You Will Not Remember This Essay: On “Antimemes” and the Failures of Rationalism

How do you build the perfect defense against cognitive blind spots? More than any other, this is the question that undergirds the highly influential online “rationalist” movement. What sounds like an introductory philosophy exercise has, over the past decade, precipitated deep-pocketed research institutes, financial collapse, at least one abusive cult, at least one other murderous cult, and national political tumult. A currently sold-out science fiction paperback might offer the answer.

In Defense of Laughter: On Dave Barry

At the start of Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, the longtime humor columnist Dave Barry informs us that he’s writing the book in part because he wants to explain where he gets his ideas. Being a fan of Barry since I surreptitiously read his column collections in middle school language arts class, and as one of his biggest enthusiasts under 50 that you’ll probably ever meet, it’s with considerable affection that I say: Hey Dave, what ideas?

Two Roads for the Literary Critical Elite: An Essay on the State of Criticism Today

The idea that literary criticism is not merely a secondary reflection about literature but an autonomous form of intellectual and aesthetic production has deep roots in Western thought dating back at least to the Enlightenment. Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” published in 1711, marks a pivotal moment in this history, treating criticism not only as an evaluative practice but as a public and philosophical engagement with literature. Periodically since then we’ve been told — unsurprisingly, mostly by critics — that we’re living in a “golden age” of criticism.

The Incarnationals: On Christine Rosen, Charles Taylor, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“If you have heard God calling you in the depths of your heart, in spite of the tumult of the world, then you are indeed most blessed.” A nun named Irene wrote this sentence to me in a letter two summers ago. I had written to her asking for advice, expressing my deep disturbance at a sense of being called to religious life. “You should have no reason at all to be frightened of the possibility that God might be calling you to serve Him,” she continued. “It is the plan of Satan today to keep people well and truly busy and distracted by spending hours on social media at work and home. So few today spend time in prayer and due to the noise in their heads, they are incapable of hearing the gentle whisper.”

Revolution Man: On Mark Z. Danielewski, His Unfinished Novel, and His Father’s Ghost(s)

Mark Z. Danielewski started outlining his third novel in 2006 and these were its major characteristics: The novel would be 27 volumes long (the number is important). Each volume would have 880 pages (also important). By releasing roughly two volumes a year, for a dozen years, it would serialize the story of nine central characters converging in Los Angeles around a few central mysteries. It’d be sprawling and brainy and challenging like his first two novels except this time he’d be doubling down on narrative. He wanted to make something propulsive. Almost addictive. Like a TV series! The sort of prestige show that seemed to be blowing up into something of a phenomenon at the time, 2006-08ish.

How to Write Successfully About Sex: On the Literature of Our Human Condition

In the early nineties, my sister covered sports for the New York Post. Once, at Madison Square Garden, near the end of a Knicks game that the home team led by a large margin, she saw one of the New York stars sitting on the bench, smiling and exchanging banter with teammates, while turned slightly toward the stands to keep an eye on his personal assistant, who brought beautiful women close to courtside so that the star could get a good look at them. He shook his head at the first few, then finally nodded, before turning back to the court, his post-game diversion secured.

The Risk of Serialized Reality: On Big Fiction and The New Seriality

When David Lynch died, the internet filled with quotes from him. I usually cringe at these sudden and predictable proliferations of soundbites that become nearly meaningless in their ubiquity. The point in moments like this is to show that you are the kind of person who posts a David Lynch quote, the quote itself is secondary at best, you might as well just post a square with the words “David Lynch Quote.” This time though, there was one quote that made its way through to me, that stuck in my brain, looping. “Ideas are like fish,” David Lynch supposedly said. “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.

Mal du Siècle: The New Romanticism and the Sickness of the Age: A Meditation on the Here and Now

In 1924, the French novelist Marcel Arland — founder of the Dadaist newspaper Aventure — wrote an article in La Nouvelle Revue Française which contained the phrase mal du siècle (the illness of the century), which he used to describe an ambivalent feeling, a dissonance, well-known to young men of his generation. Those men, many scarcely boys at the war’s beginning, had returned to a culture entirely removed from the mechanized brutality of the front from which they had emerged in 1918. It was an experience which some would try, and mostly fail, to sublimate in art and literature.

