In a psychopathic atmosphere, it feels like anything can happen, and in a perverse atmosphere, pleasure and catharsis always feel close at hand. In a narcissistic atmosphere, anything involving catharsis feels like it can happen — for the narcissist.

In such an atmosphere, the non-narcissist may be included in that catharsis — swept up and treated as an extension of the narcissist — or, if in opposition to the narcissist, be the object of that catharsis.

Let me explain:

1. The narcissist thinks of others as components of their self. If one is working on a common cause with a narcissist and things are positive, the atmosphere can feel very up and festive. For instance, when a creative project is going well, time with a narcissist can be exhilarating. But if things take a turn and a conflict emerges in the collaboration, the narcissist must negate the other, who is no longer a part of them and so must be controlled, exiled, or destroyed. The narcissistic atmosphere is fragile, and scapegoating always hovers.

2. Common projects can obscure someone’s narcissism since the shared goal of the project’s success can make it seem like the narcissist is able to think beyond themselves. Their focus, after all, appears to be on the project. In “normal life,” however, outside of any shared goal or purpose, the narcissist’s inability to recognize others as subjects is usually much more apparent. Talking to a narcissist, one quickly realizes they are listening to what one is saying either for praise or as a jumping-off point for their exhibitionism.

3. An example: a person speaks of their debilitating cancer treatment, and the narcissist replies with a story of being treated for an STI or being down a week with the flu. (Ask me how I know this.) There is no recognition of asymmetry — if anything, the narcissist appears envious that others have had experiences they haven’t, and this otherness must be immediately negated. Imagine a playwright telling an actor about their new play and the actor replying, “It’s funny, I’ve had an idea for a play for a while. I just haven’t had time to write it.” It is a similar negation at work: the envied other must be diminished so the narcissist’s sense of specialness is maintained.

4. Narcissism is especially difficult to discern in romantic relationships, since such intimacy starts as a small-scale project — the project being “getting into a relationship,” which for many only reaches its climax in marriage or the establishment of a family. To the non-narcissist, the narcissist’s desire and investment can seem like a capacity for genuine intimacy. But the narcissist is not investing in a relationship, merely a seduction. This is often obvious to the non-narcissist’s friends when they meet the new romantic partner. Since the friends are not directly involved in the project of getting into this relationship, they can more easily see the narcissist’s lack of regard and interest.

   

5. Cults function in a similar way: the narcissist’s manipulation is obscured by the stated project of self-improvement, and outsiders see it, but those inside initially do not. Many political movements share this quality. This is why cults and political movements can collapse so quickly and spectacularly, with more and more members needing to be labeled apostates while a shrinking core of true believers remains merged with the narcissist-leader.

6. Which leads us to where we started: once one no longer functions as the narcissist’s extension (psychopathic), the catharsis (perverse) must be activated: the non-narcissist is attacked, dumped, or ghosted. In extreme circumstances, the non-narcissist is killed — many murder-suicides are enacted by the most extreme narcissists, people who have not spent their lives mercilessly exploiting others like a psychopath but who, under intense stress, may utterly objectify those they feel have humiliated them by intolerable difference. Perhaps the cult collapses as loyalists are kicked out or ends in a suicide ritual for the few remaining. The political movement self-destructs with attacks and recriminations as catharsis is desperately sought by the most narcissistic members.

   

7. The narcissist is ultimately playing a losing game: no matter how seducible and manipulable others are, no matter how submissive, ultimately everyone is a subject — even the most pliant. The subject will emerge, one way or another, and the narcissist will be faced with the total delusion of the world they have built. Catharsis is the only thing (they think) they have left, and they will futilely go after it as compensation for the sterile and loveless world they find themselves in.

I have been thinking about overlaps and differences between psychopathic environments and narcissistic and perverse variants. The narcissistic type is harder to articulate because it overlaps so much with psychopathy. But the perverse is more distinct and I am ready to try my hand at detailing its unique atmosphere.

As with the post on psychopathy, I am merely trying to describe a psychological and social reality. I am not moralizing, even if one might draw out moral or ethical implications from my thoughts. I believe we all have psychopathic and perverse elements to our psyches — which is why these atmospheres are powerful to so many.

1. In a perverse atmosphere, pleasure is happiness. This is a common message of social media personalities, and why so much online content boils down to “I just had sex” or “I just ate food” — the implication is that this physical experience provided a long-lasting satisfaction, sans ambivalence. There is no psychic weight to the sex; there is no psychic (or literal!) weight to the eating.

2. Related: there are no aftermaths where pleasure is concerned. Pleasure is eternal, or at least in some fundamental way it exists outside of time. It has no consequence: you never get bored of physical pleasure, you never get full or sick from eating. The realities of time are foreclosed in a perverse atmosphere.

3. Because a perverse atmosphere relies on the power of transgression — and transgression is quickly normalized — a fantasy that one can always get or do “more” is essential. Sex must increase in frequency, volume, and type. Food adventures have a similar structure, familiar to anyone who has seen an influencer order 12 dishes at a restaurant. In a perverse atmosphere, transgression moves in an escalating way which always intensifies satisfaction.

   

4. But there is more to perversity than a focus on pleasure and transgression. Given that perversity relies so much on the build-up and release of tension to (theoretically) enable pleasure, it is notably concerned with limiting psychic tension. In a perverse atmosphere, certainties are the immediate and natural conclusion of thinking. If you bring an ethical dilemma to a pervert, they have a ready-to-go logic meant to foreclose any new thinking — nothing needs to be worked over emotionally or intellectually, the answer is obvious. Examples of a pervert’s advice: “You can’t control the other person’s reaction.” “That’s just how life works.” “Do what’s right for you.” “Embrace your nature.” Non-perverse people with dilemmas feel the tensions of conflict, uncertainty, ambivalence; the pervert rejects these states for modes of thinking that eliminate tension. In a perverse atmosphere, tension must only exist as a prop to enable catharsis, and if physical release is not possible, the tension must be eliminated by ideology immediately.

