Cobra Kai, the Twilight of American Empire, and the Allure of Paramilitary Violence
Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo explore how Cobra Kai manages to tackle American empire, wealth disparity, and rising fascism without cynicism.
Michelle Kuo (@kuokuomich) is an associate professor at the American University of Paris. Her award-winning book, Reading with Patrick (Random House, 2017) combines memoir, reportage, and research on racial and economic inequality in rural Arkansas. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Public Books, The Point, and other publications. She has worked as an attorney for undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and incarcerated people. With Albert Wu, she writes a weekly newsletter at ampleroad.substack.com.
Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo explore how Cobra Kai manages to tackle American empire, wealth disparity, and rising fascism without cynicism.
Michelle Kuo, Jeremy M. Davies, and Daniel Levin Becker discuss Éric Chevillard’s pandemic writing and the challenges of rendering his style into...
A letter for Paris by Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu.
As a new generation of Chinese writer-exiles settles in the West, we wonder whether Jin’s flat, alienating style will come to be regarded as a kind...
The joke of “The Americans” is that it’s quintessentially American.
Walter White's Rebellion
"For Robinson, America has declined because of pervasive and corrosive ideologies that ascribe human motivation solely to self-interest."