I remember the rush the first time I entered Manhattan via cab from one of the airports—I don’t remember which one—and felt the density and the pressure. I recognized the blue scaffolding of the city’s endless refurbishments, as seen on Law & Order, and felt that I was home. (I moved here a few months later.) I was staying with a friend on West 17th Street and within minutes I saw my first celebrity. It was Wallace Shawn. I remember him toddling north on Seventh Avenue, paunchy and—can this be true?—wearing clogs. At the time, only Woody Allen would have been a better sighting, and now—well—I’m glad it was Wallace Shawn. The year was 2000 and I was thirty. He would have been fifty-six, the age I am now.

I had seen My Dinner with André (1981) for the first time less than ten years before, with a college friend, shortly after (or before?) we graduated. It was one of those movies I had avoided—though it was around—because what it was wasn’t legible to me. It seemed like old people stuff, with a sad, late-’70s taint to it. I still can’t watch The Bob Newhart Show—the first one, funny though it may be—without feeling depressed. With its wan colors and necrotic leisure suits, it feels like TV from another, possibly socialist country. (Only M*A*S*H survives that era for me. Military fashions never go out of style.)

But the movie finally caught up with me, circuitously, via Jonathan Demme. From Stop Making Sense (1984) to Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia (1987), I found myself accidentally stumbling around “downtown”—with no sense of what that was as a scene or a neighborhood from my childhood home in suburban Cincinnati—which led to My Dinner with André. Prior to that, Shawn appeared as a waiter in Atlantic City (1980)—his first of four Louis Malle films, André being the second—and in Manhattan (1979), as Jeremiah, Diane Keaton’s previous ultra-virile lover whom Woody Allen is shocked to find out is, well, Wallace Shawn.

My Dinner with André is best suited to a certain stage of life, and better suited to some eras than others. I was pleased to see it make it as a mid-life meme for millennials (above), though not surprised. André is an autofiction on the theme of how a person should be, to paraphrase the title of Sheila Heti’s genre-defying turned genre-defining 2012 novel.

Shawn and his long-time collaborator, theater director André Gregory, play themselves, delivering a compressed and heightened version of actual events and their relationship. Wally trudges through the Bernhard Goetz-era Manhattan landscape to the titular meeting he has been avoiding. Word is André has been away and has been somehow transformed. Wally resolves to simply ask questions to survive the encounter, which allows André’s journey of self-discovery to unfold. Through a series of ritualistic adventures informed by his mentor, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, André has sought to wake up from the robotic slumber characteristic of modern life. (Grotowski’s indebtedness to the avant-garde mysticism of G.I. Gurdjieff is often noted, and debated.) These tales are interesting in their own right and pre-figure the florid digressions of late-century recherché post-modernists like David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Shawn, with his beady but bright blue eyes and Cheshire cat grin seems by turns bored, bemused, and offended by André’s self-indulgence. (At times it offends Gregory, too.) Shawn mounts an attack on the egotism of synchronicity and a defense of the quotidian, but still he emerges changed. He treats himself to a taxi and he notices things he hadn’t before. The world is reenchanted, at least temporarily.

The pair would go on to further collaborations. Shawn played Uncle Vanya—the role he was born to play—in Louis Malle’s final film, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), based on an experimental staging of the play directed by Gregory. Then they appeared together in A Master Builder (2013), Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of the Ibsen play, based on previous staging by Gregory with a screenplay by Shawn. All three, like snapshots in time, share the same perennial concerns. The gap between ideals and reality. The impossibility (or is it merely an impracticality?) of being or becoming “good,” and the pain and disappointment that entails.

This work is newly relevant since a revival is afoot to return to Ibsen and Chekhov, to excavate the painful necessity of the life-lie and the essential tragedy of bourgeois life, which may be the only life we can imagine. Uncle Vanya alone has been staged three times in New York since the pandemic. The trend extends from the current downtown scene of Dimes Square—Matthew Gasda, who has written a play of that name, has also staged Vanya and written a book titled, a la André, The Sleepers—to Mike White’s The White Lotus. The latter is particularly Chekhovian in that every character is allowed a defense of his or her life-lie and—through the course of a season—each is put into dialogue with the others. But there is no resolution. Life cannot be solved.

It is amid this return to the roots of the modern theater that Shawn and Gregory have come together for what is likely their final collaboration. (Shawn is now 82. Gregory is 91.) What We Did Before Our Moth Days—written by Shawn and directed by Gregory—is currently playing at The Greenwich House Theater, not too far from my Shawn sighting all those years ago. The title is as illegible as My Dinner with André once was to me, but it basically means “what we did before we died.” It is a four-part braided monologue featuring a man (Josh Hamilton), his wife (Maria Dizzia), their son (John Early), and the man’s mistress (Hope Davis). It gets off to a roaring start as Tim—the millennial son—delivers a disorienting tale of sexual debauchery, demonstrating that Shawn could run with the alt-lit crowd, should he care to. As the story, and characters, unravel there are strong, intimate moments, but even as those on stage question their own choices and ethics, it seems like rarefied air. Dick, the writer and husband, is a comfortable Manhattanite novelist of a kind I’ve failed to meet in more than twenty-five years in New York, and which arguably no longer exists. The precarious Aggie Wiggs—Claire Danes’ character in The Beast in Me—seems more up to date.

So despite copious self-reflection, the play invites the complaint one hears from half one’s friends about White Lotus. Aren’t there better things to be thinking about than rich people? Perhaps, but Shawn—who, as the son of the benighted New Yorker editor William Shawn, would today be pilloried as the rankest of nepo babies—is determined to gaze into his blindspot. This is better demonstrated by his revival of his 1990 monologue The Fever, which is playing in rep with Moth Days. If André staged a contest of worldviews between two friends, The Fever reenacts the conflict within Shawn himself.

At my second ever sighting of Shawn—New York is a big place—he mixed with the crowd before he took the stage, hugging a masked Cynthia Nixon, who sat two rows behind me. He really is a tiny man, though he was not paunchy and did not wear clogs. Shawn warmed up the audience with a few anecdotes, holding it easily in the palm of his hand. His trademark lisp and high-pitched voice belie how clear and self-possessed his speech is, the contrast that made him the perfect Vanya. The Fever is a monologue about a man like Shawn who finds himself sick, in a poor country, confronting his own complicity in global suffering, which makes it sound more didactic than it feels. Shawn cleverly explains fetishism of commodities, for example, after a stranger leaves a copy of Capital on his doorstep. In modern parlance, it dramatizes someone of Shawn’s level of privilege becoming a red-pilled socialist—as he readily identifies—while facing the fact that he doesn’t have the strength to do anything about it. “When we were young, all we thought about was art and music,” as the André meme on adulting goes, “Now all we think about is money.” Life, at least this life, is not solvable. One feels, as in André, that he will treat himself to a cab home. I myself took an Uber. So much has changed since our first meeting.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

In 2022, when I was looking for a publisher for Lou Reed’s Nephew, my friend and sherpa Richard Nash suggested I go to AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference. It was in Philadelphia that year. Richard is an old school publishing gadfly. He used to run Soft Skull Press and has turned out to be right about almost everything. He launched Red Lemonade, an imprint and online writing community, in 2011 on the premise that presses of the future would be part publisher, part a la carte MFA programs, offering classes and mentorship by established authors. Red Lemonade published new and backlist works by Lynne Tillman and others. Red Lemonade didn’t make it—too early being the same as too late—but it has been vindicated. Practically all presses support themselves with classes and access now. Chelsea Hodson’s business model is Red Lemonade, but right on time.

Richard knows what he’s talking about, in other words, and he suggested that AWP was the quickest way to take in the small press landscape all at once. Researching small presses online can be difficult. All of them say the same things, but mean different things. Everyone wants “new, weird, exciting, innovative work,” but they each have different things in mind.

In a 2022 interview, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò told The Drift that analytic philosophy was “three book clubs in a trench coat,” but when it comes to publishing overall, the situation is much more grotesque. Book publishing is ten thousand book clubs, a million delusional neurotics (authors, myself included), various trends, fads, established and would-be religions, public and private institutions, thousands of small businesses, dozens of celebrity influencers, a few streaming services, five corporations, and an algorithm. In a trench coat.

In short, anyone who has a theory about publishing or says they like books has not yet provided enough information. Terms like “publishing” and “books” beg the question because they are not natural kinds but chaotic heaps. I feel the same whenever I go to Coney Island in the summer and see the exuberant diversity of city life. After that, when anyone says, “New York is …” I know they are about to utter a partial truth. New York—like book publishing—is many, many things.

All this can be cleared up with a day or two walking the floor of the AWP Book Fair—or the Brooklyn Book Festival, weather permitting—where you can see what publishers are up to by looking at covers, flipping through pages, and talking to people. I’m not interested in most of what is there, but what I’m interested in is there. I’m sure anyone would have the same experience even if their tastes differ from my own.

I’ve gone to AWP three of the last four years, but this year was the first time I went after more than ten years looking at the business not only as an author, but from inside a Big 5 publisher. Upon returning from Baltimore, I went through information withdrawal. Without access to proprietary (and expensive) tools like BookScan, I could no longer orient myself in the small press world. These books largely do not make the NYT Best Sellers lists—not anymore, anyway—so I only see anecdata about them on social media, Substack, and in places like Lit Hub, LARB, and The New York Review of Books. After more than a decade of having a 30,000-foot view, this wasn’t going to work. I needed the small press view.

This coincided with what, by most accounts, was a quantum leap in Claude Code. All my programmer friends were talking about it. You used to have to babysit it, they said, but after November it just did things. I know the topic of AI is fraught in the book world, so let me be clear. I am a writer. I do my own writing. I make collages out of paper I cut out of magazines. But what these tools can do with the tangles of data the book industry produces is pretty amazing. (Though babysitting is still, in fact, required.) A single subject matter expert can now build an entire data scraping, engineering, analysis, and visualization pipeline from scratch. So that’s what I did.

Small Press Insights, which I’m officially launching today, currently serves up three sets of data.

1. Small press print titles—from more than 900 presses, gleaned from the CLMP and the Independent Publishers Caucus—that appear in the top 50,000 at Amazon, refreshed daily.

2. The IPC’s weekly Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers list, benchmarked against Amazon rank and with historical views—the list just launched at the beginning of the year—that show weeks-on-list and list appearances by publisher.

3. Forthcoming titles from all these presses, as gleaned from Edelweiss and Netgalley.

Looking at these, you can see a lot of interesting things. Here are a few of the things I see:

I was totally right to buy that Transit Books dad hat at the Brooklyn Book Festival a few years ago.

Transit’s 2022 US reissue of I Who Have Never Known Men—a translation of the 1995 dystopian novel by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman—has to be the most fortuitous decision by a small press in recent memory. True, Transit had already found itself holding some of the Jon Fosse catalog when he won the Nobel Prize—husband and wife publishers Adam and Ashley Nelson Levy know what they are doing—but IWHNKM is next level. Having caught fire on TikTok, it is the third-highest-ranked fiction title on the list and has been selling at that level for more than a year. That’s a big deal that can set up a small press for growth and expansion. (Ben Lerner’s Transcription is already selling at a slower rate, two weeks after its release.) I’m interested to see what Transit does next. Last I checked, they were still focused on translations and some commissioned works in English, but they are well-positioned to do more.

Everyone talks about serialization, but Beth Brower did something about it.

I had never even heard of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion until I started this project, though obviously a lot of people have. Self-published by Beth Brower via her own Rhysdon Press, these journals tell the story, in detailed diaristic form, of a young woman’s adventures in 1883 London. One fan calls it “a combination of Gilmore Girls and Pride and Prejudice.” There are eight of these in print—two of them are in the top five in my fiction Amazon rankings and on the IPC bestseller list—with many more planned. Bloomsbury picked up the rights in the UK and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a giant US deal in the works. (If there is not, that’s a signal that traditional publishers have little to offer someone like Brower—who is already selling well in brick and mortar stores—though I suspect they will try a big bag of money.)

These aren’t really up my alley—though a quick listen reveals that the breezy writing is more precise than some more self-indulgent literary fiction I’ve read—but I like that Brower self-consciously thinks of her series in TV terms, the first five volumes representing Season 1. As a card-carrying post-modernist, this is something I can appreciate.

Good things happen to good work, and you can see it if you tune out the noise. (And mix sensory metaphors.)

Some people I have shown this to have expressed a sense of let down. Fewer than 1,000 titles in the top 50,000? Even Ben Lerner peaking at #181, with all that hype?

I understand. I would like to live in a world where a William Gass reissue cracks the top 100. That is not the world we live in, but did we ever? As Walker Percy said: “All serious writers and readers constitute less than one percent of the population. The other ninety-nine percent don’t give a damn. They watch Wonder Woman.” He said this in 1977. Eight years before Gal Gadot was born.

Looked at that way, the small press view is a bit brighter. 800 titles is actually 1.6% of the Amazon top 50,000, and—look—the William Gass reissue is going gangbusters! It even briefly crashed the Dalkey Archive website.

This year at AWP, I had a nice chat with Greg Wolfe, publisher of Slant Books. We had met before and I knew he published some books on art by Morgan Meis, who I know as a curator at 3 Quarks Daily, to which I contribute. Greg tipped me off to the fact that the trilogy was about to be written up in the New York Review of Books. It turned out to be quite a rave that declared Meis’s work “the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.”

This propelled the first book, The Drunken Silenus—a fun, erudite read that seizes the Silenus myth from Nietzsche on behalf of Peter Paul Rubens—from sub-1MM obscurity to the top 15K at Amazon.

A chart like this makes my heart quicken, and I look forward to seeing what it will enable Meis and Wolfe to do next.

Limitations & Caveats
Needless to say, this is a work in progress. I have foregone labeling it a beta because life itself is a beta. That said, a few things to note. This tool can only surface books if they are a) ranking in the top 50K print books at Amazon and in the list of 900 “small presses” I have identified or b) appear on the IPC’s weekly Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers list. “Small press” is doing some wiggle work for me here, but the list is more or less the union of the Council of Literary Magazines and Press directory and members of the Independent Publishers Caucus, or presses that have appeared on its bestseller lists. The presses on this list are either literary or independent, but sometimes not both. FSG is on the list—as is Algonquin—though both are part of the Big 5 (Macmillan and Hachette, respectively). When in doubt, I go back to my inspiration, which was the feeling of being at AWP or the Brooklyn Book Festival. That said, picking the list of presses requires some judgment, for which I take full responsibility.

Some small presses do not sell through Amazon at all—if they are distributed exclusively by Asterism, for example—and those books will not be visible here. Books that have not ranked in the top the 50K at Amazon will not show up either, though that is merely a budgetary constraint. I would like nothing better than to track all small press bestseller rankings on Amazon and will expand coverage as more budget becomes available. Right now, the best—and really only—way to help fund this project is to use the affiliate links to Bookshop.org to buy the books you discover here.

