This week, we’re lucky to have a conversation with veteran art critic Johanna Fateman who currently edits the Critic’s Table at Cultured. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, 4columns, Artforum, Bookforum and everywhere else and she is, of course, a founding member of Le Tigre.

With the closure of 4columns, I wondered if you’d want to reflect on your time writing about art there. I admired so many of your pieces there and it seemed like such a special outlet. I loved your piece on the Whitney Biennial in 2024 and I remember reading your piece on Puppies Puppies with great anticipation.

The end of 4Columns does feel like a real loss. A unicorn—nonprofit, free to read, well-paying, and brilliantly commissioned, if I do say so myself (I wrote 58 reviews over eight years). And it was carefully edited, copyedited, and fact-checked, what a luxury! I will miss it as a reader as well as a writer. It’s funny, the thousand-word length was never easy for me, it didn’t get easier, but I suppose I began to learn what subjects made sense for me to write on at that length. Most of the time I was contributing to 4C, I was also writing for the Goings On section of The New Yorker, so I had another outlet for capsule reviewing, and I loved that contrast of forms.

Thank you, I’m glad you liked my 2024 White Biennial review, which was, of course, difficult to write, but quite a special opportunity because I was able to file pretty late in the show’s run, after the big outlets had published their (mostly terrible) takes. 4C did not generally operate on a fast turnaround principle, but had more of a print ethos even though it was online (another luxury!) so I was able to, in my review, respond to the discourse and critical climate as well as the exhibition itself. The Puppies Puppies show at the New Museum was a strange one to review because it was a durational performance by an elusive artist. Because she was mostly not inhabiting the staged environment when I went to observe, it was hard to know if I was “getting it.” I think the resulting review is neither positive nor negative nor a cop out. I had to work to stay open to the piece through my frustration.

How do you decide what to write about? Obviously there’s some shows that are so big Cultured has to cover them---the Biennial, Greater New York, certain shows at MOMA, but what kinds of work catches your attention? Do you find that certain themes or feelings recur? I find ambivalence to be either really interesting to get down on the page for example.

Right, I think it’s about striking a balance between writing about whatever everyone is writing about, and thus staking out a position for yourself in relationship to other voices (ie something like my Biennial review) and also looking for the gaps—what’s not being covered? And then, of course, mostly, there’s the question of what calls to you. Ultimately, that’s the most important thing—to write about things that engage and fascinate you, where there’s a personal intellectual reward. Because no one does art criticism for the money…

Ambivalence is a great starting point; it almost gives you a narrative structure. You use the review to tell the story of your own grappling, and there’s a sense suspense, even for you as a writer. I wonder where I’m going to land with that last paragraph and often surprise myself. Also I’ve found, even with something I think I don’t like, once I start writing about it, I develop a sympathy for it, there’s an intimacy that follows from my concentration on it, from figuring out how it works. That’s something I love about reviewing.

How do you think about the state of art writing more generally with the boycott of Artforum, the closure of many arts outlets like Document and elsewhere, and the sort of PR machine that keeps whirring with less places to get coverage?

This is a hard one to answer. I know from my own community of artist and art-world friends that there is a real sense that quality criticism (“press”) is no longer realistically attainable. Getting your show reviewed is a long shot. I guess that’s why many people who you think might be made of stronger stuff feel they can’t let go of Artforum: scarcity. (Honestly, it seems like just me and 10 to 20 of my friends are boycotting, so I’m not sure how much that impacts the landscape.)

That said, there is plenty of good art writing, but with the disappearance of magazines (and the disappearance of art criticism from magazines), it’s scattered around the internet, underfunded, under-edited, hard to find, not useful for readers (or artists’ CVs). The substackery of it all is pretty dispiriting. I just don’t see that this model is working for anyone (except Substack), and yet—again—there is good stuff to be found if you’re willing to spend a lot of time/money to sift through the great grab bag. Artlance, a new initiative/platform for art galleries/institutions to blind commission pieces, is trying to work within this self-publishing ecosystem, and there are some downsides to it from my perspective (reliance on Substack, for one). But at least its founder, Jonathan T.D. Neil, is figuring out a way to get money to writers. And the commissioners are guaranteed some kind of critical consideration for their investment, which is arguably better than paying a PR firm to get…nothing at all. It’s an interesting experiment.

