Criticism
Human, Unfortunately: A Cultural Criticism
A collection of essays on the small cruelties a culture agrees not to name — and what it costs to name them anyway.
Human, Unfortunately reads culture the way a coroner reads a body: carefully, without flinching, and without pretending the findings were avoidable.
Each essay takes something ordinary — a church that forgives the powerful faster than the poor, a family WhatsApp group that polices women more than it protects them, a specific national talent for making dysfunction sound like tradition — and asks what it's actually doing, underneath the sentence everyone agrees to say instead.
This isn't criticism as a performance of intelligence. It's criticism as a form of care for the people inside the systems being examined, the writer included. No essay here ends with a tidy fix. Some problems are just accurately described, which turns out to be its own kind of use.
From the essay, "The Church of Nice, A Preview"
Every congregation has a version of forgiveness that scales with the offender's usefulness. The usher who steals from the collection is disciplined by Friday. The pastor who does worse is 'covered in prayer' until the story ages out of relevance.
We call this grace. It would be more accurate to call it accounting.