When we meet Jin, the protagonist of R. O. Kwon’s new novel, Exhibit, the 29-year-old photographer is in a holding pattern: For months, she’s been incapable of producing a single image she wants to keep. Joining this creative atrophy is a new, existential gulf in her marriage: Philip, her husband, suddenly wants a child, and no part of Jin echoes the sentiment. Such disconnects might prompt a person on the cusp of their 30s to seek the guidance of friends, a therapist, or perhaps religion—time-honored, if also unexciting, options for someone invested in resolving their personal or marital conflicts. Jin, however, finds herself taking a very different route. Early in Exhibit, she goes from privately nursing her frustrations to sharing them with an alluring stranger. In place of confusion, she begins to feel something that had been eluding her: intense, exhilarating desire.

Philip hadn’t just presented Jin with a surprising new wish to have a child; he’d also been struggling to indulge one of her emergent longings. “Philip, I wish you’d hurt me,” she says early in the novel. While Philip strains to understand why Jin might want to engage in BDSM, the stranger Jin confides in is not a newcomer to the practice. Lidija Jung, an injured ballerina Jin met through a mutual friend, eagerly accepts Jin’s need to be submissive—to derive pleasure from pain being inflicted on her by someone she trusts—with eager acceptance. Stern and daring, she ushers Jin into the world of kink, a foray that reignites the frustrated photographer’s creativity. Their escalating intimacy becomes a container for Jin’s guilt over the yearnings she doesn’t feel, and an accelerant for the ones she does.  

Like most affairs, the illicit relationship at the center of Kwon’s novel does not actually begin with sex. Jin has been hiding the conflict in her marriage from her loved ones, but it’s one of the first secrets she admits to Lidija—the only other Korean American woman at a friend’s party. The pull she feels toward Lidija is instantaneous and impossible to ignore. In her memory of their first encounter, Jin recalls Lidija sticking out as though a spotlight is shining on her—“this large halo, glaring like a path to the sun.” In a conversation that begins poolside and stretches late into the night around a firepit, Jin divulges her artistic ambitions and erotic desires. “Lidija’s life had but slight overlap with mine,” she thinks. “I might risk being honest.” But any distance between the women is short-lived, and the risk wildly underestimated.

Soon, Jin’s life revolves almost entirely around Lidija, who gives Jin space to explore her interest in kink without fear of judgment. Complicating the tidy moral boxes of a straightforward infidelity story, Exhibit takes an expansive view of the things that women are punished for wanting. At times, the sheer ferocity of Jin’s desire is uncomfortable to read. But the novel doesn’t demand a reader’s approval of Jin’s cheating; whether she is justified in hurtling toward her urges matters less than the spectacle of her craving. Searching and introspective, Exhibit reflects some of the same social issues that Kwon has addressed in her nonfiction—the stigmatization of kink, the complexities of queerness, and the constant, destabilizing threat of violence against Asian women. Kwon presents these concepts as barriers to self-discovery: Jin’s clandestine journey teaches her, in part, how to want.

In vignettes that jump between periods of Jin’s life, Exhibit sketches a portrait of a woman at odds with the expectations placed on her. Once intent on surrendering her life to the Lord, she loses her faith during her college years—yet unlike the fanatical cult devotee at the center of Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, Jin isn’t led to violence by her disillusionment. Photography offered one path to catharsis for Jin’s spiritual crisis: She made large-scale triptychs depicting “lustful pilgrims who, for a sight of the desired face, will trek land, beg, hope, abjure, living discalced.” These snapshots, which sublimate her prior devotion, anchored a buzzy solo exhibition—and, months later, still attract the ire of religious zealots who deemed it sacrilegious. As Jin wrestles with public accusations of blasphemy, she also feels the weight of a rift with her mother, who refused to attend her daughter’s secular wedding. The mother-daughter scenes are some of the novel’s most affecting, showing the ripple effects of Jin’s selfish rebellions outside the narrow domains of romance or religion. That familial titles—mother, father—are written only in Hangul deepens the sense of strained, diasporic intimacy.

[Read: The generational clash at Pride is actually a sign of progress]

Before the start of her relationship with Lidija, Jin had already spent years of her marriage outside the bounds of socially acceptable femininity: She never wanted to become a mother, and didn’t pretend otherwise. Often, she found, her refusal to have a child seemed to upset people—a judgment that did not extend to men, as no one had thought Philip was strange for not imagining himself a father when they’d married. For women, she concludes, the decision not to have children represents a fundamental rejection of the natural order, a defiance that could very well signal something more sinister: “People start asking, So, what else might this bitch think of doing?” Lidija observes in one of her many brisk, illuminating exchanges with Jin.

