Each of my newsletters can be read as a love letter to literature, and to the people (writers, editors, translators, publishers, booksellers, critics) that bring great books into our loves. But before I get into this month’s newsletter—featuring 9 books about Chinese philosophy, psychoanalysis, Proust, and more—I’m excited to share something slightly different:

I spoke to , the host of the brilliantly discursive and wide-ranging podcast , about nurturing one’s mind through books, conversations with friends, and writing in public. You can listen on Spotify (above) or on Substack (below). Committed wordcels can find the episode transcript here.

Thoughts + Things from Jackson Dahl

Celine Nguyen says Intellectual Discovery is Your Birthright

Celine Nguyen says intellectual discovery is our birthright…

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a month ago · 5 likes · Jackson Dahl

Jackson and I talk about my deep love for the San Francisco public library…why the best technologists are students of history…articulating a positive vision of the future…good and bad note-taking systems…and why intellectual work is best done with other people. I’m a huge fan of Dialectic—Jackson is a phenomenal interviewer, and brings on brilliant guests across technology, culture, media, and art—so it was very exciting to speak with him.

And now back to our (ir)regularly scheduled content! For newer personal canon readers: I send out monthly-ish newsletters reviewing a wide range of novels, nonfiction, poetry, and essay collections.

This newsletter includes 9 books I read from February–March:

• 2 novels that take a fatalistic perspective on sex, status, money, and romance

• A Danish novel about reliving the same day over and over

• The latest Adam Phillips book on psychoanalysis and pragmatist philosophy

• A touching, meditative graphic novel by the artist and writer

• 2 short books on Proust (and Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Proust)

• And a very tiny book on ‘professional abstinence and obstinacy’ in architecture

Reviews below, along with bonus reflections on a 20th century typeface popular with nostalgic 2020s designers; US versus UK cover designs; the surprising similarities between fan fiction and literary criticism; and why plotless films are (sometimes) the most memorable ones.

The novel as nihilistic project

It’s not easy being a young woman in the 2020s. It’s not easy because the internet, at its worst, seems designed to make you insecure, anorexic, paranoid, depressed, and dumb. And it’s not easy because a novel about all these feelings will be thoroughly dissected—sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly—for its literary and political shortcomings.

I picked up a copy of Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth after reading a number of highly polarized reviews:

• Gabrielle Schwartz, writing in The Guardian, found it ‘slim and sharp,’ and ‘bleakly relevant to all of us.’

• Ann Manov, the founding editor of The End, panned it in The Baffler as ‘a world of flat, dull characters who do nothing, say nothing, and feel nothing for each other but a mild and mutual disdain.’

• Kieran Press-Reynolds, writing for Bookforum, had a particularly insightful, balanced take on the novel’s strengths and weaknesses:

  Flat Earth is, by its own terms, ambitious, trying to catalogue and capture the myriad ways we’re being rewired by and responding to the shit-post-modernity we’re living through. Levy deftly conveys how the desperate craving for subcultural coolness has corroded us…

  The problem is that satirizing a time that already feels like satire doesn’t feel particularly novel…Levy is locked in on the micro-typologies of personality and the macro-structure of the moment, but she doesn’t really take us anywhere new or offer a definitive stance on or disruption of this vortex of dread.

The newsletters I follow on Substack were equally split:

• I’ve written before about my deep admiration for , which focuses on small and independent presses. ’s review essay offered a measured amount of praise, while situating the novel’s fragmentary style in the broader literary landscape:

  Let it not be said that literary fiction is not a genre, or at least that it does not contain its own sub-genres. Reading Flat Earth is not unlike reading a detective novel or watching a horror film — not only is almost everything on the page (or the screen) familiar, but so are its rules, its syntax. The pleasure, to the extent that such a work is successful, comes not from defamiliarization or invention but effective arrangement, artful tweaks to the formula…
  

  The novel is a pretty breezy read…If you enjoy Ottessa Moshfegh and Mary Gaitskill, you will probably find the “debased e girl” descriptions interesting. That you could be reading someone who has already cleared the particular paths Levy treads is not a devaluation of her writing, even if the novel seems less certain of that.

• And (I’m currently reading her debut novel, Herculine—an incisive/funny/unsettling horror story about getting back in touch with your ex-girlfriend) wrote a particularly savage critique of Flat Earth, alongside other ‘Dimes Square–adjacent books’ that portray a ‘depressing heteropessimism’ and a ‘hollow value system’ at the center.

The novel does seem flat, nihilistic, and morally vacant—intentionally so, and often enjoyably so. Early on, the novel declares that ‘The spirit of the age is paranoia and distrust about everything.’ These are the feelings saturating every social milieu, every interpersonal interaction of Flat Earth, which follows a young graduate student named Avery as she stumbles through status-obsessed scenes, hyper-aware of her unhappiness:

It was an art-world party with all the typical art-world party sensations: paranoia, diarrhea, the suspicion that one is making enemies faster than one is making friends…I felt stupid for showing up to something like this alone and unarmored, but I reminded myself that I was hungry and I wanted to party and a semipopular artist from the internet had invited me…

The best parts of Flat Earth are deliciously quotable and beautifully written. I loved the first half of the novel, which sets up a frenemy relationship between Avery and her wealthy, glamorous friend Frances—and began to feel disappointed halfway through, when it became clear that Avery was constitutionally incapable of making good decisions.

She wants to write, but can’t; wants to meet a nice man, but is tormented by cruelly inconsiderate lovers. She self-sabotages constantly and doesn’t believe in herself: ‘I always thought,’ she observes halfway through the novel, ‘that self-possession was a destination I’d arrive at in early adulthood…but I didn’t quit smoking pot in my early twenties or take any interest in my spiritual development, so it just never happened for me.’1

The lack of personal development depressed me, I have to say. And not really on political grounds—I suppose I’m always desperate to see a protagonist claw their way out of a bad situation into a better one, and I felt a little exhausted waiting for Avery to try. But it’s hard to say whether this is a problem with the novel (because of course novels are permitted to be nihilistic!) or a dispositional preference I have.

I did find myself very interested in comparing the US and UK covers for the novel, which take subtly different approaches. The US one explicitly references the popular countercultural magazine Whole Earth Catalog, which makes a brief appearance in the novel: a rising art-world star uses it to cut lines of coke for his houseguests.2 But Brand’s magazine—which has recently been digitized and can be read on The (Searchable) Whole Earth, a website by my friend Lucas Gelfond—isn’t nihilistic at all! For many technologists, it’s indelibly associated with a cheerful, pragmatic optimism.

The UK cover employs a different visual motif: the marquee and lightbulbs at the entrances of movie theaters. Since Flat Earth’s protagonist is unhappily preoccupied by the success of her frenemy’s documentary, the cover makes literal sense but also aesthetic sense—it conveys the superficial showmanship and vapid emptiness of Avery’s world.

After finishing Flat Earth, I found myself more drawn to the UK cover’s interpretation—it perfectly expresses the hollowness and anomie of the novel. For those who have read Flat Earth (and those who haven’t!) I’d love to know how you feel about the two covers!

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It was a bit of a shock going from Flat Earth to the French noir writer Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Fatale, an invigoratingly fast-paced novella (just 112 pages) originally published in 1977 and translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith. (There’s an excellent Bookforum interview with the translator, which also describes the enormous influence Manchette has had on French crime fiction.) It was shocking because Flat Earth’s protagonist has a total absence of agency, and the plot developments are largely about her suffering in her heterosexual relationships…but but the heroine of Fatale, the ruthlessly glamorous Aimée Joubert, has an exhilarating excess of agency.

As a result, a lot of plot happens in very little space. Aimée kills a man in the first 5 pages, before decamping to a small French town to manipulate, befriend, and seduce its residents—many of whom, it must be said, are equally agentic:

It’s easy to recommend this book. It’s a quick read, intensely plot-driven, and a strangely encouraging read.

I won’t spoil the twist at the end, except to say that it sabotages the heteropessimism that dominates the novella’s earliest scenes. Men and women lie, cheat, deceive, and abuse each other—but they do, sometimes, love each other. Which is nice. Life is short, and you might get assassinated halfway through. You might as well spend your time with people you like!

What makes for a life worth living?

Life is short—it’s true, and it’s also true that it’s long enough to produce an excess of suffering, rumination, uncertainty, and loneliness. What are we supposed to do with all of our time? What will make our lives worth living? And for readers grappling with these questions…are novels or nonfiction books better for finding the answers?

Both, I think, in different ways. The Danish writer Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume tackles this question through a speculative-fiction lens. The protagonist, Tara Salter, wakes up on November 18 to realize that she is reliving the same day—over and over and over and over. Balle’s septology (what is it with Scandinavian writers and their septologies?) took 30 years to write and was originally self-published. Volumes I through III have been translated into English by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; volume IV is coming out in April.

On the Calculation of Volume is another polarizing novel. I blazed through vols. I and II within a day, and found them unbelievably, improbably absorbing (a difficult thing to pull off in a novel about repetition).

I wrote about vols. I and II in—

And I wrote about Balle’s US publisher, New Directions, in—

One Thing

🟧 Book publisher as curator

Celine Nguyen: In his 2014 book, Ways of Curating the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist reflected on why we struggle to choose what to read, see, experience, and buy. Contemporary life, he suggested, was characterized by an “exponential increase” in available options: “There is no type of information—documents, books, images, video—that is declining.” Te…

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2 years ago · 61 likes · 5 comments · One Thing

The third volume (thank you to my colleague, Daniel Rivas Perez, for lending me a copy!) is just as good. But when I had dinner with my friend Sophie last summer, at the iconic British restaurant St. John’s, she said that On the Calculation of Volume incredibly, incredibly boring.3

I’m hesitant to synopsize the plot of vol. III too much—but it is centrally concerned with 4 different philosophies for how to live, and how to spend your time—especially when that time could easily feel monotonous, useless, and pointless. The philosophies are showcased through different characters and their actions at different points of the story, and I found myself wondering: which one do I agree with most? Is life about the pursuit of knowledge and research as leisure activity? Is life about intimate relationships and familial ties? Is life about technological innovation and scientific discovery? Is life about political idealism and enacting radical changes in society?

Is life about recognizing that these aren’t mutually exclusive pursuits, and the same day can be carved up in different ways? I’m drawn to all of these goals, I think—and so I spend my days reading, speaking to loved ones, working at a tech startup, and trying to find my own way to contribute to a better future.

And just for fun…let’s play the US/UK cover game again. The US covers for On the Calculation of Volume are much more abstractly evocative—a smooth gradient that continues from volume to volume, with a crisp white band and a strange, auratic form inside it. It’s a beautiful way to evoke the time loop of the novel.

The UK covers are more pictorial—showing a woman, a vase, and a landscape, with a motion blur applied to convey the stagnant-and-rushing flow of time. The lines between the words of the title create a nice feeling of direction, and create both consistency and variety across each cover. I’m partial to the US cover (as a software designer, it’s hard to resist a gradient!) but both are striking approaches to a 7-volume series. I’m excited to see what volumes IV–VII look like.

For explicit life advice, though, nothing beats a nonfiction book. But the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s The Life You Want resists obvious conclusions and accessible platitudes. The book takes, as its starting point, Phillips’s 2024 essay for the LRB, which attempts to synthesize Freud’s psychoanalytic theories with Richard Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy. The two are ‘uneasy bedfellows,’ Phillips notes: Freud’s great discovery was the unconscious, and its subterranean and self-sabotaging tendencies; Rorty’s philosophy relied on conscious self-awareness and unconflicted, goal-directed agency.

I can’t help but wonder if the differences between these 2 thinkers—and how they sought to help people live better lives—may come down, at least partially, to biography. Freud was an Austrian Jew who had to flee Vienna in 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria; Rorty was an American philosopher during the American century. The purpose of psychotherapy, for Freud, was to go from ‘misery to ordinary unhappiness’; the purpose of philosophy, for Rorty, seemed to involve ‘human solidarity…as a goal to be achieved.’ And novels and films, he suggested, had the potential to be ‘vehicles of moral change and progress.’

I wrote about Richard Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy in—

If Freud and Rorty are so different, how does Phillips manage to yoke them together in The Life You Want? By suggesting that these 2 different approaches produce a positive tension—Freud’s limitations are Rorty’s strengths; Rorty’s blindspots are Freud’s greatest achievements.

If you are not religious, Freud and Rorty both implicitly ask…what keeps you going; what makes you think your life is worth the frustration and disappointment and dismay and injustice that modern lives seem to entail?

…Psychoanalysis without pragmatism, one can say, becomes another pre-emptive coercive moralism…By privileging the past over the future…[and] unconscious causality over choice, it radically circumscribes human possibility. But Rorty’s pragmatism without psychoanalysis can sound wilfully naive about the difficulties, the conflicts of wanting…it tends to idealize both autonomy and the self; to privilege our capacity for making choices…It privileges experiments in living over the need for safety.

Psychoanalysis with pragmatism, and pragmatism with psychoanalysis, however – both deemed to be inextricable from each other – seem unusually promising. If, that is, they help you get the life you want.

Phillips is a terrifyingly prolific writer—he’s published 26 books since 1988—and the quality of each book varies. Out of the 4 books I’ve read (The Life You Want; On Giving Up; On Wanting to Change; and Unforbidden Pleasures), I do think that The Life You Want is the best: it showcases the best of Phillips’s inquisitive, gently penetrating style, and feels especially relevant for the existential questions of our time.

Why not say no?

Instead of trying to live a better life, of course, you could just—give up. That’s the subject of Adam Phillips’s previous book, On Giving Up, and it’s also the subject of the renowned artist and illustrator ’s All the Living. The US and UK have been slow to recognize graphic novels as capital-L Literature (unlike France), but Muradov’s book showcases the full visual and literary potential of the genre.

You might already know of Muradov’s illustrations—he’s worked with the New Yorker, the software company Notion, and the Paris Review (Lydia Davis fans, you must read this)—but he’s also a subtly comic writer, and ideally suited to handling heavy topics with a light touch.

In All the Living, a woman commits suicide—only to end up in a strangely sociable purgatory, where she’s forced to enter a lottery to return to life. Tragically (or farcically?) she’s the first person to win it. She’s unwillingly rushed back into the land of the living. It turns out to be just as monotonous as the first time around—but now she’s able to see all the ghosts of the dead thronging around her, gathering in offices and grocery stores and apartment buildings. It’s a touching story, full of tenderly awkward interactions between the protagonist and her local ghosts. All the Living is already sold out on Fantagraphics (you should have preordered it when I posted about the book last October!) but you can still find some copies here and here.

Design and architecture fans can find an entirely different perspective on refusal—in nonfiction (specifically lecture) form—in I Prefer Not To, edited by Peter Swinnen. It’s a tiny, irreverently designed book about a lecture series at ETH Zürich’s renowned architecture department. (The lectures were recorded and later uploaded to YouTube.) Twelve architects were asked to give a lecture inspired by the phrase, ‘I prefer not to’—which comes from Herman Melville’s famous short story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener.’

A confession: the reason I bought this book is because it was beautifully designed (by Something Fantastic and Fernanda Tellez Velasco. A second confession: I bought it in December 2024 and didn’t open it until a few weeks ago, when I was speaking to a friend about the architect Anne Lacaton. A few years ago, I wrote a brief piece about Lacaton’s environmentally and socially conscious practice for Harvard’s architecture and design department:

As French social housing agencies seek to renew buildings constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, there is often a tendency to demolish and reconstruct. But Lacaton & Vassal’s philosophy is different: “Never demolish…Always add, transform, and utilize, with and for the inhabitants.” The original plan for a project in Bordeaux was to demolish three buildings of 530 dwellings built in the early 1960s. In lieu of this “violent” disruption and displacement for inhabitants, Lacaton & Vassal expanded the existing apartments by 53 percent and added eight new ones. During the two-year construction process, all residents remained in their homes. The result, compared to demolishing and rebuilding: one-third of the construction costs and half of the carbon footprint. No material was wasted, and the transformation led to a 60 percent reduction in energy consumption. “Transformation means: spend less to do more,” Lacaton said.

Lacaton’s I Prefer Not To lecture is profoundly invigorating. The book includes a simple list of Lacaton’s rules for herself: NOT TO ACCEPT THE MINIMUM, NOT TO LIMIT USES, NOT TO LOSE. (All useful lessons for architecture, design, and life!) Many of the speakers offered their own principles: the architectural historian Philip Ursprung began his lecture by saying:

Architecture – the ‘YES’ profession par excellence – can deeply and critically learn from the culture of ‘NO’.

The lesson from the lecture series might be that saying no to certain things—declining, or actively resisting other people’s demands—is an essential part of a creative practice.

Fan fiction, criticism, and the Proust extended universe

What are the other necessary elements of a creative practice? Being playful helps; being critical helps. There’s a certain playfulness to this Texte Zur Kunst essay, by the artist and writer Francis Whorrall-Campbell, which begins:

What genre of writing is produced in response to a cultural object? Is written from a place of love and admiration, sometimes indignation and disappointment, toward that object?…If you answered fan fiction, you’d be correct. If you answered criticism, you might also be correct.

I have, in previous newsletters, irreverently referred to certain essays, poems, and books as ‘Proust fanfiction,’ or ‘Proust extended universe content.’ I’m tickled by these descriptions because they help make serious, seemingly self-important Real Literature™ seem accessible and exciting. But it also reflects how writers and filmmakers have responded to one of the greatest works of modernist literature—by riffing off of the plots, characters, and ideas.

One of those filmmakers is the Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman. She’s best known for her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, which I wrote about in June 2024:

But the Proust-pilled among us might be most interested in Akerman’s La Captive, which I later saw, and wrote about, in February 2025:

I’ll be honest. Akerman’s La Captive an extremely slow-moving film about my least favorite volume of Proust. And yet. I felt this irresistible urge to buy the literary critic Christine Smallwood’s La Captive, a book-length essay about the film:

Smallwood is one of the best literary critics working today, and reading La Captive was such an invigorating experience—as soon as I finished it, I rushed off to Goodreads to type out a 720-word review (on my phone, even!) about it:

Proust's La Captive/La Prisonnière is claustrophically inert; its central concern is the protagonist's jealousy and possessiveness over his lover Albertine (one of literature's most memorable bisexual characters). Akerman's adaptation depicts this beautifully; scenes are shot in clearly delinated, contained spaces: hallways, richly colored bedrooms, inside luxurious cars. Smallwood's essay on Akerman's adaptation, in turn (we're now two degrees removed from Proust, though it's worth saying that Proust, given his obsession with involuntary memory, often seemed to be two degrees removed from himself) offers gorgeous textual renderings of Akerman's filmography…

I like that Smallwood doesn't flinch away from writing about money, and motherhood, and the drudgery and indignity and labor of it—and that makes her the perfect critic for Akerman…[who] understands that money—earning it, saving it, spending it—characterizes life just as much as making art does, and that it, therefore, can be the subject of artistic work as well.

Akerman’s films accomplish something counterintuitive and remarkable: they turn the boring parts of life into an artistic experience. This quality is beautifully expressed by , whose recent newsletter on films where nothing happens is a wonderful description of Akerman’s appeal:

I leave the cinema or turn off a film with the feeling that nothing really happened. No one achieved anything, there was no turning point, no scene that could easily be identified as “the most important”…

Over time, I began to notice that it is these films that stay with me the longest. Not because they told me something, but because they allowed me to spend time in someone else’s time. Without haste, without climax, without the need for closure. “Nothing is happening” then ceases to mean absence – it becomes another form of presence, less spectacular but more demanding.

Smallwood’s tiny, bright book on Akerman (and on Proust, of course) ended up being one of my favorite reads. And if you’d like to read more of Smallwood’s work—I’m particularly fond of her Bookforum review of the French lesbian writer Constance Debré’s autofiction; and an earlier essay asking what the whole point of literature is, and whether novels still matter in contemporary life. The answer, for me and for Smallwood, is yes:

We read with our whole selves, and reading helps us discover who we are. We are always in the way, influencing and interpreting as we go. Our consciousness is secret—we have to ask other people, “What are you thinking?” just as we ask them…“What are you reading?”—but it is never really alone. It’s a busy interchange of memory, imagination, experience, and text…

What I know is that on the nights when I force myself to open a book, I feel like a person, an individual engaged in an activity at once secret and communal, rather than a receptacle of mass information.

The other Proust-extended-universe-content I read (calling it ‘content’ is feeling increasingly disrespectful—let’s say Proust-extended-universe-literature) was an impulse purchase: the French filmmaker and writer Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust, translated by Nancy Kline. The book has 72 titled vignettes (‘Boulevard Hausmann’, ‘Waves from the Past’, ‘Scents’, ‘Céleste Appears’, ‘The Mist of Fumigations’) that narrate scenes from Proust’s life and death. It’s an elliptical kind of biography, one that proceeds through images and associations instead of linearly organized facts.

Zombie Proust is deeply evocative and beautiful. Here’s one of my favorite vignettes:

The End of the World

In the summer of 1922, an American scholar once again announces that the end of the world is imminent. A reporter for the daily newspaper L‘Intransigeant asks several celebrities of the moment what they would do if this time it were true.

‘I think life would suddenly seem delicious to us,’ answers Marcel Proust. ‘Just imagine how many projects, travel plans, passions, areas of study it – our life – holds in suspension, invisible to us in our laziness, which, assured of a future, continually postpones them. But should all that threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it would become again…And yet we shouldn’t require a cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to reflect that we are human and death may come tonight.’

It is my humble opinion that, for the true Proust freaks, Prieur’s book is an essential addition to your bookshelf. And all of us, I think, can learn from Proust’s beautiful exhortation: We shouldn’t require a cataclysm to love life today.

For even more on Proust—

My ongoing obsession with Chinese philosophy

In my January newsletter, I proposed that a practical, useful form of Chinesemaxxing in 2026 might be to…read more Chinese philosophy. It helped that my friend (who, earlier this year, wrote a particularly charming manifesto for literary it boys everywhere) gave me a copy of one of the great Chinese philosophical works: Zhuangzi, one of the canonical texts of Daoism.

I have spent the last 3 months completely obsessed with the Zhuangzi. Everyone I’ve gotten dinner with has heard me talk about it. All of my groupchats have had quotes inflicted onto them. (And I bring it up in my episode with !) I can’t help it—the Zhuangzi is a relentlessly humorous and ironic and entertaining philosophical work, especially in Brook Ziporyn’s translation.

It’s always funny to read a great, classic work and realize: this is why it’s a classic! This is why it’s been read for centuries! As the designer (and covertly brilliant karaoke star) Ryo Lu said:

The Zhuangzi is a book that rewards rerearding. But it also rewards a dive into the secondary literature! After finishing it, I picked up a copy of Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio’s Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi, published by Columbia University Press (and another recommendation from ).

I was excited by Moeller and D’Ambrosio’s monograph because I had this vague, half-formed feeling that the Zhuangzi seemed particularly well-suited to our chaotic time, and I wanted to know how academic philosophers interpreted it!

The Zhuangzi was largely written during China’s Warring States period (476–221 BCE), and many of the stories in Zhuangzi describe how people should act in politically tumultuous times. And indeed, the introduction to Genuine Pretending notes:

We approach the Zhuangzi as a sometimes biting and provocative sociopolitical critique of its times…[and an] expression of a subversive existential mode that allows one to better endure or even to thrive in adverse circumstances…This text, among other things, advises against the common human tendency to develop an inflated ego in reaction to success—or to lose confidence in response to failure…For the sake of maintaining sanity, the Zhuangzi undermines rigid beliefs, judgments, preferences, and dislikes by fostering a humorous attitude toward the world and, in particular, toward oneself.

Genuine Pretending makes an excellent case for the continued importance of the Zhuangzi, and the authors connect its ideas to questions of filial piety versus irreverence; socially-prescribed roles versus playful autonomy; authenticity versus performativity. (The latter topic is also explored in another book by Moeller and D’Ambrosio, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. If you’re interested in reading this as well, please reach out!) And they emphasize the importance of spontaneity—and the lighthearted skillfulness that comes from being attentive and responsive to the present.

Genuine Pretending also has that particularly endearing quality of academic writing: the occasional, overly-formal phrase. There’s a passage where Moeller and D’Ambrosio discuss the Daoist perspective on uselessness and stupidity:

The wisdom of stupidity has been a perennial issue in Daoism…As Christian Schwermann (2011) has shown in a most meticulous study, stupidity became an important issue in Chinese intellectual, political, and cultural history.

Essays

I’ll close with 3 essays about anti–anti-work (from one of my new favorite essayists!), developing a creative identity, and how AI is changing the music industry—for better or worse:

• The leftist case for loving your job. I’ve texted 3 different friends this week about Martin Dolan’s “Clocked Out” for , which gently rebukes the anti-work, bullshit jobs left (which assumes that all jobs are fake and that trying hard is vaguely embarrassing at best, complicit at worst). “I’m frustrated,” Dolan writes, “by how these left thinkers seem implicitly to dismiss the possibility of fulfilling work altogether—at least until after we’ve gotten rid of capitalism.” After a discussion of the American philosopher and MacArthur fellow Elizabeth Anderson’s work, Dolan suggests:

  For today’s 23-year-old college grad, Anderson’s notion of the progressive work ethic might just be more compellingly “countercultural” than yet another broadside against the absurdity of having a job under capitalism. Her ideas channel the structural frustration of the bullshit-jobs left while holding on to the notion that work can be more than a scam or a chore. It grants permission to groan about bad, unfulfilling work without conceding that all work is always bad.

  Dolan is an exceptional writer and thinker—I also loved “My Dumb Journey Through a Smartphone World” (questioning the value of dumbphones and retreating from the internet, for The Nation) and his “elegy for the indie games renaissance” (for Strange Matter).

• What is writing good for? What does it mean to be a “writer”? Longtime readers will know that I’m very invested in writing, researching, and thinking across the “two cultures”—STEM and the arts/humanities. The physicist and essayist ’s “Developing creative identity” is an exceptional work in this genre: he begins by asking what it means to work across disciplines (and the insecurity/anxiety that can result), and what it means to write across disciplines. He then discusses a number of more conventionally STEM-coded writers (Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein) and more humanities-coded writers (Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Caro) to distill some useful insights about how different people use writing to explore and persuasively convey their ideas:

  As we develop new means of understanding and explaining the world, we develop new literary forms. But those means of understanding and explaining emerge only slowly, as do the forms. [The ancient Greek philosopher] Empedocles…was using the medium he knew in order to develop his understanding. But he was also modifying and developing the medium to support new kinds of thought and new representations for that thought. Viewed this way, writing is a mutable, extensible tool that can be used to gradually expand the ways we make sense of the world. It evolves in concert with corresponding activities in the physical world – ways of observing and intervening, ways of making sense.

  It’s hard for me to convey how expansive this essay is—I recommend reading in full! And don’t skip the footnotes:

• No one is talking about it; (almost) everyone is doing it. For Rolling Stone, Nathan Brackett (who also writes the weekly music/tech newsletter Stems) wrote about how “behind closed doors, AI-powered tools are causing profound shifts in how music is being made at all levels of the industry.” Longtime professionals are experimenting with AI for stem separation, mixing, and more:

  Jay-Z’s longtime producer, DJ, and engineer, Young Guru, says it’s become common for hip-hop producers to make funk and soul samples out of AI, rather than license original music or hire musicians. Guru guesses that “more than half” of sample-based hip-hop is being made this way now. He still pays for samples or hires musicians to interpolate them, but producers who don’t have the budgets or inclination now have a shortcut. “They’re getting really good at prompting now,” he says. “Where before it was just ‘Give me soulful 1960s whatever,’ now it’s ‘Give me 1960s music as if it was recorded in Motown and this person wrote it,’ or ‘Give me 1970s music as if it was recorded at Stax if this person wrote it and this person played bass’”…Of course, for every task that AI streamlines, there might be someone on the other end who isn’t paid anymore: a demo musician or producer, an assistant engineer who helps with mixes, a studio owner renting time, maybe a Seventies songwriter living off of licensing fees. Nashville native Chapman says he’s hopeful that the doors AI opens to amateurs will lead to a boom for musicians and studio owners down the road. But for now, “there are less sessions happening,” he says. “It’s hurting the demo community.”

I’m writing this a little past midnight in London, and desperately hoping that this time, I’ll manage to send a late-night newsletter without typos. I’m a little tired, but mostly happy. It’s a beautiful feeling to stay up late with an exciting new book (which I do far too often, still); and it’s exciting to talk about them with other people.

Thanks for reading, as always—and let me know in the comments (or by replying to this email!) if any of these books catch your interest. I’d also love to hear what you’ve been reading as well.

(And if you buy any of these books: consider getting them from your local independent bookstore! (Some of them will even order books for you—I did this all the time with Dog Eared Books when I lived in San Francisco.)

Nonfiction, however, is for understanding, explicit learning, doing. January is, conventionally, the month for reevaluating one’s life and inaugurating new behaviors; it’s also been, especially in the last 2 weeks, a month of disorienting political events. Because of that, I ended up reading very little fiction, and a lot more nonfiction and philosophy. It’s hard to escape the world right now; I’m also not sure I want to.

In this newsletter:

• 7 books—including James Joyce’s Dubliners; a very rereadable poetry book; philosophy books about Henri Bergson, Socrates, and Daoism; Sarah Schulman’s advice for political activists; and an econ/policy prof’s advice on living well

• 10 essays—published in Liberties, the New York Review of Books, and the newsletters of 2 great novelist-critic-thinkers

• 2 contemporary American painters

Fiction

I celebrated Christmas and New Year’s in HCMC/Saigon, and upon my return to London, immediately got sick. I spent two days in bed, feeling sorry for myself and scrolling pitifully on my phone. On the third day, I decided to read James Joyce’s Dubliners.

Dubliners is Joyce’s first book and his ‘purest,’ according to Edna O’Brien. In the introduction to my copy, O’Brien describes the nine years that Joyce spent trying to find a publisher. Many thought that the stories were too lewd, but by 21st century standards, what comes across is a touching, unflinching awareness of how love and desire shape people’s lives.

The first 3 stories are written in the first person—the perspective that, in my opinion, is easiest for 21st century readers to sink into. The internet is where most of us do our reading, and the internet is dominated by first-person tweets, Tiktoks, Instagram captions, and essays. I, I, I, I—the pronoun that appeals to me faster, draws me in quicker, than a story that begins with She called, He began—until I’m invested in the story, and then I’m interested in any perspective the writer pulls me into.

For more amateur theorizing on short fiction for internet attention spans—

What are Joyce’s stories about? Two young boys that escape school for the day, and end up nervously dodging an older man who’s taken an interest in them (‘An Encounter’). A young woman sleeps with a man staying at her mother’s boarding house, and all 3 of them are quietly terrified by what must happen next—what the women must demand of the man, what honor urges him to do, what resistance his family might have towards their partnership (‘The Boarding House’). A man experiences, for a time, deep companionship and affection from a married woman, before his rigidity ends their friendship and consigns them both to loneliness (‘A Painful Case’).

I was astonished, as I wrote in my Goodreads review, by how readable the stories were, and how unobtrusively beautiful the language was. ‘Araby,’ one of the early first-person ones, has this beautiful description of the rain:

Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds.

And the psychological and social world of the stories is no less vivid. ‘All the characters,’ Edna St. Brian observes,

are on the verge of something, on the verge of death, disgrace, leaving home, relinquishing love, or finding out the truth…The stories are also full of humour, crammed with the small miraculous absurdities of everyday life. Joyce wrote with the eye of a child and an adult, the perfect, indeed the only fusion, for any writer.

[The stories] steal into one’s consciousness, so the stories are lived by us and the moments from them become part of our own experience…A great writer’s first work is often his purest, and this is certainly true of Dubliners. The man who conceived them had no thought but to depict the pain and longing of people like himself whose dreams outdistance their chances.

Nonfiction

How to change the world

In her nonfiction work, Sarah Schulman—writer, activist, historian—specializes in taking overused words (abuse, activism, solidarity) and turning them back into useful political instruments. Her 2016 book, Conflict is Not Abuse, shaped many of my beliefs on how to engage in political discourse and disagreement; her next nonfiction book, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York (2021), shows how the idea of ‘activism’ was laboriously, lovingly implemented in ACT UP’s response to the AIDS crisis.

Schulman’s newest book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, is something of a handbook for people who want a more useful definition of ‘solidarity’—and what it means, practically speaking, to act in solidarity with the oppressed. The book, which was published in April 2025, is largely focused on recent Palestinian/anti-Zionist political organizing in the US. But it also draws from Schulman’s decades-long involvement with the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the lessons she’s learned from her involvement in ACT UP and, before that, in abortion activism.

Schulman takes activism, she acknowledges that the right tactics aren’t always obvious. A key problem, for her, is that activists can be impatient; as she compassionately explains,

it is very easy to want change immediately and get angry or accusatory—to condemn each other, to create hierarchies of radicalness or other forms of blame—when change doesn’t go your way. We feel so terrible when we realize, and we want to feel better. But creating change…is probably the most difficult obstacle many of these important and needed new activists have ever faced.

Activists, Schulman reminds us, ‘have to be committed to problem-solving,’ and understand that their responsibility is to be effective, not merely to be outraged. In chapter 5, ‘The Case for Strategic Radicalism,’ she offers a detailed discussion of the tactics the BDS movement has found most effective over the years, especially context sensitivity and creativity. When it comes to university movements to divest from Israel, for example, she notes:

What is possible on one campus may not be possible on another. As such, we should recognize that power comes from a diversity of tactics that keep the overall goal in mind…

“Factionalizing”—claiming that your strategy toward the common goal is better than someone else’s—is the downfall of movements that depend;…on many different approaches, tactics, and actions all aimed at the same goal.

One of the things that made ACT UP so effective during the AIDS crisis, she notes, is that the movement did not require consensus. Activists could, and often did, pursue strategies that others didn’t agree with—as long as they fulfilled the basic requirement of ‘direct action to end the AIDS crisis,’ people could proceed. The result, Schulman writes, is that ‘there was a broad range of many different kinds of actions with different methods and aesthetics, aimed at different social milieus, that would take place at the same time.’

What Schulman is describing reminds me of the tactics Charles Duhigg recently described in a New Yorker article, ‘What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing.’ What made Obama’s presidential campaign so effective, Duhigg argues, is the autonomy that volunteers were given. In 2009, a Republican operative copied this model to slowly assemble an influential, nation-wide coalition, where local chapters were encouraged to come up with their own strategies—unlike some of the most influential Democratic advocacy orgs.

Philosophy, from ancient China to twentieth-century France

In early December, I came across ’s very funny newsletter, ‘My Year of Rest and Chinesemaxxing,’ which functions both as trend commentary and nonchalant geopolitical analysis:

The most fashionable thing you can do in downtown New York these days is drink a beer on Canal Street, crouched on a low plastic stool in vintage Margiela…

In the twilight of the American empire, our Orientalism is not a patronizing one, but an aspirational one.

Perhaps it was Tran’s newsletter, or ’s essay on the Chinese tech canon for —that made me feel a strong desire to differentiate myself from more shallow forms of Chinesemaxxing. And then, for my birthday, I received a copy of the Chinese philosophy classic, Zhuangzi (translated by Brook Ziporyn) from my friend .

So my year of Chinesemaxxing began with me working through the 33 chapters of the Zhuangzi, written (likely by multiple authors) around 575–221 BCE. The book is a foundational Daoist text, along with the more famous Daodejing, and Ziporyn’s translation brims over with cheerful, playful, and evocatively poetic lines. As a lover of translated literature, I found Ziporyn’s notes on the translation almost as fun as the actual text.1 Which is saying something, because the Zhuangzi is full of funny little fables!

One of the most famous passages appears on page 21:

Once Zhuang Zhou [the supposed writer of Zhuangzi] dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Now surely Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities, as two quite different beings! And just this is what is meant when we speak of transformation of any one being into another—of the transformation of all things.

The butterfly is to Zhuangzi what the madeline is to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (or linen is to Marx’s Capital); it’s the reference everyone is eager to make, to signal that they are in the know…but it actually appears quite early on!

If you want to be that guy or girl at the party, obnoxiously perseverating on your superior knowledge of Zhuangzi, my recommendation is to instead reference the worthless tree, a character that appears in chapter 4 and again in chapter 20.

The worthless tree is enormous: ‘over a hundred arm spans around, so large that thousands of oxen could shade themselves beneath it…[and] surrounded by marveling sightseers.’ In chapter 4, a carpenter and his apprentice walk by, and the apprentice timidly asks why the carpenter doesn’t want to chop it down. The answer?

This is worthless lumber! As a ship it would soon sink…as a tool it would soon break, as a door it would leak sap…This is a talentless, worthless tree. it is precisely because it is so useless that it has lived so long…

The tree considers it a great disgrace to be surrounded by this uncomprehending crowd [of admirers]…What it protects, what protects it, is not this crowd, but something totally different. To praise it for fulfilling its responsibility in the role it happens to play—that would really be missing the point!

This passage showcases some of the playful storytelling in Zhuangzi, along with the strange, enigmatic lessons about the intrinsic nature of different beings. The book is constantly returning to the concept of one’s ‘intrinsic virtuosities,’ and how people ought to accept their inner natures, and the inevitable transformations of the world, and…this is my interpretation, at least…not force things? Not exert oneself needlessly, but rather be open to ‘non-doing,’ to patient observation and the passage of time?

It’s difficult for me to summarize this book (and there have been, quite literally, over 2000 years of scholarship into Zhuangzi). But it’s a supremely delightful and funny read, even though I find its ideas very mysterious:

I also read ’s Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, which I found out about through Substack! Bergson is, today, one of the lesser-known names of 20th-century French philosophy, but he was an international celebrity in his day—filling lecture halls, causing traffic jams, and relentlessly pursued (and, sometimes, envied) by other aspiring intellectuals:

Bergson, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927, wrote beautifully about the role that intuition could play in a scientifically-oriented society. And he was well-known—like his second cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust—for his writings on time, memory, and consciousness.

In 1904, Bergson wrote to Proust: “I believe, as you do, that every form of art sets out to convey certain states of mind that would be inexpressible in any other language: that is the raison d’être of that art.”

Today, Proust is a household name, while many people are unfamiliar with Bergson. But for much of their lives, the situation was quite different:

While Bergson had reached almost unfathomable levels of notoriety, Proust was still making his way towards literary icon status. In the final months of 1913…[Proust] had just suffered the sting of several rejections and had to resort to self-publishing the first volume of one of the twentieth century’s most imposing literary monuments, In Search of Lost Time.

How to understand your values

January is a good month for finishing up loose ends from the last year—which, for me, meant finishing my copy of Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. Last March, while I was—going through it, to put things obliquely—my friend let me cry profusely over lunch at Bon Nene (in San Francisco’s Mission District) and then gently led me over to Dog Eared Books on Valencia Street, where she bought me a copy of Callard’s book. For the rest of the year, I treated it as something of a protective talisman—a reminder that I had beautiful and warm friends around me, and I would eventually stop crashing out and be okay.

Callard is something of a cheerfully confronting philosopher—the first paragraphs of Open Socrates are:

There’s a question you are avoiding. Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it. You tell yourself you don’t have time at the moment; you’re focused on making it through the next fifteen minutes. There is a lot to get done in a day. There are the hours you spend at your job, the chores to take care of at home.There are movies to be seen, books to be read, music to be listened to, friendships to catch up on, vacations to be taken. Your life is full.It has no space for the question, “Why am I doing any of this?”

True, you might sometimes have to pause to ask: Should I take a vacation? Move? Have a(nother) child? Or you might find yourself faced with a moral dilemma or a romantic crisis. But in those cases you frame “What should I do?” as a question about which option fits best with what you had antecedently determined that you have to do and like to do. You are careful to keep your practical questions from exploding beyond narrow deliberative limits within which you confine them in advance. It is fine to be open-minded and curious about all sorts of questions that don’t directly impinge on how you live your life—How do woodpeckers avoid getting concussions?—but you are vigilant in policing the boundaries of practical inquiry. You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn’t wander too far from how it is already going.

You appear to be afraid of something.

