There are precious few “ambiguous monument[s]” still standing. Many periodicals like Lionel Trilling’s beloved Partisan Review are now extinct. The wages of the little magazines left standing are continually mocked online. Their purpose, however, is to serve those who “value their ability to live some part of their lives with serious ideas,” as Trilling put in his 1946 essay “The Function of the Little Magazine.” The ecosystem of criticism that existed then, exemplified by Edmund Wilson and codified by Norman Podhoretz in Making It, was robust.1 Now, critics like Becca Rothfeld mourn the death of The Washington Post books section. Established writers like Ron Charles are taking to Substack where nearly every month a new takedown piece arises and a new school of thought is birthed. AI is eroding people’s ability to read, interpret, and think. The work of critical thought has never felt more endangered. There are, of course, mighty magazines still acting as a fulcrum for inquiry. From N+1’s “The High Style of the Hater” to The Drift’s re-evaluation of Simone Weil to The Point’s diagnosis of liberal fantasia these small but nimble institutions build a counter culture that reinforce, break, and shift what criticism can do in the modern era—an ability AI lacks.

This calls to mind Trilling’s original assertion that “the politics with which we are now being confronted may be of such kind as to crush the possibility of that interplay between free will and circumstance upon which all literature depends. These conditions can scarcely encourage us.” Perhaps that sounds familiar. But the little magazine, he argues, is a “natural and heroic response.” These cultural institutions play a vital role in our world. Their goal is to keep our culture from becoming “cautious and settled.” Of course, even small magazines can create a new status quo and some accuse these vessels of culture of being gatekeepers. Open the blogs, they cheer. Editors, however, are the keepers of sanity. Their job, often thankless and exhausting, is to corral the writer and re-establish clarity. Everyone has read a Substack that was a Tweet, or a blog that needed a fact check. Nor does every piece of writing needs to be the length of a novella. This is not to say that Substacks and blogs can’t also play an important role in culture—there are essays that can only exist in such a format. Many great writers have risen on the website. There’s a watchdog component to Substack and similar outlets, a way to check the powers that be. I immensely enjoy reading the work of Seymour Hersh, Ken Klippenstein, Kate Wagner, B. D. McClay, John Ganz, Brandon Taylor, Sam Bodrojan, Rayne Fisher-Quann, and many others. But Substack is a complement to magazines, not a replacement. Infrastructure and healthcare are nice perks. Gatekeeping is a job that comes with benefits and resources.

Trilling, of course, was not very taken with the cultural output of his time. He was worried that people preferred optimistic slop to the “tough, complex psychology of Freud.” Heady interpretation was what separated the wheat from the chaff. This is the goal of all little magazines. Criticism and interpretation, like Torah Study or Sufi dervishes, molds and expands the mind. While blogs allow a new kind of wilderness, the little magazine is like a dam, protecting the alluvial nature of the swamplands—filtering down and shaping our minds. A magazine curates, a blog flows.

Perhaps this sounds snobbish. Trilling faced similar controversies for his exacting standards and ideas. Yet I don’t think holding a higher standard for literature or art is elitist. We can take lowbrow art just as seriously as Donald Judd or John Donne. Criticism can be approachable even if it’s metabolizing Kafka or Rilke. Look at the feral tenderness of Patricia Lockwood or the vicious buoyancy of Andrea Long Chu. Margo Jefferson writes about the music of her youth in Constructing a Nervous System with the flair of a playwright. Vinson Cunningham approaches the Knicks with reverent solemnity. These are the result of a life steeped in the process of thinking, working through the rubble of literature and politics. If novels are getting worse, criticism itself is not. I am skeptical of these cyclical pronouncements—that novels or criticism are in danger, that there’s a decline of some kind. In reality, I find magazines allow for a diversity of style and intellect, collecting a coterie of disparate writers and ideas that reverberate and echo, a symphony in the same key even if they utilize different chord progressions.

The panic over declining literacy rates, the book review, and media coverage at large, however, continues. With such pressure put on readers, it’s no wonder that, as Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote: “a Sunday morning with the book reviews is often a dismal experience.” Both writers and critics must contend with the apocalyptic mood. As institutions crumble, many erudite journalists are quick to defend the credibility of their livelihood even if they are no longer the vanguards of taste. We’re terrified about the lack of authority, the free fall of magazines. Everyone is seeking confidence, trying to believe themselves the arbiters of what is good and what is bad. Personally, I welcome that gauntlet. Say it with style.

But there’s a more grim undercurrent to this crisis of authority. The layoffs and closures are alarming. Equally concerning is the attempt by tech companies to outsource the life of the mind to robots that rely on deadly data centers. Some have argued that standards are falling across the board. “Bad criticism is bad not because it has been deflowered by political ideology but for all the typical reasons that writing is bad: it is poorly paid, hastily edited, and written mostly by freelancers with so little in the way of financial security,” Andrea Long Chu wrote in her 2025 collection Authority. Even movies like The Devil Wears Prada 2 are worried about the future of big magazines.

If once magazines launched major talents, it seems now there are fewer public intellectuals. Certainly no one is interviewed on TV like Susan Sontag or Noam Chomsky. But little magazines still face the uphill battle, the noble one, to try and explore the stories behind the headlines and the niche ideas, books, and events that deserve space on the page. There have certainly been attempts to interrogate their place in the cultural sphere. Writer Naomi Kanakia has recently been reviewing one periodical after another. Criticism begets criticism. But often I think back to the days when I longed to appear in those very magazines. I imagined there was a secret castle full of stiff upper-lipped editors drinking gimlets and eating caviar who only hired their friends. I was, of course, wrong. It’s merely a long, toiling road from one piece to another. Editors are mostly overworked and underpaid like the rest of us, many hold multiple jobs and contend with unruly inboxes.

As a child, I loved reading used copies of Harper’s from Half-Priced Books. I’m not sure I understood very much, but I admired the steely prose and unfussy fonts. Now, I also love devouring Bookforum and Parapraxis. A good critic can turn something on its head while erecting lyrical carnivals with the elemental bones of language. She can animate a subculture you’ve never heard of.

In Rothfeld’s elegy for The Washington Post’s book section she sets out what I believe is a very beautiful way to think about the (new) function of the little magazine and its readers: “What they often evinced was better than interest, better even than bibliophilia; it was the rare and precious capacity to be interested in what they didn’t already know interested them. It was a willingness to be changed.”

There’s a still wide field available for writers aspiring to grave the pages of little magazines—even if perhaps literacy rates are falling and NEA grants are being stripped away. Those who do pursue such a calling (I hesitate to call it a career) certainly still toil, but the resulting camaraderie can be a wonderful thing. Certainly, some writers can be cliquish, but not all. The trenches of freelancing and writing for small (and occasionally big) magazines is the only home I know. It’s not all doom and gloom either. Some organizations are thriving. Luckily, certain special grants are replacing the loss of the NEA for outlets like N+1 and the beloved Dalkey Archive.

No little magazine will appeal to everyone, nor should it. Perhaps it seems I write from inside the house, but I am not a staff writer or editor. I did not go to an Ivy League school or get an MFA. Of course, I don’t think it’s an easy career for anyone. I make my career hopping from one beloved little magazine to another, reporting and writing about the far-right, healthcare, religion, and books. I enjoy it. I enjoy the writers I get to write alongside both here and in outlets like The Baffler and Lux. The line between a big and small magazine is growing eerily thin. If the definition is merely about circulation it seems nearly every glossy publication is in trouble. Let’s just presume that we are talking about the outlets I’ve mentioned rather than a publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

It’s a magnificent thing to hold a magazine in your hand, smoke a Capri, and drink a Diet Coke or a glass of wine. Bourgeoisie? Perhaps. Yet these magazines often cost merely $40 a year. Besides, people from every walk of life desire culture. It seems more insulting to me to say that only a certain kind of people read a certain kind of magazine. (Let it be known that even e-flux has grown remarkably more readable over the years.) Those few of us who strive to be writers know exactly what Norman Podhoretz meant when he said “What I wanted was to see my name in print, to be praised, and above all to attract attention.” We know what he meant. We all have the magazine we treat like an avoidant boyfriend who won’t text us back. Our white whale. Even Sontag, for her part, dreamed of breaking into such a world through specific “little magazines,” as Benjamin Moser notes in his biography: “My greatest dream,” Sontag said, “was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.”

The “little magazine” shouldn’t be underestimated. No matter how widely read, they offer a beacon to the next generation of readers, devoted bookworms, and pseudo-intellectuals alike. I don’t believe in much but I believe in the sanctity of the little magazine. Reading, after all, is the godliest profession. In a world where everything is about being more accessible and more slick, the little magazine offers another way—an afternoon or evening spent trying to understand.

No, I’m not on X or Bluesky anymore. The echo chamber was a long time in the making and I unfortunately am trying to make a living off my writing. So I don’t know what latest discourse is or who’s mad at who. I’m still working on a few big pieces so this remains dormant until a piece ends up getting cut or I have an epiphany. Rarely do I lurk on notes other than to post work. In the meantime, I have a new slew of links.

This is a moving, potent essay on techno, dance, and the night by Aria Aber.

A great essay by my Bookforum editor David O’Neill on Lucy Ives and writing.

Killer profile of Alia Shawkat by Leah Abrams.

LOOSEY is always great. This is a knockout piece by Brendon Holder.

I was distraught I missed the show, but Hattie Lindert wrote a great piece on the Phoebe Bridgers pop up at MSG.

Unsurprisingly, I have underscores, the new Charli XCX, and Hole on repeat. I watched Edward Yang’s Mahjong with some friends—obsessed.

I’ve been revisiting our favorite bitter queen Gary Indiana. I love Resentment and Do Everything in the Dark. I also read The Tunnel by William Gass, a claustrophobic epic about fascism and the Midwest.

And here are some things I’ve written recently:

A short novella for Community Mausoleum. Fiction! Again! First time since Herculine.

On the closure of pediatric trans care for The Verge.

John Waters’ Desperate Living for Criterion Liner Notes.

Hello! A small update and a small amount of links. I’ve been trying to pick up work and deliver a new novel draft and a proposal of some kind. Pride month, it seems, for better or worse isn’t the season for freelancers it once was. So once again, I don’t have that many of my own non-paid thoughts. Instead, I have a small round-up of other people’s work and my own.

The new MUNA album is fascinating. Can pop music move past the corny and into the visceral? Certainly there are hooks. “Big Stick” is a fascinating modern protest song. Escaping the florid, innocent, naive quality to some queer art is difficult. There was a sea of Mapplethorpe and Hartley imitators in the wake of Tom of Finland and the commodification of Keith Haring. There's an initial wave of aesthetic imitators: scrawny twinks and BDSM muscle gays in painters alongside the prototypical photographer of male nudes who admires Classical art and arched backs. While this visual art movement gave way to good artists too like Hockney and Gregg Arakai both of whom parodied gay aesthetics, it also gave way to rainbow murals and queer capitalism, artwashing and worse. Campiness became key to the personas of Elton John, Liberace, and RuPaul--only to birth Queer Eye and gay influencers like Connor Franta. Queer Joy is Resistance became a slogan slapped onto watercolors and woodblock prints. Coming our narratives and sponsored posts became a way to make money, a way to write a memoir, and perhaps even get a TV deal. Text art was a big part of this, but so was writing itself as Paul McAdory wrote in a great essay about the sentimental gay novel. Tenderness has become taboo. Satire and irony reign supreme, we want our queer art but at a slant. Down with the earnestness of Sam Smith and music videos full of yearning. Hopefully I’ll write something more on this eventually.

In other music news, the shift of trans musicians to electronica continues with Jane Remover and underscores, both extremely talented pop artists with great vision and catchy gems. I’m glad they’re having a moment that seems to reflect SOPHIE’s legacy while moving it forward.

I’ve been thinking a lot about right-wing influencers and the way they’re scaling up their streaming efforts. The left has yet to really find a corollary they’ll embrace—Hasan Piker has received a lot of flack for supporting Palestine. This was a really interesting piece by Will Alden in Jewish Currents on Curt Mills.

This was a great read, a sharp review of the MJ documentary by Paul Thompson.

Zefyr Lisowski’s great piece on the state of trans publishing. It’s a necessary piece I highly recommend.

Like many, I’ve been enjoying the Wallace Shawn renaissance. Watching The Designated Mourner reminded me of discovering Ingmar Bergman as a college student in film school. Highly recommend. I’ve also been watching and enjoying Widow’s Bay with D and we both enjoyed going on date night to see Hokum in Astoria.

I am teaching a class on finding an agent! Sign up!

On Katherine Packert Burke and the trans killer myth for The Baffler.

Interview on criticism for Red Pepper.

Appearance on Translash about trans art.

On London Falling for my book column at Defector.

On the balls barn for The Nation.

Hello from Burnout Island. I’ve been writing a lot, freelancing is my full-time job, and while I have a few regular gigs it still requires a lot of admin to get enough work lined up to pay the bills. The industry is in decline, or at least in a lot of trouble—something that surprises no one. While there are only a few full-time, fully-employed book critics, I am a full time critic/journalist/writer. I just don’t get health insurance for my contributions. As such, I am trying to finish up a few big pieces soon. So, while I wish I could offer another essay or interview for you this week I am turning to a classic Substack genre. The recommendation list. I have mixed feelings on lists, perhaps because they’re often been a way for me to manage my anxiety or troubled ideas about canon (who’s in and who’s out), but I also think they can be a place of lifting others up and expanding. One rule—these are primarily things I am not writing about. Some some books I would recommend aren’t present below. Speculate away.

Articles:

“The Polycrisis,” Brandy Jensen, The Yale Review

Today a big theme is editors who are also great writers. This is one of the only good things written about polyamory. Read it. She also wrote a great piece on Nancy Lemann, whose Lives of the Saints is great and I just read.

A profile of Charli XCX for Vogue UK by Laura Snapes

Snapes is one of the best writers on pop music. Her recent profile of XCX is a master-class mash-up and she also just had me reconsider what I thought about the new Kacey Musgraves album. (She’s right, it’s genius.)

On Emma Cline by Jennifer Wilson for The Nation

Wilson is now at the New Yorker, but her book reviews for the Nation are what I turn to for inspiration. Clear, crisp, erudite, stylish and incisive.

Driving Academy by Nicolaia Rips for the Paris Review

The i-D writer and memoirist is so funny, she’s excellent at turning grief into tiny comic gems. Her recent essays are a treat.

On Neighbors by Tyler Foggatt for The New Yorker

Foggatt’s writing on Taylor Swift is some of the best, her criticism is so fun and ecstatic, the kind of thing that ropes you in like a lasso with its flashy subjects and careful critical consideration.

Rachel Syme on the Met Gala for The New Yorker

Definitive takes. Great context.

Also:

Naomi Kanakia on short stories and style, Centrist imaginations by Rayne Fisher-Quann, Rachel Aviv on Oliver Sacks, Jean Garnett on kid’s tv and divorce, Chris Gayomali on juicing, and Hermione Hoby on Infinite Jest.

Books:

A Left-Handed Woman, Judith Thurman

Her sentences are so lush and intricate without sacrificing anything. Their sparse perfection is so evocative. Read her on any and everything from Rachel Cusk to Commes des Garçons.

Wifey, Judy Blume

This was a trip. Raunchy, sexy, grim, funny. A slender, perfect novel that should be more widely-read. Where’s the reissue? I’d do an introduction on late-in-life affairs and the appeal of gross-out sex.

On Morrison, Namwali Serpell

I obviously have a soft spot for criticism. Serpell’s book is surprising, exacting, demanding, and beautiful. I love the way she weaves in Nettie Jones and Morrison’s editorial work. It’s a daring, pitch-perfect book with a lot to say about one of my favorite writers.

Murder Bimbo, Rebecca Novak

Alongside Famesick, this is one of the few books I’ve torn through recently. Novak has written a bleak comic satire with a lot to say about love, politics, and selling out. It’s fun, biting, and sharp. I want more. Novak’s bio about being a divinity school grad continues to shift the way I read this book.

The Crime of Sheila McGough, Janet Malcolm

She’s the best, what can I say? I’ve worked through all her books at this point and there’s simply no one like her. I’m excited for a biography I hear is coming later this year.

Image credit: Leonard Carrington.

Many thanks to LitHub for calling me a critic to watch!

Stories about time travel have always felt like a form of cheating to me. Instead of sticking to one timeline, they introduce a mysterious deus ex machina: a hack, a shortcut, a trick. In her septology On the Calculation of Volume, Danish writer Solvej Balle attempts to elevate the concept of the time loop into something literary. Her characters must wonder if they can use time instead of being used by time. Can they exploit their snow globe moment? Four of the projected seven volumes have been translated into English by Barbara J Haveland, Sophia Hersi Smith, and Jennifer Russell. Balle’s characters are forced to relive the 18th of November again and again–not unlike the karmic prison of other recent media like Russian Doll, Groundhog Day, Star Trek, I Who Have Never Known Men, or even Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. These films and books open alternative timelines that allow our characters to use their ingenuity to shift their future. They can right wrongs, redo awkward encounters, and rebuild society. Like sliding doors, they can see both the negative and positive outcome of their dilemmas and work towards resolution. In truth, it can feel like an author just wants to make up for lost time. They’ve written themselves into a corner. Each of these examples exploits the fantasy of time travel to allow its characters to live in a cozy fantasy or allows for neat answers to complex conflicts. It’s a way for characters to have a get out of jail free card. More recent books, like Balle’s for instance, use the stoppage of time as a way to consider the nightmarish quality of the contemporary moment. Maybe if time stops we can reckon with the polycrisis.