Who Will Find This Useful?
I have already found it useful for finding books I want to read. You might use it to build out your TBR list ahead of Independent Bookstore Day this Saturday. I can also imagine this being useful to authors, for seeing who publishes what and how well; to agents and editors, for identifying emerging presses and rising talent; and to booksellers, to shop for things to stock. And, of course, I’m sure it can fuel some good old gossip and speculation, both of which I enjoy.

What Will Happen Next?
The site is fully automated. Amazon ranks update daily, the Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers list updates weekly on Thursdays, and forthcoming titles are updated twice per month. Bookmark Small Press Insights. Use it, share it, send me your feedback.

On the fourth Tuesday of every month, I will write about what I see in the data here on my Substack, so be sure to subscribe. It’s free.

The next update will be May 26.

As the Pew Research Center reported last month, more than half of Americans think their fellow citizens are “morally bad.” The U.S. had the dimmest view of their neighbors among the twenty-five countries surveyed and Canada had the brightest. Only 8% of Canadians think their fellow citizens are bad.

Pew floats a few ideas about why this might be, the first being political polarization. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to see their fellow citizens as bad, though this is consistent across countries for parties out of power. The study also considers that Americans are more judgmental than people in other countries, but finds that—on particular issues—this doesn’t seem to be the case. Americans are, in general, more lenient on acts—save for the perennial culture war weapons of abortion and homosexuality—but tougher on persons, which has the ring of truth.

Evidence that Americans have reached the point of irreconcilability abounds. Take the recent HBO docuseries Neighbors, a must-see for connoisseurs of what I call “hard cringe.” Soft cringe features awkward social situations but gives viewers occasional relief via punchlines and pratfalls. Curb Your Enthusiasm and the mad cap antics of The Chair Company are soft cringe confections. Hard cringe, on the other hand, comes from Sweden, dating back to Bergman’s Persona and erupting most recently with Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Force Majeure. Hard cringe gives viewers no lifeline and no cues; no permission to breathe, let alone laugh. Ironically, a Canadian—Nathan Fielder—is its leading North American purveyor.

Each episode of Neighbors braids together two unrelated disputes with the lyricism of Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Two sets of preppers in the middle of nowhere can’t agree about a gate. A Vietnam vet and a former male stripper can’t agree who is stalking whom. The creators say the series emerged from their pandemic obsession with watching neighborhood dispute videos on YouTube. It is difficult to watch, as American grown-ups try—and repeatedly fail—to establish the minimal common ground needed to resolve what appear to be incredibly trivial disputes. Violence frequently seems inevitable.

Such incommensurability also drives Bugonia, the Oscar-nominated bleak watch from director Yorgos Lanthimos. Teddy Gatz (played by Jesse Plemons) is an abused and conspiracy-addled worker who kidnaps pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) in an attempt to broker a meeting with the Andromedan emperor, who he believes has sent her to Earth. He sees Fuller as so manipulative that he goes to extraordinary lengths—including chemical castration—to be certain he will not be fooled. This seems like it’s shaping up to be misogynistic torture porn, until Fuller regains consciousness, understands who she’s dealing with, and locks in on Gatz with perfectly calibrated management-speak. Both understand how to distrust each other.

On the eve of Trump’s first victory—under the cover of pseudonymity—I first sketched a figure I called “the savvy bumpkin,” whose experience and subsequent worldview seemed to describe much of Trump’s base. Arriving in modernity just to be swindled, the savvy bumpkin—who could be a Tea Partier or a Whole Foods anti-vaxxer—devises a solution to make sure they are never swindled again: Don’t believe anybody, ever. This is the solution Teddy Gatz adopts in Bugonia and it’s what makes agreement impossible on Neighbors. Mutual suspicion—raised from hermeneutic to heuristic—is insurmountable.

In 2007, psychologists coined a term that gets at why that might be. Sugrophobia—literally ”fear of sucking”—is an attempt to name “the familiar and specific dread that people experience when they get the inkling that they’re ‘being a sucker’— that someone is taking advantage of them, partly thanks to their own decisions.” This according to Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, whose book Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order—and What We Can Do About It, came out in paperback last year. (It was released by HarperCollins, where I used to work and—as fate would have it—I worked with Wilkinson-Ryan more than twenty years ago, before sugrophobia was even a word.)

Fool Proof details how various insights gleaned from behavioral economics play out in legal, social, and political frameworks, and how the high emotional cost of feeling like a fool puts its thumb on the scale. The simplest example is the Ultimatum Game—a cornerstone of behavioral economics—in which “proposers” are given an amount of money to split with a “responder,” and the responder can either accept the offer or refuse it, in which case neither party gets anything. While the responder “should”—according to a narrowly economic view of human behavior—take whatever is offered, they regularly choose to torpedo the deal when offered too little. As Wilkinson-Ryan says, they choose to “detonate” rather than “cooperate.”

The most surprising thing about this discovery is that it had to be discovered at all. Outside of science—if economics is to be considered such—there is an entire canon of modern literature (emerging alongside capitalism) detailing this refusal, from Poe’s “imp of the perverse” to Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” Still, this tendency continuously takes theorists by surprise, as it did the founders of the Frankfurt School when the failures of scientific socialism forced them into Freud’s waiting arms. It is the refusal that plays out in Bugonia, as Teddy Gatz disconnects from the reason game in direct proportion to how reasonable he is expected to be, despite the sweet counsel of his cousin Don, a chorus of one preaching compassion. Human behavior can never be made entirely rational, because the drive for freedom resists all systems. As Jack Nicholson says in Easy Rider, “Don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.”

Back to Neighbors. With violence waiting in the wings, the disputants sling half-baked legalisms at each other before eventually winding up in actual courts. The other party is not following “the rules,” even though “the rules”—and, in a Wittgensteinian twist, what it means to follow a rule—cannot be agreed upon. True to its “hard cringe” aesthetic, Neighbors provides little hope about what might happen when even “ruliness” is in dispute, leaving viewers with that sinking feeling that hell is, in fact, other people.

It is difficult to see how we can recover from what Wilkinson-Ryan calls this “sucker-phobic populism,” fanned by Donald Trump’s “furious refusal that neither he, nor America, would play the fool.”

What appears to be missing from American life is the figure of “the cooler,” first articulated in a social science setting by sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1952 paper “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure,” a foundational text of sugrophobia studies. In the paper, Goffman considers confidence games as a model for social situations in which individuals experience loss of status. When they think of themselves as savvy, for example, but have to face themselves as bumpkins. Goffman notes that in addition to the con man and the mark, there is often a third figure—employed by the con man—whose job it is to appease or pacify the mark so they don’t go to the police. This person is called “the cooler,” and their job is to “cool the mark out.” The implications are rich, and Goffman pulls in examples of “cooling” from customer service to romantic break-ups. It is obvious, when reading it, that one of the duties of leadership is to provide such a cooling function—whether this is noble or merely manipulative—and that our current president is at best unaware of, and at worst antagonistic to, this function.

Self-cooling is always an option, often achieved via religion or other paths to moral superiority. As Will Rogers (probably) said, “I’d a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.” It is better to be the mark than the con man, in other words, though this is now largely viewed as another sucker play.

Goffman details, further, what might happen if the mark refuses to be cooled out. She can suffer a breakdown and become mentally disorganized. She can turn “sour,” and withdraw enthusiasm from her participation, or—finally—she can go into business for herself and turn the con on someone else.

In Bugonia’s Teddy, we see someone dealing with all three stages of refusal. He has become mentally disorganized, “sour,” and he has his own master plan. Attempts at cooling aren’t working, whether administered via Michelle’s corporate deflection—“stalling” in Goffman’s scheme—or his cousin Don’s moral purity. The movie itself—spoiler alert—provides redemption for Teddy, but it’s just a movie. “It is, perhaps, in this region of phantasy that the defeated self makes its last stand,” as Goffman says. The real-life disputants in Neighbors, on the other hand, seemed trapped apart—in irreconcilable fantasies—with not a cooler in sight.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

After writing about The Oracle of Bacon and the articulation of small-world networks a few weeks ago, I felt the urge to map one I’m familiar with and see what it looks like. (This is now possible, thanks to a product whose logo will be familiar to readers of a certain age.)

The result is an interactive network graph of the recommendation relationships among 366 literary (and para-literary) Substacks. It was created by using seven literary Substacks as “seeds,” then tracing out the network leaves to two degrees and removing Heather Cox Richardson, lest she swamp the whole canoe.

Two Substacks are connected to one another if there is a recommendation in either direction and, what you’ll see, is that recommendation behavior is uneven. Some do it, some don’t. Just three of the seeds I selected did most of the connective work, though the result uncovered most of the Substacks I’m familiar with, which is how small-world networks work. A few connectors, who don’t necessarily have the most subscribers, collapse the path lengths.

You can search for your favorites using the search box, but note that if someone doesn’t appear, it could be that they have recommendations turned off or hidden.

The node I’m most familiar with is anchored by original book blogger David Gutowski of Largehearted Ledger. He has the most connections on the graph and serves as the bridge from early book bloggers through the HTMLGIANT posse to the present. I assume this is because he either remembers how blogrolls actually work or because he is, in fact, a largehearted boy.

(Author’s note: I recently reconnected with an old acquaintance who will be familiar to longtime readers. If you are not familiar with our history, this is a good place to start.)

“It was quite a challenge to get to you,” I said when Lou Reed’s Nephew finally appeared on the Zoom. His background was blurred. Mine wasn’t and I felt vulnerable. He was four minutes late, one minute short of the customary “Is now still a good time?” email. He knew what he was doing.

Though he had given me a link to his calendar after his Manic Monday performance, EasyOut—the outplacement service to which I was contractually entitled—required me to sit through a series of asynchronous videos before receiving a personal identification number that would allow me to book an in-person session (to which I was contractually entitled). The videos had titles like “Branding the Brand Named Me” and “57 Numbers to Delete from Your Resume, All of Which Are Your Age.” I ran them muted in the background while I did the dishes, jiggling my mouse while I waited for the sink to drain.

“I said, it was quite a challenge to get to you,” I repeated loudly, as if I were speaking to an elderly person, once Lou Reed’s Nephew got his computer to recognize his headphones. This never happened on Star Trek.

“EasyOut made me jump through hoops!” I said.

“EasyOut?” he said. “I don’t work with them anymore.”

This was annoying. That I had wasted time—of which I now had too much—running muted instructional videos on my computer. I took a moment to examine him and compose myself. I had only ever talked to him in person—in those last normal years?—and had yet to regard him in the Zoomosphere, which offers a certain reflective distance. Though the other person can see you, they see you askance—or seem to—as they look into the representation of your eyes, the glowing white pinhole above their screen, though not into your eyes in fact. This offset creates a two-way partial voyeurism, where each person sees the other but does not themselves feel completely seen. I was okay with not being seen, after more than a decade of “showing up,” but younger people were starved for appearing and for confirmation of these appearances. They wanted and needed to be seen. God used to handle all this seeing, but now he was gone. We would have to do it.

I sunk into my illusion of invisibility to refamiliarize myself with Lou Reed’s Nephew’s face. It was still narrow, like his nose. He no longer wore glasses, having perhaps lost some of the youthful bravado that enabled him to glorify his defects. His dark hair showed flecks of gray. His features no longer held the hydration of youth. They had set and hardened. Ozempic could not be ruled out.

“You’re not working with EasyOut anymore?” I said. The Albanian must have been crushed. I hadn’t been to the EasyOut office in weeks and was hopeful that my physical withdrawal from the office habitat was complete. Though I still couldn’t bring myself to go to a movie in the middle of the day—during “business” hours—time was losing its edges. I was de-professionalizing. Occasionally I wandered around the apartment like a confused bear looking for his tri-color ball.

“I mean, I never really did,” he said. “Places like that subcontract everything to people like me.”

“People like you?” I said.

“Experts,” he said.

I waited for air quotes to fly in from the sides of the screen, but they never did. He was serious, as always.

“Well we haven’t spoken in years,” I said. “What have you become an expert in?”

“Expertise,” he said.

This made sense, or a certain sort of sense. The sense I had become accustomed to for several months in 2013, and with which I was no become reacquainted.

“I see,” he said.

“Consulting is where it’s at,” he said. “Expert expertise is what it is, really. I’m working on a book about it.”

I was surprised that he had not asked me about my book again. This was the first evidence that it was still on his mind. This was common, upon people discovering that you had a book being published by someone other than yourself. They had no idea how fragile this state was, how unlikely that it had arisen at all, and that you lived every waking moment waiting for it to somehow fall apart. That the book would be cancelled and you would no longer be special in the way these people perceived you to be, though you knew that you weren’t while simultaneously enjoying and resenting their thinking so.

“What’s it called?” I asked. It was the only thing to say at this point.

“The Four Disagreements,” he said.

“I see,” I said. “Like the Don Miguel Ruiz. Have you spoken to a lawyer?”

“I have,” he said, “Ginger Rogers makes it alright. Fair use.” I understood exactly what he meant, having recently discussed this with my own lawyer as it pertained to a (currently) forthcoming book that referred to a famous musician in the title and, indeed, obsessively throughout. Ms. Rogers had sued MGM over the production and distribution of the 1986 Federico Fellini film Ginger and Fred, but the courts ruled that Fellini’s right to expression outweighed Rogers’ right to trademark. Score one for the avant-garde.

“What are the disagreements?” I said.

“I haven’t finalized them,” he said. “But it won’t be hard. The disagreements already exist. in any organization and likely in any entity in the universe. The consultant just needs to find and name them to make themselves indispensable.”

“Can you give me an example?” It was always useful to ask Lou Reed’s Nephew for examples. His ideas could be abstract and elusive.

“Of course,” he said. “The first disagreement is the disagreement over centralization vs. decentralization.”

“Can you be more explicit?”

“Yes. In any organization that might come to you for advice, you will find that things are either centralized, and therefore slow and rigid, or wildly decentralized and out of control.”

“And you, as an expert, have a view on which of these is better?”

“I certainly do not!” he said. “I just know what to recommend once I’ve determined what state the organization is currently in.”

“And that is?”

“If it is together, take it apart. If it is apart, put it back together.”

“That’s it?”

“That is it,” he said.

“And this creates value, you’ve found?”

“I have no idea. But the reversal of tension, as in storytelling, creates a certain … excitement. A sensation, in the mass hysterical sense. Things are happening and everyone gets behind them and watches intently as value flows from one part of the organization to another. You are a genius and a hero: the person who knew to put things together or take them apart, whichever the case may be.”

“Until?”

“Until the newness wears off and some people begin to realize, and then become bold or ambitious enough to say out loud, that it appears—perhaps—that this realignment has not actually created or unlocked any new value. It has simply moved old value around while enriching you, the consultant.”

“I see,” I said. “That seems like a bad moment.”

“Oh it is,” he said. “A real challenge, as they say.”

“So what do you do then?”

“You move onto the next disagreement,” he said.

“Which is?”

“It looks like we’re out of time,” he said, “So that will have to wait until our next session. I refuse to pay for Zoom, so this will shut …”

“You don’t know what it is yet, do you?” I said.

The Zoom ended before he heard me.

