"Thinking Revolution”: Muslim Immigration and Poetic Politics

My parents emigrated from Lahore to Brooklyn, NY in the early 1990s. I’ve often imagined their arrival in the U.S.: they settled in a country far from home, where people who looked nothing like them spoke an unfamiliar language, with little in the way of a support system. When I imagine their difficulties, I’m impressed by their resilience. Today, Muslim immigrants like my parents are faced with unprecedented circumstances of danger, difficulty and hostility. More importantly, migrants are often

Reconsidering Housing and the Loneliness Paradox

Dormitory life is an Anglo-American peculiarity. Drawing on residential colleges at, for instance, Oxford and Cambridge, colleges like Amherst build their pedagogy on the firm belief that collegiate co-residence will produce a livelier intellectual atmosphere than would a university at which students go to class and then return to their separate homes. The idea is a familiar one: putting bodies together in houses and bedrooms will thrust the minds inhabiting those bodies into some kind of close-

On Irony and Hipster Leftism

There is a disappointing, scathing and toxic mix of ironic leftism permeating discourse at Amherst College. The discourse of our age is a pessimistic one, demoralizingly saturated with irony and preemptive disavowal of Serious Ideas. But irony is employed most fervently in reference to leftist ideas of workers’ revolution, racial justice and gender justice. Jokes about “false consciousness” mix with declarations that the “revolutionary Marxist college students are going to end up as attorneys.”