The Social Pornography Complex: On Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Margo’s Got Money Troubles appears on the jacket to be a book about motherhood and pornography, but it’s really about the internet. But wait, according to internet discourse, the internet novel doesn’t exist. Actually it does exist but can never succeed. Actually it should really be called “the social media novel.” There are many opinions about what an “internet novel” is and whether or not it can be good, yet many have converged around the idea that the internet novel should carry its reader through the feeling of the internet, of being “online,” and it’s not surprising that such novels that invoke this feeling tend to conclude, at least implicitly: social media is bad.

The Thinking Machine: On Dean Kissick, Paul Lynch, Claire Keegan, Leon Trotsky, and Art Today

What do we mean when we call a novel “urgent?” Presumably, we do not mean that the novel urges us to commit a certain act, or even to align with an ideology or support a particular cause. Even the most overtly political fiction that I’ve enjoyed — say, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed — never caused me to join an anarcho-syndicalist organization or start my own commune. I take it I’m not alone in this. In my experience reading “urgent” novels, I would estimate that the term indicates less the verb “to urge,” but rather “urgency” as an emotional condition, generally with an implied political valence.

Will Conservatives Make Great Art Again?: A Meditation on the New Right

Theodoric abruptly drew his broadsword and struck Odoacer with such ferocity that it cleaved him from shoulder to thigh in a single slice. “The wretch cannot have had a bone in his body,” he joked, standing over the barbarian King of Italy, the man who put to bed the Western Roman Empire. Carved to a gory stump. Odoacer had joined Theodoric that evening for a banquet intended to celebrate a truce between the two Germanic warlords. It was a trap, and after Odoacer was dispatched, Theodoric slaughtered his family and friends in ways that would make Machiavelli blush. Yet what followed this bloodletting might surprise you.

The Art of the Critic: On Henry James and the State of Literary Criticism

“The floods of tepid soap and water which under the name of novels are being vomited forth in England, seem to me,” Henry James wrote, “to do little honour to our race.” In February 1884, 40-year-old James dismissed contemporary British novels in a letter to American novelist and editor William Dean Howells. James then went on to laud Howells as “the great American naturalist” before tempering his praise: “I don't think you go far enough, and you are haunted with romantic phantoms and a tendency to factitious glosses; but you are in the right path, and I wish you repeated triumphs there.” James had opinions. He also had the language — and the critical sensibility — with which to effectively, and lyrically, express those opinions.

Kill the Editor: On the End of Literary Prestige

Twelve years ago, editors at The Paris Review held an open Q&A session on Reddit. One user asked how many unsolicited submissions the magazine receives on average in a period. The editors said around 15,000 a year. In response to a related question, they also disclosed that they rarely accept any manuscripts in the unsolicited category, affectionately referred to as the slush pile. For the most part, the slush pile is read by interns who pass along their favorites to be ignored by the editors.

Orgasming Without Pornography: On the Novels and Television of These Strange, Alienating Times

When I was in third grade, my school counselor gave me two books. One was about a girl raised by dolphins. This girl is “rescued,” taught to use language and walk normally and generally act like a human. The other book was about a girl growing up in the nineteenth century who learns, suddenly, that it’s actually 1996: she’s been living in a kind of historical museum, as a living diorama, and now must enter the real world of telephones and cars in order to obtain lifesaving modern medicine for her community. Only later did I put two and two together. This was all happening a couple of months after Hurricane Katrina, at my evacuation school in Houston.

The Future of the American Novel: Meditations on What Comes Next

There were surely critics, in the middle of the 1960s, who had no concept of what was to come. The counterculture could feel faddish; so could New Hollywood, sexually explicit novels, baroque pop, and acid rock. If history is a procession from A to B, it must never be forgotten that everyone in every time was living a life in transition, in the eternal present. Retrospective judgment only goes so far. Apprehending the future is inordinately difficult — now, and always. If you’re sure of it, you’re probably wrong. Knowing which way the wind blows is a special sort of art, one few can even start to master.