Faculty Writing: Reading Virginia Woolf during Quarantine, Right-Wing Climate Realism, and Cop-Talk

For LARB, Danielle Drori explores the potency of Virginia Woolf’s literature—particularly its “interior” quality—in the context of global pandemic and life in quarantine. “Woolf’s novel was written as part of a broader intellectual quest, around a century ago, for the right words and metaphors to account for inner life, the conscious and unconscious mind as shaped by all kinds of others: people, cities, furniture, cauliflowers.”

On the podcast This Is Hell!, Ajay Singh Chaudhary discusses the nature of “right-wing climate realism” and the way it shapes our response to the mounting climate disaster: “It’s both present and also past… This is not that new. You can see the European Union’s refugee policy, or the American militarization of the border or our migrant detention networks, or our prison system as forms of right-wing climate realism.” 

On The New Republic’s podcast, The Politics of Everything, Patrick Blanchfield explains what he calls (in recent New Republic piece) “cop-talk”—that is, the euphemism and officialese police use to paper over the harms they commit.