5. If you press a pervert to engage in thinking about a complicated situation, they will reject the normal structure of thinking-through, and redirect to a rationalizing idea that you are just afraid — of pleasure, of punishment, of asserting yourself. The deep logic of the pervert is that pleasure is available to us at all times, and it is society or our superego that stops us from embracing and experiencing it. In a perverse atmosphere, ethical concerns are merely copes for fears of pleasure or punishment.

After a long string of residencies, I have enjoyed being at home — in Brooklyn, and also literally on my couch. Going away is good for meditative thinking and creative work, and it abstracts everything in a way that makes a return fresh, interesting, and slightly destabilizing.

When I was away, many people told me they were sure I would hate The Drama as much as they did. But when I caught it just before it left theatres, I had one of my most delightful film experiences in a while and was perplexed by my circle’s general dismissal of it. It’s the story of a person who is scapegoated for not committing an act of violence — she intensely fantasized doing it — by people, the movie makes clear, who actually have hurt others in cruel ways. The ingenious set-up allowed a perceptive comedy of hypocrisy and projection to unfold. This director, Kristoffer Borgli, is special — Dream Scenario and Sick of Myself are also excellent, idiosyncratic dark comedies about victimization and scapegoating that are linked thematically and formally but distinct.

For me to really like a work of art or entertainment, I need to feel that it understands something about life that for whatever reason is not understood or is under-discussed. The first two seasons of The Comeback had this quality for me. Lisa Kudrow played sitcom actress Valerie Cherish as a deranged narcissist who, while not being a bad person, simply cannot accept the ways she is not central to the world she inhabits. One great bit from (I believe) the pilot has her ignoring her beloved hair stylist’s cancer diagnosis because she’s so wrapped up in herself. It’s funny, sad, recognizable — and you barely have time to process it before the next narcissistic micro-moment arrives. It’s a common dynamic with narcissists, and one not much talked about.

Season two deepened and darkened the character of Valerie, I felt, so I was excited for season three. But season three did the opposite: instead of exploring the not-understood or under-discussed, it existed to (barely) dramatize the thesis that AI is dehumanizing and a threat to the entertainment industry. The character of Valerie was still slightly narcissistic but essentially she had overcome the extremes of her narcissism and was a voice of wisdom about Hollywood, technology, humanity, etc. This need to demonstrate a banal thesis at every turn robbed the show of what had made it challenging and unsettling. To sentimentalize is always to flatten.

I wrote about Alex Stupak in one of my first Substacks. I enjoy having role models in industries outside my own, and he has been a big one for me — someone who thinks deeply and critically, wants to both challenge and provide pleasure, and who grasps economic and business realities without sidelining his artistry. So when he showed up on a mainstream Food Network competition show, I took notice. (Interestingly, the only other chef I can say is a role model for me, Wylie Dufresne, just did a full season on a cooking show as a judge.)

Alex was able to translate who he is (or who I understand him to be) to television remarkably well. In fact, he was so himself that multiple Redditors took to the Food Network subreddit (yes I read it) to slam his supposedly arrogant personality. What they were really seeing was a creative, assertive, libidinally alive spirit who is not constantly manipulating our perception of him to fit the mores and psychological trends of the day. He simply is who he is. To know him even casually as I do is to understand him to be sensitive and kind, but the “Food Network superego” surely favors more happy-talk, neutered, and sentimental personalities.

If there were a “Theatre Network” competition show calling on playwrights to compete, I have to say that Alex has shown me a route to do it without compromising creativity or integrity. Granted, there is no such channel and there will never be one.

Fifteen years after eating his desserts at wd~50, I am still surprised and delighted by Alex. He shows me it’s possible to be yourself in a deeply trivial era.

Finally, earlier this month, I had a fun chat with Raanan Hershberg about one of my favorite movies, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. This is my third appearance on his show. I’m getting better at being on podcasts. I tend to hate podcasts — people talking, talking, talking, endlessly, all the time, sucking up cultural energy that I suspect once went to art — but I think we got into some interesting ideas about this masterpiece.

One of the plays, An Opening in Time, has not previously been published. The play is dear to me — I wrote it in 2014, believing that I might die soon. My aim was to write a play that distilled my previous work and integrated new insights I had during my illness. I wanted it to be accessible to a range of audiences, and also deeper than anything I’d written before — a dramatization of my most intractable problems.

Initially it seemed like the play would have a major NYC premiere — but as is often the case, that big production never came together.

What I was told was the play’s selling point — a strong role for a woman in her 60s or 70s — turned out to be the sticking point. Though a major star briefly circled it (until her producer came to a reading and dissociated while watching), other actors at the necessary level of fame were not interested — strengthening my sense that famous people mostly do not want to play flawed and vulnerable characters in new plays (in established classics it’s fine).

Longer-term, though, there’s hope: a famous friend told me she’d play the part when she ages into it — so stay tuned for a revival in 2045…

Unique about this residency was that I didn’t come with a project firmly in mind. Initially I played with various ideas but none of them took off. So I just started writing automatically, with no plan. A play started to emerge, and something about it reminded me of a John Ashbery poem which then served as an organizing totem.

I don’t know what will come from my initial work, but it’s not like anything I’ve written before, formally and maybe tonally.

Before I left for the residency, one of my best friends said that he wished for me to write something that I found “fun.” That’s not a word I associate with writing, and his words struck me as an amusing provocation. But I do think I had fun with what I began — certain questions that agitate me when I write a play were absent, and while other tensions took their place, the formal choices I made did not allow for the usual madness to emerge. The writing was difficult, but in a new, less pressurized way.

