Against Doom: On Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

A few years ago, I attended a Christmastime service at an Orthodox church in Washington, D.C. The liturgy was beautiful and the clergy welcoming and gracious. The icons decorating the church’s interior were indeed evocative, and the long, slender candles parishioners placed in sand added to the atmosphere. As I was walking back home I encountered a young man who had been there too, and explained that he was a convert. “In Orthodox Christianity,” he gushed, his eyes widening, “it’s like the Enlightenment never existed.”

This Is Top Forty: On Chris Dalla Riva’s Uncharted Territory

There’s a channel on Stingray Music, an online streaming service based in Canada, called All-Time Greatest Hits. A typical five-song set goes like this: Billie Eilish followed by Foreigner followed by Gladys Knight & the Pips followed by Rihanna and ending with the Lovin’ Spoonful. Contrary to the passivity that streaming often cultivates, All-Time Greatest Hits demands the opposite. The mood and the genre and the era change constantly. Nothing is put on a pedestal. Everything played is treated equally.

The Past Is a Foreign City: On Mike Powell’s New Paltz, New Paltz

You reach a point in life where you become sort of embarrassed to be who you are. You look back at your aspirations and wonder if maybe they weren’t yours at all; maybe they were borrowed from someone else, or maybe they were sold to you by a sinister culture industry. I am a product of my time and nothing more. I did not transcend any of the embarrassing pitfalls of my era, nor did I identify any of its obvious dangers.

The Persephone Complex: Short Fiction: A Letter

My mother wasn’t able to have children. She’d been diagnosed with a severely “bicornuate” uterus. Its deep top cleft would not permit a fetus’ implantation or habitation. This congenital irregularity has been called both “horned” and “heart-shaped” in the clinical literature, depending, I assume, on the observer’s temperament. My mother, pleasantly surprised at my safe arrival after a brief and almost anonymous tryst on an Italian research trip she’d taken in graduate school, inclined toward the heart.

The Manifold Mind of Saul Bellow: On the 20th Century Master, 20 Years Gone

Twenty years ago, the year of Saul Bellow’s death, I chanced upon an unusually clean copy of Ravelstein in a ramshackle bookstall in New Delhi. India is an unexpected place to wind up reading, for the first time, this midcentury urban intellectual, comic dissector of America’s moronic inferno. But, as it happens, amidst the street chaos and the tiresome pressures of train travel and seedy hostels, I found that my irked, overstimulated soul was peculiarly receptive to the master’s comforting genius. I consumed the book in a couple of hours at a restaurant counter.

The Divine Enfant Terrible: On Lofty Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son

A long lineage of Jesus films depicts Christ as almost otherworldly, serene, and calmly removed from the people around him. Movies like Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) depict Jesus as bathed in a soft glow of light, and as he moves through Jerusalem he seems to barely touch the ground. While Christian doctrine professes that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, depictions of him in film almost always place a heavy thumb on the scale of divinity.

Selfish and Exhausted: On Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You

To be fair, it’s not like Patricia Lockwood doesn’t warn us. “I was having a Protagonist Problem,” she declares. “I could not move, or make anything happen.” Of course, by the time the reader of her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, reaches this acknowledgement midway through the book, they’re likely already aware of both the “protagonist problem” at the heart of the novel and the failure of Lockwood’s trademark self-referential humor to solve it. Credit to Lockwood for her self-awareness, but the authorial disclaimer is too little, too late.

“Quarry Club Sunset” and “Ode to Pteromerhanophobia”

Word like a dirt packed mouth, / tongue forced strike of roof in gasp, / throat impinged in resonance akin / to being buried alive: / Pteromerhanophobia. / Name as fitting as fear, chemicals / rush right past frayed nerve to terror— / There is no escaping an hour. / Who doesn’t watch birds stretch wing / and yearn to fly? Pity of a fear, really, / world gathered up in pleats and yet, / Everywhere is possible but my mind. / I do it anyway. / Walk through the terminal upright. / Like guaranteed, all semi-composure / until I lose earth again and must await / its return.

The Theater of the Unreal: On AI and the Deceptions of New Tech

I’m going to start this essay with a timestamp: August 2025. It’s about a week since the disastrous release of OpenAI’s GPT-5, a couple of weeks since OpenAI claimed a valuation of $300 billion, and about three months since ChatGPT helpfully offered a 16-year old named Adam Raine advice about the best way to hang himself. No doubt in the coming weeks and months the headlines will just keep coming, from tragedy to farce and back again. But here’s something I’m sure will not change: generative AI is theater.

The Transgressive Muse: On Timothy Atkinson’s Help Me I’m in Hell

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said Keats, “—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” But the poet was missing an element. The last two centuries have seen the binary coupling evolve into a ménage à trois. A hot newcomer, Transgression, has joined the hallowed pair as the transcendent purpose and valorizing principle of art, bringing with it a perverse polycule of aesthetic virtues — shock value, envelope-pushing, norm-busting, taboo-shattering, bourgeois-épatering — without which the modern literary canon, and certainly its cover copy and promotional spin, would be seriously bereft.

Middlebrow Madness: On Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams

It gives me little pleasure to report that Train Dreams is an unfortunately empty film. A pretty film, in some ways. But an empty one. And as a moviegoer who believes that today’s critics are, on the whole, far too easy on this contemporary strain of middlebrow cinema, I must confess: I’m tired of films that look and feel like Train Dreams. I know nothing about the original Denis Johnson novel, which some people I know have called a great one — I only have the film.

This Is What I Am: A Short Story on Land

Gordon Lewis hasn’t exercised since college. But if you saw him standing outside MacDuffy’s pub, a few blocks from the Clinton Hill Real Estate office, a lean not yet paunched figure, sucking down a Camel Light, you might think he doesn’t look half bad for someone caught in a five-year spiritual free fall. By some genetic miracle, Gordon’s pasty, 29-year-old skin hasn’t soured. Despite the alcohol and the cigarettes and the midday rub and tugs, there is still unharmed youth inside him, perfectly good unspoiled blood waiting to be shaken and stirred in the right direction.

The Miraculous and Miserable City: Jon Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer at 100

At the turn of the 20th century, the city became a source of concern, something to study, something to ponder. On the back of the Industrial Revolution and the concurrent disappearance of older, more rural forms of life, millions of people in what is called “The West” began to move to urban centers. With Empire and imperialism at their height — recall that the Berlin Conference, where the imperial powers divided up Africa, happened only in 1884 — the city expanded and became the metropolis.

How to Be a Man: On the Booker-Winning David Szalay

A few weeks ago, on one of the busy, sticky, spectacularly unpunctual trains for which my country is justly famous, I sat next to a young man around my age. He looked put-together, ambitious, very London; he was wearing a nice, clean polyester suit and had an official-looking work pass dangling round his neck. What impressed me most, though, was the intensity, the care, with which he was reading his book. He kept flicking back and forth, underlining things, taking out his phone to make additional notes.

“The Deer Come Down From the Mountains” and “Small Stack of Books”

When storms approach, the deer / come down / from the mountains. They stand in / people’s yards, they walk / through the Chevron station. / The deer look childlike and / amateurish, ears twitching / in the public park. / Gangs of them, five or six or seven, / they sniff the air, how do / they know the blizzard is coming? / Who among them / lives long enough to know the path / to safety? / The locals barely notice, avoid hitting / them with their cars.