One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book of contradictions. Accordingly, I had such opposing, conflicting feelings that have lingered days after finishing.

At its core, this book is a catharsis. Especially, a catharsis for those just beginning to radicalize and divest from the American political system, its myths and manipulations. Anyone who currently is or recently was wrestling with the rage and grief at realizing the system is irredeemable, that the American lie of "democracy" has always been an illusion.

There is a lot of value in mirroring this in a collection that has been so widely read and processed, and I have no doubt that this book will begin or deepen the radicalization process for many people.

El Akkad powerfully shuffles between philosophical political pondering and personal recollection. By vulnerably addressing his own failure to see behind the curtain, even when his profession as a journalist placed him in the middle of the imperial violence, El Akkad shows that the personal is political. In doing so, he also shows that the reality of disillusionment is messy and shameful.

Coming to terms with the collapse of a dream you believed in for your own survival and comfort is not easy, it does not happen overnight, and the cognitive dissonance often leads people down a worse path.

The shame of remembering and reckoning with your own complicity is a monster in and of itself, an ongoing project that never seems to have an end. El Akkad shows that it must be faced, even when it is painful and confusing and even when it makes you feel lost and hopeless.

El Akkad's writing is deeply moving. There are lines that hit you like a punch to the gut, that beg to be highlighted and quoted. There were times I found it a bit contrived, like El Akkad was searching for the most quotable sentences rather than the most transparent language.

His poeticism makes for a beautifully emotive experience, but at times felt like a performance. Many of its flowery moments feel like the language starts to center itself and the subject starts to recede; readers are prone to think "this is a beautiful sentence" rather than thinking about the people trapped under the rubble.

The best moments are when the language feels like it's just barely containing the thing it's describing, when you can feel the weight threatening to break the sentence. The mic-drop one-liners and quotable zingers are easier to forget. They become content, a black square to post and move on from.

This poetic language serves the book's overall purpose of emotional catharsis, but at times feels like it gets in the way of actual reflection and change.

While the cutting emotion is the strength of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, it also limits its framework. At times, there is a sense that El Akkad is so stuck in the emotion that he cannot see a way out. In his own words, this reckoning with emotion is "the most pathetic, necessary function of this work: witness". Like this quote suggests, the contradiction is that witness is simultaneously necessary and not enough.

The overarching critique of this book revolves around the oblivious way liberals buy into the American mythos, explaining away their complicity in genocide by using progressive language and useless yard sign activism, which feels powerful and empathetic but only serves the status quo.

If the critique within this book is that feeling bad is not enough to mobilize change, then it risks becoming exactly what it critiques: a way to feel righteous without being effective.

There is undeniable power in mirroring the emotions of the disillusioned, in providing catharsis for those who have nowhere for their feelings to go, but the reader is often left in the space this book creates. Angry, grieving, seeing too clearly, but stuck. Perhaps the discomfort of that stuckness is meant to push readers toward change (I hope it does), but it's an indirect strategy that risks reproducing the same problem it names.

Because of this book's focus on emotion and personal, individual experience, El Akkad often returns to pathologizing broader topics into individual feeling. Repeatedly, El Akkad conflates the idea of resistance with revenge.

I'm not naive enough to imply that vengeance is not even slightly part of the equation, of course the reality is complex and it would be foolish to expect emotion to not play a role at all. However, reinforcing the idea that resistance is a form of revenge only serves the imperial core, only reinforces the narrative of resistance being barbaric and devoid of rationality.

This conflation traps liberation in the empire's logic. Resistance becomes a reaction, defined by the thing it's responding to, rather than action. It makes resistance fully about psychology rather than politics. Even worse because he never names resistance for what it is, only relying on the assumption painted by the word "revenge".

He compares armed resistance and genocidal imperialist violence as "two evils". There is a chapter devoted to tearing apart the word "terror", which again equates resistance as something borne of fear; the empire's terror (violence) creates terror (fear) in its victims. The empire pathologizes that "terror" (fear) as "terrorism", despite the empire being the true "terrorist".