I believe in magazines, though. I would love to be able to expand the Critics’ Table (the art-criticism vertical I edit at Cultured) so that the coverage could be more comprehensive, with more regularly published short-form reviews of exhibitions currently on view. I’d love to give writers a monthly gig, and to commission big pieces farther out. I’m really pleased by the attention we’ve gotten, but we need subscribers! People are out of the habit of supporting magazines whereas Substack writers have a certain indie/underdog appeal, I think, and subscribing feels like a social good, right? (I’m questioning this as I write, I don’t actually know.)

Are there subjects or outlets you still want to conquer?

Well, I’d like to write a book, which would require me to conquer a few of my own demons.

What do you think the elements of a good review are?

I think an art review is like a pop song, or any form. You might end up discarding the structure, but it’s good to know what you are rejecting and why. Description is a good place to start. What is it that you are writing about? What does it look like? And what context do we need to orient ourselves as readers/viewers? A lot of review-writing is elevated summarizing, sorry! Hopefully all of that is suffused, inflected, shaped by voice, style, point of view. It depends on your subject how much space you really need to reserve to go off. Not as much as people think, usually. I probably shouldn’t have attempted to answer this one. I think each person has to figure it out for themself.

Over/Under

1. Tracey Emin

Look, she’s a market darling and all of that, but I don’t hold it against her. The paintings she’s churning out still have an honesty and daring that I find compelling. At the end of the day, she was early innovator-perfecter of the third-wave TMI aesthetic/philosophy and she really told everyone to suck it! The early installation and video work is more my thing.

2. Pans/negative reviews

Sometimes important and fun to read. I believe in telling your truth. But there are a lot of things to consider, for example: Maybe you don’t understand the work or you’re simply wrong. Being wrong in a pan is a lot worse than being wrong in a rave. I mean, you can’t claim you were being generous.

3. Matcha lattes

The new pumpkin spice, right?

4. Literal white walls in a gallery

Often the right choice.

5. (Natural) Orange wine

Never met her!

Image: Tracey Emin. Recent pieces/announcements:

I’m teaching a class on political reporting for Study Hall!

My paperback launch for Herculine is October 8th at McNally Jackson with the New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz. Come! I’ll also be doing a few other small East Coast events including at Stanza Books, Symposium, and Franklin Park.

I appear on Writer’s Digest Presents to talk about literary criticism. It’s a great talk.

For better or worse, I wrote about not liking astrology for Pioneer Works.

Kieran Press-Reynolds is a columnist at Pitchfork. They also write extensively on “political guys” for GQ. I’ve long been a fan and I was excited to chat about their work.

You've done a lot of great vertical videos for Pitchfork based on your column there--I'm wondering if you think that's the way of the future or how you see visuals playing into your own writing.

Yeah I’m having a lot of fun making videos. It can be slightly terrifying because I feel very at ease and free to be goofy while filming with the wonderful video producer Amy Haskour and then I get post-clip clarity and remember it's gonna hit the feed. As long as digital screens mediate our existence in increasingly intimate and perplexing ways, seems like videos will continue to dominate. At least until someone invents an even more digestible form. I wanna experiment with freaking up the videos for the weirder nanocultures, show the ideas through texture and editing rhythm—might dredge up the ol Sony Vegas and play around soon.. I think one of the main issues with short videos is the viewer’s passivity—the clip withers away as soon as the next spawns, and you retain barely any information even if it’s quite educational and well-argued. I’ve been trying to get better at condensing the reporting and arguments without losing the kind of thought-space that emerges out of being forced to sit down to read a piece. Sometimes it feels futile—the form is slop, it’s all feeding the beast. Then again, Zohran accrued an insane support base online partly through shortform media, and now he’s the mayor, putting policies that benefit real people into place. Maybe those Marxist Shambhala shitposts meant something after all…

You wrote a great piece on Clavicular for GQ, maybe the best profile of him. I'm wondering how you reflect back on that---it went so viral. But of course you also wrote for the mag about dark woke and Adam Friedland, it seems like there's a beat for you there.

