We cannot fall into the trap of believing that a system willing to humiliate, harass, gas and murder fears a good movie, much less a rise in the ambient levels of empathy. “What can we do?” already admits a realm of impossibility. It is better to ask “what are we willing to do?”

A popular way to defend film as a socially important form is to rely on Roger Ebert’s formulation that film is an “empathy machine.” The idea of a machine producing empathy is already a strange dislocation of a cognitive miracle. It is observed in a wide range of animals including rats, elephants and dolphins. It seems to be somewhat of a necessity for sociality and is a central component of learning. We don’t need machines for that and we do not face a deficit. The problem is not a lack of the ability to perceive and feel another’s pain.

There is no such thing as the right to self-defense against the police. One is supposed to acquiesce to whatever punishment is meted out and hope to live long enough to settle a lawsuit with the city. It is this right that the mayor defended when he said there was no problem with the NYPD’s response to the protests. There definitionally cannot be. There is no such thing as police violence, only criminal violence, and it is the cop who catches the robber, not the other way around. There is no common ground between the baton and the skull. Every night one might see the snarl and wonder, “Is this when they start shooting?” It is reason enough for people to stay indoors, to obey curfews, to acquiesce. But many of us have lived our entire lives knowing the shooting can start on any night. There are differences now. I am more clear-eyed about what I am walking towards and I know its risks. In the lulls, I think about other things: my hand just above someone else’s knee in a restaurant late at night, making conversation with a friend’s toddler, coffee spilled down the front of a new shirt, a novel I have just finished reading—all the rest of trying to lead a life. Then the world speeds up and a nightstick is swinging towards me. We are human and they are human, but we cannot be reconciled, because the war has not been won.

Here are elites willing to see others die to preserve orderly property relations—we saw another version of it a few months ago when wealthy and conservative businesspeople started suggesting it would be fine for people, people other than themselves, to die in order for the economy to come roaring back. Those elites project onto the masses their own ruthlessness and savagery; they fear others on the basis that they may be like themselves. I’m sure you want to kill me so I will kill you first.

Before “Philosophy,” I primarily thought of Warhol in terms of his productivity — the wildly prolific artist once told an interviewer that “everybody should be a machine.” Finding out that it was the truly mundane details of life that he savored the most — tending to his zits, vacuuming while watching daytime television — set me straight. Warhol didn’t appear to think time could be wasted. Instead, he argues, it’s “the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening,” and not the parties or adventures or art projects, that are the most significant.

[Dyer’s list] contains mostly good advice, but I’m afraid I can’t quite get behind #3, despite its obvious utility: “Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov,” Dyer says.

[My professor] handed me the book and told me to be careful—not like I might lose his beloved, marked-up copy, but like reading it might hurt.

Public spaces are the opposite of my bed.