But for Balle’s protagonist Tara Selter and those she meets along the way, the failure of time to pass is not just an opportunistic plot device bordering on tedium and frustration, it’s a way to examine existential philosophy. The big questions of life come into focus when very little changes from one day to the next. Tara roams around and eats crisp bread, jotting stray observations down in her diary. Sometimes the prose can feel barren. “It is not a disaster. It is not nothing, but it is not much either.” Other times it attempts profundity through stark similes and metaphors: “The world is a place that throws you overboard.”

This can make, at times, for fascinating reflections from our narrator Tara Selter. The series is written like her diaries, her slow trudge from one November day to the next, at first alone and then much later with a few comrades in the war against monotony. Not everyone has the same idea of how to get back to their previous timeline and make the days begin again. Tara, for instance, feels like a monster, using up resources that don’t reset with the next November 18th. Those who come later are less worried about using up the natural world. Even while Tara is alone, she’s less concerned with exploiting the expected tricks of the time travel genre. It’s her companions who arrive later on who end up inevitably trying to use their snow globe moment to save the world. Can the glitch in the matrix allow for a new kind of morality to flourish? Can all car accidents, for instance, be prevented? What about natural disasters? Tara is more concerned with bringing her husband along for the ride. She suffers through the distortion alone, wishing he could join her adventures.

In the first volume, Tara stays close to home in rural France, trying to remind her husband Thomas that the day keeps repeating. But as time accumulates, she begins to lose hope. In the second book, she tries to chase the seasons by traveling throughout Northern Europe. She later visits her family and ends up discovering, at the very end of the volume, that she’s not alone in the time loop. Tara is more interested in reading about the Roman Empire and how they fell than in the actual mechanics of the repeating days. One of her most prized possessions is a sestertius. In the third book, she finds out that there’s another man with her though the two don’t exactly see time in the same way. She sees time as a “container,” he sees time as “a long tunnel of days.” She ends up meeting a few others who have differing ideas about ethics, sustainability, and how to take advantage of their situation. They all move in together in a house, where in the fourth volume, they discover that there are hundreds of people reliving the 18th of November. By now, years have passed and Tara has given up on pulling her husband, family, or friends into her troubling timeline. The mechanics of the time loop continually evolve “like something out of a horror film.” During the first book, Tara is the only one aware that the day is repeating. Later when she meets others, some of them understand what’s going on and some don’t. She develops a kinship and eventually a commune with some of those who have become “loopers.”

The science of this strange phenomena is mostly relegated to short rambling paragraphs that toss out a few ideas without analytic grounding—not that most are reading Balle for the horology. This is not exactly science fiction in the strictest sense. Instead, it seems she’s working out a feeling that many experienced during COVID—the failure of the world to cohere into a forward-moving plot. Plenty of novels and films made or begun during the pandemic contain that claustrophobic, repetitive, haunting aura, the way many felt stuck or lost in the cosmic soup that opened up during lockdowns. Have we entered the twilight zone and crucially can we get out? Since 2020, we’ve entered an echo chamber of discourse, perhaps more reliant on our phones for community than ever even as IRL-communal infrastructure dwindles. As existential emergencies inspire fear and division, we look for more like-minded people. We act like this is for safety, to recoil inward, to seek those we’re aligned with. In Balle’s work, this tendency is found among the loopers, those caught in the world where the same day repeats over and over. They inevitably find each other. They create a sense of unity—a quasi-utopia in a big house. The world has changed, Tara Selter discovers in On the Calculation of Volume, and there may be no going back. Even scarier, however, is that she may not want to. The new timeline may offer something, even as it destroys the old ways. It may sound familiar to those who spent time quarantining during lockdowns, the loss and mourning, the eerily empty subways, the bizarre attempt to upload real life to the cloud.

I recently saw someone online describe the novels as a meditation on the dissolution of a marriage and it’s true, much of the novel concerns the fact that Tara’s husband Tomas has not become stuck in November 18th like she has. At least, he’s not aware of it. The shared intimacy of their union fades. Slowly, Tara sees Tomas as a ghost and feels like she herself is a monster. There’s a dual quality here, both sinister and cozy, in the way loved ones are protected from time and a prisoner to it. Balle is clearly aware of this dichotomy, using it to explore disintegration and preservation.

Many have found Balle’s novels to be a “literary sensation,” while some have privately complained, at least to me, that they’re boring. A private response to a poll by The Cut’s Book Gossip column scowled about “these horrendously tedious Calculation of Volume books from Denmark,” Perhaps I’m jaded but the literary series has often come to seem like a cash grab. Why publish a single book when you can publish five or even seven? Often these books are written by palatable kinds of writers. They provide nearly mythical fables with an existential twist. Not just other Nordic writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jon Fosse, and Dag Solstad but also Yoko Tawada. Thin books that can serve as markers of taste and status are in. Why publish a few volumes of Annie Ernaux in one when you can stretch out the extended literary universe? It makes sense. Book sales aren’t why they used to be and small presses need the money especially as the Trump Administration strips many of their NEA grants. It’s a dire literary economy. But I do find at times it can expose the threadbare nature of such books. Balle is clearly a talented writer, but often it feels like she was at the right place at the right time as we ease up on lockdowns and start to look back on the early era of the pandemic—her books have the kind of easily postable covers that can go viral that focus on “a fairly homogenous segment of the population.” Those stuck in time aren’t old or poor or wealthy and all speak English, German, or French. “Many held temporary jobs or were at a crossroad when the day halted… Doubters, people at a turning point… with loose-fitting identities and disoriented lives.” Perhaps this is a clue. Tara’s passivity is certainly tied to her privilege. The faint whiff of environmentalism and conscious consumerism she displays is nothing compared to the men and women she later meets who truly want to remake the world. Guilt can be a paralytic or a catalyst.

The passage and phenomenology of time is often described in spatial metaphors. Tara often conflates the two as well—she often reads “tales of pockets, loops, and labyrinths of time.” Such narratives blur the science of how we experience hours, days, and weeks. “It is often said that time seems to go more quickly, the years rush by, as one grows older—either because when one is young one’s days are packed with novel, exciting impressions or because as one grows older a year becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of one’s life. But, if the years appear to pass more quickly, the hours and minutes do not—they are the same as they always were,” Oliver Sacks once wrote in The New Yorker. This is how quarantine felt to me, the long and endless days of summer that I spent in a railroad apartment or walking around Greenwood Cemetery listening to podcasts. I felt like I was just passing time. Why not go the long way to CVS? I wasn’t sure how to productively spend the massive amount of off-time. I read a lot too, but I did not write the Next Great American Novel or write a hit screenplay.

In later volumes of On the Calculation of Volume, a character named Olga worries about finding the right way to approach the time loop, the way to maximize her ability to save the world. She frequently argues with others about the right way to do so and finds Tara to be an airhead who “just gazes out of windows, thinking about love.” For Olga, seeking justice is more important than personal problems. Tara doesn’t seem to know what to do. Her next move is shrouded in nostalgia.

Love and family frequently surface in Balle’s work as a proxy for forward movement. Volume IV ends with Tara’s husband Thomas becoming aware that November 18th continues to repeat, a stunning development that promises, at least, some kind of progression to Balle’s series. Another mechanical incident: a woman becomes pregnant while still stuck in the time loop. She loses her baby. Somehow Balle has crafted a frozen world where the future can still slip in through cracks. In many time-travel works, this would create multiple timelines. The multiverse as existential enlightenment. For Balle, it’s just the starting point for another philosophical quagmire, the ability to contemplate forward movement. It’s a grim crossroads that Tara finds herself at, but not one, it appears, without hope.

Image credit: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Closing Party (Hit the North). RIP.

On looksmaxxing for GQ.

On the New Museum re-opening for Frieze.

On naturalism for Mother Jones.

Anahid Nersessian is one of our best living literary critics and someone I’ve been lucky to meet on multiple occasions. She writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and anywhere else cool, chic, and thoughtful. Her work harbors a cool precision that’s still amiable—readable and layered, sharp and moving. She often writes about poetry, history, and the contemporary novel and has taken on behemoths like Walter Benjamin, Schattenfroh, Rachel Kushner, Keats, and Bjork. We talked about the idea of group reviews, taste, Marx, and being hot.

What is the substantive quality of a book or piece of art that you look for when deciding what to write about?

I like assignments, not because I mind pitching, but because I appreciate the opportunity to think about a book or show or whatever that wasn’t already on my mind or radar. My own tastes are pretty niche, so it’s not a given that I’ll pick up something a lot of people want to hear about. Luckily I work with editors who have great instincts when it comes to pairing a critic with an object. For example, the biography of Walter Benjamin that I reviewed for The New Yorker a few weeks ago wasn’t something I would have read on my own—as an English professor, I can’t say I feel in need of extra Benjamin—but Namara Smith, who’s an incredible editor, suggested it to me, and I thought, oh, yeah, of course! And that review turned out to be a blast to write.

I really loved your piece on Bjork---writing about Fossora for NYRB alongside so many other poets or translated literature---what was it like to approach writing about a musician in that way?

That piece is another example—Jana Prikyl at the NYRB asked me if I wanted to review the new Bjork album, and how could I say no? I listened to Bjork a lot in high school and a little in college, but I’d honestly sort of forgotten about her. (I’m one of the rare people who hated Vespertine when it came out, and my love for Bjork never really recovered.) I was the music editor of my college paper, and I used to want to be a music journalist: Lester Bangs and Ellen Willis are still two of my favorite writers, and I wait with baited breath between articles by my friend Carina del Valle Schorske, who for my money is one of the best minds on popular music out there. When I write about poetry or literature, I approach them the way I learned to approach music. How does this sound? What is its volume, its shape, what are its sonic and rhythmic references? So, in some ways, that NYRB piece just allowed me to do the kind of writing that is closest to my own practice.

There was a lot of ado about your “Nightboat School” moniker in a recent piece for Bookforum. How do you define the lyrical contours of such a genre? Or the social matrix poets like Rosie Stockton, Nora Treatbaby, or Kay Gabriel inhabit? To me it feels like a more opaque antidote to the glut of third-rate Frank O’Hara imitators. I think here too of your piece “Notes on Tone,” and the challenge of outlining trends.

I hesitate to do what you’re calling outlining trends, because I think it’s easy to jump the gun and do a disservice to something real: no shade but that “Brodernism” essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books comes to mind. Usually when a critic names a trend, she’s talking about something she doesn’t like or thinks is lame. That doesn’t interest me so much. I’m a poetry scholar by training, and after observing some of these writers—Kay, Rosie, Nora, Imogen Xtian Smith, lots of others—for several years, and feeling like Nightboat was just hitting it out of the park on a regular basis (here I’d also want to mention Lindsay Turner’s exquisite translation of the late Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life), I decided to think about the possibility that the press was allowing something like a “school” to coalesce.

Obviously throwing out a term like “Nightboat School” is tendentious, and of course people are going to be annoyed if they feel left out or like their work isn’t being “elevated” to the status of a movement—although I tried to make clear that I don’t think being part of a school means your poetry is good or bad, it just means it shares a robustly specific social and aesthetic character with poetry written by your contemporaries. I did hear some of that “ado” through the grapevine. A lot of it seemed to be coming from older male poets, many of them with a toehold in academia, either because they teach at universities or have PhDs or publish their work with academic presses. That’s a different milieu, and it’s an interesting one, and great poetry has come out of it. It’s just not what I was writing about. I was writing about young queer poets with precarious jobs, many of whom don’t have MFAs or PhDs, who publish with a Brooklyn-based small press. It’s a description, not a competition.

In your work there’s a lot of threads---the lyric form, Keats, Anti-Zionism, psychoanalysis, Walter Benjamin--how did you harness your interests? Or, how do they haunt you? Do you believe in taste?

If I have any kind of taste it’s very elastic, and I’m not a snob, except maybe when it comes to poetry: I find a lot of mainstream poetry, with its literalism and humorlessness and formal inertia, embarrassing for everyone, readers as well as writers. And if there’s a throughline to my writing, it can probably be explained by the fact that I went to graduate school and was trained in Marxist literary criticism, a method of reading and interpretation that also happens to align with my politics. Sorry but I just think leftists make better critics: Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Tobi Haslett, Lauren Michele Jackson, Ben Lerner…do the reactionaries have that deep a bench? I don’t necessarily foreground political topics in my work, but I see the world a certain way and I have certain values and beliefs about humanity and social life. If I thought those values and beliefs were dumb I’d abandon them, and then my writing would be different, and I suspect it would be worse.

Do you think the LA literary scene is fundamentally different from NYC? Howso? Your work seems to have a different sensibility, but I can’t label that or say how that manifests.

New York is the center of the publishing world the same way that LA is the center of the movie business. I think being on the periphery of your industry is good for you; it makes you feel a little out of the loop, not so saturated with information about what other people are doing. In general I’d say the literary scene in LA is less status-driven, more gentle and welcoming and—I know everyone says this—democratic. A lot of the credit there is due to people like Sammy Loren, Ruby Zuckerman and Evan Laffer, Joseph Mosconi and the Poetic Research Bureau, and David Horvitz, who curate or host readings in spaces across the city and bring all sorts of writers in front of all sorts of audiences. As for my own work, again, I’m pretty clueless—I have no idea who has a book deal or who has beef or where someone got her MFA, and maybe that frees me up a bit to follow my own instincts or preoccupations. I also just love LA, its vastness and improbability. I hope that love, and the city’s energy, makes its way into my writing.

How, oh how, did you approach reviewing Schattenfroh?

I was just talking about that book the other day! It’s an experience as much as a novel—a form of endurance art. Trying to capture that in a review while also giving readers some guideposts to what the fuck is going on was daunting, but as I wrote about Schattenfroh I found that Michael Lentz’s core commitments to narrative and the history of realism are much stronger than they might initially seem. The book is experimental but so are Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travelsand German Romantic philosophy and the other stuff it’s in dialogue with, work that’s become canonical over the years and that there’s a sort of cultural consensus on. It’s part of a tradition and less opaque when you consider it in that light. Also, Max Lawton’s translation is such a joy—buoyant and clear and just in love with language. There’s an immediate, sensuous pleasure in reading the novel that’s just as important as its avant-garde acrobatics.

Finally, we were both in On the Rag’s Hottest Critics blog post a few years back. How did you find that experience?

I mentioned Sammy Loren, the editor of On the Rag, already. I’ve found him to be an unfailingly positive, optimistic, and kind person, and for the most part On the Rag’s blog reflects that sensibility, even in an occasionally cracked or unhinged register. It’s all in good fun. What I loved about that thread was seeing so many of my friends recognized for being hot and beautiful and smart. That was lovely.

Overrated/underrated for Writers

“Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag.

I think this one has passed through canonicity, become banal, and now has risen again, like Jesus. Jesse McCarthy’s vintage n+1 piece “Notes on Trap” is a beautiful and hypnotic extension of the OG essay.

Autofiction.

Evergreen. It’s not always done well but when it is it’s delicious.

Astrology.

All esoteric forms of knowledge are undervalued even as they’re overexposed.

The Pitt.

I don’t watch a lot of TV but during the first season, I would be out on a Thursday night thinking about how when I got home I could watch a new episode of The Pitt. It scratches a certain existential itch for me because I wish I’d become a doctor. But the second season has been absolutely dreadful--so toneless and boring.

Reality tv.

The shows I find too stressful but that Netflix series ‘Trainwreck’ I will say is a joy.

Image by Richard Diebenkorn.

I wanted to share a brief update which is that I have a books column now at Defector. My first piece is a review of Ben Lerner’s Transcription. I am immensely grateful to my editor Brandy Jensen, who is a genius. The article starts by asking “Would you fuck Ben Lerner?” You can read it here.

Also, I wrote a short piece on the Supreme Court’s ruling on conversion therapy bans for The New Yorker.

More soon, and thank you for reading and sharing. This is a magnificent opportunity and I’m elated. More soon, as always.

Maya Kotomori is a fashion writer, a critic, an editor, and a woman about town. She writes about sincerity, irony, sculpture, the Downtown Art scene, and currently works at Byline. Her work brings wit and grace along with a heavy dose of history to everything from Rick Owens to gloves to Laufey. So often freelance writers and editors don’t get the recognition or platform they deserve. For this series, I’ve been focused on bringing to light the art that goes into having a career in magazine writing and highlighting the work of people I think elevate the genre. Kotomori is a great example. We talked about Kanye West, career ambition, and normcore.

Writing on your ego and fashion, you wrote: “She dresses every day in styles cobbled together from fashion plates, she doesn’t check Instagram, she covers her knees not out of modesty, but as a statement.” I’m curious about the relationship between concealment, privacy, labor, and dignity. How do you navigate it?

I was really in my bag when I wrote that. I feel like a lot of people oscillate between romanticizing the past as a way of expressing disdain of the present/future of fashion, or the opposite; they romanticize the present/future to express disdain of the past. I don’t think it’s so simple! Fashion history, for example, focuses on gentry and royalty because back then, clothing was just clothing; if you were a fisherman you wore a special type of sweater to keep you warm and dry, hence the fisherman knit sweater. People who worked wore their clothes for that functionality, so we don’t have a lot of material evidence of those garments because, well, people wore them. To pieces! The evidence couldn’t be preserved for a museum like a piccadilly collar or a conical farthingale, those items existed for performance, because everyday wear in 16th century England was performance for royals. The industrialization of clothing in later centuries, leading up to today, has turned everything into choice; such is the laissez faire economy, the definition of neoliberal capitalism turning freedom of choice into the most valued commodity. There’s a power there that I want to encourage people to locate. Systems are only as valid as you would like them to be. If industry means all clothing becomes a choice—to be a fashion plate, to follow trends, to dress purely for utility—consumers can choose which systems they’d like to participate in. My ego wants to romanticize a past I’ll never know, a time before phones where clothing could just serve as adornment rather than the chief tool for identification or belonging, but instead of yearning that, I can mobilize choice not as something used to modulate my taste, but to ignore the systems I want to ignore, and support the ones I want to support. That can be as private or public as I’d like it to be. Because I’m a writer, I share a lot of that process but that’s how I approach all of those things.