Jin’s queerness adds an additional layer to what she experiences as widespread suspicion of child-free women’s motives.  The novel channels—and reframes—a point that the author has made in her own life: In 2018, Kwon, who is married, came out as bisexual on Twitter. In an essay explaining this decision, Kwon wrote that the second-most-common lie about bisexual people is that “we’re unusually promiscuous, sexually greedy, incapable of monogamy. None of this is true.” Indeed, Exhibit takes great care to show that Jin’s bisexuality isn’t what compels her to cheat: Jin had slept with several women before meeting Philip, and publicly came out while married. The lust she feels for Lidija isn’t the result of lifelong queer repression; Jin’s destructive decisions are her own choices, not the supposedly innate pathology of all bisexual people. Jin is painfully aware of these attitudes, and of beliefs about queer people within her own community. Even when she’s acting reprehensibly, Jin still values pushing back against the dogma of elders who insist that queerness is a foreign plague afflicting white people, not Koreans.

Spending time with Lidija, a relationship that is clarifying and sacrosanct even as it sows deceit, offers Jin a reprieve from ill-fitting roles: dutiful daughter, reverent parishioner, self-sacrificing wife. With Lidija, Jin is neither a heretic nor a would-be mother. She’s a formidable artist, one whose dormant craft is reinvigorated by the freedom and inspiration she finds in another Korean American woman. Insulated from the power imbalances that restrict women’s lives, Jin can finally reckon with the role that power plays in sex. Providing Jin the pain she craves, the pain it took her so long to ask for, doesn’t give Lidija any pause. To Jin, the affair is a kind of revelation. “I’d leapt past shame to a fresh, unruled place,” she thinks.

Exhibit spends considerable time exploring how Jin’s and Lidija’s innermost desires are refracted through another damaging external lens: common racist stereotypes that portray Asian, and Asian American, women as naturally subservient. As a high-profile ballerina, “Lidija’s life relied, for the most part, on white people’s rating of bodies on the stage. Often, hers might be judged foreign.” Lidija couldn’t change how other people assessed her body. But she did, until her injury, have power over what it could achieve, and her penchant for control offstage is inextricable from her artistic mandate. Lidija, who has trained her own body to withstand pain, trains Jin’s body to do the same, and the indulgent interplay sparks something in both women.

With Lidija, Jin no longer has to hide, or apologize for her submission. But Jin still struggles to fully feel, much less publicly embrace, her love of kink, and as she considers the possibility of exhibiting self-portraits as a submissive, the thought inflames the same anxieties that had kept her from sharing this part of herself with her husband. Kink doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the racism that shapes so many other parts of American life can influence how people engage with it. Projecting images of her consenting to submission would still be “just what people expect, that I’ll be servile, quiet,” she tells Lidija. “I’ll add to the china-doll trope. It gets us killed.”

Exhibit treats both art and desire as serious pursuits, so the weighty proclamation doesn’t feel out of place in the women’s conversation. But Lidija doesn’t reflect the same anxiety back to Jin. Irreverent and self-assured, she challenges Jin’s timidity without dismissing the concern. The exchange is so tender that, for a moment, it’s tempting to forget that most secrets like theirs don’t stay hidden. No matter what becomes of the affair, though, Jin will emerge a different version of herself. Having ached for so long, she’s transformed by the thrill—and peril—of getting what she wants. Exhibit’s unflinching portrayal asks what we might learn from confronting some of the reasons for her stasis. Jin’s misdeeds are fictional, but the societal constraints she faces exist well outside the novel’s pages.

Even if a highly anticipated agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia never comes to fruition, its rumored announcement seems sure to do at least one thing: further isolate Israel within the international community.

Over the past few years, the Biden administration has been working with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, on a wide-ranging deal to strengthen ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia as part of a broader agreement in which Saudi Arabia will normalize relations with Israel.

Saudi Arabia is asking for a closer defense relationship with the United States and access to Washington’s most advanced weapons systems, but it wants more than that. It wants the U.S. to help it develop a civilian nuclear-power program, relax scrutiny of the transfer of sensitive technologies, and expedite the review of Saudi investments in U.S. technology firms and crucial infrastructure.

Based on conversations with senior Saudi and U.S. officials over the past several weeks, and bearing in mind that none of us has yet seen the details of the prospective deal, I am not yet convinced that a deal would be in America’s interest—or even necessary, given the already deepening commercial links between the two countries.

[Read: The Israeli-Saudi deal had better be a good one]

But I am also not convinced that any senior Saudi decision maker—not least the one who really counts, the crown prince—believes a deal is possible. The Saudis I have spoken with have made clear they will recognize Israel only if Israel consents to creating irreversible momentum toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Those same Saudis, meanwhile, are impressively clear-eyed about Israeli politics at the moment. They understand that few, if any, Israelis are in a mood to consider the creation of a Palestinian state, and they understand that Israeli-government policies over the past three decades might have made such a state impossible in the West Bank, anyway.