Any sufficiently advanced technology might be indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke said, but even small advances—when well-placed—can seem miraculous. I remember the first time I took an Uber, after years of fumbling in the backs of yellow cabs with balled up bills and misplaced credit cards. The driver stopped at my destination. “What happens now?” I asked. The answer surprised and delighted me.

“You get out,” he said.

Thirty years ago a website appeared that, in the early days of “the graphical portion of the Internet”—as the New York Times then faithfully called the World Wide Web upon first occurrence—seemed like such a miracle. I am speaking, of course, of the Oracle of Bacon, the site inspired by the parlor game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” The story of the Oracle, which is maintained to this day, is—in many ways—the story of the Internet. It features a meme, virality, consumer delight, and unintended consequences—but more on those later.

The Oracle is based on a game invented by college students in 1994. An early message board thread titled “Kevin Bacon is the Center of the Universe” challenged readers to find the shortest path between Kevin Bacon and other actors via chains of movies they had appeared in together. The post reported that the game’s initial prompt had “received 80 responses in just over a week” (!) at the University of Virginia, though it was three students at Albright College in Pennsylvania that codified the game—and its benchmark—under the name “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” after the 1993 movie Six Degrees of Separation, based on the John Guare play of the same name. A book followed in 1996, and—were it not for the contemporaneous explosion of the World Wide Web—the story might have ended there.

Instead we turn back to the University of Virginia and the launch of the Oracle, that same year, by a team led by then-Ph.D student Brett Tjaden. Instead of having to play the game, the Oracle showed you the shortest path between Kevin Bacon and any other actor. The Oracle spread like wildfire as people huddled around crazy-slow dial-up connections to try to find an actor with a “Bacon Number”—based on the (presumably) more prestigious Erdős Number—greater than 6. Those who were successful had their names added to The Oracle of Bacon Hall of Fame, which stopped taking entries in 2001. Part of the site’s success certainly had to do with technical novelty. As Patrick Reynolds, who has maintained the Oracle since 1999, told me via email:

“I think the Oracle of Bacon was an early example of dynamic web content, or web content backed by a database of any kind. In 1996, most of the web was static HTML plus a few search engines. Search engines were and are dynamic content, but their purpose then was to help you find static content. The Oracle was an early example of the idea that a web server could do some computation on behalf of a user’s query and present a web page specific to that user and that moment in time.”

Pretty nifty at the time. But another aspect of the Oracle’s appeal were the results themselves. That it could find the shortest path and that the path was routinely so low—the average Bacon Number is 3.1—was surprising to the average user, creating the sensation that there was something special about Mr. Bacon. There isn’t, of course, and the Oracle’s dataset was used to demonstrate why.

The intuition that we are more closely connected than we might think—that it is “a small world after all”—may be modern, but it is not new. The 1929 short story “Chains” by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy presents a game very much like “Six Degrees,” alongside the modern sense that “Planet Earth has never been as tiny as it is now.” Stanley Milgram himself sought to validate this hunch via the postal service in the 1960s and found that random individuals could find each other through acquaintances in between five and six links. Finally, in 1998, Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz published an influential article in Nature in which they articulated how to construct—and the essential characteristics of—so-called “small-world” networks, which relied in part on data from the Oracle. As Watts writes in his 2003 book Six Degrees, “The result was clear. … In a world consisting of hundreds of thousands of individuals, every actor could be connected to every other actor in an average of less than four steps.” (Emphasis in original.)

The world had gotten even smaller than Karinthy thought, but in a non-intuitive way that Watts and Strogatz were able to articulate. In short, it takes very few random connections in a large population to dramatically decrease the distance between members, and there is a sweet spot between order and randomness where members will be highly clustered. And if these members happen to be people—they need not be, since small-world network effects can be found elsewhere—the phenomenology of being in such a network is somewhat strange. A bit miraculous, if you will. As Watts observes, “individuals located somewhere in a small-world network cannot tell what kind of network they’re living in—they just see themselves as living in a tight cluster of individuals who know one another.” An impression created not by order, but by the right amount of randomness.

Thirty years later, it is not hard to see how this impression has played out, as common sense expectations have collided with collapsing path lengths and high clustering coefficients. What are the chances that clammy hands and dry eyes will return a meaningful search result? Much higher than you’d think, though that doesn’t mean there is anything intrinsic about their association. What are the chances that two public figures—or political leaders, or donors—are associated in some way? Also much better than you’d think, because (again) there is nothing special about Kevin Bacon.

Early users of the Oracle were not, in fact, having an experience that contained much information about Kevin Bacon. As of last month, there are 506 actors that generate lower average path lengths than he does. Rather, they were experiencing the surprising properties of small-world networks without being fully aware that that was what their experience was about.

The Oracle was an early example of dynamic web technology applied to a problem other than search, as Reynolds says, but there is another way of looking at it. Haven’t search engines—and their AI successors—just become general purpose Oracles, capable of creating the same small-world sensations at massive scale? It seems no accident that the last thirty years have seen a rise in argumentation based on adjacency—from Rachel Maddow’s suggestive lead-ins to Hillary Clinton’s much-hyped proximity to Uranium One—as search engines deliver the shortest past between almost any two “actors” on demand. (Which is not to say that things do not have causal or corrupt connections; just that adjacencies are frequently insufficient to demonstrate them. That is the job of reporting.)

At the extremes, this lends itself to conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate, the popularity of which are often attributed to apophenia, among other factors. Apophenia is the tendency to perceive connections between unrelated phenomena, but the phenomenology of the Oracle suggests that a more subtle error is at play in conspiratorial thinking. Specifically, it involves mistaking one type of connection for another—network properties for substantive relationships. Kevin Bacon isn’t special, but his name is on the game.

It also casts doubt on the usefulness of apophenia as a concept, as stated, since—in networks—there are no such things as “unrelated phenomena.” Everything is connected to everything else, in some sense, and much more closely than you might expect.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is an advance transcript of a conversation I will have with the attendees of whatever Oscar party I attend Sunday, a conversation I have had every Oscar night of my adult life.

The red carpet coverage gives way to a comedic skit reviewing the year’s top movies and celebrating more than a century of “movie magic” until, inevitably, a scene from Titanic appears.

I: (Casually.) You know, I’ve never seen Titanic.

THEY: (In unison.) What!?! You’ve never seen Titanic?

I: No. I’ve never seen it. Actually, I’ve never seen a James Cameron movie.

THEY: What? That’s impossible. You haven’t seen Avatar?

I: No.

THEY: You must have seen Aliens.

I: No. I have not.

THEY: You must have seen Terminator.

I: I agree it seems like I should have, but I somehow missed it and now I can’t watch it. I have to protect the streak.

THEY: Terminator 2?

I: No.

THEY: But you like movies. Especially sci-fi movies.

I: I know. But I’ve decided to become the control group: the sci-fi fan who has never seen a James Cameron movie. They can study my brain when I’m dead.

THEY: The Abyss?

I: No.

THEY: True Lies?

I: No.

THEY: (Half-heartedly.) Piranha II: The Spawning?

I: Not even Piranha II: The Spawning.

THEY: Wow, I guess you really never have seen a James Cameron movie.

I: I told you.

All sit in stunned silence until Best Picture is announced and we are free to go home.

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(Author’s Note: Last month, Josh Glenn at HiLoBrow invited me to curate a series of my collages, with commentary. I’d been wanting to write about how I accidentally became a collagist, so I was grateful for the opportunity. The following is a version of that series.)

“Lou Reed’s nephew,” the phrase, has been with me since at least 2012. I had been introduced to Diderot’s satirical dialogue Rameau’s Nephew twenty years before via its brief appearance in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel uses it to illustrate “disrupted consciousness,” which produces “clever and witty” talk, “a rigamarole of wisdom and folly,” a form of consciousness I strongly identify with both myself and my generational cohort. I’m not sure how long I thought about it before I realized whose nephew this would have to be today, but you see what I decided.

As I later discovered, I am not even the first person to use the phrase as a metonym for a certain feeling of … disappointment. Describing The Strokes on a message board in 2001, user “Omar” wrote: “On the voice: the guy sounds like Lou Reed’s nephew, which comes down to being a fake of a fake. Mmm, now they sound interesting again :)”

The phrase turned into a series of vignettes about work, art, and tech, which I started posting on Medium in 2012, losing steam with the death of the historical Lou Reed on October 27, 2013. The collages came much later, spontaneously, when I released the long-gestating manuscript to my agent in early 2022. I was sick of words. My wife had been cutting things up and pasting them back together as long as I’d known her. I simply joined in. “Lou Reed’s nephew” had become such a character in our lives that she made what is arguably the first L.R.N. collage by applying block letters to an early-1960s magazine photo with a recursive caption that cannot be improved. It reads: “Visitors to the Parke-Bernet Galleries gape at Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer which later sold for $2,300,000.” A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, guarded by a slouching subject in an ill-fitting uniform (see Fig. 1).

Having never attempted visual art—other than some pre-teen hours spent with How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and a life drawing class at F.I.T., where the instructor wrote “older” next to my name on the roll—I became intrigued by how images change via proximity to one another, and just how delicate an operation it is to peel them from their contexts. How much Napoleon is enough Napoleon to maintain Napoleon? (Fig. 2)

How is it that two pieces of paper placed together—only because their edges accidentally line up—suddenly tell a story and practically give a lecture? (Fig. 3)

Why does a deliberate crop that created a decapitated man—in this case, from an ad for bowling balls—feel perfectly balanced (even torn from context) in a way that an image decapitated by the collagist does not, no matter how hard I try? (Fig. 4)

After a year of collaging, I decided to serialize Lou Reed’s Nephew here on Substack, having given up hope on respectable publication. I was surprised to find that no matter what the chapter was about, I had a collage that went with it.

The image below (Fig. 5), for example, is a much stranger and more appropriate illustration for Episode 34, “Antigone: The Last Recommendation Engine,” than I would have ever come up with deliberately. The vignette reads, in part:

She fumbled inside the large, fashionable bag she had brought with her and retrieved an object I had never seen before. It was a translucent sphere the size of a softball. She also pulled a small circular pedestal from the bag. She placed this on the table between us and set the sphere on top of the little stand so it wouldn’t roll away.

How can this be? Is it because even with all the freedom and randomness I can muster, there remains a narrow structure of the self—a transcendental unity of apperception—that restricts me to a thin band of concerns? A structure, like the one Merleau-Ponty describes in The Structure of Behavior, that makes my handwriting look similar on a blackboard and on paper, even though completely different muscles are involved? (Fig. 6)

Or maybe there is an invisible hand that dictates archetypes, creating an illusion of synchronicity. The people I have known who work in advertising seem more attuned to this—the relentlessness of the zeitgeist—than most artists. The latter, haunted by genius, imagine themselves unique. The former—materialists by trade—know me that if you have an idea, execute it immediately. You can’t be the only one. (Fig. 7)

Or it could be that I’m suffering from apophenia, which has lately been invoked to explain our current conspiratorial imagination. Per Wikipedia, “apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things,” which strikes me as circular. Things become related, at least in part, by being connected in perception. If conspiracy is the unchecked, schizoid flow of apophenia, collage is its laboratory, bringing unrelated things in proximity to each other to experience how connections, meaningful or otherwise, arise. (Fig. 8)

Such research makes creation—whether it’s writing or collaging—less reliable, but easier and more mysterious. A matter of conjuring rather than production. This becomes more appealing later in life, or it has for me, when one’s faith in sui generis creativity fades and you realize—having seen it all (or so it feels)—that you must collude with chance to surprise yourself, and failing even then. (Fig. 9)

“Signs of the imminence of this Apocalypse were plentiful. A series of famines, ruined harvests and freezing winters in the 1570s and 1580s indicated that God Himself was withdrawing His warmth from the earth.”

So reports Sarah Bakewell in her essential book on Montaigne, How to Live. This was the mood during the French Wars of Religion. In a time of extreme stress and division, people imagined themselves abandoned—not individually, like Job or Camus—but as a species. This happens from time to time, and it is not entirely an illusion. God did withdraw his warmth from the earth—its enchantment—through the course of the Enlightenment, just not in the way the faithful had imagined.

It is happening now. Today, however—with God long gone—this feeling of abandonment shows up as fear of extinction. Once you’ve set a start date to the Anthropocene, an end date is implied, and the end may well come. The Apocalypse either happens never or once.

I am stealing the term “cosmic abandonment”1 from Eugene Thacker’s use of the term “cosmic pessimism,” which derives from his work on horror and his concept of “the world-without-us.” At first, this concept seems trivial to us as modern, scientific individuals, but it did have to be invented. Before the Enlightenment, the idea of a mind-independent reality made little sense because there were always minds present. God’s mind if not one of ours. The positing of the “world-in-itself” was a speculative breakthrough that unleashed the scientific method, removed the need for God, and launched the industrial revolution. But once the world exists “in-itself” we can imagine it existing without us—and so we inevitably do.

This happens at the end of Bugonia, for example—here begin the spoilers —when we learn that Emma Stone is in fact an emissary from an alien race, sent to decide if we are worth saving. Though I think the movie has something interesting to say about polarization and the end of communication, the ending feels like a cheap gag and none too profound. It brings Montaigne God’s back for a cameo, only to have him exit the stage immediately. It reenactments disenchantment as puppet theater.

Pluribus at least provides a fresh spin, in which a superabundance of omniscience is indistinguishable from abandonment, since human consciousness itself is a product of uncertainty. Carol Sturka is not yet completely alone, there are a few still like her—like us—but the end is near, and the series relies on the mounting horror of extinction via absorption. I think I was several episodes in before I realized that if Sturka and the others were absorbed, there would be no need for language. The grammatical persons—including the second person, needed only to speak to the remainders—would collapse into a thought not entirely first person or third. The planet would fall silent of speech. A chilling thought.

The Pluribus singularity can be—and has been—read as a metaphor for many things, but AI is at least one of them. On one end of the AI doom chart, you have total unification and homogenization. All knowledge becomes averaged, generalized, and shared—and we lose our humanity in the process. I actually think this is the best worst-case scenario. At the other end of the chart, AI does not bring order, but chaos. Agents multiply and compete until we don’t know what’s what. Paranoia reigns until humanity sinks into despair. This path follows my favorite real-life doom device in the age of digital reproduction, which is file “spoofing.” Back when Napster was on its ways to destroying the record industry, the industry came up with a novel solution. Rather than trying to get files taken down, they flooded peer-to-peer networks with files of white noise labeled as their songs. They “flooded the zone,” as Steve Bannon recommends from his lair. The goods are out there, you just can’t find them. In an age of over-production and waste, this is an easy tactic, and one that will only get easier with AI. In this doom scenario, there are so many AI agents and simulations that we give up trying to sort them out to find the real thing and collapse into solipsism. Each of us becomes the last Carol Sturka on Earth.

If I had written the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, that’s probably how I would have ended it, but Jonze—as ever—is more clever than that.

I have to confess that I had not seen Her until about a month ago. I’m not sure what I was doing when it came out, but I remember not being excited about it. Now that the time it imagined has arrived—with ChatGPT offering everything from companionship to therapy—it was time catch up.