Thank you. That Clav piece was a doozy. I’m really proud of it. I’d been writing about looksmaxxing for years, and it was wild to see this mainstream manifestation taking over everyone’s feeds doing shit like bonesmashing, and having friends saying they knew young boys IRL who were imitating him. I thought then and still think the essence of Clavicular is distinct from a more straightforward sicko like Steven Crowder—more sad and broken and tied to a kind of post-COVID internet-fucked nihilism, and hopefully something that resolves a bit with time. It’s been strange and encouraging seeing his Australian counterpart Androgenic embrace his trans fans. I get why so many people are upset about seeing this shitty dude spammed on their feeds, especially when it seems to come with a glossy photoshoot or whatever, but I don’t really understand the argument around platforming. Ignoring these guys doesn’t make them go away. Andrew Tate and NELK have tens of millions of followers, direct lines to political leaders etc. GQ, more than any other pub, is supposed to cover what’s going on with men. Most people who write about these guys also don’t have the kind of zoomer’s eye view to understand the little factions and feuds and clipping culture-esque quirks behind their virality. Generally, I have learned a lot working the weird-poliics-guy beat (I was not a Cum Town resident before I profiled Adam Friedland, contrary to what some may believe) with the great ex-GQ editor Nick Catucci, who now does RiffPost.

You've written about digging for music outside the algorithm before, but how do you do your own research for writing scene reports and finding new bands? Is it different depending on whether or not you're reviewing versus profiling? I loved your piece on Ear.

Cheers. I usually read and watch everything out there. There are so many resources even for the smaller and weirder artists I cover—BACKLIGHT, Tone Glow, Hidden Driveway, etc. Thinking about interviews and profiles, I’m really trying to see what’s been asked before, keeping note of unpulled threads, topics they light up at, things I can push forward. I probably use all the ordinary FBI-style psychological profile tactics—for ear, I was digging into Jonah and Yaelle’s SoundCloud likes, stalking their lowkey side projects, trying to put myself in their shoes and imagine what they'd been into growing up. For underscores, it was like an accumulation of years’ worth of mini-moments, rumors, memories I’d seen and knew she had never been asked about. I will scour the Reddit pages for artists, I'll type their name into Facebook and find pictures their mom posted of them giddily unwrapping a box of LEGOs on Christmas in 2009. But sometimes the best research is no research. For reviews, I try not to get bogged down by the music journo game of assiduously citing all the snippets of context an artist puts out around their new record, I wanna foreground my own ideas and perceptions instead of writing a clinical Wikipedia entry. Scene reports can be a mix of the two; a lot of digging through playlists and keyword searching to find older articles, historical grounding to orient the new. Sometimes "research" also means just reading a lot of great and weird prose, criticism or fiction, anything to lubricate my brain to write a colorful piece.

I'm curious how you think about fan culture in the wake of music criticism. I know you mostly write about more under the radar/bubbling acts (Colle, Chanel Beads, Jane Remover) but I'm sure you've had online interactions as a Pitchfork staffer.

I dunno, it all makes sense? For the more extreme stans, it just tracks that they’d derive meaning and community from this sort of ravenous musical jingoism, every in-group needs its villain. Maybe there is also something to admire in there—the capacity for such passion in a supposedly numbed-out generation?—and it is sometimes good to be forced to articulate and defend your opinion. In some sense I have a pretty privileged position: I write a Kanye West pan and the Westingtons spam pictures of me with BuzzBall Blue Raspberry hair, and I can laugh. I know other people have been hit way worse with doxxing campaigns and harassment. The internet makes some people so dumb. It inspires the worst kind of low-effort fandom mimesis and keyboard warrior wailing on all sides. Stans threaten anyone who dares lob a barb at a Barb; stans act super creepy toward Jane Remover because they know it’ll get engagement.

In the wake of so many male music critics, who are your favorite female music writers?

Cat Zhang really set the standard for what I’m doing at Pitchfork. Anna Gaca, as writer and editor—she helps make my reviews so much better. I always enjoy reading Hattie, Lily, Jaime Brooks, Isabelia Herrera, H.D. Angel, Rae-Aila Crumble (first ever, banger Lucy Bedroque profile). Billie Bugara, s/o the Lyrical Lemonade column… going crazy with the video game soundtrack reviews recently. I’m a big fan of the sisters Pelly & Laura Snapes & Mina Tavakoli

Gen Z - Underrated
The Dare - Rated
Playboi Carti - Overrated
Halsey - Abstain
Hyperpop - Underrated

Image: Chagall.

I recently wrote about:

Lena Dunham’s Famesick for The Nation.

