shaan sachdev

The U.S.’s free-flowing pipeline of armaments, amid mounting evidence of civilian massacres, offers a grim dilemma to scientists, scholars, activists, and others who believe in the clarifying power of a wartime death toll. If acknowledging it changes nothing, how much does the number matter?

Also available in Isuue 13 of The Drift in print.

Some tops say they don’t bottom because it’s too fraught or too painful. But one doesn’t bottom because it’s easy or painless — one bottoms whether it feels good or not. The core of the experience isn’t really physical anyway. It’s psychological.

Also available in print

Without unstifled access to our city's tree-lined streets and architectural marvels, New York's amblers are left trapped in tiny apartments and cluttered offices. When we go outside, the domination of cars, scooters, and bicycles imprison us in public.

Humans age. All athletes must eventually grapple with time's sly creep, and when they bow out of the game, we tend not to click our tongues but to throw roses their way.

Republished by MSN Entertainment

If young audiences around the world stumbled upon the cheer of collective individuality through Friends, it was Chandler who supplied them with the postmodern irony with which to make sense of it. As such, he became — and possibly remains — one of sarcasm’s most effective global exporters.

Preluded by winking, clue-laden speeches, the songs' unveilings elicit in both live and virtual audiences the sort of manic rush akin to that aroused by the unwrapping of Pokémon cards in the 2000s and baseball cards in the decades prior.

When the Stanford man broke up with me, he told me it was because he needed to date someone more “average.” He told me that intellectualizing and reading tomes were for graduate school, not the stuff of romance.

Pushcart Prize Winner XLIX (49)
Also available in print

Today’s critical culture and mass culture tend to readily reinforce one another, posing a strange, almost axiomatic embrace of commercialism in the name of relevance.

A country as large as ours will unavoidably entail fragmentary realities — what’s evident in New York City isn’t so in Jackson, Mississippi — and I am thereby emboldened to declare a golden age for gay disease in my small, populous and populously gay corner of the country.

Renaissance takes us on the psychotropic dance floor trip that explodes into the bloodstream when “Blow” is crushed and snorted — inducing neither blackout nor hyper-anxiety but grimy, gaudy euphoria.

Republished by Yahoo News

Of course, Arendt wasn’t a perfect thinker. She erred. She misjudged. She abandoned empathy. The model of a perfect thinker today seems to be one who has never expressed an offensive thought. Yet, “there are no dangerous thoughts,” as the famous Arendtian maxim goes—“thinking itself is dangerous."

What I’d really like to do is skip over the statistics-stuffed task of proving that the military-industrial complex is what the military is for. I’d much prefer to discuss why this well-documented fact lies wispily in the margins of serious conversations about the military — why it’s underestimated, ignored, misunderstood, mocked.

Today's energetically indignant Instagram posts, op-eds and demonstrations will leave defense contractors with a fountainhead of cash long after we've moved on to the next crisis du jour.

On December 6, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published its annual list of the world’s highest-earning arms manufacturers. The Swedish think tank disclosed that in 2020, as hospitals overflowed, morgues filled up, stores shuttered, and the global economy contracted by 3.1 percent, the top 100 weapons makers earned a record total of $531 billion, a 1.3 percent increase from 2019.

Because Beyoncé approaches her performances with the sort of ferocious discipline more commonly associated with professional athletes than with pop stars — she practices until her feet bleed — she is our most physically capable living superstar.

Republished in Everyone's an Author (4^th edition)

I walked away with a portrait of this new style of empathy. It was anchored in the sorts of outrages that had fueled humanitarian interventionism, but the outrage now also appeared to be personalized, applicative and, to some degree, recreational.

Also available in print and audio

When we lose sight of the bigger picture — of history, cycles, agendas and consequences — we can find ourselves seduced by the smaller picture: a bombing here, an atrocity there, a rifle-toting militant sitting behind an ornately carved presidential desk. We forget who attacked whom first. Who funded whom. Who profited. Who lied. In isolation, sensationalized increments capitalize upon our outrage, preserving axioms and insulating institutions.

Philosophers’ lives are, of course, irresistible. They tend to be bestrewn with dysfunction. Something about the gulf between the life of the mind and the life of the person leaves us marveling at the cost of luminescent thinking (or of practical drudgery, depending on your side). But Arendt, while “a magnificent stage diva” when compared to the theorists and scholars of the Frankfurt School, was extraordinarily disciplined.

I was only dabbling in the world of OnlyFans, stepping into the skin of the adult performer, because requests to film casual hookups had come to denote a new frontier of urban gay encounters.

There are no radicals in Hollywood. Most seem to be centrist Democrats. They kowtow to war. They thank the troops. They hate red presidents and love the blue ones.

Today, however, the world’s largest rapid transit system bestows upon its dowdy loyalists no more badges of honor or comradeship. Nearly a year after the governor ordered its late-night shutdown, my underground world is a sort of hell.

If life imitates art, then Wikipedia pursues life with unflagging voracity. As we mark the site’s twentieth anniversary, the Covid-19 pandemic tests the status to which it has risen: a breathing, collective record of our past and present—and the digital age's most expansive and accessible English-language encyclopedia.

In his thirty-three months at the helm of the State Department, Pompeo came to caricature rightwing jingoism. Economic and rhetorical warfare were his first resorts; obstructionism was his modus operandi.

Republished by Common Dreams

While the accord benefits Israeli, Emirati, and American governments and companies, it also embraces a Middle East roiled by foreign intervention and widespread violence.

The bipartisan rejection of this proposed troop reduction exemplifies an “any price is worth it” mentality toward national security, propelled by the revolving door between government and companies that profit from American armament and adventurism.

Governments around the world are routinely antagonized by the United States for quashing dissent and democracy. This week they are reveling in the nationwide chaos and global demonstrations prompted by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

When my sister and her husband offered to drive me from New York City to their home on Shannon Farm, in Rockfish Valley, Virginia, I acceded. Happily. I’m spending my quarantine surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains and 520 acres of forests, pastures, and hayfields.

In Caleb Crain’s new novel, Overthrow, a thirty-one-year-old graduate student named Matthew meets a poet who recruits him to volunteer at Occupy Wall Street. The poet and his friends read tarot cards, and some of them even believe they can read minds: with a mixture of irony and earnestness, they refer to themselves as the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings.

Late this summer, Crain and I sat down to talk about technology, Occupy, and how fiction helps us understand life.