I understand the purpose of wanting to interrogate language in this way, but it feels flat when El Akkad falls into the same rhetorical traps that ultimately serve the empire's mythos. Here is a direct quote about the actions of Hamas (whom he refers to as a "terror group") during the Al-Aqsa Flood (October 7th): It was a bloodbath, orchestrated by exactly the kind of entity that thrives in the absence of anything resembling a future.

This quote, and El Akkad's subsequent pathologizing of resistance throughout the whole book, specifically Palestinian resistance, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the Palestinian cause.

Anyone who has read anything about Palestine's liberation knows that their lives, despite being under the most gruesome occupation and genocide for 75+ years, are carried on by an astounding thrum of indestructible hope. This hope for a better future is a fundamental tenet of radical thought, something that has carried movements across the globe for centuries, and Palestine is no exception.

Oppressed people are not fighting for revenge, they are fighting for liberation. Palestinians are fighting for land that is rightfully theirs, for an end to occupation, for the right to live. The very act of their resistance is evidence of their hope for the future. To chalk that up as simple fear and a desire for vengeance collapses all depth of importance.

This language only serves to dehumanize Palestinians as helpless victims who have no hope for the future, and it reinforces the same individualism that El Akkad seeks to critique. Oppressed people are fighting because they insist on their future. To miss that is to miss everything.

This subtle return to individualism is present throughout all of El Akkad's writing. Victims of imperial violence are scared and vengeful, politicians are cowardly, citizens of the empire are selfish and unempathetic. This enforces the idea that the system can be saved, that the US has just taken a turn away from democracy, that we just need the "right" politician to stand up and do the right thing.

Politicians are not failing to act, they are profiting from a system that is functioning exactly as designed. Israel is not an ally that the US is too afraid to oppose, it is a military asset, a projection of power, and a tool for imperial control. Calling political inaction cowardice implies that braver people could fix it, which lets the system off the hook. There are even moments where El Akkad throws in US-backed anti-Chinese propaganda for seemingly no reason.

Normally, I would not zero in on such minor faults of language, and I would not discredit a book based on a handful of unsavory additions. But, in a book about rhetoric and propaganda and the illusion of neutrality, about how language becomes a way for the state to manufacture consent for its violence, doesn't it make it even more important to be clear about the language used? Doesn't the book lose part of its meaning when it subtly reinforces the same problem it critiques, even if unintentionally? Doesn't it become even more blatant when the author spouts state-funded talking points?

Again, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is fundamentally a book of contradiction, a half step between radical analysis and liberal catharsis. It is one man's reckoning with his own radicalization and complicity in the imperial core.

An imperfect, messy, personal experience that can never be expected to be flawless. It is not a perfect book. Its core message is striking, timely, and so, so important. And yet, it does not feel like enough, and its limitations become more and more glaring for those who are further along on the journey of radicalization.

So, read this book. Feel the feelings. Grieve, rage, nod your head knowingly when El Akkad says the right things, but don't stop there. Turn the rage into action, educate yourself on the reality of Palestinian resistance from Palestinians themselves, revolutionize your thinking and build a community of radical thought and radical care.

So one day, when everyone claims to have always been against this, when the rage and grief comes back full circle, rather than it being because the system cannot be stopped, perhaps it will be because enough people rose to action, because enough people chose to divest from the systems that profit from genocide and imperialism. That revolution does not start or end with this book. It starts and ends with you.

Visionary, and deeply disturbing for all of the least obvious reasons.

In The Sluts, Cooper uses the format of an internet forum to explore the hazy boundary between reality and fantasy. Through a cast of increasingly unreliable, anonymous narrators, the impossibility of determining reality becomes more and more stark. Each new post builds upon the last, in a terrifying display of performative masculinity and dehumanization, as each poster tries to one-up the depravity of the previous one. You want to write them off as miserable basement-dwelling freaks, but the terrifying part is that they feel too real.

You want to pretend it's all fiction, but it's so reminiscent of real-world internet culture that it becomes a meta experience of blending fiction and reality, both in the content of the work and the reading experience itself. There is an uncomfortable complicity as you turn each page, and while a feeling of disgust bubbles up toward the forum-goers and their sick fantasies, there's a pull in your gut that reminds you that you too are feeding the fantasy.