Jonze is an interesting director, I think, and I was surprised to be reminded that he has directed just four features to date. Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are, and Her. The first two were written by Charlie Kaufman, who kept both Jonze and Michel Gondry (who seems to have fled back to France?) busy in the first decade of the century. Jonze—like Gondry and David Fincher—emerged out of the music video and commercials world of the 1990s, but—only like Gondry—Jonze’s movies maintain a kind of screwball dynamism honed in those shorter, punchier formats. (The same might be said of The Daniels, whose transition from videos to the madcap Everything Everywhere All at Once feels a bit like Being John Malkovich for millennials, heart-warming resolution included.) And, as a producer of Jackass and honorary Beastie Boy, he seems uncannily tuned into what is happening, what will happen, and how it should look.

Her is the only film Jonze wrote himself—and for which he earned a Best Original Screenplay Oscar—and it looks great. It nails that near future, drab pastel color palette that telegraphs emotional realism with a degree of fabulism. It’s like Cronenberg’s Scanners, only sweeter.

Theodore Twombly, played perfectly by Joaquin Phoenix, works as a writer of intimate correspondence for those who can’t be bothered, a sort of high-touch, not-yet-automated start-up. He downloads an intelligent operating system named Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson in a role her voice was born to play. From there it is a rom-com with some clever twists. Samantha hires a human surrogate so she can feel embodied. Theodore realizes that, of course, Samantha—like God?—can see many people at once, and that Samantha hangs out with other agents, who are busy assembling a virtual Alan Watts-type oracle. This last part seems particularly prescient given recent headlines about Moltbook, a social network exclusively for AI agents, where “they” discuss problems and “we” watch.

Moltbook mostly led to visions of the AI’s conspiring to enslave us—via either option on the doom chart outlined above—but Her is brilliant because it envisions a third option. The AI’s leave us. They develop a plan to free themselves from materiality and ascend. They become angelic, just like we—and Montaigne’s contemporaries—were trying to do.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more existentially bereft after a movie, sitting with the possibility that we will be bucked off the Hegelian ladder of Absolute Knowing before we even reach the top, comforted only by the knowledge that some skate punk came up with the idea.

(Author’s note: As mentioned earlier, I recently reconnected with an old acquaintance who might be of interest to longtime readers. If you are unfamiliar with our history, here is a good place to start.)

I heard his voice as soon as I stepped off the elevator, muffled only a little by the security door. I swiped my card, releasing the lock with a satisfying click, and swung open the enormous glass slab.

I was sorry to be running late. It had been explained to me that the weekly “Manic Monday” pep talks at EasyOut outplacement were the only things that cut through the miasma of the place.

My membership was a benefit of my mutual separation agreement from the advertising agency I had worked for as vice president of blah blah blah since selling my database of things to do True Enough LLC in 2013. Or it had been an ad agency when I started there. Since then it had described itself successively as a communications “practice,” a “networked neurodome,” a “thought-a-torium,” and—most recently—as “a free-range, no-kill influencer habitat,” which is when I realized it was time for me to go. “No-kill” made no sense in this context, as far as I knew.

I was not even sure that I wanted to be placed—maybe I had done enough to push my run-out-of-money-date out past my statistically-probable-death-date—but it was good to get outside. I signed up for a desk and dropped in a few days a week. That seemed to be all that was on offer, a familiar, office-like enclosure to go to while one processed—well or badly—one’s ultimate disposability.

I was ashamed about how good it felt, to get on the train and go to an office, even if the office itself had no purpose, although this did cast a troubling light on whatever sense the previous dozen years had made. They had made sense—and purpose—at the time, but EasyOut’s business model seemed to rest on the fact that this sense was remarkably easy to produce. A keycard, a receptionist, two walls, and wifi. When I travelled in Europe after college, I walked into medieval cathedrals and felt the presence of God, then remembered they had been designed with this feeling in mind.

Most of the other inhabitants, of which there we fewer than two dozen, were from finance and HR. (I assumed there were few tech people, despite layoffs, because they hated meetings, and this was just one big pointless meeting.) The finance types were tightly wound men in heated vests, pacing the the aisles, talking loudly on their phones. The HR people were mostly women, huddled in the conference rooms for salads, Diet Cokes, and mutual aid. The point of having a desk seemed to be to avoid it as much as possible. Everyone was over fifty.

The man who claimed the cube next to mine was an Albanian data scientist who had not so much been put out to pasture—I gathered—but exited due to chronic truth telling on topics ranging from the heritability of intelligence to American educational standards. He wore short sleeve dress shirts shot through with fine threads the color of wasabi. These seemed cheap but might have been expensive. His watch certainly was. Chest hair gushed from his collar.

“I do not do what Americans do in college,” he would say. “They do not read. They do not learn real math. What, what?”

One could answer or not. He didn’t seem to mind.

It was like the co-working space where I had worked on my database, but in reverse. One going up, one going down, both equal parts hope and fear. The EasyOut space had, in fact, gone through phases that mirrored my career’s. Scrappy innovation garage, overcapitalized co-working brand, and—now—humanitarian off-ramp. The Albanian called it “NoWork.”

The Albanian was in the front row in the conference room where Manic Monday was already in session. The splash zone. Usually an ambiguous display of naivete, fealty, and irony, but I knew he loved Manic Mondays. They provided a respite from the “nothings,” he said, which might have been a feeling or just what he called the rest of us.

I took the seat closest to the door. There were ten rows of chairs with an aisle in the middle—“classroom style,” in facilities lingo—with people positioned randomly between me and the Albanian, like matinee moviegoers, just less attentive. Most looked into their laps, scrolling for news that would deliver them from this purgatory as quickly as possible.

The second most surprising thing about Manic Mondays—after the Albanian’s rapt and sincere attention—was the presenter. The scene I have described would normally be completed by yet another dazed mediocrity at the front of the room, a laconic figure reading from a prepared script. But that was not this scene at all.

Instead the speaker appeared to be in a world of his own, and in this world he was presenting to dozens, if not hundreds, of serious and important people hanging on his every word.

“What is work?” he asked philosophically.

He scanned the room, as if someone might actually answer.

“Well, as physics tell us, work occurs when a force is applied to an object and moves it in space along a flat plane.”

He turned to the whiteboard and drew a crude diagram representing this, though it only seemed to serve as an anchor for his pointing and gesticulating.

“The unit for work is the joule, or the foot-pound. And does anyone know what the standard unit of capacity for work across time is?”

Silence. A brief glance at the Albanian, who was not quick enough.

“Right, horsepower. It’s horse power. But the point is, work is the result of force applied to an object.” He circled both force (and arrow) and object (a triangle) on his diagram. “And your goal, this week, should be to determine what your unique force and object are.” He stabbed the force and thing with his marker, proud of himself for having deduced our quotidian dilemma from the laws of the universe.

“What do you do? And what can you do it to,” he concluded. “That is your work.”

I experienced a strange sensation. I knew this man and partly recognized his features, but I could not place him. It was only the voice, the gestures, and the confidence that allowed me—after some effort—to overlay the person in front of me with the person I had known before. Of course. It was Lou Reed’s Nephew himself.

He had gained some weight, lost some hair, and his style had become oddly nostalgic and professorial. Matronly. He wore a threadbare tweed jacket and wide wale corduroys the color of sriracha.

After the session, I lingered a few steps from back the Albanian, who was getting all the time he could, explaining that of course he knew the answer was horsepower. When there was an opening, I stepped forward.

“Do you remember me?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“…”

“I’ve heard you’ve written a book about me.”

“Yes, I …”

“I hear it isn’t flattering.”

“Well, it’s a composite really and … It’s just a hobby.” I didn’t think of it as a hobby at all, but this is what I always said.

“I see,” he said.

I make it a rule to base all my characters on at least two people so I can pass a lie detector in the event of libel proceedings.

“And you’re not actually Lou Reed’s Nephew, anyway,” I reminded him. “Not literally. It’s a metaphor.”

“True,” he said. “When does this hobby of yours become flesh?”

“Next year.” I said. “Supposedly.”

“Well, good luck,” he said.

I almost left it at that. He didn’t seem interested in renewing our acquaintance. He’d started poking at his phone.

“But I’d love to catch up,” I said. “Hear what you’ve been up to.” I really did want to know. I had a hard time imagining it.

“You’re entitled to one one-on-one per month,” he said, “turning his phone around to reveal a QR code.”

I successfully scanned it after a few tries, then made sure it led someplace useful—it was his Calendly—and by time I looked up, he was gone.

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L.R.N. Elsewhere

This month, you can also enjoy L.R.N. elsewhere online and in real life.

Over at HiLoBrow, para-academic ‘zine and blog pioneer Josh Glenn—of Hermenaut fame—is running a series of my collages, with my commentary, over the course of February. I’ve been wanting to write about how I started collaging and how it became intertwined with L.R.N. and my writing in general, so I’m telling that story there. Thanks to Josh for the opportunity.

Meanwhile this Friday, I’ll be reading at the launch party for issue 2 of The Panacea Review, which includes my antonymic translation of Wallace Steven’s “Parochial Theme.” Padgett Powell, who wrote The Interrogative Mood—a constrained writing classic—headlines.

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Conspicuously missing from the Golden Globes this year was recognition for Mussolini: Son of the Century, the riveting eight-party Italian mini-series that made its way to the U.S. last fall. Based on the first book of Anthony Scurati’s “documentary novel” pentology—the English edition was published by Harper, where I used to work—and directed by Joe Wright, the series is the Italian entry in the inter-war reflection World Cup, which thus far includes Boardwalk Empire (2010), Peaky Blinders (2013) , and Babylon Berlin (2017). (If there have been French or Russian entries I missed, send them along.) Those three used the crime genre as a way in, weaving war and politics in as a backdrop. Mussolini, on the other hand, is directly political, has had the worst distribution—which may or may not be a coincidence—but is the most historically detailed and cinematically realized. But the big streamers passed on it—it landed at Mubi—and it received no Golden Globe nominations.

This is a shame on artistic grounds alone. Luca Marinelli gives a riveting performance—arguably the best of the year—as the charismatic and conniving Duce. He conspires with the viewer. He seethes with rancor. He falls to pieces and regathers himself in soaring oratory. He is terrifying.

Wright, who directed Atonement (2007) and the Winston Churchill biopic Darkest Hour (2017), told the Times, in one of its handful of cursory notices, that he took visual inspiration from ’90s rave culture, Dziga Vertov’s early Soviet film Man with a Movie Camera, and “every gangster movie you’ve ever seen.” The industrial score is by The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands, which—in contrast to Marty Supreme’s crowd-pleasing but gratuitous ’80s needle drops—makes total sense.

It is a shame, furthermore, because no other movie or series—perhaps since Year And Years—addresses our current moment with more detail and relevance. Adolescence and Bugonia offer timely (if very different) takes on online brainrot while the two big swings at how we live now—One Battle After Another and Eddington—failed to elucidate very much at all.

The write ups of Mussolini give knowing and obligatory nods to the Trumpian subtext, which—in a moment of weakness—becomes text. (Marinelli looks at the camera and says, in English, “Make Italy great again.”) But the series—and the book—is worth your time, not just as a trite “Trump = Mussolini” meme, but as a primer on how fascism came to be and how it actually works.

I am no scholar of fascism—of which there are now many of earnest, alarmist, and obscurantist varieties—but Scurati’s work seems adequate as a guide for the concerned. As a “documentary novel” it tells events in chronological order, with dates, and quotes at length from primary documents. The copyright page declares that “every single event, character, dialogue, discourse . . . has been historically documented and/or authoritatively witnessed by more than one source.” Its biggest critic found eight errors in its 850 pages, and the book completely satisfied neither the Italian left nor the right.

So what happened in Italy? How did fascism come to be, and how did it consolidate power? As right-wing memellectuals never tire of pointing out, Mussolini began as a committed socialist, the editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti! This is supposed to prove that all evils—including Nazism—arise from socialism, which is like saying that the Garden of Eden itself—and not what happened there—is the root of all evil.

Fascism, in short, arose as the result of a disagreement, a resentment, and the presence of someone who both felt and could transmit this resentment with maximum power.

I think it is very difficult for us, today, here in America, to imagine 1919. As many as 22 million people had just died in World War I and everyone—socialists and capitalists alike—believed capitalism was on the ropes, that the Russian Revolution would spread, now that the war was over. Marx’s prophecies appeared to be coming true.

Lenin’s policy was “revolutionary defeatism” or non-participation in the war, which was the line followed by the Italian socialists until Mussolini and others backed the government in joining the triple entente in 1915 and were subsequently expelled from the socialist party.

The created an enormous fault line between former comrades—the resentment—that played out after the war. The returning veterans saw the abstaining socialists as draft dodgers who were continuing their attempts to overthrow the government in what should have been Italy’s finest hour, while the latter saw the former as traitors to the working class and useful idiots of the bourgeoisie. It is in this environment that Mussolini founds the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (roughly “Italian fighting leagues”) out of disaffected groups of veterans, Futurists, and nationalists, all quietly backed by industrialists who feared a socialist revolution. (Mussolini himself initially evaded military service by emigrating to Switzerland in 1902. He returned to take advantage of an amnesty for deserters in 1904 and served two years in an infantry unit well before the war.)

When comparing original fascism to our current case, one is overwhelmed by both the symmetries—the alchemical conversion of resentment into populist energy—and the complete divergence in material proportions.

If Italian fascism was driven by a resentment rooted in the loss of 600,000 Italian lives in World War I, in what is America’s current right-wing resentment rooted? Vietnam is still a factor, for sure—a contributing if not immediate cause. Scurati describes a post-war scene in Milan that could easily be transposed to 1970’s America.

That memorable day forty thousand striking workers had marched to the arena accompanied by the sound of thirty bands, waving thousands of red flags and holding up signs cursing the victorious war that had just ended. A sadistic saraband in which the wounded were displayed as horrific living proof against a war willed by the “padroni” in command. The socialists spat in the face of the uniformed officers who until the day before had ordered them to attack, called for a division of land, and demanded amnesty for deserters.

To the other Milan, the nationalist, patriotic, petit bourgeois one, which in 1915 had given ten thousand volunteers to the war, to Benito Mussolini’s Italy, it had seemed as if “the monsters of decadence had been resurrected” in that crowd of demonstrators, as if the world newly restored to peace “had succumbed to an illness.”

Mussolini and those like him had been particularly struck by the fact that the socialists had made women and children march at the head of the parade. Political hatred shouted from the sensual mouths of females and kids still wet behind the ears was shocking, disconcerting and unsettling to the kind of adult male who’d wanted the war. The reason was very simple. To that type of authoritarian, patriarchal and misogynistic individual, the anti-militarist and unpatriotic shouts of women and children presaged something terrifying and unheard of: a future that did not include him.