Fishers Island is a special place, and Lighthouse Works is a beautifully structured and run residency, with real care afforded to the five artists in residence. I will cherish my time there.

Just prior to spring, I read Karl Ove Knausgård’s novel The School of Night. Its surface story is simple: a callow twenty-year-old fantasizes about becoming a famous photographer and, after a horrific incident, becomes one. A mystery around the incident reverberates into his middle age, then comes to a head.

I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that The School of Night explores contemporary cultural dynamics — fame- and attention-seeking, the no-contact trend, scandal, scapegoating. But more deeply it dramatizes timeless existential and spiritual questions about meaning and purpose. Unlike recently acclaimed films with existential themes — I’m thinking of It Was Just an Accident and Sirât — the book’s foregrounding of psychic reality made me feel like I was in the realm of people, not messages. At this point in my life, I can’t imagine any “insight” a work of art could offer that would interest me unless it manifests through a psyche.

The School of Night gave me big questions in a small and recognizable mind. I found it captivating and disturbing. (See my friend Trevor’s review here.)

Before I left for Fishers Island I attended the memorial for Isiah Whitlock Jr. at the Atlantic Theater. This was the first memorial I attended for an actor who was in one of my plays — when the great Mark Blum died, it was early Covid and no gatherings were possible in New York.

Like Mark, Isiah had a special warmth that I will always remember. A friend of his who spoke said that shortly before he died, Isiah motioned for her to come close and said, “No one has a bad thing to say about me.” I think this must have been true for Isiah, who could be as critical and cynical as anyone in showbiz must be but who was always positive and kind. I spoke about how he modeled for me an essential skill for surviving this industry: to see all the pathology, experience all the disappointment, but stay cheerful. I can’t say I always achieve this, but it is the perpetual goal.

Many spoke beautifully of Isiah as a person and as an actor. His performance in Four is so vivid for me, even though it’s nearly twenty-five years since the MTC run. Something I love about theatre is how the good stuff stays with you. No one can fake that; no hype or PR can generate it. Sometimes the soul of a play opens up — usually because of an actor — into something so alive that it lives in you forever.

RIP Isiah.

A final thought: being away from “normal life” means I am at least slightly less tapped into the news cycle and the various shifting cultural debates. A few things I’ve noticed as I begin to return to my normal media rituals:

1. Not all, but most “opinions” — about movies, TV, podcasts, whatever — feel less like earnest sharing of one’s thoughts and more like an attempt to generate desire and interest.

2. Social media still seems to thrive on a sense memory of a monoculture where we all have read and seen the same stuff. There’s a longing for this even though it doesn’t really exist — and the ways in which it seems to are largely performative (see 1).

3. The mainstream media also labors under the fantasy that there is still a monoculture. Ben Lerner is a good writer, but why is the Times saying his “Latest Is a Strange and Brilliant Attempt to Resurrect the Novel”? The novel isn’t dead and there are many good novelists writing today. And “resurrect” for whom? Again, here is a nostalgia for some kind of center that is gone.

This February, my adaptation of Hedda Gabler had its first professional production in the US since its 2009 Broadway premiere, five days after Barack Obama’s inauguration (worst timing ever). While I haven’t been able to see the new production, I have been in close touch with director Marti Lyons and have been excited about her vision for the play. In a Zoom chat I did with her theatre’s donors, I was asked about my experience adapting the text, which awakened rich memories for me of how seriously I took the task. I really wanted to become Ibsen in order to adapt his play and, once I felt I had gotten as close as one could to that, experience him in all the characters as I wrote. No doubt the initial criticisms of my adaptation especially stung because I carried Ibsen’s pain and disappointment (as I imagined them) in response to those criticisms, as well as my own.

The fourth season of Industry has so far unfolded with the same psychological complexity it reached in its extraordinary third season. Marisa Abela’s performance remains beyond great for me (speaking of Hedda, she would make an amazing one).

But I’ve had a nagging sense that this season the show — which as of this writing has two episodes yet to air — has lacked a center. At first glance, this could have to do with the shuttering of the office that had united the characters, but I think what I’m missing has to do with a palpable dynamic at a meaningful distance from psychopathic and narcissistic pathology. Industry misses the character of Rob — who seemed, however compromised, to be capable of thought and feeling beyond self-interest.

This made me think about how other all-time great shows managed this challenge. The therapeutic relationship between Melfi and Tony in The Sopranos always seemed like a way into inwardness for the show, but perhaps it also simply gave us a world in which psychopathy was not the core element. Melfi had her limitations, but one never felt she was a psychopath or narcissist. A somewhat similar role was played by Peggy in Mad Men. While she was hardly a perfect person, without her, the selfishness and superficiality in the advertising office would have been harder to take.

The world continues to spin out its own dramas, and I continue to struggle with how to orient myself to them. My somewhat flippant wording doesn’t indicate my feelings about all of the dramas, but it does convey how empty I find the cultural conversation around them.

Why is there so much conversation? When I fire up Substack, the algorithm provides me with “Notes,” usually linking to posts it thinks will be of interest to me. I often give them a shot. I usually read a few sentences of the linked essay before clicking out. It just seems clear to me, most of the time, that the person sharing their opinions and arguments either 1) hasn’t read widely or deeply, 2) hasn’t engaged in meaningful self-scrutiny, or 3) isn’t a very good writer. Of course, two or more of these dynamics are often present.

In a way, this doesn’t — or shouldn’t — annoy me. Who am I to say whose opinion is worthy of being shared? Often, these Substacks have hundreds or thousands of readers, so presumably others find the writing interesting enough. Just because I demand a depth of study and scrutiny of self in those who presume to take up my time doesn’t mean others share my demands. Also, I don’t believe I am a snob — in theory, I should be happy for anyone and everyone to communicate what they think.