Rachel Aviv for SSENSE.

I have been very, very tired. Burnout feels like such a soft word for the kind of existential ennui I’ve been feeling. I am an overworked and underpaid freelancer with a Protestant work ethic. I have hoped to crack the code of getting a job, but it’s yet to happen. I have asked my non-workaholic friends what to do and had breakdowns in an attempt to look away from the obvious. The problem was that I have lost my sense of curiosity. That’s the only cure for overload. I decided that I needed to find things that could not easily become material, things I couldn’t master. I wanted to be a novice. Perhaps if I forced myself to learn and try new things I would leave my comfort zone while finding a newfound sense of confidence. I would recover that old virtue lost to the algorithm: chance. I hoped this would get me out of my depressive rut. Maybe one of these hobbies would even become a new lifelong obsession. Because I’ve never had a problem with executive functioning, I decided to try out a few classes from my bucket list I was always too afraid to try.

Since I have horrible balance, I decided the first thing I should try was ballet. I knew I would never become a dancer. My boyfriend D dutifully went to Bloch with me to buy a black leotard and nude ballet slippers. I felt triumphant walking by the fountain on the Upper West Side even before I’d executed a single pirouette. I watched tween girls prance past me with ease, far more graceful than I would ever be.

By the time I arrived at my first dance class, however, I was a bundle of nerves. Miraculously, I recognized a few of the other dancers. My fellow students ranged from pros who probably shouldn’t have been in a Beginner I class to neophytes like me who had simply enjoyed seeing The Nutcracker as a child. I went to the barre terrified of looking foolish—the very shame I wanted to shed. I struggled to pronounce, much less remember, the choreography we learned. I went home and woke up more sore than I’d been from years in yoga or running on the treadmill. Still, I felt good. Like I was accomplishing something. After years battling an eating disorder, I’ve tried to find ways of moving my body that don’t feel oriented around merely shedding calories. When we started spinning, however, I came to think that perhaps ballet wasn’t for me. I could not reach the end of the room without wanting to puke from my inelegant twirling. Perhaps I would come back to it, I told myself.

The world does not allow women many outlets to feel sexy in a safe, chill way. So, I decided I would try a pole dancing class. It felt like something I wanted to do but couldn’t imagine myself ever trying. Add it to the list! I signed up for a few intro classes and dragged my ass to Chelsea for a morning class. I thought I would be one of the shiest women there—I was certainly the only trans woman, a common theme in the classes I went to—but some of the others wouldn’t even take off their sweatshirts. I completely understand. Between being sexually harassed by male writers and cab drivers and scrolling models in bikinis, the erotic life of women is a fragile thing. Still, my goal was to try and put myself out there before imagining someone putting me down. We are often thinking about ourselves too much. I became a regular at my local bar around the same time, also to experience meeting people of different ages and walks of life. The local watering hole became my Cheers. I love it. Classes can offer a similar utopia—the possibility of meeting and even befriending people who aren’t like you. Sure, I’m terrified someone will say something awful. And they will. And they do. But I found the other women in pole dancing just as intimidated by our hot, smack-talking instructor as I was.

There are few water-cooler moments anymore. Less people are going to bars, less of us are watching the same TV. So we may have to create them ourselves. Of course, church has always been one of the main sober social spaces. Of course, it’s a third space that comes with baggage.

Organized religion has always terrified me, ever since I went through conversion therapy. But I recently was trying to write a piece about Quakers, so I knew I had to follow through and do my research. (Another way work and play collide, I hate a vacation.) I found a small Quaker meeting that was occurring in a James Turrell skyspace in Manhattan. I wound my way to the first floor of a school and waited with others during a 5pm dismissal on a gray December evening. After a while, we were led to a freight elevator and taken up to the top floor. We sat in the small wooden box cathedral as colorful lights bloomed and transmuted on the ceiling. We sat in silence, waiting for someone to have something to say. Every once in a while someone decried ICE or talked about the unity of the world or God’s love. Then the kind, wiry leader of the group opened the skylight and we watched the sun finish setting as the James Turrell lightscape glistened on every side of the opening. I left feeling moved, glad I’d gone, taking the subway to the popular gay bar Singers on a Friday night. Duality is everything.

