Escaping the Panopticon: On Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection

What do you need to build a panopticon? If you ask the ghost of Jeremy Bentham, who originated the concept in the late 18th century, he’d say something like the following: you need a circular building with a central observation tower staffed by a single guard. You need the ring of the building to be built with cells filled with prisoners who are being observed by the guard in the tower. If you ask the contemporary liberal subject — the citizen of a free society — you’d receive a more complicated answer. The modern concept of a panopticon isn’t confined to a single building, but expands into the more sprawling, networked, and technologically sophisticated notion of the authoritarian surveillance state.

A Tepid Search for Genius: On Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne

“One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.” Sheila Heti wrote this line in her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? and a thousand well-behaved girls who treat their art like it’s going to affect their grade point average underlined it, posted it to their Tumblr, and fervently whispered into the pages, “Me.”

The last fifteen years or so have been ardently dedicated to figuring out what a woman genius looks like. Much of this has focused on digging through the past, trying to trace matrilineal pathways in and around the artistic canon. Publishing, art museums, historians, and film scholars have sought out “rediscovered voices” to exploit and establish. While much of this work has been invigorating, the backward glance toward the overlooked, the forgotten, and the inappropriately maligned has given our culture a nostalgic feel, one lacking in vigor and direction.

The Blind Spot: On Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Boxing is the most honest of sports. The boxer, unlike the normal person, steps into the ring and willingly accepts that he’ll be punched in the face. Anyone can throw a punch at a heavy bag, but you’re not a boxer until you’ve eaten some punches and nodded like a demented little freak at the guy trying to take you out. Years ago, in the heat of my boxing fandom, I had my dad buy me a pair of gloves and I proceeded to throw jabs and hooks and uppercuts into the air. The great Mexican fighter, Julio César Chávez, was one of my heroes, and, so, for a brief interlude in the burgeoning days of my adolescent baseball career, I thought that I’d give boxing a go. I was already a jock, after all, so the transition would be easy. I was a tough kid, too. I’d watched hundreds of bouts alongside my dad, so, like a typical young man, I thought: I can do that. I can throw a punch. I can bob and weave and bounce off the ropes and attack my opponents with body shots and keep coming. I can surely take a punch.

A Flawed Novel Addresses A Failed Utopia: On Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals

We can never escape the world. Nor can we remake it. This truism underscores all great would-be utopian novels, from Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon — an anagram of “nowhere” — to dystopias proper like Brave New World and 1984, to failed-cult novels like Emma Cline’s The Girls. Any attempt to lift a few, quixotic human beings out of the psychosocial morass of human nature

Dream Warrior: On Bruce Wagner’s Remarkable Oeuvre

The time has come for Bruce Wagner. Because Wagner is the most pun-drunk writer since Nabokov, if not since Shakespeare, I couldn’t possibly not mean this phrase in multiple senses. For one thing, Wagner says he’s finished. After an almost 35-year career in fiction punctuated by occasional movie and TV writing, which includes his celebrated screenplay

Great American Misfire: On Percival Everett’s James

Percival Everett’s James is a novel that's set on the eve of the Civil War, in a town in Missouri. It's told from the point of view of James, who is Black and who is an enslaved man. He and his wife and daughter are owned by a woman named Miss Watson, and he often has to do tasks for her like chopping wood and hauling chickenfeed. James has a wife and a daughter. They live in a cottage. It's not clear what this wife and daughter do with their time, but this family survives and they seem to love each other.

Discovering A Great American Writer On Inter-Library Loan: On Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book

I first saw the name “Nate Lippens” while poking around alt-lit circles online. This might have been on Substack, or Twitter X. He was mentioned as a new writer, apparently of the alt-lit milieu. Based on the name “Nate Lippens”, I pictured some young kid, who was funny maybe? Not necessarily an author, but maybe a Twitter anon, a political commentator or a Dimes Square personality, someone offbeat.  He seemed to be someone significant though. It was unclear why.

Against Self-Actualization: On Susan Minot’s Don’t Be a Stranger

An older male friend once gave me the single best piece of dating advice I know of, even if, like most good advice, it’s sometimes easier to articulate than to abide by. I was in my early twenties, new to the city and eager for connection when he told me not to approach potential new relationships as if I am auditioning for the guy, as if my interest is already secure, and I am just waiting to find out if he reciprocates or finds me good enough—this is a trap, my friend said. Instead I ought to be auditioning the guy.

Welcome to The Metropolitan Review

We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that we took for granted in the twentieth century. So much mainstream art can feel like a pale imitation of yesterday, marketers at the top chasing specters of what was successful a generation ago. “Artificial intelligence” is no longer an insult—wasn’t artifice to be avoided at all costs, plastic a much-deserved insult?—and tech behemoths long to jam us so full of cultural slop that we won’t be able to think coherently again.