I think part of what gets me down is a sense I have in my broader career that I am no longer writing for readers or audiences but for other writers: we are all now writers writing for other writers (even if the only “writing” in which the consumer of a play or essay engages is an online post). I began my career writing in a world in which I could imagine my audience as fundamentally readers or viewers whose responses to my work would remain private or limited to private conversation. And I know such people are out there, maybe as many as ever. But it doesn’t feel that way. What it feels like is that everyone is constantly sharing their opinions through writing.

Perhaps if I found more of this era’s writing interesting, I would not be so opposed to the volume of it. The endless babble of the internet has awakened in me a question that didn’t really exist for me until the last few years: Are people really like the way they seem to be online? The writing I so often stumble across is difficult for me to square with my sense of genuine human souls navigating a complex world. So much just feels fake to me — like an idea of how a human writes and thinks wrote it. A performance of the human. I am not (I think) even talking about AI here.

AI, of course, intensifies this sense I have. It also writes. And humans use it to write. Sometimes they use it in lieu of writing themselves. The uselessness of expression that does not come from human consciousness feels so obvious to me. But what if it isn’t really that obvious to a significant portion of the population now? The human-AI merger will continue apace, and the disappearance of “writer” as a unique and rare identity may already be, in significant ways, total. Everyone writes or performs writing; the machine writes with us and for us; we slowly become the machine…

I find life without a dedicated area of study challenging. It’s easy for me to become overwhelmed by thoughts about the bad cultural trends that seem to be irreversibly overtaking us. But I am not sure into which subject I might productively channel and organize my thinking. I feel a desire to read more fiction, but this is hard for me to do when I’m writing a play — I don’t like to be so open to the vision of another artist.

I remain interested in psychoanalytic theory, and there are new thinkers in the field who seem exciting — but that kind of reading sparks an intense introspective process that also does not jibe with writing. Also, the more “digital” life becomes, the more incongruous it feels to try to discern deep structures of the psyche that can only be reached through years-long treatment that very few people can afford. I’m not a clinician, and if I approach psychoanalysis on a purely intellectual level, it can easily become a fetish — a way of soothing myself in a shallow time.

What would happen if I tried to roll with this lack of focus? Is it possible I’d find a helpful way to think about the trends that overwhelm me — the push to merge our minds with algorithms, the dominance of parasocial dynamics in public life, the various manipulations and “enhancements” of our physical form? I guess in theory I might engage meaningfully with these issues, but it’s hard for me to imagine. They seem culturally settled, driven by financial motives and a widespread human desire either to submit to what is on offer or to pursue omniscience and omnipotence.

Perhaps thinking about these issues could lead me into deeper friendships with those who feel similarly alienated — but I want my life to be more than just a retreat from public engagement into private relationships. Intimacy is vital to a meaningful life, but I don’t want it to be everything.

What are you thinking about? How are you directing your thinking as we move into a new year? Given the above, is there anything you think I might enjoy studying?

On a now-excised “Latest” page on the old site, I used to do a “year in review” post. During Covid there was less to report — but I’ve noticed that it has more or less stayed this way in the years since.

I am not the only one who has noticed that most things showbiz-related are slower now. I’m sure it’s different for superstars, but for most of us, things that used to take a week take two or three weeks, things that used to take a month take a few months. What might a decade ago have taken a year — say, sending a new play to one’s agent and figuring out a home for production — now takes a few years at minimum.

So the more apt year-end post is really “what am I hoping to do” rather than “what have I done.” In 2026, I will continue to work with a director to get my new play up in a suitable production; I will finish another new play that I began this summer; and I will aim to make more progress with a co-writer on a passion-project film idea we’ve been working on. I also have a few new ideas for which I hope to develop momentum.

I am excited for a return to MacDowell in the winter and, in the summer, my third collection from Methuen, which is already available for pre-order. I just finished writing the introduction, and it has satisfied one of my periodic impulses to write a theatre memoir (this will never happen).

Beyond that, who’s to say what’s to come. Certainly a surprise or two is in store. Of course, I hope for something concrete to happen with my finished work in 2026, but I can very easily imagine writing a post looking ahead to 2027 with this same sense of “hopefully…”

I have ideas about why everything moves slowly now — some are more material, others more psychological — but I will leave my speculations for another time. For now, I want to note — for myself and also those interested in my work — that my desire to realize my vision in collaborative form is as strong as ever, as is my frustration and sadness at the turns art and entertainment have taken in recent years.

And forget about the tragic. I wonder if our culture can even process reality in a tragic way now. There is no room for sentimentality in it, and very little for identity. The tragic requires a genuine sense of agency — even if unconscious — and we are still in a moment in which people look outside themselves to explain the internal world (hence our obsession with politics, ideology, and science).

But in comedy, the psyche sneaks in…

• Conner O’Malley. I saw Conner twice at the top of the year, once on his own at The Bell House and then a few days later in a shorter set at Union Hall (iPhone pic below). It is always wild to watch Conner perform — he works from true depths and even when he’s doing well-worn bits seems on the verge of losing control. He’s not just a great comedian, then — he’s a great actor, or at least he can do what great actors can. Watching his anarchic spirit struggle with the hyper-sexual, hyper-capitalist mania of our device-laden world reveals more about our time than any other artist I know. (See an amazing live spot he did on a local news program ahead of a recent San Diego show here.)

  

• The Chair Company. Sometimes his “explosive anger” mode borders on shtick for me, but in The Chair Company Tim Robinson found a marvelous container for his archetypal character. The series’s exploration of a defeated family man’s search for meaning in a bleak and lonely world connects, and the show is full of unforgettable comic performances. Even when its narrative turns feel less structured and more like wheel-spinning, the show’s idiosyncrasies resonate in strange and tender ways.