Each page turned brings a low-grade hum of shame, mimicking the feeling of sitting in a dark corner of your room with nothing but the brightness of the computer screen illuminating your face as you continue to witness something you really feel like you shouldn't be witnessing.

Through this meta experience, The Sluts produces questions about complicity and collective participation, especially as it pertains to the internet. On the internet, where everyone can hide behind a screen name and an anime profile picture, personal responsibility and social consequences seem to be nonexistent. Even though no forum-goer is technically individually responsible for the eventual outcome, the forum itself can create a vacuum of attention, speculation, normalization, and escalation. How long can you hide behind the excuse that it's "just a joke" or "just a fantasy" without knowing where the boundaries between performance and reality are for everyone involved?

The thought loop then expands to the idea of fantasy itself. The ethics of consuming extreme fiction or disturbing fantasies is a topic that gets brought up on a revolving basis, and The Sluts performs a stress test by pushing it to its absolute extreme.

Importantly, Cooper never hammers home a predetermined conclusion with heavy-handed didacticism. The Sluts instead does what horror does best by exploring possibility, and the internet forum being used as a vehicle is frankly brilliant and alarmingly relevant even 20+ years later.

There is no place that blurs the distinction between fantasy and real life quite like the internet, and as much as The Sluts is a reminder of its early years, its evolution into algorithm-driven and bot-populated sites only introduces more nuance into Cooper's questioning. The escort forum brings up so many thoughts about toxic internet spaces such as 4chan and incel threads, but it's relevant to any site where people gather behind the comfort of relative anonymity.

While drama discourse on TikTok or community lore on a niche subreddit is not quite the same as graphic fantasies of CBT and snuff films, the mechanism is eerily similar, and Cooper expertly uses disturbing content as a way to force the reader to reckon with their complicity and the boundaries of fantasy itself.

The Sluts is a meta-literary experience that leaves you trying to reconstruct the "real" story from unreliable fragments, recreating your own Brad, imagining your own ending.

By the end of the book, you're left abandoned by Cooper in the middle of a spiral that you feel a little disgusted for taking part in, and a little sickeningly interested in reading more of.

just a bunch of people manipulating each other and calling it revolution. it's cutting, absurd, purposely overwritten, and for me, a little boring. i didn't really care for the social commentary. very intentionally white feminist with a narrow focus on class, the politics felt performative and emotionally shallow. the performativity is obviously intentional, a cutting commentary on political groups that masquerade chaotic interpersonal conflict as radicalism without interrogating structural harm. it fell flat for me, mostly because the writing felt too on-the-nose to leave anything up to the imagination. but the toxic yuri was fun?

the communal experience of reading this book via the forum made it actually enjoyable. if it weren't for the readalong & the forum, i would have DNF'd expeditiously. since i'm probably one of the last people to read When We Lost Our Heads for the Spring 2026 Readalong, i want to celebrate a little time capsule of my favorite posts because the forum made it bearable. i did not enjoy this book, but i loved us reading this book together. so hold my hand and skip along with me while we revisit the bangers of the 2026 Spring Readalong - When We Lost Our Heads edition 🌸🌼🌻 (beware of spoilers!)

15% (dragonfriend) / 18% (Fantasy) / 19% (minsuni) / 21% (broenyn) / 22% (exploringthestacks) / 31% (darlingdearestdead) / 39% (Wombworm) / 40% (those_who_wander) / 42% (munitum) / 47% (linnie) / 51% (helli) / 53% (ranaofvoles) / 60% (Titania) / 61% (liareads) / 67% (CatherineJ) / 75% (Pageturner11) / 77% (bigbootylez) / 82% (emilyspages) / 82% (notbillnye) / 88% (sofiebug) / 99% (minsuni)

and of course, the cherry on top: the delicious, scrumptious review that perfectly sums up When We Lost Our Heads, by our mother, lucyPagebound

seeing everyone's thoughts and updates about this very polarizing book over the past 3 months brought me so much joy and made me laugh out loud. the lovely discussions in the forum encouraged me to think deeper about the strange choices the author made. the community genuinely made what would have been a mediocre reading experience better.

happy 2026 Spring Readalong, here's to many more!!