From: Edward Kerr
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2022, 8:19 AM
To: Lili Marwan
Subject: Re: For Review—Draft
Lili,
Comments attached.
Great work. This is a strong first draft. It’s excellent that we have time to develop this further before the fall.
You have a good grasp of the ethic’s history and its secular transition. For example, your handling of the secularization of self-surveillance from omnipresent God to self-governing neoliberal self is skillful.
What I’m focused on now—what most of my comments address—is pushing you to articulate what is implicit. As younote, we see the emergence of an inner drive to work, which looks utterly illogical from a straight economic perspective; what does that tell us about how these ideologies help us make sense of our lives, today? How can that be a through line driving the entire draft?
I’m on campus this morning. Let’s meet at 10 a.m. I’d like to discuss deadlines, as well as a few other timely topics we need to tackle beyond your thesis.
Talk soon.
“Fuck,” Lili groans, dropping into the seat beside James.
“And a good morning to you, too,” Jackie greets her. She pushes a mug of coffee across the table to Lili. “Black coffee to match your mood. We already ordered, food is on the way.”
“Thanks—sorry, I can’t stay long, I have to meet Kerr. Just got thesis edits back.” The pit in her stomach grows as she starts swiping through the draft attachment, sees the extent of the red lines and comments, tiny on her phone screen. Around her, the restaurant is loud: Buvette, close to Jamie’s house in the West Village, is always tightly packed; jostling elbows, orders called out over the bustling dining room; plates heaped with scrambled eggs, dark jam, crunchy toast; it’s too cramped for Lili’s taste, but Amina loves Buvette, thinks it’s aggressively cute. Usually, Lili can grudgingly admit its charm—the warmth of exposed brick, fresh sunlight—but now the clamor of the restaurant drains away fast, replaced by panic from the email.
“Aren’t you working at the farm today, that new site by Battery Park?” James asks. “I thought we were heading downtown together after this.”
“Yeah, you were going to walk Jamie to work so the other analysts didn’t beat him up and steal his lunch money,” Jackie adds. Her face is scrubbed clean, bright in the early morning, all her red curls pulled back into a tight bun; she has a shoot today, a skincare brand.
Flicking back to Kerr’s email, Lili slides her phone across the table to her roommate.
“I’m getting fired,” she says. “I just sent in my draft on Monday—it’sbarely been four days, how does he have edits already? And ‘a few other timely topics’? What does that mean? What does thatmean?”
“I don’t think you can get fired from a master’s program,” James comments dryly, resting his arm over the back of Lili’s chair.
“I could be the first,” she shoots back, darkly. “Oh, shit, I need to tell Eileen I can’t come in today.” She grabs her phone back to tap out an apologetic, frantic message to her farm manager; their new location downtown is under work, and today was a massive planning day, digging into expansion and fundraising prep—it was going to look fucking horrible on her that she’d be missing it. “Sorry, it’s fine—it’s all fine,” she tells her friends. “I’ll deal with it, don’t let me ruin things. Where’s Amina?” She’d been the one who asked them to meet for breakfast.
“Outside,” Jackie says, gesturing out the restaurant window. Across the street, Amina is on the phone, pacing. Her thick black hair is twisted into a bun, speared in place by a paintbrush. She’s wearing a breezy, oversized Winchester dress shirt stolen from Jamie, blue with a white collar and cuffs rolled up, a tiny black Maryam Nassir Zadeh miniskirt that she and Lili keep swapping back and forth, and dirty, paint-splattered sneakers. As Lili watches, Amina chews on her cuticles, staring down at the sidewalk with a frown. “Talking to her parents. I think they called to say they can’t make her show.”
A pang of familiar sympathy softens Lili’s own anxiety. Amina’s relationship with her parents—rich family that fled the Iranian Revolution, an only child, coldness and distance in their wealth, shipped off to Le Rosey as a kid, never in the same house together for more than a few weeks—is strained at the best of times.
James heaves a massive sigh. On the table, his own phone lights up with emails. He’s dressed for work: gray trousers, crisp blue button-up, no suit jacket in a concession to a more casual summer Friday in the office, some hollow corporate attempt by Goldman to facilitate a convivial work environment. His golden hair—salt water, summers outdoors—is a darker color than usual, hours spent inside this last year of work since graduating. Lili resists the urge to muss it up; she settles for a consolatory squeeze of his shoulder as he gives a half-hearted flick through his dozens of notifications, before flipping his phone face down.
Last April, the final few weeks of undergrad, she and Amina had gonewith him to buy new suits. She remembers how he’d stared into the shop mirror, dark suit on—tall, extremely handsome; Jamie has always been all-American looks, golden boy, wide grin of white teeth, full of mischief and rude health, tracking Lili down in the library after his crew practice, making her laugh too much at some ridiculous story from his team, until the librarians hushed him with affection; running into class late, dropping into the seat she’d saved—now silent and humorless.
They’d tried to tease him to cheer him up:You’ll be the best dressed nepo baby on your floor; he looks like the type of guy who thinks a Submariner is an impressive watch; get this shirt, I want to steal it.But as their efforts failed to make a dent in his uncharacteristically resilient silence, they—a sign of drastic measures—resorted to pure positivity.
You look good!Amina had said, her optimism growing strained with worry, as the tailor stepped away from measuring the breadth of his shoulders, habitually brushing off nonexistent dust from the immaculate fabric.I mean, you look really damn good. I’d give you my money to manage, no questions.
Not responding, James continued to watch his reflection, expressionless; disembodied, detached from himself.
I look like my father, he’d finally said flatly. Lili had caught his glance in the mirror; he’d held it for a moment, before looking away again.
“Shouldn’t you already be at work?” Jackie asks him now, taking a sip of tea.
He shrugs. “I have an army of interns selling their souls in Excel right now, I’m fine.”