As for concealment, my friend Mika Kol once said to me that covering your joints is the most dignified thing you could do, which led to a conversation about exactly how. You can cover your knees with kneepads (I have a pair, they’re a secret accessory-weapon I have), you can cover your elbows with elbow pads, you can cover your knuckles with special gloves, and the rest of your body could be completely naked, and that intentional concealment is almost kinky because you’re turning the joint into an errogenous zone, and turning the rest of you into the accessory. There are a lot of metaphors and woo-woo interpretations that can go into the errogenous-zone-ness of joints and what that can mean, but for the sake of cogency and wonderment I’m gonna leave that there, open for your interpretation ;)

What do you make of normcore? In fashion, as an ideology, as a form of or rejection of sincerity…

Normcore in fashion: an extension of industry, where industry is classified as I did above. I’m wary of origins (NOTHING is linear!!) but this feels like the first microtrend. Proto-social media, with roots in anti-fashion from the late ’80s through the ’90s, the pre-indie sleaze aughts blogger era, the post-indie sleaze “revival” in like 2012.

Normcore in ideology: I have a bit of a snowflake interpretation here. Normcore as ideology feels like a fetish of the canonical “normal guy”; in the western world at least, it’s a guy who goes to work 9-5 loves his friends wants a family has a family owns a house likes sex with cis women watches the big game etc. Normcore has also emerged in the past decade as blue collar fetish, it involves a lot of workwear which just gives obsession with working people, meanwhile we know how working people are treated by the federal government in this country. It’s the art student whose parents pay full price at a $35k/semester private art university hiding the Rick Owens their parents bought them in high school in the back of the closet, wearing only dirty Carhartts because they’re a “tradesperson.” No shade at all; I’m literally an NYU BA and Columbia MA holder. And, I also think there’s something we should mine there ideologically as to…why that, and also how has it become widespread enough where “Carhartt rich guy” is now a type.

Normcore as sincerity/not as sincerity: I love this one. So what you’re talking about, this idea of sincerity or a rejection of such, is the difference between sincerity and post-irony. Put simply, sincerity is liking what you like without concern of a zeitgeist that might thumb its nose at your taste. Post-irony is mobilizing that “I don’t care, I like what I like” as an aesthetic where the idea of actually being sincere is ironic. Natural question to follow is: well, then what do the post-ironic care about? Everything, nothing…we’ll never know. The surface of the joke contains all the meaning. The way something looks is where it begins and ends. Normcore is that for me; I think today it’s deployed post-ironically as “teehee the most interesting person you know is normal” and I think the most insidious thing about that is how hyperawareness of identity types and subtypes bred post-irony. Everyone is looking at each other and classifying one another to the point where believing something must be a joke? I…don’t like that. There really is no solution either, because what are you gonna do, ask everyone “hey are you doing that sincerely or because you want to look sincere?” People don’t even know that this has become the reading protocol for interpreting one another now, it’s a phenomenon I’m still trying to find the best way to explain.

I’ve been really enamored with this concept of post-irony since I was 24. Shout out to my friend and favorite editor Drew Zeiba for helping me write my very first essay on the topic a couple years ago; it was the first time I ever dared to put words to this really big idea and he helped me shape it in a way that now serves as a framework for all future iterations. (I want to write a book on it but every time I try and open conversations with Important Book People they tell me that no one will read a book on post-irony from someone under 30). Three more years to go.

Do you approach writing about art and fashion differently? How?

Not really, actually. Journalistically, both art and fashion writing hold hands in the sense that if you’re talking about a concept, you can get freaky and romantic with your wording; when you’re doing the necessary scene-staging you describe the piece/collection/show. I also feel like in NYC at least the scenes are all adjacent, the industries are parallel, the value systems for high-priced objects are parallel. I often times approach both with a bit of Kantian purity, analyzing the work in the context of the world it’s created in moreso than the world it lives in. Back to the systems thing I said earlier, both of these industries are systems. I write about them, I choose to put meaning on them. That doesn’t make them neutral, but it does mean I have a choice. It’s kind of like a separate the art from the artist thing but for my work. That compartmentalization is really important to me.

Do you feel more freedom to write your blog Responsible Gun Owner and also where did the title come from…

Absolutely. I reinvigorated my blog after I had ACL surgery in 2023 and was laid off of from a job I hated. Nothing quite like unemployment mixed with learning to walk again. Then I got a job as an editor at Document Journal and I started writing less because I did the work of someone paid three times as much as my “salary” (no one was formally employed there; we were all independent contractors). Then my former bosses owed me $10,000 in unpaid wages despite my going on work-stoppage strike twice (with only one fellow co-worker) so after what would be my last press trip to Copenhagen Fashion Week for the publication I made sure they ran me my money, and then quit on the spot. What’s a girl to do to enrich a slapdash freelance career? Blog.

Document was my first magazine job and I learned so much about how advertisements work, and how they affect critique. When you rely on Dior money, for example, you’re not gonna write a critical essay on the collection, you’re just gonna keep it to news. It’s not unethical if you just prioritize one kind of content, but it is, you know, one kind of content. One perspective. A lot of people take this fact and say, “oh well you can go on substack and do this,” you can go freelance and monetize yourself rather than working as an editor to monetize a magazine. And that can be a good idea for people! What comes with it, though, are similar constraints facing indie magazines, an obligation to be brand-safe to continue stacking partnerships and making money to pay for basic necessities. Freelancing doesn’t feel like it’s free anymore, from an ideas perspective, I guess is my point. The influencer-fication of freelance writers is really great for brands because they give their product to someone who seemingly has no skin in the game, get an honest, nearly always positive review, keep working together, etc. I’m lucky in that I’ve only received gifts (not for review, just cus!) from brands I actually really ended up liking, and honestly there are brands who have slid into my DMs that I’ve not been into and I just said “thank you so much for the offer but this isn’t for me.” Could those DMs have precipitated money, perhaps lasting creative partnerships? Yeah, they could have. But I freelance as a writer for hire, not as Maya Kotomori for hire. If you want to hire Maya Kotomori, however, I’m here and I would like to be an editor at a magazine again because that was my favorite thing to do.

Saying no is what Responsible Gun Owner is all about. I get asked all the time what it’s like owning a gun, and I actually don’t; I’ve never even shot a gun before. But the title comes from my love of guns as tools, as an idiom of American violence, as a mutilating object that sparks so much debate in America. A gun is a stand in for an opinion. Sometimes I want to use my POV as a tool, sometimes I want to call to attention the things politically affecting myself and my fellow Americans, sometimes I just want to eviscerate a previously-held notion that I particularly hate, or I want to defend an idea or artwork or movie that I love. Because I think my thoughts, I am armed and dangerous. My friend Marisa Nakamura always says that honesty without kindness is cruelty, and that’s what the blog is all about.

Tell me your thoughts on the new Kanye album, I know we DM-ed a bit about it.

It’s a soft 7 for me. I appreciate the soul chop ups, the North West prod credit. Despite this, I will say that there’s a level of connection that I’m not getting; like the head bobs, but it doesn’t bang. Still can’t quite put my finger on it but I do love the project as a whole, I love that the concept comes from the fact that Saint allegedly kicked a child for being weak, I feel the frustration and I feel the power and I feel the want and I don’t feel all of the invigoration I normally feel from a Kanye album. The other day, my dad (a psychiatrist, one of few good ones) was breaking down the magic of bipolar people in that the way their brains work makes them more attuned to other people’s energy, and we both fit Kanye into that. There’s also a lot to think about with public/privacy, his “crash outs” aka the times when his having bipolar was actually harming himself and others, rather than the different frequency of his mind offering him a creative edge. I would say more but I really really really want to write about Bully for a publication. If you are reading this please accept my pitch <3

Over/Under for Writers

1. Blogging: Underrated, it’s free, you can do whatever you want, it’s a great way to practice writing big ass ambitious pieces. I am pro blogspot just because it’s what I grew up with and my blog sometimes can be like my diary so I don’t wanna necessarily email-blast my every thought all the time. I will put it on the internet, but you can read it if you want to find it. Feels more consensual?

2. Drake: I can’t answer this one because I just do not listen to Drake. I grew up watching Degrassi: The Next Gen re-runs on The N (remember?) and it’s still really hard for me to take him seriously.

3. Sandy Liang: Overrated. The work does nothing for me.

4. Saltwater taffy: Underrated. Haven’t had it in years. Perfect chew but with a neutral sugar taste PERFECT for writing something itself that might be chewier…stickier, etc.

5. Addison Rae: PROPERLY rated as in she rightfully has all her accolades. That’s my GIRL. Her music is freeing it is pop it is fantasy it is fun it makes me feel alive. That level of “I am untouchable” is really important to me.

I don’t know if I’ll do this every week quite yet (though I have recently)—and certainly I may talk to non-writers in the future as well. I don’t always have new writing of my own to share, though I think next month will be busy so stay tuned. Sound off on what you think about this format in the comments. The above image is Cy Twombly. I do carefully choose each image, so feel free to draw your own associate analytic ideas.

Almost every week Tasbeeh Herwees has a new ground-breaking, watercolor report on the cultural scene of Los Angeles. My skepticism of the West Coast is hardly a secret. Nearly every time I go to LA, something bad happens to me. I was recently in town to report on a Bari Weiss talk that got cancelled. Everyone was talking about her recent essay on LARB. Her indispensable reporting continues to come out of No Bad Days. We spoke about Substack, free speech, local journalism, and smoothies.

How did No Bad Days in LA start? And can you guarantee this?

No Bad Days is less of a guarantee and more of a manifestation. There are always bad days, but it’s easier to get over the minor trials and tribulations of contemporary life when it’s consistently 70 degrees outside. I’ve never really lived anywhere else, so I can’t imagine what it’s like trudging through the snow only to be humiliated by a situationship. But of course LA deals its own unique humiliations, which even the sun can’t sanitize.

I started No Bad Days in May of last year. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for many years, but I finally decided to just do it because I had been laid off from my tech job in January 2025. I love local reporting, but didn’t find anywhere to do that besides the LA Times, which has its own issues.

I also really wanted to build something more community-focused. LA’s physical gathering places, like our beloved Taix, are at constant risk of closure and demolition. We no longer have a strong alt weekly reporting on the sub-cultures and underground communities that make LA really fun. I wanted a place where young writers could try out experimental forms of reporting or do things they can’t do at other outlets. I just commission some really fun work I’m excited to publish!

You have reported a lot on the hostile climate in the media world in LA, do you see any big patterns emerging? Especially in regards to free speech and the ongoing genocide in Gaza?

Absolutely. In my interview with Sara Yasin, we talk a little bit about how local media came after her for tweeting an article by Raz Segal, the Holocaust scholar. One of those people in local media was The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman. She published a number of articles parroting the claims that Sara was a Hamas sympathizer, which, for a Palestinian in that kind of position at a traditional media institution, is a career-ending accusation.

That was, what, two years ago? A couple of weeks ago Waxman tweeted about moderating an Oscars panel with Kaouther Ben Hania, the writer/director of the Voice of Hind Rajab. Which, by the way, was the target of a really ugly propaganda campaign.

It’s honestly pretty distressing to see all these people who worked so hard to silence dissent or even censor journalism about the genocide in Palestine suddenly and quietly changing their positions now that the truth is too hard to deny. Now that Rafah is flattened. Now that the Kushners are presenting plans for the redevelopment of Gaza. It’s becoming easier and easier to speak up about Palestine now that the ethnic cleansing project is near complete. I get fewer and fewer objections in my comments about calling it what it is. Organizations like the LA Review of Books are publishing work by and about Palestinians as if they weren’t involved in the censorship of that work just a few years ago. It’s insane to me that no one has the balls to say, “I made a mistake.”

Do you feel a freedom to represent your sources and subjects that might not happen in other more mainstream news outlets?

For sure. Anyone who’s worked for traditional news outlets has felt the pressure to make edits or changes that don’t necessarily align with how they think the story should be reported. Many years ago now, I profiled the three founders of the Black Lives Matter movement and ended up making a number of concessions to my editor, who was a kind of clueless white guy, that I regret making. I think the story was worse off for it.

I think my report on the LA Review of Books would have looked a LOT different had I published it with another outlet. I don’t think I would have been able to publish a lot of those anecdotes, even though I had a lot of supporting evidence and testimonies. The same goes for my interview with Sara Yasin. A lot of these journalism institutions are really held back by old ways of doing things.

How in the world did you get so much access for the LARB piece? Even if you don’t share specifics— it seems like a coup. Getting so many people to trust you and share there story. Ditto on The Key.

I’ve lived in LA my whole life and have spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with people in different industries. I think a lot of the people who spoke to me trusted me already. And they also helped me gain the trust of the sources who didn’t know who I am. I also try to approach sources with a lot of empathy and understanding. I think journalism school—which I went to—as well as working in traditional news journalism trains you to be a little cold and somewhat removed from your subjects. Or that you have to approach them with skepticism. I didn’t approach anyone with skepticism and made them feel like their story would get told with compassion.

With the Key, Sara is a very old friend of mine and approached me because she knew that No Bad Days was the right place for it. It’s a small newsletter but it has a lot of reach, especially in the LA media community. I have a lot of heavy-hitter subscribers.

Why LA? Take it as abstract or specific as you want. I am but a humble New Yorker with a lot of confusion over West Coast culture and geography. Further, do you think there’s a big divide or rivalry between the two?

LA because it’s big and beautiful and diverse and misunderstood. LA is a city whose love you have to earn. And that love is literally and figuratively like feeling the sun beaming on your face. Learning how to navigate this city and building community here and making it a home is really gratifying because it’s so hard.

I’m never bored here. There’s always something to do and somewhere to be. I do think the places in New York that feel rarefied and difficult to access are not so here. You can sneak your way into any party or pool. I find that people are less interested in what I do for work here. There’s freedom in that. I don’t know what a lot of my friends do for work.

I personally find that taking public transit in Los Angeles, as rare as that is for a member of my demographic, has really made the city more enjoyable for me. It takes a little longer than usual to get places but it slows down the pace of my social life in a necessary way. It makes me feel connected to a greater human project, versus the loneliness that a lot of people experience in their cars. And it saves me a lot of money.

I don’t really pay attention to city rivalries. I’m sure that rivalry exists. But I love New York! I try to spend a month in New York every year. But at the end of the month I always want to go home.

Who are people in LA you think should be getting more coverage and respect?

What we lost with the alt weeklies was coverage on the subcultures and underground communities that make Los Angeles really great. For example, when I saw the LA Times publish an article about a “jazz renaissance” that neglected to mention any indie jazz institutions, I knew I wanted to publish an interview with Yousef Hilmy, the founder of Minaret Records, in response.

I think about Nacho Nava a lot. He was the founder of Mustache Mondays, but he died in 2019 before anyone could really profile him. He had an indelible influence on LA queer nightlife. You could go to Mustache Mondays and see Big Freedia, Kelsey Lu, Kelela. He was an incredible figure but no one really profiled him or the work he did until after he died, which makes me so sad. That was work that an LA alt weekly could have done. But we don’t have those! Nacho is one of the people I thought about when I started No Bad Days.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the wonderful gay guys who host Gay Guy Night at Taix, which will be closing down soon. I think about DJ Bae-Bae who founded Hood Rave. I think about places like the Smell, an all-ages punk institution that has nearly closed down too many times to count. I think about people like Maddie Phinney and Chloe Coover who throw these amazing perfume swap parties called White Smelephants. I think about places like Murmurs Gallery and Frank News. People have been panicking about the state of post-pandemic LA, about its “death spiral”. I don’t see that! Everyone I know is working on the margins of mainstream culture, making beautiful things and creating beautiful spaces despite what’s happening in the institutions. I’m personally having a wonderful time.

Over/Under for Writers

Hailey Bieber Smoothie

I’m neutral. I never had it myself but I feel like if you come to LA for the first time in your life you should try at least one overpriced smoothie! I prefer the overpriced smoothies at the Punch Bowl in Los Feliz (~$15).

The Scientology Headquarters

Quick story: In my 20s, I had freshly broken my nose and was experiencing a full body eczema breakout in some kind of psychosomatic trauma response to something that had happened to me. I decided to take a free tour of the headquarters with a friend from the internet and our guide was so distracted by the scars and skin rash she didn’t even bother to proselytize to me. She was just like, “Ma’am, what happened to you?” I do not recommend the tour, which is just an opportunity for them to collect your data. I’m also convinced their surveillance cameras are equipped with some kind of facial recognition capability…

In N Out Animal Style

Under! I tend to take In n Out for granted but every time I’m showing a friend from out of town around, I’m like, oh yeah, this is why people love this place. My personal order however is cheeseburger with chopped peppers.

Sally Rooney

Under. I’ve read only one of her books but it’s so refreshing to see a writer exhibit some courage.

Staff Writer Jobs

I’ve only had one, more than ten years ago, so I really can’t say. Can someone tell me??

Image credit: Ceija Stojka.