Because I have been converting to Judaism at the only Anti-Zionist synagogue in New York that I’m currently aware of, I decided it would make sense to take a Hebrew language class. Another facet of my life that will almost inevitably find its way into my work. Even the things that are sacred are fuel. Certainly play and learning are the raw material that worms its way in our intellectual development. I have never been very good at learning a new language. I’ve taken a few semesters of Spanish but hardly enough to speak fluently. But I wasn’t the oldest person in the class by a longshot. One older woman came in every evening with her Lipton tea ready to crack us up and tell the teacher that certain rules made no sense. “So you just have to remember that a patach is a patach?” she asked quizzically. “If you say so,” she said.

I jumped to kickboxing. I had gone too cerebral and needed something physical to balance out the life of the mind. Too much of my life has been spent sitting at a laptop with an empty Word Doc blinking in front of me. I decided to go to a queer gym for no real reason other than that it was close to my life and had a cheap intro class. I ambled in, more nervous perhaps than if I’d merely gone to a “straight” gym. A dozen or so lesbians and a few gay guys slowly came in as I sat waiting. Because I’d taken one self-defense class before, I was the only one who knew how to wrap my hands before we started punching—which probably boosted my ego a little too much. But the thing I enjoyed the most wasn’t learning moves, it was the punching bag. I didn’t realize how much anger I needed to let out.

I’ve just started a bridge class in Manhattan, a card game I’ve always wanted to learn. I go in person, because I do really believe when possible it’s a better format than Zoom—offering the ability to connect in the same room. For many reasons, it’s easy to stay home and give up on meeting strangers. But everyone from serial class takers to canvassers knows that meeting other people is a way back into the rhythm of the world.

Certainly part of my burnout has been feeling bitter about the state of the world and the amount of times men have tried to fuck me in inappropriate ways or strangers have been casually cruel. Yet I still believe in the redemptive power of going outside. Each moment is more exhilarating and terrifying than the last. I love getting back home to my couch and my cat and my slippers, but I’ve learned to love the rush of being social too. Sometimes such small danger is worth the cost of leaving the house.

Towards the end of my Bride class, I lost a hand. I made a simple, stupid mistake and I started to get pissed off. I didn’t yell, I just lost my cool. The older woman next to me turned to me and said these words: "It's just Bridge. Take your time, don't worry. If it stressed me out, I wouldn't do it."

Image: James Turrell.

Recent pieces:

A review of the new Phoebe Bridgers for the Fader.

A review of Claire Stapleton’s book on leaving Google for my Defector column.

José Sanchez is an incredible writer I’ve admired for a long time. We did a panel a while back about Criticism and the Left, but I’ve wanted to talk more about writing with him for a while so we spoke via email recently and chatted raving, class, the DSA, Basement, Donna Summers, and Lenin as Saint Paul. As always, he had a lot of keen, fascinating, and surprising observations.

In the past, you've spoken a lot about the importance of keeping working class writers in the conversation and have been vocal about labor rights. Do you think this ever seeps into your writing? I'm thinking of your past few pieces in N+1 for example.

I’m an envious and spiteful omnivert, so I am always scrolling through social media, talking to people at parties, clubs, dives, and such. And we’ll get to talking about what we do, how we got to where we are, and, being a working person from a working-class family who’s struggled with making ends meet, I’ll definitely start to compare and contrast past and present circumstances. I’ve met writers that have had, say, a spouse or set of parents cover all or part of their rent while they pursued M.F.A.s. No one in my family has a doctorate, so I couldn’t even talk about that stuff with my blood-kin. There are so many New Yorkers around my age that I come across that have a father that co-signed a lease for a rent-stabilized place, or a mother providing monthly grocery or utility bill allowance. Or they’re sitting on a trust fund, wiggled their way into jobs that make tens of thousands or a hundred-thousand dollars more than I. And so forth. I just never had those advantages. I’ve been evicted, been on food stamps and Medicaid, visited food pantries, and have had an array of shitty, dead-end jobs. Sometimes one on top of each other, yet to little avail. My family wasn’t necessarily poor, and I, though born out of wedlock, grew up in a two-parent household in the tri-state burbs. Mom didn’t have a degree. They were quite religious, and things got so bad as a teen sometime after being found out as gay that child services swung by a few times. So I just never had the sort of private safety nets and quiet security that so many writers, actors, playwrights, and so forth rely on in this era of state abandonment, of an ever-shrinking public safety net, inflation, and deteriorating workplace conditions. I mean, so much of my headspace is just taken up by panicking over finances, where I am going to eat, how am I going to afford a medical bill, keep a roof over my head, and so much we can file under “survival mode.” And, of course, being black American and Puerto Rican has not exactly helped either.

