in Korea is Yoonchae, who is also the youngest of the six. Their diversity has long been their strength—carefully engineered to capture the hearts of millions of fans, starting from their debut on 2023’s The Debut: Dream Academy, then in 2024, through their intimate Netflix docu-series Pop Star Academy. Following multiple successful commercials for Jollibee, Glossier, and The Gap (the latter of which went viral as a perceived response to Sydney Sweeney’s rather tactless American Eagle ad), the group became seen by fans as a paragon of what the future of K-pop could be.

“I found it interesting that there was a member with the same name as mine who also has Venezuelan ancestry,” says Daniela Bottini, a self-identified Eyekon, as the group’s fans are known. “It was refreshing to see that when they said global, they really meant it. They took the best parts of the K-pop training system, but also recognized that the rigid rules that govern it couldn’t work in a group mainly comprised of young Gen Z women raised in more liberal countries.”

Indeed, on paper, Katseye checks off every K-pop box: rooted in the trainee system, with a deeply interpersonal fandom, challenging choreography, and catchy songs perfect for a 30-second TikTok. Unfortunately, their success has also shed light on the uncomfortable ways global groups are still perceived—and treated—in K-pop compared with their all-Korean peers.

Unlike her Korean contemporaries, Bannerman has not been offered the same grace nor protection she might otherwise have found from fans, even before she announced her hiatus. Throughout her trainee days and well into her debut, she received online hate and death threats and was often called “lazy” and “ungrateful” for someone in her position. It’s an unfortunate reality that all idols, Korean or not, have to go through; but coupled with xenophobia and racism, often rampant against non-Korean idols within fandom spaces, the insults compound.

While anti-Blackness is a worldwide phenomenon, it feels especially glaring in an industry that has long been inspired by Black American culture. Historically, the genre has borrowed heavily from Black aesthetics and practices while divorcing them from the bitterness of Black history, thus turning them into something more “palatable” for a broader audience to enjoy. Across the genre, Black culture is simultaneously commodified while its originators go unrecognized—something increasingly harder to ignore when Black idols like Bannerman exist. Katseye and other global groups, then, present an interesting tension point within the genre, ultimately forcing K-pop’s global audience to reconcile its conflicting ideas of fetishized exotic orientalism—its own form of racism—with its disdain for Black people. It's also what makes BTS’s Arirang trailer snafu—intentional or not—so glaring.

As the genre continues to diversify and to innovate, we’ll likely see more attempts at recreating Katseye’s success, and songs that are not just in English, but in Spanish, French, and other languages, too. Maybe there will be a K-pop group that only produces house music and dance. Perhaps the next trend in K-pop will be country guitar riffs. Jeff Benjamin, a K-pop contributor at Billboard, made the prescient prediction that 2026 will be a defining year for how the genre shifts and how global audiences perceive K-pop overall.

“At this year's Grammy Awards, we saw Katseye as well as Rosé of Blackpink perform; additionally, KPop Demon Hunters won an award—but the bodies of work that these three acts were nominated for aren't traditional K-pop,” says Benjamin.

It’s likely we’ll see a shift happen sooner rather than later. As of June 2026, the Grammys have introduced a new award: Best Asian Pop Music Performance, a category recognizing pop music performances originating from or widely known in Asian markets. It isn’t limited to just K-pop, but J-pop, C-pop, and music from other countries across the Asian diaspora, too. Shortly after the category was announced, BTS said they would not submit Arirang for consideration in the 2027 awards.

“We hope our music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language,” reads a statement from all seven members of the group, explaining their decision. “We thank Army [the group's fandom] and everyone who has always stood by us.”

As barriers between cultures and languages break down on our screens, and the world as we know it inevitably changes, it’s clear that K-pop has the potential to be a bright spot in a new world order. It’s already crossed the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and language to become an international genre. Its music resonates and inspires millions of fans across the world. But if the genre wants to reach its full cultural potential, it will also have to reckon with its relationship not only to idols of color, but xenophobia towards idols outside of Korea, once and for all.

As of today, Katseye is a de facto four-member girl group with Bannerman’s hiatus ongoing, and Sophia's recent announcement she would be stepping back from the group until September. Prolonged hiatuses aren’t uncommon in K-pop groups, usually due to illness or injury or just the need for a mental health break. But whether Bannerman comes back to the group or not, one thing is for certain: the issue of anti-Blackness in K-pop remains, and it’s up to both the industry and its fans to dismantle it.