Brady Brickner-Wood is skilled at deciphering trends in the political weather. He came up as a music writer and performer, often writing for Pitchfork and The New York Times, before regularly writing for The New Yorker shortly before I started writing for the magazine (with the same, incredible editor). Brickner-Wood writes with the crisp clarity of someone who has good taste. He reports on podcasts, AI, Spotify Wrapped, pop music, rap, and occasionally books. For what seems to be turning into a series, we spoke about the relationship between art and liberalism and played a new game of Over/Under for Writers.

You’ve written a lot about the relationship between aesthetics and politics. How do you see your own work functioning in such a capacity?

I think I approach most of my subject matter—whether that be an idea or an event or a trend or a person or an artifact, whatever, really—through a primarily aesthetic lens, meaning I find it essential to determine how a thing is being consumed and culturally metabolized before assessing it on its own terms. This means I’m often thinking about the internet, how pretty much all information is now mediated and disseminated through algorithmically guided and profit-minded platforms. Our relationship with reality is completely enmeshed with, and thus guided by, the aesthetics and virtues of the platform-driven internet. It’s nearly impossible for me to divorce this fact from any earnest examination of modern life, political or otherwise—it’s the inescapable framework for everything. I like writing about things that people might disregard as stupid or vapid or unimportant because I find it that much more urgent to unpack the vast, intricate web of complexity informing whatever crudely determined assumptions underpin a given thing.

You wrote a great piece on Spotify Wrapped, but, what was on your last Wrapped playlist? Or Apple equivalent.

I make music, so embarrassingly my top artist is always myself. Otherwise, I think since 2020 my other top artist has been Brevin Kim, a brother duo from Massachusetts whose music I share an unnerving kinship with. Aside from that, my top artists this year were Bieber, Dijon, and Cameron Winter. For songs, Elio’s “Lucky October” and Ian’s “Shut it Down” were in my top five. These year-end data presentations are weird because I often find that what I spend the most time listening to doesn’t usually reflect what I deem to be the “best” or most accomplished releases of the year. When I work out or am toiling at my day job I’ll put a song on repeat until I’ve wrung out every last drop of its emotional power. The other day I listened to Choker’s new song “Good” for like six hours in a row and now I may never listen to it again. But I’m sure I’ve already guaranteed it a premier spot in my Spotify Wrapped.

3. Do you find writing on say Drake or Justin Bieber different from writing about AI or Adam Friedland, how do you approach such subjects differently? What comes first? I suppose part of this is also about the different functions of criticism and reporting.

To give a different answer than my previous, more abstracted one: Almost everything I write about is informed by a genuine curiosity and fascination, and I rarely know what I think about something until I write about it. I may have loose, unformed feelings about a topic, but writing helps me shape and clarify my ideas into something coherent. When I review a record or perform any sort of arts criticism, my aim is to understand my subject as dynamically and fully as possible, to contextualize its arrival and identify what about it feels vital, crucial, surprising, novel, staid, flat, enlivening—etc. As I’ve transitioned to writing more about politics and other cultural phenomena, this approach remains more or less the same. I start from a place of wonder and unknowing and move toward “truth” or understanding, no matter how circuitously or strangely I may arrive at it.

I think you’re one of the few writers I know who writes about the hysteria of liberal politics and their fear of change---in the Grammys or podcasts or protest. How do you manage to cut through the noise and find the signal?

I was born in 1993 and so belong to the bastardized generation that’s neither fully millennial nor really at all Gen Z but instead straddles the nebulous middle between the two. For me this means that I came of consciousness within the monoculture but truly came of age amid the fractured and schizophrenic era of the internet. I think this grants me both a sympathetic credence to the hysteria you referenced and an acute critical insight into its absurdity. What I find particularly maddening about the Democratic establishment, and every other end-of-history neoliberal, is that they operate as if the monoculture still exists, as if the titanic shifts in society and culture are incidental or irrelevant, that once the bad Cheeto-man leaves the White House then Obama-era optimism will return we will reestablish the “norms” and “values” of our “sacred” institutions. I am not immune to the romanticism of this messaging! It’s like a warm blanket. But it’s obviously been proven to be a farce. The “resistance” to Trump’s first term centered around the fantasy that we were a wonderfully progressive society and that Trump’s election was a wild aberration, a downward dip on an otherwise ascending chart. Our liberal leaders have spent much of the past decade daydreaming of our pre-Trump exceptionalism rather than urgently grappling with the contemporary conditions and factors that helped create and perpetuate the modern far-right movement. I have to think that part of the reason why the U.S. has come to be dominated by tech billionaire isolationists who nihilistically reject moral contemplation and community ethics is because they’re moving full-hog ahead, more or less suicidally, toward an odious vision of the world totally disconnected from the remembered beauty of what once was.

You live in Maine, or so I’ve heard. What should people visiting do? Without blowing up your favorite spots of course.

I’ve lived in Portland since 2022, and it’s a lovely city. I like to run in the woods beside my house; the city has great public trail systems. For visitors, I’d recommend a walk and picnic at Eastern Prom before hitting Izikaya Minato for dinner. Then you can grab a beer at Oxbow across the street. SPACE Gallery has great programming, too, so I’d check out whatever they’ve got going on.

I think writers should have a Pitchfork over/under. As such:

1. Bon Iver

Under – A tough one; Bon Iver is probably overrated because he’s seemingly every casual music fan’s favorite “real” artist. But 22, A Million is one of humanity’s great artistic achievements, and Justin Vernon is just undoubtedly one of my heroes. So: underrated, baby!

2. Apple Music

Over – As Spotify continues to come under fire for sucking—rightfully so!—I’ve noticed a lot of folks transitioning to Apple Music as if its somehow a more ethical alternative. Not sure if I’m buying that, but as someone who used iTunes since the aughts and was an early adopter of Apple Music, I do miss how seamless it was to incorporate your local files onto the service. Spotify is awful for that. So I don’t know. It’s all bad.

3. Call Her Daddy

Over – I’ve never been a listener of Call Her Daddy, and I’m clearly not the target demographic, but I do remember the podcast becoming a big deal in I think 2016, when it emerged as this raunchy podcast from two hotties who talked about sex the way frat guys did—carnally, frivolously. I was privy to the drama that eventually broke the hosts apart; I watched the entirety of Dave Portnoy’s tell-all video detailing the podcast’s theatrical departure from Barstool Sports. It seems to me that Call Her Daddy has since become just another vapid celebrity promotional engine. A monolith that’s lost its sense for the specific. The show now feels like it’s mostly a vehicle to maintain Alex Cooper’s celebrity. I don’t think at this point I could be less interested in it.

4. Negronis

Under – The Bon Iver of cocktails?? I’d pretty much only drank Natty Light until I moved to Austin, Texas, after I graduated college, and was introduced to the negroni by friends I met working at a fancy restaurant. I thought it was the taste of luxury then and still think it’s the taste of luxury now.

5. Limewire

Under – Growing up I shared a single desktop computer with my brother and parents, so it was very hard to get away with any nefarious activity like illegally downloading music. My brother and I were forbidden from using Limewire on our shared family computer, though we did try, and fail, to sneakily download it several times. When I went to friends houses, Limewire was like a holy grail; I’d spend hours downloading music and then burning files onto blank CDs. These remain some of the most electric moments of my childhood—typing in albums and songs into Limewire, downloading them, and later, at home, listening to my mixtapes with a violent fervor.

Image above is Mark Rothko. I don’t have a lot of recommendations this week but I found this article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus to be incisive and alarming. I found the Biennial to be mostly underwhelming except for a few really wonderful artists. It is, after all, a networking event.

Recent writing:

Review of Alpha for Screen Slate.

On Gavin Newsom’s book launch for the Lux Newsletter.

Sam Bodrojan (aka helmet girl) is a silky, incisive voice who writes about film, books, and culture while maintaining a passionate voice. This week I got to ask one of our brightest and most provocative critics a few questions about film writing. The young Chicagoan recently migrated to Substack where she’s written about everything from Wuthering Heights and Eddington to cats and hate crimes. We spoke about gooning, the pitfalls of IP and American cinema, thirst traps, and Magic Mike.

Your bio says your work as a film critic focuses on a bunch of genres and one is “filmed sex.” What does that mean exactly? Porn and stag films? Something else? I think there’s a possible link to your great work writing on Titane and body horror but I’m curious.

The term “filmed sex” has a great amount of versatility. Compare it to a similar term, like pornography; that’s a word with a slippery definition. How do you assess the primary goals of something as inherently multi-faceted as watching people fuck? Why differentiate between titillation and other emotional targets in the first place? Many types of audiovisual media are both artistic and erotic. I am not interested in delineating further. I am invested in discussing all of it, whatever it’s called.

Furthermore, I’m interested in ephemeral, functional, private forms of “filmed sex.” Think sexting, cum tributes, gooner self-tapes, the late Omegle. These are non-artistic forms of “filmed sex” - they are approximations of touch, they are digital interpolations of physical intimacy. That’s what interests me. That is the heart of a sexual culture where multiple generations have been digitally groomed en masse at one point or another, where incel lingo has fully inoculated into straight spaces, where trans people are being legislated out of public life. Everybody is building a sexual identity that incorporates audiovisual feedback, whether we like it or not. I’m not just talking about “sex that is filmed” I am talking about “recorded material that operates as sex itself.”

Anyway, thank you for mentioning my Titane review. That is probably the first thing I ever wrote where I’ve stayed proud of it. A lot of my writing, even my most well-received stuff, is a source of shame for me. I can see the function and tactics of my prose so transparently. It is ugly. This is an unremarkable observation, but that Titane piece is like one of five essays I’ve produced that I think are just straight-up good. Honestly, not a bad record!

Do you think movies are getting worse? Or, do you think we just enjoy pans as a culture? I feel like more and more of your pieces are, not takedowns exactly, but negative, perhaps. Your piece on Anora, your “hatewatch” of Wuthering Heights. Conversely, you are often a champion of films I find surprising.

Are the movies, on the whole getting worse? Not really. American movies are worse than ever, certainly. There are fewer movies and most of the incentives driving developing are actively working against creative impulses. It’s a totally barren landscape. In foreign markets, where there’s government funding and a bigger pool of investors interested in small-scale, arthouse fare, that’s how most of the work is getting made nowadays, even by American audiences. Everything is Paramount Skydance now, even the places that aren’t. Movies get made if they’re IP or horror, preferably both. Boutique distribution is a nightmare, even compared to three years ago. Getting a measly 200k for a feature is quite difficult. Cinema is always finding new and exciting ways to become irrelevant and unsustainable.

As for the cultural obsession with contrarianism, I feel like that’s a solved occurrence. We all communicate, in part, via digital spaces that engage in dark patterns of user retention, primarily through bad-faith engagement. There are ways in which I’m suited for this. Those who dislike my work, or at least my online persona, consider me too emphatic, passionate in a way that’s genuine but misguided. My enthusiasm belies that I have succumbed to a hype cycle, or that I’m being lazy, or that I do not have a good grasp of my own taste. I think those are all fair conclusions, frankly. I come from a long line of exaggerators. I doubt I’ll be able to shake that entirely. I don’t mind.

This also means, despite the fact that we are talking about art more often than ever, a lot of the “discourse” is poisoned. It’s combative, stan culture logic. It’s about wheeling out viral heuristics like “film grain is good” and “camp is when something is silly but nominally progressive.” The algorithms incentivize a lack of curiosity. Even Letterboxd! I made a bunch of friends on that site a decade ago; I’m in touch with them to this day! That’s a beautiful thing, something I’m sure young people are still experiencing. But where else do they go to develop their practice, to deepen their knowledge? I often think of my review of Magic Mike’s Last Dance. That’s the best review I’ve ever written, I think. It was a measured examination of the mediocre follow-up to one of my absolute favorite films, Magic Mike XXL. But basically nobody read it, because that movie wasn’t particularly polarizing, and my “take” was not eye-catching enough.

But all the most important criticism in my life has not come from an algorithm. It came from a book of translated Cahiers I got in high school. Quite possibly my favorite piece of film criticism ever was what Amy Taubin wrote for Film Comment about Chantal Akerman after her death. That’s barely nine years old, and yet it’s not even available online. Film Comment isn’t even in print anymore!

Look, there are fewer outlets than ever, there’s no money to allocate to freelancers, there are maybe two dozen salaried positions for a film critic. I genuinely believe there is value, especially in the nascent stages of developing a person’s taste, in talking to people who share aesthetic preferences, who have shared blind spots that they can explore together. But so often, on Tiktok or Twitter, I see people asking questions about the medium they have no idea have already been answered! Read old issues of Film Comment, or A.S. Hamrah, or David Bordwell, or Duras, or Dorsky. These are the people who gave me a language for seeing. That’s what having taste is. It’s knowing as much as possible so you can know what you like and can intuit when you don’t know enough to see clearly. I think people underrate the peculiarity of their own taste. I’m just very loud about mine. So there. That’s a meandering and insufficient answer to your great question.

Where does the term helmet girl come from? Biking?

So in Magic Mike XXL - there it is again! - the boys are all hanging out at this motel where they’re throwing a party. A girl runs in wearing a bikini and a motorcycle helmet. She says nothing, just runs in, headbutts a few of them in the abs, and runs out. Someone once told me I had her vibe and I’ve clung to that for god knows how long. I accidentally gave myself a nickname this way, which is funny, because I am generally opposed to nicknames. Since you ask, I’m quite a bad biker. I veer from side-to-side. I stop too abruptly. It’s a miracle. I haven’t been hit by a car yet, given how much I bike around Chicago.

What do you think is the relationship between glamour, hotness, and criticism? I know you’ve tweeted about that before. Do you think Substack is changing this at all? I know you’ve yet to leave Twitter/X.

You know, when I was a kid I idolized Sasha Grey and Jane Fonda. I have always been hypersexual and, despite being shamed for it pretty consistently throughout my youth, I always liked this about myself. I felt it was my default state, one that felt relieving to embody whenever given the chance. I refuse to not post slutty pictures of myself, basically. That’s something I like doing. For a while I thought it was healing, or because I wanted external validation. But in the end it is autogynephilic, I suppose, in the most tender way. I like reminding myself that I am absolutely ecstatic about the way that I present to the world. Perhaps that’s shallow or belies a deep insecurity about my own authenticity, but if so, that’s a rupture in my character I’ll happily entertain for now.

This has some knock-on effects, of course. I’m not naive; I know some people overestimate their own affection for my written output because of their attraction to me. On that same token, those who find my work hacky have exaggerated resentment for what they often see as undeserving attention. It all cancels out. It’s probably cost me a great number of job applications to have my tits show up when you google my full legal name. But I genuinely wouldn’t have it any other way. I am living in a way that makes myself proud to be who I am. This manifests in many deeper ways on an internal and personal level, but it extends to like, looking hot online.

Substack does not have thirst traps, which is good. But any type of blogging promotes a type of aspirational parasocial connection, of course. I feel the urge to produce a manicured image of myself in words much more intensely than in photographs. When writing a DTC weekly newsletter for an audience who genuinely just want to know whatever you are thinking, it’s easy to slip into a kind of paranoid narcissism. I cannot just present myself, because no one person is all that interesting; I must show off a persona that could only come from me. It’s been tough refining that while still writing exactly what I want to write, week after week. Before I started I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the schedule I’d established. This work itself, it turns out, is a non-issue; my Substack is rewarding and pleasurable, basically always. But on several equations I’ve stopped writing a piece halfway through because it was not something I actually wanted to share. I’m working on keeping more of my life private, not feeling compelled to process everything in the open. Sometimes I sense I am forcing myself to excavate my own emotions just to reincorporate them into something externally accessible. That’s dangerous territory for me. I have made my peace with being the subject of myriad parasocial desires/attachments/ projections. But I can’t let my obligation, in the most neutral sense of the word, to these phenomena take precedent over my own stability.

What is the worst film ever made?

I don’t think I have a good answer. Whenever someone asks me for my favorite film, I always give a different answer; there are many films for whom I harbor undying love. So every time, it’s an oppurtunity to give one its proper due. As for the worst? That answer is probably something racist and audacious. Son of Saul, Goodbye Uncle Tom, Crash, Cannibal Holocaust, etc. These are all self-evident failures not really worth discussing.

If you just want one of my personal, irrational grudges, I’d have to highlight Ruben Ostlund’s The Square. That is a movie whose entire purpose is congratulating the discernment of its audience, reassuring them that they are higher beings who can appreciate real artistry when displayed, despite how ludicrous so much celebrated work turns out to be. It is mean but toothless. And Ostlund has the single worst impulses of any filmmaker - all sharp, simple lines in his composition, no sense for blocking, coaxing flat and bug-eyed line reads out of accomplished actors. His one gimmick is holding on every joke so long that the audience becomes uncomfortable. This is a shortcut to a strong reaction. But not all unpleasantness is created equal. Compared to the ways, say, Bela Tarr or Roy Andersson use boredom in such variable, rewarding ways, Ostlund is so belabored. It’s like being on a broken down bus with a dead phone and a migraine.

I know we’ve had our differences about Kurosawa. In my opinion, he’s the greatest auteur of those early days. Who’s your favorite?

I want to clear this up: I like Kurosawa! I just dislike Ran, because I think it’s overwrought and the metatextual stuff annoyed me. Many directors have late style work that grates on me for similar reasons. You’re allowed to think I’m wrong about this; I probably am. It’s basically irrelevant that I dislike Ran to anyone except me, as a way of clarifying my own taste. It’s the kind of introspective work one must do as a critic from time to time but it’s important to remember that self-discovery is the least important vector of writing criticism. It should be an obligatory side-quest, at most.

