The Magic Eye: On the Art (and Life) of Joan Mitchell

A couple years ago, I got the idea that I should spend a week in Paris by myself. Considering I have a boyfriend who could have gone with me and that, perhaps more pertinently, I don’t speak French, the decision was confusing to a handful of people I know. I was satisfied by my own reasoning for the trip — I wanted to travel alone, to be in a situation in which I’m entirely out of my element, at least once while I’m young. Also, JetBlue had a sale. Still, I could read the awkwardness in their eyes, the real questions not being asked, when they’d look at me and carefully go, “So… what are you going to do there?” Really, what I wanted to do there was see the Joan Mitchell paintings at the Centre Pompidou. I’d still never seen a piece of hers in person then, the frenetic swipes and smears which I loved so much observed only ever through my various screens. A depressing thought! While it hadn’t been part of my decision to take the trip, in my loose planning it came to hold a kind of post-hoc, kismet-like significance for me — a chance to finally commune with Mitchell, my fellow Chicagoan-turned-New-Yorker, in the country that she made her ultimate home.

It Wasn’t Real, But It Was Beautiful: On the WWE Holiday Tour Live and Gabe Habash’s Stephen Florida

Last year, on the day after Christmas, I went alone to the WWE Holiday Tour Live at Madison Square Garden, where I sat in nosebleed seats. I wore a plaid button-down shirt and black jeans. I listened to “Danza Kuduro” on repeat on the half-hour walk from my apartment. My life was stable for the first time in two years. I was twenty-nine, living in New York after a nearly ten year hiatus, and dating a wonderful medical student at the University of Michigan who loved me very much. Everything was good. But I hadn’t finished writing my book and editors often edged me on whether my short stories would make it into their magazines (Not this story, but maybe the next one? Keep submitting to us!). I loved the medical student, but sometimes worried about our relationship. We never fought! Was that good? Or did it hint at some pliability of his that was a weakness of character? Back in New York, I felt like an animal free for the first time. I wanted to see men pound each other on the aptly named Boxing Day.

Would You Rather Have Married Young?: On Lena Dunham, Sally Rooney, and The End of Experience

In an iconic episode of Girls, “One Man’s Trash,” Hannah spontaneously spends a weekend with a hot, respectful doctor in his expensive brownstone. After a couple of sublime days in his house she suffers a moment of shameful envy. “Please don’t tell anyone this,” she says, in tears, “but I want to be happy.” Doctor: Of course you do. Everyone does. Hannah: But I didn’t think that I did. I made a promise such a long time ago that I was going to take in experiences, all of them, so that I could tell other people about them and maybe save them, but it gets so tiring, trying to take in all the experiences for everybody, letting anyone say anything to me. Then I came here and I see you. And you’ve got the fruit in the bowl and the fridge with the stuff, the robe, you’re touching me the way that… I realize I’m not different, you know? I want what everyone wants, I want what they all want, I want all the things. I just want to be happy.

Paperback Vibrators and the Pragmatic Evasions of Literary Men: On Gender in Contemporary Fiction

I want to begin with what this is not. A definition by negation. Two exes have accused me of doing this trick all the time. It feels relevant to mention only because, as with most things in a guy’s life, this is all about women. Writing anything about the woes of young men in contemporary fiction can feel like yammering about a lost cause. It can also prompt some pretty fatuous counters. Not even Joyce Carol Oates could be spared — when she shot out a tweet in 2022 about how a literary agent had told her he couldn’t even get editors to look at debuts by ambitious boys, the Twitterati collectively told her to get stuffed. So, here’s what this is not: I’m not saying that literary culture has degraded because women pack the book world to the brim; I’m not saying that Stephen King and James Patterson are immaterial nobodies, that their sales numbers matter not at all; I’m not saying that nonwhite folk have a cinch of a time getting their books on the shelves; and I’m not saying that female editors should now be freighted with the grim responsibility of victors and must dole out ginormous contracts to yearning and pitiful mediocrities just because they happen to be male. Everyone knows that some of the writers crying foul about the paucity of men getting published are mere aggrieved nimrods trapped in a deserved eternity of irrelevance. The phallus is no skeleton key for unlocking the mystery of their nothingness. They just suck.

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.