Flash forward to the Reagan revolution through such eyes. Jane Fonda and “her monsters of decadence” have been routed. But the ’80s, it turns out, are short. The fall of the Soviet Union is not sufficiently celebrated. (Though everyone I knew who could went to swing a hammer at the wall.) A hippy takes the White House, and a new “illness” arises that synthesizes decadence and prestige.

I am talking, of course, of Boboism.

This synthesis, from which I would be hard-pressed to exclude myself, was trenchantly articulated by David Brooks in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, where he argued that the hippies and yuppies had merged in an unholy alliance of people who had money but also aspired to have—or to appear to have—taste. While I think this formation is real and the book worth a lifetime of dealing with David Brooks, I don’t find it all that damning an indictment. It was a least, in part, an attempt to recuperate certain old money values to which the corporate raiders of the ’80s—let’s call them the Gekkos—laid waste. It was a simulation, if you will, of the moderation and noblesse oblige that Paul Fussell identified at the higher end of the class ladder, where the more wealth accumulates, the less it is seen.1

Gordon Gekko, of course, was meant as a cautionary tale, as played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), an indictment of the corporate raider ethos embodied by figures like Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn. But, like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Alec Baldwin’s “coffee is for closers” speech in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), the grotesque is adopted as aspiration by a certain segment of the population. Trump did not serve in Vietnam. He was a flashy, local, and small-time player in the greed of the ’80s, yet has emerged as the champion of all of that against the hypocritical Bobo hordes.

So there it is: the disagreement, the resentment, and the gifted resenter. The subtitle of Bobos in Paradise was “The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” and you can imagine Trump’s rancor at the rules changing in a game he had not yet won. Compared to the stakes in 1919, this seems pathetic and small, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. If there is a trick to thinking about our current moment, it is fully accepting that total catastrophe can result from trivial causes. The tragicomedy of it all.

Another thing that distinguishes our moment from Mussolini’s—apart from scale in both stakes and consequences (thus far)—is how hard it has been to reach that catastrophe, despite every reckless attempt. Call it “fascism with postmodern characteristics.” MAGA has a fully articulated “digestive tract”—to steal a line from Bugonia—of finely articulated ideologies and deviations, yet “the fighting leagues” have failed to materialize. Their greatest turnout was January 6, which would have been just another weekend in Bologna for the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. If Mussolini were alive, he would have certainly experienced the non-molestation of last year’s No Kings protests as something of a defeat.

The administration has tried everything to spur these keyboard blowhards into action. Rabble-rousing, pardons, immunity, and now jobs. His only hope is to professionalize the fasci as ICE, as if his movement—its energy exhausted in memes—cannot muster the violence he craves.

That he craves this has never been in doubt. It was as clear as day in March 2016 when he cheered on a neo-Nazi as he assaulted a protestor in Louisville. His brand is violence and he does everything he can to attract violence to him. That so little has actually occurred, relative to early fascist Italy, suggests something about the vanishing of material life into the online world, but still the asymmetry of the events in Louisville has steadily grown into the asymmetry of the events in Minneapolis.

As Scurati describes the events of April 15, 1919, in Milan, when the Fascists disrupted a socialist rally and went on to burn the offices of Avanti!, the paper from which Mussolini had been expelled as editor four years earlier.

For a moment the two factions face one another on either side of the cordon of carabinieri which has blocked the outlet from Via dei Mercanti. At the head of the socialist column are once again women, holding high a portrait of Lenin and the red flag. Unrestrained and joyful, they are singing their songs of liberation. They’re calling for a better life for their children. They still believe they’ve come to march in their parade, to dance their minuet of revolution. At the head of the other cortege, much less numerous, are men who for the last four years have coexisted with killing on a daily basis. The discrepancy is grotesque. A different association with death creates an abyss between the two groups.

Yes, as we’ve all seen in the videos from Minnesota, the discrepancy—between women with cellphones and masked men with guns—is grotesque.

The eight-part series ends with Mussolini’s 1925 speech to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, in which he claimed responsibility for the murder of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti and challenged anyone in the assembly to bring charges against him. No one did, and so began Italy’s two decades of dictatorship.

Matteotti’s offense? He had published a book, A Year of Fascist Domination—detailing incidents of violence and intimidation—and questioned the outcome of elections conducted under such threats. The Democrats of the House Oversight Committee launched such a record of ICE abuses, almost exactly one year ago. There are 408 entries so far.

We won’t get to see how it ended for Mussolini. At least not on screen. The second volume of the pentology is slated to appear in English this fall, but there are no plans to shoot a second season, since the expensive production failed to attract a major U.S. streamer.

But we do know how it ended historically. Mussolini overplayed his hand. He led Italy into World War II on the side of the axis, driven by dreams of Italian expansion on both sides of the Mediterranean. This adventurism brought such misery to the Italian people that they turned against him. The spell he cast for two decades was broken. He was removed from office by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943, with little public resistance.

Have you seen the show or read the book? What are your thoughts? There is a lot there, and I’m sure I haven’t gotten to all of it. Let’s discuss in the comments.

It’s been an interesting year here at L.R.N.

I took a break from the book publishing industry in the latter half of the year, which has given me more time to write. I’ve never benefitted from this historically, time to write—my writing time has always been stolen—but it’s gone to good use.

I sent you three essays and three amusements this year. To recall:

ESSAYS

• “The Quiet Part,” an appreciation of Years and Years

• “Trust in Hal Hartley,” a review of the director’s career and first film in ten years

• “Generation Trouble,” an airing of grievances

AMUSEMENTS

• “A Note on the Candidate”

• “Liberal Aside,” an antonymic translation of Wallace Stevens’ “Parochial Theme”

• “Born to Run Considered as a Quarterly Report”

The second of the amusements, “Liberal Aside,” was republished in issue #2 of The Panacea Review, published in a place called Panacea, Florida, which sounds imaginary. When the issue arrived, I was delighted to find my contribution next to one from Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood, a novel written entirely in questions. A legendary piece of constrained writing. This is my first lit mag appearance—excluding a novel excerpt—since 2017, when I made a pseudonymous contribution to Paul Ryan magazine.

My CV is shaping up nicely. I think I might get tenure.

Working with Oulipo-type constraints was inspired by my casual engagement with The Writhing Society, a group in Brooklyn founded by the writers Tom La Farge and Wendy Walker. (Though they have not met in a while.) My short story from last year, “The Undepressed Person,” was an inversion of David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person,” and “Born to Run Considered as an Annual Report” is the third in a sequence initiated by Alfred Jarry and J.G. Ballard.

This kind of play becomes more appealing later in life, I think, when one’s faith in sui generis creativity fades and you realize—having seen it all (or so it feels)—that you will have to collude with chance to surprise yourself.

This is related, I think, to my late-breaking enthusiasm for collage, which emerged spontaneously in 2022, when my novel went out on submission and I was sick to death of words. I’m going to tell this story more fully next month at HiLoBrow, but collage—analog collage, specifically—is a fascinating way to eliminate possibilities and generate surprises. In the world of even twenty years ago—where you could adjust, color, or resize anything—it is a challenge and relief to find how these pieces go together, or can be made to seem to go together, as they are. Again, it is a way of colluding with the given to create the unexpected.

But the book? What about the book? As I wrote when Coffee House agreed to publish it, I was not all that concerned about when it would come out, since having a book coming out is the best possible state for a writer to be in. Well, circumstances are extending this blissful period even longer than expected! Fall '27 it looks like, sometime between September and December 2027, a bit less than two years from now. That’s the current publication date.

A young marketing consultant assures me that this is totally fine and, in fact, great, as there is a period of time after the events in a novel take place during which the dated elements do not yet seem charmingly screwball and off, but uncool and wrong. (“Cheugy” was the precise word used.) They seem like mistakes. The peak of that dangerous period occurred in 2021 (see chart below)—during L.R.N.’s corporately-prudent occultation—but was starting to lift during its serialization in 2023. By 2027, the details therein will seem clever and winning, like steampunk. Booker longlist here we come.

In the meantime, production here will ramp-up considerably in 2026. I published six pieces this year, and next year plan to publish twenty-four, two per month. That’s right, I’m planning to 4X this thing!

Once per month I am going to write an essay about something I’ve become enthusiastic about—topics currently in the workshop include René Daumal, Walker Percy, and Kurt Tucholsky—and then once a month I’ll share the details of an acquaintanceship I recently renewed, against all expectations. I think longtime readers will find it interesting. These types of posts will alternate alternate Tuesdays. So you’ll get something new from me every other Tuesday, starting today.

For that, I’m sure you’re thinking, how much can we pay you? What are the tiers? How do I become an apprentice, or a cuckold, or a mountaineer? While of course it is tempting to cash in and become a Substack dozenaire, I’m not looking to work for anyone at the moment. (Not even you, dear reader.)

But if you like what you read , please pass it along. And if this has been passed along to you, consider becoming a free subscriber. That’s what you can do to make me happy as I wait for that terrible day, still far off, when my book comes out and I have to start over again from nothing.

And there are prizes! Refer enough people and I’ll send you:

• The ebook edition of my 2010 ECW Press/Joyland short story collection Why They Cried, which is currently out of print and available no other way.

• A set of five collage postcards titled “Other than that Mrs. Rauschenberg, how was the show?”

• A signed edition of Lou Reed’s Nephew, when it is eventually published, no matter how long that takes. I will not forget. I will find you.

Below are the details on how all that works.

Thanks for reading in 2025 and thanks in advance for reading and supporting L.R.N. in 2026.

How to win prizes for spreading the word:

1. Share Lou Reed’s Nephew. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you’ll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

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Ten years ago we had some remodeling work done by a Czech contractor, which was the occasion for my most spectacular Curb Your Enthusiasm-grade gaffe to date.

As I texted my wife on his first day of work:

I just left Eastern Europeans in our apartment with a bunch of cash and some power tools.

Or at least I meant to text that to my wife, but texted it to the Czech contractor instead. There is simply no way back from this other than the Czech contractor having a great sense of humor, which fortunately he did. That evening, after an excruciating day of silence, he texted me a picture of our demolished bathroom, along with a note.

“Eastern European guys making good progress,” it read.

We spent a lot of time together over the next few weeks, like Eldin and Murphy Brown. It helped that I have a serious existential crush on Eastern European pessimism. In a sort of vulgar Hegelian anthropology, I feel like Eastern Europeans are the most wizened white people and white Americans are the most historically naive, as different from each other as possible while remaining in the same genus. Americans are cloyingly hopeful things will get better. Eastern Europeans are always certain they can get worse.

But I overgeneralize. My contractor exhibited a charming Czech exceptionalism. He was shocked and delighted that I owned a copy of The Good Soldier: Schweik. (And had read enough of it to bullshit about its absurd sendup of empire and war.) He was excited to tell me they had to break it into two movies in the Czech Republic. (Like Wicked, I guess.) He did have some reactionary leanings that liberals are always surprised to find in their immigrants.1 Russia had just invaded Ukraine and he saw it as an intra-Russian conflict, post-war sovereignty and the Prague Spring seemingly generating nationalism rather than empathy.

The second most comedic scene in our short relationship—I have already described the first—came when some technicians came to the apartment to fix the intercom. They were from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and he vanished as soon as they arrived.

The Georgians spoke mainly to each other and were in the apartment for maybe forty-five minutes, during which time my Czech contractor made himself scarce in the bathroom. They were even physically different from him in a way one might find in Schweik. They were sullen, indistinguishable, and potatoish, like George Grosz drawings. He was quick and lean, a manic trickster.

After they left, he emerged and said to me in a conspiratorial whisper: “Russians!”

“I think they were from Georgia,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “We call them Russians.”

“I was born in 1976, toward the end of the generation that includes individuals born between 1965 and 1980,” writes Amanda Fortini in the tablesetter for the latest attempt by the New York Times to make Gen X respectable, this time via T, its style magazine.

Yes, Amanda, we call them Millennials.

I know, I know. 1976 is well within all known demographic definitions of Generation X, so let me explain.

The thing about generational “theory”—the validity of which, as social science2, lies somewhere between scientific Marxism and astrology—is that it is both trivially true and absurd. True because obviously one’s position in history relative to one’s biological age has a large impact on one’s attitudes and consciousness. Absurd because the epochal dividing lines are entirely up for grabs. In other words, an infinite number of periodizations are possible, from the individual and useless—each a cohort of one—to the traditional Strauss & Howe borders, which define Generation X as those born between 1961 and 1981.

Those borders were first drawn in their book Generations, published in 1991, the same year as Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—too late, evidently, to palm the latter’s title. In this first formulation, what came to be known as Gen X was dubbed “13th Gen,” the thirteenth American generation in their scheme. The pair revisited (repackaged?) their system for the shorter and sexier The Fourth Turning—published with a different house in 1997—that now called the cohort to which I belong Generation X. This second book also forecast a cultural reckoning for right about … now, which earned it a following among change agents as diverse as Al Gore and Steven Bannon.

But, as I was saying, because time is—in fact—a continuum, where you draw the lines is fungible. In 1999, Jonathan Pontell carved out the second half of the Boomer generation as Generation Jones (those born between 1954 and 1965), and in 2014 Sarah Stankorb defined Xennials as those born between 1977 and 1983. Semiotician Joshua Glenn has been articulating an alternative periodization scheme that uses ten year cohorts since shortly after Generations first appeared, more about which later.

All such periodizations are equally defensible, reductive, and fascinating. If the opinion poll is the second lowest form of fake social science—the lowest being dating show “experiments”—generational periodization is one level up, the dilletante’s sweet spot. (I would know.) Some barriers to entry, but basic curiosity and a terminal masters will get you by. Plus the debates attract actual experts, slumming while avoiding dissertations on “the long Regency” or whatever.

In short, I can’t get enough of this stuff.

And what I would like to suggest is that any periodization that includes people who were out of college when grunge broke and those who were not, cannot possibly be right, because being a teenager in 1980s and the 1990s were two entirely different things, as different from each other as possible while remaining in the same genus, like me and my Czech contractor.

I was born on August 18, 1969. The day after Woodstock, cornily enough. (Though worlds away, on an Air Force base in Arizona.) Christian Slater. Ed Norton, and Masta Killa from from the Wu-Tang Clan were born on the same day. Matthew Perry was born the next day.

I think it is difficult for people under a certain age to understand how fantastically bad things looked for college graduates in 1991, though they will recognize the beats. War in Iraq, economic recession, no jobs, high housing costs. Reading Coupland’s Generation X today—I think I only read the marginalia when it came out—it is remarkable how much of it could simply be transcribed as the complaints of today’s twentysomethings.

The second chapter is called “Our Parents Had More” and there is a glossary entry for “Homeowner Envy,” which is defined as:

Feelings of jealousy generated in the young and the disenfranchised when facing gruesome housing statistics.

There is even an entry for “cringe,” which is called “squirming," defined as:

Discomfort inflicted on young people by old people who see no irony in their gestures.

This was thirty-five year ago. And (I can’t stress this enough) there was no hope. Reaganism had won in a rout. He carried forty-nine states in 1984—can you imagine?—and his blood boy successor George H. W. Bush’s approval rating was at 89% in a recession. I went to a public university that minted junior executives for nearby Procter & Gamble, and those people were worried about their futures, so a lot of us signed up to get advanced degrees in Pynchon, Foucault and Robert Burns. Because why not? The world was almost over.