So, I don’t think a lot of writers can actually draw on memories and experiences of material deprivation and its psycho-social impacts if they haven’t actually struggled. Some can, though I would say that most cannot. And so much of “NYC fiction” then becomes about the foibles and foolery of, I’m sorry, a lot of white woman with fancy degrees from respectable, piggy-bank families that can laze around Clandestino, the Amalfi Coast, or wherever the fuck without consequence. And just look at the whiteness and class and educational pedigrees of those that make up the publishing industry itself. So, have any of these Literary It-Girls been a nanny, a Starbucks barista, or a home health aide like so many immigrant women of color in this city? Have they waited inside an HRA office for three hours waiting to get their food stamp applications sorted out? Have they ever been on a rent strike? That’s why I, a salt-of-the-earth Brooklynite, always have hated the Dimes Square bullshit to the extent that it has existed. Just rich white people circlejerking themselves in salons like it’s the Lower East Side of Lucy Sante and Gary Indiana’s heyday. I’m sorry, but those days are over or they got priced out real, real deep into the outer boroughs! Or worse: New Jersey. That’s why “NYC fiction” qua “NYC fiction” always feels like it’s missing how the average New Yorker lives their lives. Never mind that about one out of four New Yorkers live at or below the outdated federal poverty line, or that closer to 60 percent live in near-poverty.

I truly think once the Zohran and DSA housing agenda locks in and expands then the art and literature of the Gotham scene will improve because writers that know the struggle, know the hustle it takes to both hustle for rent money while also writing their novels and shit, those writers can afford to stay here and not have to work forty or fifty hours doing some bullshit. I’m heartened by the DSA’s Workers Deserve More national platform that Fox News and others are denouncing because we have the temerity to call for the Senate’s abolition, yet the thing that I think a lot of writer and artist friends should champion in it are things like a 32-hour workweek with full pay and benefits and other pro-worker and pro-renter measures that could give us the “Freedom to Flourish,” the freedom to just laze around and write all day like some Victorian aristocrat or something in the 19th-century.

I found your piece on rave writing really fascinating. What was the reception like? I was interested in your idea about party reporting not being equatable with philosophy. That might be my own extrapolation though, how do you see this genre of writing? Do you enjoy it?

The reception was pretty good! Definitely was feeling my oats for a sec there, and I’m tryna have that high be some sort of motivation for my spotty and inconsistent work ethic going forward. I really wish I capitalized on the feedback and splash it made. I also wish I was back on Twitter also to spread the piece even further, yet some Elon-groupie hacked it months ago, and ... I have to thank him because he kind of freed me! I owe some folks a message back in response in my Instagram DMs. I think one person offered to get me into a party for free, and, honestly, getting paid to be a sort of nightlife and live performance reporter or something would be pretty chill. I guess I do find the phrasing of your question to be an extrapolation of your own though I perhaps don’t understand it? I think all of those “rave writers” have a philosophy or theory of sociality, what a party could prefigure socially, and so forth. I think I just thought some inflated the importance of raving or what have you. Prefiguring, cultural interventions, and such, all that’s fine and good. Yet throwing a party has to be secondary to building a party of the proletariat ... a small-c communist party if you will! I think that Emily Witt and Simon Wu’s books were of that more sober-minded opinion, so, yes, I do enjoy writing and theorizing about partying, house and disco music, and so forth. I just don’t think we’re gonna rave ourselves to the revolution. Though again, if I can’t rave in your revolution then it’s a chop, boots.

You’ve written a lot about Socialism and the DSA, especially in contrast to Afropessimism and nihilism. What do you think socialism offers your writing practice that other forms of leftist cultural critique don’t? Or do you see it differently?

Interesting question! I honestly cannot say for sure. I’ve been a dues-paying member for about a decade at this point, and I was commie even before that back in high school. I think I am always trying to think about how a piece of writing relates to its moment and circumstance. And then how there are certain blindspots, patterns, or contradictions within the writing itself that’re unexplored, unsaid, etc. I am no Marxist literary critic, yet I try to do that. If I were to do academia all over again, I might’ve done Comp Lit or English!