  

• The Rehearsal. Nathan Fielder’s evident melancholy sets him apart from Conner and Tim. If they are hysterics, Nathan is obsessional — investigating the minutiae of our lives for hidden clues or signifiers that most breeze past. This attention to detail seems to be a route to sustaining meaning for Nathan, even when it reveals sadness, desperation, denial, and delusion in the people whose lives he explores. Charges of cruelty, whatever their merit, are evidence that he is investigating and touching something very real about our time.

  

• Liam Benzvi. Liam Benzvi’s dreamy music is catchy in conventional ways, but swirling inside the addictive melodies is something else — not darkness necessarily, but an offbeat, slightly psychedelic tension that resonates in an era where distraction and trauma interlock surreally. Near the end of the year, he put out “The Wall,” one of his best songs yet — tuneful and rich in its repetitiveness, somehow unlocking new dynamics as it progresses. (Liam also sings on a few songs from one of 2025’s best albums, Blood Orange’s Essex Honey.)

• Bring Her Back. Danny and Michael Philippou delivered the horror movie of the year, finding tension and surprise in a genre that has begun to feel worn out by the same old tropes and that increasingly eschews scares for chuckles. Here the “trauma,” while not necessarily unique, is represented with a rare depth: a woman, unable to grieve the loss of her child, deals by wholly objectifying the vulnerable children in her care. The movie’s story unfolds along two tracks: the mother’s deepening obsession with bringing back her lost child, and the children under her care trying to endure the horror of not being seen for who they are. The movie is an incredible metaphor for the devastation of narcissistic parenting. Sally Hawkins’s performance fully commits to the psychological reality of her character, and the three younger actors — Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, and Jonah Wren Phillips — are astonishing. (Bonus: this movie is a meaningful step forward in disability representation.)

  

• The Wild Duck. I wrote about Theatre for a New Audience’s remarkable production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck earlier this year. What a delight to see a major production of such a strange play, one so deeply hooked into the mysteries of the psyche — the desire to hurt others, the desire to avoid hurting others, the desire to escape emotional pain… This show delivered unforgettable performances from Nick Westrate and David Patrick Kelly. Our era may struggle with the tragic, but at least there is a canon — and great actors — to remind us of who we (don’t want to believe we) are.

However commodified it may be, the cultural history here feels made for me: Ernest Hemingway, who had a house in Key West, was a favorite writer of mine as a teenager, and Wallace Stevens (a big hint about my love for his poetry has been present on this site from the start) also spent time here. The Idea of Order at Key West is one of those poems you could read every day for a month and not tire of.

Apparently Stevens and Hemingway had a scuffle here and Hemingway knocked him out. It’s hard for me to imagine a belligerent Wallace Stevens. But that he got into a fistfight in Key West makes me think that I should go out and drink one night before I leave. I have seriously soured on alcohol as I’ve gotten older but maybe it’s worth a hangover to see if any literary spirits come alive for me in drunkenness. James Merrill had a house here and of course Tennessee Williams did too — two more writers I loved in my teens and early 20s.

Not being in New York, I had to miss book launches of two friends: P.E. Moskowitz’s Breaking Awake, about the role of drugs in their life and in American life, and Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage, about the tech world’s turn to the right. I’ve only had time to peek at their books, but feel confident in recommending them — I am a longtime reader of their journalism and they are both brilliant. P.E. writes a wonderful Substack that I love in part for the way it integrates challenging psychoanalytic ideas with progressive politics. Jacob has a less-active Substack but publishes widely on crypto, corruption, and Silicon Valley. Both are incredible writers who explore our reality with depth and are also very funny.

Being away from my usual daily life allows me to distance myself from the flow of news and gossip and to return, through my creative work, to public concerns and psychological dynamics which have barely changed in thousands of years. Of course we live in a social reality and can’t bracket news (or gossip) all the time; but being away brings home to me how oversaturated I am with the latest micro-scandals and micro-tragedies. Almost everything in our culture evaporates in a few days — even Charlie Kirk’s murder seems to have mostly faded in just a few weeks’ time. There is no need to keep up with every cultural twist and turn, even if our phones are seducing us into believing otherwise. And of course much of the world now just lives on the phone, which adds an anxiety about being “out of touch” if we are to put our devices down.

But we should. This is by now a totally banal observation, but real life doesn’t happen on our phones; it happens inside of us, as we navigate the internal and external challenges that have confronted the human psyche from the start, and will confront us for as long as we live, no matter how tragic or blessed our lives are. The less we consciously address these inner and outer challenges, the more likely it is we will get fully swept up into digital reality — a death before dying.

D.W. Winnicott wanted to be present for his own death — “Oh God! May I be alive when I die” he wrote. Who knew just a half century later we’d need to adjust his prayer to apply to life too?

I still could not find it. Frustrated and hungry, I did a three-second Google search and discovered the restaurant had been closed for eight years.

I’m not only an AI skeptic because LLMs are error-prone and inconsistent. More deeply, I feel that behind the relentless AI push lie ideas about human life that are just not true for most of us — even if the minority for whom they might be true makes a lot of cultural noise.

These ideas are pushed by those in charge of AI companies. A cynic would say they hype AI because they’re financially incentivized to do so, but I think they also really do believe that this technology is amazing and revolutionary.

Below is a brief (and incomplete) list of what their beliefs are — though they obviously use different language — and, in italics, what I believe is likelier true. (I don’t deal with AGI here because I don’t think that we’re close to achieving it.)

1. Reality is mostly grasped via information. Reality is mostly grasped via emotion.

2. Creativity is primarily a matter of combining. Creativity involves but transcends combining.

3. We inherently know how to think; AI simply aids us. The ability to think is a painstaking, ongoing achievement; AI corrupts it.