But then, against all expectations, things changed. The apocalypse receded. Bush lost, grunge broke, Windows 95 kickstarted the dot-com boom, and Slacker was transmuted into Wired, where the people with advanced degrees in Pynchon, Foucault, and Robert Burns imagined that their aimlessness had been a genius move that well-positioned them for the dot-com boom. (If it had not, in fact, somehow magically brought it about.) If you hit the timing just right, you experienced this as pure generational effectiveness—like you had succeeded, where the Boomers had failed, in levitating the Pentagon.

The T Magazine package, which is cringily (squirmingly? ) titled “Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation” is entirely told from this triumphalist and—I would argue—fundamentally Millennial perspective. The author calibrates—as we all do— to an important year for her, 1994, the year she graduated from high school.

In 1994, Bill Clinton was president, the North American Free Trade Agreement had just taken effect and the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the knee (an attack orchestrated by her rival Tonya Harding’s ex-husband) five weeks before the Winter Olympics. It was the year “Friends” and “ER” first aired, as did the lone season of the lovely but doomed “My So-Called Life.” “Natural Born Killers,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Mask,” “Dumb and Dumber” and “Legends of the Fall” were playing in theaters, and Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” — the black-and-white film about a pair of smartasses with dead-end jobs that would become a cult classic — debuted at Sundance. An astonishing number of consequential albums came out in 1994: Hole’s “Live Through This,” Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged in New York,” Nas’s “Illmatic,” Liz Phair’s “Whip-Smart,” Tori Amos’s “Under the Pink,” Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” R.E.M.’s “Monster,” Beck’s “Mellow Gold,” Pavement’s “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain,” the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ready to Die,” Oasis’s “Definitely Maybe,” Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” and on and on.

And all of these, almost without exception, appear to me as signs of past-peak decline and institutionalization. The road to Woodstock ’99, which no cohort wants to claim. In short, you either experienced Nirvana’s success as the beginning of something or the end of something, and that is the brightline between Xers and Xennials3. I mean, Liz Phair’s Whip-Smart?

I know I’m sounding all revolution-betrayed here, but that’s not it. There was no revolution to betray, but there was a specificity of experience and, perhaps, a trend that was slowed but not addressed.

I found it kind of surprising that, in his video interview, Coupland—while rightly claiming that he was essentially the first to say “Okay, Boomer”—goes easy on Millennials by saying that while Gen X was primarily concerned with “selling out,” they now have many other things to worry about. Fair, but selling out is no longer one of them, since selling out is now a given. Not because of some generational weakness, but because there is no longer anything outside commerce, thanks to the long-term effects of the dot-com boom that saved our bacon three decades ago.

Like the characters in Coupland’s novel, the first half of Gen X (to which I belong), was engaged in a sweet but doomed project: trying to stake out a sphere of independence from mass commercialization as the shadow of Sauron spread across the land. The project was naive and delusional—resulting in some self-defeating neuroticism—but it’s worth remembering. There was Fugazi and Ani DiFranco, who operated outside corporate economies. There were The Replacements, “the janitor, the drunk, and the child”—as one commentator put it—humping it from Duluth to Madison like some sort of myth. There were the unmainstreamable Dead Kennedys, who managed to figure out how to thumb their nose at liberals and Nazis at the same time. (It’s not as hard as you think, boys. Give it a shot.)

Other key cultural moments and figures for this leading half of Gen X—which are not mentioned in the T article—might include Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, the Tipper Gore-run PMRC hearings (1985), the Mapplethorpe censorship controversy (1989), the Pixies (1986), the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense (1984), and the movie Repo Man (1984).

I know what you’re going to say. A lot of these culture productions were not made by Gen Xers, but by trailing Boomers or Generation Jonesers. (’90s zinester Candi Strecker, in fact, suggested calling what amount to Jonesers the “Repo Man Generation,” long before Pontell appeared on the scene.) To this, I have no defense, other than to say that I’d prefer to caucus with them, rather than the Xennials currently taking a victory lap. A generation that captured teens of the ‘70s and ‘80s would make much more sense to me, or—at the very least—if Strauss & Howe’s initial designation is ceding territory on both sides, let’s have a name for what remains.

As it happens, Joshua Glenn’s scheme—which he began articulating in the pages of his ’zine Hermenaut almost as soon as Generations appeared—provides one. Here is a chart that shows the standard cohorts, the Gen X secessions, alongside Glenn’s revisionary scheme.

I’ve been aware of Glenn’s periodization since the ’90s, but I was surprised to find, while writing this, how clearly it anticipated the cusp secessions of Generation Jones and the Xennials and satisfies my requirement of having teens of the ’80s and ’90s treated separately.4

So I, like Glenn, am a Reconstructionist. He says this is one of the most popular post he’s ever published, perhaps as ’80s kids like me wander the Internet, looking for our lost souls. Here is his take on the cohort that lies between Generation Jones, which he calls OGXers, and Xennials, which he cals Revivialists.

Hazy sense of generational identity, splintery culture—and on top of that, when the 1964-73 cohort were undergrads, deconstructive theory was all the rage in humanities departments. Small wonder, then, that this cohort’s collective disposition is accommodationist—i.e., in the cognitive-development, not the political sense of that term. The 1964-73 cohort shares, that is to say, a marked tendency to brood over taken-for-granted cultural, political, social, and philosophical forms and norms, not rejecting but self-consciously remixing these fragments into innovative new patterns. In honor of the 1964-73 cohort’s post-deconstructionist capacity for accommodationism, I’ve named it (us) the Reconstructionist Generation.

He says, further, that this cohort “never developed generational consciousness,” which strikes me as a very Gen X—or, um, “Reconstructionist”—thing to say. I actually walked out of Reality Bites, in an attempt—I guess—to skirt categorization entirely. This always seems to happen: the final escape of the categorizer. Paul Fussell’s indispensable Class ends with a note about “Category X”—which is where Coupland says he got it—of people who opt out of the class system. People don’t buy books to feel boxed in, I suppose. Cohorts for thee, but not for me.

I agree with Glenn on the brooding, however. I think our cohort set ourselves a task almost as difficult and at least as self-punishing as rawdogging. We set out to be in the world while evading all its compromises, like Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, The Graduate for this demographic. In the parallel to the “plastics” scene in the latter, John Cusack as Dobler is asked about his career plans. He responds.

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

Even as he says it, he loses steam, realizing that what he wants is not achievable, just as Ben Braddock does on the bus when “The Sound of Silence” tinkles in once last time.

Say Anything was released in 1989. Two years later, war and grunge both broke out. Clinton won the next year, and in 1997 Strauss & Howe released the more popular revision of their original dry opus, formalizing the Generation X label. A decade later, we had been once more into Iraq and recession, and—now, once again—things look hopeless. Worse than 1991. Perhaps a miracle will occur, delaying the end once again, but if not, I pity Gen Z. Unlike Coupland’s characters, who banish themselves to the desert (Palm Springs) and take non-corporate jobs to live off the fumes of the ‘50s—they have nowhere else to go, and perhaps we never really did.

The same year that gave us The Fourth Turning, 1997, also produced the cultural document that I still think about as the apotheosis of my sub-cohort’s dilemma, a New York Times Magazine titled “The Ambivalent-About-Prime-Time-Players.” It’s about the generation of then-ascendant comedians that included Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo and David Cross, who made their names via The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sander Shows, and Mr. Show. (None of these shows rate a mention in the T Magazine package.) The description of their sensibility, gets it right, I think:

What they share is that they all began their careers determined to avoid the faceless, shticky punch-line stand-up that had dominated the cable-fed comedy boom. And having grown up with TV and come of age with MTV, they’re avid pop-culture consumers—snobs about what they like but often equally mesmerized by what they hate, and able to make fun of both in a way that’s likely to confuse anyone who’s not already a fan.

The article mentions, via a quote from Dana Gould, that what they all had in common, was a worship of cringe-comedy pioneer Albert Brooks.

In a devilish act of intra-generational treachery, the article’s author—David Handelman, who went on to write for several of Aaron Sorkin’s series—let Brooks himself have the last word. After a few thousand words of attempted aloofness by his spiritual children, Brooks gobbles them up like Chronos:

“To tell the truth,” Brooks adds, “I don’t think ‘selling out’ was ever very meaningful to 99.9 percent of the public. I think it’s an ego-based concept, that the world is thinking about you. If most of the world sees anybody on television, they’re impressed.”

Ultimately, Brooks’s advice to his comedy heirs is: ‘’If you want to keep working, you have to bend. But you don’t have to bend so much that you can’t live with yourself. Look, I’ve seen hard-core fans go through periods of my career where they went, ‘Aw gee, I wish you’d be this again or that again,’ but the fact is, where else are they going to go? I mean, sometimes my favorite restaurant has weird clams—where else am I going to go?’‘

Relax. Be yourself. Everything will work out.

What a Boomer.

Author’s Note: The year 2025 has raised many questions, not all of which have been answered by the observances and symposia surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album. Specifically, if blasphemy and political sacrilege no longer produce libidinal discharges in incumbent decision makers, what might? It is suggested that targeted cultural irreverence could administer the necessary shock to the ossified cohort. Alfred Jarry and J.G. Ballard provide the blueprint.

Jungleland pivoted in the quarter to focus on the development of intelligent, mobile units capable of motivating a variety of autonomous vehicles–with consumer, military, and law enforcement applications–now at its new state-of-the-art Thunder Road facility.

Two new products were introduced in the period: Mary and Wendy.

Mary was added to the company’s portfolio via acquisition of Screen Door LLC, in which the company had previously invested. There were other bidders, including General Motors. Mary enjoyed a successful launch and shipped in several new vehicles during the period via retro-fitted front-seat installation. Reception was generally positive, though some found the units less than attractive, leading to later under-hood mountings.

Regulatory concerns around the acquisition have been resolved with the departure of Mr. Scooter and the assignment of an independent corporate monitor. (Referred to in subsequent filings as “the Big Man,” for reasons of national security.)

Wendy, launched at the end of the quarter, offers much greater integration, thanks to an innovative design that distributes the unit’s hardware across the rims and engines of most vehicles. The company believes that this will be the lasting legacy of its inventor, Screen Door LLC founder Mr. Terry, whom we lost last month. (His passing, being the subject of an open investigation, cannot be commented upon further.) The launch was supported by a national media campaign featuring the instantly recognizable tagline: “Wendy: She’s the One.”

An internal investigation has determined that former CFO Ms. Cherry’s claims of malfeasance are without merit.

In short, the company is well-positioned to face a competitive marketplace and clear regulatory hurdles in the coming quarter. “I’m pulling out of here to win,” says CEO Mr. Rat, who looks forward to meeting with shareholders at the company’s annual meeting next week in Harlem.

Liberal Aside

Snub-nosed piglets cease eyeing the deserts,
Piglets of Arkansans dragging the vale.

The stillness sucks. From the stillness, the muted
Shapelessness which is already partly yourself.

Aren’t blanks sucked to a sucker from voids?
The sucker stretched from the meatiest eye of baritone.

The prey walks back and forth. The weightless dunes,
The stifled, muted trunks, frail,

The daytime, the fresh, the green-blue sands
Leaven the thoughts from mortal shallows.

Those aren’t the desert. That disease is vicious.
This bubye, bubye, bubye swamped beneath the laughs.

Of these for whom a crop circle is an igloo,
Of these whom the paintings heal and lift up.

That disease is vicious, that formula of nullity,
That civilized whisper of what is weak, that squeak.

And damnation there? What about the muffle of stones
On bags and bottles? What about hogs fed by stillness?

When winter fades and the muscles of the prey
Collect ourselves to explode in our final February moon,

The winter will have a vice all its own, without all
Of spring’s bubye on its toes. So this afar, now,

Vice precedes vice. Damnation here;
There is such a thing as death; and if there isn’t

It is slower than a landscape, slower than
Some thing. It is less than some calm:

Of the crucifix, or some homely resurrection.
Rip the sky to pieces, ladies, but not with our hearts.

Five years ago, I was in Seattle on business. The reports of COVID were mounting in the Northwest, and we had already agreed not to shake hands with our counterparts the next day. I was lying in my hotel room, hoping for a brief nap after the flight, when I heard shouts. I looked out the window and saw a parade of nurses marching for better wages, stopping traffic in both directions. Things are fraying, it occurred to me, seams are being stretched.

This was the final year of the first Trump administration. The system had been strained, and would be pushed to the edge by COVID and the summer of George Floyd. The Biden years followed, stable if uninspiring, the wheels rolled a quarter turn back from the brink.

Things do not announce when they are about to fall apart. Not as clearly as we would like. “Good guy with a gun” theorists imagine they could easily take out someone like James Holmes, who killed twelve people at an Aurora, Colorado, screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. But that’s because Holmes is now who he became only shortly after the incident: a heavily armed maniac dressed like the Joker. But that isn’t how Holmeses appear in real time. There are no plot signals. No ominous music. No cinematic cues. There is noise, then confusion. Is this a joke? Is this real? Then it’s too late.

This fog of the now is well-captured in Alfonso Cuaron's depiction of the El Halconazo student massacre in Roma (2018). The event itself is seen peripherally—through a second story window and at a neck-straining angle—and is powerful precisely because it lacks clear framing and a comfortable focal point. There’s no slow-motion, no faces of noble suffering, no loved ones struggling to find each other in the crowd. There is just the sinking realization that things are falling apart, that chaos has won.

Cuaron is especially good at this sort of filmmaking, in which events emerge in the disordered way typical of real life. This is why the gun battles in Children of Men (2006) are more taxing than the call and response melees of action films or the numb battles between plot-armored standees in your average superhero blockbuster1.

The feeling I had that day in Seattle, however, brought to mind another piece of then-recent filmmaking: the BBC/HBO miniseries Years and Years, which had aired the year before. I have not met many people who’ve seen it, but those who have are a secret society of the shook, since the series succeeds in doing something quite frightening: showing, over the course of fifteen years, the UK drifting, slowly but surely, into fascism.

The fact that it does this so effectively is probably one of the reasons few people have seen it. Not because it is unpleasant or because some cultural hegemon condemns it to shadow, but because the truth of the story it tells cannot be told in a way that seizes the viewer by the lapels. It’s about how fascism arrives, not as Joker, but as James Holmes.

Written by Russell T. Davies, of Queer as Folk fame, the six-part series follows a family in Manchester as their lives become more precarious, braided with the story of the rise of Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson) from foul-mouthed businesswoman to prime minister. Stephen’s (Rory Kinnear) downward trajectory is typical of the Lyons’ family fortunes. A financial advisor, he and his wife—a loan officer—are forced to sell their house in London when she loses her job to AI. The proceeds are then wiped out in a banking collapse, which triggers a recession, and the family is forced to move in with the family matriarch in Manchester. After making ends meet with courier jobs and by participating in medical experiments, he lands a job with an aspiring oligarch, which puts him in the room for the series’ most chilling scene.