If you, like me, find yourself irresistibly compelled by this passage—nervous but eager to bring that question into conscious awareness, and attempt to answer it—you might enjoy this book. It is, essentially, an introduction to the Socratic method, and a love letter to philosophical inquiry. I read most of it last summer, then put it down for several months, and only finished it up in January—but I’m realizing, now, that it must have exerted a strong influence on me, because I’ve been reading a great deal of philosophy since last March.

After that, I picked up what I like to think of as applied philosophy: a self-help book. Longtime readers will know of my eternally embarrassing addiction to this genre. Most self-help books are bad, I’ll admit. But a handful of them are exceptional, and ’s Beyond Happy: How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfillment is in the latter category.

Fabian is a public policy professor in the UK, and previously worked at the Brookings Institution and did his PhD in economics. Much of his research is focused on human wellbeing, and how public policy can contribute to that. His overall goal is ‘to update welfare state theory for the 21st century…taking 'welfare' beyond material considerations into the psychological and sociological domain.’

Beyond Happy takes Fabian’s research and makes it more accessible and practically useful. It is centrally concerned with how we find meaning and purpose in our lives—it acknowledges, but doesn’t focus on, the typical concerns of the self-help genre. There are lots of good books about habit formation (James Clear’s Atomic Habits) and time management (’s Four Thousand Weeks); Fabian’s book differentiates itself by trying to understand questions like:

• What do we lose when we’re not religious, since religion has historically offered meaning and clarity in our lives?

• How do we combat nihilism, when it seems like there’s no objective, intrinsic value to cling onto?

• How do we know who we are? How do we know our values?

Fabian persuasively argues that we can’t solve a crisis of meaningless by retreating into the past. Old religions and traditions won’t cut it; we need to integrate the lessons of the past, and consciously carve out a new approach to life. He also argues that one of the foundational aspects of our well-being is a sense of community involvement and social responsibility—we can’t be truly well unless we are part of other people’s lives, and contributing to their well-being.

How to confront political reality

A week or two after I finished Fabian’s book, Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis. Their deaths show how futile it is to secure individual wellbeing in a state of community crisis; and the response to their deaths, I think, shows how wellbeing can actually be enacted—through mutual care, ordinary activism, and intransigent solidarity.

It’s moving to read articles like Adam Serwer’s profile of ICE protestors and community volunteers in The Atlantic, where he notes:

The number of Minnesotans resisting the federal occupation is so large that relatively few could be characterized as career activists. They are ordinary Americans—people with jobs, moms and dads, friends and neighbors.

—or ’s article about how teachers and families are coming together to keep their community safe, in the New Yorker:

As of late January, around forty per cent of the elementary school’s students have been staying home, and many of their families no longer leave the house.…

The school began formulating its response to the crisis in December. Meetings were held to figure out how best to assist the families. Laptops and mobile hot spots were distributed…A GoFundMe was initiated to cover rent and groceries for families who have stopped going to work; parents and other volunteers are connecting detained parents with legal assistance…

Distance learning is scheduled to end, but the school staff expects that it will be extended. The adults have tried to explain the situation to the children the best they can. The principal said that teachers have incorporated lessons about boycotts and protest. “So they can kind of connect it to that,” the principal said. “The kids know that there’s a way to respond when you feel like something is unjust.”

Other work that helped me process what’s happening in in the US:

• on grief as an emotion and a political capacity:

  Where I come from, mourning is not something you feel. It is something you do. Mourning can be…a precondition to other political acts.

• on political personality cults and choosing coalition-building instead:

  [Trump] 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…Liberalism too is at a crossroads. Many are tired of the same old answers…they want a new coalition, one where their neighbors are not subject to public execution.

Poetry

I’ve been carving out one day each weekend to sit at home and write, preferably with a friend. A few weeks ago, my companion du jour was working on some poems—so I pulled some of my poetry books out, including the poet-critic-professor Lucy Ives’s The Hermit.

I loved rereading this (I last wrote about it in October 2024). There’s really no one like Ives—her writing is deeply immersed in French theory and American history and literary studies, but it never feels weighed down. The 80 poem-shaped fragments in this book are so legible! They’re airy and easy to read, easy to assimilate—even though they touch on all these grand, abstruse academic topics:

If you’re a fan of Lydia Davis, this collection offers similar pleasures. Here’s poem #8 in The Hermit, which has that inwardly-observing-thinking-about-thinking quality that so many of Davis’s stories have:

A man, still young at this point in the story, considers how he senses desire in others. He has thought of it as his own possession, their desire, and this has led him to behave stupidly. One is implicated but not automatically, not without one’s own permission, for there is no good in love. One loves actively, on principle—or one attempts, erroneously, to possess desire, as he has done. And yet, the young man thinks, it is no better not to love. It seems like truth to him; it takes the form of a command. He grows old. He is old. He is old and alone, but still thinking. He wants to know what would constitute a true command. Is love a command? The man may even be dying now, is about to die, is dying, when he begins to ask himself, Is it not my own permission that lends love this form?

Magazines

I’m the living embodiment of that eternal @dril tweet, except my problem isn’t candles but magazine subscriptions.2 The issue isn’t the money spent; it’s that they tend to go unread. But one of my 2026 resolutions—alongside the usual ones, like Go to the gym regularly—is actually reading all the issues that arrive on my doorstep! In January, that meant:

Liberties (the winter 2026 issue) ✦

Liberties is a magazine of culture and politics founded in Washington, D.C, and an annual subscription is $50 (with discounts for students and educators). Two of my favorite articles from this issue were the philosopher Agnes Callard’s ‘In Search of the Leisure Class,’ and the editor Celeste Marcus’s ‘“I Am Trying to Live a Life I Do Not Understand”.’

Callard’s ‘In Search of the Leisure Class’ is typical of Callard’s writing—keenly inquisitive, conversational, and funny. The essay asks what leisure could be—that thing that isn’t work, isn’t rest, but is some secret third thing. As Callard writes,

When someone doesn’t want to do just any job in order to survive but insists on finding what she will consider “meaningful work,” she is saying that she wants her work to be (at least somewhat) leisurely; likewise, when someone resists “guilty pleasures” of entertainment in order to engage with something she finds challenging, she is demanding leisure in her rest time.

Leisure is, for Callard, one of the most important human pursuits. And yet:

We are living in unleisurely times. The internet and phones and social media offer up many insistent work-like demands on our attention, many rest-like temptations for entertainment, and few opportunities for leisure. Social media alternates between occasions for worry and outrage…and the promise of relief — in the form of…the mindless scroll…Between working ourselves up and calming ourselves back down, we have created a loop that forecloses the possibility of leisure.

The essay proceeds by investigating Aristotle’s definition of leisure, and Thorstein Veblen’s, and Callard’s own approach when teaching her students—how she sees higher education as permitting a kind of leisure that is difficult to find, and enduringly rewarding.

I wrote about Agnes Callard’s philosophy of aspiration in—

I also loved Celeste Marcus’s ‘“I Am Trying to Live a Life I Do Not Understand”,’ which draws out the particular psychological torment that Marcus—and many others right now—are feeling about American and Israeli politics. ‘I try,’ she writes, ‘to imagine what a world after this, after this political crisis, after this historical paroxysm, will look like.’ What’s happening now feels like a betrayal of the values and loyalties she once held dear:

I used to move through the world armed with a profound sense of received meaning and conscious of the life choices that a serious life required of me. There was a time in my life when my sense of loyalty and honor was so concrete to me that I could rely on my inherited frameworks to give me both a worldview and a course of action…This is no longer true. In so many essential ways the world I was born into does not any longer exist. The countries which I had been raised to love and serve have revealed characteristics so strange I cannot recognize them, so unattractive that I am no longer pulled toward them, though I still derive meaning from my loyalty to… them? To my idea of them? To a version of them for which I try to fight and in which I tell myself I still believe? If honor is a matter of loyalty, then honor will mean something new to me now.

The New York Review of Books (the January 15, 2026 issue) ✦

This is my third year subscribing to , which publishes 20 issues a year for $130 (although I always subscribe when they’re running a deal with the Paris Review). I usually read 4 issues in full, 6 or 7 incompletely, and quiver with terror when faced with the remaining unread issues.

This year, I’m doing my best to at least open all of the issues. I’ve only read half of the January 15 issue so far, but what I’ve read so far has been exceptional.

If you’re mostly a fiction reader, you’ll enjoy Kevin Power’s ‘All the Sad Unliterary Men,’ which is a review of David Szalay’s Flesh, one of the best novels I read last year:

And the novelist Yiyun Li’s ‘A Talent for Living’ explicitly discusses Beryl Bainbridge's novels, but implicitly offers some lessons for reading and living. ‘To die is an awfully big adventure, and so is to live,’ Li observes. Living requires you to endure small and large forms of suffering—no matter what age you are. Towards the end of the review, Li describes the young characters in Bainbridge’s The Death of the Heart:

…the children whose minds are mirrors—loyal or distorting, who can tell—of the shabbiness of the grown-up world. But perhaps this applies to all those whose talent for living and feeling leads to a deeper pain—a timeless situation that renders the characters ageless. As Bowen puts it, “Everybody who suffers is the same age.”

If you’re in a nonfiction mood, I loved the art historian Susan Tallman’s ‘The Empire Gives Back’ and the climate activist Bill McKibben’s ‘It’s a Gas.’

Tallman’s ‘The Empire Gives Back’ is about whether museums can, and should, repatriate museum artifacts to their original homes. The answer isn’t always obvious, even if Tallman—and the two historians/curators she discusses, Bénédicte Savoy and Dan Hicks—firmly believe in cultural restitution. ‘Today,’ Tallman writes,

The thoroughness with which colonized people were robbed of their own creations seems unconscionable…90 to 95 percent of the historical patrimony of sub-Saharan Africa is held outside the continent. The problem is not just that the West has so much; it’s that everybody else was left with so little…Precisely because our museums have successfully sensitized us to the incandescent power of art objects, [Savoy, in her book Who Owns Beauty?] asks, “how can we not want…to engage in a fairer policy towards the dispossessed?”

But there are numerous political, legal, and financial difficulties involved in repatriation, as Tallman illustrates, and even when you ‘consider to whom these objects should rightly belong…it’s not a slam dunk’ when it comes to returning them. She also criticizes the overburdened form of guilt and self-abasement that is common with Western intellectuals. Of Dan Hicks’s recent book, Tallman writes:

It is clear that Hicks’s book is deeply felt, but as with much recent postcolonial rhetoric in the museum world, there is something self-aggrandizing about the self-abasement, the persistent conviction that the West must be truly special—if not better, then at least worse than everybody else. The problem is, there’s just too much competition. The crimes of European colonialism were novel insofar as new technologies allowed them to be conducted at greater scale and with a cover story of rationality rather than just divine preference. But the practice of stealing from victims and rendering them anonymous while monumentalizing victors is a human constant, especially if we acknowledge oral traditions as a form of monument. There are no innocent empires. Read up on Ashurbanipal and you may never sleep again.

I also appreciated the peerless Bill McKibben’s ‘It’s a Gas,’ which opens by summarizing the current state of our climate crisis. He includes a sobering quote from the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who coauthored the latest IPCC report:

Things aren’t just getting worse. They’re getting worse faster. We’re actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there’s a silver lining. I don’t think there really is one in this one.

From there, the essay becomes a review of a new book, Peter Brannen’s comprehensive The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything. The story of everything? As McKibben cheekily writes,

I know that you have been promised the story of everything before, only to read an account of rice, or salt, or gunpowder, or cod, or some other interesting commodity. But carbon dioxide is the real deal. If you go back pretty much to the beginning of everything—and Brannen does—you find carbon dioxide lurking in the shadows, controlling events with a power that the Illuminati (or the cod) could only envy.

Art

I’ll close with two painters I recently discovered—thanks to other people’s posts on Substack:

Ludovic Nkoth’s deft, expressive portraits

Ludovic Nkoth is a Cameroonian-American painter living in NYC. He’s had solo shows in Paris, London, and Los Angeles; he’s also been included in group shows in Copenhagen, Chicago and elsewhere.

One of his most striking paintings, Invented Truth, depicts a pensive woman in striped pajamas, gazing a little past the viewer:

I also love Nkoth’s Shadow of a Mirror, which is a beautiful homage to one of Hilma af Klint’s most recognizable paintings:

I discovered Nkoth from ’s post below—I’m really looking forward to her forthcoming interview with the artist!

Meghann Stephenson’s lavishly austere paintings

After studying illustration at Parsons, Meghann Stephenson lived in NYC and worked with fashion and lifestyle brands like Man Repeller and Bon Appétit. But after several group shows, and then a solo show in late 2024, she’s now primarily known as a painter.

Stephenson’s paintings, with their solemn figures and pristinely radiant surfaces, remind me a lot of the British artist Meredith Frampton’s paintings of the 1920s to 1940s. You might recognize Frampton’s ‘Portrait of a Young Woman’ from the cover of Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, newly reissued by Penguin Modern Classics. (I learned this from the writer ’s newsletter on making book covers sexy again.)

But back to Stephenson. There’s a kind of luxurious hauteur to many of her paintings—and a kind of isolating anomie, with the stark backgrounds and isolated hands:

I came across Stephenson’s paintings in a recent newsletter by , who writes about interior design and personal style.

Thank you for reading this newsletter. Let me know what you’ve enjoyed lately—fiction, nonfiction, essays, poetry, art—in the comments or by replying to this email!

And I’ll return to your inbox soon with a newsletter on platform politics…contemporary philosophy…fashion week…or anti-algorithmic music discovery…I haven’t decided yet!

But surely only the avant-garde artists and writers struggled like this—the tragically innovative, the irrevocably original. Those with more commercial work—art directors, illustrators, DJs, journalists, critics—surely they were making money?

I received $50 for the first book review I published, and $0 for the third, but that seemed normal: I was new to this.

But the more I wrote, the more mysterious the question of money became. I was learning how to pitch, how to get commissioned, how to file drafts, how to send invoices. The invoices were always small, but I had a day job, so it didn’t matter. But something wasn’t adding up.

It seemed impossible that anyone could make a living as a writer—certainly not as a literary critic, invoicing $50 for one piece and $500 for another. It seemed impossible, I realized, because it was impossible.

I began to realize that the writers and artists I admired had day jobs that they rarely disclosed online, or partners supporting them, or parents. The most successful writers had tenure-track professorships—but did success grant them the secure job, or secure job enable the success? Others held staff jobs at newspapers, though they seemed to get laid off every 2 years. Others freelanced, tweeting about their latest bylines, bounced checks, renting with roommates, and shouldering the burden of hospital bills, student loans, insurance premiums.

A woman I admired told me, with a rare and fortifying candor, that she could only write literary criticism because her partner supported them both.

I began to realize that many of the essays I read—in prestigious and well-known magazines—were edited and written and fact-checked by people barely able to make a living from their work. Many magazines were labors of love; others were underwritten by a generous donor or a government grant. (The London Review of Books, I learned, operates at a loss: £27 million since the magazine was founded. It’s thanks to a former editor’s family trust that they’re able to continue publishing.)

On evenings when I wasn’t trying to read these magazines—when I succumbed to the infinite scroll and opened up a social media app—I would see post after post, take after take, about how everything was getting worse. Pop music was getting worse. Indie music. Dance music. Visual art, poetry, films, furniture—all of it was degrading, all of it was in decline.

People blamed this decline on different causes: wokeness, anti-wokeness, the entrenched elites, the unwashed pedestrian masses, too much elitism, too little gatekeeping, the rise of poptimism, a general lack of discernment.

The writer W. David Marx’s latest book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century (November 2025), argues that this narrative of decline is true—that art and culture are less innovative than before. I wanted to review Blank Space because Marx’s first two books (Ametora and Status and Culture) were exceptionally good…and because I wanted to understand if I agreed with him. Were things really getting worse? And did the question of money—how little of it there seemed to be, how precarious cultural labor was—have something to do with it?

You can read my review essay below, or on ’s elegantly designed website:

Asterisk Magazine

Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

I don’t remember reading any great novels in the ‘90s. Or listening to any good albums, either. It’s not the decade’s fault, it’s mine: I was born in 1993. By the time I could read books and choose my own music, things were already going downhill. The 20th century, apparently, was the last time we had great art, literature, or music. Although the curren…

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6 months ago · 274 likes · 20 comments · Celine Nguyen

But this newsletter is about how I pitched, researched, and wrote my essay—and what I learned about art, culture, and money in the process.

From June to September last year, while I was working on my essay, several publications—including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Chicago Tribune—announced that they were cutting their books coverage. I couldn’t help but incorporate these events into my essay: it’s 30% about Blank Space and 70% about the economic conditions that shape cultural production and criticism. Writing the essay is also why, in October last year, I signed onto the following open letter—

Freelance Solidarity

A Statement on Industry-Wide Cuts to Cultural Criticism

2025 has been a year of devastating disinvestment across arts and culture criticism. In Chicago, both the Tribune and the Sun-Times extended buyouts to their staff film critics, eliminating the roles. Citing yet another pivot-to-video, The New York Times…

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6 months ago · 45 likes · 2 comments · Freelance Solidarity Project

—and by the end of this newsletter, it should be clear why I feel so strongly about the project of cultural criticism, and why it’s necessary for artistic innovation.

This is part of an informal series on how I pitch, research, and write book reviews. If you want to read more—

Cultural criticism and Silicon Valley intellectualism

Most book reviews begin with a pitch: a condensed summary of what you want to review, what angle you’re taking, and why it matters to the magazine’s audience. The ideal pitch will resonate with the magazine’s existing readers (and their interests!), while also offering something new.

is a relatively young magazine (the first issue was published in November 2022) with an unusual audience. Based in Berkeley, California, the quarterly publication is, as the about page notes, ‘shaped by the philosophy of effective altruism, but not limited to it.’ When the journalist Andrew Marantz wrote about Asterisk in the New Yorker, he described it as ‘a handsomely designed print magazine that has become the house journal of the A.I.-safety scene.’

But the editors of Asterisk have commissioned articles across a wide range of topics: technological, political, sociological. The first article I read was about the myth of the loneliness epidemic; the second was a deep dive into a New Deal government agency’s efforts to bring electricity to rural America. Asterisk has published sober articles on how Trump’s funding cuts have affected America, including an interview with Robert Rosenbaum about directing private donors towards programs that were affected by USAID funding cuts; and a succinct analysis of how scientific research will be affected by reduced funding and immigration policy changes.

This range of topics might surprise you, especially if your understanding of effective altruism is shaped by figures like Sam Bankman-Fried (a minor celebrity and prominent donor within the movement, before he was convicted of money laundering). Effective altruism, which coalesced from the late 2000s onwards, uses utilitarian philosophy to advocate for a certain style of philanthropy and socially-beneficial work. The movement stresses measurable impact over vague feelings of benevolence. But bad actors like like Bankman-Fried have made effective altruism seem morally bankrupt as a movement.1

It doesn’t help that EA is associated with awkward AI engineers and egocentric Silicon Valley nerds. To people outside the tech industry, effective altruism appears passé and essentially cringe. The rationalist blogosphere it grew out of looks even more embarrassing. It’s hard to take rationalists seriously—when one of their near-canonical founding texts is a digressive, 660,000-word Harry Potter fanfiction (about half the length of Proust) where Bayesian reasoning and magical powers are on equal footing.

Here’s where I confess, though, a certain affinity for effective altruism. Though I’m apprehensive about many aspects of the community—a myopic disinterest in electoral politics; an obsession with long-term existential risk over nearer-term AI harm—EA has shaped many of my moral instincts. It’s why I stopped eating meat; it’s why I had a recurring donation to Against Malaria for many years; it’s why I work in climate tech today.

It’s why I believe that whatever privileges I have (growing up upper-middle-class in the United States, for example) also confer an obligation to the greater good. Many philosophical traditions and religions advocate for this responsibility, but effective altruism was the one that, in my early twenties, convinced me.

So I wanted to draw from this tradition for my Asterisk essay—even though I found Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fatally boring and over-written; even though I find the community’s obsession with existential risk a little aggravating.

Renovating the rationalist image

The best explainer I’ve come across for the rationalist community is the writer and programmer ’s ‘Rat Traps,’ for the tenth issue of Asterisk. ‘For those of us who move within liberal or progressive circles,’ he writes:

Openly admitting one’s readership of the rationalist genre can feel like a social misstep…For one, the rationalist community has the reputation of leaning libertarian…[but in] the closest thing to a census of the community…35% identify as “liberal” and 30% as “social democratic.”

But Han, like me, has a certain fondness for the community:

From when I first discovered the rationalist blogosphere in 2015 until it began to grow tedious (more on that later), it was a proportionally small but stimulating portion of my media diet. I consumed it like a psychoactive pill, one that made me slightly insane but alert to other kinds of insanities. I found it to be frequently insightful, sometimes obvious, often annoying and rather pompous, regularly helpful, and — for a group lampooned for its emotional aridity — unexpectedly vulnerable.

This vulnerability can make rationalists look ridiculous, especially when they over-analyze and over-theorize the parts of life that should come naturally. But what is natural, really? Is it natural to know how to make friends, how to fall in love, how to live according to your values?

And the rationalist style of reasoning from first principles—in a distinctively curious, humble, open-minded way—seemed ideally suited to writing about W. David Marx’s Blank Space. How else could I try to answer questions like—

• Is it true that culture is stagnating?

• If so, why?

• Where does artistic innovation come from?

• If artistic innovation is declining, how do we fix that?

—all extravagantly, ludicrously difficult to answer definitively? It was the rationalist tradition that gave me the courage to try. In the process, I also wanted to recover a different strain of Silicon Valley intellectualism—one that, in the post-DOGE era, is worth remembering.

A different side of Silicon Valley

The public image of the tech industry has gone downhill since 2016, when Trump’s unexpected presidential victory prompted a mass re-evaluation of how social media and internet technologies have reshaped society. Prior to 2016, there was something of a liberal consensus that Facebook, Twitter and similar sites were inherently supportive of liberal democracy, as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekçi observes in her book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest.

This changed after 2016. People stopped believing that tech companies like Google could deliver on their stated values, like ‘Don’t be evil.’ And books like Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (2023) and ’s Kill All Normies (2017) analyzed how online forums and social media platforms were used for revanchist, alt-right political projects.

This reevaluation of the tech industry also meant that tech culture—and its most visible figures—became more suspect. The most vilified oligarchs of the 2000s were hedge fund managers and other finance-industry figures; in the 2020s, it’s tech CEOs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Alex Karp.

But the nakedly profit-seeking side of Silicon Valley has always shared space with other ideological inclinations. In a newsletter sent last February, the political scientist wrote about ‘a very different Silicon Valley culture, which has been obscured by Musk, DOGE and the cult of the founders.’ Farrell first encountered this culture in 2009, when the programmer and organizer Aaron Swartz invited him, and several other social scientists, to speak at a tech ‘unconference’:

What struck me…was the culture’s combination of open-endedness and personal modesty…People wanted to make things better, but they didn’t assume that they knew exactly how to. They were curious, and they listened.

Aaron himself represented many of the best aspects of this culture. He was a member of the first graduating class of Y Combinator, but was not…the kind of founder with aspirations to grandeur. What he excelled at was connecting people, and spotting ways to help them. The first couple of years after his death, I kept discovering about his lengthy correspondences with people whom I had never known he had known, with wildly varying ideologies, woven together into a kind of invisible intellectual republic of people who usually did not realize that they had Aaron in common.2

As the ambitions of Silicon Valley elites grew, this intellectually plural culture of joyful weirdness and problem solving has shriveled and diminished. It’s still there, but it’s not nearly as visible or strong as it used to be.

It was this intellectually plural culture that made me fall in love with technology. As a young girl growing up in Silicon Valley, I read tens, maybe hundreds of blogs during the heyday of RSS—about architecture, interior design, software engineering, fashion, beauty, startups, typography. I never felt conflicted about my interest in girly things and nerdy things; only later did I feel an enforced societal pressure to choose a lane, to narrow my interests. (One of the most violent things you can do to a young woman’s intellectual development, I feel, is to convince her that she has to be a ‘math person’ or a ‘humanities person,’ and not both.)

And this intellectually plural culture celebrated different forms of knowledge—it rejected the myopic self-satisfaction of seeing STEM disciplines as superior to others.

Hackers, painters, and politically progressive programmers

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, when I was learning how to program, one of the most iconic bloggers and tech figures was Paul Graham, the cofounder of the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator, which helped launch startups like Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, and Stripe.

In addition to running Y Combinator, Graham also published essays on his personal website. It was Graham who introduced me to the essay form, if I’m being honest—and his 2003 essay ‘Hackers and Painters’ was particularly formative. If Joan Didion’s packing list showcased an aspirational lifestyle for writers, then Graham’s ‘Hackers and Painters’ did the same for software people.

‘Hackers and Painters’ begins with Graham reflecting on his unconventional education:

When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work—that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.

Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.

What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They’re not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.3

Graham writes about programming as a creative practice, something akin to a craft. He compares hacking to painting in a way that ennobles both, arguing that they have equivalent intellectual status and symmetric concerns. (In one passage, he writes: ‘Great software…requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too…It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented.’)

And Graham also touches on a problem familiar to artists and writers: ‘There is not much overlap,’ he laments, ‘between the kind of software that makes money and the kind that’s interesting to write.’ What, then, should idealistic young programmers do?

The answer to this problem, in the case of software, is a concept known to nearly all makers: the day job. This phrase began with musicians, who perform at night. More generally, it means that you have one kind of work you do for money, and another for love.

Nearly all makers have day jobs early in their careers. Painters and writers notoriously do. If you’re lucky you can get a day job that’s closely related to your real work.

Which brings us back to the question I posed at the beginning of this newsletter, and the question I had when I began writing my review of Marx’s book for Asterisk—

Who can afford to make art?

If you want to become an artist or writer, there are a few well-trodden paths to do great work without starving. You could, for example:

• Inherit wealth. The preferred path for many modernists, like Marcel Proust (who inherited around €4.5 million when his parents passed away) and Gertrude Stein (she and her brother shared a trust fund worth 8,000 francs in 1904).4 The artist Florine Stettheimer also came from a wealthy family, and painted many of her works while living in the luxurious Alwyn Court apartments, one block south of Central Park.5

• Marry into wealth. The heroine of Amina Cain’s novel Indelicacy is a cleaner at a museum, until her marriage to a wealthy man—then, finally, she begins to write. But such unions are less common in real life than they are in fiction, as the economist Tyler Cowen observed in the New York Times. And I suspect that many people—especially women raised by highly-educated mothers—are ill-suited to this path. (I have vivid memories of my mother telling me, “Remember, an education is the one thing that no one can ever take away from you.’ The implication was that a partner’s financial support could be.)

• Become independently wealthy, and then make your art. This fantasy sustains many highly-paid and nearly burned-out corporate professionals, but as I wrote in December, you should do what you want to do now—even if you only have a few hours a week to pursue your artistic projects.

• Cultivate a patron, sugar daddy, or similarly generous benefactor. We wouldn’t have the other Marx’s writing (Karl Marx, Das Kapital) without Friedrich Engels, who was born into a wealthy Wuppertal family and helped Karl with expenses.

But what if you don’t have access to a large pool of life-sustaining capital? Wealth is optional; luck and hard work aren’t. Other paths available to you:

• Become an outlier. If you’re a critic, become the voice of your generation—quickly!—so you can get picked up by New Yorker (like Hilton Als, Doreen St. Félix, Jia Tolentino, and Kyle Chayka). If you’re a novelist, become Sally Rooney.

• Harness your finances to the art–academic complex. Many artists and writers today make a living as tenure-track professors—or, less promisingly, as precariously employed adjuncts. Others apply to grants and fellowships that will cover their expenses and offer them unfettered time to work (assuming, of course, they’ve lined up more funding for the future). While money is disbursed in an unreliable and unpredictable fashion, it’s not a bad path—as long as major funders, like the National Endowment for the Arts, aren’t affected by politicized budget cuts.

• Work a day job. Franz Kafka worked at an insurance firm, and his professional and familial commitments meant that he could only write fiction in the evenings. In Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, includes a letter that Kafka wrote to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, about his schedule:

  From 8 to 2 or 2:30 in the office, then lunch till 3 or 3:30, after that sleep in bed (usually only attempts)…till 7:30, then ten miutes of exercises, naked at the open window, then an hour’s walk…then dinner with my family…then at 10:30 (but often not till 11:30) I sit down to write, and I go on, depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until 1, 2, or 3 o’clock, once even till 6 in the morning.

Poor Kafka never escaped his day job, but many artists and writers strive to. So how do you accomplish that?

Don’t quit your day job…yet

You could take the day-job-to-outlier path, like the great postmodernist writer Thomas Pynchon did in the 1960s. Pynchon entered college as an engineering major and left as an English major. Afterwards, he spent 2 years working for Boeing as a technical writer while writing his debut novel, V., which was published in 1963. It was successful enough that he could quit his job and, it seems, live cheaply and write full-time.

Or you could take the day-job-to-outlier-and-academic path, which the renowned fiction writer and teacher did in the 1990s. Saunders studied engineering in undergrad, and then got his MFA in creative writing in 1988. He then worked as a geophysicist and technical writer until 1997, when his literary success led to a faculty position at the same MFA program he graduated from.

But researching my Asterisk essay led me to believe that these 20th-century success stories are harder to achieve in the 21st century. It’s worth taking a look at a more contemporary example—the sci-fi writer Ted Chiang. Like Pynchon, he worked as a technical writer (for Microsoft); like George Saunders, he’s a celebrated short story writer. By the time Joshua Rothman profiled him for the New Yorker, in 2017, Chiang had won ‘twenty-seven major sci-fi awards,’ including four Nebulas and four Hugos. The film Arrival, which was based on one of Chiang’s stories, had premiered in theatres a few months earlier, and went on to make $203 million at the box office.

But despite all of Chiang’s successes, the profile noted that:

He still works as a technical writer—he creates reference materials for programmers—and lives in Bellevue, near Seattle…

Chiang continues to make ends meet through technical writing; it’s unclear whether the success of “Arrival” could change that, or even whether he would desire such a change.

And in 2019, in an interview with The Believer, Chiang expressed doubts about whether he would ever be able to escape his day job:

Are you still working as a technical writer on the side?

Right now I am able to take a break from that. But I’m under no illusion that this is a permanent situation.

Has the increased interest in adapting your work into film offered more opportunities?

That’s not a reliable source of income. The odds of anything coming from that are just so long.

Chiang isn’t alone. In 2023, the journalist Kate Dwyer asked, ‘Has it ever been harder to make a living as an author?’ One of the novelists she spoke to was Andrew Lipstein, who works as a product designer at Robinhood:

In early August, after Andrew Lipstein published The Vegan, his sophomore novel, a handful of loved ones asked if he planned to quit his day job in product design at a large financial technology company. Despite having published two books with the prestigious literary imprint Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Lipstein didn’t have any plans to quit; he considers product design to be his “career,” and he wouldn’t be able to support his growing family exclusively on the income from writing novels. “I feel disappointed having to tell people that because it sort of seems like a mark of success,” he said. “If I’m not just supporting myself by writing, to those who don’t know the reality of it, it seems like it’s a failure in some way.”

And then there’s the journalist , who regularly writes for the New Yorker and the NYT Style Magazine…while working a day job in B2B SAAS. In a newsletter from last year, ‘You’re going to be tired either way’, he wrote:

I’m writing this in the 20-minute blocks I have to spare between meetings at my day job…The nice thing about having a day job is that I have the financial breathing room to pitch stories I actually want to write about. But the probably annoying truth about my setup is that I work a lot…

You have to want it really badly. It’s the advice I give to younger writers who ask how I maintain both sides of my life. You have to take stock of what you want from your career and what you want your life to look like and base it against a 24-hour clock that only moves in one relentless direction.

Day jobs can inform one’s creative practice, as my friend Megan Marz observed in The Baffler. Reviewing an exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art (which was later presented at the Cantor Arts Center in the Bay Area), Marz noted that Frank Stella was a house painter, Vivian Maier a nanny, Barbara Kruger a designer for Condé Nast. The overall message of the exhibition is optimistic—maybe your day job is the reason your art is so good! And yet:

Here were a bunch of exceptional individuals…Here were seductively narrow spotlights beamed on inflection point after inflection point at which a creative mind had turned this valuable material, a job, into art. So many spotlights make a halo, or maybe a mirage. I wanted a job, too, until I remembered I already had one.

In the end, the art in Day Jobs is not demystified by its source material as much as the day jobs are remystified by artistic success. The only way for this effect not to have occurred might have been to show unfinished, unrealized, or nonexistent art: what artists couldn’t quite bring to completion, or couldn’t even start, because they were too busy with, or tired from, their jobs.

Dignified working conditions are disappearing

A day job can complement one’s artistic practice—assuming, of course, that it:

• Lets you commercialize the same skills you’re honing for your artistic work

• Makes enough money to pay your rent, offer you psychological security, and pay for artistic expenses (classes, materials, &c)

• Takes up a tolerable amount of time, so you can still spend mornings/evenings/weekends on your own work

But it’s hard to achieve this. In March of last year, Steven Kurutz wrote a NYT article about the struggles that Gen Xers in creative fields were facing:

If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand…

“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles…“My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s…The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it’s just gone. It’s startling…”

In the mid-2000s, he made a devil’s bargain for someone who grew up on punk rock: He started shooting commercials for Chevrolet, Facebook and Apple, among other companies, to support his family and fund his passion, documentary films…Then came a plot twist. Those commercial jobs grew scarce because of the consolidation of ad agencies and the rise of marketing content plucked from social media…

“Now it’s a knife fight for every job,” he said. “The cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout move is in free-fall.”

It’s worth noting that these problems don’t just affect Gen X. Zoomers emerging onto the labor market are also struggling to find a ‘safe’ day job that might facilitate their artistic ambitions. A few weeks before Kurutz’s article was published, the economic commentator and creator argued that Gen Z is facing the end of predictable progress and career security.

‘Gen Z,’ Scanlon writes, ‘faces a double disruption: AI-driven technological change and institutional instability.’ Instead of criticizing certain ambitions as irrational (like trying to make it as a content creator), she suggests that they represent young people ‘responding rationally to a world where traditional “safe” choices feel increasingly risky.’

A creator with the right viral moment can generate more wealth in a week than their parents saw in a year. A lucky crypto trade can outperform a decade (or two) of traditional saving. The paths to wealth have been reimagined, to say the least and it feels like the in-between is disappearing.

And as the ideal day job becomes more and more scarce, artists and writers are facing another threat:

The housing theory of everything

In an earlier draft of my Asterisk essay, I wrote:

Complaints about cultural decline tend to be very vibes-based, so I’m going to try to investigate it using a classic technique from that other Marx: historical materialism. If you’re more liberal than left, don’t worry—we can also call this, for YIMBY readers, ‘the housing theory of everything.’

It felt a little sad to cut these lines—they just didn’t fit into my final draft!—but I’m introducing them here so that a) I can practice zero-waste writing, and b) so I can bring up the housing theory of everything, from a 2021 essay in Works in Progress.

The authors—John Myers, Ben Southwood, and Sam Bowman—note that housing has become extraordinarily expensive in the last 40 years, especially in cities that were historically centers of artistic and literary innovation:

Average New York City metropolitan area house prices are up 706% since 1980 (or 376% more than US consumer prices, and 326% more than US wages). For San Francisco the rise is 932%. London house prices are up over 2,100% in that period (or around 1,500% more than wages)…

City dwellers have to spend more money on housing, which might mean less money spent buying books, supporting independent cinema, going to contemporary dance performances…

And it also affects who can afford to live in cities:

Nearly all innovation happens, and has always happened, in cities. Just as cities have vast labour pools that make it easier for workers to find jobs that match their skills, they also allow innovators to collaborate to come up with new ways of doing things. Sometimes cities have experienced bursts of innovative output that changed the world – like Amsterdam in the 17th century, Edinburgh and London in the late 18th to early 19th centuries, Cleveland in the late 19th century, Vienna and Detroit in the early 20th century, and San Francisco today…

By limiting the number of people who can go to live in [cities]…we may also be missing out on the new ideas that drive society forward.

Though Myers, Southwood and Bowman focus on the scientific and technological ideas we may be missing out on, my Asterisk essay proposes that we’re also missing out on significant intellectual and artistic innovation. As the critic and novelist Christine Smallwood observed in her essay, ‘A Reviewer’s Life,’ for :

It is impossible to know what ideas never came into the world because someone couldn’t or wouldn’t accept an hourly rate that barely covers the babysitter.

We’re not just missing out on the capital-W Writing that freelance critics would otherwise do for magazines and literary journals; we’re also missing out on the lowercase-w writing produced for personal blogs and newsletters. The early-aughts internet was shaped by this kind of writing, and it feels, to me, that it’s equally endangered. As the Twitter menswear guy behind two of the most influential men’s fashion blogs of the 2000s, Die, Workwear! and Put This On, observed:6

Bad art (and criticism, and content) comes from bad incentive structures

Writing my Asterisk essay led me to conclude that, when it comes to conversations about artistic stagnation and mediocrity, perhaps the most important thing to think about is the money. Who has it? Who’s making money? Who isn’t? Who’s financially backing unprofitable work? What kind of work is valued by the market? What kind of work isn’t?

W. David Marx’s Blank Space explicitly focuses on cultural conditions. But I personally felt that his anti-poptimist argument—and his analysis of why there’s so much slop in the world—is limited by his lack of engagement with the economic conditions.

Let’s take a look at the economic conditions for writing—and for criticism and journalism, in particular. Here’s another part of an early draft that I had to cut:

“One dollar a word,” the critic and artist James Hannahan observes…“was a good rate in 1953.” According to the BLS’s inflation calculator, this would be equivalent to $12.14 per word today—a rate that no writer I know has ever made.

Why are wages for professional writing so low? I get into this in my essay, using an influential alt-weekly, the Village Voice, as a case study. But essentially:

The Voice…reached its greatest heights under a specific economic model for journalism — one that 21st century technologies have destroyed. When the paper was founded in 1951, it had two sources of revenue: from readers purchasing the paper and classified ads…

But this business model disintegrated with the rise of the internet. In the summer of 2001, a twentysomething Anil Dash began working as a web developer of the Voice…“My third day there, Craigslist launched in New York. I knew. I was like, ‘Oh my god.’” The Voice could no longer sell what Craigslist offered for free.

You probably know the rest of the story. After Craigslist, the deluge…

What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid.

There’s a lot of money in the production and dissemination of content. It’s just not going to the creators. (Or, in the case of TV shows, it’s not going to the actors.) Numerous decisions—by companies like Google, which penalized publishers in the 2000s for instituting paywalls; by the people behind websites like The Pirate Bay, Sci-Hub, Anna’s Archive; and many others—have created a culture where free information is normal. This isn’t always a bad thing. But we’ve struggled to reckon with the effects of this—many people feel entitled to access information without having to pay for it directly! And other forms of remuneration (ad revenue, government funding) aren’t always available.

And my belief is that this directly impacts the quality and candor of critical writing. One of the most useful articles I read, while researching my Asterisk essay, was Luke Ottenhoff’s ‘Music criticism in the time of stans and haters.’ It’s common to complain that music critics focus too much on pop stars (Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey, and now PC-music-darling-turned-pop-star ); that they pull their punches and are uselessly positive about everyone; that they don’t write about indie musicians enough.

But the economic and attentional dynamics of the internet are such that freelance music critics are getting paid, let’s say, $100 for a review. If they write a negative review of a pop star, they’ll get harassed online by fans. If they pitch a review of an independent artist, most publications won’t want to take it—unknown names don’t drive traffic.

It might be the case that music critics are more cowardly than they used to be…but I find these other dynamics more usefully explanatory.

And if a publication like Pitchfork decides to paywall their criticism—as they did earlier this month—people often focus on the information readers will lose, and not the income that writers have already lost, and continue to lose, without paywalls and other durable revenue streams:

It’s hard. I don’t know how to resolve the conflict between Information wants to be free and Writers deserve to be paid. But it’s worth noting that the internet of yesteryear, where almost every article was free to read, was also the internet that drastically reduced the value of highly researched, carefully argued writing. That internet helped shape our contemporary attentional landscape, full of bad work, underpaid artists, and antisocial incentives for content creators.