4. AI helps us feel capable and connected. AI makes us feel submissive and alone.

5. Images, whether imagined or generated, convey meaning and feeling. Images that are merely generated convey the absence of meaning and feeling.

“There are so many more obscure Ibsen plays, and I would love an opportunity to bring those to New York audiences.”

When Ben Brantley reviewed the production a few weeks later, he wrote that it was “one of the worst revivals I have ever, ever seen” and singled me out for “bending words into pretzels just to avoid the expected.”

So much for my Little Eyolf!

It’s rare that a lesser-known Ibsen play gets done in New York, so I was thrilled earlier this year to see Theatre for a New Audience announce a new production of David Eldridge’s adaptation of The Wild Duck, directed by Simon Godwin.

I saw the show at yesterday’s matinee and it is powerful. Though typically interpreted as a dramatization of the consequences of self-righteousness and truth-telling, The Wild Duck in this production became an intensely moving exploration of self-pity.

Nick Westrate plays Hjalmar — the “victim” of an unsought confrontation with the truth — with tremendous sympathy, yet he doesn’t shy away from the character’s petulant refusal to process pain. However blindsided Hjalmar is by what he learns, his self-pitying lashing out in response culminates in a genuinely tragic and sad climax.

Afterwards, looking through the reviews for the production, I noticed a glaring absence: the Times. There are rumors that the paper has decided to massively scale back its coverage of off-Broadway theatre. I don’t know if this is true, but regardless, it is shocking to me that no one there has reviewed the play. This is a major new production, and has been reviewed by New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post among others.

I sought out reviews because I wanted to see what others made of such a mysterious and fraught play, and how they reckoned with its themes. Ibsen’s work when done right stirs up difficult emotions, demonic energies — I found myself wondering, as I watched, how I would react were some objectively true, disillusioning reality forced upon me. However outraged I was by the form in which I received it, could I manage to process the content with maturity and care for those I (claim to) love?

It is a mark of the quality of this production that I cannot say for sure. Perhaps I would retreat into my version of the attic world of Hjalmar’s father, Old Ekdal (played brilliantly by David Patrick Kelly) — fantasied illusions meant to protect me from pain. Or perhaps I would scapegoat those closest to me, as Hjalmar does. I hope not — but Ibsen shows you the parts of yourself you most deny.

Sixteen years after my ill-fated Hedda, The Guardian review of Nia DaCosta’s new film adaptation of the play mentioned our production in the first paragraph. A fan bought our old domain and maintains a kind of memorial to the production to this day. Perhaps reviews don’t matter with Ibsen — panned or ignored, Ibsen’s dark magic casts a spell regardless. All these years later, I am curious to see how my Hedda feels in 2026, when it receives a new production at Remy Bumppo in Chicago. And I’ll maintain my hope that Ibsen’s lesser-known plays find productions in America.

That said, there really is something like “antisocial personality disorder” and “narcissistic personality disorder.” Of course, we know this because our culture is filled with movies and TV shows about psychopaths, we watch reality TV built around psychopathic logic, etc.

And yet when it comes time for mainstream thinkers to try to understand what’s happening in our culture, awareness of psychopathic dynamics often evaporates. We are left with a weird mix of repression, sentimentality, and naivety — exemplified by Ezra Klein, who wrote last week that Charlie Kirk “was practicing politics exactly the right way.”

For whatever reason, centrist and center-left thinkers especially find it hard to grasp that there are psychopathic and narcissistic individuals in our government, culture, tech, and media, and that they have a central role in the discourse we live within.

This is what personality-disordered people do: trap you in their reality. They live for your attention and your submission. I am not saying this is deliberate or conscious — for all I know, it is a mental illness like any other and beyond their control. Regardless, these disorders are central to what is happening right now in our culture.

Being aware of this and integrating it into our understanding of the world may not change much. But it would at least bring us into a more accurate representation of our actual reality — a start.

Its theme of youthful grandiosity and its relationship to adulthood captivated me. I was raised to not question ambition and easily identified with Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s early plans and hopes. It isn’t clear to me if George Eliot believes there is something inherently pathological about ambition, or if ambition functions as a symbol of a youthfulness we need to give up as we mature. Given that the novel itself is a grand achievement, I imagine Eliot was not totally opposed to ambition — but she must have understood the ways it can buttress a naivete and narcissism we would do well to work through and renounce.

I’d love to know what others who have read the book think about the novel’s representation of ambition (or anything else). Comment below!

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It’s been nearly twenty years since I had a fellowship with the American Psychoanalytic Association, and I continue to find it a fascinating world.

One way I keep up with it is by listening to Harvey Schwartz’s wonderful podcast “Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch.” In a recent episode, he interviewed Sharone Bergner, who offered a fascinating critique of how some analysts have treated physical illness in both theory and clinical practice.

When I was seriously ill, I heard from people who told me my illness was due to repressed anger or was an unconscious attempt to get out of a relationship I felt bound to by my superego. (Thankfully, none of these theories came from my then-analyst!) Absurd as I found such ideas, I also understood that I had my own fantasies around my illness. Did I have a desire to die? Some unmourned loss or impossible psychic pain?

Given that we are psychological beings whose psyches are inseparable from our bodies, how could I not have such fantasies? And it isn’t impossible that there are discoverable links between the mind and physical illness. But to focus too monomaniacally on such possibilities evades the incredible mysteries of the body, all we do not yet know — and may never know — about illness. In trying to unearth, detective-like, repressed psychic truths, we risk adding more suffering and guilt to that which illness already brings.

I found this to be a wonderful and important conversation, accessible to anyone.

