Hannah Lew is spending some alone time in New York. “I’ve been doing a lot of by myself stuff here and having a really good time,” she tells me over coffee in Brooklyn on a Tuesday afternoon. “When you go to a museum by myself, you just take it in in a different way. New York is a place I’ve spent a lot of time alone. That’s sort of my relationship to the place.”

It’s a fitting way to start a conversation with Lew, whose new band Cold Beat, plays songs that are laced with a palpable sense of isolation. Lew started writing the songs for the . . .

For years trigger warnings have been a commonplace in radical spaces, but only recently have trigger warnings come into the mainstream. Earlier this year, several universities implemented policies recommending or requiring trigger warnings in response to students’ urging. Oberlin College’s new trigger warning policy in particular has generated controversy: not only does it encourage professors to be aware of “racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and other forms of privilege and oppression,” it recommends making triggering material optional, or removing it from the curriculum entirely.

Most media coverage I've seen is polarized, reduced to a simple binary: right-wingers (and yes, I’ll say it, cisgender straight white guys) are unsympathetic to others who've experienced trauma, scoffing at the possibility that a classroom discussion could be . . .

Here is something I used to say: I found zines and feminism through the punk community in New York.

But that’s a lie. There’s really more to it and if I were to just leave it at that I would be doing a disservice to my more formative years.

What I actually meant was this: The punk community and the zines they produced helped me to stoke the flame, but in no way started the fire.

Folks involved with punk music, or any subculture for that matter, all know, or at least should know, that while unendingly important in . . .