Along the Fold

Fully cognizant that no one, not even me, needs another “My Pandemic Year” narrative, I nonetheless want to think about the pandemic-era newspaper fold and the social relations limned by it. Specifically, how does the fold intersect with the slash in in/habitable, and with the echoes and contradictions and traces of meaning between English and French, as outlined by Thangam Ravindranathan in her evocative meditation on Georges Perec in this issue? If we have learned anything in these months, it is perhaps that this one-word, two-language oxymoron might name the pandemic accommodation to inhabiting a new normal, a mode of living which, in the “old world” or the “before times,” would have seemed (un) inhabitable.