[post_title] => The Globalization of K-Pop [post_excerpt] => As the genre continues to diversify, it's time for K-pop to reckon with its relationship to Blackness. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => globalization-k-pop-music-genre-anti-blackness-katseye-manon-bannerman-idols [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-19 12:34:00 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-19 12:34:00 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10961 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 18, 2026August 19, 2026

The Globalization of K-Pop

by Niya Doyle

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What the art world can learn from the jocks.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersections of art, capital, and politics with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

Should you find yourself at an art week any time soon, the most important thing to know is this: All the parties are fake. They aren’t even actually parties, per se. They are set pieces that maybe—maybe—might facilitate a simulacrum of networking; but parties they are not. No one has had a good time at an event thrown by a PR firm with a list, a venue, a production team, a brand in its heart, and a glimmer in its eye since maybe the first four cocaine salad years of Miami Basel. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to keep their job.

It’s all for the gram, honey. Since the advent of social media, the art party circuit has been purely performative. True, society pages have existed as long as newspapers have. But, now that the world is ruled by tech overlords who view human interaction as a problem to solve (read: monetize), brand value, relevance, and other phoney metrics drive content that absolutely no one went into debt over an MFA to create. These same metrics also now define the success of its “parties”: Rather than trafficking in actual relationships or connection, the art world, allegedly a community, can only manage to crap out one inane brand partnership after the next and throw meaningless events to “launch” them. Imagine an orgy where everyone smizes instead of getting off; then, for unclear reasons, someone trots out Patti Smith. Departing guests jostle one another for the last few swag bags, the Uber home is the cost of a ride to the airport, and yet everyone posts about it as if they are desperately trying to convince themselves they just had the best night of their lives. It’s no one’s definition of fun.

It could be said that the art world needs to touch grass, but I would argue it needs to touch hardwood. This past June, the entire city of New York did just that, when the city’s beloved, beleaguered Knicks broke a 53-year dry spell by winning the 2026 NBA Championships. Millions spilled out onto the streets in a state of delight and delirium that did something not a single corporately-sponsored art party or its online remnants has ever managed to do: spontaneously unite hundreds of thousands of strangers in public. New Yorkers danced on cars, hung off of street lights, sang from fire escapes, and lingered for hours in the streets—an electric togetherness that served as a reminder as to why anyone would live in a city as punishing and crazy-making as New York. The city seemed to remember itself in a way alien to the day to day adversarial experience of just getting by.

To that end, New York did what it does best: throw a tantrum of main character syndrome, ensuring the euphoria was not just about the Knicks, but about the city itself. As one viral tweet put it, “If you thought New Yorkers were insufferable before, you ain’t seen nothing yet!” The Knicks’ win—and specifically, the opportunity it allowed New Yorkers to converge in the streets—seemed to grant permission to publicly embrace a new era of civic pride and to define all the facets that identity entails. Rather than simply saying it wasn’t like the rest of the country, New York was asserting what it had become. Chants of “KNICKS IN FIVE, HAPPY PRIDE!” were heard everywhere. The Tribeca Film Festival had just wrapped. The World Cup was heating up, bringing the entire world to town and spotlighting our many immigrant neighbors. (New York is, after all, the most linguistically diverse city in recorded history.) And, presiding over everything, everywhere at once, DSA dimples and Knicks jersey under his suit, was Zohran Mamdani: a young mayor with the party stamina to stay up all night with the rest of his city and still make it to the Puerto Rican Day Parade the next morning.

The Internet, as it is wont to do, took note, with art world commentary account @artnotnet noting, “THE ART WORLD NEEDS WHATEVER THE KNICKS ARE HAVING.” Diffuse, gate-kept, internet-facing, fake, and over-branded, this would seem to be a fair prescription for a culture sector with the vitality and diversity of the Mall at Short Hills. (I have lived in New York for over two decades, but I am Jersey born and bred: I write from expertise.) But this brings us to the next logical question: What exactly were the 2026 Knicks having, and how might anyone—let alone something so nebulous and often nefarious as the art world—actually replicate it?

As the financial capital of the world, it’s rare that NYC gets to play the underdog. That the Knicks hadn’t taken home a chip in half a century really didn’t bother the rest of the country; no one was sitting around feeling sorry for New York. The difference was the team itself: The 2026 Knicks were absolute charmers, captained by the deadpan Jalen Brunson, who turned down a massive contract extension of roughly $113 million in 2025, instead asking the back office to use that money to build a team that could win. On the court, that team achieved a cooperative flow state that would build over the course of a game and kick into a furious full throttle in the fourth quarter; off the court, they were droll, self-effacing, and funny enough to carry comedy podcasts. The chemistry was palpable.

