The Moral Authority of a Body: On Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

Kate Manne’s Unshrinking is very successful in achieving the ends it sets for itself. It is an exemplary trade book, and we may expect it to win some prizes, and to be an absolute hit in the book clubs. Part of what is involved in being an exemplary trade book in 2025 is the display of a tight focus on a clearly defined cluster of points, easily transferable into the bullet-point format (prize juries do not typically read their books cover to cover). This book’s core philosophical notion, and one of the principal bullet points that was likely part of its initial “elevator pitch,” is what Manne calls “the moral authority of the body”: if your appetite makes itself known to your conscious mind, its imperative comes with real moral force. “In my view,” she writes, “bodily imperatives constitute our most important moral imperatives.” We’ll get back to this notion soon. But let me first briefly note what else might have got mentioned in that short elevator ride shared by Manne’s agent and publisher. It would surely have been clarified that the book is not about fatphobia in general, but about the intersectional experience of fatphobia on the part of women and girls. Eating disorders and harmful dieting will have been said, in that elevator, to be a feature of misogynist societies in particular. There are undoubtedly gendered dimensions of the problem. Yet too much emphasis on these can obscure from view just how varied judgments about the goodness or badness of fat can be in different times and places, and can also conceal from us many of the genuinely universal problems, philosophical and practical, of human embodiment. This latter point has considerable personal importance to me. When I was a young man, just 19 years old, I began a two-year bout of rather severe anorexia, constantly in and out of hospitals and psychiatrists’ offices, hooked up to IV’s, fretted over. I was six feet tall and I weighed 99 pounds. I purged myself with laxatives and diuretics every morning before my weigh-in. If the scale ever crept up past 100, I doubled down on my efforts at self-starvation.

Toward a Sordid Utopia?: On Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small

The writer Lore Segal — known in particular for Other People’s Houses, her novelized account of fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria as a ten-year-old — once asked Vivian Gornick to explain feminism. “What is it that you want? I don’t think I’ve ever understood,” Segal said. Startled to be asked such a question in the early 2000s, Gornick began to explain. Segal listened to Gornick’s perspective and then summarized, “with something like wonderment, ‘You have a passion for equality.’” Gornick was astonished that Segal didn’t. “I have a passion for many other things,” Segal said, “for love, and friendship, for good conversation, for living inside another’s imagination — but not for equality. There are many things I cannot live without before I cannot live without equality.”

Desperado Dadaism: On a New Biography of Terry Allen

Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Lights” sightings helped to kick off the UFO craze. In 1988, 12,000 pilgrims came to Lubbock to witness an alleged apparition of Mary. In between these two phenomena, a young man named Terry Allen left Lubbock for California. He wanted to become an artist, but he wound up becoming something more. Allen is perhaps the only person in history to achieve equal acclaim in the fields of conceptual art and country music. His work hangs in major museums and his public installations can be seen livening up the staid financial districts of major cities, while his weird, warped, and warm brand of outlaw country, to his devoted cult, stands shoulder to shoulder with Willie, Townes, and the rest. Brendan Greaves, who through his offbeat, literate “American vernacular” record label Paradise of Bachelors helped to rescue Allen’s music from defunct-label oblivion, spent five years talking to Allen, his friends, and his collaborators to produce Truckload of Art, the first major biography of him and his work. For anyone with an interest in any of the things I mentioned above, it’s essential reading: as a record of a truly underappreciated American artist, a narrative of a biographer coming to know his subject, and an exploration of the perils and joys of a creative life.