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I’m writing this from Cassis, where I’m on a residency with the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation. After getting a lot of creative work done at MacDowell in just three weeks in December 2023, I’ve become more aggressive about seeking out residencies. However, I was at MacDowell in the winter, and both the cold weather and the isolated, spread-out studios made total immersion in my psyche pretty easy. Here on the Mediterranean, the beauty and warm weather may make a retreat into myself trickier. We’ll see how it goes…

5. Do psychopaths always get away with doing whatever they want? No. Many lack discipline and sooner or later run into problems because of this.

6. But many psychopaths are successful and wield power in their fields. In such an atmosphere, it can seem as if “the real world” is the world of the psychopath and that succeeding means submitting to these dynamics — as if we have no choice.

7. The rationalization is, “This is just how it is.” To object is to reveal resentment, an inability to marshal the aggression needed to succeed. All ethical concern is really envy, so no criticism or opposition is valid.

8. When psychopathy dominates a social setting — or a society — it may be hard to maintain a non-psychopathic sense of reality.

9. In such situations, one must try their best to resist submitting to psychopathic logic. But there is a danger in this: in psychopathic atmospheres, non-psychopaths may be scapegoated — especially by other non-psychopaths who have submitted and cannot tolerate any reminder that there are other ways to be.

Monetizing also brings new superego pressures: make more money! Appeal to more people! Granted, this same pressure applies to my dramatic writing, but I guess I think of that work as too sacred for me to submit to those voices. I’m not sure I’d feel that way here — especially given an algorithm that seems to push “takes” and activates “guru mode” in so many. Would I be immune?

Perhaps. I have never been too interested in claiming special wisdom about reality, or arguing at length that such-and-such cultural dynamic is “bad.” Of course I have opinions about things being destructive or stupid or dangerous, but I’ve always wanted my writing to inhabit a deeper realm, to insinuate itself in such a way that my superego is barely perceptible — or, if it is, is the thing being explored.

Because there is always something deeper happening in us, in reality. The superego can go deep, but there are depths it can’t access — except, perhaps, in an attempt to protect against them. And those depths are where our core disturbances, delusions, and traumas live (and also perhaps a transpersonal or nondual sense). How I am flawed and wish to change, the experiences I struggle to move past, the ways I am not “me” on a day-to-day level as much as I think — these all animate my desire to create dramatic representations of my thoughts, feelings, conflicts, memories, fantasies, and impulses.

Such psychic terrain can be articulated and explored in essay writing — many of Mary Gaitskill’s essays, for example, reach this level of art — but if I were to devote my time and energy in that direction, I don’t think I’d be able to write anything else. And fundamentally, I’m a dramatic writer. I don’t want to give that up. (I sense that I actually can’t, even as this form becomes less and less central to our culture.)

This is all by way of saying that I am taking a break from my infrequent posting here. I have projects at various stages of development I want to go deeper into and believe it or not, even my rather breezy monthly posts take real creative effort. I also want to do more serious reading which, for whatever reason, has gotten more challenging for me.

For those who will miss the Substack this summer — thank you for reading and know your support is appreciated. It’s so nice to have a spot to put down occasional thoughts amidst the intensity of my creative work. I may pop in with a quick note — but if I don’t, know I’ll be back soon. Or not! But that I appreciate you either way.

Onwards…

Actually, the show is all about interiority and authenticity — the threatening and inescapable reality of our inner lives. In the first episode, Nathan lays out his thesis that one reason airline crashes happen is that first officers are scared to speak up when they sense the captain is doing something wrong. Nathan wants to understand why we’re afraid of expressing our feelings, and quickly moves from plane crashes to the perils of romantic intimacy. In subsequent episodes, Nathan investigates what makes some people capable of flexible thinking under pressure when so many are not, and why some people are adept at offering critical feedback while others struggle. Further on, he explores the embrace of “autism” in the culture and questions the difference between diagnosable autism and normal problems of living with others.

Trickster that he is, Nathan ends the show in flight (literally and figuratively) from his inner world. But he knows he’s doing this, and wants us to think about the ways we all do it. Nathan likes to linger on his subjects’ faces as they experience internal conflict around expressions of longing, desire, criticism, fear — he’s all too aware of the tensions, suppressions, and repressions that dominate us. That so many are missing the message is just more evidence of Nathan’s core obsession in The Rehearsal — that we are unable, or unwilling, to engage our authentic inner lives. Some of us would rather die.

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Another trickster figure, David Mamet, has returned with a remarkable film, Henry Johnson. Mamet’s best work always leaves me on edge: I know something is happening at a very deep level, but I never quite know what. Henry Johnson has this quality and is anchored by a remarkable performance by Evan Jonigkeit as a porous man susceptible to strong personalities (one of whom is played by Shia LaBeouf in an intensely seductive turn).

Mamet explores extreme psychological states with a clarity and precision that very few dramatic writers are capable of. There is no sentimentality and not much interest in the surface — Mamet’s going to the depths. While I think his work leaves a lot out of the psyche, his unique achievement is in how he turns his core concerns into an overwhelming psychological atmosphere. Watching Henry Johnson, I felt dread. I thought about people I know well, and wondered how well I actually know them. Could I be getting played? Am I more susceptible to mimetic vulnerabilities than I like to admit (and I admit it to myself often)?

Mamet’s destabilizing dramaturgy is unmatched. He knows what he’s doing because he knows how it’s done.

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This month I turned 50. I tried to really take time to reflect on the life I have lived and imagine the life that (I hope) is yet to come. (Pictured below: me and a birthday cannoli, just after midnight on May 9. Can you tell I’m making a wish?)

It’s a strange moment — it seems like governments have decided that AI is the crucial national security issue, and corporations have decided it’s the future of economic life. This means that whatever I or anyone thinks of AI, we’re going to have to deal with it in a big way. Where does this put me as someone who sees the human as unique and sacred, and whose career has been built around studying and representing human subjectivity and intersubjectivity in dramatic form?

