Status Updates From Days of Love and Rage: A St...

Fantastic reading, I fear I’ll have to disappear again soon thanks to annoying law school applications. Still can’t believe LSAC sends me a VOLUNTARY survey on “rating my experience!” as though it were some kind of spa retreat. Literally: “Did any particular song help get you HYPED for the LSAT?” (I.e., “Always” by Beyonce.) uhh no. Try, “The Drugs Don’t Work Anymore”, “Under Pressure”, etc.

The description of the arts festival is deeply compelling to me, especially the theatrical performance. I think the way Gopal glosses this with theories of narrative and storytelling is highly provocative.

The descriptions of airstrikes in this are devastating. Gopal makes the peculiarities of the emerging new government in Manbij in 2012 and 2013 relatively easy to understanding and pretty engaging—he makes political theory and democracy exciting to read about.

Absolutely incredible

I’ve been wondering why Gopal focuses on Manbij—from what I understand, it is not usually said to be a focal point of the Syrian revolution. What I now see is that Gopal is interested in the emergence of democracy in Syria, and Manbij is highly significant to this topic. In the U.S., we often take democracy and certain freedoms for granted, so it is interesting to see people create a democracy in the 21st century