Culture

THE E’ER INSCRUTABLE | Fimbulwinter; The End of the World

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It is not easy to imagine what an entire city on fire must look like. It would be easier to imagine what Hell itself looks like: more than two millennia of referential material survive to aid in painting that mental portrait. Perusing Dante, or staring wide-eyed at a tableau of Hieronymus Bosch, even turning one’s ear to the apocalyptic blare and bleating of any dime-a-dozen Evangelical can give one at least an inkling of this. The word itself has been cheapened almost beyond practical use: “go to Hell,” “to Hell with it,” “what the Hell.” It is as if, as the preacher in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man explains it, the eternal punishment of brimstone were a mild discomfort. Not so: Hell is stench, Hell is immobility, Hell is an eternity of directionless torture, and by eternity is meant the elapsed time it takes for a sparrow to light upon a mountain of a million-billion grains of sand and, carrying one away in his beak, to make it flat.

Culture

CULTURALLY SHOOK | CNN Has a White Savior Complex, and I’m Not Surprised

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Recently, CNN published a story—a love story that, CNN insists, “defies borders.” Carly Harris, a Mormon college student, was volunteering at a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, when she met Soufiane El Yassami, a Muslim fast food worker. El Yassami had studied industrial refrigeration and was seeking a better life in Europe, fleeing the dismal economic situation in Morocco. “After several weeks of flirty conversations with Harris,” the article states, El Yassami was denied asylum into Europe, arrested and sent back to Morocco. The two continued to converse through Facebook messages, trying to find a way for El Yassami to visit Harris in the United States. Yet they soon realized the possibility of El Yassami obtaining a visa was bleak, if not impossible.