So on the one hand, the Saudis deserve some credit for doing what would have been unthinkable a decade ago: making a desire to eventually normalize ties with Israel the de facto policy of the kingdom. But on the other hand, there is no real, immediate cost to the Saudis for doing so—not when they know that Israel will not accept their one condition.

This deal is setting Israel up to be the fall guy. The United States and Saudi Arabia are likely going to herald a potentially transformative agreement that Israel appears almost certain to reject—in front of a global audience that has lost patience with that country’s policies toward and treatment of the Palestinians.  

The Saudis will likely not be overly disappointed, or surprised, by Israel’s rejection of their terms. They might even enjoy it. Indeed, 50 years after Israel’s then–Foreign Minister Abba Eban lamented that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” the Saudis and other Arabs will delight in throwing that famous quote back at Israel.  

Even in the best of times, Israeli political debates can be maddeningly solipsistic. Henry Kissinger quipped that Israel “doesn’t do foreign policy—only domestic politics.” But these are not the best of times. In the seven months since the horrific attacks of October 7, the gulf between how Israel defines its security needs and how the world defines those same needs has grown like never before. My conversations with Israeli friends—almost all of whom believe that their country has basically done the right thing in Gaza, even as they now demand a strategy for concluding the campaign—are invariably tense. Israel is waging a war of punishment against the people of Gaza, and Israelis have been largely shielded from the images of the suffering and destruction that the rest of us see.

When the Biden administration made the relatively modest decision to condition some military aid to Israel in advance of an assault on Rafah, Israeli leaders responded with defiance, hurling abuse at the American president—“Hamas ❤️ Biden,” one right-wing minister tweeted—and boasting that Israel would “stand alone” if necessary.

But Israel has not stood alone for a very long time. For years, Israelis might have told themselves, and Americans, that they can provide for their own security—if only the United States would help arm them. But the Jordanian and Egyptian armies have long defended Israel’s southern and eastern flanks, while the United States provides roughly a quarter of Israel’s defense budget and has elaborate and well-rehearsed contingency plans to defend Israel in an emergency.  

That U.S. troops would someday be called upon to defend Israel in a regional war has seemed inevitable. That moment arrived in April, when the United States led a coalition of nations—including Jordan, France, and the United Kingdom—in repelling an Iranian aerial assault on Israel. A precedent had been shattered: American men and women were in the line of fire, protecting Israel from its enemies.

They did so, of course, because Israel does not, in fact, stand alone, nor is Israel an island unto itself: It is part of the international community and a broader regional security system. Its decisions affect not only its own citizens but millions of people across the region, and billions of dollars in international trade. And the United States and its allies have no interest in either Israel or Iran dragging them into a wider conflagration that will affect those lives, or that commerce.

The Saudis and the Biden administration both seem determined to teach Israel this lesson. If Israel, as expected, rejects a deal, the Saudis will quickly pivot, telling Biden’s negotiators that the same long-term bilateral agreement that made sense within the context of a deal with Israel would surely make sense on its own. Riyadh’s point about Israel and its place in the region will have been made, and the Biden administration will have helped make it.

The protest season at universities usually crescendos just before commencement: The weather is balmy and most term papers are done, but what student or professor would wish to stay around campus during summer break if they did not absolutely have to? This year, the protests have taken an uglier turn, as encampments have sprouted up. The demonstrators—most of them students, many not, often masked—are calling for divestment by their universities from companies based in or doing business with Israel. Some of the protesters see this goal as an interim step toward the destruction of the state of Israel.

In each case, students, faculty, and administrators participating in or supporting the protests assert that universities have a special obligation to take an institutional stand, separate and apart from what any of their members believe, say, or do as individuals.

Universities have reacted in various ways. University of Florida President Ben Sasse was firm and unambiguous; the administrations at Tufts and Cornell similarly refused to fold, and the students threw in the towel when they realized that their protests were going nowhere. Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia, accepted the demands, while the larger university vacillated between tolerance and crackdowns, ultimately having the police storm an occupied building. But some elite institutions—Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard among them—have chosen to end the encampments by offering disciplinary amnesty for nonviolent protesters, and promising to review investments in Israel, often through expedited processes.

The reality behind this last approach is a desperate squirm.

On the one hand, university presidents do not want riots in the quad, and they know that calling in the cops can trigger more extreme demonstrations by faculty and students. On the other hand, they are feeling the fury of pro-Israel alumni and donors and, after watching congressional hearings on television, have a healthy fear of being, as one might say, Stefaniked.

Their solution, however, is no solution, resting as it does on flawed practical politics, wishful thinking about the real animus on their campuses, and, most seriously, a misunderstanding of the moral concerns and values that universities can legitimately represent.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

The amnesty and investment reviews are attempts to buy off protesters, in the hope that by the time the university committees do their work, the war in Gaza will be over, and in any case the divestment decisions (almost assuredly negative, because the alternative would open up an equally ugly can of worms) can be made this summer or next, while the kids are backpacking in Mongolia.