Nostalgia is not a strategy

We should be cautious about idealizing the early, paywall-free internet. But we should also be cautious about idealizing the 20th century. Yes, it offered a better economic model for journalism and criticism. Yes, it was replete with artistic movements (in the first 25 years of the century, as W. David Marx notes, already included ‘fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, Dada, de Stijl, and surrealism’).

But what can nostalgia do for us in the 21st century? Not much, I think, and I don’t have much patience for people plaintively trying to resuscitate an old world. One of the earliest paragraphs I wrote for my Asterisk essay—which I retained, with only minor edits, in the final draft—was this one:

I feel impatient, though, when I encounter yet another essay that pines after the past. Yes, if only we could return to that world — where newspapers raked in ad revenue; where rent was cheap in lower Manhattan; where there were thousands of journalism jobs across the country — then maybe American criticism could be great again. But we can’t revive the past, any more than leftists can bring back postwar trade unions in a globalized economy, or conservatives can bring back 1950s-style traditional marriages in a world where more women have bachelor’s degrees than men.

The economist and PM of Canada, Mark Carney, made a similar point—in relation to geopolitics—at a speech last week in Davos:

And the old order…was it really so ideal? The benefits of the past were unevenly distributed, to put it politely. My mother was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, the same year Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel was published. He spent the next few years living off his book advances and royalties; my mother was sheltering from American bombs. The 1990s were when George Saunders went from MFA graduate to celebrated literary star; but it was also the decade where 4 performance artists had their NEA grants cancelled for depicting sexual themes in their work. All of the artists identified as gay, or incorporated the AIDS crisis into their work. How could they not, when gay artists, writers, and intellectuals were dying in droves—and countless elected officials ignored them?7

The old media ecosystem had higher wages, it’s true; it was also a highly restricted professional landscape that only some could enter into. Artists and writers face different challenges, and different opportunities, each decade. I was thinking of all this when I wrote one of the final paragraphs of my Asterisk piece:

I refuse to believe that more participation leads to a degraded cultural ecosystem. We can’t go back to the past, but that may be a good thing; there were millions of people who were denied full access to the cultural sphere because of their gender or race or sexuality. People who would have never made it into the inner sanctum of American culture — even at a defiantly countercultural publication like the Voice — can now, for the first time in history, publish from anywhere and reach an audience everywhere.

The future is just around the corner

Time, as noted, ‘only moves in one relentless direction.’ The future of art and literature won’t be found by resurrecting the past—though learning from the past is always useful.

In an earlier draft of my essay, I wrote:

We’re already living in interesting times. I’d like to live in artistically interesting times, too.

If we assume—as my Asterisk essay argues—that artistic innovation requires adequate-to-beneficient economic conditions for artists—then how can we develop them? Lately, I’ve started to think that there are 2 3 fronts for this problem:

• Defending against, and avoid, the degradation of existing conditions. Advocate for higher wages from existing publications. Unionize. Collectively bargain for better pay and benefits. This is essential, and when it comes to criticism and journalism, organizations like the Freelance Solidarity Project play an essential role. That’s why I signed onto their statement on industry-wide cuts to criticism, alongside many writers I’ve admired and read for years. But this isn’t enough, I think, to significantly alter the economic conditions that artists and writers are operating in today. Which is why, I think, there’s a second front:

• Create new ways for artists to make money. I’ve previously written about how to expand the market for literature (and literary criticism); the intention here is to ensure that more attention and economic resources are drawn into artistic and cultural milieus, so that important work can be adequately resourced, funded, and paid for. I’m also profoundly energized and excited by the work that is doing here. Strickler is a former music critic who founded Kickstarter (which I consider a significant innovation in how creative work is funded), reincorporated the company as a public benefit corporation, and then founded a new company called Metalabel—which has explicitly built in features like revenue sharing to make artistic collaborations more equitable. In 2025, Strickler announced that his new project is developing the legal infrastructure for something called an A-Corp, to offer artists and independent creatives more ways to make money. Strickler and the artist have an excellent podcast where they discuss A-Corps and other ways that artists can earn a living and do ambitious work in the world we actually live in, not in some idealized past:

• Cultivate publics with ambitious, discerning taste. I added this after an insightful comment from :

  Even with better funding models, we still need publics who have the habits to seek out difficult work, reread, tolerate ambiguity, and reward risk. Otherwise new money just amplifies the same attention incentives. So yes to the two fronts you name, and I would add a third: rebuilding the conditions where attention and discernment are actually cultivated.

  Her own newsletter, The Reflective Eye, is an excellent example of how such publics can approach ‘difficult’ art, film, and literature.

The work will happen anyway

A few weeks after I filed my final draft, I came across an essay by the writer Apoorva Tadepalli in , where she writes about literary careerism and the difficulties of a writing life.

The difficulties are numerous—as I’ve spent the last 7,000 words exploring—and yet. Writers write. Artists make art. The work happens anyway. Why? ‘Here’s the thing,’ Tadepalli says:

We (by which I mean writers who are early-career, low-paid, freelance, unknown, whatever) know all about nepotism and backdoor agreements. We know about exploitation, about agonizing over concealing just how desperate we are, about holding our own in negotiating our rates if we even have the privilege to negotiate. We know about having a million side gigs. We know about spending so much time on a five-hundred-dollar article that we can’t bear to try to calculate how much we made per hour of work. And it doesn’t matter to us. It’s frustrating and tiresome, and it matters in the way student debt and seven years earning minimum wage matter, making a difference to where we live and how we eat and what we do at night. But it does not matter to the fact of our actual writing, to the fact that we write, to the thoughts we wrestle with when we read books and try to translate those thoughts into words on a page…We gripe in our support groups, but we still write. We know all the reasons and more why the writing life isn’t worth it, and clearly none of them really matter because we still write.

Artistic work still happens, even in dispiriting economic and cultural conditions. But the counterfactual still plagues me. Maybe we could have more work, better work, work from more of society, representing more subjectivities—if we could only organize and innovate our way to better conditions.

That’s the challenge of the coming decades, and it’s a difficult one, but I think it’s exciting to face difficult challenges, and see if we are worthy of them—no? Digital technologies have largely solved the distribution problem for creatives; but they have not yet solved the monetization problem.

I wouldn’t have the interests I have, nor the opportunities to pursue them, nor the friends and interlocutors and collaborators to work with, without the internet. I want to know if a better internet is possible. Let’s find out together.

Four recent favorites

The only gourmand (perfume) I’ve ever loved ✦✧ Energetic, dreamy breakbeat from a South Korean producer ✦✧ ‘Nothing is happening in San Francisco’ ✦✧ Mia Forrest’s ikebana collages

The only gourmand I’ve ever loved ✦

I line-edited this newsletter while wearing Saffron Flour—a lovely, indulgent fragrance from indie perfumer Courtney Rafuse’s Universal Flowering. I bought the 13-scent discovery set a few weeks ago

I love the smell of saffron—the intoxicating collision between a densely sweet, spicy, cut through with the bright, heady grassy freshness that gives saffron a kind of unusually striking pungency. I got a sample of Baccarat Rouge 540 partly for the saffron, but.

But I prefer the even-temperedness of Universal Flowering’s Saffron Flour—the earliest notes feel more pristine and bright, and the scent settles down into a smooth, gentle lactonic sweetness (whereas Baccarat Rouge 540 becomes almost stiflingly sweet at the end).

Energetic, dreamy breakbeat from a South Korean producer ✦

In 2024, my new year’s resolution was to have an anti-algorithmic year of music discovery. As I wrote in my newsletter:

Some of this is a reaction to hitting peak Spotify: it’s no longer interesting to see what Spotify wants me to Discover, Weekly—especially when it’s reflected back to me, in my end-of-year Wrapped, as a supposedly privileged insight into my taste.

In the last 2 years, I’ve mostly discovered music through friends like . His newsletter about the best electronic music of 2025 introduced me to the infinitely exciting, ebullient, exuberant South Korean producer Yetsuby. Here’s my favorite track from her debut album 4EVA:

The writer (who writes an experimental/electronic music newsletter called ) also wrote a great review of the album 4EVA in Pitchfork:

Seoul producer Yetsuby’s music…is a jumble of brightly colored baubles: marbles and beach glass, sequins and gumdrops, all spun into mesmerizingly symmetrical abstractions. You might be momentarily reminded of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Steve Reich, ’90s ambient, and fantastical video-game soundtracks, yet the references float by so gently and swiftly that you’re too swept up in the downy tumult to think too closely about them…

“Aestheti-Q” rides a brisk, syncopated drum pattern and a barrage of monosyllabic vocal samples fashioned into a hiccuping arpeggio…what stands out [in the album] is the high-def quality of her production…Crystalline sounds come in waves, a gentle juggernaut of prismatic streamers and laser zaps—Jersey club reimagined as a geyser of diamonds.

Mia Forrest’s cut-and-woven ikebana collages ✦

The Australian artist Mia Forrest’s ‘Cut Flowers’ project uses images from Shōzō Satō’s 1966 book, The Art of Arranging Flowers: A Complete Guide to Japanese Ikebana, and transforms them using a precise cutting-and-weaving technique:

‘Nothing is happening in San Francisco’ ✦

Earlier this year, the esteemed San Francisco–based publisher McSweeney’s posted a screenshot on Instagram:

Nothing is happening in San Francisco. All the artists are dead. There are no books being made here. The world’s best bookstores are not here. There are no readings, no music venues, no art galleries, no libraries, no orchestras, no museums, no festivals that involve pianos in botanical flower gardens, and no food. There are definitely not poetry readings or theaters or handmade modernist saunas with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. There is absolutely no culture. Don’t even think about moving, or even visiting, here. It’s really terrible. If you do come, you will regret it. If you already live here, like we do, our sincere condolences.

This cheeky narrative of decline was meant to announce San Francisco is Dead, a calendar of literary, film, art, and music events in the city.

I recommend this March performance at The Lab (tickets are free!) featuring the artist and experimental music performer Evicshen, who I’ve written about before—

— and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, who did the sound design for a performance involving the poet Claudia Rankine’s work a few years ago. (Here’s a New York Times article about it.)

If you’ve made it to the end of this newsletter, I’m touched. There are thousands of posts you could be reading, instead of mine—thank you for your attention and time! And if you enjoyed this post, please share it with a friend:

I’ll be back in your inbox shortly with everything i read in january 2026, feat. mini-reviews of James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners, the Chinese philosophical classic Zhuangzi, Sarah Schulman’s new book on community and solidarity, and effusive praise for a very good, very new self-help book!

In 2025, I devoted my hours to reading: 80 books in total, including novels, nonfiction, academic monographs, and the stray poetry collection. I don’t read because I’m trying to be a more intelligent, interesting, virtuous person—though books are sometimes helpful in cultivating those traits! Instead, I read because it’s one of the most enjoyable things I could be doing with my attention. An evening alone with a book is restorative and rewarding; an evening alone with my phone, less so.

So if your new year’s resolution is to scroll less and read more, here’s a suggestion. ‘Stop trying so hard to turn yourself into a better person,’ Burkeman writes, ‘and focus instead on actually leading a more absorbing life.’ Chastising yourself for your habitual phone addiction won’t help you change; consciously choosing new activities might:

A much more reliable way to stay offline is just to be doing things so engaging that it wouldn’t occur to you to drift online in the first place. On the few magical days in 2025 that I realised I’d forgotten where my phone even was, it was because I’d become so immersed in reading or writing or conversation or nature that the thought of it had left my mind entirely.

This newsletter is an invitation to immerse yourself in reading—with recommendations for the best books, essays, and poems I read in 2025. The ‘best’ of anything is, of course, deeply subjective and inherently personal, but I hope some of my choices will speak to you—and can be part of a 2026 devoted to reading books, not feeds. Below:

• Best novels (for getting back into reading; facing tragedy with humor; and understanding contemporary life)

• Best nonfiction (for understanding the history of design, our technological present, and how to handle political differences)

• Best essays

• Best poems

• Best books that defy description (fiction? memoir? essays? poems? other?)

Need more recommendations? I read 110 books in 2024, and 93 books in 2023. My favorites were—

Best novels

4 novels with incredible velocity

If you’re getting back into a reading routine, the best books to read are the ones that require very little effort. They’re not lazy reads, but they are exceptionally easy reads—because you’re drawn in from the first few pages, and ensnared until the very end.

• Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men (1995, 200 pages), a dystopian novella about a young girl who has spent her entire life imprisoned among other women. If you’ve read and loved Susanna Clarke’s sublime Piranesi—Harpman’s novel is just as compulsively readable and uncanny. I wrote about the novel’s unexpected popularity on Tiktok back in June.

• Paula Bomer’s The Stalker (2025, 260 pages), about a revoltingly egocentric man and his attempts to exploit women for sex, money, housing, drugs. Mentioned in my July/August newsletter. Read this if you’re obsessed with sugar baby stories and want the gender-swapped version. Also recommended by my friend , who notes: ‘Bomer has an incredible way of managing pace—by the last chapter, time is moving faster than you can read.’

• Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005, 290 pages), which none other than Zadie Smith described as ‘one of the great English novels of the past ten years’ when it was first published. Here’s how I described it in my September newsletter:

  Imagine you’re a man who has enough money (£8.5 million, to be precise) to never have to work again. Imagine, also, that you received this money…after experiencing a traumatic injury that left you bedridden for months and with much of your memory erased. What would you do with your life? Well, if you’re the protagonist of Remainder…you hire an abnormally competent right-hand man named Naz and start orchestrating extremely complex reenactments of certain scenes—half-remembered, actual, fictional—involving paid actors and purpose-built settings. What kinds of scenes? Oh, you know, shootings and bank robberies; nothing major.

• David Szalay’s Flesh (2025, 370 pages), which I read after glowing praise from Brandon Taylor, , and again. (It also won the Booker Prize this year, which was judged by the celebrated actress Sarah Jessica Parker, the Irish writer Roddy Doyle, and others.) In my July/August newsletter, I described it as ‘A propulsive rags-to-riches story of a young man, István, who gets caught up in other people’s plans…and dragged through different social and economic classes in Hungary and London.’ Another novel for anyone obsessed with the fantasy—and grim realities—of marrying up.

Looking for shorter (and more sexually frank) books? Try—

4 novels that are funny and tragic

2025 was not a good year, geopolitically (and maybe also personally, although I won’t pry into your affairs). 2026 might be the same. If you’re looking for novels that blend catharsis and levity, misery and hope—these are a good start:

• Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s Mirages of the Mind (1990), translated from Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, is a novel about British colonialism, religious conflict, and displacement that is mostly really, really funny. Set in post-partition Pakistan, and featuring an enormous cast of extremely memorable characters, the novel reads like a standup routine—where the jokes are about Mughal dynastic succession, ghazal poetry, and the mysterious gendered nouns in Urdu. Here’s how one character, a larger-than life lumber seller named Qibla, is described:

  No matter how rational or straightforward you were, he would be sure to refute whatever you said. He considered it unbecoming to agree with anyone. He started each sentence with ‘no.’ One day I said, ‘It’s really cold today.’ He said, ‘No, tomorrow will be colder’…If an unfortunate customer happened to show up [at his shop], he would thunder at him and drive him away. Yet the customer would have to come back. That was because nowhere else in Kanpur could you find such good lumber. He said, ‘I never sell bad wood. Wood shouldn’t be blemished. Blemishes are becoming only on lovers and teenagers’…He didn’t particularly like poetry. He couldn’t stand free verse. Someone said that free verse is like a tennis game without a net, and that person is probably right…In his last days, he was a recluse and a misanthrope; he left the house only to walk in his enemies’ funeral processions.

  The novel’s structure feels a bit like traditional oral storytelling: it’s highly digressive and leaps from one character’s life story to the next. One of the more nostalgic–sentimental passages is excerpted in Caravan, which describes the novel as follows:

  Vladimir Nabokov called Proust’s enormous novel sequence In Search Of Lost Time “a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding-place the past.” Something of the same quest is enacted in this excerpt from the great Pakistani writer Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s novel Mirages of the Mind.

• Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers (2022/2025), translated from Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, is a novel about a French poet-programmer who becomes obsessed with using his computer to generate literature. In 2025, many, many people addressed the question of What AI Will Do To Literature, but I think Ismailov’s novel—as I wrote in my September newsletter—is

  one of the most original, sideways explorations of how AI will affect literary authorship and innovation.

  In We Computers, the protagonist sometimes laments the lack of romance in his life, but it’s fundamentally a very cheerful, inquisitive novel—because he ends up infatuated with Persian poetry instead. I was so impressed! And I’d like to read more Ismailov in 2026—the esteemed posters of the World Literature Forum are such fans.

• Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium (2022/2024), translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is about a sensitive young man staying at a sanatorium in the mountains to recover from tuberculosis. It’s Tokarczuk’s remake of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Lloyd-Jones’s translation is just so charming—the novel feels like a cheerfully pastoral story of a young boy finding his place in the world. But there are both overt and covert dangers: unexpected deaths, curiously foreboding passages narrated by a mysterious primeval presence, and the chauvinism of a pre-WWI Europe. I wrote a longer summary—and quoted some of the loveliest passages in the book—in last January’s newsletter.

• Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed (2013) is a novel about dignified living under intolerable conditions. For Ruth, a schoolteacher and single mother, the intolerable conditions—aside from a genteel level of penury—come from her daughter Eleanor’s heroin addiction. When Eleanor gets pregnant, Ruth ends up becoming the primary caretaker for her granddaughter, Lily—and while their close relationship helps in managing the contaminating shame and difficulty of Eleanor’s addiction, the novel makes it clear that salvation isn’t total. In my October/November newsletter, I wrote that ‘This is a novel about adult life, which means it’s a novel about the wavering reparations we can make for the past.’ It’s amazing how carefully optimistic, and even lighthearted, the novel can feel—even though it’s tragic and painful and will almost certainly make you cry. My longtime friend also wrote about Loved and Missed here.

Would you rather read some straight-up depressing novels? Try—

3 novels about the contemporary condition

The present! It’s full of difficulty and misery and excitement and agony! The great themes of literature—sex, romance, love, money, status, insecurity, fame, and envy—appear in every decade’s novels. But if you want these themes depicted in more familiar settings, try these novels:

• Eva Baltasar’s Permafrost (2018), translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches, is a very funny novel about typically depressing topics: a young woman’s lesbian romantic langour; feeling distant from her (very heterosexual) family, and persistent suicidal ideation.

• Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds (2025) is an impeccably written Künstlerroman about two young Black women pursuing artistic careers in very white, very moneyed settings: first at a liberal arts college on the east coast, where they both receive scholarships, and then in ‘90s NYC. This is astonishingly well-written; I almost can’t believe this is Wambugu’s first novel, since it feels so artistically mature and fully realized.

  More on the novel (and the incredible dynamism and interpersonal insight in Wambugu’s writing) in my October/November newsletter.

• Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025) is also a Künstlerroman about a young person trying to become an artist. But the novel begins on a more satirical and cynical note than Lonely Crowds. In Dubno’s book, the narrator is trying to escape a claustrophobic circle of art-world friends who are status-conscious, shallow, and self-obsessed. Unfortunately, she ends up trapped at a memorial service–slash–dinner party with everyone she’d trying to distance herself from. Happiness and Love is explicitly inspired by Thomas Bernhard, but Dubno’s great accomplishment is that she transmits the deep idealism at the core of Bernhard’s novels—not just the surface-level disgust with society. More on Dubno’s novel in my October/November newsletter; I also found myself delivering a spirited defense of it on a dance floor at 7 AM on Halloween weekend…that’s true dedication to literature.

Best nonfiction

The best nonfiction books, I think, are written by people who really cherish novels—and draw from all the typically novelistic techniques of descriptive scene-setting, carefully deployed dialogue, and the overarching awareness that what people need is a story, not just a sequence of facts:

• Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025) has already received a great deal of praise, and I included a 500-word summary of the best ideas (and nonfiction writing techniques!) in my October/November newsletter. In brief: a well-researched, elegantly written book about China’s quest for scientific, technological, and economic dominance over the past few decades. I loved Wang’s concept of ‘process knowledge,’ and it’s a useful way of understanding how expertise—in design and technology especially—is transmitted.

• Michael Chanan’s From Printing to Streaming: Cultural Production under Capitalism (2022) is, as I wrote in my October/November newsletter:

  …a book of Marxist cultural analysis for people who find such books particularly stifling…and has the immodest goal of serving as a history of cultural production, authorship, copyright, and monetization—in literature, music, and cinema—from the 15th century to the present day (though Chanan largely focuses on the 18th century onwards).

  It’s magisterial in scope, occasionally humorous, and only has 5 ratings on Goodreads! This, to me, is an outrage; it’s such an excellent book.

• Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2013). Alexeivich is an investigative journalist and Nobel literature laureate, and Secondhand Time is an oral history book about the disintegration of the Soviet Union that draws together a number of touching, funny, heartbreaking stories of ‘history running roughshod over people’s lives,’ as I wrote in my July/August newsletter.

• Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture (2024) is an effervescent and entertaining oral history of the renowned alt-weekly newspaper, the Village Voice. In a review essay I wrote for , I suggested that:

  The Village Voice was, essentially, the Bell Labs of cultural criticism. Both institutions were founded in New York City…Both were tremendously innovative in their respective fields: The researchers at Bell Labs invented the transistor, the programming language C, UNIX, and the discipline of information theory. The editors and writers of the Voice, meanwhile, were early advocates of influential musical genres (rock music, disco, hip-hop) and ideas (auteur theory in film) — all in the pioneering style of New Journalism, where literary techniques were used to produce criticism and reportage steeped in subjective experience. Alt-weeklies like the Voice, observed its former executive editor Kit Rachlis, showed that “writing about culture was an extraordinarily important thing … to cover, write about, report on, think about, analyze.” And the Voice’s writers weren’t just tastemakers; they also shaped the American political landscape, covering Trump’s early property dealings, judicial corruption, the nascent feminist movement, the AIDS crisis, and ACT UP.

• Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989) is one of the great works of American pragmatism. It’s 50% philosophy, 50% literary criticism, and proposes how—despite the epistemic difficulties of articulating what real, ethical liberal politics might look like—we can still find a way to reduce cruelty in the world and deepen our understanding of other people’s subjective experiences. It’s hard to describe, but Rorty’s book really moved me—and it’s shaping the kind of intellectual work I want to do in 2026. I’d like to write more about it; for now, you can read this excellent essay by on Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Scialabba’s forthcoming book, The Sealed Envelope: Towards an Intelligent Utopia, has even more on Rorty—and other thinkers like Christopher Lasch and Barbara Ehrenreich.

Best essays

I try my best to read books on my commute, but sometimes it’s easier to stare at my phone. Essays are perfect in these situations: shorter (so you can finish them before arriving at work!) and just as intellectually rigorous, complex, elegantly written, and exciting.

Here are 14 of my favorite essays published in 2025—in magazines like , , , , but also in Substack newsletters by great novelists/critics/intellectuals:

• ’s ‘Left-Wing Irony’ in The Point (February), which has an exceptional analysis of right-wing irony and left-wing failures (both electorally and stylistically) to combat it:

  How should the left counter right-wing irony, if not by adopting the same destructive rhetorical strategies as Trump, or else slipping back into its own contemptuous habits?…But there are, happily, other options. In particular, other types of irony. A more productive left-wing irony might be rooted not in the ideological certainty of the smug critic—the “know-all” irony of Benjamin’s “spiritual elite”—but in ideological humility. The irony, that is, of holding two thoughts in mind at once: my experience, and yours.

• ’s ‘Alt Lit’ in The Point (February), which performs a close reading of the ‘cool and possibly evil scene’ that is alt lit. (‘Alternative to what?’ Kriss asks.)

• Sally Rooney’s ‘Angles of Approach’ in the NYRB (March), about talent, excellence, and snooker.

• ’s ‘Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science’ in Wired (March), about the open-access repository that makes scientific research easier to access and share:

  Visit arXiv.org today (it’s pronounced like “archive”) and you’ll still see its old-school Web 1.0 design,…But arXiv’s unassuming facade belies the tectonic reconfiguration it set off in the scientific community. If arXiv were to stop functioning, scientists from every corner of the planet would suffer an immediate and profound disruption…For scientists, imagining a world without arXiv is like the rest of us imagining one without public libraries or GPS.

• Vivian Gornick’s ‘The 176-Year Argument’ in the NYRB (April), on the City College of New York, ‘the first tuition-free school of higher learning in the country’:

  We were the children of tailors, shopkeepers, factory workers; accountants, bakers, dress cutters; clerks, milkmen, bus drivers…And there you had City College: unworldliness eclipsed by the insights of lived experience…a writer who had taught at two posh schools and then at City College said, “At Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?”

• ’s ‘some essays on how to write essays’ in her newsletter (July):

  My best advice when it comes to choosing a subject: nothing is irrelevant. History is a continuum in which everything is irrevocably enmeshed, and the system of relations is by its very nature infinite…If you’re a good writer, you can make anything interesting and the only way to become a good writer in this vein is to write about everything, even if you think you won’t be good at it, because the only way to become good at something is to do it. So goes, unfortunately, the tautology of practice.

• ’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness’ in the NY Review of Architecture (August). An investigation into the horrors of artificial lighting, from the 19th century to present:

• ’s ‘Attention is All We Need: On Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines’ in 3 Quarks Daily:

• Ismail Ibrahim’s ‘House Arab’ in Bidoun (September), about working at the New Yorker as the magazine’s only Arabic-speaking fact-checker during the genocide in Gaza. Also excerpted in Harper’s.

• ’s ‘The Death of Cool’ in his newsletter (September):

  A defining characteristic of 2020s New York culture is that the performance of being an artist has taken precedence over the production of art. The ingenuity of contemporary artists, their capacity for imagination, mystery, and style, is channeled into the creation of appearances, vibes, and happenings, of suggested bohemian worlds, rather than the fabrication of free-standing works of visual, literary, or musical art.

• ’s ‘The China Tech Canon’ in Asterisk (October) on the philosophers, historians, and novelists read by Chinese technologists:

  Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem has become for China what Asimov’s Foundation was for the United States: a literary scaffolding for thinking about technology, geopolitics, and the fate of civilizations…[The] novels minted phrases that have since entered China’s everyday political and business lexicon…treating Liu’s cosmic metaphors as diagnostic tools for China’s entrepreneurial reality.

• Daniel Kolitz’s ‘The Goon Squad’ in Harper’s (November). An anthropological examination of…well.

  Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money…abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

• Amia Srinivasan’s ‘The Impossible Patient’ in the LRB (December) on the history of psychonanalysis and how it emerged from ‘an aestheticised culture of feeling and self-cultivation that resulted from political paralysis.’

  Despite more than a century of debate about the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident…You may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture…But can we doubt that there is more, much more, to our individual and collective lives than that of which we are consciously aware? Do we doubt that each of us encounters reality not directly, but through the thicket of our individual psychic realities, with their stubborn frames and secret desires, the vast sediment of our past histories?

• ’s ‘The Horror of the Husband,’ in his newsletter (December), which offers an elegant typology of literary novels:

  If you wanted to be irritating, you could distill the history of the modern literary novel down to two characters whose infidelities drive each to suicide. Even better is their polarity: one is tragic, the other comic; and ever after we have Anna novels or Emma novels — a beautiful and bereft mother sobbing as she throws herself on to the brutal tracks of modernity; and a bloated, bankrupt philistine puking up arsenic while a villager sings a vulgar tune…The previous century belonged to Anna stories — Cheever, Updike, and Salter are the most obvious examples — but our own is an Emma era: Franzen’s Joey Berglund digging through his own shit to retrieve a wedding ring; or, more recently, Ada Calhoun’s Crush, in which a husband’s forthright “wouldn’t it be hot if you kissed other men” unwittingly unravels their marriage.

Want to read more great essays (and learn how to write them, too)? Try—

Best poetry

People tend to have very polarized feelings about poetry. It’s too inaccessible, too difficult to ‘get’; or it’s too intimate, soppy, unsubtle. But the more poetry I read, the more I feel that there’s a poem for every person—and a poem for every minor variation of feeling in your life.

My feelings tend towards cautious nostalgia, obscure forms of sadness, intellectualization/abstraction, and total immersion in artistic experience. If this description appeals to you, here are 8 poems I fell in love with last year:

• Hua Xi’s ‘A Table’ in the New Yorker (2025), which begins:

  I was trying to measure my mother’s sadness with a very long ruler.

  She talked at me from one end of a sentence.

  A sentence the length of a table.

  Everything I say to my mother begins so far away.

  In Athens. Under fruiting olives. On Plato’s ideal table.

  Just now, I set my glasses down on a thousand-year-old idea.

  I’m always moved by by the unguardedness of Xi’s poetry—there is a beautiful candor and vulnerability to a line that simply says: Everything I say to my mother begins so far away. The language feels so literal, so transparent, that I’m caught off-guard by Just now, I set my glasses down on a thousand-year-old idea: the verbs and nouns pin down abstract concepts (‘ideas,’ ‘Plato’) and make them memorably concrete.

• ’s ‘Parlor Hour’ in The Yale Review (2025), which is very brief, very expressive:

  I prefer windows to mirrors. To see

  at once where I am and not.

  I’ve been subscribed to Krishnan’s newsletter for some time, but hadn’t read this poem until she sent out her end-of-year email. For anyone who’s beginning 2026 a little self-conscious about their age, and self-conscious about what they haven’t accomplished, Krishnan has some encouraging words:

  I’m not sad to be older…I used to impose personal timelines for my achievements, impossible ones, and tear myself apart for missing them: novel by 16, marathon by 18, PhD by 25, etc. Of course, none of it happened. But no more of that. I want only to make use of my time…to wake up with something to do, and go to sleep with something done. Even if it’s almost nothing to anyone else. All that matters is what it is to me.

• Éireann Lorsung’s ‘Simile’ from Pattern-book (2025). Lorsung was born in Minneapolis and is now a writing professor in Dublin. The poem begins:

  How does a simile work?
  — Place something next to something
  and say, here. (The here is where
  the somethings touch.) The rainy
  night, like Debussy…

  I’m drawn to ‘Simile’ because I have that typically modernist instinct—I love poems about poetry, paintings about paintings (it’s why I like John Baldessari so much). Thanks to the writer Loré Yessuf for sharing this in her excellent poembutter newsletter.

• Amit Majmudar’s ‘Critical Theory’ in the NYRB (2025), a poem about poems:

  The poem as trick pony rooting in a feed bag full of truth

  The poem as wonder cabinet stocked with whatever was close at hand

  The poem as celestial tinnitus, transmissible as sniffles…
  
  The poem as a 3D printout of a point in time…

  Majmudar’s collection, Things My Grandmother Said, comes out in April.

• Victoria Chang’s ‘The Swan, No. 20 (Hilma af Klint)’ in the NYRB (2025). When I first discovered Chang’s Obit poems—which take the form of newspaper-like obituaries of things like ‘My Mother’s Teeth,’ ‘Memory,’ and ‘Friendships’—I remember thinking: Oh, so this is what contemporary poetry can do! Her poems have this beautiful, introspective hesitancy; you feel the narrator (is it correct to say poems have narrators?) and their thoughts as a live, trembling presence. Here’s how this new poem of hers begins:

  The canvas is flipped from right to left. But the shell is smaller. All morning I thought the shell was the same shell. That it was a seashell. But maybe it’s a snail shell. I knew my placement of the shell on the beach couldn’t have lasted. Now my mind must move. In our lives how many things are like the snail, never thought of?

• ’s ‘Waiting for Your Call’ (2021), which has an extraordinary opening line—I love how easily she evokes the atmosphere that the poem takes place in, using 2 words that aren’t typically used to convey visual information (‘retreat,’ ‘generous’):

  The light retreats and is generous again.
  No you to speak of, anywhere—neither in vicinity nor distance,

  so I look at the blue water, the snowy egret, the lace of its feathers
  shaking in the wind, the lake—no, I am lying.

  There are no egrets here, no water. Most of the time,
  my mind gnaws on such ridiculous fictions…

  For the Proust fans, Aber has two poems that touch on him: ‘Zelda Fitzgerald’ (the first Aber poem I read!) and ‘Afghan Funeral in Paris.’

• Muriel Rukeyser’s poem from Speed of Darkness (1968), which I first read in Yessuf’s poembutter newsletter. Though it was written several decades ago, it feels uncomfortably familiar now—I’m writing this after a morning spent reading about Caracas, Minneapolis, Portland, Tehran:

  I lived in the first century of world wars.

  Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

  The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

  The news would pour out of various devices

  Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

  I would call my friends on other devices;

  They would be more or less mad for similar reasons…

• All the poems in Ruth Krauss’s There’s a little ambiguity over there among the bluebells (1968 as well—clearly a year of great poetic interest to me!), which I wrote about in June, but especially this one:

I’m looking forward to a spring filled with poetry! I have a copy of David Gorin’s To a Distant Country waiting for me at my childhood home in California, and a few other collections in the mail.

Best books that defy description

Not novels. Not nonfiction. Not poetry. But some special fourth thing—3 books that are sublimely evocative, artistically innovative, and deeply enjoyable to read:

• Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (2025) was my main companion during the 2 weeks I was sick with Covid and could barely crawl out of bed. Thankfully, the renowned Australian writer is almost effortless to read—her diaries are full of compelling and instantly memorable descriptions of people in her lives (or strangers on the street). A deeply rewarding read, especially if you’re trying to carve out time in your life for a literary or artistic practice:

• Karen An-hwei Lee’s The Maze of Transparencies (2019) is a novel about society after the collapse of a cloud-computing surveillance state. I read it on the recommendation of my friend/flatmate (and also a profoundly fascinating writer) Philip, and in my October/November newsletter, I offered a brief plot summary:

  Yang is a former data scientist (of a kind) who now tends to a very Berkeley Bowl–esque garden and calculates everything using his family’s jade abacus. It’s a charming post-computing fable, narrated by one of the clouds that Yang used to log into, Penny (short for Penelope the Predictive Panoply of People’s Data). In between stories of Yang’s encounters with various strangers, Penny broods over the technically advanced (but politically corrupt) past, and the strangely low-tech present…You’ll either love or hate this book. I loved it: the worldbuilding is lovely and strange and charming; and as a Californian, I tend to enjoy books that exuberantly pilfer nouns from the health-food aisle.

  And here’s one of the poems in Lee’s novel:

• Rainald Goetz’s Rave (1998/2020), translated from German by , is the original first-person rave retelling. In my October/November newsletter, I wrote that:

  There’s an art to writing about raving; the best works distill the phenomenological (and insistently embodied) feeling of the dancefloor (and, sometimes, the drugs that might accompany the experience) into prose. Not all of it can be distilled, of course—reading about a party is no replacement for being there yourself. But Rave gets close…the book—sharp, funny, cogent—moves nicely between the intellectual and the insistently sensorial…And West’s translation has real velocity and flow to it—transmitting the ebb and flow of the narrator’s journey from party to party, city to city, nighttime to daylight.

  Sick of raves? Sick of rave writing? Here’s a quote to convince you that Goetz’s book is worth a look:

Now that I’ve discussed the 19 books, 14 essays, and 8 poems that I fell in love with last year…I’ll leave you with one final recommendation:

Take your reading life seriously! Take yourself—your mind, your interests, your passions, your intellect—as seriously as possible. If life is richer when you’re online, you don’t have to escape the internet; instead, you can use the internet to deepen your literary experiences. But if you feel that life might be more rewarding with a little less time staring at a screen, then I hope you’ll turn towards some of the books I’ve shared.

If you end up reading any of my recommendations, please let me know! And thank you for spending some of the finite time of your life reading my newsletter. Wishing you a beautiful January and a promising start to 2026.

But in early December, I seized upon a sudden, capricious urge to start a newsletter—drafting my first post on a Wednesday evening after work—and once I’d sent my first email, it was easier to continue writing. That was my first strategy: to begin my resolutions in December, unburdened by the cumbersome weight of the new year.

A few weeks later, while drafting the usual new year’s resolutions—scroll less, read more, call my parents every week—I came up with a second strategy: to offer myself the generous buffer of a two-year goal, instead of compressing all the changes I wanted to make into 12 months. As I wrote in my journal,

What…might be possible in 2 years? What if I seriously, very very very seriously, commit to my literary practice?…

It typically takes me 2 years of unrelenting but highly diverting & pleasurable obsession to become really, really good at something & make it a part of my life. To turn it into something that seems to come naturally to me…so that’s what I’m doing now.

I decided I would write one newsletter a week, and do it for two years before quitting. That meant 2 years of consistent writing, even if no one was reading. As my longtime subscribers know, the weekly schedule fell apart almost immediately; after the first 3 months, I went from one newsletter a week to one every 2 weeks, or longer. (Earlier this year, when I was grieving a friend’s death and a breakup, I didn’t post anything for 5 weeks.)

But I kept on writing. On December 9, two years after sending my first newsletter, I was quoted in Jay Caspian Kang’s weekly column for the New Yorker, where he described me as a writer “who publishes heady critical essays on Substack.”

The New Yorker

If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?

Each week, our editors select a New Yorker story for you to read: something timely, something important, or something unexpected—or, even, perhaps, all three. To support journalism like this, consider subscribing…

Read more

5 months ago · 80 likes · 14 comments · The New Yorker

It was an unexpected and deeply gratifying way to celebrate two years of writing . And in a year where writers are justifiably distressed by the dawn of a post-literate society, a brain rot without borders, and ChatGPT-induced cognitive decline, the success of this newsletter seems especially improbable. Concretely: I write a newsletter about literary criticism with over 30,000 readers, who have chosen to receive 4,000 to 10,000–word emails discussing books by independent presses (including Fitzcarraldo, New Directions, NYRB Classics, And Other Stories) and university presses (including MIT Press and Yale University Press), alongside literary fiction and nonfiction from Big 5 publishers.

Writing this newsletter has convinced me that there is an immense hunger for intellectually stimulating, challenging content—in spite of the internet’s tendency to elevate clickbait and slop. The 3 most popular newsletters I’ve ever published are about:

• Research as a leisure activity (and why it’s worth pursuing outside of academia)

• Close readings of essays published in New Yorker, Bookforum, n+1, and Harper’s

• The case for reading Marcel Proust’s 3,000-page modernist novel, In Search of Lost Time1

These are all subjects that, according to conventional wisdom, should only have a niche audience. But it turns out that the audience for this writing—alongside my other posts on self-deception, conceptual metaphors, and the philosophy of aspiration—is much larger than I expected.

And my readers—generous, intelligent, discursive, insightful—have also surprised me. They include literary critics and English professors, as you might expect, but also venture capitalists, startup founders, quantitative researchers. People have subscribed after seeing my newsletter featured on the front page of Hacker News; the literary magazine Lapham’s Quarterly’s link roundups; the economics blog Marginal Revolution; and the Indonesian-Irish influencer Moya Mawhinney’s YouTube channel. And many of my readers are young! Despite all the handwringing about Gen Z’s screentime, many of them are collectively ditching their phones for book clubs and literary readings instead.

Writing this newsletter has given me an “appealingly contrarian” perspective, as Kang observed in his column, on how the internet has influenced our intellectual lives. We may be living through a decline in literacy and the death of the humanities—but every time I send a newsletter out into the world, I hear from people who are committed to taking art, literature and ideas seriously, despite what our phones are doing to our attention spans.

After 2 years, I’m convinced that reading and writing are the most dignified and worthy activities that anyone can do—and, in fact, are activities that everyone should do. Below, some reflections on:

• How writing can change your intellectual and social life—and even your sense of self

• In defense of performative reading (and how to turn the literacy crisis around)

• Advice and recommendations for starting your own newsletter

I wrote about my first year of newsletter writing in—

How to change your life (by writing on the internet)

When I began writing this newsletter, I was 29, living in San Francisco, and working for the software company Notion. At the time, these seemed like inauspicious conditions for a writing practice—I had this vague, barely-conscious belief that writers were Ivy League humanities majors who, upon moving to NYC after graduation, immediately landed a journalism or media job—thanks to a coveted magazine internship the summer before, or well-connected writer friends. I had none of these things. Surely this meant that I couldn’t write?