Lubitsch is my favorite, obviously. He will always be one-of-one, because the conditions under which he produced work will never again arise. You need actors trained to be over-mannered, you need a production model that allows for meticulous rehearsal and blocking, and you need an audience who wants to watch that without snickering. It’s an impossible request. Take Billy Wilder; all his movies are the prime example of a great artist still failing to make something as good as the worst thing Lubitsch ever made.

Is there a director who has yet to announce a new film but you’re dying to write about?

Maren Ade. She’s made three feature films and they’re all masterpieces. All of them were rightly acclaimed upon release and have been quietly forgotten. They’re all extraordinary beyond words, really. They all appear, in screenshots, in trailers, like simple German realist films. However when you watch them they feel expansive. Every new scene is surprising, even the cuts between scenes can be equally revealing. Toni Erdmann, for example, appears to be about the social contract between an aging father and his adult daughter, until it becomes about how everyone routine crosses the boundaries of those around them, trade agreements in the EU, grand tragedy of the girlboss, and culture death. All in a three-hour movie where every scene has at least one punchline and it is never the same type of joke twice.

Grace’s recommendation corner:

Martine’s excellent show “Lottery” up at RYAN LEE, chronicling her take on Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. Up through April. If you’re in São Paulo, I always love Willa Wasserman. She has a solo show at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel.

Oscars season is coming up. I really enjoyed The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, both of which are worth checking out.

If you’re not reading Tasbeeh Herwees, you must. I also enjoyed Becca Rothfield on looksmaxxing, now at The New Yorker. I have a piece on looksmaxxing forthcoming.

Time to admit it, I love J Crew. Their Rollneck remixes and revivals are great, I wish I’d nabbed the one from Eckhaus Latta.

Image above is from Cecily Brown.

Recent writing:

On Bari Weiss for The Nation.

On CBK for SSENSE.

Brenda Goodman for Frieze.

You have probably already read an essay by Lily Scherlis and been hypnotized by her exacting, magnetic prose. Scherlis is a scholar of pop psychology with viral essays on boundaries, group dynamics, and therapy at large. As an acolyte of psychoanalysis and other similar modalities, I’ve found her to be a clear voice with an excellent bullshit detector. Her work has appeared in Parapraxis, N+1, The Drift, Harper’s, and elsewhere. (These are all, by the way, great magazines to subscribe to.) You should read her entire body of work and then come back to read a short conversation between the two of us. Her forthcoming book, People Skills, is on the way.

“Group relations is essentially a petri dish, as if you could take a sample of the swamp and model group behavior in vitro,” Scherlis wrote in a moving essay for N+1 about difference and Bion. Perhaps in a small way, this conversation can offer a similar lens on the “experimental enclosure.”

Okay, I have to ask. Do you advocate for any particular kinds of therapy having studied so much of pop psychology and group relations? Or do you feel agnostic?

I long to live in a world where everyone can try whatever therapy they want, including the labor- and time-intensive ones like psychoanalysis, rather than getting shunted into more cost-effective or “efficient” methods. Different personalities are organized differently and need different tools! I don’t like when people take a purity mindset here. It’s almost a cliche to cite the empirical data that shows that efficacy has much more to do with the working relationship between patient and clinician (and, well, clinical skill). Right now I’m a training case for a psychoanalyst in formation, which I highly recommend as an affordable way to get on the couch, if you live in a place where this is an option. (Or you might check out the Psychosocial Foundation’s telephonic clinic.) If I’m being deadly honest, I will confess that I experimented with IFS at one point and liked it a lot, even if the framework is a kind of manic overinterpretation of object relations (IMO it should definitely not be used in carceral institutional settings). Something I haven’t done that I think more people should really consider is analytically informed group therapy. It’s more affordable and, hokey or scary as it might sound, I think it has some major clinical advantages over dyadic therapy if you find a good group.

Your work often incorporates a strong political bend, a material analysis of the conditions of psychology. How do you think politics play a role in your criticism and essays?

Pop psychology is folk ethics: what should I be like? How should we treat each other? But no one knows that these questions are actually up for debate in the terms we use to describe ourselves and one another—that pop psychology is not merely a descriptive inquiry into how we apply Hard Pure Science to the mind, but prototypes of social norms jockeying for public belief. It’s like unspoken moral parameters are being determined by a constant poll that no one knows they’re taking. Even though ethics and politics are not the same thing: “the humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics,” writes Andrea Long Chu—ethical norms really affect how we go about political struggle.

I also think once you start seeing all the resonances between material and political-economic developments and cultural developments, you can’t look away. To put it in grad school terms, historicizing stuff that no one realizes they should historicize is a crazy rush, in the way that having a paranoid hunch confirmed can be deeply pleasurable even as it’s horrifying.

On the one hand, people deal with world events on the terrain of pop psychology without really knowing it, processing and making sense of them by adopting norms around things that feel more in control, like their bodies and minds and relationships. On the other, it sounds nuts, but I think things happen in the world because of pop psychology. Moving from small to big, media relentlessly personifies what’s nebulous in order to make sense of it too. If you listen to the wording Trump and others talk about geopolitics like it’s an allegorical play where all the countries are characters. This is also how soooo many people talk about Israel and Palestine. Nation-states just aren’t people. I don’t think it’s grandiose to think that there’s some conceptual spillage in both directions.

How did you decide to write about “soft skills” and how do you see its relationship to AI optimism? I thought that was a fascinating part of your article in Harper’s.

When I was growing up I was contantly told by random authority figures that emotional intelligence and social skills were more important than IQ, which is, well, not untrue, but I think it made me a much more socially anxious child than I needed to be. When everyone was talking about the loneliness epidemic and feeling socially “rusty” after shelter-in-place, I had to wonder if the idea that socializing is a skill cuts both ways. On the one hand, it makes it learnable; on the other, it makes other people something you can be bad at.

If you think about what a “soft skill” really is, in the context of historical definitions of skill in labor contexts, to have “soft skills” is to be a human that can skillfully operate other humans (i.e., manage them). Around the time LLMs became publicly available, business media seemed to erupt into a panic over a so-called “crisis of soft skills.” Meanwhile, LinkedIn reports were insisting that soft skills were more important than ever, “key sites of growth,” and so on, partly because human interaction felt like the most obvious activity that AI couldn’t automate into obsolescence. (Of course, now plenty of people are finding chat more pleasing to talk to than other humans.) Soft skills were a kind of human preserve for managerial types, which meant there could never be enough of them. I argued that people were displacing a lot of fear—about technological change but also about geopolitics—onto the “crisis” of soft skills, turning an abstract idea called “soft skills” into a kind of corporate messiah. Some of the more bonkers AI-optimistic social scientists were publishing peer-reviewed papers that made claims that improving our soft skills “will enable artificial intelligence and robots to use human brain capacity and creativity to boost process efficiency” and advocating “a strategic approach incorporating the perfect human partner and Cobots (collaborative robots) with human resources.” I was interested in how much attention “soft skills” were getting in these contexts while the labor of care workers gets socially devalued as unskilled.

Writing about protests and encampments alongside therapy and group dynamics is fascinating to me. It’s something hannah baer has done a lot as well. I’m curious about the impulse to compare and contrast the two. On the one hand there seems obvious overlap and echoes and on the other hand they seem to operate in very different registers. Maybe there’s something about utility or usefulness in both modes? Or “having a role?”

This is a really interesting question that’s very dear to me. I should say I am a random layperson who’s very lucky to get to hang out with a bunch of skilled clinicians like hannah baer, whom I love thinking with. We’re both in a working group oriented around this question, among others. Many of us would start by noting the very long history of the clinic as a site of political work and struggle. Beyond and before group relations, clinicians like Fanon and Tosquelles helped radically reinvent institutions; meanwhile, protests and encampments tend to devise inventive care infrastructures. I guess ideally they’re two sites where people are working hard on the question of how people can survive the historical and political present. Of course, a lot of therapeutic settings forget the “historical and political” part, or have been reduced to mere nodes on a circuit of institutions that shunts psychotic people from one inadequate holding place to another.

Clinical and political settings are almost always set at odds: so many of the magazine essays I see on self-help and therapy are still rehearsing updated versions of a reductive (and kinda trad) argument: stop focusing on fixing yourself and go to a protest!

Anyway, I think this advice is dumb, or at least not useful. If people are neurotically fixated on their deficiencies, sure, it’s partly because the powers that be wants to turn us into self-obsessed sheeple, but it’s also because staying attuned to the world is a lot to bear.

For me, “having politics” is about getting intimate with this question: how is my silly little psychic life bound up in a totality of massive systems that seem to wholly transcend me; how is my life tangled up in the lives of faraway others? Some people are forced by circumstance to confront all too obvious answers to this question. Others find very acrobatic ways to avoid asking it. Indeed, if you can avoid the question, it takes a lot to keep thinking about it without totally losing your mind or psychically abandoning yourself and your immediate relationships. If something horrific happens that you cannot look away from—a genocide, a slew of federal abductions, a war—too often we find ourselves self-abandoning in the face of it, choosing one scale to focus on. This can be therapeutic in its own way—as you suggest, feeling genuinely useful is everything. It’s healing to have a meaningful role in a meaningful project (which is what the famous theorist of groups W. R. Bion tried to provide as a form of treatment in WWII psychiatric hospitals). But when it involves wholly losing track of your individual experience, it can be a form of spiritual bypass—a recipe for burnout. There’s this principle in some schools of somatics that as you grow you become able to hold wider and wider scales of existence in the field of your intuitive, somatic awareness. I think there’s a difference between this multiscale awareness and self-abandoning out of political rage. Being able to hold multiple scales in mind without becoming psychotic requires real psychic resources. This is one reason I go to therapy.

Church Bulletin

Thanks for reading. Image credit: Philip Guston. You can read recent articles I’ve written below:

On vagueposting for DIRT.

On VROOM VROOM by Charli XCX for The Fader.

Why is the Right so appealing to young women novelists? The protagonists of Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth and Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs are enamored by incels and Info Wars, soldiers and QAnon. They also care about God, or at least they enjoy the spectacle of ritual and purity. These two books by the co-founders of Forever Mag offer an opportunity to consider the e-girl novelist whose reactionary Dimes Square world masquerades as princesses with personality disorders. Their attempt to outline the contours of modern womanhood often becomes its own trap. The Right and Left vie for erotic triumph with emoji-filled irony.

Anika Jade Levy is a very funny writer, even if her book occasionally fails to connect the dots into a coherent political framework. Dimes Square is a hell many enjoy taking down, even those on the inside. In Levy’s novel Flat Earth, two young women navigate college and the twenty-something dating world, one takes the ethical route and one takes the aesthetic. It’s been marketed as Renata Adler’s “Speedboat for the Adderall generation,” but it’s more like Elif Batuman’s Either/Or for the girl who loves Brandy Melville and preferred Lolita to philosophy class. Down the drain they go, twirling around flat earth conventions, purity balls, and right-wing dating apps while chasing clout. Her narrator Avery continually scrapes her finger on her cracked phone screen while she and her best friend/creative rival Frances travel through “postindustrial towns ravaged by QAnon and synthetic opioids and dead factories” to create a bizarre avant-garde documentary. Avery enjoys the company of fascists and would “would rather kill [herself] than give up dating taxicabs or having [her] hair professionally washed.” Frances, on the other hand, becomes an art world sensation. Jealousy, of course, ensues.

Cash’s debut novel, Lost Lambs, features its own bonkers zombie right-wing ideas through a more surreal, magical realist tint. It also features—what else?— a Jeffrey Epstein stand-in, a cult, and three disaffected sisters chasing a twisted American dream while their parents try out an open marriage. “The Flynns’ marital ‘arrangement’ seemed neither exploratory in the swinging-sixties sense nor justified in the new age liberal poly-whathaveyou sense but rather a creative avenue through which each spouse could inflict pain upon the other and their three daughters,” she writes bleakly. It’s a “nonconsensual nonmonogamous spell.” Imagine if Jonathan Franzen’s America crossed paths with “Mean Girls” by Charli XCX. Coquette, casual, Catholic. It’s The Bee Sting by Paul Murray for the vaping crowd, those who have retreated from neo-conservatism to a sort of middle ground now that Zohran and pronouns are back in. Lost Lambs shifts focus between three sisters, each displaying their own boutique spin on masochistic femininity, their mother, and father both of whom are pursuing their own romantic leads---all while disaster looms, shrouded in Pynchon-esque puns.

In “Hostage #4,” an earlier short story by Madeline Cash, all politics and events are flattened into one deadpan send-up of girlhood: “I’m twenty- four and everyone on Instagram has been sexually assaulted and I’m allowed to roll my skirt up as short as I want now because of #metoo and because there is no God and Trump’s railing Adderall and Lauren Myracle died of cervical cancer and Dante went to jail for vehicular manslaughter and Lacey McKelvy is on OnlyFans and Mr. Gayworth adopted a beautiful baby girl and the dry cleaner man was deported.” Cash’s prose levels both the personal and the political into one nihilistic whirlpool, almost as if to suggest each event is as bad as the other. Instead of dramatizing the difference, she collapses it.

Cash and her contemporaries attempt to marry sign to symbol inside an empty belief system. So far, e-girl novels have not exactly broken into the mainstream, not outside the online literary bubble at least, but can they rehabilitate themselves for a mainstream audience outside the bubble of a certain cultural milieu? The success of Lost Lambs seems to suggest so. Many even think it’s an industry plant of coordinated press, though the truth is far more quotidian. Some books have a publicity team and get a bigger push. Some books, especially those by cis white women, get more coverage. It’s also not Cash’s first book, she previously published a book of short stories with CLASH. There’s no conspiracy in the combination of privilege and hard work and it’s clear these authors do work hard. They write often and make connections. Isn’t that what we all want to do? Certainly, the reaction online is also backed in misogyny and jealousy—the fact that Cash was so successful, that she isn’t a man, that her press team is clearly on point.

That’s not my gripe with these books. My frustration is their tendency to masquerade as something they’re not. These women pretend to satirize the conservative world they inhabit when in reality their belief system is a dog whistle for conservative far-right values. They use internet aesthetics (emojis, Epstein satire, Dimes Square Catholicism) as linguistic currency to obscure the emptiness of their beliefs. In interviews they say they’re writing about flat, archetypical women as a way to skewer male perceptions. But merely depicting misogyny, sex work, conservatism, the shallowness of internet culture, and eating disorders is not inherently radical or progressive. Their novels are about “flat” women who only want men and sex and to be skinny. (Anika Lade Levy went so far as to say she purposefully attempts to write two dimensional female characters.) Each novel follows a Catholic young woman who wants to be loved---often told in fragments and sketchy asides that don’t add up to much. While they’re seeking erotic fulfillment, their values don’t allow them to enjoy sex. Conservatism is always anti-body. If you can’t enjoy your body, how can you enjoy sex?

Perhaps these women writers are trying to excavate misogyny by perpetuating it. But even as they try to distance themselves from their right-wing sisters, their work often ends up enshrining the same conservative values. Their politics are incoherent because their work is about referencing politics, not wrestling with ethics. These writers seem to think they are writing about the Right and misogyny from the outside. They’re not.

There was an uproar after UnHerd, a typically conservative outlet, published a pan of Flat Earth. (Though, admittedly, I would not want the full-on MAGA Red Scare girls coming to my support in such a tumult.) The author of that review then went viral for fatphobic bullying of Vogue writer Emma Specter. But that seems like a convenient smoke-screen to ignore the fact that there are already people calling out the misogyny these writers perpetuate in their work by crying wolf. Instead of focusing on the content of the review, or later a pan in Bookforum that merely called the novel boring, readers could ignore the content of the negative article. The problem is sometimes multiple truths can exist at the same time.

Regurgitating what you hear your Downtown friends say is not inherently skewering them. Just look at Brock Colyar’s piece on the Downtown Republican scene. While profiles (and novels) are not endorsements of the politics they depict, they certainly lend credibility to the reactionary party scene. Matthew Donovan has written a fascinating piece in this vein about the platforming of Clavicular by fashion designers like Elena Velez. The tricky thing for writers is to understand the difference between endorsements, satires, and reporting. Media literacy is down, of course, and the political responsibility of a writer is a tricky thing. Ivy Wolk recently posted a few Instagram stories wondering why men are allowed to platform or profile Clavicular without backlash while women were often punished for the same activities. Where do we draw the line? If we argue we’re just following the trend and writing about the same controversial figures as everyone else, aren’t we, at some point, just as culpable? This isn’t just woke for the sake of wokeness. At some point it’s complicity. Is it possible to have it both ways? Can we hang out with our problematic favs while keeping our leftist values in tact?

Authors like Madeline Cash and Anika Jade Levy offer a shallow attempt at positioning themselves outside the conservative mediasphere even while these books enshrine the normative values of cis white womanhood: power, beauty, men, family. The narrators in Dimes Square-adjacent books like Flat Earth, My First Book, Paradise Logic, and Lost Lambs are skinny, white women with eating disorders addicted to using their beauty for social cache while looking down on other women. There’s no output for their misery, instead they internalize it, wishing and hoping for men to pay attention to them and give their lives the guardrail of meaning. “Why was I always seeking permanence in places where women are disposable?” Levy’s narrator Avery wonders.

There are plenty of tradwives, erotica writers, online magazines, and it girls with the same kind of political gambit. The downtown scene is full of those enacting a glamorized, sexualized it-girl routine. Levy and Cash’s Forever Mag regularly publishes these kinds of stories. Cassidy Grady’s “hi i’m holly” features a woman who wishes to be kidnapped and sold into white slavery. It’s a bizarre, striking example of an inflammatory attempt to court right-wing readers.

