Murder Exam

Murder, Muggers, And Rottweilers

Thurston Moore | Esquire | 10th October 2023

Sonic Youth's co-founder remembers life on the Lower East Side circa 1978, a peak year for no-wavers and punk rockers but also for muggers, murderers, rottweilers, junkies, drug-dealers, rent-boys and drunks. "The crime and violence were real, but they were more or less arbitrary. Also, I probably shouldn’t have been walking alone around Alphabet City at three in the morning" (4,500 words)

The Exam That Broke Society

Yasheng Huang | Aeon | 19th October 2023

The Imperial Civil Service Examination was the sole avenue of social mobility in China from the seventh to the twentieth centuries. It was a catastrophic success. The most brilliant minds in China wanted only to pass the examination, win high office, and entrench their emperor's monopoly on power. So far from fostering private enterprise and civil society, their job was to suppress it (4,000 words)