Ilias Alami in The Breakdown:
“We will not accept a new Cold War between the United States and China”, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva declared in his victory speech in October 2022, “we will have relations with everyone.” It is a sentiment echoed by leaders across the Global South. “Malaysia’s position is clear”, announced the country’s prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, earlier this year to an international audience of policymakers, business leaders and diplomats. “The country remains non-aligned and will not be dragged into any global power rivalries.”
This is a strategic sentiment shared by a growing group of nations: the pursuit of what some scholars have termed “polyalignment.” Increasingly, developing countries refuse to fall in line with one of Beijing, Washington, or Brussels. Instead, they are forcefully asserting their rights to develop trade, investment and security partnerships with whoever they wish. In doing so, they are drawing on the principles, symbols and rhetoric of the Non-Aligned Movement, the coalition of Third World countries who, during the First Cold War, chose to join neither the US nor the rival Soviet geopolitical blocs.
As Kenyan president William Ruto stated last year in response to a CNN journalist’s question about whether the country would choose between Chinese or US investment: “we are neither facing West nor East; we are facing forward where opportunities are”—a modern twist on the famous quote from Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, who in 1960 declared that “we face neither East nor West; we face forward.” Past histories of non-alignment clearly live through the current discourse and practice of polyalignment, informing how Southern leaders interpret and navigate today’s geopolitical rivalries, as well as the risks and opportunities available to them. In doing so, however, they highlight a sobering truth: we are now entering a new era of great power competition, a Second Cold War, whose roots lie deep in the twentieth century.
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It’s now almost a reflex: An election is held, and someone pushes the big, red Death of Democracy panic button. When Donald Trump won in 2016, liberals saw a gold-plated Adolf Hitler in a red baseball cap. Then Joe Biden took over and conservatives warned of Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot reborn, an America where your kids would be forced to go to gay camp and pray to RuPaul before lunch. (They’re panicking again with Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race.) Now, we have Trump redux. The hysterias flip, but the impulse stays the same: to imagine top-down tyranny as a looming catastrophe.
It is no great secret that the undergraduate English department is in a state of decline: a shrinking number of English majors, a decrease in faculty, and a reputation of unemployability and irrelevance. Much has been written about this decline. Nathan Heller’s recent New Yorker piece, 
One of the biggest stories in science is quietly playing out in the world of abstract mathematics. Over the course of last year, researchers fulfilled a decades-old dream when they unveiled a proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture — a key piece of a group of interconnected problems called the Langlands programme. The proof — a gargantuan effort — validates the intricate and far-reaching Langlands programme, which is often hailed as the grand unified theory of mathematics but remains largely unproven. Yet the work’s true impact might lie not in what it settles, but in the new avenues of inquiry it reveals.
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Have you ever sat through a dull or inappropriate toast at a celebration, desperately wishing for it to end? You’re not alone. Bad toasts have a way of dragging down events, resulting in awkward silences, eye-rolling, and seat shifting. The problem with these subpar tributes is that they often make the audience uncomfortable, drag on and on, or focus too much on the speaker, rather than the individual or occasion being honored. Bad toasts can easily drain the energy from the room, detracting from the purpose of the celebration—to unite people in a moment of joy, respect, or reflection.
IN 1946 THE AUSTRIAN WRITER Marlen Haushofer began publishing fairy tales and short stories in newspapers and small magazines. Her prewar writings—stories, poems, chapters of novels—had all been lost, and during the war she wrote “not a single line.” The new stories were a pragmatic measure: they were written to be published, to supplement the household budget. (Her husband, a provincial dentist, frittered the family’s finances away on flashy cars.) Yet since neither he nor her sons read her works, they could also be a form of revenge. “Professionally, I feed on anger,” she wrote to a friend in 1968, two years before her death. This stifled anger takes oblique forms. Philosophical novels, thrillers, dreams: her enervating allegories are like burrs—they stick.
A coming-of-age ceremony, a Burmese bar mitzvah, a meditation retreat: I had called it all of those things to friends in the weeks before. It was a little bit of each but “more ceremonial slash familial than necessarily religious,” I’d qualified. We’d bargained with my mother for weeks to get out of it. We’re nearly thirty, my brother Nick reasoned. We’re adults. We didn’t want to shave our heads, wear monk’s robes, meditate all day. Maybe it is important to you, but we don’t care about religion, we said, armed with years of therapy.
In the Middle Ages, friendship was