If Honor Levy came out guns blazing for neoconservative anti-MeToo talking points, Cash and Anika Jade Levy offer a reformed version of the Hegelian e-girl. (Though even Honor Levy has seemed to soften her reactionary edges in more recent interviews.) There’s a daisy chain for this kind of cultural byproduct. The Red Scare girls are often at the top of the waterfall, directing the politics that flow downstream. This is not to say some of these writers aren’t shifting their focus, intent on joining the pronoun Mecca, perhaps even by canvassing for Zohran. But it’s difficult to do an accountability tour when one isn’t actually repenting. These writers want it both ways. They don’t just hate patriarchy, they hate women too.

There’s a kind of depressing heteropessimism here as Arielle Isack has previously referenced in a review of Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic. Isack found the work “outright hostile to female readers like myself, if not womankind writ large. I guess it doesn’t matter though—anything goes. Existence is meaningless and random, the market for contemporary fiction even more so. YOLO.”

This is a hollow value system that refuses to move toward something, merely contracting instead. These writers try to take on bigger ideas like the church, sex, beauty but instead merely replicate beauty norms, the nuclear family, and sneering at sex work. But the value that’s really apparent in these novels is self-punishment, not a feminist critique of it. The attempt at farce seems to say more about their autofictional morals. Flat Earth follows a woman’s struggle to be interesting and compete her “best friend” and Lost Lambs follows a family collapsing after they open their marriage and their kids lose all sense of their values. Womanhood, these books argue, requires total self-abnegation. The yonic is empty. No wonder they run with the boys.

Ann Manov also critiqued Flat Earth in The Baffler for its anti-feminist limitations, citing both the narrator Avery’s obsession with sexual value and her inability to become a successful writer: “When I did manage to write, there was no plot, just prose.” The book’s mix of first-person narration and oblique omniscient Twitter-esque dialogue never rises above its obsession with fertility (“Gynocracy has failed, and everyone agrees that we are moving toward a masculine vision of America”). Manov asks the essential question: “does Flat Earth actually exist outside the ecosystem of female identity it critiques?”

“The Girls of Forever Magazine Have No Editorial Standards,” one Interview Magazine headline jokes. Cash and Levy are more interested in QAnon and Pizzagate as fictional fodder than political phenomena. The ambition of these novels is profundity through referencing politics in passing, never engaging. This is not how critique works. As bell hooks wrote, cynicism is not progressive. The worst thing these protagonists fear is aging, their breasts sagging. They fret over their competitive female friends more than their patriarchal foes.

“All my exchanges with men felt like prostitution,” Levy writes in Flat Earth. “It’s true that I have a technically perfect body, but I’m hopeless at sex and secretly conservative,” she states elsewhere. Cash’s book is no less full of such diatribes. “Perhaps sex was the secret to religious adherence,” her characters half-jokingly confess. They know that “any huge conglomerate was probably a little evil,” but they rarely care. The girls of Lost Lambs date soldiers and pay lip service to liberal democracy before they say the quiet part loud.

Satire isn’t protection from scrutiny. Portraying the suffering of women through eating disorders and sex work is an attempt at wallpapering character motivation instead of developing interiority. Cash is certainly aware of the way such narratives are mobilized. The religious cult in Lost Lambs encourages young girls to tell their stories to earn luxuries, “tales of neglect, disordered eating, sexual assault.” But rarely is their “sincere vulnerability” rewarded, instead it’s ammunition. The same can be said of these authors’ dramatization of suffering. I think writers owe readers something by the end of the book. If the message is just “being a woman sucks lol” followed by a lot of emojis or writing-as-trolling, it’s justifiable---important even---to critique that. It’s important to consider the way we consume and contemplate these “uwu it-girl” kinds of literature, it’s not just playful but can be harmful and relies on stereotypes while acting as if it’s subversive. Their nihilism comes from the limited roles they allow women to take on, how much they punish their narrators for their desire. Arielle Isack critiqued Honor Levy’s short story “Love Story” for a similar reason: “the digital world serves up an unlimited vocabulary of alienation and self-hatred.” Instead of offering us community, the internet serves as a cauldron of vicious comparison and feral feminine competition.

Of course authors are not their characters, but I think merely pushing aside their ideology as a pure aesthetic gives them too much of a pass. “All complex female characters need conflict and adversity,” Cash writes in Lost Lambs. Their novels portray the self-degradation of women with little redeeming qualities in their narrators. What is the point of that? I’m not trying to cry woke scold, not entirely, I’m pointing out that this satirical bend is a foggy fictional tool that these women can hide behind. I don’t think fictional narrators have to be unimpeachable, but don’t their authors have to stand for some sort of value system beyond mere cynicism? Do authors get away with poor politics and cold prose in defense of cool girl, I’m-just-quoting-someone-else posturing? Authors don’t control how their books are marketed, but they do have to defend the aesthetic and political values their books purport to explore. Even if we can’t say an author’s characters are espousing morality (and certainly no novel should be read for moral qualities alone) the authorial intent and vision of a book must still stand for something. The narrative distance of a book is always telling.

Renata Adler was able to tap deep wells of political weather and crystalline, biting prose—reading her fiction you’d be forgiven for thinking she was anti-politics altogether. A stylish nihilist. Not so with the e-girls, they wear their flimsy beliefs on their sleeves: make money, stay beautiful, hate the body into submission. More than a Catholic revival, they believe in self-hatred. Men offer canvases for masochism, trophies they don’t even want, and women offer competition for empty prizes. If the prose wasn’t so brutally barren, it might just offer a distraction from their cruel politics.

Image above is a painting by Lee Krasner

The hospital took something from me. It also replaced absence with presence, experiences both frustrating and fruitful. For a long time, I believed I was swimming only in loss. My years in the hospital were also marked by death. I should’ve seen that time as a chrysalises, but even now I bitterly resent the things stripped away from me, a world of pleasant illusion.

I am not sure when my life irrevocably changed, when we slipped into what my friend M called the twilight zone, but by the time I began my many years in and out of the hospital it was in full effect. The gossamer threads of our world seemed to float away into the sky. Time itself seemed a medium we no longer dealt in, a lost currency from another epoch.

I have joked privately before that I feel like Saint Paul, given all forms of temptation so that I can relate to all people. Even if I no longer feel called to minister under the banner of Christianity, I still feel the call to soothe the bereft. In the same way, I feel that I have gone to the hospital for a litany of ailments: a broken lung, suicidal ideation, plastic surgery, a sex change. Similarly, I have dabbled in most modalities of therapy. After surviving conversion therapy, I had to try a stunning number of practices in order to feel whole once again. CBT, psychoanalysis, DBT, mindfulness, EMDR, and so on.

The hospital is a liminal space—like the airport or a synagogue. Healthcare is a teacher. Being forced to rely on a system tied up with the state compels and coerces us to learn fortitude, patience, interdependence, pleasure, and even love. Sometimes the absence of a quality is a great friend in pushing us towards our desires at a later date.

When I was in the hospital, I confronted a variety of ideas about the world and myself that I had been holding at bay. When I first moved away from Indiana to New York I shied away from myself. I was an observer, like Nick Carraway, afraid of learning too much about my interior monologue. Even in therapy I was more concerned with rumination than introspection. When my lung collapsed and I was terrified I might die, I touched something on the other side. It was not, to be clear, a near-death experience, but I discovered a placid lake down at the bottom of my existence. It is not a place I can stay, not in the tumult of the everyday, but I have found it’s worth a visit every now and then. It is easiest to discover such an oasis in sacred places.

Around the same time my hospital-mania started, I began searching out a new faith tradition. I have always been spiritual even if I struggle with the idea of God. I read theology for fun. My youth pastor used to tease me about reading Nietzsche, saying the philosopher didn’t believe in art, yet there I was, writing in my notebook. Some things don’t change.

First, I tried the Buddhist sangha. I had always been seduced by mystics and like many young melancholics. I read the dervishes and the Zen koans with equal attention, devouring traditions like a seeker without discipline. The sangha seemed a way to learn practice. When I first entered the temple, I was terrified. I had to try three times to ride the elevator up without having a panic attack. When things went on Zoom, it was easier to attend in silence. It was only one of the faiths I’d dabbled in since leaving the Evangelical church in high school. I went to my first Catholic service at the late age of seventeen. Later, I went to Universalist Unitarian services were Rilke and Wicca were held in the same regard. Not that long ago, I went to my first Quaker meeting at a James Turrell exhibition. Each prayer I learned would later keep my company in the long silent hours of the clinic. Now, post-hospital, I am converting to Judaism. One day soon, God-willing, I will have a mikvah.

I cannot separate the mind from the body, faith from lust, health from architecture. The past few years I have seen the inside of an ICU room in Woodhull, NYU Langone, Mt. Sinai, and Northwell. (New York Presbyterian and Lennox Hill are on my wishlist.) The time I spent in hospitals did not teach me anything—-not in the moral sense of the word—but it did chew me up and spit me out, reminding me of certain celestial rules the world sticks to in times of chaos.

Healthcare is at a crossroads. Not everyone in the US is receiving treatment and certainly some politicians would like to further limit who is worthy of medical attention. The past few years have seen more and more people forced to seek DIY and underground solutions to their illness. Abortions, hormone replacement therapy, insulin, psychiatric care.

Having spent my life in hospitals, I have a nostalgia for plastic trays, stale coffee, and sugary cups of orange juice. I’m a bit of a surgery junkie with a sentimental love of medical institutions even as I know they have been the cause of enormous harm. Our reliance on the state distresses me. I would like to find care outside of such institutions---certainly they’re crumbling in the face of pressure from far right politicians. We must somehow create our own spaces in the coming years. Many already have. But these shadow networks of care, perhaps as necessary as they may be, are no substitute for the vast systems we already have. Burnout is always a present danger. This is a dangerous crossroads.

Smuggling healthcare is not a possibility for all. But it can offer one way forward. While staying in hospitals, I learned how to ask for support and give it. I was not historically someone who’s adroit at giving and receiving care. I preferred to bottle things up until they came pouring out. Sometimes this is still my position but I know from experience the rewards and discipline of creating small networks of care. Many trans people I know are adept at giving each other support after major surgery: meals, babysitting, help cleaning, grocery shopping, errands. In the wake of ICE raids across the country, we’re seeing even larger scale systems crop up to take care of vulnerable and targeted populations. This is a form of healthcare under fascism, an attempt to strength the bodily autonomy we all deserve. Despite dire consequences, many are fighting back.

The threat to bodily autonomy is not new. Far-right regimes throughout history fear body modification of all kinds from vaccines to abortion to trans healthcare. From Weimar Germany to the Tenderloin in the 1950s and 1960s, the right to change sex, to do what one wants with their body, has faced intense surveillance. The troubled history of bodily autonomy and sex changes is filled with revolutionaries and wild women doing their best to enact the freedom of bodies even in small ways under troubled regimes.

The politicization of bodies as expendable, unruly, and toxic has blossomed in recent years through the Make America Healthy Again movement, a viciously anti-science coalition led by RFK Jr. But such ideas are not without precedent.

Changing sex is often seen by far-right critics as a pollution of the body---an irreversible damage. Instead the body should be “natural” and “untouched.” This argument is not dissimilar to the Nazis argument about eugenics and their desire to sort bodies into good and bad, natural and unnatural, abled and disabled, right and wrong. Doctors became the experts, a troubling power dynamic that persists to this day. My time in hospitals has not been without such struggles. The right to change is always under attack, but has never been quashed.

Hospitals can reinvigorate our sense of justice, our ability to distinguish treatment from care and life from living. They carve into us, hollow us out, and then, hopefully, return us to the “normal” world. Sometimes, however, they fail. Sometimes we are left in purgatory, wandering around the bardo, unsure of how to reintegrate with the sentient world.

From lung repair to psychiatric care to gender-affirming surgery, I have left the animated crowds of New York for a small white room and returned, reborn, somehow both more and less certain of what constitutes the contours of our mundane existence. To move forward, we must somehow re-conceptualize care. It won’t be an easy lift. Hospitals are a tough act to follow, their triumphs and missteps originate from a thick, overly-official grimoire. An alternative code of conduct would start by considering patient care something more ephemeral than what can be answered on a patient satisfaction survey.

$35 million dollars is a lot to spend on promoting nationalistic propaganda. Aren’t fascists known for cutting sweetheart deals? Melania’s titular documentary, directed by the disgraced Brett Ratner, has already attracted critics’ ire. It’s a big coordinated publicity push for a “film” that amounts to for-profit public relations for the First Lady. For many years, she’s chosen silence. But recently, she’s released a door-stopper of a memoir and now a first-person documentary about the twenty days leading up to the 2025 Presidential Inauguration. Melania is a deeply awkward, uncomfortable, and painful watch that struggles to bridge the gap between the public and private life of the Slovenian-born former model. Of course, it’s funded by Amazon. Jeff Bezos even has a cameo during a massive dinner the night before the Inauguration alongside Elon Musk and other techno-capitalists who cozied up to Trump in the hopes of lucrative tax breaks.

There is somehow far too much and too little to say about Melania. Both the documentary and the person are containers for the empty signifiers she hopes to imbue with some kind of meaning—though with what is unclear. “As a rule, she has existed in the collective imagination not so much as real-life woman, with her own interests and idiosyncrasies, but as a glossy 2-D image, largely known through the mediating scrim of magazine coverage, which has tended to present her as one luxury object among others in her mogul husband’s arsenal,” critic Naomi Fry wrote of the FLOTUS’s memoir in 2024. Fry panned the book, also titled Melania, calling it “is one of the flattest, most abstract, and least revealing accounts of a life that I’ve probably ever read.” Melania’s not above making a statement, but she’s never sure how to land the follow-through. She’s the kind of woman who in 2018 wore a jacket emblazoned with: “I REALLY DON’T CARE DO U?” and then said it was all just a big misunderstanding.

The film features Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” an obscene number of times as well as many, many shots of Melania getting in and out of cars and airplanes. (“No sleep, club, another club, bus, plane, wake up” the Lady Gaga refrain echoes.) Predictably, there is also a barrage of drone shots featuring black SUVs winding through Mar-a-Lago. “Home,” as Melania calls it. The extremely high-definition the film is shot in also lends a bizarre, slick feel to the proceedings. There’s no talking heads here—just the smooth, guileless voiceovers of Melania delivering truisms about her life, family, and love for America. The clack of heels becomes the metronome through which we measure time. She only takes them off at the very end of the film, after the Inaugural Ball is over and she can finally eat dinner. A woman’s work is never done.

Allegedly, the film is meant to introduce Melania to the American people. To show us her love for this “great nation.” More often than not, there are only small glimpses of Mrs. Trump’s personality in this film. In the opening montage there’s a bobble head of Trump as a solider. That seems more indicative of Trumpism than Melania’s many bland, beige outfits. It’s not that she doesn’t have taste—it’s just that most of her dresses and outfits are meant to say nothing. “Straight,” she commands her designers. She doesn’t want to ruffle feathers. While her black and white zig-zag dress is admittedly lovely, her Inauguration hat recalls a cartoon witch trying to look professional. While much ado has been made about “Mar-a-lago” face, Melania’s hair, on the other hand, is gorgeous. She is a well-composed, stunning figure even if she doesn’t court modern fashion sensibilities.

Director Brett Ratner has been cancelled. A few times. That clearly didn’t stop Melania from hiring the rapist and sexual predator who moved to Israel in 2023. Pictures of Ratner next to Jeffrey Epstein have also recently surfaced. Throughout the film, the two banter with casual camaraderie. Melania often motions to Ratner to come closer and in turn he asks her about her love of Michael Jackson or encourages her to sing along to “YMCA” during the inaugural festivities.

The film glides along with the soft reassurance of an ASMR video. The problem is Melania, unlike Maria of GentleWhispering, is not a comforting figure. Her ASMR betrays something more grim, a banal and taut narrative about a new day for America. “My creative vision is always clear,” she says. She praises “beautiful shades of griege,” calling to mind the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Society album. The film gleefully plays an instrumental of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” This is America First on steroids. Imperialism is smooth. There’s no room for messiness in Melania’s world. She arranges her schedule and delivers a film that feels like a resume rather than a vulnerable biography.

Melania’s many homes are sealed shut with palatial gold doors. She orders gold eggs with caviar. “Her colors,” throughout the film, include: white and gold, black and white, navy, and brown. She changes outfits for nearly every shot. Everyone describes working with her as an honor and provides cover for her husband’s immigration policies and anti-LGBTQ Executive Orders. In Melania, minorities provide moral cover. It’s a gauche, macabre horror filmed with the paranoia of a spy thriller. Melania continually voices her fear for her family’s safety. After all, this is only months after the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania. She praises her son Barron and doesn’t mention her husband’s other kids. Why would she? Too complicated. Barron, for his part, seems to enjoy the spotlight now. “It’s a Man's, Man’s, Man’s World” is his theme song.

Melania is “a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend.” Her charity for orphans is simply called “Be Best.” She worries over internet safety, but never quite addresses the dangers of bills like KOSA. Children are a benign cause to champion, even if she claims to be raising the role of First Lady to something more meaningful than her predecessors. (She does not reference Michelle Obama or Dr. Jill Biden, preferring instead to harken back to the golden age of the Roosevelts, Kennedys, and Eisenhowers.)

Ultimately, the film is a bizarre, shiny documentation of the 2025 Presidential transition. An “Olympic installation for designers,” one staffer notes. For Melania, politics is an aesthetic, not a practice. Everyone acts as if her visual palette will one day be memorialized in the Smithsonian. The annoyed faces of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are reduced and brushed aside as “awkward” encounter by Trump.