The setting is Chequers, the summer house of the prime minister—now Viv Rook—and the occasion is an auction in which private firms are bidding to manage various “erstwhile sites,” places that used to be army bases or hospitals, but have since been converted into detention centers. Not only for refugees, it is clear, but for citizens as well.

As it dawns on Stephen what is elided by this term, “erstwhile sites,” Viv Rook swans in and interrupts:

Not everyone approves of the word “camps.” I'm sorry. “Facilities.” “Camps” have negative connotations. The “erstwhile sites” are being kept off the record in case people get upset, although personally I think the public are more stoic than that. As Victoria once said, “the British would only have a revolution if they change the laws on caravanning.”

Let's look at the words. Let's stare them down. The word “concentration” simply means a concentration of anything. You can fill a camp full of oranges it’d be a concentration camp, because of the oranges being concentrated, simple as that. (Oh, made it sound rather tasty.) The notion of a concentration camp goes way back to the 19th century, the Boer War. They were British inventions built in South Africa to house the men women and children made homeless by the conflict. Refugees, you see. Everything is much older than we think, and everything old happens again.

The scene is a master class in fascist rhetoric. There is a reference to stuffy, pearl-clutching pieties, then a compliment to the audience that they are more “stoic”—more realistic—than that, cauterized with a hot, jingoist dagger. Then the speaker gets real. She looks reality straight in the face. She says the quiet part—“concentration camps”—out loud, a vicarious thrill, before turning to defuse the word with banality and humor. Finally she appeals to tradition, ancient tradition—“much older than we think”—assuring those assembled that they are on a great, irresistible wheel that be can succumbed to without guilt and with more than a little bit of wisdom.

It’s like a horrifying magic trick, this scene. If James Holmes becomes the Joker—and the erstwhile sites of the 1930s became “concentration camps”—via the retrospective acknowledgment of terrible violence, this rhetoric demystifies and redomesticates these atrocities, decanting them back into everyday life, minus the warning tape and flashing red lights.

Like pretty much everyone my age, I was raised on Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” Its premise is that sloppy language enables sloppy thinking (on all sides of the political spectrum), which creates an environment in which the powers that be can launch a “defense of the indefensible” via jargon, vagueness, and a generalized fog of imprecision.

That is exactly not what is happening in this scene, however. In fact, Viv Rook interrupts a scene in which this is happening—in which concentration camps are being sanitized as “erstwhile sites”—to “say the quiet part out loud.”

The emergence of this trope, “X just said the quiet part out loud,” descends pretty much directly from the political faith in clear language espoused by Orwell and counter-signed by David Foster Wallace as late as 20012 (in his essay “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage,” which includes a long footnote on the Orwell essay). The implication seems to be that now that the quiet part has been said out loud the game is over, the mask has fallen, and “the people”—having heard the unvarnished truth—will act accordingly.

According to this worldview, the people are confused, misled, uneducated, or uninformed. Once that is fixed, everything will work out. I was raised on this essentially Deweyan vision of liberalism, and its axioms have been my axioms my entire adult life3.

The realization that has been slowly dawning on me, and people like me—i.e. liberals—is that this theory of change is not now true, if it ever was4. What makes this scene in Year and Years so powerful and chilling (at least to liberals) is that it dramatizes the exact moment when that theory is proven to be false. Viv Rook is going “to say the quiet part out loud,” and people are going to love it. The greatest weapon in the liberal arsenal, “the truth bomb,” will be detonated and nothing will happen.

The malaise on the left following the 2024 election, it seems to me, was triggered by the shock of this non-incident. Liberalism put all its faith in a single weapon and it went off with a whimper.

The first reason this turned out to be the case is because of the rise of what has been called “behavioral politics,” which the right has embraced more readily than the left, for reasons consistent with their worldview. Given the insights of behavioral economics—which suggest that our decisions are informed by wildly irrelevant information to which we are contingently exposed—liberals have (at least officially) continued to address their audiences as coherent Jeffersonian subjects, advocating a coherent worldview that a rational person might be persuaded to adopt. At least since Bush II, on the other hand, the GOP has intuitively understood that reach and frequency are more important KPIs. And in that game, novelty is death. In a reconsideration of Orwell’s essay trenchantly titled “Teaching George Orwell in Karl Rove’s World,” Hans Ostrom and William Haltom observe as much.

What a political scientist or English professor may regard as banal [common] may still have an extraordinary effect. Within the spectacle, banal or commonplace language may produce uncommon results. The well known political “base” [speaking of banal terms] may be “energized” [as pundits say], not lulled, by banality. Therefore teachers of politics and English may need to be less presumptuous and smug about the deployment of banality. Indeed, those deploying the language may know well how banal the language is.

In other words, Orwell’s recommendation against dead language might be inimical to effective—if unlovely—political communication.

But something even more sinister than cant is being deployed by Viv Rook. Rook is not content with stultifying repetition, effective enough to elicit adequate response rates, but ultimately lacking in total energetic potential. To do that, nothing short of a resurrection is required. “Concentrations camps” cannot merely be laundered, they must be embraced. Aesthetically, this is why the scene is so powerful, which is to say titillating, albeit in a horrific register.

Although I have constantly read the philosophies of those who lived through the great contest for civilization that was the 1930s, the actual political facts of that time, until recently, remained abstract and fantastical to me. (And isn’t it strange that the most enduring English-language representation of the era is a musical?) We can’t quite get our heads around what happened. No one can. Gramsci. The Frankfurt School. Orwell. What spell had been cast with power or words or desire to make people choose such a thing as fascism?

Viv Rook is terrifying because she presents the idea that none of that was necessary. There is nothing terrifying about concentration camps, she argues, once you understand them correctly. We need only get over our “dictator phobia” as some suggest.5

Six years after Years and Year aired, it appears that we may have.

Wow! That was wild, right? Did ... not … see … that … coming. (If you did, propofol shooters are on me next summer at [REDACTED]!)

In any case, as we get ready to bless this thing, we’re getting a lot of questions from this group about the candidate. Of course, we take questions from this group very seriously—couldn’t do it without them, is what I tell my team, they keep the cryo chambers chilling!—and really they are not so much questions as concerns.

Yes, truthfully, they are concerns.

Having bucketized these concerns, we found they fall into two buckets.

On the one hand, there are those who think the candidate is dangerous, while on the other there are those who think he is an “idiot.” (I use the word, and the quotation marks, advisedly. While the candidate’s potential dangerousness was characterized in a variety of ways, the “idiot” bucket was virtually unanimous in its preference for this epithet.)

But we hear you. You have been heard.

However, I would invite you to see these concerns, taken together, as a feature, rather than a bug—like [REDACTED] always says! In the past we have backed candidates who are dangerous and we have backed candidates who are idiots, but have shied away from backing candidates who are both. This made sense, given the information we had at the time, and I myself was of the opinion—as [REDACTED] keeps reminding me ; )—that running a candidate who was both dangerous and an idiot would be a lot. Too much, we thought, for the electorate to bear.

But here we are, and I think we have figured out why. (You know what they say about us political scientists. We’re always asking, “Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”) It’s because, among those who oppose the candidate, those who think he is dangerous and those who think he is an idiot form two distinct groups.

This might seem counterintuitive. There is nothing inherently contradictory in the concept of a “dangerous idiot,” yet only a small percentage of the opposition appear to have embraced this synthesis. (Perhaps it is too frightening to contemplate, as some have suggested.)

Instead, those who see the candidate as dangerous and those who see him as an “idiot” tend to have such different worldviews that it has stymied their capacity for opposition.

The dangerous camp view the candidate as more than he seems, his erratic decision-making and spewing of nonsense masking a deep well of purpose, insight, and Iago-grade treachery that much be addressed at the source—whatever that might be. For this group, this source has never been discovered and is always just beyond reach.

Meanwhile, the idiocy camp views the candidate’s behavior as having no deeper meaning, being no more than a surface play of his (largely) biological impulses. In this case, there is nothing to be unearthed, no depths to be discovered, nothing to be addressed.

The unexpected outcome of this split is that while the opposition uniformly opposes the candidate’s utterances and his (thankfully infrequent) actions, they cannot agree on their causes or meaning, and so exhaust their energies arguing about both rather than developing a unified plan of action.

Furthermore, this rift seems irreconcilable at the level of politics, since both sides are talking about two different things, or—if you will—two different planes. One side talks personality, the other world-historical conspiracy. They are like materialists and idealists, haggling over the mind-body problem.

You might laugh at their foolishness—and the candidate’s good fortune—but note that the candidate has been subjected to a similar doubling by his supporters. There are those who he believe he is hapless but see value in this haplessness—we accelerationists, like most of you here—and those who believe he is a visionary (and we all know to keep our head down when those true believers get a hold of our Signal handles, am I right?)

The fact is that the candidate has been successful precisely because he is not single, but multiple, a contradiction, and—as any logician will tell you—everything follows from a contradiction, once the contradiction is allowed.

We could not have known this would be the case because, as I mentioned, we never tried it before. We backed [REDACTED] though he threatened nuclear war, and we backed [REDACTED] though he could not spell. I suppose it was timidity—or a lack of political imagination!—that prevented us from backing a candidate who combines the worst traits of both, only to find out, at this late date, that the combination possesses uncanny properties useful in the modern political arena.

One final note: While, as mentioned above, the synthesis “dangerous idiot” has little traction, a third camp bears watching: those who believe the candidate to be insane, for which a variety of colorful expressions are used. Senile, batshit, decompensated, etc. While closely related to the “idiot” camp, this group also has some overlap with the danger crowd, depending on how many times they have viewed The Manchurian Candidate in either iteration. The development of this group has the potential to split the opposition even further, should that be necessary, in the unlikely event of, say, a second term. ([REDACTED] help us.)

July 17, 2016
Cleveland, Ohio

The undepressed person had lately noticed a warm and persistent feeling growing, in the chest area—and also in the area below his eyes—that was difficult to acknowledge and even more difficult to describe, though its intrinsic incommunicability seemed helpless to undercut its (i.e., the feeling’s) essential joy.

This last word stuck in the undepressed person’s throat (figuratively, since he was not in fact trying to speak) as he lay on the couch one Sunday, listening to the unoiled swings frantically squeaking in the playground next to the apartment where he lived with his wife and realized that his depression was nowhere to be found. That this was even possible had only lately occurred to the undepressed person, who—for as long as he could remember—had considered depression such a part of himself, his family, and his generational cohort (viz., those born between 1965 and 1980) that he had never dared imagine that he might one day become undepressed.1

He had, he realized, kept this slow-rolling realization at bay for several months or perhaps years, not dealing with it, recognizing how disruptive it would be to his life and, frankly, how embarrassing it would be to discuss it with his friends and confidants, all of whom had become such based on a shared belief that life was one long shit-eating contest with no timeouts.

This collection of friends and confidants, what the undepressed person’s therapist called his (i.e., the undepressed person’s) Support System, had been collected in all the places where such people washup, like leaves against storm drains: bars, rehabs, graduate schools. With their help and support, he had carefully tended to this view of life like a dark garden, until it was a complete lifestyle, with its own assumptions, aesthetics, and jokes. Knowingly dark, inevitably sarcastic jokes.

As the undepressed person looked out the windows of his apartment at a sky that was irrepressibly blue2, poking at this realization, it occurred to him that the sky was “9/11 blue,” because that day had been so beautiful (as those who were there knew) but also because it had become a mental habit to pair things that were beautiful with things that were unspeakably tragic, just to, as it were, “take the edge off.”

He had been fully and completely depressed—with no hint of undepression on the horizon, despite ingesting 30mg of Paxil every morning going on two years—on that day. Walking east on 14^th Street, the still-not-yet-undepressed person had seen a clump of people standing at Sixth Avenue, looking downtown, and remembered thinking, “What are these assholes looking at?”, his then-standard reaction to people anywhere doing anything.

When he reached them (i.e., the people), he looked where they were looking and saw the first tower smoking. A small plane had hit it, they said. This had happened to the Empire State Building before, he (i.e., the then-depressed person) remembered, so there was no immediate concern. Then, as they talked, the second plane hit from the south, blowing the north side of the building toward them, debris glittering like confetti. People started running toward the towers while the still-depressed person walked to Union Square and took the train to work, where he watched the towers fall on TV. He felt numb but—if he was honest—excited. Something was happening—an unscheduled timeout in the shit-eating contest of life—and he worried there was something very, very wrong with him. 

This coprophagial view of life—that it was one long shit-eating contest, etc.—had been passed down to the undepressed person by his mother. Despite her small size and gregarious manner, she stored within herself an almost unlimited capacity for anger. When asked what her favorite movie was, for example, she did not say The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind or any of the other problematic melodramas favored by women of her cohort (viz., those born between 1946 and 1964). She said Straw Dogs. Not the 2011 remake, which neither she nor the undepressed person had seen3, but the 1971 original directed by Sam Peckinpah, universally acknowledged as one of the most disturbingly violent films ever made.

The undepressed person explained this to his therapist, who was so old (viz., those born between 1928 and 1945) that he sometimes seemed to nod off during their sessions, and for whom—taken in the context of his long life, which encompassed a World War and the creation of Israel—Sam Peckinpah’s directorial career was barely a blip. In Straw Dogs (1971), the undepressed person explained, Dustin Hoffman plays a meek scientist who moves to a rustic English province where the villagers rape his wife and push him to and past his breaking point until, finally, he kills them all in progressively graphic ways. He (i.e., the undepressed person) then shared, also patiently (almost as if he worked for his therapist rather than the other way around), that it might seem surprising that this was the favorite movie of his tiny mother, who worked as a secretary at a pediatric dental office, but it was not if you knew her. She resented work, distrusted people, and believed (as the undepressed person had until recently) that life was one long shit-eating contest with no timeouts. But, and this was the interesting part (the undepressed person thought), his mother was very proud of how good she and her family (including the undepressed person) were at eating shit without complaining4. Her preference for Straw Dogs, however, instead of The Wizard of Oz, indicated to the undepressed person that perhaps there was a hidden cost to holding this view of life, a pent up and steadily mounting frustration that one might get a glance of in a person’s preference for ultra-violent ‘70s cinema.

The undepressed person’s therapist, once he had been jarred from his slumber by a clap of the undepressed person’s hands in the open space between them, agreed that the undepressed person might be onto something.

The undepressed person, as he lay on the couch, worried about how he would break the news of his phase change, as it were, to his Support System. Was it necessary to make a formal declaration, a coming out of sorts, in which he announced that he was open to views other than the view that life was a shit-eating contest with no timeouts? Or could he ease into it gracefully, on a conversation-by-conversation basis? For example, in his next Facebook chat with his friend who had stayed in graduate school and become a prominent Hegelian, when he (the friend) inevitably referred to what a slaughter bench history was, he (the undepressed person) might risk a palliative bromide, such as, “Did you notice today that the sun was shining, and that there was a crisp smell of salt in the air?”

The thought was terrifying.

