It all started with an unexpected late-night phone call delivering some much-needed good news. I was coming back from visiting my dad, who was fresh off a debilitating car accident that cost him five broken bones and a sternum in the process. Luckily, despite the laborious rehab, he was quickly en route to a full recovery, but I was still desperate for a pick-me-up, and that’s just what came.
We find this passage in a letter written by John Updike to his girlfriend Mary Entwistle Pennington on April 1st, 1952, sent from the farmhouse he was visiting in Plowville, Pennsylvania, where he had lived with his parents and maternal grandparents during high school before he went off to Harvard where he would meet Mary, a Radcliffe student, in a course on medieval sculpture. They would be engaged by the end of the year, with just over 20 years of marriage and four children ahead of them.
It’s perhaps not surprising that American poetry’s A-listers have come, of late, to espouse sincerity as both writing practice and a way of discoursing about writing. Plenty of developments seemed to clear a path for this new wave of earnestness. There was Marc Kelly Smith, arguably the first “slam” poet; the proliferation of spoken word, or “performance” poetry; and the subsequent transformation of the open mic into the gestic, roaring soapbox that it is today. There was, beginning in 1996, National Poetry Month, which drew inspiration from Black History Month and Women’s History Month.
I always imagined I would write something about Edmund White after his death. What I never imagined was the death itself. It came on the evening of June 3, 2025. I found out the morning after, lying in bed. I had slept in; I was startled and squinted into the indirect sunlight just past my bedroom doors as I heard my wife say, “He died.” I didn’t know whom she meant, nor why he should be important enough to wake me; I assumed she was talking about some actor, musician, or statesman whose obituary she’d read in the paper. “Who?” I asked.
The news came by text from my older sister. Just had a policeman at the door. Dad died. Found deceased in his apt. No other details yet. I was grocery shopping with my daughter, and she was growing impatient, squirming in her stroller. I quickly wrote back: Thanks for letting me know. Call you later. I tried calling my sister that night, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t call again. My father’s death didn’t come as a shock. Months before, he’d been hospitalized for respiratory failure, his lungs ravaged from decades of smoking, his cirrhotic liver barely functioning. He’d pulled through that time, but by all reports, just barely.
The 20th century variously imagined the end of history: rapture, communism, the triumph of neoliberalism. For the people of the Lamb of God, it was a gust of wind and words. Partly because far-away Jews had recently reclaimed the city of Jerusalem and partly because of our own faithfulness, we believed we were witnessing the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Heaven was “inbreaking,” and before long, it would fully sweep the earth.
A portrait of the artist in 1986 finds him at Woods Gramercy, an upscale restaurant in what the New York Times is calling “the year of the column in restaurant decoration,” and it’s just about the only restaurant right now that’s trying to make a name for itself with vegetables, of all things; in fact the “Steamed Vegetables” is among the most talked-about dishes on its menu and the most affordable (always a good sign) . . .
One hundred and nine million albums sold. Fifteen billion YouTube streams. One hundred Billboard charting singles. One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs. Thirty-four Billboard charting albums. Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson? What if I told you it was none of the above?
The key question posed by Fifty Shades of Grey, as sociologist Eva Illouz recognizes in her brilliant 2014 book on the topic, Hard-Core Romance: “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Best-Sellers, and Society, isn’t why a poorly written BSDM romance novel would capture the imagination of millions of women. Poorly written and slightly rapey romance novels have been firing the erotic imaginations of millions of women in the book-buying West for more than a century, ever since the romance genre became a mass market phenomenon.
My feet are bare and so are my companions’. We are walking over cool deep-pile carpet and what feels like rough forest floor as we travel through Viola’s Room, an immersive experience created by London’s Punchdrunk collective, which recently wrapped up a five-month run at Manhattan’s arts complex The Shed. We are a group of six. We walk through corridors accompanied by the gloriously round vowels of actor Helena Bonham Carter, who speaks into each of our noise-canceling headphones. Her voice tells an odd fairy tale. We enter and exit a series of rooms. Beautiful rooms . . . empty rooms.
He’d met a lot of people who loved to announce that they were failures, and then other people, usually friends, felt compelled to deny it, saying, No, no, you’re judging yourself too harshly, using bizarre and ridiculous standards, you have such good things going on, even if you feel in some way that you have fallen short! — but when it came to suicide, if you were still here then you could absolutely be considered a flop.
I am not sure what motivated my friend Susan and me to choose Marfa, TX, as the destination for a midweek fall mini-vacation, but the storied art town near the state’s southwestern border with Mexico proved a seductive mecca for an artist and an art journalist. Some may know it as the setting for Chris Kraus’s brash epistolary novel I Love Dick, and the Amazon Prime series of the same name (wherein one character describes it as “a small quirky place . . . a combination of blue-collar desert town and folksy artistic retreat”).
It’s 2006. I am an unpaid blogger without a day job living at home with my parents. Freelance work has been slow. After smoking a bowl in my green Hyundai Accent with a dent in the front left bumper, I shuffle to the computer room and go through my bookmarked blogs. One of them (I don’t remember which one, probably BoingBoing) links me to a Henry Jenkins essay on the challenge of making video game narratives; how it is difficult to find the balance between good gameplay and good narrative. I have what blogger Lindsay Robertson of the now-defunct blog Lindsayism calls a “highdea.”
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.
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.