Good afternoon, beloved -
Kind of a light and scattered dispatch for you today, mostly to reflect on some recent experiences and share a few pieces of good news.
§ 2025 has seen a burst of international travel like none I’ve experienced since the heady, headlong days of fifteen years ago — Amsterdam and Rotterdam in January; the second round of Stateside Lifehouse talks in April, which took in Austin, New Orleans and Chicago; a separate trip to New York City; Crete, over the summer; Berlin, Mexico City and Paris in the past month alone; and we’ll spend a few weeks in Seoul before year’s end. It’s left me somewhat thrown off my gyros with regard to exercise and diet and general life-pattern, but it’s also been genuinely salutary to get out and see what people in all these different places are thinking and doing.
Perhaps the most striking thing I noticed in these wanderings was a universal revulsion for the Israeli state. And when I say “universal,” I mean just that: I encountered Palestinian flags and prominent graffiti taking up the cause of Gaza literally everywhere I went, from the entirely expected sites (the walls of Neukölln and the 5e arrondissement) to theose that are somewhat surprising (fluttering from one of the corncob balconies of Marina City; inscribed on the guardrails at a particularly hair-raising switchback on the road above Hora Sfakion). In a time of otherwise ubiquitous moral disappointment, I found this universal clarity reassuring. I’m not nearly naive enough to believe that anti-Zionist sentiment always goes unleavened by frank antisemitism, and in my life I’ve certainly seen enough of the former used as a smokescreen for expressions of the latter. The sense that people in all of these places found no ambiguity whatsoever in choosing where to lodge their sympathy, though, when confronted with an opposition between the criminal Israeli state and the multitude pinned helplessly beneath its might, was nevertheless somehow powerfully restorative for me. It is possible to wish that global upwelling of sentiment had amounted to more, somehow — had been mobilized more broadly, effectively or consequentially. But I’ll take what I can get, you know?
§ It’ll be interesting to see if any of this groundswell of feeling surfaces in Korea, which has just had itself a hell of a year. I’m not sure how many folks outside the country quite realize what a massive accomplishment it was to face down the declaration of martial law on the part of the right-wing former president Yoon Suk Yeol last December, from the unarmed legislators barricading the National Assembly against the special-operations troops deployed to storm the building, to weeks-long outdoor vigils in the soul-flensing depths of a Seoul winter. Not merely did this prevent Yoon from enacting the assumption of total dictatorial power he’d planned, but it wound up with him impeached, arrested, indicted and jailed. (It’s an outcome an American can only regard with envy: if only our own prosecutors had treated January 6th with the same seriousness as their Korean counterparts did Yoon’s attempt at a “self-coup,” well, we’d be living in a very different world right now.)
But that this overwhelmingly central K-drama of the year has, so far as I have been able to discern, gone virtually unnoticed abroad makes for a somewhat schizoid feeling in me, because Korea was the other thing that was ubiquitous in my travels, very nearly as much so as Gaza. Everywhere I went, I found K-pop, K-beauty, Korean fried chicken, and a subtle but distinct inflection toward Korean aesthetics in branding, styling and packaging. This broad fascination with all things Korean is unquestionably a triumph for the national chamber of commerce, the tourism ministry and the architects of soft power more broadly, but it feels completely severed from the currents which roiled and continue to roil the actual place and the people who live there, prominent among which are the rapid aging of society, the sharp turn toward the misogynist right among young men, and the pervasive use of networked platforms (and increasingly, inevitably, “AI”) to harass, abuse and extort. I suppose it’s something approaching diametrically foolish to expect an interest oriented precisely toward surfaces and sensations to attempt engagement with the real Korea. It’d be refreshing as hell to see, though.
§ For reasons related to something I’ll relate below, I’ve been thinking a lot about surplus lately, about excess and overspill and superfluity. And given that it’s how I make my living, one of the conditions of surplus I’m most acutely interested in is that of expression.
The explosion over the past few years in low-barrier platforms for social expression, both long-form and more Twitterish, has produced an overwhelming surfeit of discourse, even of meaningful insight, on subjects I’m interested in. There are any number of writers from an equally wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives now essentially stepping up to the public-intellectual role, connecting the dots between events and processes and otherwise generating the kind of analysis I generally aspire to, on topics ranging from the political semiotics of fashion to the prospects for a Chinese geostrategic hegemony based on distributed renewable-energy generation. This is, in some sense, what it was all about — what internet publishing was designed and intended to result in, from the very earliest pre-blogging days of Geocities sites and web rings. But I don’t mind admitting that it’s left me saddled with a curious reticence to comment, even on matters my experience might otherwise qualify me to speak to.
Part of this is a sense that I don’t have very much to add to what’s already been said. Part of it is not wanting to play the take-merchant game. Part of it has to do with the overwhelming sense of futility I’ve, fairly or otherwise, come to associate with the project of public expression more broadly, in the wake of the sharpest possible thought manifestly doing so little to prevent us from arriving at this terrible moment together. Who knows, part of it may simply be the shorter days settling into my neuroemotional system. Whichever or whatever’s driving it, it’s what I’m struggling with at the moment, and there’s no question that it’s getting in between me and language.
§ Possibly relatedly, though in some obscure way I have yet to comprehend fully: After many years of hemming and hawing — underwritten primarily by the acute awareness that every nice pen I’ve bought in the past thirty years wound up gathering dust, prettily and expensively — I finally bit the bullet and picked up this elegant little Kaweco AL Sport fountain pen. I bought it from the most appropriate possible vendor, Kreuzberg’s wonderful Modulor, and I’m thrilled to report that I’m actually using it (for just about the only thing I actually hand-write anymore, marginal annotations in books).
It’s a tiny thing, the pen, both conceptually and literally. It’s the only thing I’ve encountered for quite some time that’s reignited the desire to think with my whole body, though. I find myself looking for excuses to use it more. Watch this space.
§ Finally for today, I’m delighted to pass on the word that I’ve now signed contracts for two new books: one tentatively called Against Abundance, for Verso, and another just as tentatively entitled The Tetrad, for the brand-new Ill Will Editions. These are both intended to be shorter works, rather more essayistic than anything I’ve published in the past, and if I get the balance right they’ll complement one another perfectly. Wish me luck.
§ Right now I'm reading Timothy Morton’s Humankind; listening obsessively to the newish Swans record, Birthing, ahead of seeing them next week, and the extraordinary Kaneng Lolang, who was the highlight of an already all-killer/no-filler showcase for Shahzad Ismaily at OTO week before last; and watching a thoughtful Japanese drama about a near-future state euthanasia program, called Plan 75; Naeem Mohaiemen’s ambitious, flawed three-screen film on the Kent State killings of 1970 and their aftermath, Through A Mirror, Darkly; and all five seasons of Slow Horses, shotgunned.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 149 of Sunday, 2 November 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