I am really not sure. And AI is hardly the only dehumanizing force in the culture. Increasingly social media seems like its own world — worse than a narcissistic distortion of reality, it is a new reality itself. Even a platform like Substack seems overrun by pseudo-intellectual influencers, wannabe-gurus, people playing roles they think (often rightly) will gain them attention… I have no interest in being a guru and try not to lie about my life or objectify myself in service of a “persona.” Will there still be a place for me in ten years? It’s hard to think much beyond that — even five years feels murky given the speed of technological change and the ever-increasing rate at which we seem to be abstracting and objectifying reality.

Still, I experienced my birthday mostly with hope. Amidst some disappointments, I have dream projects slowly progressing and my paid jobs have been interesting and meaningful. The work I’ve done to build authentic relationships and creative partnerships seems like it’s sticking. Life stress means I read and think much less than I’d like to, and worries about the world are never far from my mind — but I still find meaning in trying to understand myself, my loved ones, my world, and beyond. There’s so much to learn and experience, so much to build in myself and with others, so much destructiveness — within and without — to take on.

It’s a bleak world, but it was a happy birthday.

Something else I noticed on this rewatch is that the show is written with a different sense of time than “prestige” TV today. Take White Lotus, where one of the major plot strands this season centered on an incestuous dynamic between two brothers. Instead of a dramatic escalation where we feel tensions rising and boundaries under threat, at the crucial moment for this storyline all we got was a montage — quick edits, music, morning-after flashback tropes… In contrast, when something dramatic happens in The Sopranos, we are usually given a full arc: someone comes into a room, begins to engage another person, they talk, tensions rise, and then the characters experience the consequences of what unfolded.

This, of course, is how we still live our lives today — at least those of us who have not become consumed by our devices. Drama still involves individuals interacting in real time and shared space. But for whatever reason, we seem to be representing this less and less. There is almost no social reality or recognizable human behavior on White Lotus, and not just because it’s set at a luxury resort. People still have to eat — but where The Sopranos gives us long scenes of Sunday supper and people digging into ziti, on White Lotus we’re usually watching the characters sitting at a table before their food has arrived.

White Lotus is primarily concerned with slow moves towards transgression and taboo (Mike White relates his storytelling style to “edging”) and this seems to do the trick for many people. But to me, watching the show felt like I was in a perpetual present of repeated beats and empty titillation, where time didn’t thicken or move. Despite all the quick cuts and frequent montages, it was slow. Whereas The Sopranos, with its long, play-like scenes, never lags — genuine tension is always interesting. David Chase understood how heaviness can have speed, momentum, lightness to it. That so many people rewatch the show and gab about it on subreddits suggests that we still want storytelling that reflects what it feels like to have an inner life and to be in complex relation to meaningful others in a mysterious and unknowable world.

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Back when I discovered Bright Eyes, I lived not far from Conor Oberst on the Lower East Side. I drank at a bar he frequented and often took walks and runs along the FDR. I must have passed him at least once in those days — in his song “St. Dymphnas Kicks Us Out” he sings, “Be careful with your headphones on/When you cross the FDR/Don't want to be a casualty/Before you make it to the bar.” I had no idea he lived nearby as I ran along the East River, listening to his music and often singing along. I didn’t even know what he looked like — I didn’t read music press, I didn’t have a TV then, and the internet was still slow enough that I wasn’t using it for much more than email and news.

Conor is a few years younger than I am but essentially of the same generation, and I feel very identified with him. His career began early and he was intensely driven to expose his soul and neuroses in his work. He maintained this dynamic in his music long after the “emo” trend faded but he also allowed himself to change and grow as an artist. The despair he expresses always feels real to me, and anyone who has watched him play live a few times has seen him struggling with his pain — often in a deeply concerning way.

A week and or so ago, Conor and his band performed at the beautiful Brooklyn Paramount and I believe it is the first time I have seen him sober onstage. He’s lost weight and he moved around the stage with more aliveness than I am used to. There was still deep pain in his voice, but it had a greater clarity of expression. In his crowd banter he sounded grounded, libidinal. The concert made me feel like Conor will survive and continue to make meaningful work into his old age.

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Another early artist identification of mine is Conan O’Brien. Seeing him have a moment the last few months — successful Oscar host, Mark Twain Prize honoree — sent me back to the archives, to revisit how profoundly I attached to him in my college years as a symbol of innovation, risk, and persistence.

Conan’s Late Night show started my freshman year at NYU and early on, it was very easy to just show up at Rockefeller Center and get in to the tapings. I was a day-one fan of his wildly original humor, and the antipathy towards him from the media angered me. Looking back, I see that not only was I quite active on the Conan newsgroup, I did things like call up the then-TV critic for the Hartford Courant to try to persuade him that Conan was a major talent. I even had a secret correspondence with someone on the crew who informed me that, amidst NBC’s 13-week renewals of the show, there had actually been a few hours where, unbeknownst to Conan, they had been cancelled — before another extension was granted. I remember being shocked and stunned at what was happening behind the scenes of this show that had more aliveness and complexity to it than nearly all the plays I was seeing on and off Broadway.

Why was I so passionate about Conan? Something about his sweetness and absurdity were genuinely new in an era where it seemed like the dominant modes were bland (Jay Leno) and cynical (David Letterman). Jon Stewart was getting going then too and had a smugness that felt at odds with Conan’s humility and gentleness. Conan seemed like a true creative spirit — uncertain, alive with feeling, and willing to give free rein to his unconscious. He had a deep interest in history and seemed to understand how cruel human beings could be, how unfair life was, how challenging it was to be a person. He searched for laughs in idiosyncratic and unexpected places and never seemed to think he was smarter than anyone else, despite his obvious intelligence. That mix of risk-taking, compassion, warmth, and humility is fully in evidence today these many decades later. He remains an inspiration. (Below: a Conan zine I contributed to!)