The problem is that the appearance of caving is caving. If you tacitly tell students that violating university rules will bring no sanctions, they will do it again. The chances are pretty good that the students and others will see through the “we will look carefully at our investment decisions” dodge and come back, with more insistent demands and an awareness that the university lacks the gumption to suspend or expel them for setting up tent cities, blocking access to buildings, and disrupting study in libraries and dormitories.

The wishful thinking about what is actually going on is much worse. The brute fact is that many American universities and colleges, including some of the best, have seen a surge in anti-Semitism, including protesters mobbing students wearing kippahs and shouting that Zionists—that is, people who believe that the Jews deserve a state of their own—deserve death. Many Jewish students, as a result, feel unsafe and unwelcome, and university leaders have only rarely denounced anti-Semitic outbursts without reference to other forms of bias, thereby skirting the core problem.

The deeper misunderstanding of universities’ roles and moral standing, however, is the most troubling aspect of the Great Academic Squirm of 2024. Universities cannot claim and do not deserve some special status as arbiters of a moral foreign policy. After all, they are not, and have never been, paragons of moral virtue. Both Harvard and Johns Hopkins, universities with which I have been proudly affiliated over many years, in the past century had rabidly anti-Semitic presidents: A. Lawrence Lowell and Isaiah Bowman, respectively. They were accomplished academic leaders and architects of much of the modern university. They had academic vision, and they did good things for their institutions. They just also happened to be bigots.

Modern university leaders have recognized the sins of their predecessors and apologized copiously for them, but that is not the point. The lesson, rather, is that as individuals, they are probably every bit as fallible, albeit in different directions. They should aim for humility, not self-flagellation.

The students and faculty are even worse from this point of view. Nineteen-year-olds make good soldiers, but not good generals, judges, corporate executives, or bishops, for the excellent reason that their emotions and passions, noble or ignoble, have yet to be tamed by wisdom and good judgment. It was the best and brightest on our campuses who signed up for the original America First movement, after all, pushing for isolationism as the Nazis seized power in Germany. (Many, of course, more than compensated for the puerility of their collegiate political views by honorable service in World War II.)

Today’s students are no better or worse than their predecessors. They are, as befits their age, morally selective to a fault: Can anyone recall a demonstration against Pernod Ricard for failing to fully halt exports of Absolut Vodka to Russia until about a year ago? Where are the mass demonstrations about the Rohingya, Sudan, the Uyghurs, the Syrian massacres, or for that matter the Chinese laogai penal-labor system or the prisons of North Korea? Or, in an earlier era, against Robert Mugabe’s murderous tyranny in Zimbabwe or the Vietnamese gulag after the fall of Saigon?

Presumably, students come to a university for an education, which implies that they need to be educated, which means that they are not, in fact, ready to make the deeper judgments on which society depends. They are high on passion, and, as interviewers have found, many of them are extraordinarily ignorant about the causes for which they are demonstrating.

As for faculty, reading the novels of David Lodge and Julie Schumacher—not to mention viewing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—would confirm the view that I have come to after 40 years in departmental meetings, that one should not expect too much by way of prudence and profound moral and political judgment from them, either.

There are sterling characters among the professoriate—heroic, self-sacrificing, and wise. There are a great many more who are simply passionately dedicated to a subject, be it broad or arcane, and just want to teach and research it and otherwise be left in peace. But in addition, there are the garden-variety intriguers, backstabbers, prima donnas, and bullies. There are also quite a few adulterers, predators, egomaniacs, and borderline swindlers, and even a sociopath or two. Some professors are experienced in the ways of the world; most of them are not, having viewed it with all the blessed autonomy and freedom from the constraints of politics or war that universities appropriately provide. They have no special qualification for the role of society’s conscience.

The university’s real missions are noble: education, particularly of the young, and the pursuit of the truth. The people engaged in that mission may or may not be the finest characters in the world, or have the best moral or political judgment, but the missions are of the highest importance.

It is the business of academic leaders to sustain their institution’s commitment to those missions, and nothing more. They have neither the moral standing nor the credibility in wider society for exceeding that mandate, or doing anything other than creating an optimal environment for learning and research, upholding the rules, and stewarding the institution’s finances.

The leaders of universities do not exist to pass judgment on politics, or twist their endowments into moralistic knots, or attempt to shape the course of American foreign policy. As individuals, they (and students, faculty, and administrators) may have something useful to say about politics and every right to do so. In their official roles, they should have none.

When educational leaders exceed their mission or, conversely, lack the courage to defend it resolutely, they will bring more discredit, more unwelcome political attention, and more turmoil upon themselves and their institutions than they already have. And however much they squirm today, the protesters will come back to make them squirm more tomorrow.