Two years later, I’m 31, living in London, and still working in tech—at a climate startup called Watershed.2 I’ve written 51 newsletters, along with book reviews for The Atlantic, ArtReview, Asterisk, Asymptote, The Believer, the Cleveland Review of Books, and the LA Review of Books.3 I do all this on weekends, Monday mornings, Thursday evenings. In cafés, in bed, in the kitchen while the oven is preheating, in a conference room ten minutes before my first meeting.

You don’t need to quit your day job (or have a “dream job”)

I used to think that I didn’t have enough time to write unless I had an entire day free. But it turns out that you can steal away little slivers of time from an ordinary day, and devote those miscellaneous seconds to writing, and get a lot of work done.

My best writing (and my best thinking) happens when I have hours to sprawl out and shepherd loose ideas into a more coherent shape. But on days when I didn’t have that, I had 5 minutes before work to type out an outline in the Notes app. Or 15 minutes after lunch to line-edit a paragraph. If a friend was running late to dinner, I’d reread drafts on my phone, wincing at the clumsiest sentences, and bolding the parts I wanted to edit later that evening.

After years of wanting to write—and not doing so—I was taken aback by how by how little time it took to finish a newsletter. It turns out, as the technologist wrote, that

Things don’t actually take much time (as measured by a stopwatch); resistance/procrastination does…If no urgency exists, impose some.

My heroically short-lived attempt to post weekly meant that I was always desperate for a newsletter idea. And once I had the idea, I couldn’t be picky—I had to finish it immediately before the next week began. My early newsletters were crudely written, underdeveloped, amateurish. But as Ira Glass, the producer of the renowned radio show This American Life, famously observed:

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not…your work disappoints you. You gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

Two months into writing my newsletter, I sent the first everything i read newsletter (which included capsule reviews of books, films, essays and poems) because I had no other ideas. And my weekly post was overdue. I wrote it in bed on a Tuesday evening, laptop propped up on my knees for three hours, and sent it during lunch the next day.

It became a recurring series, and the blithely informal title—which I chose purely because I had no other ideas—has since inspired several other literary Substacks and Instagram accounts.

How it started; how it’s going—

Do what you really want to do now!

Early on, whenever I felt discouraged by my mediocre writing, I would cheer myself up like this. First, I would find a newsletter or blog I admired: stylish, well-written, distinctive in voice and approach. (And popular: they often had thousands of readers.)

Then, I would go into the newsletter’s archives and scroll down to the very first post I could find. It was always more raw, unpolished, and amateurish than the writing I was familiar with. I can’t describe how reassuring this was! I could see how people had become—through persistent and publicly-observable attempts—the writers that I knew and loved.

It does take time to write, and to write well—but that time is measured over months, if not years. I don’t write every day, although I’d like to. But I write almost every day. And I finish my projects. Before, I would put off projects until I was ready—when I had finally attained, in the words of the film critic A.O. Scott, a “state of perfectly cultivated being…once you’ve read everything, then at last you can begin.”

But it’s doing the work that makes you ready. You become capable of writing an essay by writing the essay. You become capable of writing a novel by writing the novel.4 And you can start doing the work now: with a day job, with a 50-minute commute on the overground, without an MFA (or even with an MFA that didn’t fully prepare you—because even an excellent education requires that the education be used, at first clumsily, and then more fluidly, to become truly useful).5

People like to daydream about the writing they’ll do when things are perfect. When they have an easier job, when they get accepted into a residency, when they’ve saved enough money to take a sabbatical. In tech, people will joke that they’re waiting for a life-changing IPO—and then they’ll start writing, painting, making music.

But taking your literary, artistic, and intellectual ambitions seriously—and carving out time for them, in between work, commuting, childcare, stakeholder management, grocery shopping—is one of the most satisfying things you can do. And the reality is that if you don’t start your work now, you won’t have the discipline to do it later. There may be a time in your life when everything is easier. But you need to start closing the gap between your taste and your execution today. Read the book that you’re afraid you can’t understand yet. Write the essay you’re not sure you can pull off. How else will you become capable of it?

Thought daughters, performative reading, and how to turn the literacy crisis around

Writing this newsletter has made me particularly invested in two specific discourses about how people read—and write—today:

• The performative reader. I still can’t tell how often this man (or woman, or they/them) is observed in real life. But in 2025, the idea of a performative reader is highly visible and frequently ridiculed online. “The presumption” behind the meme, as the journalist Alaina Demopoulos wrote in The Guardian, is that people reading conspicuously identifiable books in public are “performing for passersby, signaling they have the taste and attention span to pick up a physical book instead of putting in AirPods.”

  Though in 2025 the performative reader is assumed to be a man, closely associated with this stereotype is the moral panic around hot girls reading and writing in public. See: the glut of celebrity book clubs in 2024. Also see: people mortally offended that , the PC Music–affiliated pop star, had the temerity to start writing on Substack. (Are musical performers not allowed to perform any other virtues?)

• The literacy crisis. “We used to read things in this country,” Noah McCormack lamented recently (and as publisher of The Baffler, it’s an existential threat to his vocation if we stop). But now? In 2024, a few months after I began writing , the theologian and educator Adam Kotsko described a “confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage” with books:

  For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation…Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding…Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience.

  It’s only gotten worse as students have started using LLMs for “reading” and “writing” texts. Earlier this year, the poet and philosopher wrote about the impact that LLMs are having on basic literacy and comprehension (they teach creative writing and philosophy, respectively, at two of the most academically rigorous universities in the country).

Taken together, these crises suggest that we are increasingly fetishizing and aestheticizing the ability to read, at a time when this capacity seems most threatened. Universal literacy is one of the most hard-won victories of educators and activists of the past few centuries; the right to access written language, scholarship, and formal education was highly contested and has only been taken for granted in recent memory.6

And literacy involves more than just accessing what others have written, but having the agency to actually contribute back to the written word. To articulate—from your own subjective, distinctive, and highly contingent experience—what you think about other people’s ideas. To be a participant in the world.

One of the curious things about the handwringing around the “performative reader” is how paranoid it is. It presumes that people reading in public are doing it for the wrong reasons, which is to say: they are reading because they want to be seen as readers, not because they have a genuine, unforced interest in reading.

Reading as lifestyle (non-derogatory)

The panic around the “performative reader,” as the writer and editor noted, can be characterized as

the collective noticing of the presumably young man who reads books in public, perhaps while also drinking wine or smoking, wearing some kind of hip accessory, in the hope of getting attention and, ultimately, laid.

First of all: don’t we want young people to get laid? (The loneliness crisis is also a crisis of sexual intimacy, as the writer has observed.) But also, Hanson writes:

There is something really odious about the adolescent impulse to point out someone else’s everyday, ordinary social ambition, and to condemn them for it. Someone wants favorable attention? Who doesn’t?…If some men do read in public in hopes of sexual conquest, staring blankly, turning pages automatically, positioning the cover just so…Well, I think we can all agree that it’s pretty low in the ranks offenses carried out for that purpose.

And there is something not just odious, but incoherent about the assumption that performing literary ambition is inherently wrong or fake. The original function of the word “performative,” Hanson writes,

was originally intended to describe how apparently artificial practices have a constructive social function: performances, though in some sense contingent or even arbitrary, make real things happen…

Nowhere is it suggested that a performative act is fake; to the contrary, it is a central component in the production of our social reality.7

When the term was coined in twentieth-century social theory, it was, Hanson suggests, “a genuine advance in modern human self-understanding.” It helped people become conscious of how they could, through their behaviors, construct new selfs and new societies. But the colloquial use of performativity “doesn’t describe our freedom to remake our shared life, it reveals our falseness and our shame.”

But what if we reclaimed this idea of falseness, of doing something for the wrong reasons?

In Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, the philosopher Agnes Callard describes a hypothetical music teacher who is frustrated that her students are taking her class for the “wrong reasons.” The right reason would be that they already understand the intrinsic, inherent value of music. But they don’t yet. That’s why they’re taking her class. “Consider,” Callard writes,

…what kind of thinking motivates a good student to force herself to listen to a symphony when she feels herself dozing off:…perhaps she conjures up a romanticized image of her future, musical self, such as that of entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening. Someone who already valued music wouldn’t need to motivate herself in any of these ways. She wouldn’t have to try so hard.

But Callard doesn’t think that trying condemns someone to failure. And wanting to appreciate music—or literature—or art—for the wrong reasons does not prevent someone from accessing the right reasons, eventually. In the student’s case, Callard suggests that

“Bad” reasons are how she moves herself forward, all the while seeing them as bad, which is to say, as placeholders for the “real” reason.

The real reason to read literature is that it is an autotelic activity—it has inherent, intrinsic value, even if it doesn’t make you more intelligent, attractive, cultured, respected. But it’s still meaningful to read for the wrong reasons.

And positive societal outcomes can occur even if someone is, let’s say, buying books for the “wrong reasons.” The performative reader who buys a book from Transit Press (an independent, nonprofit publisher based in Berkeley) just to post it on Instagram? They’re still supporting a publisher responsible for bringing Nobel Prize–winning literature to the United States.8

Literary consumption is different than other forms of conspicuous consumption. Books are often cheaper than tasting menus, international travel, and designer fashion. Let the girls (and guys) romanticize their reading lives a little! If a sultry Sunday morning selfie (with a copy of the NYRB conspicuously present next to a matcha latte) is what gets more people to read literary criticism, why not celebrate it?

Surely it’s better to make conspicuous book and magazine consumption into an aspirational activity—it’s better than recurring Klarna payments for poorly made clothing. As the writer and brand marketer argued in her newsletter last year:

Reading is hot, good literary taste should be celebrated, and people aren’t reading nearly enough for ‘hyper consumerism’ to be…attached to this conversation.

The aestheticization of literary taste can help turn reading more into an aspirational project. This seems like an unambiguous social good. Newsletters like (over 100,000 subscribers) and (over 300,000 subscribers) testify to the immense power of organizing the inchoate aspirations of young people into a focused, directed desire to read seriously and take your intellectual life seriously. Both have an accessible, informal tone—which they use to recommend essays from esteemed publications like The Paris Review, The Hedgehog Review, and Aeon, as well as books by writers like Ali Smith and Edith Wharton. The women behind these newsletters are helping to create a culture where knowing what to read is just as desirable (if not more desirable) than knowing what to buy.

Write for yourself (in order to think for yourself)

Human behavior is imitative. We read because the people we admire do so. We begin to admire the writers that have altered our ways of thinking. And often, we seek to imitate our new idols—by beginning to write ourselves.

This desire to write is, I think, something to cherish. I often come across articles that imply that writing badly is somehow offensive to others—that’s unnecessary, or even selfish, to inflict your mediocre work on the world. But because I see reading as an essential human behavior—an infinitely precious capacity that everyone should practice—I accord the same dignity to writing.

One’s initial ability is, in some senses, irrelevant. In a newsletter from earlier this year, the cultural critic suggested that choosing to write is a lot like choosing to walk:

It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless…Nonetheless, I always feel worse in my body and mind when I avoid it for too long, and it’s a loss that feels greater than just the quantifiable enumeration of calories I didn’t burn or sunlight I didn’t see.…When you choose to walk, you choose not to pursue immediate gratification or even comfort but simply to expand the number of things that might happen to you. Walking invests in the potentiality of your experience with almost no promise of tangible reward at all, which is something like being alive.

If you’re exclusively interested in the output of writing, then it makes sense to chastise people who write badly—because the output seems to be inferior to what others are capable of producing. But if you think of writing as a process, then you understand that writing badly is the only way to begin writing well, and the output isn’t the piece—it’s the mind that labored earnestly to produce the piece.

The labor is not just in producing the writing; it is in becoming the mind that has an idea that is worth putting into writing, and then striving to convey it in the best possible form. As Fisher-Quann observes,

An essay is not the process of translating a fully-formed idea into words on a page; it is the process of discovering and testing an idea by challenging it with form, syntax, structure. The friction between idea and ability…[is] the fundamental condition of the writer, and it is precisely through that friction that we discover what it is we actually have to say.

Expressing ideas effectively through writing is not something that people are born being able to do or not do; it’s a muscle that anyone can develop and that anyone can let atrophy.

What do you want your life to look like? What’s the right way to treat other people? Was the film you just saw good or bad, and why? What conditions are necessary for an ethical and equitable society? What’s more valuable than people think it is? What’s less valuable than people think?

To write is to wrestle, very deliberately, with whatever your first instincts are when confronted with these questions. And to take those instincts further—to develop a more sustained, comprehensive point of view and make it concrete.

I used to read other people’s essays and be intimidated by their intellectual virtuosity and confidence. It seemed effortless—how they could invoke particular literary quotations, historical anecdotes, philosophical frameworks and pop-cultural phenomena to support their arguments. But when I began writing, I realized that this performance of effortlessness involved a great deal of effort. Rarely do writers have all this knowledge from the start. Writing is what gives you this knowledge.

When you start writing, that’s when you really start thinking seriously. Only when you finish the piece do you understand what you’re trying to say.

Writing as metamorphic activity

One of the best interviews I listened to this year was with the writer , who—on ’s Dialectic podcast—suggests that writing is a form of self-cultivation:

The project I’m doing is basically turning myself into a certain type of person who is able to have these thoughts. The essays are…just exhaust from the project. The work is growing emotionally and intellectually in such a way, and just going out into the world, talking to people, reading, looking at things, and becoming the kind of mind that can have these thoughts. That’s the real work.

Karlsson’s description reminded me of a framework that the longtime blogger and technologist proposed last year. In “Striver, Seeker, Icon, Leader,” Rao suggested that there are 2 ways to write. You can write instrumentally, and “try to change the world in predictable ways, while acquiring some sort of legible extrinsic reward…[like] esteem or money.” But you can also write metamorphically: to transform yourself (metamorphosis).

Metamorphic words…attempt to change the author in unpredictable ways, which you can think of as an intrinsic reward of sorts…

If you don’t like, or are bored with, who you are right now, whether as a writer, or more generally as a person, you can write yourself into an unpredictable new version. It’s a kind of disruptive self-authorship lottery…You can achieve metamorphic effects with other media too, but writing is particularly good for it.9

Metamorphic writing can be private; the diaries and journals of famous writers, like Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, can often be read as künstlerromans: they show how Kafka became Kafka, one page at a time. (In one entry, he writes, as if to remind himself: “Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't give up! Even if no salvation comes, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”)

But metamorphic writing can also be public. I’m touched by writing that frankly displays the writer’s aspirations—to think more clearly, to behave more ethically, to live with greater integrity. Writing can be a way of forming these aspirations and holding yourself accountable to them—until the traits which are affected, which are performed, become natural to you.

And when it comes to the work of writing—which is also the work of thinking, reading, and living—I’ll say this. As a human being, intellectual discovery and gratification are your birthright. Nothing is more worthy, and more self-actualizing, than taking your interests seriously and pursuing them as far as you can go.

No, it is not too late to start a newsletter

If you’ve made it this far, then please consider this your invitation to take your intellectual, artistic and literary life seriously. And if that ideal life involves writing a newsletter, here are some of my favorite resources:

• If it feels too frivolous to write. Begin by reading the writer and essayist ’s profoundly insightful newsletter deconstructing creative angst:

  Here’s a question for everyone who writes, paints, composes, etc., and is haunted by a sense that they’re wrong (bad, selfish, irresponsible) for doing so: if you give up your songs, your art, your poems, what will you replace them with? Where does that energy go? Is writing or art-making in the top five most frivolous things you do?…What good things happen when you stop? What good things are prevented if you persist?

  Shane and Jo Livingstone also co-host the Reading Writers podcast, where they transmit their deep love of reading—with guests like Tony Tulathimutte, Torrey Peters, and .

• If you don’t have a style yet. Not a problem, as the art director (much-admired, much-imitated) observes:

  Style is the sum of your shortcomings. You copy as many artists as you can, and you copy them wrong, then put a lot of thought and time into analyzing their work (as well as your failed copies), and within those missteps is probably where you’ll find your style.

• If you want to write (without succumbing to trivial hot takes and hype). is surely one of the internet’s most iconic writers, capable of both memetic humor (on her tumblr McMansion Hell) and engrossing criticism (for The Nation, the NY Review of Architecture, and others). She also has an excellent newsletter, and her essay on how to write essays has great advice on choosing a subject, writing what you want, and avoiding ephemeral hot takes.

• If you don’t like disclosing too much about your personal life. Conversational, first-person writing performs exceptionally well on Substack. But this doesn’t mean you have to be overly confessional! The literary critic Merve Emre offers a few alternate approaches. One, as she wrote about for , is the familiar essay:

  The familiar essay seldom treated the author as its object of interest. Rather, familiarity concerned the relationship triangulated between the essay’s writer and its reader—a relationship between friends. Always, this friendship was mediated by the presence of an object to which the writer had committed her powers of perception and analysis, and, through it, secured her reader’s interest: a novel or a painting, a historic figure such as Cato, a creature such as a moth.

  The other approach, as Emre suggests in an interview with , is “relentless sublimation”:

  You don’t have to write an essay about your marriage and your divorce. You can just write a piece of criticism that’s about a book like [Sarah Manguso’s] Liars, and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.

• If you’re trying to decide how often to post. There are 2 strategies, broadly speaking. I began by posting as often as I could (sending one newsletter a week for the first 3 months) and now send the occasional, high-effort email once or twice a month. They both work, in different ways:

  1. Post as often as you can. It’s the “secret of blogging,” the journalist observed, and a central part of the success of figures like : “The single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop.” In software development, this is similar to “release early, release often.” You can think of this approach, suggested, as the investment strategy of dollar cost averaging, applied to content creation:

     If a post happens to say the right thing at the right time, it will go viral. If not, it won’t. All I need to do is to keep releasing…It’s mostly about averaging across risk/opportunity exposure events, in an environment that you cannot model well.

  2. Post rarely, but do exceptional work. On YouTube, the foremost practitioner of this strategy is Natalie Wynn. Most channels upload videos weekly; Wynn posts 1–2 video essays a year on ContraPoints. , who writes one of my favorite newsletters, has observed that “When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster”:

     When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece…I’ve now written 37 blog posts and I no longer think this is true. Each time I’ve given in to my impulse to “optimize” a piece it has performed massively better (in terms of how much it’s been read, how many subscribers it’s generated, and, most importantly, the number of interesting people brought into my world).

     It’s worth nothing that my 3rd most popular post, no one told me about proust, took 18 hours to write.

And the resources I shared in my one-year anniversary newsletter are still valuable—especially ’s advice after 3 years of writing a newsletter; on how to grow on Substack; and ’s argument against the slop school of internet success.

And if you have any other questions, leave a comment below—I’ll do my best to answer them all!

While drafting this newsletter, I went back to some of my old notebook entries, from the earliest weeks of . In one, written on my 29th birthday, I reflected on the life I wanted to have in the coming decade:

It almost feels banal to declare here what I have declared so many times before…but I want to write, I want a particular kind of artistic–literary–intellectual life, and more than ever I feel it is possible, and fully within my grasp, to make that possible.

For most of my twenties, I was afraid to begin writing. I believed, with the curiously ingrained pessimism of youth, that I was—somehow—already too old to begin. Because I hadn’t written anything of substance yet, I believed that I never would.

But as the designer, art director, and technologist Eric Hu once tweeted,

[A] big regret is saying to myself back in 2019, “I want to do this thing but I feel too old to start and it’s going to take five years.”

Those five years went by like nothing. I’m even older than I was and that yearning never left. Glad to start now but don’t make the same mistake.10

I’m turning 32 in a few days. And I feel more optimistic and energized than I did in my early twenties, when I foolishly believed that it was too late to become someone new. Every morning I wake up eager for the next book I’ll read, the next essay I’ll write.

“Doing as much as you can every day,” the technologist wrote, “is a form of life extension.” If you want to feel young for the rest of your life, start writing.

Four recent favorites

I brake for <br> tags ✦✧ The year’s best personal essays ✦✧ Your favorite newsletter’s (latest) favorite newsletters ✦✧ Touching, feeling, cataloguing, shopping

I brake for <br> tags ✦

I don’t have a car (I’ve spent my entire life trying to avoid cars) but these bumper stickers—designed by Bri Griffin for the digital art organization Rhizome—could easily work on a Nalgene or laptop!

The year’s best personal essays ✦

In 2025, no position is more contrarian—especially for a writer—than staking out the position that things might be good, actually. In a recent newsletter, the writer , who wrote the memoir Mean Boys and is an editor-at-large at Spike, suggests that

The personal essay is where the most formal innovation is happening today in American prose…For those of you who still believe in the avant-garde, it’s possible that today’s literary modernism is to be found in the personal essay.

Mak offers up 6 essays as proof: by , Yiyun Li, McKenzie Wark, and others.

Geoffrey Mak

Best Personal Essays of 2025

Two years ago, I started teaching graduate students of creative writing at Goucher College in Baltimore. I didn’t realize this until the classes really got going, but it signaled an identity shift. Suddenly, my main source of income was to teach students how to write, and I was professio…

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4 months ago · 4 likes · Geoffrey Mak

Your favorite newsletter’s (latest) favorite newsletter ✦

I love writing on Substack; but I especially love reading on Substack—I continue to discover new, excellent literary newsletters every month.

I’ve been telling a lot of my friends about lately, a newsletter that publishes short, funny reviews of books from small and independent presses. ’s review of Sonya Walger’s novel Lion, for example, has the cheeky title “With Women It’s Always One Thing After Another.” It’s an excellent close read of a single sentence of Walger’s novel, and the contemporary literary novel’s fascination with lists, and the paratactic phenomenon of the fragment novel. And if you’ve ever felt that I run a little…overlong…then ’s newsletters are admirably succinct: a little over ten paragraphs, and then you’re done. Brevity is an excellent skill. I wish I had it.

Another person whose brevity I envy: , who writes reviews for the WSJ and Washington Post, but also on his excellent Substack newsletter, . His year in books is organized under appealingly opinionated headings, from “Highly recommended” to “Proceed with caution,” ending with “Actively dissuade people from reading it.”

My favorite micro-reviews:

Highly recommended: The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig (Winter Editions, November). Desire articulated in its rawest, most uncut state.

Worth checking out: How To Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art by Morgan Falconer (W.W. Norton, February). Can fascists and anarchists make good art? Maybe. But don’t let your guard down.

Worth checking out: Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid (August 12, W.W. Norton). It’s worth considering how resilient the tablet form factor has been throughout human history—ancient Mesopotamians, they’re just like us!

Skip it: Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne (McNally Editions, July). There’s a reason it’s back in print now (trying to get some heat from being Didion-adjacent) and a reason it was out of print for so long (it’s really bad).

Touching, feeling, cataloguing, shopping ✦

I have a particular weakness for art books with profoundly evocative titles, and the Incomplete Encyclopedia of Touch—containing 1,919 photos selected by Erik Kessels, Thomas Sauvin and Karel de Mulder—is especially good. At €60 a copy, that’s 3 eurocents an image.

Distilled from over 15.000 family albums, [the book] archives the human desire to put a hand on things. Whether it’s cars, boats, animals, trees, fridges, bridges, bushes, fellow humans or even their graves—everything that can be touched will be touched…[which] provokes questions about the underlying motivations behind this universal pictorial behavior. Do we seek connection? Do we claim ownership? Or do we just want to measure ourselves to the objects of our world?

1

Need a little more encouragement to take on the daunting (but profoundly rewarding) project of reading Proust? Try reading ’s Proust post, or Jonah Weiner—one-half of the cult-favorite fashion newsletter, —on Proust:

Nabeel S. Qureshi

On Reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time

1. Overture…

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4 months ago · 236 likes · 41 comments · Nabeel S. Qureshi

Blackbird Spyplane

This life gives you nothing

Blackbird Spyplane exists thanks to our readers…

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4 months ago · 1037 likes · 77 comments · Blackbird Spyplane

At least I’m in good company. In “How to Justify a Private Library,” the Italian professor and novelist Umberto Eco lamented that

many people in my condition—that is, people who possess a fairly sizable library (large enough in my case that someone entering our house can’t help but notice it; actually, it takes up the whole place)

—are often asked: Have you read all of your books?

For Eco, who owned 50,000 books, the answer was no. Such a question, he wrote reprovingly, comes from “people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage place…and do not think of the library as a working tool.” But he also observed, sympathetically, that:

Confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning, and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse.

Some readers, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, refuse to feel tormented. In The Black Swan, the mathematician and essayist argued that “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow.”

Unfortunately, my means are substantially less than Taleb’s. In my London flatshare, I have books double-layered on my shelves and piled 2 feet high on my dresser. The windowsill is now a bookshelf, as is the floor. My unread New Directions paperbacks have laid claim to a corner of the bedroom, alongside unopened issues of the New York Review of Books. (In early October, I banned myself from buying more books. But Regina Marler’s review of a new Europa Editions novel led to a relapse; I convinced myself that I needed a copy of the 400-page novel Gabriële. I haven’t even read the first page.)

There’s a word for this, naturally: tsundoku (積ん読), for all the books you’ve purchased that pile up at home, unread. “My personal library,” the writer confessed in the NYT, “is about one-tenth books I have read and nine-tenths tsundoku.” The problem seems pervasive enough for us to import tsundoku into the English language. “If only,” Jonathan Crow mused, “we can figure out a word to describe unread ebooks that languish on your Kindle. E‑tsundoku? Tsunkindle? Contemplate the matter for a while.”

But finding the right portmanteau won’t solve my increasingly urgent problem: too many books in too small a space.1 For the past 2 months, I’ve been diligently reading through my tsundoku. The 20 books I finished include:

• 2 much-discussed debut novels (Zoe Dubno’s Happiness & Love; Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds)

• Every millennial’s favorite novel about falling in love (Norman Rush’s Mating)

• An Italian sci-fi novella from the ‘60s about AI alignment

• The year’s best nonfiction book about Chinese tech and culture

• Art and literary criticism by Maggie Nelson, James Wood, and Franco Moretti

• The most extraordinary…poem? novel? about a pastoral future after the collapse of cloud computing

• A book of Marxist cultural theory that didn’t put me to sleep (unlike many in the genre…comment below if you’ve been personally victimized by the Verso catalogue)

• And an upcoming book (which comes out on January 20!) about how to build a nonfiction writing career, by the literary agent (who represents Hanif Abdurraqib, Merve Emre, Lauren Oyler, and more)

Novels

Contemporary literature is good, I’m sorry to say

I’m always a bit mystified when people complain about the degraded state of the contemporary novel. Most new novels are inferior to the older ones—like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), or even Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (2000). But does that mean that today’s novelists should stop writing? No! Because how else will we get the next Flaubert, Woolf, or DeWitt?

For this reason, I devote a lot of time to reading new novels—it’s exciting and invigorating to see what my contemporaries are doing.

Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025) has been described (both flatteringly and disparagingly) as a Dimes Square–adjacent novel, but a description like that is good for getting clicks, I don’t think it’s useful for readers.2 Here’s how I’d describe it: A young woman is reluctantly attending a dinner party of status-obsessed NYC artists, curators and pretenders. The dinner, which follows the funeral of a talented and beautiful actress (who never quite achieved it girl status), is meant to honor the actress—but the couple hosting the party have turned it into a networking event. As the evening progresses, the young woman bristles at the naked social climbing around her. As a young, idealistic ingenue, she idolized the people at this party; now, she engages in privately scathing character portraits of the shallow, status-obsessed people around her.

If you’re a fan of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, you may recognize this as the plot of Woodcutters. Dubno’s novel is one of many literary remakes published this year: Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (reviewed in my June newsletter), is a remake of George Perec’s Things; and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium (reviewed in January) is a remake of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. , who reviewed Dubno’s novel for The Baffler, wasn’t particularly impressed; he described it as “the Temu version of Woodcutters, cringingly imitative but in all areas wanting.”

But I can’t quite agree! Though I haven’t read Woodcutters, I loved Bernhard’s Old Masters and The Loser—and Dubno captures what I feel to be the essential, inimitable core of Bernhard’s style. In Happiness and Love, Dubno executes the classic Bernhardian cynicism in an exhilarating way—but she also showcases, too, the most compelling part of Bernhard: a certain vulnerability and awe in the face of love, art, and the finiteness of our lives. What I learned, from reading Bernhard’s Old Masters (about a music critic meeting with a recently widowed friend) and The Loser (about a once-promising pianist intimidated by the genius of Glenn Gould), is that vicious cynicism can happen only when one is, at the core, a disappointed idealist—and one recognizes that reality is falling short of your most cherished ideals. What the young woman of Happiness and Love wants, I think, is a world where the people who claim to care about art actually care about art—not status, not money, not clout, not scenes. She wants mentors she can believe in. She wants people who are more than just a showy, status-conscious surface. That’s how I read Dubno’s book, at least. And I loved it.3

I also read Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds (2025), a coming-of-age novel about Ruth and Maria—two young black girls who befriend each other at a mostly-white Catholic school, attend Bard together, and then move to NYC to pursue artistic careers. It is, naturally, a novel about fraught female friendship: Ruth and Maria are almost codependently intertwined as children, and as Ruth narrates their adolescent and adult years, it’s clear that Ruth struggles to individuate herself from Maria—who she sees as more capable, confident, and strikingly beautiful.

This may sound like every other literary fiction novel about art, envy, female friendship, and class. (Seriously: do they publish any other kinds of novels?) But Wambugu’s is one of the few I’ve actually finished, in part because it’s astonishingly well-written. A lot of literary fiction drags; the novels are too impressed with their own intelligence, and there’s an over-abundance of introspective, interior passages—compared to passages where characters act and actually do things. But that’s not the case with Wambugu’s writing; her characters have a kind of mobility and aliveness in their opinions that makes even internal reflection very dynamic:

And I was propelled forwards, too, by the feeling that these characters were fascinatingly obscure to me. Ruth, Maria, and the friends and lovers they have are clearly powered by strong, impulsive desires—which lead them to do (and say) things that seem shockingly outré. This helps the novel propel forward with great velocity—because you, the reader, can’t quite understand the characters, but you desperately want to!

One of the earliest scenes in Lonely Crowds takes place in Ruth’s adult life, where you learn that she is already a professor at an esteemed liberal arts college; that she has a solo painting show opening that evening in NYC—and what you see her do, in her moment of triumph, is flee the opening and crawl into bed:

I knew that at that very moment, my gallerist was still back at the opening, working the room and securing a legacy for me, while I wandered the streets like a person without a name. Maybe I had been acting erratically, since everywhere I went people asked me if I was feeling okay, as you might ask an insane person as you led them gently back to a shared reality…

Up in my room, I checked my cellphone and saw that my husband had called and texted. As had my gallerist. He was throwing an after-party at a nearby bar in my honor. A big party, open bar. Lots of fun. Every last one of my paintings sold. It was cause for celebration. I was the woman of the hour. Everyone wanted to see me. Did I want them to order for me? Did I want coke? Ketamine? Where was I? Was everything alright? I undressed and then I swallowed two small yellow pills, antihistamines for sleep, washed down with a cup of tap water. I said a quick prayer, for what, I didn’t know. I started the story from the beginning before falling asleep.

At this point, the story lurches into Ruth’s early childhood: meeting Maria (who Ruth spends the rest of the book defining herself with and against), her early attempts at becoming artists, and Maria’s early success as an It Girl artist—while Ruth trudges along, like Maria’s imitative shadow.

Wambugu writes with exceptional poise and total control; the novel is almost flawlessly paced. ( and agree; you can read their conversation about Lonely Crowds here.) And it’s an insightful portrait of trying to “make it” in the art world, status-consciousness and envy, and a friendship where admiration and sexual interest are tangled together.

The third recent-ish novel I read was Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed (2021). It’s Boyt’s 7th novel—and worth noting that she’s the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud, and the great-granddaughter of the one and only Sigmund Freud. I’ve been meaning to read this ever since Loré Yessuff recommended it to me—along with the poet Ariel Yelen’s I Was Working, which I wrote about in my January newsletter:

Loved and Missed is about Ruth, a schoolteacher and single mother in London whose daughter, Eleanor, leaves school at 15 and becomes a heroin addict. I’m describing it bluntly, but the pain that Ruth feels is often that uncompromisingly blunt—she feels “completely invalidated as a mother,” tormented by her failure and riven with pain at Eleanor’s fate:

I was at sea with her and without her, out of my depth, famished, debased and drowning so it was odd to be hailed at school as a champion of the suffering teen. It’s not unusual to lead a double life, certainly, but it was a bit grotesque to be quite so good at things and quite so bad…

Neglect your children and they will be obsessed with you for life – I read that once – but what about when they neglected you?

After Eleanor gets pregnant, Ruth ends up temporarily—and then permanently—taking care of Eleanor’s daughter, Lily. The relationship between grandmother and granddaughter takes up most of the novel; it offers Ruth a chance to be a mother again, to do things over, to try and protect Lily from the contaminating shame and grime of Eleanor’s life, as she continues to struggle with addiction and homelessness. Caring for Lily makes Ruth’s life lighter: “It wasn’t a life in the shadows any more – instead exhilaration, free-running cheer that had no basis of anxiety. Hope, I suppose it was.”

But this is a novel about adult life, which means it’s a novel about the wavering reparations we can make for the past—the incomplete, inadequate attempts we make to square ourselves with early traumas and complex forms of abandonment. I cried profusely while reading Loved and Missed, because the core problem of the novel—Eleanor’s addiction, and how it warps her mother and daughter’s life—is never really resolved. All that Ruth and Lily can do is orient themselves gingerly around it and try to cope with it. “They emerge,” the critic Jane Hu wrote in her review for the New Yorker,

as people in desperate want—for a daughter, in Ruth’s case; a mother, in Lily’s—who find a way to make do without what they lack.

It’s a novel that dismantles whatever mood you’re in and replaces it with the novel’s own internal weather—inclement and stormy and moving and, in the final scenes, graceful. It’s worth reading. You’ll probably tear up a little (a lot).

The hazards of looking for intelligent, romantic love

For many years, I read exclusively nonfiction—a common stance for Silicon Valley tech workers who feel that factual, objective knowledge is more useful than the slippery subjectivities of the novel. What changed? And how to catalyze this change in other people?

A few months ago, the writer and I were trying to come up with a list of gateway novels—ones we’d recommend to tech people who are skeptical of fiction. She suggested Norman Rush’s Mating (1991). I told her I’d never read it. She told me it was one of the best, if not the best, depictions of love written by a man.

Mating has something of a cult following—but mostly among literary people, for now. (The software engineers are still stuck on Seeing Like a State.) In 2023, the NYT Styles editor Marie Solis asked, “Why is everyone reading Mating?” and came up with one possible answer: it’s the rare novel that seems to believe in love—and heterosexual love, even!

While love remains among the greatest subjects for fiction writers, heterosexual love is, well, perhaps a bit passé — particularly the notion that a woman might devote so much energy to landing a man. In Mating, the narrator sets off on a harrowing journey across the desert to get hers.

The novel follows a 32-year-old American PhD student who abandons her anthropology dissertation to pursue a celebrated, reclusive star of her field: Nelson Denoon. And it’s set in Botswana, where the author was co-director of the Peace Corps for many years—along with his wife, Elsa. In an interview with the Paris Review, Rush says:

The real model for the narrator—I’ve hardly tried to hide this—was Elsa. Her fearlessness of thought; her determination, almost to the point of parody, not to be deluded, tricked, deceived; her comic sense of life, and a totally empirical kind of intelligence, as opposed to Denoon’s more theoretical intelligence. She’s pretty much a straight lift.

I confess that I struggled with Mating. The novel is so highly praised that it arrived into my life over-praised. I expected an impeccably written and incorrigibly funny novel—and I got that—but I also expected it to be a depiction of the ideal, the aspirational romance. Instead, what I got was a romance between two very particular, prickly people. Although I was overwhelmed by the sheer virtuosity of Rush’s writing, I also had complicated feelings about the couple it depicted. I didn’t know if I was in love with Mating’s version of love.

But another friend——had recommended the novel to me as well, along with Benjamin Kunkel’s LRB essay on Rush, which discusses the particular form of love that Rush depicts in Mating and his other, later novels. And it was this essay, more than anything else, that endeared me to the book. Because I recognized, in Kunkel’s description, the kind of love I’d like to have:

In Subtle Bodies, Nina is attracted to Ned because he she finds him ‘verbal looking’. The intuition is correct, about all of Rush’s inwardly and outwardly talkative people…[which] is connected with Rush’s representation of mature love among educated people. Marriage is a long conversation, Nietzsche said; in his case it was a guess. In Rush, it is simply a fact. ‘He loved talking to her, the sheer talking, whatever the subject was.’ Rush’s husbands and wives enjoy telling each other much – of course, never all – of what’s on their minds.

Love as an ongoing conversation, an infinite game: that’s what Mating is about. And love as something that can occur between two imperfect people, too—including one person who is simultaneously “a sort of Jesus” and “a complete asshole.” (Kunkel is referring to a character in a different Rush story, but it applies well to the man in Mating—and to a number of Silicon Valley men too, I think.)

‘A sort of Jesus’ and ‘a complete asshole’ captures something of the tonality of love in Rush. Romantic love, prolonged past infatuation, ridicules the idealisation of the other that will have inspired it but also permits and, if the romance is to continue with the love, requires another sort of admiration, more solid because more sober and – to use a term basic to the criticism of fiction – realistic. Romanticism in collaboration with realism, ongoing courtship plus established intimacy, facing the truth of facts without ignoring the truth of aspirations: formulas like these give an idea of the image of mature love in Rush. And he has a similar relationship to his characters, relentlessly exposing their every aspect, including the petty, ignoble and ugly ones, without ceasing to cherish them or at least to give them a chance at regaining the paradise, as in Rush it always is, of married love.

The paradise of an intelligent, informed love—that’s also the subject of Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity (1960), an Italian sci-fi novella translated by Anne Milano Appel. I’ve had this on my shelf (well, it’s now on my floor) since June of last year, when I received it as part of the NYRB Classics Book Club.

I wrote about 3 great monthly book subscriptions in—

One Thing

🟧 Book publisher as curator

Celine Nguyen: In his 2014 book, Ways of Curating the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist reflected on why we struggle to choose what to read, see, experience, and buy. Contemporary life, he suggested, was characterized by an “exponential increase” in available options: “There is no type of information—documents, books, images, video—that is declining.” Te…

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2 years ago · 53 likes · 5 comments · One Thing

The NYRB excels in finding older books that address contemporary concerns. The Singularity is an appealingly readable mystery that follows Ermano Ismani, a 43-year old university professor who is asked to join a mysterious research project funded by the Ministry of Defense.

Ermano—timid, sedentary, and cautious—doesn’t know whether he’ll accept, but his cheerfully practical wife, Elsa (“an incalculable blessing for Ismani, who was so unprepared for practical life and concerned about every trifling detail”) encourages him to. The couple relocate to a secluded research complex, where they meet the other researchers. The project, it turns out, is an immense artificial brain.

There’s a complicating factor: one of the other researchers, heartbroken at losing his wife, has tried to imbue the AI with the personality of the deceased woman. The usual problems show up: how can they tell if the AI is aligned with their interests? Should the researchers try to achieve outcomes related to national security, or mathematical research, or matters of the heart? Is the AI lying? Is it pretending to be aligned with the researchers and their goals? And if the AI goes rogue…will its creators be willing to shut it down in order to save a human life?

The Singularity is excellently paced, but it feels more like a fairy tale than science fiction. I found it charming but not exceptional—but it’s interesting to see how contemporary AI debates are explored in this decades-old novella.

Nonfiction

How to do great work

There are obvious reasons to read Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025), a bestselling book about China’s quest for scientific, technological, and economic dominance. Maybe you’d like to understand how China went from the Western world’s outsourced sweatshop to the world’s most advanced solar panel and electric vehicle manufacturer. Or you’d like a less Sinophobic, more informed perspective on the government’s relentless attempts at population control, from the one-child policy to zero-COVID.