The President only appears in Melania sparingly, preferring to appear via phone calls or on previously obtained footage of the Inauguration. Occasionally, he’s seen discussing plans with Melania and delivering zingy one-liners like “When do I Make America Great again?” He makes for far better entertainment than his wife. She, meanwhile, delivers benedictions that sound like ChatGPT and turns the funeral of Jimmy Carter into an emotionless meditation on the grief she feels over her mother’s passing. Watching her walk into St. Patrick’s cathedral and get fawned over by priests is nauseating. This is the same house of worship that had a conniption over activist Cecilia Gentili’s funeral service.

The film also borrows Black aesthetics throughout its palatial run time—Gospel music, a priest reciting MLK Jr, Michael Jackson, even a brief techno interlude. Ratner and Melania seem intent on gesturing towards a multicultural America without ever digging into how such a world would function under Trump 2.0.

Occasionally Melania does attempt to stake out a position. She meets with Avivia Segal, an Israeli woman who was held hostage by Hamas and is advocating for the release of her husband. Segal gives a weird speech about love triumphing over hate. The film does attempt a bizarre rehabilitation of certain conservative, Zionist, and Republican world views—or at least it tries to soften the edges to deliver something digestible for those who aren’t paying too much attention. Melania coos and acts as if she was touched, yet displays no emotion. “I will pray he doesn’t suffer,” she says with the same monotone delivery she always gives the public.

To her credit, she seems to have attempted to try and set limits on AI-generated porn through the TAKE IT DOWN Act. Of course, that was hardly the only law passed passed year and the film was released at the same time children were abducted by ICE in Minnesota.

Later in the film, Melania delivers this bizarre one-liner, almost as if she believes it: “Everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights.” Okay! Let’s do it. Except she’s mostly intent on protecting her husband. Especially his reputation. She’s proud of him; people have attempted to “murder him, humiliate him, slander him.” What a CV. This is individual romance as nation-building, slow dancing to the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

“Here we go again,” Melania jests when the Inauguration starts. But she’s right. We’ve been here before. Most of Trump’s speech is cut off but we do hear: “The golden age of America begins right now.” Cut to a close-up of Biden’s face. Ouch. Ratner has a comedian’s editing skills even if the film is a bloated mess.

Is this fascinating? Is this really worth seeing? MAGA politics is always about spectacle and meme-ability—think Nicki Minaj’s acrylics in Donald Trump’s hands—and Melania, the documentary, delivers, but it’s a hollow attempt at hagiography for a woman who seems to have no direction, no goals, and no personality. The film does not mention Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, or even Trump’s previous wives. Tabula rasa prevails.

“It really brings back a glamour that you just don’t see anymore,” Trump told reporters at the movie’s premiere last week. But Melania, as much as she may want to exude Old Hollywood glamour, does not have the wit or charm of Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe. The fake 16mm film effects certainly don’t help. “Ratner seems desperate to find action, but there is none,” Sophie Gilbert wrote in her review for The Atlantic. The diva wears no ball gown.

Writing about such a figure in depth is a vexed enterprise. Certainly, even the crew on the film felt complicated about taking the gig. Some no longer even want their name in the credits, even though executives at various studios fought to buy the rights to the film.

Analyzing Melania is a difficult exercise—not because it’s a complicated film, but because it shifts the playing field to the other side of the spectrum. “Writing this piece is a losing game. In order to criticize the Free Press’ failures, I have to do something they refuse to do with so many of the subjects they write about: I have to be interested in them,” Rayne Fisher-Quann recently wrote in an excellent piece on The Free Press’s house style. What’s the point of going to see or read something we know we’ll hate? Yet, I believe that reading and understanding conservatives is important, a practice in studying media literacy. You can’t live on a diet of liberal news outlets, Democracy Now, and anarchist zines. Or perhaps you can, but it seems an omission to completely toss the propaganda of MAGA aside.

“legit everyone at the first screening of “Melania” of the day is a journalist. Two of them are interviewing each other right now,” Variety journalist Daniel D’Addario tweeted. Yes, it’s true. Not everyone in the audience at the movie theater is a true believer. After the credits rolled, I spoke with a blogger who was writing a critique of the film. But it wasn’t only fellow trolls. One woman asked me why I was at the screening.

“She’s a reporter,” my friend said, jumping in.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I’m from Peru. I voted for Trump two times,” the woman replied.

The other journalist asked how the woman felt about Trump’s policies in light of everything “going on.”

“I came here legally,” she said. “I think Melania is very impressive.”

We parted ways, all a bit perplexed. I’d never gotten out of a movie where everyone was so eager to talk to each other, to understand why this odd collection of people had come to witness the coronation of Melania Trump. What a sad party.

One of the first political reporters I knew by name growing up was NPR’s Mara Liasson. I was fascinated by the way she both reported on and seemed chummy with Republican politicians. But I was also fascinated by the fact she claimed to be a neutral blank slate. Horrible and hopeful things played on the car radio as I zipped around Indianapolis. Later, when Trump was elected and James Comey testified before Congress, I tuned in while working as a delivery driver for Panera, dropping off bread bowls for corporate lunch meetings. Years later, I read Janet Malcolm’s seductive profile of Rachel Maddow for The New Yorker. My curiosity about the power of the pundit was resurrected. The political profile is a precise tool, an exercise in pushing past a subject’s enigmatic restraint or overpowering audacity to say something philosophical—something new.

The age of political punditry has certainly evolved. My Fox-obsessed grandparents grew to enjoy crueler and crueler programming over the years. Hateful rhetoric mirrored the extreme, warped politics of the TV programs and radio shows. Now, the vitriol of early FOX News from 2008 to 2016 seems quaint.

Hated By All The Right People is a new biography of Tucker Carlson written by The New Yorker’s newest staff writer Jason Zengerle. The book tracks the former FOX News pundit’s complicated journey to the top—from his early days as a relatively tame Neocon to his troubled relationship with Trump and ultimately his dangerous flirtation with the President that’s resulted in a wild level of unfettered influence. Zengerle starts his book by noting the outsized influence of the commentator in the MAGA tent. “You can’t work in this White House and not watch Tucker Carlson,” Jared Kushner remarked. But their relationship, as Zengerle notes, was not always so rosy. “[Trump’s] a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years,” Carlson spat out during a rift.

Zengerle writes a surprisingly tender account of Carlson’s rise to prominence. He begins by noting he had a somewhat personal relationship with the conservative thought leader—originally meeting the man when he would come to pick up New Republic writer Stephen Glass for a standing lunch appointment. “Looking back on it now, there was a LARPing quality to all of the political fighting. In print, writers at TNR and The Standard were waging ideological war. In real life, they were meeting for lunch,” Zengerle notes of a sunnier time. Eventually the “sinkhole of social media” would shift journalism’s priorities.

The fulcrum was a 2004 debate with Jon Stewart during Tucker Carlson’s short-lived stint on CNN’s Crossfire. For so long, Carlson had tried to be a voice of reason—someone who cared about facts and accountability. But Stewart destroyed him on air, calling him a “dick” and saying his debate show was “hurting America.” Stewart apparently thought everyone—including Carlson—knew the show was a joke. Apparently not. (A month ago, Stewart doubled down and likened Carlson to Ursula from the Little Mermaid.)

In 2010, Carlson started his own news website and drifted further and further to the extreme right in order to get clicks. His old friends no longer could countenance getting lunch or drinks with who they once saw as a fairly reasonable man. It’s the story of political polarization in America through a single man. “Whether Carlson really believes the awful things that he says these days matters less than that he says them at all,” Zengerle writes.

The Guardian review was critical of the ellipses Zengerle employs: “Zengerle’s smart, well-written, and well-reported book also leaves unanswered three big questions. Unfortunately, these are also the most burning ones: why exactly was Carlson fired from Fox, in 2023, at the peak of his power? Will he run for president? And how earnestly does he hold his increasingly out-there views?” But these are not answerable inquiries. The political profile can unearth secrets, but it can only venture a guess into the hearts and minds of its subjects. If Zengerle humanizes Carlson, he also nails him to the cross, pointing out the man’s kooky hypocrisy with stinging glee.

Carlson’s father, Dick, was also a right-wing talking head. His favorite hobby was outing trans women. In Zackary Drucker’s excellent docuseries, The Lady and the Dale, we meet Dick as he viciously outs Liz Carmichael and tennis player Renée Richards. He instilled macho values to his kid and enjoyed drinking while helming the news. Growing up in California, Tucker hardened his heart against the woo-woo hippies around him. They disgusted him. His father only encouraged such beliefs. Carlson Jr. was not, however, a very disciplined conservative. He never graduated college and barely got into Trinity. For years he felt that he faced the burden of living in an age when “mainstream media… was no country for white men.”

Eventually, he managed to get a second interview at The Weekly Standard and developed a robust freelance career. While it’s nearly impossible to imagine Carlson writing for The New Republic or Slate now, he did. Tina Brown even courted him for Talk, her splashy post-New Yorker magazine. He had a flair for copy and witty repartee when discussing Republican candidates: “Stylistically, a [Rand] Paul speech is about as colorful as a tax return.” The piece ends with Carlson showing up to a Paul rally with two girls from a brothel who joke about using campaign stickers as pasties. It’s the kind of story drinking buddies regale each other with as much as it is a profile of a candidate—his profile of John McCain notes that the candidate prefers a single chilled vodka alone at the end of the night.

Early on, Carlson courted controversy, often by writing controversial polemics about race. He argued that Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black Panther who murdered a police officer, deserved to be on death row. (Interestingly, Zengerle argues that Carlson’s piece holds up, he critiqued those who believed Abu-Jamal should be judged based on the fact he shot a police man, not on the face he was on Death Row.) He also beefed with conservative personalities, even pouring a Bloody Mary on Grover Norquist. Carlson’s ideology was typical conservative fare: anti-abortion, anti-immigration. But rising to the top of the magazine writing world wasn’t enough. He knew that print was a dying medium. The shining age of Hunter S. Thompson was long-gone. TV was the new gauntlet. Carlson was able to navigate the shifting world of journalism at just the right time—-when FOX and MSNBC were vying for ratings and trying to steal viewers away from CNN. By the end of his cable news career, Carlson had appeared on all three stations—as well as PBS. Punditry had become chic.

At first, Carlson was opposed to the lowest common denominator quality of FOX. “Only masochists would go on [O’Reilly]—-or watch it,” he said in an interview with Newsweek. “I hate to say it because it sounds snobby, but I don’t know anyone who’s read his book.” But by the time Carlson was at the head of Crossfire, he was already being encouraged to drain the nuance from his ideas. He was supposed to be the riled-up Republican, not the “both-sides have a point” guy. Clearly, he took this to heart. Over time he would learn the value of a fight and a put down for ratings. Once he was no longer a magazine writer however, there was no room to give “voice to his doubts.” “Television isn’t conducive to nuance.” The Carlson who now discusses voter fraud and monarchy is a far cry from the man who once recanted his support for the Iraq War and got along well with his liberal colleagues.

When Stewart went on Crossfire, Carlson felt ashamed of the resulting dress-down. The comedian said the show should be a debate, not “theater.” His next venture, a talk show with Rachel Maddow for MSNBC, wasn’t much different—-though he was given a more formidable opponent to square off with than the Crossfire team. Always nimble, when the show failed Carlson dove into reality TV. Of course, it was a dud. Maddow, of course, got her own show, and became the de facto face of MSNBC.

Meanwhile, civility was on its way out. Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Obama would fail. Enter The Daily Caller. What began as an attempt to mimic the New York Times’ desire to get names right soon became an oasis for fringe conspiracy theories. He wanted links from The Drudge Report, something he knew would increase revenue and viewership. “The transformation of The Daily Caller is the Rosetta Stone moment of Carlson’s career, a period during which he learned his lesson. He never sought respectability again, New Republic staffer Alex Shepard wrote in 2021. Isn’t this the tale as old as time? The downfall of fact-checking and clear prose? Journalism’s wary role in defending democracy shifting to tabloid fodder with the political twist of a dirty martini. Carlson’s goal became making liberals mad. But soon Steve Bannon began poaching his far-right, white supremacist writers for his own website, Breitbart, and left Carlson with a dud of a website. The origins of these right-wing “news’ organizations is deeply incestuous and far older than some may expect. Reading the names now feels like digging around Trump’s advisory cabinet picks. Personality politics sell.

This was the “nadir” Carlson found himself at when he was hired to FOX News, the network he’d previously insulted. Once installed, however, he worked his ass off for the conservative cable network. Zengerle anchors a late chapter in the book with an adroit account of FOX News in the lead up to 2016. Just as Trump became a serious operative, Carlson rose through the ranks and eventually booked the now iconic Tucker Carlson Tonight. Here he assumed his rightful role as a telegenic bully. For a brief moment, Carlson was not necessarily pro-Trump, but he was “anti-anti Trump.” The President quickly became a loyal viewer and hung on Carlson’s every word—enthralled by one of the few pundits who did not always bow the knee. Yet the network and Trump enjoyed a cozy relationship: “Where Fox News had long been the Republican Party’s media arm, it now seemed as if the Trump White House was going to become the political arm of Fox News.”

Carlson, for his own part, was wary at first of getting too close to the controversial President. He didn’t enjoy the MAGA leader’s “rococo” style and feared retribution if he partook in any extralegal affairs. Instead, he continued his ritual humiliation of straw men and weak liberals, pushing for more and more extreme guests. (He even tried to bait feminist historian and writer Sophie Lewis to come onto his program.) But as time passed, he realized he could influence Trump’s Cabinet picks, foreign policy, and perhaps even his Covid response. Carlson was one of the few right-wing thinkers to express concern over the virus in 2020, though he would eventually reverse this position.

His disillusion with Trump—or Trumpism without Trump—-didn’t last. While at first he derided the Jan 6 uprisings, he later made a documentary attempting to humanize them and downplay their insurgency. He also worked to behind the scenes to advance J.D. Vance’s Senate run and later his bid for Vice President. Carlson smuggled the work of Curtis Yarvin, Viktor Orbán, Anti-Semitism, and replacement theory into the mainstream and influenced everyone from J.D. Vance to mass murderer Dylann Roof. His version of National Conservatism, or NatCon, was a shift from his original NeoCon positions. “Carlson was no longer just a cable host,” Zengerle writes. “He was a movement leader.”

By the time FOX took him off the air, Carlson was ready to re-ingratiate himself with Trump. Where once he refused to answer the President’s calls, he now relished them, ready to wield his influence without hesitation. “When Carlson had his Fox show, it was relatively easy for him to hold on to America’s attention, but now he was going to need some help. Fortunately for Carlson, Trump needed him too. Their interests aligned most immediately in their mutual desire to stick it to Fox.” When Carlson launched a speaking tour in 2024, Trump and Vance were both special guests at select stops. His interviews with Charlie Kirk, who he called a great Christian, and Nick Fuentes have revealed, however, cracks in the conservative movement. Some have come out against Carlson for his Anti-Semitism. But his power and influence no longer relied on cable news or legacy media. Now, Zengerle wonders, if Carlson might run in 2028 having created his own niche. He wouldn’t be the first media darling to try.

Over the past few months some political reporting books have gained larger mainstream audiences, becoming blockbusters of the genre: Original Sin, Furious Minds, Empire of AI, When the Clock Broke. By tracing the political theater of our past few decades, writers hopes to pull back the curtain on opaque mechanisms. Sometimes, this results in the curious humanization of rather vile positions. At its best, such books use their protagonists to understand larger social weather, the political phenomena that shape our world.

One of the most interesting things of Hated by All the Right People is its insistence on tracing the evolution of journalism and the right-wing Overton window through Carlson. Some on the right flee to anti-Trump podcasts and columns, but Carlson continues to re-invent himself vis-a-vis the President in an attempt to stay relevant—rarely challenging the former Apprentice host. “As he saw it, he’d exchanged one set of comrades for another—and his new set of friends offered him so much more than his old ones,” Zengerle concludes. (The canny ruthlessness of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, whose son was a colleague of Carlson’s for a time, comes to mind.) Rising to the top of the magazine world is hardly rewarding anymore. Public intellectuals no longer appear on TV.

The distinctive language of pundits and elections is a curious one—perhaps a substitute for the age of French theory and Susan Sontag—where intelligence and technical jargon still hold a modern role in how we live our lives. I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s excellent essay, “Insider Baseball” on election reporting:

“I didn’t realize you were a political junkie,” Marty Kaplan… said when I mentioned that I planned to write about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own specialists, is why, finally, an American presidential campaign raises questions that go so vertiginously to the heart of the structure.

This is the power of books on “the process,” as Didion christens it. The pundit plays a key role in this transmission of “specialized” language to the people. The problem, of course, is they’re never a natural party, armed with their own preoccupations and sometimes a bald desire for power. Clearly, Carlson has capitalized on the translation of “the process” into not only a ratings coup, but an instrument for far-right ideology. Now that he’s tackled so many of his life-long wishes, it’s only a question of what nefarious goal he’ll dream up next.

If the two main political stratagems of our time are shitposting and aura farming, the primary aim of political figures is not service, but persona. The mask of the public figure is not dissimilar from exuding an aura in that both prefer referencing praxis rather than practicing it. It’s not only the right that has a cult of personality problem, the left also still believes in princes on white horses coming to save us—look no further than the rise of “dark woke.” Watch as AOC, I’ve Had It’s Jennifer Welch, and Gavin Newsom gleefully deride, bully, and call out far-right politicians. The furthest edge of such a practice might be the popular podcast TruAnon, though of course, they’re leftists, not liberals. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with adopting these more aggressive tactics on the left, it’s not like the right cares if the left “plays nice.” Personally, I find listening to both I’ve Had It and TruAnon invigorating. The problem is that some see Zohran Mamdani as a singular figure, a savior, instead of a cumulative moment that results from the work of a mobilized community. This is Main Character Syndrome as politics, an exhausting cycle of hope and pessimism. No single person can change everything—even if we want them to.

