The Mexican novelist and activist talks about the role that the US plays in the hemisphere, and a joint future for North and South America.

We need your memory and your imagination or ours shall never be complete. You need our memory to redeem your past, and our imagination to complete your future. We may be here on this hemisphere for a long time. Let us remember one another. Let us respect one another. Let us walk together outside the night of repression and hunger and intervention, even if for you the sun is at high noon and for us at a quarter to twelve.

"4chan value system, like Trump’s ideology, is obsessed with masculine competition (and the subsequent humiliation when the competition is lost). Note the terms 4chan invented, now so popular among grade schoolers everywhere: “fail” and “win”, “alpha” males and “beta cucks”. This system is defined by its childlike innocence, that is to say, the inventor’s inexperience with any sort of “IRL” romantic interaction. And like Trump, since these men wear their insecurities on their sleeve, they fling these insults in wild rabid bursts at everyone else. Trump the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies this duality. "

How the People’s Temple tore one family apart, told in part via letters:

We have at long last opened our hearts to you, expressing the sorrow and agony which we have restrained over six long years. Any time you express the wish to resume normal relations and exchange with us, the past will be forgotten. For after all we do love you and the children more than any other persons. We shall continue to cherish you to our last day on earth. The peerless joy of raising you from childhood to youth is a unique life experience, indeed. Your father and mother

During my first weeks in Rogers Park, I was surprised by how often I heard the word “pioneer”. I heard it first from the white owner of an antiques shop with signs in the windows that read: “Warning, you are being watched and recorded.” When I stopped off in his shop, he welcomed me to the neighbourhood warmly and delivered an introductory speech dense with code. This neighbourhood, he told me, needs “more people like you”. He and other “people like us” were gradually “lifting it up”.

Excerpted from Notes From No Man’s Land

In high school, I started to become like a local legend. A hood celebrity, if you will. And you really gotta understand how poppin’ New York City basketball was at that time. I’m playing against Stephon Marbury, Skip 2 My Lou, Alimoe (rest in peace), all these guys who would become household names, they were just kids from around the way. Man, even Cam’ron was super nice!!!

I knew all these guys from when we was little kids playing church basketball, and now all of a sudden we got Jay-Z, Puff, Dame Dash — all these guys are showing up to our games. That’s how insane New York City basketball was at that time.

An excerpt from Darnielle’s debut novel, in which a disfigured man talks to maladjusted teens.

A year after her death, a tribute to the Saturday Night Live star who didn’t want to be on TV.

“Norbert Grupe—a Nazi soldier’s son, boxer, professional wrestler, failed actor, criminal, and miserable human being who was never so happy as when he could make someone hate him—was once a man so beautiful that other men wanted to paint him.”

Before ending up in Rikers, Jeremy Wilson — if that’s his real name — had portrayed himself as a Scottish-born DJ, a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer, a professor at MIT, an Apple executive, a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and an Irish mobster. Among others.

An interview on craft:

Writing The Subs in three nights was really a fantastic athletic feat as well as mental, you shoulda seen me after I was done...I was pale as a sheet and had lost fifteen pounds and looked strange in the mirror.

An interview with the novelist, who died on Saturday.

“We take it that all young writers overestimate their work. It’s impossible not to—I mean if you recognized what shit you were writing, you wouldn’t write it. You have to believe in your stuff—every day has to be the new day on which the new poem may be it.”

Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, have long shared a vision for remaking America. Now the nation’s top law-enforcement agency can serve as a tool for enacting it.

There’s no telling how many guns there are in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose.

He’d sold his company, chartered a yacht, and set off with his model girlfriend to see the world. Finally, it seemed, Chris Smith was living the life he’d always wanted. But back home there was trouble: missing money, unraveling secrets, and a sudden question. Where the hell was Chris Smith, really?

He came home from Vietnam, wrote the novel that became Full Metal Jacket, was nominated for an Oscar and riding high. Then he got thrown in jail for stockpiling stolen library books, started drinking, cut off his friends and fled to a remote Greek island. He never made it back.

“Fear is running rampant in the Curia, where the mood has rarely been this miserable. It’s as if someone had poked a stick into a beehive. Men wearing purple robes are rushing around, hectically monitoring correspondence. No one trusts anyone anymore, and some even hesitate to communicate by phone.”

The 66-year-old became lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail. She survived for at least 16 days before crawling into her sleeping bag one last time, her journal sealed in a waterproof bag.

“My dad’s whole idea was to do an amusement park differently, not where you just got strapped in and twisted around, but one where you controlled what was going on. You can have an awesome time, but you can also hurt yourself if you don’t use good judgment.”

“When I’ve had courage, I often lacked the healthy choices. When I’ve had healthy choices, I often lacked courage. Ending unhealthy transactional relationships and opening ourselves to radical possibilities is one way we effectively heal ourselves and others in America.”

“I decided that if he would not tell us his story, then I would.”