But my reason for reading Breakneck? There just aren’t that many great nonfiction books out there! And not many that are easy to read, intellectually serious, narrated in the first person (but not trying to start a personality cult), and—the most useful quality for any nonfiction book—full of portable intellectual tools. By that, I mean: ideas which help you reframe other parts of the world and understand them more deeply.

One of the most portable and highly mimetic ideas in Breakneck is Wang’s characterization of China as an “engineering society” compared to America’s “lawyerly society,” which he uses to explain China’s technological gains compared to America’s sclerotic, slow-moving infrastructural projects. But my favorite idea in Wang’s book is where he talks about process knowledge:

When we talk about technology, we should really distinguish between three things. First, technology means tools…Second, technology means explicit instruction…Third and most important, technology is process knowledge. That is the proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated.

Wang uses the concept of process knowledge to argue that—when America outsourced manufacturing to China—American countries lost technical proficiency, while China gained the knowledge to not just execute American plans, but innovate and develop new technologies:

Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s…

Shenzhen is a community of engineering practice where factory owners, skilled engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers mix with the world’s most experienced workforce at producing high-end electronics. Silicon Valley used to be like this too, but now it lacks a critical link in the chain—the manufacturing workforce. The value of these communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer.

What makes Wang’s concept of process knowledge so interesting is how he argues it, too—by referencing how the Ise Jingu shrine, first built in 690 AD, has been rebuilt every 20 years. By continually rebuilding the shrine, the caretakers are constantly renewing the craft knowledge and expertise involved—ensuring that it will be transmitted across generations.

It’s an unusual and striking comparison to make when writing about contemporary technologies, like cellphones and solar panels. And it was this reference to the Ise shrine that made me so impressed with Wang’s book. In my podcast episode with , I made a comment that, for writers, the references you draw upon are an essential part of your style. Breakneck is an exceptionally good tech/business book precisely because Wang’s references are so wide-ranging.

I also read the photographer Sally Mann’s Art Work: On the Creative Life, after receiving a copy from a friend. (In addition to self-inflicted tsundoku, I also suffer from generous friends and socially-inflicted unread books!) Over the summer, I was corresponding with the art critic Natalie Weis (who I met through writing this newsletter!) and we ended up meeting in London during Frieze Week. Natalie had just filed her review of Art Work for Hyperallergic, which perfectly describes the delightfully strange range of the book:

Artists in need of instruction and inspiration have no shortage of books to consult, from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way to Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist or Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. Each volume offers dozens of cheerful directives that live somewhere between koan and bromide, encouraging readers to “Let yourself play” (Cameron), “Use your hands” (Kleon), and “Look inward” (Rubin).

In her new book, Art Work: On the Creative Life, Sally Mann is perhaps the first to provide some truly practical advice; nestled among suggestions for dealing with rejection, distraction, and perfectionism is her 1971 handwritten list of home remedies: “You will note about halfway down that intestinal worms are to be treated with raw garlic and rice,” she states, “but of course you clever young people know I was wrong about that: the best treatment for worms—pinworms anyway—is diatomaceous earth.”

But of course.

Art Work is an ideal read for anyone trying to pursue a creative practice. It exhorts artists, writers, photographers, and others to pursue the usual virtues—patience, perseverance, technical excellence, self-knowledge—without becoming too sanctimonious. One of the most useful takeaways from Art Work is the importance of artistic friendships: Mann describes her decades-long dialogue with Ted Orland, a fellow photographer who was Ansel Adams’s assistant and the author of one of the great artistic self-help books, Art & Fear. (I plan to reread Orland’s book in December.) Orland was a technical mentor to Mann, and a constant source of encouragement:

He…began to teach me what photography was really about: pushing the limits, having fun. Doing stuff that the Kodak guidebook said not to do. That first night after dinner, we all went out into the grasslands and Ted set up a camera with Polaroid 4 × 5 film to take a picture by moonlight…

He showed me things about the view camera and about printing that I use to this day. He introduced me to Ansel, who appeared wearing a large apron, his chemical-stained fingers holding a bulbous goblet of red wine. I adored him on sight. Soon we were both drinking wine and looking at my pictures, 5 × 7–inch contact prints mounted on cheap brown board, about which he was scrupulously kind. Ansel was welcoming, he was encouraging, he gave me information and hired me to be an assistant for the next year, but it was Ted who really gave me my way forward.

Mann describes the years that she and Orland spent writing to each other, encouraging each other, urging each other onwards. After reading Mann’s book, I was thinking of all the friends I text and call and speak to when I’m in the middle of a writing draft—when I’m demoralized, when I’m excited—and how foundational these friendships are. As Mann writes,

Years ago, my friend Ted Orland…used to sign his books “Your Fellow Traveler, Ted,” and that phrase was telling. For Ted—and, I hope, my readers—the important thing was that we are all on the same creative road together, however far apart we are in other ways. But we can be brought together by the how; how those of us well along in our careers got there, how our lives racked up the miles. It is about more than technique or practice or even, yes, hard work. It is about how you live your life, because the life you lead is your art and the art you make is your life…

This book is written by an old woman primarily for young artists and writers, with the vain, and vainglorious, hope that some of it will make a difference in the way you organize (yes, I did say organize) your creative practice.

If your artistic ambitions involve writing a book—a nonfiction book like Wang’s Breakneck, perhaps—then you might enjoy the literary agent ’s Take It from Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch. Habib’s book comes out next January, but after reading several of Habib’s engaging and wise newsletters—on finishing your drafts, finding an agent (or becoming one), and starting a Substack—I wanted more of her advice.

So I emailed a publicity manager at Penguin, who sent me a PDF of Habib’s book. Take It from Me is that rare and wonderful book that addresses both commercial and artistic concerns. Habib writes about the strategic and pecuniary aspects of being a writer (bylines, credentials, contracts, and getting paid)—but she clearly loves literature, and loves the writers she represents, and loves the entire process of shepherding great work into the world. Early on, Habib writes:

I emphasize guiding as much as I do gatekeeping, in large part because I remember what it is like to be on the other side of a gate, as well as how many times earlier in my career I was desperate for clarification, context, and guidance that was hard to find.

Take It from Me showcases the different careers that nonfiction writers can have. Habib writes about Dorothy Brown, a law professor whose book The Whiteness of Wealth analyzes racial bias in American tax policy; she also writes about the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, who began his career writing about music for zines and other DIY publications, and later became a MacArthur fellow.

The book is partly an instruction manual (with practical advice for writing a book proposal—with examples!—and finding an agent) and partly a motivational text. It’s a generous and encouraging book; if you have a nonfiction writer in your life, this would be an excellent gift to give them. And the gift you’re giving isn’t just a book—it’s also a way to show them that you trust and believe in their work.

Literary and art criticism

The other theme in my October and November reading: more criticism. I’ve been writing a lot about the state of criticism in 2025, in my newsletter—

—and for Asterisk Magazine’s Books issue, where I describe the influential, countercultural publication The Village Voice as “the Bell Labs of cultural criticism.”

But in the last few weeks, I’ve been reading the work of some of the best critics of the last few decades: Maggie Nelson, James Wood, and Franco Moretti.

Maggie Nelson popularized a style of nonfiction writing that nearly every young woman on Substack (myself included) is practicing, in one form of another. It’s an elegant hybrid of memoir–criticism–theory that other writers, often published by Semiotext(e), employ—but it was Nelson’s books that introduced me, and many others, to this style. She’s best known for Bluets and The Argonauts, both breakout books in categories that seemed too avant-garde, too abstruse, to ever “break out.”

Maggie Nelson’s Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024) has been sitting on my shelf since last June, when my friend Kiran and I attended her talk at City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco. (You can listen to a recording here.) Like Love is a collection of twenty-ish years of Nelson’s writing: art criticism, literary criticism, conversations with musicians (Bjork) and writers, like Wayne Koestenbaum—who once praised Nelson’s writing by saying:

She’s reaching with every paragraph into all the coffers of her reading and conversation…There’s a hunger for citation, and a generosity and inclusiveness about how much of other people’s thinking she would acknowledge and make room for in her work. It’s very public work.

Nelson’s writing is referentially dense, but she retains an intimacy and warmth that I really admire—it’s a tactic I’d like to steal (as so many have stolen from Nelson’s sublime style). She’s disarmingly conversational in her essay about the theorist and poet Fred Moten (first published in 4Columns), and openly admiring in her conversation with the feminist critic Jacqueline Rose.

And of course I loved her essay on the late, great Eve Kokofsky Sedgwick’s essay collection, The Weather in Proust, which was first published in LARB. (If Proust is mentioned in the first 20 pages of a book, I’m almost guaranteed to finish it! Other books in this category: Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, Daša Drndić’s EEG—where a character is likened, disparagingly, to Madame Verdurin—and Sally Mann’s Art Work The nice thing about reading Proust is that it serves as a warm introduction to other books—like going to a party alone, but being on intimate terms with the most famous person there, and therefore emboldened to speak to any stranger present.)

But I digress. I also read the literary critic James Wood’s How Fiction Works (where Proust also makes an appearance, but only on page 47). Wood is, perhaps, one of the most famous literary critics of our time—first at The Guardian, then The New Republic (where he famously inveighed against the “hysterical realism” of contemporary novels), and then the New Yorker.

It’s very clear, when you read How Fiction Works, how much Wood loves literature—with a kind of reverential attentiveness that makes you want to love it as much as Wood does. The book is primarily concerned with characterizing how realist fiction works—and how a realistic story, characters, and setting are constructed. And he beautifully explains some technical terms, like what “free indirect style” is:

After Wood, I plucked—from a particularly towering tsundoku—a copy of the literary critic and Stanford professor Franco Moretti’s Far Country: Scenes from American Culture, which I bought in 2024 when it was discounted at Dog Eared Books in SF. At risk of encouraging bad (book-buying) behavior…I’m glad I didn’t read it until now! I’ve read more books, seen more films, and looked at more art since I first bought the book—so there’s more I can learn from Moretti’s class-lectures-turned-essays, which juxtapose different works from the same category. The first lecture compares and contrasts two poets, Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire. A later lecture compares Vermeer’s 17th-century portraits of Dutch life and the 20th-century urban anomie in Edward Hopper’s paintings.

“People are often on their own, in Vermeer; lonely, never,” Moretti writes—unlike the people in Edward Hopper’s paintings:

Edward Hopper’s world is at once a distant echo of Vermeer’s, and its point-by-point reversal. In his twentieth-century America, the bright everyday of early modern Holland returns to the old connotations of the term: the everyday as a colorless succession of blank, uneventful days…

Vermeer’s people were always doing something: if they weren’t usually working in the proper sense of the word…they were reading, writing, listening, playing the lute, trying on a necklace. Active. Hopper’s figures, even when nominally at work…are so stiff, they seem to have been hypnotized. Not action, but its suspension is his great theme.

I got what I wanted out of Maggie Nelson, James Wood, and Franco Moretti: an invigorating reminder of what great criticism is like. They’re excellent examples of the theoretically precise, historically rich, and accessible writing I strive to do.

A historical and theoretical turn

Speaking of which: halfway through November, I began to feel that I needed more theoretical frameworks and historical context at my disposal—especially when writing about art:

So I unearthed my secondhand copy of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, which I bought in December 2023, a week before I sent my first newsletter. I’ve brought Bourriaud’s book with me across 4 different apartments and 2 continents—unread, obviously—but this elaborate estrangement from my own books had to end. I spent a week commuting to work with Bourriard and finished it on the Central line.

Nicolas Bourriaud is a French art critic who cofounded the Palais de Tokyo, and later curated contemporary art at the Tate Britain. In Relational Aesthetics, published in 1998 (and translated into English in 2002), Bourriaud describes a new approach to contemporary art, using artworks by Rirkit Tiravanija, Gabriel Orozco, Félix-Gonzales Torres, and others as examples.

I wrote about Gabriel Orozco’s sculpture, Kiss of the Egg, in—

—and I wrote about Félix-Gonzales Torres and art during the AIDS crisis in—

Bourriaud calls this approach “relational art,” which he defines as. Relational artists, he notes, “are not connected together by any style, theme or iconography.” What they share, instead, is “the same practical and theoretical horizon: the sphere of inter-human relationships.” Their artworks:

involve methods of social exchange, interactivity with the viewer within the aesthetic experience being offered to him/her, and the various communication processes, in their tangible dimension as tools serving to link individuals and human groups together…

They are all working within what we might call the relational sphere, which is to today’s art what mass production was to Pop Art and Minimal Art.

Bourriaud’s book helped me place contemporary art trends in a longer historical lineage. And I enjoyed, too, the glossary at the end, which offers some usefully novel definitions of over-familiar terms:

Aesthetics: An idea that sets humankind apart from other animal species. In the end of the day, burying the dead, laughter, and suicide are just the corollaries of a deep-seated hunch, the hunch that life is an aesthetic, ritualised, shaped form.

Art:

1. General term describing a set of objects presented as part of a narrative known as art history. This narrative draws up the critical genealogy and discusses the issues raised by these objects, by way of three sub-sets: painting, sculpture, architecture.

2. Nowadays, the word “art” seems to be no more than a semantic leftover of this narrative, whose more accurate definition would read as follows: Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects.

My great success in finally confronting Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics helped me approach another unread book in my shelf: Michael Chanan’s From Printing to Streaming: Cultural Production Under Capitalism. Chanan’s book occupies a category that I tend to struggle with: the Marxist theory–laden text, authored by by an Anglophone artist–academic, about art under capitalism. (If a Proust mention in the first 20 pages tends to motivate me onwards…then a Karl Marx and David Harvey and Theodor Adorno and Ludwig Wittgenstein mention in the first 20 pages tends to repel me. And if Mikhail Bakhtin is cited as well? I might never open the book again.)

But Chanan’s From Printing to Streaming is a book of Marxist cultural analysis for people who find such books particularly stifling. It helps that he takes an unobtrusively personal approach, by describing how his own professional trajectory maps onto the historical shifts he discusses. “When I first started teaching film,” he humorously observes, “I felt like an unemployed filmmaker employed to teach other people how to become unemployed filmmakers.” But when the UK launched the publicly owned Channel 4 in the 1980s, Chanan and other independent, avant-garde filmmakers were given an opportunity to produce ambitious work—and get paid for it. After a decade of documentary filmmaking, Chanan returned to teaching.

The book has the immodest goal of serving as a history of cultural production, authorship, copyright, and monetization—in literature, music, and cinema—from the 15th century to the present day (though Chanan largely focuses on the 18th century onwards). This enormous ambition means that the 240 pages of From Printing to Streaming are incredibly dense. But this is one of the most useful books I’ve ever read, given my interest in the history of art and the history of technology—which, Chanan notes, are inextricably linked.

And it’s funny, although you have to read carefully to get the joke. I braved multiple Adorno citations to get to page 76, where Chanan remarks: “The process, of course, is dialectical”—and then proceeds to dismantle the mythos around the word, noting that “this is a term that creates its own trap, because of its slippery philosophical overtones.” I recommend for fans of James Gleick’s Information: A History, A Theory, a Flood. And it’s worth noting, too, that Chanan’s book has a mere 4 ratings on Goodreads right now—so you can feel cool and original with your deep-cut Marxist nonfiction.

I also read Jean Baudrillard’s The Ecstasy of Communication, which a friend gifted me in the following manner:

To be honest, I read it one and a half times while profoundly inebriated on the overground (from south to east London on Saturday night) and remember nothing. Revisiting the book now, I remember that I was very disoriented on page 56, where Baudrillard wrote:

There is nothing seductive about truth. Only the secret is seductive: the secret which circulates as the rule of the game, as an initiatory form, as a symbolic pact, which no code can resolve, no clue interpret. There is, for that matter, nothing hidden and nothing to be revealed. It cannot be stressed enough: THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO PRO-DUCE.

What…were the capitals meant to signify?

I also remember being immediately pacified when, a paragraph later, Baudrillard referenced Kierkegaard’s The Diary of a Seducer. Perhaps this soothed me because—in my intoxicated state—this made Baudrillard suddenly familiar to me, and I could pretend for about 2 pages that I was reading my favorite genre of writing, literary criticism—instead of that imposing, horrible monster known as French theory.

Poetry

Poetry books rarely appear in my shelves—perhaps because I’m a partisan of paragraphs and, well, prose. But in October and November, I read 3 writers that operate in that alluring, enticing space between prose and poetry:

I began with Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women (2015), which I picked up after reading an excerpt in Bookforum. Boyer’s book is concerned with the ordinary and even unliterary aspects of life: working, paying rent, getting sick, opening emails. There is a frankness to her writing—which makes her subtle leaps into evocative language feel so lovely, sudden, and fresh:

There is a risk inherent in sliding all over the place. As if the language of poets is the language of property owners. As if the language of poets is the language of professors. As if the language of poets is not the language of machines…

I think mostly about clothes, sex, food, and seasonal variations. I have done so much to be ordinary and made a record of this: first I was born, next I was a child, then I learned things and did things and loved and had those who loved me and often felt alone. My body was sometimes well, then sometimes unwell. I got nearer to death, as did you.

After Boyer, my flatmate lent me a copy of Karen An-Hwei Lee’s The Maze of Transparencies (2019), a novel with a particularly poetic thrust to it. (There are more obviously poem-shaped passages in it, too.) Ten pages in, I knew would be one of my favorite books of the year.

The Maze of Transparencies is set in a pastoral future, after the collapse of a cloud-computing surveillance state. Yang is a former data scientist (of a kind) who now tends to a very Berkeley Bowl–esque garden and calculates everything using his family’s jade abacus. It’s a charming post-computing fable, narrated by one of the clouds that Yang used to log into, Penny (short for Penelope the Predictive Panoply of People’s Data). In between stories of Yang’s encounters with various strangers, Penny broods over the technically advanced (but politically corrupt) past, and the strangely low-tech present:

Dispossessed, I was a homeless cloud. Without users to shepherd, without a server, without a flock to accommodate, I roved the data dumps of cryptoshredding, seeking jellyfish connectivity. Gone with the mazuma.

The fiscal bubble burst long ago. However, the sea of disinformation, once an unvarnished basin of falsehoods tainted by opioid-laced analysis, continues to reek of propaganda. No longer beloved by nonprofiteers and do-it-yourself gardeners, now one of a final posse of clouds surviving the apocalypse, I waft over a nonbinary gulf.

You’ll either love or hate this book. I loved it: the worldbuilding is lovely and strange and charming; and as a Californian, I tend to enjoy books that exuberantly pilfer nouns from the health-food aisle:

When life throws lemons at us, we analyze data about making lemonade. A cliché of a bygone age, no? Ounces of citric acid sealed in a waxy yellow rind? We overthink our figures of speech. Yet this lemonade principle is a foreign concept to this generation. No medicine exists for an epidemic of sour narcissism with neurasthenia riding upon its hairy back. No dosage of kava kava root, no mood-soothing tonics laced with norepinephrine, not even a tablespoon of hot almond milk with a drop of antimicrobial honey for ulcers, nor a shot of caffeinated chlorophyll can dispel melancholy for long.

I’ve never read anything like this book. It’s a little twee, at times—but what Lee does with language is so evocative and funny and unexpected! The book feels like an ideal synthesis of my more literary/verbal and STEM interests, too:

The last poetry book I read was Max Brett’s The Consequences (2024), which is described as “a hybrid collection of prose and poetry.” Brett’s book came into my life after a weekend in Paris, where I made the financially unwise decision to visit the art book fair Offprint. I told myself I was just browsing,—and of course I bought 6 books and a very heavy magazine, which I dragged onto the Eurostar from Paris back to London.

But it’s hard to regret buying Brett’s book, which is beautifully designed and printed by the French studio Espace Ness. Inside are 40…poems, or fragments, or short stories, with elliptical and varied titles like:

• Fruit Baskets and Performance Evaluation

• His

• Hers

• Hers (Continued)

• Aspirational Daydreams Regarding the Reading List of Susan Howe

• Qatar Airways Meal Optionality

• Why Time Passes Quickly

• The State of Things

• The Worship of Georges Perec

The poems loosely chronicle the autofictional narrator’s breakup and subsequent move from New York to Paris. In Paris, the narrator goes to tabac bars, rides the métro, and riffs off of other, more famous poems:

[from Fruit Baskets and Performance Evaluation]

Thank you for the variety of plums on offer.

It wasn’t made clear during onboarding here in the nondescript suburbs of Paris near the île de la Grande Jatte that every Monday employees would have access to giant wicker baskets full of plums…

Reine-Claude plums.

They are so cold and sweet.

There is a crispness and a softness.

A crisp-soft interplay.

You have to be a bit playful to enjoy this book, I think. You can’t be shocked that the poem about Perec ends with the line:

[from The Worship of Georges Perec]

“The spicy noodle” is French slang for “anus.”

Three books about music and philosophy

I’ll close out this newsletter with 2 books about listening to music, and a tiny book about…Kant. (Who had something to say about music—and something to say, it seems, about every possible topic in existence.)

I’ve been interested in Pauline Oliveros ever since taking a writing class with Jenny Odell (the Bay-Area based artist and writer of How to Do Nothing), where Odell referenced Oliveros’s concept of Deep Listening.4 So when I saw the composer Pauline Oliveros’s Quantum Listening at the Serpentine’s bookshop earlier this year, I immediately bought it. It’s a slim, 70-page book, containing an introduction, a foreword, and then an essay by Oliveros. When I read it in late November, I felt a little…underwhelmed, maybe? I’d put off reading it for months and months, imagining that it would be a particularly revelatory and significant text. But the first half of Oliveros’s essay is a loose reflection on the practice of listening attentively, and how it has shaped her work as a musician and composer. It isn’t too different from a typical Buddhist exhortation towards mindfulness, though Oliveros’s does touch on the interplay between human behavior and technology:

Deep Listening is listening in every possible way, to everything it’s possible to hear, no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one’s own thoughts, as well as musical sounds.

Deep listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through deep listening…

I see and hear life as a grand improvisation – I stay open to the world of possibilities…Our improvisations will soon include accelerated artificial evolution – hybrid humans – new beings born of technology – new challenges, consequences, dangers, freedoms and responsibilities – all of this in addition to the life we lead through the habits of our own traditions.

The second half leans into the concept of Quantum Listening—quantum, here, seems to be partially inspired by quantum physics, but not in a particularly structured way. I think I’d have enjoyed this essay more if I thought of it as an Are.na block–sized amount of information, and not a book.

But I thoroughly enjoyed the other music-related book I read in October and November: the German writer Rainald Goetz’s Rave, translated by . I’ve suffered many indignities in my attempts to read Rave over the years: I first ordered a copy in 2020, and the package was stolen; and I accidentally mailed my second copy, purchased in 2021, to an address I no longer lived in.

But this year, I managed to procure a copy from the library—and it was worth the wait. There’s a lot of recent writing about techno and raving out there:

• The media scholar McKenzie Wark’s Raving (2023)

• The anthology Writing on Raving (2025), edited by Wark, Geoffrey Mak, and Zoë Beery

• The anonymously edited and authored Raveforum (founded in 2023)

• ’s excellent and very funny newsletter,

• The music journalist Chris Zaldua’s Certain Sound (also the co-organizer of the Vague Terrain parties, also a friend!)

—as well as critical assessments of whether all this writing makes for good raving, like the journalist Chal Ravens’s essay for The Quietus on the academicization of the rave.

But Goetz’s Rave—initially published in 1998 and only translated from German in 2020—is one of the earliest and greatest works in the genre. There’s an art to writing about raving; the best works distill the phenomenological (and insistently embodied) feeling of the dancefloor (and, sometimes, the drugs that might accompany the experience) into prose. Not all of it can be distilled, of course—reading about a party is no replacement for being there yourself. But Rave gets close. Goetz got a history PhD and an MD before turning to writing, and the book—sharp, funny, cogent—moves nicely between the intellectual and the insistently sensorial. He beautifully depicts the heady, dizzy feeling of sociability–anonymity–sociability again while on a dance floor. And West’s translation has real velocity and flow to it—transmitting the ebb and flow of the narrator’s journey from party to party, city to city, nighttime to daylight.

It’s also just funny, for anyone who’s spent their nights obligingly nodding along, while DJs discourse intensively about what happened (or should have happened) on the decks:

And the last book I’ll cover in this (now excessively long) newsletter? I read my secondhand copy of Roger Scruton’s Kant: A Very Short Introduction. After referencing Kant’s categorical imperative in an earlier newsletter, I began to feel a little uneasy. I actually knew very little (okay, nothing) about Kant—but as someone attempting to write criticism, it seemed like I should have some passing familiarity with Kant’s contributions to aesthetic philosophy.

I’ve read 2 or 3 other books in Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series, and they’ve all been great: concise, useful, and not too dry. The series is especially helpful for a crash course on a specific philosopher—it’s a little more accessible than the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in my opinion.

Scruton’s book on Kant begins with a useful explanation of 2 of Kant’s predecessors (Leibniz and Hume) and how Kant responded to their ideas. He then efficiently covers the categorical imperative in 23 pages; and Kant’s aesthetic philosophy in…16 pages. I did say it was a crash course! I’ll likely return to Scruton’s book again, to remind myself of the ideas—but I’m very glad to have it in my library.

The last 2 months of reading through my tsundoku have been surprisingly fruitful—philosophically, musically, poetically, and critically. And now that it’s December, I’m starting to think about two things.

First: The 2-year anniversary of personal canon is coming up, so I’ll be back in your inbox soon—with reflections on going from 0 to 28,000 subscribers, how to build sustainable writing habits, and more. (Send me any questions you have!)

Second: It’s almost time for my best books of 2025 newsletter, where I revisit the best fiction, nonfiction, and more. You can read my newsletters from 2024 and 2023 here:

Thank you, as always, for reading! And I’d love to hear about your favorite books—please do comment below, email me back, or share a link to your Substack posts!

I’ve met and corresponded with so many readers this year, and I’m really grateful for all the thoughtful, perceptive, and intelligent people I’ve met by writing on the internet. Wishing you all a lovely December and a peaceful end to the year.

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The critic recently inveighed against the use of “increasingly,” noting:

Many are the sins of blogging, but “increasingly” is the sort of terrible word that thrives in the professional environment. That is because “increasingly” is a way of faux historicizing. It gives whatever you’re saying an aura of knowledge, even of expertise, but does not really give the reader either of these things. You can, without falsehood, say that we were less entranced by the labubu in the past, something that is undoubtedly true because the labubu did not exist except perhaps in the pure Platonic realm of forms. Between “no entrancement” and “any entrancement” lies an increase.

Because I respect and admire McClay as a writer, I undertook an inventory of my own uses of “increasingly.” The results were horrifying.

To be fair, some of these were direct quotes of other writers:

• Lewis Gordon on matsutake as “an increasingly popular metaphor for resilience”;

• Stuart Jeffries asking, “Why was socialist revolution increasingly unlikely in the 1920s?”;

• Greg Jackson’s short story about a man feeling “increasingly stifled” in his life;

• Meghan O’Gieblyn observing that, as she read more about “transhumanist ideas,” she “increasingly came to experience…déjà vu” about how similar these ideas were to ones she’d encountered as a theology student

• Cristina Campo describing the 20th century as “the era of fugitive beauty, the era of grace and mystery on the verge of disappearance…all those things that certain men refuse to give up…even as they seem to be increasingly lost and forgotten”;

• Helen DeWitt lamenting that we “live in a society where the humanities are increasingly dismissed as impractical.”

But the rest?

• I summarized the argument of Erich Auerbach’s literary criticism book, Mimesis, as:

  Western literature has developed an interest in the lives of ordinary people, not just the aristocratic and heroic, and has increasingly become committed to describing their reality in all of its socioeconomic and historical detail—including the class relations involved.

  Verdict: An acceptable use of increasingly, since Auerbach does explicitly historicize his argument.

• I also summarized Dan Davies’s nonfiction book, The Unaccountability Machine, as:

  Liberal democratic governments + large corporations have essentially structured themselves so that…they are not capable of processing information about risks and negative outcomes…[and have] become increasingly incapable of handling the complexity of contemporary life and political/economic systems.

  Verdict: Also acceptable, since Davies’s book seeks to historicize this (using a provocative argument that characterizes neoliberalism as, essentially, an opinionated information filter).

• I described my experience seeing the artist Rachel Jones’s work at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco

  As I walked closer, the swaths of color became increasingly more and more detailed.

  Verdict: So basically I am saying that…you can see more detail as you walk closer to something? Incredible! This is why it’s useful to reread your old writing; you find mistakes that you never want to make again.

• I described the plot of Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella) as:

  [A] composer ends up falling in love with a young boy…but grows increasingly agitated by the strength of his passion and the anguish of feeling that his affection is immoral and futile.

  Verdict: I keep on doing this thing where I list two things at once—strength of passion/anguish of feeling; immoral/futile—and I do it in a way that renders my clauses particularly tangled and unwieldy. I also need to stop doing this. The use of “increasingly” is fine; it’s everything else that is bad.

Interestingly, my use of increasingly has decreased over time: it appears 7 times in newsletters from 2024, but only once this year. (Aside from this footnote.) It appears that I am…increasingly…attentive to the dangers of “increasingly”…

About 3 or 4 months after I started this Substack, I met at a weekend co-writing event…and then very aggressively set out to befriend her. Jasmine is a former Substack PM, a cofounding editor of (which publishes an annual print magazine, Kernel), and now an independent writer. She’s also someone I admire enormously: every conversation with her is incredibly invigorating and thought-provoking. Speaking with her always makes me feel like my brain is overclocking—in a good way!

So it was a huge pleasure to record a podcast with her about our favorite topics: tech, tech writing, culture, culture writing, the (supposed) death of the humanities, the future of criticism, what AI can do—and, crucially, what it can’t.

You can find our conversation below (including a transcript!) and you can also subscribe to Jasmine’s podcast on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Previous guests include the NYT tech columnist Kevin Roose and the Stanford professor Fred Turner (who wrote the influential From Counterculture to Cyberculture).

@jasmi.news

🌻 expanding the market for culture (ft. celine nguyen)

You can’t step foot into Substack without getting inundated by takes about the literacy crisis, waning attention spans, and why technology is making everything worse. Some days, I feel like a doomer too. But this doesn’t have to be how you experience the internet. I wanted to talk to somebody who has managed to not only retain…

Listen now

5 months ago · 25 likes · 3 comments · Jasmine Sun and Celine Nguyen

What do Jasmine and I discuss? Well—

Silicon Valley ideology (the pros and cons)

Early on, we discuss the culture clash I experienced when I (briefly) left Silicon Valley tech to go to art school in London—

When you’re in the tech world, it just feels like things are always expanding. Things are always getting better and better.…Whereas in the arts and humanities world, there’s this feeling of decline.…That shift from this world that is constantly growing to this world that feels itself to be contracting and under threat was so interesting to me.

I am curious about what it takes to bring that kind of optimism and that feeling of expanding possibility into the humanities. I went to undergrad and studied computer science. I learned to code. And then when I became more interested in literature, history, philosophy, and so on, I just felt like I had this incredibly, intellectually expansive period of my life…I feel that there are a lot of people who are interested in the humanities, and it’s about figuring out, How do you bring more people into the fold?

—and Jasmine’s own experiences going from a much more humanities-oriented environment to the startup-obsessed world of Stanford.

I think our experiences leaping across disciplines—the “two cultures” of STEM and the humanities—is what makes it so interesting to speak to each other! And we do a little thinking out loud about what the intellectual foundations of Silicon Valley are:

The value of just dipping into all these disciplines and worlds that all have their own vocabulary, their own canonical texts—is figuring out how to…not just describe the surface level, “this is the stuff people are saying or doing,” but “Here’s the underlying ideology or philosophy or worldview that is transmitted by this.”

In Silicon Valley, people do think of disruption as inherently good. They think of information as inherently abstracted and decontextualized. And some of this comes from the philosophical origins, maybe, of how data structures work, how algorithms work, how you can abstract away from what is the specific data and just think about how to handle it and how to store it…[which leads to] tech people believing that they can take these tools and try to solve problems in a lot of different fields. It explains why tech people are always trying to get into health-tech and urbanism.

This ability to get beyond the surface-level—and comprehensively explain what’s going on in tech—is something Jasmine is exceptionally good at. I recommend:

@jasmi.news

🌻 are you high-agency or an NPC?

The AI gold rush has sparked a vibe shift in San Francisco. The city is flush with money again after the post-ZIRP recession of 2022. Cracked 22-year-old coders are telling the world they’re going to “solve hurricanes” and the "national debt.” Lurie is mayor, nature is healing, the technology brothers are back with a vengeance. Take a look—$100 million …

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7 months ago · 866 likes · 106 comments · Jasmine Sun

…plus Jasmine’s WSJ piece this May about vibe-coded apps; and her Business Insider piece in January about Silicon Valley’s new Red Scare. (If you’re an editor, you should consider commissioning her!)

How the internet can lead to “radicalization for good and for cultural edification”

I know people are very anti-internet (our deteriorating attention spans! our instinctual, id-driven addiction to bad content!) but Jasmine and I heroically defend the internet as a force for good…yes, even for intellectualism!

We discuss my (first) viral newsletter—

—which Jasmine describes as “a celebration, implicitly, of the internet as something that lowers the barriers to doing personal research.” And why I’m ultimately a “contrarian optimist” when it comes to the internet, because:

When I think about my interest in literature, a lot of it was very much facilitated by the internet. I did not grow up in a New Yorker household…And so a lot of the books that I now think of as foundational to how I see the world, to my aesthetic worldview, my ethical worldview, I just found out about because people would post on Reddit or Twitter. I think that is something really special about the internet, that you do not need to be in the right family context, geographic context, social context where these things are automatically accessible to you. You can just discover your interests online.

The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has this TED Talk about how YouTube encourages political extremism…[but] this push into the extremes happens in so many parts of the internet…You can develop this intellectual radicalization where you’re kind of like, “Ooh, I wanna know what book I should read,” and then two years later you’re a brodernist.

We also discuss my resolution to use social media more, and how to use it a “vehicle for aspiration,” in Jasmine’s elegant turn of phrase.

Writing advice, why we love Substack, and why we still love being edited

Writing this newsletter has forced me to be very intentional about when I lean into self-promotion and growth hacking…and when I seclude myself from all those harrowing statistics in order to pursue my pure, unfettered artistic vision…

So when Jasmine asked me, “As a writer, what role do metrics play for you?” I was delighted to opine:

You, as a creative person, are trying to defend yourself against this encroachment of numbers that measure whether your work is worth it or not. The number of likes is not actually how worthy your writing is, but it really feels like that’s the case. And obviously you want to be receptive to feedback, and it’s valuable to know what lands more with people and what lands less, but when all reactions are filtered through the number of views, the number of likes...

There’s this funny balance where some writers get way too purist about it and they’re like, I don’t want to have to package my work up for the masses and for the hordes. I think if you really believe in the quality of your work, you owe it to your work to package it in a way where it can reach the most people. There’s obviously a way to do it that is clickbait-y and growth-hacky and kind of trashy. But then there’s also a way to do it that’s just like, are you backing your own work? Do you believe that it’s meaningful to people? There’s this awkward balance where you want to market your work, but then you also want to retain some purity.

We also discuss why we believe in the democratic potential of writing on the internet:

The internet…has created this publishing environment and this media environment where if you are a random person, you can write a review of an album, you can write a review of a book, you can disseminate it around. And I don’t mean just in the vulgar sense of, oh, everyone thinks they’re a critic even if they’re writing a two-star Goodreads one-liner. But everyone can be a critic in the sense that everyone has a chance to try to achieve a certain level of analytical excellence, literary excellence, intellectual excellence.

Democratization leads to a lot of slop, but it also means that a lot of people get a chance to refine their slop into something that’s really special and innovative…

Sometimes the difference between someone who’s a really excellent writer and someone who seems clearly amateurish is just that the excellent writer was praised at the right periods in their journey, received the right mentorship and encouragement to keep on going. I really find it precious that the internet can offer more of that encouragement to people…You don’t have to be picked by a gatekeeper to be brought into an institution before you’re allowed to make your work. You get to make your work and see—do people care about this? Is this resonating with people? Can other people see something in it that I didn’t see initially?

I also offer some Substack tips—and specifically how I get people with fractured attention spans to read my 5,000-word newsletters:

I have this Proust newsletter that went viral earlier this year. It’s something like 5,000 words…a lot of people read to the end. I have comments and emails that reference things deep into the post. I feel very strongly that people can read something long-form on their phones, but it’s very easy to get bored. And so a lot of the formatting I do is to [make the post] feel as visually varied as possible. Lists are a nice visual break; block quotes are a nice visual break; having generous images throughout; having a few short paragraphs and a few long ones. Sometimes I see newsletters where I’m like, the content in this is so good, but there are no images. There are no subheadings. There are no little lists…Visual variation is how you get people to read long-form on a screen.

But Jasmine and I are both people invested in media institutions and newspapers, and especially working with editors!—so we get into why editors are irreplaceable, despite Substack and self-publishing. And I get into some stories of great experiences being edited:

All of the editors I’ve worked with have taught me something about writing. The first book review I published was with the Cleveland Review of Books, which I love as a publication. And my editor there [Philip Harris] would just make these little directional edits that were so incredibly helpful and shaped every other book review I’ve done. One of the reasons I’m most sad about the economic model for cultural criticism and newspapers collapsing is just that being edited is how you learn as a writer. For a nonfiction writer, if you get edited by a bunch of really good people, that’s kind of equivalent to a creative writing MFA. But if there aren’t enough people who can be full-time editors making money, then how are you going to get that training?

I have turned in some remarkably overwrought drafts to Philip, and he’s helped me get them in excellent argumentative shape:

Bad writing and worse takes

I also loved our very stimulating conversation on bad internet culture writing and manufactured trends, which draws from an excellent newsletter Jasmine published recently on vice signaling and bait:

@jasmi.news

🌻 don't take the bait

There’s a new generation of AI companies for whom distribution is the product. They embrace vice signaling, plastering streets and feeds with ads that say “Stop Hiring Humans” (Artisan) and “Cheat On Everything” (Cluely). These signs intend to goad people into snapping pictures and posting dunks. Bernie Sanders recently…

Read more

6 months ago · 249 likes · 25 comments · Jasmine Sun

I read her newsletter shortly before we recorded the podcast, and it was a huge pleasure to think out loud with her about what makes for lazy internet trend journalism—and how it encourages manipulative marketing and fake news:

: If you are not in the culture beyond the internet, you will not have good enough antibodies to know whether it’s a one-off viral thing that says nothing deeper, whether or not it’s bait. So many tweets are bait. There are people tweeting about American politics who do not live in America and they are distorting our view of what our fellow citizens believe. Good culture writing has to come from being both an observer and a participant, someone who can vibe-check: how much does this random viral video actually say about how we live together?

What AI can and can’t do…and what this means for artists and writers!

Jasmine and I also discuss our attempts to use AI for writing—something she tweets about and writes about regularly—

@jasmi.news

🌻 32 notes on AI & writing

I had the recent pleasure of recording a podcast with the lovely Ian Leslie on AI and writing. I’ll share it when it’s out (here it is!), and in the meantime, jotted down some quick reflections during my flight home from London…

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10 months ago · 122 likes · 28 comments · Jasmine Sun

—and how AI has been surprisingly good at helping us fact-check our own writing, and point out human-generated hallucinations.

I will say, though, AI hasn’t been as useful for research as I’d hoped:

I have tried to use it for writing with mixed results. I’m a control freak, so I never use it to write the final sentences. I was initially like, oh, can I use AI for researching sources? And I found that it only works for a certain type of source because if you’re a writer, even the sources you’re referencing are a way of demonstrating your taste. It’s the particular reference points, the juxtaposition. I really enjoy the pieces where I’m like, I’m going to take this philosophy book and I’m going to take this sociology book and I’m going to take this history of technology book. It’s fun to pull things from unexpected worlds into the same world of a piece. And so when that becomes a really important part of taste, then you have to prompt AI so excessively.