Following a typical Hollywood formula, the NBA finals paired an incredibly likable team with a whiny, hair-pulling villain, whom the writers’ room went so far as to make French. Some framed the match as veteran Millennials going up against cocky Zoomers; an age gap that played out in interviews where the Knicks frequently spoke of the need to overcome ego to win.

This likability factor is not to be ignored. The Knicks win happened to overlap with the World Cup, an event heavily promoted by Mamdani, who is both a die-hard soccer fan and extremely invested in the city’s immigrant narrative as a Uganda-born mayor from Queens. In New York City, this concurrent enthusiasm for the world’s game felt jump-started by Knicks euphoria—all that energy had to go someplace after the season was over. As in the NBA Finals, there were controversies: FIFA is evil, Egypt was robbed, and of course, Trump interceded over a red card. However, none of that seemed to slow the excitement and earnest need to connect in troubling times, whether it was Koreans in Mexico or Scotland’s Tartan Army in Boston. The sweetheart of this proverbial rodeo (even if Dallas was where his run ended) was Norway’s Erling Haaland, whose personality cult felt familiar (at least to this Knicks fan). Rather than a podcast, Haaland had his Snapchat, which introduced the world to a very goofy, community-oriented, terrifying striker who chose to add his mother’s name to his jersey. This was no Maradona blowing rails in a mink. The media has framed Haaland as wholesome and hardworking, often mentioning that he’s still together with his childhood sweetheart—as are some key Knicks players.

Whether or not it’s true behind closed doors, there’s a reason the athletes the world has fallen for were the ones portrayed as having their priorities straight. If romanticizing the bedroom exploits of someone like George Best might be seen as projecting our fantasies onto one freakishly talented human being in his own time (the Swinging 60s), perhaps assigning down-to-earth qualities to Haaland and Brunson is a symptom of what we crave. The world is aching for the real and the relatable: In an era of apps and Amazon, we desperately lack day-to-day existences rooted in human interactions. Community—in so many forms—has ceased to exist. Tellingly, the person who got the loudest cheers at the Knicks' Victory Parade was neither Brunson nor Mamdani, but point guard Jose Alvarado, who grew up in public housing in Bushwick and still has close ties to his high school. His is a community connection that’s anything but performative.

And this is where the art world must take note: In recent months, the sense of joy and togetherness that both New York specifically and the world more broadly has felt around athletics has valorized humility, humor, and—in what has become Brunson’s signature quote—heart. Pouring into the streets to celebrate the athletes we believe to represent these qualities has been a healing experience for de-regulated nervous systems around the world.

Sports franchises are tied to cities that are meant to support community and culture. But those two things have migrated online behind paywalls. The physical art world—the siren song of any one of the world’s putative capitals—has retreated into fairs, auction houses, and private jets. It is completely disconnected from not only its creators but from any potential class of audience. That, more than anything, will spell its death if something doesn’t pivot.

No one outside the billionaire class is asking for the sun and moon and stars. But, in 2026, even affordability is aspirational. We want to feel alive in the communities we break our asses to live in. These sports moments have reminded us of that sensation. If the art world wants to feel vital again, it needs to tap into that sense of place, time, purpose, and togetherness. What does that look like? I have no fucking clue. But the art world needs a Brunson or a Haaland stat. Or at least, a place for the narrative we have projected onto them: that talent, discipline, sacrifice, and groundedness will pay off—and that a great personality on top of it all never hurt. We need a final countdown feeling of magic, we need uplift. Art can and should provide that—not just another VIP experience that even the rich who are privy to it (or the writers who cover it) can't fully remember.

Personally, I cannot wait to see what the art world will become in Mamdanistan. The city’s newest budget has ballooned arts funding, and what a relief it is to see taxpayer money going this way. We have seen what happens when only the rich pay for art: It becomes their plaything, their investment tool. We’ve seen how a billionaire mayor can make the city itself into a plaything and investment tool for the rich, too, rather than a livable city for everyone else. New York will always be smug and self-congratulatory, but—this summer at least—that stance was alive and well out in the streets for anyone at all. Now let’s see what art comes out of it.

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August 12, 2026August 14, 2026

Y’all Ready for This?

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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