Last fall’s GQ profile of the TruAnon gang notes they’ve become “‘personalities’ with ravenous, invasive fans.” Even the hosts themselves are nervous about the “‘influencerization’ of everyday people.” Jennifer Welch has become known as the Joe Rogan of the Left with some even encouraging her to run for president. Can they offer us a way out and, crucially, can they change the conversation? It seems inevitable that when such characters fall, as they always do, it can fracture momentum instead of building cohesion. After Bernie Sanders’s loss in 2016, it’s true some joined organizations like DSA and re-mobilized for Zohran Mamdani last fall, but plenty of others let the defeat curdle their political commitments. Some even voted for Trump.

On the conservative end, nowhere is this opportunistic individualism more apparent than in Bari Weiss. As Claire Malone’s excellent profile of the CBS czar details, she’s jumped from one publication to the next, from books to opinion, always ready to shit talk her previous employer as too liberal or crotchety before she finally launched The Free Press and started praising Trump in earnest. Her reward was a television network, one where she seems to have full authorial approval. She is not interested in those she deems “politically homeless,” but in herself.

Trump’s second term seems marked by these rags to riches stories, tales of power-hungry dilettantes climbing to the top by ruthlessly aligning themselves with whoever is most powerful—or profitable—at any given time. It’s a deeply cynical job market out there in the age of economic depression and AI automation.

You should be infuriated. It is beyond enraging to watch Kristi Noem and J.D. Vance justify the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti alongside the invasion of Venezuela. The U.S.’s imperialism both abroad come home to roost in I.C.E. The videos coming out of Minnesota the past few weeks have been brutal. Banal in their images of icy streets strewn with cars until the roar of gun shots brings the cityscape into sharp relief with eerie silence. “It can feel kind of slapstick, until you remember that they will destroy someone’s life today, and that they can kill you,” Erin West writes in N+1.

The protests against I.C.E. in Minneapolis are the opposite of siloed liberal politics. The sheer amount of organized resistance through Signal groups and in-person community mobilization is staggering. Opposition to I.C.E. is bubbling up across demographics. If the 2016 resistance was marked by pussy hats and a fear that Trump would disturb the order of capitalism, the resistance is now marked by wine moms and teachers radicalized by the murder of their neighbors. Of course, many wonder why it took so many white Americans in particular so long to wake up. Now even the editorial board of The Washington Post is calling this a “turning point in Trump’s second term.” Despite the harsh winter, Minnesotans continue to pour out onto the streets. They are used to the cold, but not the siege. After the murder of George Floyd, many outreach groups, grocery delivery services, and vigilant block associations cropped up on social media, ready to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of distributing resources. Now they’re back—despite the tear gas. Those who are acting as whistle-blowers and observers are coming from all walks of life. They are not, as Republicans seem to believe, an organized branch of so-called Antifa.

Jennifer Welch’s strength is the coalition-minded politics she both preaches and practices. Her work is about making sure no one gets left behind. “I was a very good MSNBC liberal,” Welch recently told The New Yorker Radio Hour. Past tense. Now she’s fighting Cory Booker over his refusal to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide and ripping into Rahm Emmanuel for his antagonism towards trans rights. Few are willing to draw such a line in the sand.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is another left-leaning intellectual with iron-clad beliefs who faced intense scrutiny over his last book, The Message, and his reflections on the genocide in Gaza. When Charlie Kirk was murdered, Coates ended up talking with Ezra Klein over at The New York Times about the nature of political violence, polarization, and winning hearts and minds in middle America. Coates was cynical yet pragmatic and argued there were important boundaries and beliefs worth holding. “I do think, on a basic level, there’s a respect that has to be had for people with whom I disagree. At the same time, I recognize that part of my audience — and I would say an important part of my audience — is people who have never enjoyed that respect. People who, in fact, are subjects of the kind of hate that Charlie Kirk was harvesting,” Coates told Klein. There are people who’ve been the subject of organized abandonment that Kirk zeroed in on, Coates seems to say. He argues he can’t turn his back on trans people or Haitian immigrants. “I’m all for bridging gaps but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity,” he pointedly asserts. It was one of the few times I’ve seen a cis public intellectual make such an argument—a demand—and link it to a wider struggles for human rights. It was also fascinating to watch two liberals fight about the direction of our country. This is the crux of it. Do we want to shrink or expand?

It is nearly impossible to unearth a coherent story from the lethal swamp of American politics. Someone is always playing chutes and ladders with the lives of very real people, unafraid of the consequences. Trump is vicious. If he really is backed into a corner, he’s more dangerous than ever, ready to unleash a barrage of military operations unimpeded by common decency or the demands of Congress. This is the final boss of personality politics, someone so invested in his legacy and mythology that he has eaten through the guardrails of an already fragile democracy. Still, there are cracks. Even Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, seems fed up by his toxic swagger, casually saying he has an “alcoholic’s personality.” In an earlier email before her explosive interview with Vanity Fair, Wiles said “I don’t welcome people who want to work solo or be a star.” Yet, MAGA is a magnet for such personalities. Falling stars and solo dictators intent on milking their current positions as much as they can.

Liberalism too is at a crossroads. Many are tired of the same old answers by mainstream Democrats hungry for power. They want a new coalition, one where their neighbors are not subject to public execution.

Recent writing:

On vaginoplasty for The Nation Weekend Essay.

Ever since Jesus left, we’ve been told he’s coming back. Like a UFO, he will return and beam up his chosen people. Those who are ushered into the gates of heaven will be safe from the coming Tribulation. Repent all ye sinners or face the Mark of the Beast. All the billboards across America say the end is near. Surely, it’s only a matter of time?

So far, …

Read more

If you have ever had a reporter try to seduce you then this isn’t such a salacious story. There is no sin quite as unforgivable as mistaking a mark for a lover. No one exits the carnage with a happy ending. Like her former lover, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, Olivia Nuzzi is prone to temper tantrums. Her breakdowns, however, occur while decked out in Gucci. She would like to be seen as Joan Didion reincarnate, a reporter reflecting on the “scorched earth” of her life while hiding out in Malibu. But her new memoir is more concerned with building this mythology than rehashing old gossip and erotic passion. Nuzzi wants to write a glamorous account of becoming a fallen woman, but she comes up short on insight.

It’s unlikely you’ve managed to maintain an online presence and not hear about the colossal fallout of Nuzzi’s affair with Kennedy. She covered the anti-vaxxer’s presidential campaign before apparently falling in love with the controversial figure. It’s unclear if their relationship was ever physical. They both insist it was merely a flirtation. Before the affair Nuzzi was known for her stylish political reporting on Trump and his associates at New York Magazine. Few achieved such a high-power position, she was the first Washington correspondent for the publication. In the media landscape, she’s an anomaly, continually landing on her feet despite repeated layoffs.

After the collapse of her private and professional life, Nuzzi camped out in Malibu. (Lizza too has been writing dispatches about the whole sordid mess from Death Valley.) While hiding from the paparazzi, she began writing her memoir and was hired at Vanity Fair despite her tarnished reputation. (The magazine has since parted ways with Nuzzi.) In the lead up to American Canto, Jacob Bernstein, son of Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron, wrote a fawning profile of Nuzzi for The New York Times. Bernstein makes a big fuss over the “Hitchcock blonde” who listens to Nancy Sinatra and writes while hiking.

In Nuzzi’s telling, this is a story not of ethics but vengeance. Her ex, disgraced journalist Ryan Lizza, leaked details of her affair with Kennedy out of spite after the two reporters called off their engagement. Nuzzi claims Lizza was controlling—and in fact she’d jumped to him after escaping a previous controlling lover, sports journalist Keith Olbermann. Kennedy, in turn, told Nuzzi: “I need you take a bullet for me.” She took the fall for their affair and was subsequently fired from her job at New York Magazine for cozying up with a source and not disclosing her clearly conflict of interest. Kennedy was running for president at the time the two had an affair and Nuzzi was covering the race. American Canto does not reveal all the juicy details. Nuzzi simply refers to Lizza as “the man I did not marry.” It’s unclear what these pseudo-literary monikers accomplish, but all of these men fail her in their own dubious, underhanded ways.

The journalism world has treated the affair like a circus. Lizza’s Substack campaign to besmirch Nuzzi has given us a few bombshells and a few duds. For Lizza, this “is not really a scandal about sex, but a scandal about journalistic ethics.” He claims it’s not the first time Nuzzi has been intimate with a source, claiming she also had an affair with Mark Sanford in 2020. Lizza also claims Nuzzi helped kill stories that would’ve hurt Kennedy during his failed presidential campaign—something Nuzzi seems to lightly admit to in her memoir—and that she may have heard a rumor about the attempted assasination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania before the shooting occurred. It’s unclear how reliable his claims are, considering his obvious vendetta. Others have resurfaced Nuzzi’s former social media footprint to damn her. She once tweeted: “Why does Hollywood think female reporters sleep with their sources?” She also released a song called “Jailbait” when she was a teenager. The New York Post is reliably eating the scandal up.

Many were hungry for Nuzzi’s side of the story, hoping to read a libidinous tale of high-stakes deceit. But American Canto never stumbles on a thesis. It’s a short, rambling collection of notes and ephemera, reporting and personal anecdotes. She covers her engagement to Lizza, her childhood, her work at New York, before briefly covering her affair and the immediate aftermath. The book begins and ends, however, with her exile in Malibu. Frankly, it’s a mess of notes with no clear timeline more than a cohesive narrative. She often goes on diatribes about school shootings, the drones buzzing over her reclusive hideout, and the plight of being a scorned woman.

While Nuzzi claims that this is not “a book about the president or even about politics,” it is certainly enamored by Trumpworld. Every personal loss and triumph from losing her parents to calling off her engagement are sandwiched between conversations with our current president. He gets far more screen time than Kennedy. She enjoys being the one “liberal” he enjoys talking to, supine and amiable, challenging him only when she believes he’s lying. There is a long section comparing Trump’s ear to the fragile state of democracy after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. While she claims to detest his lies, she is a patriot at heart, enjoying the theatrical nature of Trump as much as the next political junkie. “It is also a book about love, because everything is about love, and about love of country,” she writes in the introduction as if she were a Substack princess instead of a woman writing about the decline of an empire. She claims to Cassandra, but what, exactly, is she warning us of?

The opening of American Canto is not entirely dissimilar to Nuzzi’s previous political reporting for New York Magazine. A metaphor gets away from her, thrashes around, and runs out of steam. Rinse and repeat. This stuttering occurs for a good fifty pages before we get to the actual story of “The Politician,” Nuzzi’s codename for Kennedy. Few editors let their children get away with such high and mighty meandering introductions, full of grand pronouncements and sweeping generalizations. Nuzzi was one of the few political reporters who had style. But clearly Nuzzi was on a tight leash at New York. In her memoir, she’s crafted a new elaborate persona for herself as a wronged woman in the vein of Brittany Spears and Pamela Anderson. The litany of women she compares herself to doesn’t end: “JonBenét Ramsey said that if you are beautiful you may get killed in service to your country.” In a recent interview with Emily Sundberg, Nuzzi claimed that Monica Lewinsky reached out to her after the deluge of negative press her new book has received. Whether or not you buy into Nuzzi’s victimization, she’d prefer you see her as “the victim of a crime… not… a victim.”

There is little admission of fault or complicity on Nuzzi’s end, though she does admit she lied about the affair to her boss and the press. She does not, however, acknowledge the abysmal and deadly healthcare policies of her former lover. Nor does she parse through his misinformed conspiratorial anti-vaccine policies as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. She waves it off as the work of politics—everyone needs a crusade. Kennedy’s current wife, actress Cheryl Hines, is hardly mentioned. In Nuzzi’s original profile of “The Politician,” Hines is only mentioned in passing. “Poor Cheryl,” she writes. American Canto skates over the political stratosphere, giving color without much critique. While she claims to be critical of Trump, Nuzzi certainly seems to enjoy his company.

If you are reading this, you’re probably wondering if Nuzzi’s memoir is worth reading. It is, with the caveat it’s not a very good book. It’s full of forced mic-drop moments that land with a heavy-handed thud. The opening of the book repeats “I mean to tell you” and “Which is to say” a mind-numbing amount of times. It’s full of fragments, some interesting, some banal: transcripts of interviews, FBI reports, long conversations with Trump, and clunky nicknames for key characters like the “War Hero” (probably John McCain) and the “South African tech billionaire” (Elon Musk). She intersperses her work with quotes by Alfred Hitchcock, Nietzsche, Langston Hughes, and Jane Birkin. Nuzzi’s attempts at mimicking Didion’s cadence are undercut by her repetitive prose. These are not the viciously calculated columns Didion wrote for New York Review of Books. This is a cry for help. It’s not that Nuzzi isn’t a good writer, it’s that her political analysis and character studies are lost in a sea of indecipherable sentences. Her New York magazine columns were far better—there she had a target. The problem is that in interrogating her own life she misses the mark. Herself.

Nuzzi’s original profile of Kennedy is far more perceptive than her book. The details of their affair are mostly glossed over in American Canto. He wants to get her pregnant, he enjoys waxing poetic about DMT, and he writes her love poetry. She, meanwhile, loves him wholesale—whether or not he has a worm in his brain. (“I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein.”) She listens to his stories on phone calls and during their meetings and wryly notes that “betrayal seemed to manifest through the politics of boats.” She likes that they both find corvids to be striking birds. After the break-up, they agree on a spin. It was only a flirtation. Only Nuzzi’s brother is strong enough to try and ask why she’s dating Kennedy. “It’s not daddy issues, right?”

How could someone trash her credibility so thoroughly for a man so unattractive? Nuzzi lays it out within the first few pages: “I mean to tell you that as I studied them, I was sometimes fooled. Fooled about their power. Fooled about my own. Fooled about the nature of power.” By linking herself to Kennedy, Nuzzi ascends to the national stage, no longer just a reporter. It’s unclear who started the covert digital adultery, Nuzzi or Kennedy, but their alleged activities border on the vanilla side. The one exception is that Nuzzi’s ex-fiancee Ryan Lizza bemoaned having to know what felching is because of Kennedy’s erotic love poems: “‘Don’t spill a drop’. I am a river You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.”

Certainly, she doesn’t see how her relationship with Kennedy would be a conflict of interest. Instead she seems to think the libs are out to get her because of her negative coverage of Biden during his mental decline during the 2024 election. Her own politics are never clearly defined. She neither regrets nor admonishes, merely observes. Across short histories of California and drone technology, she reaches for profundity and comes up lacking because she has no point of view. These fragmentary political commentaries offer no thesis, only a distraction from her inner suffering. Nuzzi would prefer us to look elsewhere than at the vulnerability of her pain.

Somewhere in American Canto is a great breakup book. But instead of real vulnerability, Nuzzi delivers pithy comments and meme-ladden snark. “Girl Dinner,” a cashier tells her when she buys a can of Diet Coke. Capris, she tells us, do not count as smoking. Empty calories. Unfortunately many of her sentences are similarly barren. The cliches fall apart like soggy bread. “You cannot outrun your life on fire,” “There are two types of men who are the most dangerous,” “Males intrude by nature,” “I would die before I hurt you.” She talks about the “loaded gun” of her affair as an opening to discuss the history of mass shootings. The strands of political violence—from Parkland to the attack on Paul Pelosi to the self-immolation of Maxwell Azzarrello—never quite cohere. They do not occur in the same mundane world of sleeping with a politician. This self-aggrandizing mythology is less interesting than her more flinty prose, which only comes in brief flashes. Occasionally, when she writes from an observational perspective instead of a memorist’s, she finds gems. An actress tells her that “the secret to life is to be rapeable.”

Nuzzi, like Didon, can blend in. She enjoys disappearing into the anonymous role of the reporter—a little ego death for the woman who has it all. By trying to insert herself back into the narrative, as Nuzzi does in American Canto, she loses her primary skill as a writer: her ability to isolate the quirks of her characters. Instead, her neuroses are on full display. We can read her crafting her story in real time. It’s just not the one we’d like. There is a world where Nuzzi delivered a good book while stifling our expectations, but that is not the one we live in. Instead, we must settle for a book that attempts many things and fails at them all. There is no gossip, no political acumen, and no heartbreak. Nuzzi never seems sure what kind of mythology she’d most like to build. Is she a victim or a mastermind?

Towards the beginning of American Canto, Nuzzi quotes Hitchcock: “Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.” It is yet another self-styling sleight of hand, the director and the victim one and the same. Nuzzi clearly has a set of aesthetic references she would like to be read alongside. But elegance, like taste, is not bought. It is earned.

Review of Paper Girl for New Yorker.

On question marks for Granta.

Review of the new Florence album for New Yorker.

A misguided biography of Luigi Mangione for New Statesman.

I was interviewed by my one of my favorite podcasts Ordinary Unhappiness as well as Lux Magazine, both about Herculine. Herculine has been featured on some year end lists as well—-including LitHub, Dazed, LibraryJournal, MUBI, Them, and Debutiful.

Image by Dike Blair.

Perhaps this sounds quaint or blasé to say in 2025, but Trump has changed the way we read and communicate. I don’t mean this as a joke, I mean to say that both the right and left have reformulated their approach to language. This ranges from the obvious like electoral campaigns to essay writers to press releases. “Now more than ever…

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