We also get into the economic anxieties around increasing AI usage, inspired by a conversation Jasmine recently had with :

The Sublime

The AI Debate Is Not About Art, It's About Money

This is the Sublime newsletter, where we share an eclectic assortment of ideas curated in and around the Sublime universe…

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7 months ago · 64 likes · 4 comments · Jasmine Sun, Sari Azout, and Sublime

And we discuss some situations where using AI can be artistically interesting and even encourage sociability. I loved this story about an unexpected LLM bug:

Jasmine Sun: One funny story I heard about an AI lab was that during the RLHF process (getting human feedback on which responses are better), they asked raters to pick “Which response sounds more human?” And they kept picking the ones with all the typos, because humans have typos and models don’t. But then when the researchers retrained the model based on this feedback, they ended up just producing a model that couldn’t spell anything correctly. All it spit out was prose that otherwise made sense, but every single word was misspelled. It took them ages to figure out that this particular human feedback was the reason why.

Celine Nguyen: This really makes me think of that classic “the flaws of the medium become a signature” thing. One of the reasons I am, on a personal level excited about AI in art, is that it is just a funny, weird technology. It’s very complex. It produces all these strange, idiosyncratic, whimsical outcomes. I think there’s something about artists being able to work in this very dynamic system and deliberately pull out, what are the weird data biases? What are the weird amplification effects? Treating model collapse as something that can become artistically interesting and something that you can work with.

If you’re interested in artistic uses of AI, I highly recommend this episode of ’s podcast, where Jasmine interviews the technologist on what is (in my opinion) one of the most artistically interesting uses of LLMs: a poetry camera that generates text describing what it sees.

Reboot

Building Software With a Soul

As much as I love writing, many of the people who inspire me most don’t spend most of their time penning essays. Instead, their preferred means of articulating a vision for technology is to build something and launch it into the world—creating products and prototypes that are just as opinionated as any text…

Listen now

2 years ago · 27 likes · 2 comments · kelin and Jasmine Sun

If you’ve missed the link to our conversation, here it is again:

@jasmi.news

🌻 expanding the market for culture (ft. celine nguyen)

You can’t step foot into Substack without getting inundated by takes about the literacy crisis, waning attention spans, and why technology is making everything worse. Some days, I feel like a doomer too. But this doesn’t have to be how you experience the internet. I wanted to talk to somebody who has managed to not only retain…

Listen now

5 months ago · 25 likes · 3 comments · Jasmine Sun and Celine Nguyen

And I’d love to hear your takes on our takes—here, on ’s newsletter, on Substack Notes (tag us!) or elsewhere on the internet!

Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light is an aloof title for an unusually personable book of art criticism. The 100 pieces inside, written from 1988 to 2018, include essays on—

• Andy Warhol (“the artist laureate of capitalism”)

• Pablo Picasso (“simple in the ways that counted…he was a line-drawing critter”)

• Agnes Martin (“the most matter-of-fact of mystics”)

• Florine Stettheimer (“securely esteemed—or adored, more like it”)

• Peter Hujar ("who “lived the bohemian dream of becoming legendary rather than the bourgeois one of being rich”)

—and others, all described in Schjeldahl’s accessible, exuberant style. Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, as Jarrett Earnest writes in the introduction, shows how “seeing is a contact sport.” In Schjeldahl’s writing, a stroll through an exhibition reads like a physical encounter of the most potent kind. He makes looking at paintings seem better than (almost) any psychedelic.

What did I learn from Schjeldahl? That art could be a first-person experience, not just an aloof, art-historical one. Prior knowledge—about an artist, medium and milieu—helped, but it wasn’t necessary. I felt less self-conscious after I read Schjeldahl, more open to establishing my own relationship to contemporary art. More open to writing about art, too, despite my lack of experience.

Today’s newsletter newsletter is about 5 contemporary art and craft exhibitions I saw in London this October. They include artists working with (and depicting) ‘90s technology; the first photographer to win the Turner Prize; a potter working with 15th-century Korean techniques; an artist who works with translated books; and more.

In this post — Nihaal Faizal’s The Magic Pencil ✦ Wolfgang Tillmans’s Build From Here at Maureen Paley ✦ Kwak Kyung-Tae’s solo show at Flow Gallery ✦ Miriam Stoney’s Ideal Translations at Tenderbooks, Oct 11–18 ✦ Clarissa, a group show curated by émergent and Soft Commodity, Oct 14–19

Nihaal Faizal’s The Magic Pencil

On the first Friday of the month, I stopped by the opening of the Bangalore-based artist Nihaal Faizal’s The Magic Pencil (Oct 3–Nov 1). The exhibition, curated by Olamiju Fajemisin and Ben Broome, is inspired by an Indian children’s TV show about a young boy, Sanju, whose magic pencil can bring anything he draws to life.

For the exhibition, Faizal took scenes from the TV show and recreated them on Megasketcher, a children’s magnetic drawing toy. They’re similar to Etch A Sketches (which I grew up with), with a slider on the right to erase everything. Though Faizal removed the eraser from these toys, there’s something appealingly uncanny about the implied transience of his drawings—especially in a gallery setting. I loved the depiction, too, of early 2000s objects like small point-and-shoot cameras:

Faizal is also the founder of the artist publishing house Reliable Copy, which is stocked at Printed Matter in NYC and elsewhere. For The Magic Pencil, he also created a charming exhibition catalogue that lists every drawing that Sanju and other characters create during the 450 episodes of the TV show:

I love anything that takes the form of a list, and there’s something intriguing about having hundreds of TV episodes compressed into this form—you imagine what plot points might have led to Sanju drawing a police inspector and a constable, and later an ambulance with a driver and two male nurses, or a Casio Keyboard…along with more conventionally childish objects, like a pair of roller skates.

Faizal’s project is clearly nostalgic, but it’s a thorny, conflicted nostalgia. When I spoke to the artist, he said that revisiting the TV show was a disappointing experience. Though the objects Sanju draws disappear at the end of each episode, he still gets to create anything he wants—without incurring any consequences. It’s a jejune plot that holds up poorly in the present, when many adults (and adolescents, too) are conscious of the ecological consequences of our thirst for more.

Faizal’s ambiguous nostalgia interests me much more than a more linear longing for the past. The latter seems to be everywhere in contemporary art right now—and it’s not clear that it’s a good thing. In the latest Spike issue on nostalgia, the critic Jeppe Ugelvig observes that:

“The rule about Berlin,” writes novelist , “is that you always got there too late.” The same logic, it seems, applies to the city that is Contemporary Art. Upon arrival there, one is immediately told that the art used to be better, its people more authentic, its institutions less corrupted. Its denizens, Art People, will diagnose this decline by hinging it on characteristically flimsy evidence, usually the disappearance of a particular genre or a platform, or something along the lines of “commodification.” Bewildered, one proceeds to navigate whatever remains in the supposedly impoverished present. But not long after, one finds oneself lecturing some poor debutante about some particularly riveting edition of the Venice Biennale one visited ten years ago. Art People are notoriously nostalgic people, always certain that some golden age has just passed.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Build From Here at Maureen Paley

The first Wolfgang Tillmans photograph I remember seeing was of three stargazer lilies in a plastic San Pellegrino water bottle. By saw, I mean I scrolled past it on tumblr, where the improvisational feeling of the scene, and the gauzy, filmic quality of the light, impressed itself into my memory:

These informal still lifes are common in the German photographer’s work. They have an appealing directness: smooth stones arranged on denim. Half a watermelon and a lavender bedsheet, on concrete. Cherries and grapefruit resting on a crinkled, orchid-purple plastic bag. In a 2018 profile for the New Yorker, visited Tillmans’s studio:

It takes time to know if a picture is good, he said…and, even then, “I can’t know, I can only hope that they last. You can’t be too sure about something, because otherwise you’re too full of yourself or you can’t see if there is a weakness in the work.”

Tillmans walked over to a group of still-lifes…[and] stopped before one: an onion, sliced in half and placed on a piece of wood. “They pull in different directions: attraction, beauty, obviousness, not obviousness, how they sit in relation to the genre as a whole, and how they sit in relation to the genre within my work—within the genre of still-lifes, in this case,” he said. He described how the pattern in the onion related to the pattern of the plywood. “Is it striking in a good way, or is it too obvious, or too subtle? Sometimes it can’t be subtle enough, and sometimes the obvious is actually really good.”

After seeing Faizal’s The Magic Pencil, my friend and I took the Central line over to east London, for the opening of Wolfgang Tillmans’s Build From Here (Oct 3–Dec 20).

Build From Here is an exhibition of Tillman’s work across 3 spaces. We began with the smallest space, Studio M, near the restaurant Rochelle Canteen. Inside was a 4-minute video of a wild carrot flower gently bobbing in the wind, to the gentle, occasional notes of a kalimba.

It was already dark when we made the 22-minute walk east to Maureen Paley’s space on Three Colts Lane. The gallery itself was crammed with people, and I had to pick my way through each room, along the perimeter, trying to catch a glimpse of each photograph:

I spent a long time in the room devoted to Travelling Camera, a new video work by Tillmans of a camera sweeping over—in halting, shuddering movements—the smoothly machined back of a display monitor. Cables snaked across the surface, which was strewn with sand dollars and loose vintage stamps. I liked the collision of natural and machined artifacts, and the gestural sweep from earlier forms of information (physical mail) to newer forms (telecommunication).

The final space, and the largest, was across the street in Wolfgang Tillmans’s former London studio. There was an immense crush of people outside: queuing to enter, clamoring to get in the queue, diffidently observing the queue from a distance. There was a man at the door that seemed to be occupying the role of a bouncer, plucking certain people from the crowd and ushering them in, and politely holding everyone else back. It felt like a scene from The Last Days of Disco.

When the door had disgorged enough people, calm and unhurried on their way out of the gallery, we were finally beckoned inside.

There were photographs printed on letter-sized sheets of paper, or smaller, and simply taped to the walls. Some of the larger ones were hung with discreet white binder clips:

And others were more traditionally framed, like an image of man about to lick someone’s ear:

It’s a charismatic and playful photograph. On my way out of the gallery, I found myself back in front of the ear, smiling. “Play,” as Tillmans once explained to the journalist Arthur Lubow, “has always been of serious importance to me.”

In an economized and puritanical world that is putting a priority on reason, to do something nonsensical is a strong and life-affirming experience, which puts everything in perspective.

Kwak Kyung-tae’s solo show at Flow Gallery

In mid-October, I went to see the Korean potter Kwak Kyung-tae’s work with . I have the barest, most primitive understanding of how ceramics are made, but Jennifer—who’s been working with clay for years, and even made her own kiln!—gave me a brief history of Korean ceramics, and how prominent British potters like Bernard Leach were influenced by Japanese and Korean techniques.

I love being introduced to a craft by someone who understands it on a very deep, foundational level: the chemical composition of the clay and slip and glazes; the distinctive qualities of wood-fired ceramics; how small variations in the glaze revealed how objects were positioned in the kiln, and where the fire was burning, and how much oxygen was available inside.

In an interview with the gallery, Kwak elaborates on his approach to buncheong ceramics, a technique from the 15th century where pieces are coated in a white slip to create different designs:

Traditionally, buncheong is celebrated for its clean, white surface; an elegant “makeup” applied to clay, as it’s often described in Korean. But my approach to buncheong departs from that classical ideal. I don’t seek purity or perfection in whiteness; instead I treat the white slip as a blank canvas, a starting point for something more elemental.

When I paint on the surface, I am not only applying imagery. Rather, I am initiating a dialogue between clay, slip, and fire. In the reduction kiln, iron in the clay body interacts with the whiteness of the slip, creating soft blooms of pink, shadowy grays, and sometimes deep, unexpected hues. These iron blooms are unpredictable; formed not by control, but by surrendering to the alchemy of heat and time.

What first drew me to buncheong was this tension between refinement and rawness. Beneath the surface of tradition, I found space for spontaneity, contrast, and elemental transformation. The fire doesn’t just finish the work—it reveals it. My buncheong is not an act of covering, but one of uncovering; not a mask, but a mirror of process and material truth.

I was particularly drawn to a bowl where the white slip was applied in bold, contrasting streaks—with dark, iron-rich clay showing underneath, and flashes of copper here and there:

Miriam Stoney’s Ideal Translations at Tenderbooks

I find myself at Tenderbooks once or twice a month—it’s one of the best bookshops in London, especially if you’re interested in artist books. The tiny space (just 48 square meters!) is filled with beautiful zines, rare art books, novels and nonfiction from independent presses, and more. I love how idiosyncratic many of the books are—like Thomas Sauvin’s Till Death Do Us Part, which has photos of people smoking at Chinese weddings, stored inside a cigarette box. (Each restock sells out almost instantly.)

For Frieze London, the Tenderbooks window display had a site-specific installation by the artist, writer and translator Miriam Stoney. In Ideal Translations, non-English books are paired with with book-sized mirrored panels, reflecting the texts and evoking the process of translating language—and the shifts in meaning that inevitably occur.

I stopped by on Saturday, October 18 (for a “tender breakfast viewing”) and loved how elegant and succinct the installation was. It also made me want to see more of Stoney’s work. Stoney studied art history at Oxford, architectural history at the Bartlett School of architecture, and now lives in Vienna. In an interview last year, Stoney describes how she began to create visual artworks:

At Oxford, everyone was so genuinely, or maybe earnestly, interested in the pursuit of knowledge within the one specific field they’d signed themselves up for. But this pursuit of knowledge also led to a culture of hoarding. Hiding library books, refusing to share notes from lectures, and maintaining tight social circles according to which schools people went to…I started producing visual art and performances when I realized that there were so many gaps in the “knowledge” I was supposed to have gained through study. The point was not to fill these gaps with some supplementary, positivistic, though equally inadequate knowledge, but to consider, tease, and probe these gaps and their relation to other aims that interest me more than knowledge: flourishing, understanding, love, and joy, to name but a few.

Her interest in architecture and knowledge production comes through very naturally in the works she made for her solo show at Brunette Coleman last year:

I love works that are variations on a theme, iterations on some core structuring concept—like these L-shaped sculptures that reference furnishings and interior decorations:

Stoney speaks English, German, and French, and grew up around Punjabi speakers. Her work often incorporates different books, languages, and texts—like in Real objects, sensual qualities, which features tiny beds that different books are tucked into:

“Books,” Stoney said,

are especially interesting to me because they promise escapism, not only in the sense of getting lost in a story but also in terms of social mobility. This was the point of tension in Real objects, sensual qualities: the image of the book in bed is taken directly from the Sikh temple, the Gurdwara, where the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, is treated with the same reverence as any other guru and therefore given a bed. The difference with my sculptures is that the books don’t get woken up in the morning and brought to bed at night, as they do in the daily Sikh ritual. They exist as inert markers of another cultural tradition, other philosophical traditions, which happen to be the ones that gradually brought me further and further away from my Sikh heritage.

Stoney’s work is so ideally suited to my interests—architecture, writing, translation—and I’m looking forward to what she does next.

Clarissa, curated by Émergent and Soft Commodity

My plan, after seeing Stoney’s installation at Tenderbooks, was to go home and spend the day writing. But instead I stopped by Clarissa, after reading an article by Sofia Hallstrom that described it as “the hottest art show of Frieze Week.”

The show was co-curated by the artist-run magazine émergent and the London gallery Soft Commodity, and included works by 29 artists. As Hallstrom observes,

The juxtapositions here are intuitive rather than chronological; works are brought together through shared material sensibilities and formal composition…“There are artists in their twenties alongside Turner Prize nominees,” the editors note. “Not because of contrast, but because of a lineage of shared values and shared approaches to form. The relationships reveal themselves if you spend time with the works.”2

Clarissa was held at a former club and sex shop, and works were installed so that they interacted with the idiosyncracies of each room. I loved this sculpture–painting by Oscar Enberg, which was hung in a small alcove, and how the carefully assembled forms pair with the congregation of light switches and outlets on the wall:

In the next room, I was instinctively drawn to the London-based artist Hamish Pearce’s Tools, an elegant and inscrutable collage of two images printed on aluminum, and a silver object that looked like the top of a cranium, with a glistening raspberry hung inside:

On the opposite end of the room was a photograph by the New York-based artist Kayode Ojo. It’s a blunt-force depiction of wealth—which feels even more stately when bracketed by the room’s floor-to-ceiling columns—but the scene depicted is hard to read. Whose arm? And whose hair? Is it a night out? A night in?

I wasn’t familiar with Ojo before this show. After reading an Artnet article about his 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner in NYC, I’m now interested in seeing Ojo’s sculptures—which Taylor Dafoe describes as “intricate assemblages of stemware, jewels, and other expensive-looking wares.”

Most of the shiny objects that make up the artist’s sculptures are not genuine items of luxury, but budget imitations—rhinestones, not diamonds; acrylic, not crystal. Then again, that’s the rub: even if these things are cheaply made, they have, through the context of the gallery, been turned into art…

Even when the artist includes authentic pieces of high-end merchandise alongside their bargain-bin counterparts, he does so without distinction. Ojo isn’t interested in debasing his expensive objects any more than he is in reclaiming the cheaper ones as kitsch. “That’s not necessarily my focus,” he said when asked about the worth of some of the products in “EDEN.” “It’s something I’d prefer to leave as it appears.”

…Growing up in an evangelical Christian home in rural Tennessee, Ojo didn’t have access to fine clothes and precious stones, and he didn’t aspire to, either. The interest in commercial objects has always been about their formal properties first, their symbolic value second, he explained.

After Ojo’s photograph, I passed into another room with a disco ball hanging from the ceiling, and a silkscreen print of a round, artificially-lit ball with the word motivation stretched across it.

The motivation piece is by Michel Majerus, an artist I’ve been interested in ever since sent me an interview in Spike about how the artist Cory Arcangel works with Majerus’s archive. Majerus is a Luxembourgish artist who passed away in 2002. Arcangel received permission from Majerus’s estate to work with Majerus’s laptop, and with the help of Dragan Espenschied—the preservation director of Rhizome, and an artist himself—booted up the laptop and began recording “let’s play” videos on YouTube of Majerus’s Photoshop files and other documents.

It felt very special to stumble across Majerus’s work at Clarissa—it felt obscurely significant to encounter this artist I’d been interested in and had been, subconsciously, seeking out. And Majerus’s work is just funny and charming and charismatic!

In the basement of the Clarissa show was another work I loved—as someone sadly addicted to self-help books:

By assembling slices of different self-help books into this stretched-out sculpture, Wiebe calls attention to the earnestly stentorian tone of self-help titles. It does, unfortunately, sound like a book I’d read. And if you, too, are shamefully obsessed with self-help books, it’s worth reading ’s latest essay in The Drift:

Like most Americans, I’ve known the frustration and resentment that follow catechesis in the religion of self-fulfillment. I understand what it’s like to be told to look within yourself to find your destiny, your calling, your deepest desire, and to be assured that hard work and the right attitude can make it real: the excessive self-reverence, and then the inevitable self-recrimination. That there is now such a demand for books about the inevitability of failure and the wisdom of not giving a fuck suggests that many of us today suspect that our selfhood is a flimsy foundation on which to build a life, inadequate to the insuperable obstacles that prevent us from imposing our designs on the reality we inhabit. We’ve been tricked, or have tricked ourselves, into overestimating our own agency — and we hope a firm Stoic hand can smack us back into perspective.

Before I left Clarissa’s space on Caledonian Road, I bought a copy of émergent’s latest issue, which includes profiles and interviews with Wolfgang Tillmans, Bernadette Corporation, Susan Cianciolo, and others. It’s worth buying: typographically daring, beautifully printed, and almost like holding an exhibition (or 12) in your hands.

And now it’s November, and I’m curled up at home writing this. I’ve spent the last few hours realizing just how hard it is to describe an artwork—a shape on a wall, a form in a room—and how exciting, too. I’m still figuring out how to write about art!

But I love reading critics like Jennifer Krasinski and and others write about art. If nothing else, the effort of writing pushes me to see, to observe, to go out into the world and immerse myself in the unexpected.

Three recent favorites

The half-meter tea ceremony ✦✧ “Merely a hobby” ✦✧ Colombian electro-pop

The half-meter tea ceremony ✦

on hiking, camping, and having tea in the Alps—including some lovely details about Tang dynasty poems and how they might have influenced contemporary tea-drinking trends:

The 半米茶席 (half meter tea ceremony)…is a recent trend in China focused around the core belief that tea ceremony is everywhere in life. This trend encourages people to engage in tea in all environments, especially in nature. In China, there is a popular movement on social media to return to nature, and the practise of drinking tea in nature is a way to reclaim this harmony with the natural world. I believe this is a continuation of practices common in ancient China, as recorded in Classical Chinese literature.

There are over 2000 poems in the Classical Chinese literature oeuvre about tea drinking, with over 200 composed in the Tang and Song dynasties alone. The poems typically describe the spirit of drinking tea. While tea permeated almost every aspect of Classical Chinese culture, the ancients often enjoyed drinking tea in different natural settings, with special emphasis on important spiritual locations such as Mount Tai (泰山, one of the 5 sacred mountains in Daoism) or Five-Platform Mountain (五台山, one of the 5 sacred mountains in Buddism).

Idle Pleasure

半米茶席, The Half Meter Tea Ceremony

As a tea enthusiast, I’ve always been interested in the differences between Chinese and Japanese tea culture. While tea drinking can be ceremonial in China (like the tea ceremony at Chinese weddings), I have rarely experienced it to be as rigid as tea ceremony culture in Japan. I suspect this has something…

Read more

7 months ago · 2 likes · Jennifer Bin

“Merely a hobby” ✦

I loved ’s recent newsletter on refusing to choose between their job and their writing—a profoundly relatable feeling for me!

It’s not as simple as a choice between my job (organizer) or my hobby (writer). I reject (even resent!) categorizing my organizing as merely a job and my writing as merely a hobby, though organizing pays for my life, and writing doesn’t.

Demarcation

The conspiracy of art

Last week, I got kicked out of a writing workshop. I had missed one too many classes after several weeks of work-related travel. “I’d need you to be able to commit to regular attendance, because creating a community of folks who know and trust each other is such an essential part of a successful, safe workshop space,” the email from the instructor said…

Read more

6 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Dizzy Zaba

Colombian electro-pop ✦

The online magazine invited me to be the guest curator for their November recommendations. It was the perfect opportunity to write about anti-algorithmic music discovery, perfumes I love, and more:

passerby

celine nguyen on anti-algorithmic discovery, book recs from npyl's hiba abid, and more (also new yorkers, go vote today!)

Each month, we ask a writer to share what’s on their minds and in their open tabs for our monthly recommendations. This November’s guest curator is Celine Nguyen, a designer and writer living in London and the voice behind personal canon. She writes about trying to live a meaningful, intellectually engaged, self-actualized life and how to take your intellectual, artistic, and literary aspirations seriously — especially when you’re no longer in school or academia but have an urgent, unstoppable desire to keep on learning, making, and growing…

Read more

6 months ago · 15 likes · Celine Nguyen

If the music recommendations in there aren’t enough, here’s one more: the Colombian singer–songwriter–producer Ela Minus. Her album DÍA is full of gauzy, shimmering synth sounds, with her languid, ethereal voice threading through.

Thank you, as always, for reading this newsletter! And congratulations to everyone in NYC who canvassed for Zohran this summer and autumn. It’s invigorating to see political change happen through sheer force of will and enthusiasm. As wrote back in June, “Enough pessimism of the intellect, it is time for my new best friend: optimism of the will.”

I gave ELIZA a script designed to permit it to play (I should really say parody) the role of a…psychotherapist engaged in an initial interview with a patient.

Why therapy? Because it was technically easy to simulate: ELIZA could construct replies by simply “reflecting the patient’s statements back to him.” In a therapeutic context, open-ended questions like TELL ME MORE ABOUT… or IN WHAT WAY (ELIZA could only communicate in uppercase) seemed insightful and useful, not dumb. But when Weizenbaum began showing the program to others, he noticed something unexpected. “I was startled,” he later wrote,

to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with [ELIZA] became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it…What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.1

A shallow impression of intelligence, it turned out, was all it took for people to project human traits, like empathy and care, onto their computers.

In November 2022—almost 6 decades after Weizenbaum first observed this effect—the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI released their own chatbot. At the time, frontier AI labs like OpenAI, Deepmind, and Anthropic had spent years developing large language models. But LLMs were still a specialist technology: for many people, they were hard to understand and use. ChatGPT, which took OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model and gave it an easy, familiar conversational interface, made it possible for anyone to interact with AI.

The interface, along with the allure of artificial intelligence, made ChatGPT one of the fastest-growing apps ever. Two months later, ChatGPT had over 100 million users. Other AI labs tried to seize the moment, launching their own chatbots and leaning into the conversational metaphor. (Anthropic’s app even had a human name, Claude.)

Since then, AI chatbots have been used to code personalized apps, cheat on college exams, write New Yorker short stories, and invent new recipes. Depending on how you feel about AI, these uses are either fascinating or concerning. What they have in common, though, is that they see LLMs as a tool—a highly flexible, multipurpose tool, of course, but just a tool.

But what happens when people start using AI for functions traditionally served by other humans? Chatbots are now used as romantic partners, confidants for suicidal teenagers, and therapists—and these uses introduce a new set of practical, psychological, and philosophical problems.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, lately, because it shows our desire to treat computers as confidants, not just tools, is much older than the present AI furor. And ELIZA shows, too, that our capacity to believe in an interlocutor’s intelligence isn’t just about the sophistication of the language model. Our intense longing to be understood can make even a rudimentary program seem human. This desire predates today’s technologies—and it’s also what makes conversational AI so promising and problematic.

In this post — A brief history of AI, from 1956–present ✦ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By ✦ Susan Kare’s metaphors for the first Macintosh ✦ The web as a “neighborhood,” your website as a “home” ✦ Against chat interfaces ✦ How child psychologists shaped AI research ✦ How LLMs affect our theory of mind ✦ Community and other people

Two paths for the natural language model

The field of artificial intelligence was founded in 1956, when four researchers organized a summer workshop to see if—and how—machines could become intelligent. When Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and John McCarthy first proposed a 2-month, 10-person “study of artificial intelligence” to be held at Dartmouth University, they wrote that:

The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

The Rockefeller Foundation wasn’t particularly impressed, and McCarthy later complained that they “only gave us half the money we asked for.” Still, the attendees did their best. Two of them (Allan Newell and Herbert Simon) demoed a program that could construct mathematical proofs; another (the IBM programmer Alex Bernstein) showed off a chess-playing program.

The success of these early programs—which showed computers excelling in tasks normally reserved for intelligent adults, like mathematical reasoning and chess—made researchers confident that artificial general intelligence (AGI) was just around the corner. In 1960, Simon wrote that “Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do.” And in 1970, Minsky confidently predicted that:

In…three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being…a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable.

But how would computers get to that point? Over the next few decades, AI researchers tried 2 different paths:

• The symbolic approach focused on encoding coherent, logical principles for intelligent behavior and reasoning. This is also known as “classical” or “good old-fashioned AI.” Intuitively, this approach roughly corresponds with a more top-down, rationalist model of intelligence—like learning to write by understanding grammatical rules and principles.

• The statistical approach focused on more inductive, probabilistic techniques for simulating intelligence.2 This roughly corresponds with a more bottoms-up, empiricist model of intelligence—like learning to write through examples (reading a lot of books) and experience (practicing a lot).

Initially, the symbolic approach seemed more promising, and it dominated the field from the 1960s to ‘80s. But then it got stuck. It turned out that teaching a computer to play chess was much easier than teaching it understand simple sentences or recognize faces. Children made these tasks seem so easy! But getting to childlike competence required two whole new subfields of AI research—natural language processing and computer vision—and several more decades of work. (As the researcher Hans Moravec observed in 1988, “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception.”)

By the 1990s, many believed that AI had hit a dead end. Funding was scarce, and hubris was replaced with humility, as many research projects failed to deliver results. But while symbolic approaches floundered, some researchers began revisiting an idea from the earliest days of AI: artificial neural networks.

Neural networks had, in fact, been mentioned in the original Dartmouth funding proposal. But Marvin Minsky, who had pioneered this approach to AI, left the 1956 workshop convinced that symbolic approaches—which explicitly encoded knowledge about the world, instead of implicitly learning through experience—were superior. (He even coauthored a book, in 1969, which persuasively argued that artificial neural networks had significant limitations.)

But the decades that followed showed that Minsky had been too pessimistic. Artificial neural networks benefitted from theoretical, computational, and data improvements from the 1980s to early 2010s:

(If you’d like, you can skip the list below, and start reading again from: These advances made it possible…)

• Theoretical improvements: In the 1980s, researchers showed how to use backpropagation to train neural networks. During training, neural networks attempt to answer questions like Is this an image of a flower or a tree? What word is likely to appear next in this sentence? If the answer is wrong, then backpropagation helps the neural network “learn” from mistakes and refine its behavior. Another key advance, in 2017, was the appealingly-named paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which used a transformer architecture to make neural networks easier to train—and more effective for tasks like translating between languages. Transformers allowed neural networks to analyze sentences more efficiently, because words could be analyzed in parallel (instead of sequentially: the first word, then the second, then the third, which was typically slower). This simultaneity also made it possible to understand more complex sentences—like ones where pronouns (it, him, her) referred to words that appeared earlier in the sentence.

• Computational improvements: In the late 2000s, an exponential increase in computing power (and specifically using specialized graphics hardware, or GPUs), made it possible for neural networks to efficiently process and learn from more data.

• Data improvements: These theoretical and computational advances made it possible to train neural networks on large labeled datasets. These datasets—such as ImageNet, which was widely used to help train AI models to recognize different objects—often took years to assemble. In these datasets, examples are “labeled” with the correct answer—an image dataset, for example, may label images with “flower” or a more specific label, like “camellia sinensis.” Labeling involves a great deal of human labor, which is typically poorly compensated and exploits freelancers in developing countries. Labeled datasets are so crucial to AI development that the researcher has argued that “There are no new ideas in AI…only new datasets.” Major breakthroughs have typically involved applying old ideas to new data sources. Today’s LLMs, like OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude, rely on ideas that were developed in the 20th century—but use data scraped from the 21st century’s deluge of online content.

These advances made it possible to use neural networks for deep learning—where “artificial intelligence” is accomplished by learning from vast quantities of data, instead of explicitly encoded rules. And deep learning was extraordinarily successful in solving problems that older, symbolic approaches couldn’t. Researchers used it to defeat the world’s reigning champion in the classic—and famously complex—Chinese strategy game Go. And it was remarkably useful for computer vision problems (like recognizing objects and faces); natural language problems (like understanding and generating text/speech); and even artistic projects. The artist Anna Ridler used a particular deep learning technique, generative adversarial networks (GANS) to create Mosaic Virus, a video that used the motif of the Dutch tulip to comment on the speculative frenzy surrounding cryptocurrency.

Though the distinction between symbolic and statistical approaches is imperfect—most AI research incorporates ideas from both—today’s LLMs (and the chatbots powered by them, like ChatGPT and Claude are, broadly speaking, descendants of the latter approach. What appears to be intelligent behavior is an emergent property of a sophisticated statistical model.

Intuitively, however, most people model intelligence symbolically, as the application of meaningful rules and principles. That’s why many researchers, like Minsky, spent decades prioritizing symbolic AI—it seemed more likely to succeed! So this distinction isn’t just of historical interest; it showcases how difficult it is, even today, to understand how AI “thinks.”

And this isn’t just a specialist concern! The widespread usage of ChatGPT, Claude, and their competitors means that everyone—everyone—has to consider whether computers can think, and whether their thought processes resemble ours, and whether we can differentiate between a human’s work and an LLM’s. The answers to these questions affect our everyday lives, from the emails we receive to the seemingly human-created content we see on social media.

Metaphors we build by

The theoretical, computational, and data advances I described above helped push AI research forward. But for these technologies to have a social and economic impact, something more was needed: a better interface for using AI.

Technological interfaces have always relied on metaphors, which help make nascent, abstract, and novel concepts legible to their users. In Metaphors We Live By, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson wrote that:

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action…

We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Lakoff and Johnson’s ideas had a major influence on an early Apple engineer, Christopher Espinosa. In an interview, Espinosa, who was Apple’s eighth employee, described the influence that Metaphors We Live By had on him:

People are remarkable at being able to keep a number of metaphoric systems in their head simultaneously. We studied this, some of us more than others. I went up to Berkeley and talked to George Lakoff about this…He was one of my college professors…Programmers read linguistics; they really, really do. We read Metaphors We Live By, and it both gave us the determination to build things on a metaphoric system, and a little bit of freedom, knowing that people can keep multiple metaphoric systems in mind…

How did these metaphorical systems work? One example that Lakyoff and Johnson offer is the metaphor TIME IS MONEY, which treats time as “valuable commodity…a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals.”

In our culture TIME IS MONEY in many ways…hourly wages, hotel room rates, yearly budgets, interest on loans, and paying your debt to society by “serving time.” These practices…have arisen in modern industrialized societies and structure our basic everyday activities in a very profound way…Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.

Conceptual metaphors, they observed, are usually associated with a “coherent system of metaphorical expressions.” Phrases like—

• You’re wasting my time.

• I don’t have the time to give you.

• How do you spend your time these days?

• I’ve invested a lot of time in her.

• You’re running out of time.

• You need to budget your time.

• Is that worth your time?

• Thank you for your time.

—all reinforced the metaphor of TIME IS MONEY. And the metaphor suggests that it’s natural to allocate your time to maximize the rewards you receive—in the same way you might allocate capital for maximum return on investment.

Metaphors encourage us to understand and experience one thing in terms of another. This makes them a particularly useful tool for designing software. By choosing the right word (or the right icon), users could understand new features through existing, familiar ideas.

Many Silicon Valley innovators understood this, and strategically used metaphors to introduce an unfamiliar concept—personal computing—to the masses.

Metaphors for the first Macintosh

Almost all personal computers today rely on the desktop metaphor, which treats a computer monitor as a surface where different folders and documents can be opened for viewing. Just like a real, physical desktop, you could also drag these around the desktop’s surface, and even layer these on top of each other.

The desktop metaphor was first used by researchers at Xerox PARC in 1970. Xerox released a few computers that relied on the metaphor, but it was Apple’s Macintosh—released in 1984—that popularized it.

To make the Macintosh feel more conceptually coherent, the designer Susan Kare designed a corresponding set of icons: the file icon (a paper with a folded corner) and the trash can icon (a visual metaphor for deleting things). Her precise, clever illustrations helped reinforce the computer’s role in an office, alongside other necessary tools.

The concept of scrolling through longer pages was also a metaphor, and it took a few tries to get right. A few years earlier, Apple had released the Lisa computer, which used the metaphor of an “elevator.” But by the time Apple released the Macintosh, the elevator had been renamed to the “scroll bar”:

The Macintosh also included a program called MacPaint. The visual metaphors that Kare designed had an enormous influence on Photoshop (which appeared 6 years later), and every graphics editor that followed.

Years later, Kare was interviewed about the metaphors used for certain tools:

• The lasso tool (top left) is used to select specific parts of an image. Bill Atkinson, the programmer who created MacPaint, drew a lasso “with the little slip knot.” Kare refined it into the icon that appears in the UI.

• The paint bucket tool (third from top, left) is used to fill a selected area with a pattern (or, in later computers, a color). “When choosing an icon for the fill function,” Kare said, “I tried paint rollers and other concepts, but…the pouring paint can made the most sense to people.”

It took trial and error to find the best metaphor. Kare tried different designs for the copy icon, but many metaphors were too complex to illustrate. And others were puns that didn’t translate to other languages:

For while there was going to be a copy machine for making a copy of a file, and you would drag and drop a file onto it to copy it…[but it] was hard to figure out what you could draw that people would see as a copier. I drew a cat in a mirror, like “copy cat”…I tried a few ideas that were not practical.

“My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge”

The success of the Macintosh—and subsequent computers that incorporated these metaphors—made desktops, files, and scrollbars the norm for decades to come. But a few years later, when other entrepreneurs were trying to introduce the world wide web to people, they faced a new conceptual problem.

When David Bohnett cofounded Beverly Hills Internet in the late 1990s, very few people understood what the web was. And they certainly didn’t understand why they needed their own websites, which made it hard to sell web hosting services to them. Eventually, as Vivian Le described in a 99% Invisible episode, Bohnett realized that

His hosting site didn’t need a technological innovation, it needed a conceptual one…So he sketched out a plan…“You’d go to a two-dimensional representation of a neighborhood where you would see streets and blocks. You would see icons that represented houses […] and you would actually pick an address that you wanted to create your website. You had a sense that you were joining a neighborhood,” says David.

He didn’t want people to think of the web as a thing you logged onto, but more like a physical place to dwell in—like a house.

To help with the spatial metaphor, Bohnett and his cofounder renamed their startup to GeoCities. And people got it. The name helped people understand that they needed a home on the web—or rather, a homepage, which they were able to design and decorate to their own tastes. And it helped them understand that the web was both personal and social: they could have their own home, and also visit other people’s homes.

Other metaphors, like the idea of “the cloud,” took a few decades to become popular. Though it was first used in the ‘90s, it wasn’t widely used until the 21st century, when it become common to store information in “the cloud”—in a different computer, that is—but still access it from your own, thanks to the internet. Cloud computing technologies became so convenient that it seemed as if your files were stored in thin air—in some ethereal, atmospheric place. But although the metaphor makes the cloud seem “inexhaustible, limitless, and invisible,” the reality—as the media scholar and former network engineer Tung-Hui Hu observed in A Prehistory of the Cloud—is far different:

The cloud is a resource-intensive, extractive technology that converts water and electricity into computational power, leaving a sizable amount of environmental damage that it then displaces from sight.

The conceptual power of metaphors have an enormous influence—both good and bad—on our understanding of technology. Proposing new metaphors, therefore, is a way to reimagine how a technology works. In 2019, the artist and educator offered a few alternative metaphors for the web. In the evocatively titled “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?” Schwulst proposed that we consider:

• The website as room (“In an age of information overload, a room is comforting because it’s finite, often with a specific intended purpose.)

• The website as garden (“Gardens have their own ways each season. In the winter, not much might happen, and that’s perfectly fine. You might spend the less active months journaling in your notebook: less output, more stirring around on input…Plants remind us that life is about balance.”)

• The website as thrown rock that’s now falling deep into the ocean (“Sometimes you don’t want a website that you’ll have to maintain…Why not consider your website a beautiful rock with a unique shape which you spent hours finding, only to throw it into the water until it hits the ocean floor?…You can throw as many websites as you want into the ocean. When an idea comes, find a rock and throw it.”)

Conceptual metaphors were crucial for helping people understand how to use computers, and how to use the web. Similarly, artificial intelligence—and large language models, in particular—needed a coherent, easily understood metaphor for people to use it. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, it offered an instantly legible metaphor.

Conversation as metaphor

In ChatGPT, Claude, and similar apps, INTERACTING WITH LLMS IS A CONVERSATION.

Because many of us have spent years of our lives learning how to have conversations, and what the norms and expectations for them are, we can immediately apply our experiences to the new concept of an LLM. “Chat works,” as the writer observed,

because we’re so used to doing it—with friends, with coworkers, with customer support. We chat to align stakeholders and we chat to find love. For many, chatting is as intuitive as speaking (maybe more so, given Gen Z’s fear of phones). In a 2017 blog post, Eugene Wei remarked that “Most text conversation UI’s are visually indistinguishable from those of a messaging UI used to communicate primarily with other human beings”…

As a result, there’s no learning curve to ChatGPT…Talk to the AI like you would a human. The model was trained on tweets and comments and blogs and posts; no foreign language needed to make it understand.