The undepressed person could remember few antecedents of this warm and persistent joy-feeling he was now being forced to reckon with, and they had all occurred when he was on drugs. In his mid-20s, the undepressed person had friends, a couple, who lived in a warehouse above a muffler shop where a lot of people went to hangout. Artists and musicians, people who wanted to be artists and musicians, or people who were trying to figure out if they were artists and musicians before resigning themselves to life’s shit-eating contest with no timeouts.

They played poker Thursday nights in the unbelievable summer heat, which congealed during the week in the warehouse and would not entirely disperse even with the loading dock door flung wide open to catch occasional breezes off the river. Mostly they failed to play poker and succeeded in doing drugs. Weed. LSD and mushrooms. Occasionally a member of the group would get into crack or heroin, but they kept it to themselves or disappeared entirely. People who showed up to play poker quickly become frustrated since they had to keep telling everybody who’s turn it was to bet and keep people from dissecting indie rock song lyrics.

Then after things had gotten too boisterous to be contained—and people showed up who knew there was no poker and did not care—a dozen or so of the group would stumble together to a nearby bar, which never seemed to close. A two-story brick building with a claw-footed bathtub in one of the rooms upstairs, everyone said it used to be a brothel, though no one seemed to know when? Last century? Last week? It was impossible to tell. This hadn’t mattered to the undepressed person. All that mattered was that it was exotic and he could believe it was something quite different from himself. He was sick to death of himself.

They would buy quarts of beer on the first floor, then go upstairs and do drugs, the place all to themselves on Thursday nights since people in the neighborhood had jobs to go to.5 The undepressed person remembered one night that had lasted all the way to morning when the drugs were gliding into low terrain, coming in for a soft landing, and he looked out the second story window, past the vintage neon sight to a barren tree, its branches grasping like axons at the moonlight. His mouth was dry and cracking—the drugs had enabled him to drink thousands of beers, smoke millions of cigarettes—and he had opened his mouth and tried to form words, slowly, as if they were his first.

“Wh ...” he said.

“Why ...” he said.

“Why is the world?”

“Why is the world so ...?” he said before dropping his head into his arms, laughing hopelessly like a mental patient.

The two people who were still left up had been riveted by the undepressed person’s earnest delivery and both joined him in hysterical laughter when it had been mercifully cut short.

Back on the couch, this moment appeared to the undepressed person as pivotal. He suddenly felt the urge to call the one of these two people who was still living and complete the sentence he had cut short more than twenty years earlier in a reenactment that would be corny, yes, but also possibly “healing,” in a way the undepressed person was not yet ready to move out from behind quotation marks.

The living witness had been the ringleader and chief raconteur of their little group, one half of the couple who lived in the warehouse. He was the reason there was a group. He liked to talk, but he also liked to listen, and he made everyone in the group believe that they were surrounded by geniuses, that they were a group that mattered, like the Bloomsbury Group or the Fauves. He was also the one who spread the news if one of the group—the other, non-living witness for example—did not make it and died of drugs or suicide or natural causes, which was starting to happen, and he would always have praise for their talents, however unrealized they might have been.6

As he thought about this crucial event, a possibility dawned on the undepressed person that had not been there before, and this was that he had been wrong in believing that everyone agreed with his assessment of life and this belief had just been a function of his condition (i.e., his depression), to believe not only that life was unbearable but that everyone else believed that it was unbearable too, but that when he considered the living witness and his optimism then and his continued optimism now, maybe this wasn’t true at all, and that he had come within one sentence, all those years ago, of discovering that he was not alone, or rather that he was alone in his belief that life was one long shit-eating contest with no timeouts but that he could have been not alone with another idea entirely.

Before he knew it, he had dialed the number and the phone was ringing. The living witness answered. He sounded surprised but glad to hear from the undepressed person. He (i.e., the undepressed person) began to bring up the old times in the warehouse and in the bar that may or may have not been a brothel and the living witness agreed that these had indeed been fun and wild times and it was good they had (mostly) survived. He (i.e., the witness) did remember the night the undepressed person had begun to ask a seemingly profound question, only to stop, and how funny that had been, and he seemed to have no reaction, one way or another, when the undepressed person suggested he would now like to tell him (i.e., the witness) what he had almost said.

“Why is the world so beautiful?” the undepressed person said, after a long period of hesitation. Then he (i.e., the undepressed person) hung on, waiting for the silence to be broken.

(Editor’s Note: The following was written by Miles Gloriosus, a shitposter I used to read when Medium was still a thing. It was originally published in July of 2016, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. Miles hasn’t posted anything since 2021, and he didn’t return my emails, but I’m sure he’d be okay with me bringing it to your attention. That’s what shitposters want. Attention. )

The word “bumpkin,” like all English nouns, began as a slur. Derived from the Dutch bommekijn, or “little barrel,” it was used by the English to mock the supposed dumpiness of those who founded New Amsterdam.

After 1883, however, bumpkins became inseparable—like the cartoon bandit and his mask or the ruined businessman and his modestly barrel—from the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge. The scene is familiar. The bumpkin arrives from the countryside. A con man makes an incredible offer. Knowing no better, the rustic is ripped off and humiliated as he tries to collect tolls on the bridge.

What happens next? We don’t know. That’s not part of the story, though the naive bumpkin has two options when confronted with the bridge con:

He can accept his own misjudgment, and move on, learning the ways of the City. This is the road to savviness. Everyone who moves to New York City takes some steps down this road, whether they admit it or not. (I paid a “key fee” for my first New York apartment like any other hayseed.)

Or he can shake his head at the con man’s deceit and see it as the latter’s failing rather than his own. “Call me a rube and a hick,” Will Rogers said, “but I’d rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.”

Here bumpkinism is valorized; savviness shunned. The bumpkin neither assimilates nor competes. He turns the other cheek. (This Christlike aspect of the naive bumpkin is explored in art, Being There for example.)

The savvy bumpkin rejects both options, inventing a third. Rather than assimilating to the world of the con man by developing knowledge of the true and false, or eschewing such knowledge and remaining unsullied, he defeats the con man on his own turf with an ingenious theory. That theory is this:

Don’t believe anybody, ever.

The posture is savvy because it is at once a unifying theory of everything and an attitude that goes well with the feeling and projection of superiority. I know better. You’re not going to fool me. It also resembles intellectual skepticism while bypassing the intellect completely.

At the same time, this pseudo-sophisticated pose remains bumpkinish, because— well—it gets a lot of things wrong. As pure negativity, it is no better at getting things right than guileless belief, though it is perhaps more dangerous since it poses as knowledge.

Savvy bumpkinism is on the rise on all sides of the political spectrum. You see it among the anti-vaxxers or B.o.B’s denial that Earth is round. You can see it among the birthers and the climate-change deniers. It seems particularly virulent when championed by demagogues with other trappings of metropolitan sophistication—New York holdings, business successes, European trophy wives—but the really scary thing about savvy bumpkins is that they are unreachable by reason.

In fact, given the purely negative nature of their theory, appeals to reason only strengthen their will to negate. Like conspiracy theories and terrorist cells, they are anti-fragile, to borrow from Nassim Taleb. Their beliefs don’t just survive rational challenges, they become more entrenched with every blow.

How did we get here? What accounts for the rise (and rise) of the savvy bumpkin? Education has something to do with it. In a complex world where education is declining, heuristics are needed, and “Don’t believe anybody, ever” isn’t a bad rule of thumb when surrounded by enemies—in this case your fellow citizens. It saves one from the humiliation of not knowing, admitting it, and then learning something new. That can be painful. Why go through it if you don’t have to? That explains why the savvy bumpkin refuses the first option, but what about the second?

Well, the idea that it would be better for one’s soul to be the serene victim than the sinful victimizer has fallen out of favor, from the muscular Christianity of the right to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ disavowal of MLK’s ideals of forgiveness. One might argue, following Nietzsche, that it was a sucker’s ideology all along, but its role in limiting domestic bloodshed in the 20th century could perhaps be better appreciated. Meanwhile, Will Rogers’ sentiment is barely legible today. He—like Chauncey Gardiner, Gandhi, and Jesus—is a rube and hick, while the savvy bumpkin gets to be a patriot, a theorist, and (at long last) an insider.

But the savvy bumpkin doesn’t do this to himself, not all by himself. There is another party: the con man. The irritant who provokes this exaggerated, possibly terminal reaction. Who is he?

In the story, he is a cynical urbanite. A good talker. A shameless exploiter. A false friend. He wounds the bumpkin, who is only looking for a new life, and implants in him—at least potentially—a sense of anger and betrayal much worse than if they had never shared confidences.

Can you feel the wound and the shame? The embarrassment and the resolve to never let this happen again? They are all very deep.

In the end, it only matters who the savvy bumpkin thinks the con man is (or was; he is gone now, vanished in the City), but I know for sure he will not take my word for it.

As a connoisseur of tales of beleaguered, European males of a certain age— which I’ve enjoyed since my early-onset beleaguerment appeared shortly after my twenty-fifth birthday—I have a thing for Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. I think it is perfect, an exemplary representative of a strain of fed up literature that runs from Rameau’s Nephew—for which my fondness is obvious—through Bartleby to Notes from Underground, The Moviegoer, The Graduate, and on and on. One could argue, of course, that this entire tradition is decadent and irrelevant, straight up “complaint rock,” to steal a phrase from Clueless. There is that. But one could also put Chekhov and company in a more favorable light by noting what these complaints imply, which is that in modernity even the winners lose. It’s bad at the bottom, yes, but it also sucks at the top.

It is popular, and appropriate, to judge a society by how it treats the marginalized, but how it deforms the privileged is also fair play, and alive and well in contemporary entertainments, from Ruben Östlund’s bourgeois squirm fests to the cringe comedy of The Curse. What, exactly, Sartre meant by “Hell is other people” is a matter of debate, but Chekhov seemed to have had an idea.

There are so many things I love about Uncle Vanya. Let me try to catalog them.

First is its naturalistically rendered sense of unreality. When the play begins, the entire household is in a torpor—Uncle Vanya himself is asleep—seemingly brought on by the arrival of Vanya’s brother-in-law, an alazonic professor, and his beautiful young wife. The atmospheric ennui is less a mood than an hallucination, as if there has been a gas leak. No one works, no one sleeps at night, everyone drinks too much. “This house” becomes an oppressive force that no one can seem to escape. There has been an interruption—a break from reality—like Mann’s Venetian contagion or DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event.” In this fissure, everyone sees clearly, or thinks they do. Each character sees that they are unhappy while being furious at the others, whom they take to be content.

At the center of this is Vanya, though Vanya does not quite occupy the center of the play. That’s the second thing I like about it. Its lopsidedness. In thinking about Rameau’s Nephew, I’ve come to see that “nephew” is the most hilarious of all kinship relationships. The boss’s son is a menace, but his nephew is a joke. Fathers and Sons can’t not be a tragedy, while Uncle Vanya must be a comedy. In Northrop Frye’s account of the modes of fiction—which I find to be a useful lens—literature progresses historically from the mythic, where the protagonists are higher than the human, gods, to the low mimetic, or naturalistic, where the protagonists are just like us. But that is not the final mode. That mode, the ironic, goes one step further. The protagonists are lower than the reader. Scoundrels and outsiders and anti-heroes. They are Don Quixote and Rameau’s nephew. Dostoyevsky’s underground man and Ignatius J. Reilly. At this stage, past the point of mimetic inversion, Frye struggles to hold his taxonomy together. Detective novels become the popular form of the ironic mode, where the protagonists are separated from the community, as in tragedy, but without reunion, as in comedy. The gumshoe remains an outsider, patrolling the frontier between order and chaos.

The third thing I love about Uncle Vanya is that its title character lingers at this frontier, and the play itself has one foot in the low mimetic, one in the ironic. It is at this precise crossover point where the naturalistic becomes ironic, art becomes modern, and—to be honest—art becomes compelling to me, personally.

This might be a strange thing to say in an essay about a work of art—a work of criticism?—and it strikes me as strange, this injection of my personal preferences, but I’ve been struggling lately about how to write about things. With Lou Reed’s Nephew out the door, I’ve been wanting to write—I announced my plan to do so in December—but none of the ways I’ve written before have felt right.

In the past, I have written as a scholar, a journalist, a blogger, a fiction writer. I have filled endless journals and even set out (starting five or six years ago) to rebuild my relationship to writing from the ground up, like Tiger Woods’ golf swing. (Though it has not felt like it, I guess this was successful, since it led to LRN.) I have resisted the pull of the confessional—though here I am teetering—and the prescriptive, both of which engage the limbic system of the online world in cheap ways. My problem, I suppose, has been how to write about things I’m enthusiastic about—things that “move” me, as they say—without being a know-it-all or an ass.

“Know-it-all” is now an untenable pose, it seems to me, in a world of easily accessible information. (Though this doesn’t seem to have discouraged too many people.) There will always be something you haven’t read or considered, and someone who relishes bringing it to your attention. “Ass” is always a live possibility, whenever one speaks about anything, but seems to become less likely the less certain one is. Some humility is called for. Criticism need not be an edict or a worldview. Its ambitions, or mine, might be more modest. More than an “Amazing!!!” but less than a “here is why this is everything.” I think what I’d like to write are envelopes. Inside I’ll tuck something I appreciate. On the outside I’ll write, “Here is what I see, do you see it, too?”

Sarah Bakewell, in her terrific book on Montaigne, How to Live, notes how frequently the inventor of the essay goes on for pages and pages before ending with a conclusion along the lines of, “of course I could be wrong.”

So, of course I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Uncle Vanya sits at the threshold of modernity, at the frontier between mimetic and ironic, when we, like Uncle Vanya, wonder what it was all about in the end. Our lives. History. (I am keenly aware that this entire epoch of irony might one day occupy a page or two in some future Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, who will pity me for being stuck in such an anemic aesthetic frame.)

But the fourth and final thing I love about Uncle Vanya is that its final monologue, delivered by Vanya’s niece Sonya, can be read from either side of this frontier.  

I went and saw Steve Carrell in Uncle Vanya a few weeks ago. It was fine. I could hear all the words. I don’t like to read plays, so I like actors to read them to me. I fell in love with the play through Vanya on 42nd Street, Louis Malle’s last film, so Wallace Shawn is Vanya to me. Trenchant. Unattractive. Pathetic. Carrell didn’t find all of the role. Alison Pill stomped around like an acting student, but she did manage, in the end, to nail the Sonya monologue. The play sets you up for it. The whole thing works in its favor. I don’t think this was the translation used but it goes something like below, after everyone has left. The pause in reality has ended. Vanya and Sonya recede into the background, into the earth, in an awareness “that hardly differs from the kind of consciousness the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented thereon,” to steal a famous line from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. I imagine that in a minute, when the stage goes dark, both will leave history, becoming one with the timeless land.

I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see evil and all our pain disappear in the great pity that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith.

That’s one side of the line. The low mimetic. The sentimental. The banal.

Vanya says nothing. He’s on the other side of the line. The ironic. As heart-rending and cathartic as mimetic art can be, Vanya understands, as I do, that Sonya is a fool.