Ledio Cakaj's New Yorker essay, 'A Passage,' about crossing into England at twenty with a fabricated story, is a piece about survival and performance: the self as a script you write under duress. This week it sits alongside two other stories about performance under pressure that, read together, form an unexpectedly coherent argument about how people construct and consume narrative when reality feels inadequate.
Myth-Making as Survival Technology
Miles Greenberg's performance videos, reviewed by Seph Rodney in Hyperallergic, invoke the wild human spirit and make Black people the protagonists of universal stories. The word 'rehearses' in the title is deliberate: myths are not given, they are practiced, refined, performed into existence. Greenberg's work and Cakaj's essay share a recognition that identity at the threshold, at the border, at the edge of what is permitted, is always a performance. The story you tell the officer. The myth you give to a future that does not yet exist. Both are acts of world-making under constraint.
Conspiracy as Collective Performance
Jessica Winter's analysis of why people believe the Lindsay Clancy conspiracy theories adds a darker register. The conspiracies around Clancy, a mother who killed her children, are driven, Winter argues, by real and legitimate anger at the way women in extremis are disbelieved. The conspiracy is a performance of alternative narrative, a collective act of insisting on a different story because the official one feels unbearable. It is the border-crossing essay inverted: rather than one person fabricating a story to survive, a community fabricates a story to cope. Marcus Bösch's concept of vibocracy, where affect outpaces argument and reality dissolves into circulation, describes precisely the media environment in which conspiracy narratives now thrive. The false story is not an aberration. It is the grammar of survival in an attention economy that cannot hold ambiguity.