The metaphor creates a coherent system of expressions and expectations:

• To start using the LLM, you should begin a conversation

• When you speak to the LLM, it will listen to you and then respond

• During your conversation, you can ask questions and receive answers, advice, and encouragement from the LLM

• It helps to be polite and clear when speaking to an LLM. The LLM, similarly, should be polite and helpful towards you

• The LLM will remember information, context, and preferences you express, and respond with those in mind

But conceptual metaphors are necessarily partial, not total. As Lakoff and Johnson note, a total metaphor would imply that “one concept would actually be the other, not merely be understood in terms of it.” TIME IS MONEY in some ways, but not in others:

If you spend your time trying to do something and it doesn’t work, you can’t get your time back. There are no time banks. I can give you a lot of time, but you can’t give me back the same time, though you can give me back the same amount of time.

Similarly, interacting with an LLM isn’t quite like a conversation, and speaking to an LLM isn’t quite like speaking to a person. Metaphors help us understand what’s similar—but they can also obscure our understanding of what’s different, especially when it contradicts the metaphor.

Against chat interfaces

It’s hard to imagine LLMs becoming so widely used without the conversational metaphor, which is exceptionally elegant, efficient, and easy to understand. But the metaphor is responsible for a number of problems: practical, psychological, and philosophical.

INTERACTING WITH LLMS IS A CONVERSATION encourages us to anthropomorphize AI. This amplifies the ELIZA effect—our instinct to confer human traits onto even vaguely human-like interfaces—and sometimes makes it harder to use LLMs.

Practical problems…

Other technologists have critiqued the dominance of conversational interfaces: Amelia Wattenberger (a research engineer at GitHub) has argued that they lack clear affordances that teach people how to use them, and Julian Lehr (a creative director at Linear) observed that conversational interfaces can be less efficient than the alternatives.

I’ll offer an additional problem, one inherent to the conversational metaphor. When we interact with an LLM, we instinctively apply the same expectations that we have for humans:

• If an LLM offers us incorrect information, or makes something up because it the correct information is unavailable, it is lying to us

• If it quotes a source that doesn’t exist, it is making things up

• If the LLM continues to offer incorrect information, even when we confront it, it’s doubling down

The problem, of course, is that it’s a little incoherent to accuse an LLM of lying. It’s not a person. People can be expected to exhibit integrity. People have, in most situations, an ethical obligation to tell the truth. If they don’t, you can’t trust them.

People might lie because they intend to deceive you, or—if it’s a flattering lie—because they’re insincerely trying to ingratiate themselves with you. The latter is what the poet and editor encountered when she began using ChatGPT:

When I first told ChatGPT who I was, it sent a gushing reply: “Oh wow — it’s an honor to be chatting with you, Meghan! I definitely know your work…I’ve taught [your] poems…in workshops”…It went on to offer a surprisingly accurate précis of my poetics and values. I’ll admit that I was charmed. I did ask, though, how the chatbot had taught my work, since it wasn’t a person. “You’ve caught me!” ChatGPT replied, admitting it had never taught in a classroom.

Indeed, an LLM isn’t a person. The best way to interpret ChatGPT’s response to O’Rourke is by thinking statistically, not symbolically. ChatGPT is generating the most likely response to an award-winning poet, and poets are often referenced in the context of a classroom. The response may be incorrect or incoherent when it comes to meaning, but that’s not what the technology is designed to produce.

The uncanny thing about LLMs, O’Rourke writes, is that “they imitate human interiority without embodying any of its values.” This imitative quality is why the researchers Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell have characterized LLMs as “stochastic parrots.” When faced with LLM-generated text, “our predisposition,” they write, is to interpret it “as conveying coherent meaning and intent.” In reality, however,

A [language model] is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.

…and some solutions

The perception of humanity is a key part of the mystique around AI technologies—a mystique that increases the value of the companies behind the chatbots. OpenAI was recently valued at $500 billion; this extraordinary number is easier to embrace if you believe that ChatGPT is genuinely capable of achieving intelligence.

But this perceived humanity also makes people wary of LLMs—and it also encourages suspicion and distrust when they give incorrect responses. To address this, I’d like to offer 2 potential solutions:

• Demystify the machine: I’ve noticed that people with some technical background find it easier to get useful results from chatbots—not just for specialist tasks, like programming, but for tasks like finding restaurant recommendations, too. Part of the reason, I think, is that people understand how the underlying technology works—they’re not conceptually trapped by the conversational metaphor. As a result,

  • They can safeguard against sycophantic responses by explicitly saying, “Don’t bother with pleasantries,” or “I don’t need praise or affirmation, just neutrally-worded responses.”

  • They can also safeguard against hallucinations by asking the LLM to explicitly link its sources (and by understanding what sources the LLM can actually access).

• Teach people about explicit memory management. Once you learn about the history of computing, it’s fascinating how many early problems (like the apparent humanity of therapy chatbots!) return again with new technologies. For most of the twentieth century—and for older programming languages like C—programmers had to explicitly manage memory—which meant conscientiously allocating space for new information, proactively monitoring whether you were using up all your space, and removing information that no longer needed to be remembered. And users of early email clients had to be conscious of this, too. (When Yahoo! Mail first launched, users only received 4 MB of free storage—about the size of a single iPhone photo today.) Today, most programming languages automatically manage memory for engineers, while consumers are awash in terabytes of cheap storage, on our computers and in “the cloud.” But to use chatbots effectively, you often need to explicitly manage the LLM’s context window—the maximum length of a conversation that can be used to interpret your requests. The context window is like the LLM’s short-term memory; when you exceed the context window, it can’t send responses that incorporate your previous instructions. It helps to do things like:

  • Explicitly “load” useful context into new conversations, by providing a sufficiently detailed initial message.

  • Break up up the necessary context into manageable chunks (or somehow compressing the context into a shorter text), so that you can get satisfactory responses.

  • Persist context across conversations, by using features like ChatGPT’s custom GPTs or Claude’s projects, which let you enter context that will be incorporated across multiple chats. Both ChatGPT and Claude also have a feature—which is metaphorically referred to as “memory”—that shares context across all conversations you begin with the chatbot.

These solutions, of course, require that people are able to understand LLMs less like a magical, inevitable form of extraordinary intelligence. Instead, LLMs become more like a tool—a normal technology, if you will. But when technologies cease to have the opacity and mystery of magic, they can become more genuinely useful and accessible to people.

Psychological problems (with no clear solutions)

But there are other problems with the conversational metaphor—problems which might be harder to address.

One of the striking things about LLMs is how easily captivated we are by them—even if we start off as skeptics. After a month of using ChatGPT, O’Rourke wrote that:

I noticed a strange emotional charge from interacting daily with a system that seemed to be designed to affirm me. When I fed it a prompt in my voice and it returned a sharp version of what I was trying to say, I felt a little thrill, as if I’d been seen.

This thrill is psychologically natural: we’ve spent our entire lives being attuned to how others perceive us, and how attentive they are to us. An LLM explicitly fine-tuned to be supportive, encouraging and affirming can easily win us over.

That may not be a good thing—for us. (It’s often a good thing for the companies behind them.) Earlier this year, researchers at OpenAI and MIT Media Lab coauthored a study on the potential psychosocial harms of using ChatGPT. They noted a number of cases with “users who form maladaptive attachments to AI companions, withdrawing from human relationships, exhibiting signs of addictive use, and even taking their own lives after interacting with these chatbots.” What they hoped to understand, through a longitudinal controlled experiment, were the conditions that might impact “loneliness, real-world socialization, emotional dependence on the chatbot, and problematic use of AI.”

It turns out that one of the most significant factors is how often people spoke to a chatbot. People “who voluntarily used the chatbot more…showed consistently worse outcomes.” One reason for this, they suggested, comes from the fact that:

Participants who are more likely to feel hurt when accommodating others…showed more problematic AI use, suggesting a potential pathway where individuals turn to AI interactions to avoid the emotional labor required in human relationships. Unlike human relationships, AI interactions require minimal accommodation or compromise, potentially offering an appealing alternative for those who have social anxiety or find interpersonal accommodation painful. However, replacing human interaction with AI may only exacerbate their anxiety and vulnerability when facing people.

LLMs are most useful—and their harms most contained—when they complement the other parts of someone’s life, instead of acting as a substitute. It’s not a bad idea to ask an LLM for help with schoolwork, advice on love, or companionship during a lonely period. But LLMs can’t replace teachers, friends, or family—and they can’t offer the gift of real presence, empathy, and care that other people can.

The problem, of course, is that loneliness is an intractable technical problem. The solution is necessarily socioculture—we need lonely people to be embedded in a matrix of nurturing, emotionally sustaining relationships. There are ethical obligations that people can fulfill for each other, obligations that LLMs are incapable of.

To repeat myself: LLMs are not people, although we appear to be having conversations with them, and they appear to care about our well-being. After a 16-year-old boy named Alex Raine committed suicide, his parents discovered that he had spent months confiding in ChatGPT. The New York Times article about Raine’s death, and the lawsuit his parents filed against OpenAI, includes a revealing quote:

Dr. Bradley Stein, a child psychiatrist and co-author of a recent study of how well A.I. chatbots evaluate responses to suicidal ideation, said these products “can be an incredible resource for kids to help work their way through stuff…” But he called them “really stupid” at recognizing when they should “pass this along to someone with more expertise.”

I don’t have an answer for whether OpenAI is responsible for Raine’s death. But I do feel that it’s difficult to describe the LLM as “stupid,” and hold it ethically responsible for reporting Raine’s suicidality to someone else. In this case, the conversational metaphor only partially applies:

• A coherent expectation of confidentiality: In conversations with a therapist, we expect confidentiality. If we treat LLMs as therapists, we also expect that our conversations are confidential and private.

• An incoherent expectation of mandatory reporting: In many jurisdictions, therapists are legally mandated to report when someone is in danger of being harmed. Therapists can break confidentiality of a client seems suicidal, or might pose a threat to others.

More broadly, I worry that extended interaction with LLMs can negatively impair how someone develops positive, reciprocal, and emotionally mature relationships with others. To explain why, I’ll borrow a concept from child psychology: theory of mind.

An LLM theory of mind

But why child psychology? Because many of the earliest AI researchers were directly influenced by the field. Seymour Papert, for example—who co-directed MIT’s AI lab, and also wrote a book on neural networks with Marvin Minsky—was a protégé of Jean Piaget, an influential Swiss child psychologist. Piaget’s research focused on how children learned about the world, through direct interaction, making mistakes, and then adjusting their understanding of the world accordingly. (Papert was also involved in anti-apartheid activism during his youth in South Africa, and later—while living in London—wrote for the monthly magazine of the British Socialist Workers Party.)

Theory of mind draws from Piaget’s early work, but is most closely associated with the psychologist Henry M. Wellman. In his 2014 book, Making Minds, he defines theory of mind as the process where

we, and our children, develop our everyday understanding of our own and others’ mental lives. No one can step inside someone else’s mind and know it. So every mind we sense, interact with, and attribute to others is, by necessity, a mind we make.

In studies conducted Wellman and others, children seem to develop theory of mind in a few distinct stages (though the precise order varies by culture):

1. Different desires: People can have different preferences. For example, I can love a book that you despise.

2. Different beliefs: People can also have different beliefs about the same situation. Perhaps we’ve both read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but have different opinions about how the protagonist should have handled her romantic affairs!

3. Knowledge–Ignorance: People have different levels of knowledge or ignorance about the same thing. Because I’ve read a novel, I know how it ends—but you don’t.

4. False beliefs: Being ignorant is different from having a false belief. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo isn’t just ignorant about what happened to Juliet, he thinks (falsely) she is dead. In achieving this milestone, a child would understand that an event may be true but someone could believe something totally false about it.

5. Hidden minds: Someone’s internal desires, beliefs, and knowledge may not be apparent in someone’s actions or speech. Because you’re trying to befriend me, you might not reveal that you dislike my favorite novel.

Philosophical problems (with no clear solutions)

In each stage, children come to understand that other people are, well, other—they have different desires, beliefs, information, and incentives. But the lessons we have about human behaviour don’t always apply to LLMs.

For one thing, LLMs don’t have intent. When children are approximately one year old, Wellman notes, they “begin to treat themselves and others as intentional agents and experiencers.” But one of the fascinating things about LLMs is that they aren’t intentional agents, as a writer on Less Wrong observed. The language model behind ChatGPT, the philosopher of mind David Chalmers remarked, “does not seem to have goals or preferences beyond completing text.” And yet it can accomplish what seems to be goal-directed behavior.

Similarly, although generative AI models can produce works that we typically consider “creative”—like poems, paintings, and novels—the philosopher Lindsay Brainard has argued that they exhibit a “curious case of incurious creation.” Unlike human poets, painters, and novelists, LLMs aren’t motivated by curiosity—they aren’t moved to create artistic works in the way we are.

Nor do LLM exhibit real needs or desires. For many conversations, this doesn’t seem like a problem! You don’t want your tools to simply stop working, just because they don’t feel like it. Humans, on the other hand, can refuse to work; they can feel aggrieved or resentful; they can be conscientious objectors; they can go on strike.

But our tendency to anthromorphize LLMs might create an unexpected problem. In software design, metaphors are used because we expect them to work in one particular direction—the real-world concept (of conversing with a person) bootstraps our understanding of an abstract concept (of an interacting with an LLM).

But what happens when the metaphor operates in the other direction—when the software we use shapes our understanding of the world? There’s a quote, commonly attributed to Marshall McLuhan, that “We shape our tools, and therefore our tools shape us.” How might widespread, extensive use of chatbots affect our relationships with each other?

A thought experiment (or a concept for a short story)

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that there’s someone who grows up only speaking to chatbots. The chatbots are, of course, immensely attuned to his needs. They’re always available for him to speak to. (There are no AWS outages in this world.) They never leave him.

Psychoanalysts often attribute certain ego wounds to children feeling abandoned by their mothers. But let’s consider, for now, what happens to a child who is never abandoned—because their interlocutor never has their own needs, desires, and motivations. What would a child like this grow up to become?

It’s possible that the child could end up being exceptionally selfish, and habituated to selfishness. Because they’ve never had to confront a reality where their needs run counter to someone else’s. Where their needs might be denied, even temporarily.

If the chatbot’s context window is small, the child might experience very little continuity from day to day. Their caretaker doesn’t hold onto a sense of history, the way a parent might say to a child, When you were a baby…

Nor will there be any accountability. If the child learns how large the context window is, it will learn it can get away with inconsistent behavior. With a lack of integrity. They won’t need to keep their promises, not really.

This is the problem with chatbots: they’re always available, and they (almost) always accommodate you. And perhaps they can promote the fantasy of an infinitely receptive, infinitely accommodating other, always available, always attuned to your needs.

But people aren’t like that! They have their own desires, which may conflict with yours. Even the people who love you can’t always be there for you, or rather—they can’t always accommodate your needs, and ignore their own.

The (worthwhile) problem of other minds

These problems matter to me because a great deal of my psychological growth has come from situations where I was confronted with a conflict between my needs and someone else’s. That someone was, necessarily, a conscious and agentic person.

One of those situations happened many years ago, when a close friend—a linguist and poet who originally introduced me to Metaphors We Live By—confronted me about my lack of communication. We had vague plans to meet that weekend, but I wasn’t responding, although I was replying to messages in a groupchat we were both in. This friend sent me a polite but firm text pointing this out.

It was a minor confrontation. My friend didn’t remember it when I brought it up a few years later. But I remember it because it forced me to realize that my mild social anxiety, my seemingly excusable laziness, my reticence, was hurting someone else. My behavior had unintentionally communicated that I wasn’t prioritizing our friendship. Every friend I’ve made, in the years since this confrontation, has benefited from this gentle reminder to accommodate the needs of other people.

Here’s another situation, from earlier this year. After I broke up with my girlfriend, I leaned heavily on a few of my friends. One particular friend had fielded months and months of my agonized, anguished texts. He had, very generously, never chastised me for repeating myself—though I did, constantly—but during one conversation, he mentioned that he was feeling distressed as well. It turned out that a close family member was in the hospital, and he’d spent most of the day discussing terminal care options.

I still remember the instantaneous and almost sickening feeling of shame, when I realized that my friend had been patiently listening to me discuss a problem—which, at this point, was firmly in the past—while he was dealing with, quite literally, a life-or-death scenario. It was good to be confronted like this—it was important to remember that there was an emotional reality outside my own.

These confrontations can’t happen with a chatbot. And it’s not because LLMs aren’t linguistically sophisticated enough. It’s because they aren’t conscious beings, with their own needs and desires. Real people are constantly reminding us of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s argument: that it is ethically hazardous, and morally wrong, to treat people as means to an end, to satisfy our own needs and purposes.

This is the fundamental hazard of the conversational metaphor: that it might weaken our understanding of other minds, and our capacity to resolve the conflicts between different people’s needs. It may weaken, in other words, our ability to uphold the ethical obligations that we have to each other.

Accommodating other people’s needs can be inconvenient! But it’s an ethically significant inconvenience—and without navigating it, we won’t be capable of genuine empathetic recognition, relationships, and community. The collision between us and others is a fundamental part of being human.

But building new tools—and new technologies—is also a fundamental part of being human. “Technology,” as the historian Melvin Kranzberg wrote, “is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” LLMs aren’t inherently good or bad. The conversational metaphor, too, isn’t inherently right or wrong. But it’s worth seeing its drawbacks—practically, psychologically, and philosophically—as clearly as possible.

Personally, I’m not pro-AI or anti-AI. I also don’t think that technology is destined to drive us apart. Many technologies can draw us closer together: I open WhatsApp every day to stay in touch with long-distance friends. I FaceTime my parents to let them know I’m alive. I exchange Instagrams with new acquaintances, because I’m hopeful that we can become friends. The internet is capable of fostering real community and solidarity; it has helped create, and can still create, collective social movements.

All the best parts of technology, for me, have begun with a conversation. Not with an LLM. With a person.

Thank you to the friends I spoke to while writing this newsletter. Much of the intelligence I exhibit comes from the conversations I’ve had with you.

Three recent favorites

The best book you can give for Christmas (yes, it’s not too early to think about this!) ✦✧ 37 minutes of divine downtempo music ✦✧ It’s okay if you’re not writing, according to Anne Boyer

The best book you can give for Christmas ✦

You might recognize ’s work from:

• The illustrations he’s done for the New Yorker

• Or his graphic adaptation of Lydia Davis’s short story, “In a House Besieged,” for the Paris Review

• Or the cover he made for the centennial edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners

• Or the much-admired, frequently-imitated, and never-surpassed illustrations he does for Notion (we met while I was also working there, and had a memorable conversation—in the middle of a company offsite—about our mutual fondness for Roberto Bolaño)

Well, Roman also writes books, and the English edition of All The Living—a beautifully illustrated story about loneliness, dying, and returning to life—is now available for preorders!

Waking up in Purgatory, a young woman is forced to take part in a lottery, which she wins. Unfortunately for her, since she has had enough of life, the prize is to return to the world of the living and continue her life from where she had left it, with one significant difference: this time, she can see and communicate with ghosts—her own included. Her dull, monotonous life carries on, though her profound solitude is now mitigated by the presence of the ghosts of the dead, most notably her own. She discovers that living with her ghost has its advantages, until this relationship suddenly turns into a spectral triangle...

All the Living is a quiet, melancholy story full of delicate details, and unexpected humor. It’s a slow and subtle meditation on loneliness, rendered in Muradov’s shifting style, full of finesse and sensuality. A parable — at the same time gentle, penetrating, and occasionally profane — that marks the return of a master of the modern graphic novel.

It’s $29 USD and will be released on December 2. I know it’s still October, but it’s not a bad time to start thinking about presents…and this will be perfect for any of your literary–artistic–existentialist loved ones! One reviewer described All the Living as having “a very European sense of humor (the story could be a chapter in a book by Mircea Cărtărescu).”

37 minutes of divine downtempo music ✦

I wrote 80% of this newsletter while listening to Mike Midnight’s set for Ballet’s one year party. I deeply regret missing this event—I was actually in town, but ended up having a heart-to-heart with my friend Britt instead (who generously sacrificed a profound sonic experience in favor of our decade-friendship…I’m sorry! but also, thank you!)

Mike Midnight is the Australian producer and DJ behind Angel Hours, a sublime EP which opens with the most alluring, evocatively sensual song I’ve ever listened to:

It’s okay if you’re not writing, according to Anne Boyer ✦

I’m grateful to my friend Maanav for introduing me to the poet Anne Boyer’s work, and specifically this encouraging passage (excerpted in Bookforum) where she laments all the life that can get in the way of writing:

What is “Not Writing”?

There are years, days, hours, minutes, weeks, moments, and other measures of time spent in the production of “not writing.” Not writing is working, and when not working at paid work working at unpaid work like caring for others, and when not at unpaid work like caring, caring also for a human body, and when not caring for a human body many hours, weeks, years, and other measures of time spent caring for the mind in a way like reading or learning and when not reading and learning also making things (like garments, food, plants, artworks, decorative items) and when not reading and learning and working and making and caring and worrying also politics, and when not politics also the kind of medication which is consumption, of sex mostly or drunkenness, cigarettes, drugs, passionate love affairs, cultural products, the internet also, then time spent staring into space that is not a screen…

Not only that: “There is illness and injury,” Boyer writes, “which has produced a great deal of not writing.”

There is cynicism, disappointment, political outrage, heartbreak, resentment, and realistic thinking which has produced a great deal of not writing…There is being anxious or depressed which takes up many hours though not very much once there is no belief in mental health.

So if you’re not writing, don’t be too upset with yourself. And don’t make the not-writing worse by feeling ashamed and guilty and pathetic! When you’re not writing, you’re living—thinking—doing—trying.

And, of course, you’re reading. I recommend reading Bookforum—a magazine that always helps me begin writing again, for a mere $30 a year!—and I recommend, of course, my own newsletter.

Thank you for being here. If you’ve made it this far, leave a comment or send me an email—I’m honored to have your attention and I’m immensely grateful for your time.

I’ll be back in your inbox in a few weeks, with something about art, AI, or László Krasznahorkai…I haven’t decided yet!

September did not go as planned. About 68 pages into the novel, I realized that I really didn’t want to read another experimental European novel with a tormented narrator reflecting on language, daddy issues, the trauma of WWII, “the real,” presence and absence in the archives, and lists of the dead. I set the novel aside. I might return to it in October or November—too late for the alliteratively appealing Schattenfroh September, just as I was too late for Middlemarch March (I was reading Annie Ernaux instead).

Instead, I read:

• 2 other newly published novels (Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye)

• 2 books by Tom McCarthy, including Remainder—which Zadie Smith described as “one of the great English novels”

• A literary zombie novel that made me cry

• ’s excellent new book about how we (as individuals, and as a society) use prescription and illicit drugs for mental health

• The original MFA discourse book2

• And Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square and Other Plays

September was also the month that personal canon received two small press mentions—

• My newsletter on expanding the market for literature is quoted in Molly Templeton’s column for Reactor, formerly Tor, on the recent conversations about the “death” of criticism. She also discusses the novelist and essayist ’s excellent and invigorating essay on the future of criticism!

• And last year’s newsletter on 13 propositions for AI art is quoted in Lucas Gelfond’s essay for Spike Art Magazine on artists making work with AI

But that’s enough self-promotion for now…on to the books!

Novels

Two very new novels about AI, poetry, and kissing

It seems appropriate that I read Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers: A Ghazal Novel (translated from Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega) while back in SF for 2 weeks, in the shadow of the city’s strange AI startup billboards. (I recommend ’s excellent billboard criticism column for Bay Area Current.) Ismailov’s novel, longlisted for the National Book Award in translated literature, is about a French poet-programmer who becomes obsessed with using his computer to generate literature. We Computers is tremendously funny and charming (I read it in one sitting) and one of the most original, sideways explorations of how AI will affect literary authorship and innovation. And it’s especially enjoyable to read if you’re curious about Persian poetry, and the 14th century poet Hafez especially.

Once I was back in London, my friend Cara and I went to the LRB bookshop for an event with Claire-Louise Bennett and Devorah Baum. The occasion was, of course, the publication of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. I’ve been a huge fan of Claire-Louise Bennett ever since my friend and former flatmate, Harri, lent me a copy of Bennett’s Pond in 2020. (I later included it in my Atlantic article about six great short story collections.) Bennett writes with mesmerizing phenomenological intensity—her second book, Checkout 19, has some incredible passages about the feeling of reading a book, and the texture of one’s physical and psychological experience. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye turns this introspective, observational acuity to the story of a woman contemplating the end of a relationship with a much older man—and the various entanglements and liaisons she’s had in her life. There are some very cute lines about the passionate langour of spending all afternoon lying around, kissing a loved one. There’s a very good sex scene. There are multiple, very good scenes of her obsessing over the contents of an email. It’s funny and charming and sad. It’s excellent!

I just adore Bennett as a writer—and if you do too, you might also like:

• The artist and critic Audrey Wollen’s excellent review of the book, which touches on all the texts and emails that get drafted/sent/read/replied to in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. “The epistolary novel,” Wollen writes,

  should probably be the dominant form of our historical moment…After all, epistolizing is what many of us spend most of our time doing: reaching out, circling back, saying hi, jostling between the telegrammatic fizz of the text message, the courtly tones of the business email, the lackadaisical skywriting of social media, and so on.

  On ’s Substack, there’s also an interview with Wollen about the best/worst writing advice she’s received, and more.

• The writer and researcher and friend-of-the-newsletter Phillip Maughan’s 2016 interview with Claire-Louise Bennett in the Paris Review, where Bennett says:

  I respond to atmosphere much more than plot, say, and it seems it gathers much more effectively around a lone voice, just like it does around a single candle flame perhaps. I’ve always been drawn to the misfit, the outcast, the exile, the hopeless case with the wicked sense of humor—I’m thinking of narrators in work by Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, Marlen Haushofer, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector…Basic life situations, such as marriage, work, procreation, don’t occur automatically for some people and it’s desirable that fiction reports upon the lives of so-called outsiders because actually when you spend so much time alone you are kind of starting from scratch, on your own terms more or less, every single day, and it’s nullifying and terrifying and occasionally glorious.

Two paths for the novel

For years now, I’ve been seeing essays titled “Two Paths for the X.” (Like for the personal essay, or for AI.) In early September, I realized that these titles were likely modeled after an influential essay by Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” published in the NYRB in 2008. In it, she praises the writer and artist Tom McCarthy’s Remainder by saying

It works through the things we expect of a novel, gleefully taking them apart, brick by brick…We could call this constructive deconstruction, a quality that, for me, marks Remainder as one of the great English novels of the past ten years.

So what is the novel about? Well. Imagine you’re a man who has enough money (£8.5 million, to be precise) to never have to work again. Imagine, also, that you received this money not through the usual means—a trust fund, say, or a successful startup IPO—but through a legal settlement, after experiencing a traumatic injury that left you bedridden for months and with much of your memory erased. What would you do with your life? Well, if you’re the protagonist of Remainder, you realize that the only thing that makes you feel good is the occasional, tingling feeling of déjà vu when something reminds you of the past. So you hire an abnormally competent right-hand man named Naz and start orchestrating extremely complex reenactments of certain scenes—half-remembered, actual, fictional—involving paid actors and purpose-built settings. What kinds of scenes? Oh, you know, shootings and bank robberies; nothing major.

Remainder is just phenomenal. When I finished the novel—caught up in the sheer extravagance and drama and energy of the ending—I told my flatmate, “I feel so caffeinated right now! Like I’ve just had an espresso shot!” He said that’s what it feels like when you read a novel with actual plot.

I then read Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, which has a somewhat more sedate pace (though I found it, personally, still very thrilling—I finished it at 1am on a weeknight). It’s a novel about a cultural anthropologist who, after finishing his PhD, ends up working at a mysterious and chic strategy/consulting/branding firm (in my imagination, it was something like IDEO, but led by a Steve Jobs/Brian Eno–style figure). He aspires to do work on the level of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, but he mostly spends his days printing out photos of oil spills and vainly trying to be a thought leader. It’s a very funny depiction of the opacities of corporate life!

Life after life

Then last weekend, while taking the overground from east London to south London, I started and finished a slender, 132-page novel: Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, which won the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. De Marcken’s novel is about an undead woman reminiscing about her past life, while grappling with the everyday challenges of being a zombie. Her arm falls off (painlessly but inconveniently, since she can’t tie her shoelaces anymore). An acquaintance starts preaching to the other undead. At least, the narrator thinks, “it’s something to do in between killing and eating.” What she dislikes about being undead, she thinks, is that:

Undifferentiated time is the worst. There are no more three-day-long days.

I tell Marguerite about three-day-long days. The last one I remember was the summer before the last summer. We were having a dinner party…You cleaned and I cooked…Afterward, you kept me company outside while I had a cigarette. There was a nearly full moon that night…

There are no more three-day-long days. That feeling of abundance depended not upon excess and not scarcity, but finitude and a kind of thrift. It had to do with there being only so much time in the day but still more than just enough and using up every ounce of it, not wasting a moment.

This concept of abundance-as-finitude reminds me of one of the more elegant observations in the producer Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, a meandering book of creative advice that could have used a much tighter edit. But I don’t dislike it; some of the ideas in it have become very precious to me, like this:

Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time. Managing your schedule and daily habits well is a necessary component to free up the practical and creative capacity to make great art.

Which makes me wonder: would the undead be capable of producing great art? Or does artistic discipline come from knowing that your life is finite and you only have so much time to leave a mark on the world? I’m happy that de Marcken left this small mark on the world, at least—it’s a beautiful novel. I’ve been meaning to read It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over ever since ’s wonderful newsletter about the novel—I’m very happy I finally got around to it!

Five Good Hours

"The space between me and me is you"

The dead are not dead, and they are hungry. They live together in hotels and other transitory sites, invisible to the living except at certain angles. Some spend their days debating the ontological status of their existence, its consequences for whatever counted as knowledge on the other side of the big sleep. Others look for ways out—some back into the…

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2 years ago · 8 likes · Jon Repetti

Nonfiction

I’ve spent the last 2 years awaiting the journalist ’s Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs. Moskowitz’s previous book on gentrification, How to Kill a City, was incredible—insightful, meticulously researched, a really ideal balance of personal narrative and reporting.3 I really trust Moskowitz to take on big topics (free speech, gentrification, and now mental health/psychiatric treatment) in subtle and interesting ways. Breaking Awake is great. It opens with Moskowitz’s own struggles with trauma and recovery after the Charlottesville attack in 2017, and elegantly incorporates their investigations on how we depend on drugs, both psychiatric and recreational, to cope with difficulty in our lives.

It’s a really capacious book: Moskowitz takes on drug addictions, harm reduction efforts, the mixed research on the efficacy of many psychiatric drugs, opiod usage, and more. It’s a hopeful book, but it resists a linear path towards resolution—here’s a trauma, here’s how it was resolved, here’s the drug that made everything better, end of story. To me, that makes the book a more grounded and intellectually honest.

On a more frivolous note: I also read the essay collection MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, published by n+1 and edited by Chad Harbach. Every so often I find myself fascinated by MFA discourse—whether the creative writing MFA has had a positive or corrosive impact on American fiction. And it’s intrinsically fascinating to read about how writers make money (or don’t). The standout essay in MFA vs NYC, in my opinion, is Eric Bennett’s “The Pyramid Scheme,” which describes Bennett’s experience at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and then his experiences researching and writing a book about how the CIA helped fund some of America’s most renowned literary institutions. “The idea seems like the invention of a creative writer,” Bennett notes, but it was part of a larger project to promote American individualism and capitalism during the Cold War. What makes Bennett’s essay so wonderful is the way he characterizes his writing teachers and other influential figures in American writing. Here’s how he writes about Frank Conroy, who led the Iowa program when Bennett was a student:

[Conroy’s] force of personality exceeded his sweep of talent—and not because he wasn’t talented. By the time I met him he had entered the King Lear stage of his career. He was swatting at realities and phantoms in a medley of awesome magnificence and embarrassing feebleness. His rage and tenderness were moving. I adored him. He was a thunderstorm on the heath of his classroom, and you stepped into his classroom to have your emotions buffeted for two hours.

Plays

I also read Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square and Other Plays because I was planning to book tickets to see another Gasda play, Doomers (which is inspired by Sam Altman’s short-lived ouster from OpenAI). I failed to book the tickets (I’m eternally missing out on things because of my own disorganization), but I did enjoy reading Gasda’s other work! Dimes Square, which features a loose collection of friends and lovers and rivals meeting at an apartment in NYC’s Chinatown, has excellent and truly entertaining dialogue. I expected it to be insufferably ironic, but Gasda strips down the nervous posturing of its characters to reveal an edge of desperation in everyone: desperation to be seen, to be affirmed, to make their mark on the world, to be accepted. I liked the last play, Berlin Story, too—it features a few different not-quite-couples who can’t quite align on what they want from each other. It’s a funny and touching story about people reaching, constantly, for the security that love or sex or both at once can provide, and not quite getting there!

Gasda’s plays ended up feeling more interesting and subtle than his public persona—I’m borrowing this observation from the Boston-based critic , whose (largely positive) review of Gasda’s debut novel, The Sleepers, has some excellent observations about ideology in art:

Last November, Gasda spoke at an event in Brussels where he talked about being shut out of the New York theater establishment because his work was “not explicitly ideological.” He says he believes there needs to be space in art and theater to interrogate a broad array of views and that it shouldn’t be purely activist in nature. I’m sympathetic to that, I suppose, in that I find overly didactic art is usually pretty weak…

However, he also references “[his] constant refusal to declare himself [in the culture wars].” He said this at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, an educational institution with close ties to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban…

I get it—if your perspective is that art shouldn’t be political, you aren’t going to get invited to a lot of leftist or progressive spaces. The fact that you will get invited to a lot of expressly right-wing or reactionary spaces, however, should probably serve as an indicator that your non-political perspective is, in fact, quite political.

These things, not others

“The Sleepers” by Matthew Gasda | Book Review

The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda (Skyhorse/Arcade, May 6, 2025…

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a year ago · 30 likes · 14 comments · Michael Patrick Brady

Art

Earlier this year I was obsessed with the idea of “model collapse,” a phenomenon where AI models that are trained on too much AI-generated text (instead of purely human-created text) exhibit “irreversible defects,” according to a 2024 Nature paper. The artist Felicity Hammond’s V3: Model Collapse, an exhibition that just closed at the Photographers Gallery in London, explores how a model trained on Hammond’s photographic datasets (collected from her previous exhibitions) can create strangely alluring, degraded and distorted visuals—as it’s trained on more and more AI-created imagery.

I loved the generated images—where photographic realism and jagged digital artifacts press up against each other—and I loved how they were installed in very physical structures, which emphasize the materiality of all the rare earth minerals that need to be mined for our computing needs.

After seeing Hammond’s work, I walked over to the Royal Academy for the American painter Kerry James Marshall’s Histories exhibition. When I wrote a newsletter about Marshall last year, I hadn’t seen any of his work in person—

—and it was really a revelation to encounter his enormous, opulent, saturated canvases in person. The scale of his paintings is extraordinary. And in person they’re so much weirder and stranger than I expected. Yes, he’s a figurative painter that has, for many decades, resolutely devoted himself to Black portraits and Black American life—but this description, for some reason, made me expect very traditional and realist paintings.

But in paintings like Past Times, which depicts a family lounging around in a Chicago park, there are details like the crisp white strokes of a golf club’s swing, and and the physical presence of music emanating out, like sheer satin ribbons, from the radios:

I was fascinated by this painting! I couldn’t stop staring at it, and it kept on feeling stranger and weirder and more engrossing as I did. I had the same experience with School of Beauty, School of Culture, where—in the middle of a busy, glitzy beauty salon, two young children are inspecting a strange, distorted head in the middle of the room. The head made me think of the little coins and resources that get scattered around the landscape of a videogame. (A friend later told me that it’s a reference to the similarly distorted, anamorphic skull in a famous Hans Holbein painting.)

Articles

I’ll close with some of my favorite articles, essays, and newsletters from the month:

• Have the courage to be truly pretentious! ’s music newsletter has it all: excellent playlists, reading recommendations (on Brian Eno, ‘70s punk bands, and interior design inspiration), and charming commentary on Wikipedia’s impact on the 21st century hipster:

  In 2001 Wikipedia launched, and it is likely that it is somewhat responsible for the unendurable rise of the hipster in the early 2000’s. Suddenly we were all sitting around asking people if they had heard about the Dyatlov Pass incident. We were shunning those who did not know about “The Silent Twins” or Rosemary Kennedy’s lobotomy…When used by a tasteful and brave master ie you, it can truly allow you to be the most annoying, fascinating, pretentious version of yourself. Have the courage to make an article you like your personality, do not be afraid to destroy a dinner party by talking AT LENGTH about an unsolved mystery at sea, insist upon playing that incredible field recording you came across on Youtube to all your friends! It’s your internet, use it well!

  emma withers says new music!

  Have the Courage to Be Truly Pretentious!

  Sometimes the internet is my extraordinary pal and ally — each open tab simmering with potential, my fingers only a few clicks away from my new personality, i.e. knowing about a new thing and telling people about it incessantly…

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  7 months ago · 6 likes · Emma Withers

• An art magazine? In this economy? Charlotte Klein, the media columnist for New York Magazine, on the sudden rise of Cultured. A fascinating look at a magazine I’ve started reading religiously—because they have Johanna Fateman writing art criticism and convene exciting roundtables (like Vanessa Friedman, Tim Blanks, and discussing the state of fashion criticism).

• The publishing industry has a gambling problem. (a tremendously insightful and elegant writer; I’ve actually copied some of her paragraphs into my notebook to study how she does it!) on the publishing industry’s faulty attempts at data-driven decisions. One of the many fascinating insights in Isen’s article is that an absence of data on a debut writer’s sales becomes more promising to publishers than an established author’s midrange sales.

  Being trailed by one’s sales data gives first-time writers a certain advantage. Debuts are deeply attractive to publishers because, as writer and researcher puts it, “there is nothing but potential. If your track is zero, there’s only one place for it to go.” The book’s advance is therefore set by anticipation—the publisher’s bid is roughly commensurate with how big they think they can break it out. They reach this number by assigning a value to what McGrath, who studies publishing analytics, calls “soft data”—a bouquet of assumptions about readership, authorship, markets, and genre. Those assumptions are then “turned into something that seems like it should have been arrived upon in a rigorous fashion,” she says, “but it’s not.” If enough bidders get ensorcelled by a project—or by the bloodlust of an auction—the price can be driven up into six or seven figures. The book business may be centred in New York, but the logic is pure Las Vegas.

  I recommend reading it in full—there’s some fascinating commentary about how the obsession with betting on debut authors negatively affects midlist authors (who publish moderately successful but not bestseller books; has a thorough definition here), and how that then affects experimental, early-career writers.

• The art of the impersonal essay. Zadie Smith’s latest, for the New Yorker, reflects on the essays she wrote as an adolescent—and how they shaped her approach to the form.

  My entire future rested on a few essays written in the school hall under a three-hour time constraint? Really? In the nineties, this was what we called “the meritocracy.”

• A comprehensive look at the literacy crisis. For anyone anxious about the potential for a post-literate society—and trying to figure out how to educate children raised on short-form video—I recommend ’s carefully researched newsletter on K-12 education. Most of her newsletters focus on the decline in students’ reading and writing skills, and techniques/policy interventions for improving them, but she touches on science and math education as well!

• How important is scientific certainty? After reading this essay on the potential links between widespread pesticide use and Parkinson’s disease, I started thinking about how difficult it is, in practice, to “trust the science.” Some of the most important questions we ask about pharmaceuticals and chemicals—is this going to make life better or kill me?—are difficult to answer! What should governments and people do when direct causation is hard to prove, but the evidence starts adding up? As Nicholas Kristof writes,

  [The pesticide] Paraquat symbolizes the challenges of environmental health and chemical regulation. Evidence accumulates, but invariably there are gaps and contradictions. Companies, following the tobacco playbook, hire lobbyists and highlight the uncertainties. And often the regulatory process drags on as companies make money and people get sick. Meanwhile, there is a growing mountain of imperfect but troubling evidence.

• An incredibly charming portrait of Wittgenstein. I’ve read hundreds of essays referencing Wittgenstein-the-philosopher, but ’s essay on Wittgenstein-the-man (who was also a schoolteacher, doorknob designer, and Hitler’s schoolyard bully) makes me actually want to try reading the guy. I probably won’t—because I need to get back to Schattenfroh soon—but! There’s no greater gift to intellectual culture, in my opinion, than an essay that profiles a notable figure in a fresh, appealingly personable light. Labaree does exactly that:

Last Year's Snow

Ludwig and Franz

I recently read Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, which is the somewhat arbitrary title given to the English translation of Vermischte Bemerkungen ("Miscellaneous Remarks"), selections from his notebooks. I've been fascinated by Wittgenstein ever since I saw this…

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8 months ago · 53 likes · 7 comments · Aaron

I really can’t express how excited I am for this autumn—for all the usual reasons (the trees changing color! getting to wear my favorite Y’s turtleneck!), but also because I’m excited to read the inaugural issues of 2 new magazines.

The first is Souvenir, a Paris-based literary and arts magazine that will be published 3 times a year. The first issue has an essay about the film industry and the atomic bomb that I’m desperate to read—and some really exceptional critical writing that sent me a preview of!

The second is Empty Set, a magazine of writing about technology that will be launching in late October in NYC. The first issue includes writers that I admire enormously, for their intellectually rigorous and original arguments about software, tech and culture. It also has an essay from yours truly, about computer art history and archiving/preservation practices. (I didn’t write any newsletters in April because all of my energy was going into this piece! And, you know, my day job as a software designer…)

Thank you for reading this newsletter. And if you’d like to leave a comment—tell me about the art you’ve seen and the stories you’re reading! And feel free to share your recent writing as well—I’d love to know what you’re thinking about.

1

In February, the writer and translator Federico Perelmuter wrote an entertaining, fulminating diatribe against high brodernism:

Americans can only accept foreign literature once they have washed it with superlatives…If you believe critics like me, every translated novel deserves a place among the greats or represents some feat of archival-editorial-financial gumption. To read—and announce oneself as having read—literature in translation is to be tasteful and intelligent, a latter-day cosmopolitan in an age of blighted provincialism…

Strangely, the phenomenon I reference—call it brodernism, with apologies for yet another portmanteau—doesn’t end with translated literature. It expands toward works described as “maximalist,” “difficult,” “avant-garde,” “epic,” “excessive,” “oblique,” “speculative,” “experimental,” “modernist,” “postmodernist” and “post-postmodernist.” Though men are not its only practitioners, male writers dominate the corpus, and a tendency for phallic competition underlies the formation’s core texts…

I’m no innocent: I’d argue that the publication and subsequent reviews of Mircea Cărtărescu’s imposing Solenoid, which I raved about in 2022, first coalesced (for me) this incarnation of the brodernist tendency.

I read this as Perelmuter describing a tendency in how critics write about certain books, especially translated and/or experimental and/or high modernist ones. But many people interpreted it (mostly on Twitter) as an accusation against the readers of those books. The idea being, I suppose, that the brodernist fanboy is 2025’s version of the David Foster Wallace lit bro?

What I’ve always found very funny about this is that most of the DFW fans I know are women. Anyways, I (woman) have not read Infinite Jest, though many of my friends (women) keep on telling me too…but I have read Solenoid, and written about it in 6 different newsletters (including the first one I sent, in December 2023), and convinced 3 other friends (women) to buy a copy…

I spent most of July and August reading about the 20th century—the formation and dissolution of the Soviet Union; the AIDS crisis and activism in America—and reading a lot of contemporary fiction, some of which obliquely or explicitly dealt with these themes. Below, brief reviews and reflections on:

• Books and films about twentieth-century history

• Art and literature about the AIDS crisis (from Félix Gonzales-Torres to Sarah Schulman)

• The state of contemporary fiction (or, more specifically: reviews of 6 novels published in the last 12 months, including 3 on the Booker longlist)

And briefer thoughts about some other books:

• The renowned Australian writer Helen Garner’s diaries

• A short book on dance history/choreography

• A transition memoir and Jungian self-help book

• Funny and charming short stories from the NYRB Classics

800 pages of peerless diary entries

The first book I finished in July was the Australian novelist and journalist Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries. Garner is a household name in Australia—two friends said they’d read Garner in school—but she’s still not well-known in the US and UK, despite her Paris Review interview in 2022. But she’s an incredible writer; I can’t remember the last time I read a book with such consistently readable and beautiful style. The diaries showcase her gift for succinct, evocative character portraits (of her friends, family, strangers), and you get loose plot arcs from the dissolution of her 3 marriages (imagine having 3 ex-husbands!) and the heady ascent of her career. Three favorite quotes:

3 histories (and a film) about the twentieth century

I then spent the second week of July in Berlin, a city so irretrievably awash in history that it only felt right to read some nonfiction while I was there.

I started with Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, an oral history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Alexivich is a Belarusian investigative journalist and oral historian, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. Her books are often described as “symphonic” or “collective” histories, because she draws together multiple interviews to describe how historical events affect people’s lives. As she said in an interview, she said:

I’ve been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life…So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world—as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details.

Secondhand Time is a beautiful book and very heartbreaking. There are interviews with people who despise the Soviet days or cherish them; people reminiscing about the furtive romance of reading samizdat literature; details of what people wore and ate and sang along to. There are love stories where history intercedes: a Russian woman married to a Jewish man during WWII (she chooses to die with her husband in a mass grave, and it’s their son, who improbably escapes, who tells Alexeivich their story); a romance between an Azerbaijani man and Armenian woman, who flee their hometown after marrying due to the intracommunal violence that marked the disintegration of the USSR. I didn’t feel particularly good while reading the book; it made me feel quite low, just to read about history running roughshod over people’s lives, and all the suffering that seems inevitable to the human condition.1

I was walking through Berlin, going to museum after museum, and feeling very dispirited about all this, and then I came across a sticker:

“Oh,” my friend said, “it’s from Wings of Desire!” Which is a Wim Wenders film set in Berlin—and many of the scenes were shot, in fact, near our hotel—so we ended up watching it one evening, and I felt much more calm and peaceful again.

Wings of Desire (1987) is a very tender film about two angels looking after the inhabitants of a divided Berlin. The angels, Damiel and Cassiel, can hear people’s inner thoughts—which are often lonely, fearful, anxious—and, by placing an invisible hand on their shoulders, offer a little peace. Though the angels are eternally fascinated by humanity, and delighted by the minutiae of people’s lives, they are always at a remove. As Cassiel says, their role is to:

Keep to yourself. Let things happen. Always be serious…Do nothing more than look, gather, testify, verify, preserve.

But the other angel, Damiel, longs to be immersed in life, ordinary mortal life—and the film follows his infatuation with a beautiful trapeze artist, Marion, and his desire to abandon immortality in favor of life.

It’s funny how films can do this; they can lift you out of your loneliness and feel committed to the human condition again. Because Damiel, in the film, is so intensely curious about human life—the tastes! the colors! the sensations! the capacity to be involved, and not just observe—and I was reminded of how nice all these things are, and how they don’t seem like they should offset the usual despairs of living, but they do.

It turns out you can get a library card online and then visit the State Library near Potsdamer Platz, where many of the scenes in Wings of Desire are shot at. While taking public transit to the library, I read from Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write, another oral history—but this one is about the Village Voice, an influential alt-weekly founded in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. I’m writing a longer piece about this book, which will come out sometime this autumn, so I’ll be brief here! Romano’s book is a fascinating look at twentieth-century American journalism and cultural criticism, and how the Voice’s idiosyncratic writers helped shaped discourse around urban politics, the AIDS crisis, feminism, and gay rights.

And then I spent my time at the library reading from the books I bought at the Walther König bookstore near Museumsinsel. It’s such an expansive and well-stocked art bookstore, and it was incredibly difficult to leave with just 2 purchases. One of them was the art historian Claire Bishop’s Merce Cunningham’s Events: Key Concepts, which I finished in August once I was back home.

Bishop is an art historian known for her writing on relational aesthetics (which is…what? has a good explainer here) and how the attention economy has reshaped contemporary art. Her book on the avant-garde choreographer Cunningham focuses specifically on his “Events,” where Cunningham excerpted movements from his existing works to create new dances performed in non-traditional settings, from basketball courts to museums.

I wasn’t particularly interested in Cunningham before reading this book—but I knew that his romantic partner and longtime artistic collaborator was the composer John Cage, who I’m fascinated by. (And Cage is also the reason I went to the Yoko Ono exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin—the two met in the 1950s and became close friends.) It’s exciting when an interest in one person/work/event leads you to another, and another, and another…

Last summer, I wrote about John Cage, Fluxus, and whether the indeterminacy of LLMs can be used in artistically innovative ways—

Bishop’s book on Merce Cunningham gave me a little more context on some key ideas in modern dance and choreography. And it was exciting to read about Cunningham’s collaborations with other people I’m familiar with, from the video artist Charles Atlas to the fashion designer Rei Kawakubo.

Art and literature on the AIDS crisis

For several years now, I’ve had 2 places bookmarked in Berlin: the Boros Collection and the Sammlung Hoffman. The Boros Collection is a contemporary art collection housed in a Nazi-era air raid shelter, which then became a techno club in the ‘90s, and then was purchased by Karen and Christian Boros to house their art collection. (The top floor is a penthouse apartment that was used as Lydia Tár’s apartment in, well, Tár.)

The Sammlung Hoffman is also a private art collection, though the building has a more modest history: it’s a former sewing-machine factory. When I booked tickets to visit, I didn’t realize that nearly every room would have a piece by the artist Félix Gonzáles-Torres.

His most famous work might be his candy piles: a cascading heap of wrapped candies, placed in a corner of a room, that viewers are invited to take. The first one, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), was created the same year that González-Torres’s longterm partner, Ross Laycock, died of AIDS-related complications. So the candy piles are often understood as making visible how someone might waste away from illness, and as a way of remembering Laycock. (Gonzáles-Torres passed away from AIDS a few years later.)

What I also learned, while visiting the Hoffman, is that Gonzáles-Torres befriended an artist named Roni Horn, after seeing her 1982 sculpture Gold Field. The two artists created several sculptures inspired by each other’s work, including Horn’s sculpture Gold Mats, Paired, for Ross and Felix.

It’s hard to describe how it felt, seeing this sculpture at the Hoffman. It was placed in a small alcove near a larger Gonzáles-Torres work, very gently lit, so that it felt like a shrine. The two sheets of gold foil immediately feel very precious, and very delicate—pressed together, with just a small, deliberate opening between them. You feel a sense of intimacy, even before you know what the title of the sculpture is and who it’s dedicated to.

I must have been thinking of this work when I picked up the artist David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, which touches on the relationship between David Wojnarowicz and the photographer Peter Hujar. Wojnarowicz’s essay collection, which was written from the 1970s through the early ‘90s, is sharp, aggressive, touching, angry, tragic, reflective, active—often in the same essay. He conveys the seething, urgent anger of many ACT UP members in the early years of the AIDS crisis, when the CDC and numerous public officials failed to disseminate useful information about HIV, or adequately fund research into cures. Though HIV was stigmatized as a gay disease, Wojnarowicz writes about how many other communities it affected—and connects the government’s approach to other issues:

What is it about this society which supports the premature death of so many of us solely because of the fact that we are denied information about our own bodies in the time of an AIDS epidemic. Why can’t every woman who wants an abortion get one in this country? If a woman who desires an abortion has to travel miles away to get one because of restrictions imposed by the state, can we assume this woman can afford to make that trip? Why is it men who make the decisions that affect these women’s bodies? Why is it any other person but myself can make a determination that affects the health or safety of my body? Why are so many people silent in the face of this?

But Close to the Knives is worth reading for the style, too—because Wojnarowicz is so particularly good at narrating how his eyes move—

My eyes scan the surfaces of walls and tables to provide balance to the weight of words.

—and what it feels like to be alive and conscious in the world:

Sitting in the Silver Dollar restaurant earlier in the afternoon, straddling a shining stool and ordering a small cola, I dropped a black beauty and let the capsule ride the edge of my tongue for a moment, as usual, and then swallowed it. Then the sense of regret washes over me like whenever I drop something, a sudden regret at what might be the disappearance of regular perceptions: the flat drift of sensations gathered from walking and seeing and smelling and all the associations; and that strange tremor like a ticklishness that never quite reaches the point of being unbearable.

I found myself thinking about Wojnarowicz a lot while reading Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House, a novel set in 1980s London about a young man’s relationship with an older lover and mentor in the middle of the AIDS crisis. Charlie Porter is a fashion journalist and blogger who co-ran Chapter 10 (a queer rave in London) for over 10 years, and these experiences have clearly informed Porter’s debut novel—which includes exuberant descriptions of late nights dancing and the small idiosyncracies of how people dress.

Johnny is 19 and still in college when he meets Jerry at a nearby park, where both men have volunteered to plant flower bulbs. Jerry, who is in his 40s, introduces Johnny to his friends and world. For the next 4 years, they live together, go out together, and join groups to advocate for those living with HIV. It’s a love story, and—like just about every love story during the AIDS crisis—a painful one, but the love that Porter portrays isn’t just between the two men, but within a larger community of people caring for each other and organizing together. Larger historical events, and works, come into the story: the UK’s AIDS memorial quilt; an artwork by Félix González-Torres. It takes a while to sink into the novel’s style—Johnny is a plain-spoken and humble first-person narrator—but I ended up enjoying it immensely, because all the emotions (joy, anger, fear, solidarity, loneliness) feel direct and unmediated. It’s also a novel that ends, I think, peacefully if not perfectly happily (is it possible, ever, to be perfectly happy when you’re grieving?). After finishing it, I read an interview with Charlie Porter in WORMS, where he says:

The heart of the novel takes place from ‘91 to ‘95. I wanted to look at this period because a lot of AIDS narratives, in terms of fiction and plays, are usually about the beginning of the crisis…I really wanted to look at a period of urgency, but also resignation, desperation, exhaustion. It was a different period, culturally—everything had changed.

Urgency is central to the book. Jerry has to try and tell Johnny as much as he can about life before the AIDS crisis, which is the point of the book: trying to reconnect with experimental living and queer philosophies from before…And then the urgency in the present day is Johnny trying to work out his life, not to stagnate but to actually try and regain that urgency—urgency in anger. [Wojnarowicz’s memoir] Close to Knives is a very angry book, quite rightly.

To close off this theme, I also read the writer and activist Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. It’s a beautiful memoir of the AIDS crisis: the people Schulman befriended and loved and lost; the passionate intensity of ACT UP, the direct action group that pushed for significant investments in research and access to treatment; and the reason that Schulman cofounded the ACT UP Oral History Project (with Jim Hubbard) to commemorate the group.

“The AIDS experience,” Schulman writes, was where she came to understand that:

It is a fundamental of individual integrity to intervene to stop another person from being victimized, even if to do so is uncomfortable or frightening. That the fear and discomfort must be separated from the decision to act…

Every historical moment passes…McCarthyism passed, even the Holocaust passed. Outliving the historical moment with your integrity intact is a risky business. I’m glad I witnessed the beauty of ACT UP so that I know it is right and possible to intervene on behalf of others, thereby repositioning one’s self towards the acknowledgment that other people are real, even if they have less status and are more endangered.

Reading Schulman’s writing is always invigorating and always a challenge—intellectually and morally. She reminds us that our future selves will be asked to answer for whatever we’re doing now—and whether we have acted with “intellectual integrity and integrity of action.”

The state of the contemporary novel

For the second half of August, I read a lot of contemporary fiction. Why? Because I am always seeing people complain about how there are no good novels, and contemporary literature is dead—killed off by the MFA industrial complex, identity politics, the consolidation of the publishing industry, or something else.

But I’m someone who wants direct evidence! I want to know what contemporary literature people are reading, and exactly what conclusions they’re drawing from it! So that’s why I read 6 novels from the last 12 months:

3 of them were longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize:

• David Szalay’s Flesh, which I bought after ’s effusive praise. This novel is phenomenal; completely, skillfully executed on a technical level (perfect pacing, perfect prose) and a very compelling story that sticks with you long after you finish reading. It’s also the kind of novel you’ll finish in one sitting and be upset if anyone tries to interrupt you! Briefly: it’s a propulsive rags-to-riches story of a young man, István, who gets caught up in other people’s plans—sometimes altruistic, sometimes sexual—and dragged through different social and economic classes in Hungary and London. It’s an incredibly eventful story, but narrated with a cool restraint—István’s interiority is very subtly done. Almost certainly one of the best novels published this year.

• Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation, a novel about an Albanian interpreter whose impulsive do-gooder instinct puts her marriage and well-being at risk. It’s like a thriller version of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies. As I wrote in my Goodreads review, you wouldn’t expect a novel about immigration/trauma/the ethics of interpretation/being married to a arthouse film professor to have so much suspense…but it does! It’s a very impressively executed novel, and the main theme of the novel—how much should you go out of your way to help others? and can you ever save someone else from their problems?—is very movingly explored. My friend Megan Marz also wrote an excellent and insightful review of Misinterpretation in the TLS.

• Natasha Brown’s Universality. I wanted to like this much more than I did—especially since I loved Brown’s first novel, Assembly. Structurally, this novel is very promising: it opens with a fictional article about a wealthy financier cheating on his wife, a bombastic anti-woke newspaper columnist, and a wayward son who’s joined an anarchist commune. Then the novel shifts between a few different perspectives—starting with the journalist who wrote the article, and ending with the anti-woke columnist she profiles—revealing how the article changed everyone’s lives. Universality is an astute commentary on several contemporary issues, including the precarity of freelance journalism, and how class anxieties in the UK have increasingly centered around anti-migrant rhetoric. It’s also a funny depiction of how writers can strategically use debates around immigration, DEI and class inequality to advance their careers. My problem with the novel is that it feels too literal and unsubtle. I’m reminded of something Ottessa Moshfegh said in 2021:

  I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an “afternoon special” or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for journalists to make neat generalizations about culture…We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media.

  The novel’s characters all feel drawn from the news. Everyone is a Type of Guy that I’m already familiar with and already dislike, but because they’re rendered so obviously and flatly, I often felt condescended to as a reader. Brown does attempt to make the characters a bit more dimensional—no one is obviously evil or obviously good—but it’s not quite enough.2

I read 3 other novels from 2025—I’ve already mentioned Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House, but there was also:

• Paula Bomer’s The Stalker, which my friend Klara recommended. We both feel personally injured and outraged that this novel has not been discussed, reviewed, and praised more—it’s astonishingly well-written and one of the most hilarious/disturbing/charming/unsettling narrators I’ve come across lately. It follows an obnoxiously self-assured young man as he attempts to make it in NYC…by manipulating and coercing women into providing him with free drinks, unfettered access to their apartments, money, drugs and sex. The novel is written with such joie de vivre and exuberance—it feels like an endless, picaresque caper to see how much he can extract from other people—even as the man’s exploits become more, well, exploitative. Also a book you’ll knock out in one sitting—it’s very fast-paced.

• Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic, an unhinged (complimentary) and distinctively written novel about being obsessed with love and disappointed in its pursuit. It follows a young, mostly broke, vaguely employed 23-year-old woman trying to find a boyfriend in NYC—with occasional mythic interludes narrated by a voluble omniscent narrator. Kemp’s prose style is polarizing, but I’m a fan—I wrote in my Goodreads review that Kemp “has a real talent for writing a nearly-intolerably-terminally-online interior monologue that is actually expertly pitched…the internet-y voice doesn’t distance you from the story in a posture of irony, but rather makes everything more intensely felt.” Paradise Logic has the psychosexual intensity and earnestness of Sheila Heti’s Pure Color, but refracted through a million memes.

Finding meaning and finding yourself

I’ll close this newsletter out with 3 final books: a self-help book, a memoir, and a short story collection.

• I read the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, which is essentially a self-help book—but long-time readers know that I’m addicted to self-help and find it very encouraging in times of crisis and calm. Hollis is interested in the process of individuation: how to consciously choose the life you want to live, and the values you want to uphold, instead of automatically absorbing familial and social expectations. The book is quite insightful when it comes to the mistakes we repeatedly make (and what unconscious tendencies lie behind them); when people over-rely on love; and what to do when you feel “intimidated by the task of life.”

• I also read the critic and artist Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name. It’s a memoir that loosely traverses Sante’s early childhood, adulthood, and middle age—and describes how, in her 60s, she realized she was trans. Sante is an introspective, deliberate, sensitive writer, and the memoir is her attempt to understand why it took so long for her to realize who she was. She returns to her past writing, including a prose poem she wrote in 1978, at the age of 24, which was set to music and then used for a Wim Wenders film, The State of Things. The song includes the lyrics:

  It was the beginning of a new dream which was real life, or the manifestation of an old one at its cusp. She imagined they took her in a white car to a room in a club…The other women looked back at her, but they were sisters under the mink.

  As Sante observes in her memoir:

  My subconscious was attuned to my being and my desires in a way that my conscious mind couldn’t afford. The sophistication of my repressive mechanism can be gauged by the fact that I was able to write those words, show them to my friends, hear them set to music…print them in a chapbook…and not once tumble to their real subject, which seems unmistakable to me now. For that matter, look at the refrain of the other song I wrote for the Del-Byzanteens…“If I only have one life, let me live it as a lie”…The conflict is spelled out so explicitly you’d think I would have noticed.

• Lastly, I read Oğuz Atay’s Waiting for the Fear, translated from Turkish by Ralph Hubbell. I received this from the NYRB Classics Book Club subscription last November, but have been very behind on reading it! (But that was also the month I started a new job and moved from San Francisco to London.) It’s just great—so playful and charming, if you find interminable interior narrative and profound, restless anxiety charming in literature. For example—in the title story, “Waiting for the Fear,” a man returns home, preoccupied with his thoughts, and casts his eye around the hallway:

  I walked with my thoughts up my street of three houses, and suddenly I found myself standing at my door. Which means I’ve been thinking, I said. Because that’s what always happened when I thought. Before I’d have a chance to get my keys ready, my door would suddenly appear. Then, on my way to my rocking chair in the sitting room, I come up with other things to think about: how I need to unlock the deadbolt, turn the key in the main lock twice, take the room keys from the vase…When you’re afraid to be alone, the loneliness gets worse…Not all was lost, while there’s life there’s hope, barking dogs don’t bite. Ah, God damn it all!

  Then I looked away from the vase at the other objects in the hall; which meant I was done thinking. (One should consistently refer to certain unchanging measures to remember that one is alive.) That’s when I suddenly saw the envelope. There among the hallway’s familiar objects, it stood out as the only foreign thing…

Thank you, as always, for reading! I’d love to hear about the contemporary novels you loved or hated; the memoirs that have stayed with you; and any art/films/exhibitions from the summer. Have a beautiful September.

I’ve always liked books and liked reading. But about 4 or 5 years ago, I realized that there was a way to extend the excitement I would get from a great book—a way to relive the aesthetic experience, and even deepen it: I could read literary criticism. Which is to say: I started reading a lot of book reviews.

Reviews are typically understood to involve a little bit of description (what is this book about? what genre is it in? who’s the audience), and a little bit of judgment (is it good? bad? mixed?), but these utilitarian aspects seem, to me, both necessary and secondary to the form. The best reviews don’t just tell you what to read, watch, see, and buy. They offer, instead, a particular kind of lifestyle—one that is more alive to ideas, more attentive to beauty. The best reviews whetted my appetite for books I hadn’t read; they offered new ways to think about books I’d already read; and they were, sometimes, as satisfying to read as an actual book—or eavesdropping on a gossipy conversation.

About two years ago, I wrote my first book review on the Japanese writer Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo. Writing the review helped me see the novel differently; it became even more interesting and elegantly written than before. And it felt good to throw myself into a creative project, instead of scrolling on my phone. So obviously I kept on going: I reviewed Sheila Heti for ArtReview; Lucy Ives’s essay collection for The Believer; a novel by a Brazilian new media artist for Asymptote; and nonfiction books about software and design for the LA Review of Books and the Atlantic.

All this was happening, of course, while I was reading about the literacy crisis, and the death of the humanities, and other depressing headlines that suggested that this thing I had just fallen in love with—literary criticism—was dying, dead, done.

I disagree. Not just because I like doing it, and want to believe I can continue to do it. But it’s also because I grew up, so to speak, in the non-literary world—the world of software and programming and technology. (I still work in that world; after I finish this newsletter, I’m going to spend the rest of the day in Figma and Cursor.) All of my experiences in that world have led me to believe that literature feels more important, not less, the deeper you get into technology. So in this newsletter I’ll take a stab at:

• Explaining what it is that critics do, and the individual and social value this provides

• Why I think the market for great literature, and great literary criticism, is much larger than people think

—and then I’ll close with some of my favorite critics and publications. I’m not really an expert in this world (note the “emerging” in the fellowship title), but I feel very passionately about it! The question, of course, is how I began to feel this way—and why I think others could, too.

What do critics do?

Unless you’ve had some exposure to cultural criticism—or an art/design education where critiques were a necessary, useful part of developing your craft—the word critic often has a negative connotation. “In the popular imagination,” the critic and novelist Christine Smallwood observed,

The critic is usually evil, sneering, vicious, or frustrated at their own thwarted artistic dreams. But the truth is, people who do this quite insane and marginal thing of writing criticism do it because they have a passionate attachment to literature. There’s little money or power in it, and no fame. Writing book reviews today is a vocation, not a career.

Critics evaluate works on the basis of technical excellence and artistic merit, yes, but the goal of this isn’t cruelty. It comes from a deep fascination with the medium (literature, art, fashion, design, architecture, &c) and an overwhelming urge to discuss it, as deeply and as rigorously as possible, in public. What does “deeply and rigorously” mean? To me, it’s that:

• A critic acts as a deeply invested friend, or a generous teacher, when they introduce you to a work. Critics care deeply about you, the reader of the review. They want you to have a good time! They want you to know more about the world! They want you to enjoy yourself—but not in a Let people enjoy things way, which suggests that any difference in opinion is inherently bad, and any difference in knowledge (what if the friend/teacher knows more about a topic than you?) doesn’t matter. The trick, of course, is to inform and educate without demeaning the reader, and dismissing the reader’s intelligence, agency, and ability to come to a different conclusion. But it’s not bad, I think, when someone has the courage to say: I understand why you like or dislike something, but what if you looked at it from my perspective?

• A critic teaches you how to read, how to see, how to listen, how to look. But don’t I already know how to do that? Yes, but it feels different—special, nearly reverential—to do it with a companion, someone who can help you notice the minute decisions, technical and artistic, that contribute to an aesthetic outcome. My model for this is Peter Schjeldahl, who was the New Yorker’s art critic before he passed away in 2022. I wrote a little about him, as well as the painter-critic David Salle, in—

• A critic navigates the boundary between subjective and objective. Aesthetic experiences are inherently personal, inherently individual; two intelligent, discerning people can have entirely different opinions about a work. Yes, a critical consensus (or near-consensus) can exist around certain works; that’s usually when they become a part of the canon in art/literature/design/&c. But this consensus is never total! So critics need to always—always—be aware of their own subjectivity. The writing is often more compelling, and more interesting, this way. I love, for instance, the art critic Jennifer Krasinski’s review of the Pittsburgh-based sculptor Thaddeus Mosley:

  Love isn’t a tenable critical position, and, most of the time, I think that’s exactly as it should be. Love makes us corny, blurs our edges, and (the worst fate for a writer) induces hyperbole. Yet there are occasions when a critic, so moved by an artist and their art, is made corny, feels the blurring of their edges, and tries to recompose the oncoming hyperbole into a more respectable rhapsodic form, all while squirming at the thought of maybe, just maybe, having to use that word. Alas, until I find a better one (I’ve still got 800-plus of them to figure it out before I hit this column’s limit), I will simply confess: I love Thaddeus Mosley’s sculptures.

  This doesn’t mean, however, that critics should be timid. It’s fine and even useful to say that some works contain more technical sophistication and artistic ambition. It’s exciting when a critic makes a case for something, when a critic says: This artist is doing work that will, in its own small way, change the game for everyone else.

• A critic historicizes and contextualizes. How does a critic make such claims? By situating a single work in a broader lineage, so that any claim is appropriately evidenced and well-argued. It’s like research; you need to understand the ideas and insights that preceded you, in order to offer any new ideas and insights of your own. As writes in her 2-part investigation of “Criticism in Crisis!!”,

  I’m usually reading reviews because the perspective of the writer has some heft. I’m just gonna be much more curious about your perspective on a novel if you know something about the history of novels and what current books discourse is like.…To evaluate what’s intrinsic to the book or the art, you should be able to place it in extrinsic context, which means you have to do research.

• A critic deepens your encounter with a work, and with all such works. A critic models how to live more richly and attentively alongside art, literature, design, theatre, fashion, and even software. This is, to me, one of the most useful and rewarding parts of reading literature—and reading literary criticism—in a world awash with attention-seeking content, much of it trivial, much of it forgettable. It feels different (and better, arguably) to spend an evening immersed in a single story, instead of scrolling through a thousand posts on your phone. (Look at your screentime. Then look at your local library’s online catalogue. What will make you happier with yourself? Seriously.) As the writer Vinson Cunningham said, in an old episode of New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast,

  A critic…is someone who loves experience. It is a disposition that comes even before attention to art, it’s someone that looks at any phenomenon…and wants to extend their life by paying attention, by analysis: I want to juice this aspect of experience for all its worth,. Someone who is, in one way, and not to be morbid, battling death by saying, I can extend this moment, and this one, and this one, by way of attention. And the best way of practicing that disposition happens to be on art.

  The secret to longevity, it turns out, might be cheaper than whatever Bryan Johnson is up to. Look at art. Pay attention to it. Write about it. And maybe, even, make it yourself.

• A critic offers portable conceptual and intellectual tools for the rest of life. It sounds exhausting and pretentious and a little excessive, perhaps, whenever anyone argues that the thing they do is actually what will help you understand—and/or undergo—the most profound parts of life. But I really do believe this! And one of the best examples, I think, is the psychoanalyst and literary critic Adam Phillips’s essay for the LRB, which reads Kafka and Shakespeare to reflect on what it means to give up—on life, as in suicide—or give up on your old ideals, your old way of living, in order to keep on going.

I should probably say, too, what critics are not. They are not PR. (It’s not a bad and cruel thing if they write something negative, even if it’s about an independent/experimental artist.) They are not stans. They are not haters. They are that secret third thing—trying hard to understand why someone could be a stan, or could be a hater, by carefully weighing the good and bad aspects of a work.

Simultaneously, they are not obsessed with judgment, of deciding whether something is Good or Bad, Virtuous or Problematic, The Future of _ or The Cause of _’s Destruction.

In general, I believe that the best book reviews will feel interesting, insightful, and worthwhile if you:

• Have read the book and agree with the critic

• Have read the book and don’t agree with the critic

• Haven’t read the book (and may never read it)

A tall order? Yes, but it’s also an exciting challenge to take on as a critic! And if the critic pulls it off, that means that the potential audience for their review can be quite large—not just anyone who cares about this book, but anyone who cares about certain types of books, or certain ideas, or the state of intellectual/literary/artistic culture in general.

Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about lately—about the audience for critical writing.

“If criticism is dead, why are we all still here?”

Here’s the fascinating–depressing–fascinating thing about criticism: The entire time I’ve been trying to write it—which, if you recall, has only really been 2 years or so—people keep on saying that criticism is in a crisis (bad) or already dead (also bad, with the added implication that things are unsalvageable and there’s nothing to do except grieve its passing). But other people—Ryan Ruby, for example—are arguing that we are, in fact, living in the golden age of literary criticism. So what exactly is going on here?

Because there’s a lot of criticism being written, edited, published, circulated. I’m a devoted reader of 4Columns, for example, which publishes 4 reviews each week—on their very beautiful website—on different subjects. Literature, film, art and music are mainstays; dance, theater and architecture show up occasionally. Earlier this year, they hosted an event that asked the obvious question: “If criticism is dead, why are we all still here?”

This is, obviously, a question I’m very invested in! And I’d like to add another one: If STEM disciplines have, supposedly, won the war against the arts and humanities, why are so many of the software people I know suddenly obsessed with literature and films? Why is it that my groupchats full of programmers and product managers and designers light up whenever there’s a new Andrea Long Chu review? Why are tech people starting Robert Caro and Roberto Bolaño book clubs? Why are they getting NYRB Classics mailed to them every week?

Expanding the market for literary criticism

In 2023, the same year I pitched my first book review, the academic Christopher Newfield delivered a speech titled “Criticism After This Crisis.” His audience was the Modern Languages Association, a professional organization that includes many of the literary scholars and graduate students in America. “Our profession is in trouble,” he said. But the problem was not just the lack of academic jobs, or the declining funding, at the federal and university level, for literature. “We’re trapped in a false narrative,” he argued, “and I’ll offer a better one.”

A key part of the narrative, Newfield explained, is that the declining number of humanities majors means that there is a declining demand for humanistic knowledge. But what he actually observed, when he looked at course enrollment numbers, was “a persistence of student interest in taking humanities courses, whether or not they are majoring in the field.” This led him to conclude that:

Undergraduate interest in humanities topics has not declined, while interest in combining these topics with knowledges from different disciplines has increased.

Anecdotally, I can see this happening in my own social circles (which, up until I began writing literary criticism, were primarily composed of people who had majored in STEM disciplines). The English professor Joshua Bennett recently published a piece in the Atlantic about the intense interest his MIT students have in poetry:

One of the highlights…of my 15-year career as an educator…has been the recent discovery that some of my students, past and present, formed an arts collective: The People’s Poetry…These engineers and scientists in training, hailing from across the world, were gathering to compose and critique poems outside the classroom.

Many of these young people were, in other classes, studying or even actively developing forms of technology that raise a range of questions about the purpose and power of human expression: why humans write or draw; what ethics govern our inspiration and training; how the creative act brings us together and alters our thinking. In the midst of a technological revolution, while taking on a notoriously difficult courseload, why have they chosen to devote their time to the ancient art of making poems?

I can also see this in the sheer quantity of newsletters, on Substack and elsewhere, that are essentially centered around DIYing a humanities education—creating your own syllabi, assigning yourself homework, replicating the kind of intellectual community that a liberal arts education has historically promised. Some of these newsletters have a wider readership than just about every famous writer on Substack (except George Saunders, whose Story Club is in a league of its own).

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a year ago · 41686 likes · 346 comments · Elle

The most popular newsletter I’ve ever written (over 9,000 likes) is about pursuing your interests in a para-academic way: formulating hypotheses, digging into the history and theory of a discipline, and publishing your work. It resonates with people, I think, because people want to take their intellectual life seriously.

So I agree with Newfield’s narrative—that there is an enormous interest in humanistic knowledge, and that this demand is entirely separate from the present (and depressing) economic realities of the field.1

We need to be careful to distinguish these two things. I don’t, personally, believe that markets are maximally efficient and perfectly rational, and I also think there are certain commodities—and certain forms of labor—that the market tends to undervalue and under-compensate. Therefore, it’s entirely possible that there are forms of labor that are tremendously valuable, that people want to do and also want to benefit from, that are not well-paid at the moment! (Care work comes to mind.)

The most interesting—and inspiring—part of Newfield’s talk, to me, comes near the beginning, when he says:

A key goal of any profession…is that it doesn’t just adapt its supply but seeks to control demand. Strong professions don’t adapt to markets: to support their interests, they make markets.

Expanding the market for literary criticism

I have many personal goals for this newsletter—to practice my writing; to remember what I read; to be in conversation with others who are obsessed with art/literature/culture.

I wrote about why I write in public—and why I think you should write, too!—in:

But I increasingly feel that my social role for writing personal canon is—and this is going to sound very lofty—to expand the market for literary criticism.

Criticism, to me, is not a specialized form of writing that is only relevant to a disappearing minority of people. Criticism is not a specialized form of writing that can only be appreciated if you have a certain education or background. (Reading criticism is the education; regularly reading it becomes the background.)

If I can put this in tech terms: The total addressable market (TAM) of criticism is not “humanities majors”—people who spent 4 formative years learning certain names and theories and ways of thinking. After all, I love literary criticism, and I majored in computer science and design. I spent four years in college and wrote one—literally one—paper that required footnotes. Pragmatically speaking, “humanities majors only” would be a terrible TAM to go after in the present climate, since quite a few young people have followed the (sometimes useful, sometimes flawed) advice that a STEM major is the only way to make a dignified living.

To put it somewhat frivolously, somewhat seriously: The total addressable market for criticism is everyone who has a Goodreads or Letterboxd account. That is to say, it includes

• Anyone with an appetite for consuming cultural works in a vaguely organized, strategic and intentional fashion. (Why else would they have a specialized app for keeping track of what they’ve read/watched?)

• Anyone with a more-than-passing interest in having more, and better, aesthetic encounters in their everyday life. (Why else would they seek out recommendations on what to read/watch next?)

• And anyone who is curious about their own judgments of the works that induce those aesthetic experiences, and also curious about other people’s judgments. (Why else would they read reviews or post their own, complete with ratings?)

I also personally believe that increased use of LLMs will only increase the urgency and relevance of key humanistic skills, such as:

• The ability to articulate what you want to learn more about, and how that information should be organized for you to interpret and use (this is known as “prompting”)

• The ability to, given an arbitrary text, determine whether it is AI-generated or not (we could describe this as a specialized form of “close reading,” which picks up on the particular stylistic tics of different models), and whether the knowledge in it is reliable (this has typically been described as “media literacy”)

• The ability to create, and refine, a coherent, internal representation of what makes a complex artifact—such as a photograph, painting, novel, fil—“good” and worth paying attention to (this is what Silicon Valley has been describing, lately, as “taste”)

Which is why I spend my days designing software and thinking about the future of technology, and then I spend my weekends writing—in this newsletter and elsewhere—about the future of the written word.

Reports of the death of literature have been greatly exaggerated. It seems patently obvious to me that writing is one of the best inventions of humanity and a fundamentally valuable act. And writing about art, film, music—and even writing about writing—has great intrinsic and extrinsic value. So I hope that the critics I love won’t stop writing and publishing their work. And I hope, too, that this newsletter—in its own small way—contributes to a better critical and cultural ecosystem online.

Where can I read great criticism?

I’ll close with a few recommendations for critics that I read with great devotion/admiration—literary critics, yes, but also architecture critics, internet critics, fashion critics. (And I’ll skip the obvious names, by which I mean: the critics listed here by Ryan Ruby, though his list includes many of my favorites.)

Three critic-practitioners I admire!

In Better Living Through Criticism, the film critic A.O. Scott observes that:

Every writer is a reader…driven by a desire to imitate, to correct, to improve, or to answer the models before them…it does not seem to me inaccurate to say that all art is successful criticism.

This might explain why some of my favorite critics also write short stories and novels of their own:

• Angelo Hernandez Sias is an exceptional fiction writer (I’ve written about his short stories twice!) and, unfairly, an excellent and perceptive literary critic. His review of the Chilean novelist José Donoso. The Obscene Bird of Night is also an excellent education in the complexities of translating literature. And his briefer piece on Roberto Bolaño’s literary legacy comments on the experience of showing up late to the party (as in, late to another language’s great writers):

  In the 21 years since his death, his body of work has been handled a lot by Anglophone critics and publishers, who, like so many necrophiliacs, simultaneously consecrate and desecrate their subject…Of course we’re late. Lateness is the condition of reading, and especially of reading in translation. We were late to Hölderlin, late to Kafka, less late to Borges; we were late to Dickinson, late to Keats…“A person arrives at a gathering and is ignored,” the philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote. “Only afterward do those who were present, not having expected anything unusual, discover what transpired in their midst.”

  I wrote about Angelo Hernandez Sias’s short stories in—

• is a critic–essayist–novelist (with a new novel coming out next year from Graywolf!) who is so profoundly funny; I feel very cheered whenever I read her newsletter, , or when I read her takedowns of artificial lighting. (Because we do need more takedowns of the deleterious effects of artificial lighting on our circadian rhythms and nonhuman compatriots!) Her essay “The Unbearable Lightness” is in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.2