How do you slot your writing genre-wise? You also write fiction, of course. Do you see yourself as primarily one kind of writer over another? A novelist? A critic? A political writer?

I think I see myself more of a critic and essayist. Though I would like to be a novelist too. I haven’t published my fiction anywhere although I was a Periplus fellow being mentored by Bryan Washington. And I did the Lordship Residency along the Long Island Sound. And I did readings of the manuscript I’ve been working on last year. At 85,000 words at the moment last time I checked the Google Doc? Would love pointers on how to submit fiction to journals! It’s something that’s alien to me. I almost feel like I should not or don’t even know how to review works of fiction. I mean, for me, reviewing a history book like Deborah Baker’s for The Nation felt familiar because of my academic training. Find the argument, identify primary and secondary sources, identify a methodology, etc. Is it historical? Anthropological? More qualitative methods or quantitative ones? Intellectual forebears and inspirations? Where were they educated and by whom?

I’m curious how other writers define their own “style.” Do you think your voice has any hallmarks?

In terms of non-fiction, somewhere between comedically colloquial and pretentiously lettered. And let’s bring back pretentiousness! I don’t have much in this world, yet I do have discernment: the essential ingredient of pretentiousness, mind you. I am, as you can tell, long-winded, winding, and verbose. I can be baroque in the drafts. Bit scatter-brained. Sentences are just accumulations of clauses. I kinda like it. Why should we be miserly with our words? Have you looked around? Listened to yourself? It’s an overwhelm.

Over/Under

Lenin - Misunderstood. If Lenin was alive today then he would be in the DSA. If Marx is Christ, then Lenin is Paul. Stalin? Billy Graham.

Donna Summer - Underrated. Sexuality, glamor, theatricality, the pipes, the innovations with Morodor. There is no Madonna or Bey without her. Dance music and the histories of other genres can be periodized as before “I Feel Love” and after “I Feel Love.” Synthesizer-lushness and the vocals brewed together? Trailblazing. “Macarthur Park” came on at this underwear party at Ice Palace over the weekend. Everyone was belting the words, hundreds of shirtless men. It felt euphoric. Overall, the tracks were forgettable and brash circuit-y remixes of Britney, Whitney, and the usual suspects.

Basement - Underrated. Yeah, I said it. I’m a member. Love telling people that in the hopes of seeming cooler than I am. Probably one of if not the best club in the city, as cringe as that sounds. All dancefloors should put stickers on people’s phone cameras. I typically stick to the second dancefloor, Studio, inside it where the music’s a lil’ bouncier and lighter in vibes. And, literally, the lights are brighter too. Honestly? No complaints. Sometimes the night’s a flop and the darkroom’s empty or full of heteros, but that’s usually because I picked the wrong party. Go for Carry, Wrecked, or the other fag-fests if you’re family like myself. Those nights the darkroom area is packed, and I’m suckin’ n’ fuckin’ a storm. Look up the D.J.s too before you go. Mama, let’s research, y’know? I love Kilopatrah Jones, Dee Diggs, Nita Aviance, Juan Sterling Diaz, and others.

Taylor Swift - Gowns. Beautiful gowns. Rest in peace, Aretha.

Queer Theory - Underrated. You should know how to be queer and what that means currently, and how it has come to mean whatever the fuck that means. I’m a gay guy, so I’ve tended to read stuff about gayness. And some of the stuff goes to weird places if not grounded in the material, the historical. Love Foucault and stuff, yet it helps to have an idea of from whence in real-life power comes from, or else you get this nebulous, pervasive, and fatalistic conception of power that. There’s sorta been a re-examination of past theoretical and historical work that deals with questions of capital and class which I think is quite necessary in the Americas and broader so-called West since, post-legal equality integration or assimilation has meant having to confront gay and lesbian capitalists, Zionists, and imperialists. Think Mayor Pete or pinkwashing Israel’s genocide. I think everyone should read Freud’s 1905 Three Essays on Sexuality and then Foucault’s History of Sexuality to start, yet John D’Emilio’s Capitalism and Gay Identity from 1979 is probably an even more important touchstone if you want a more straightforward Marxist analysis. Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism is a fave as is Rosemary Hennessey’s Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late-Stage Capitalism is great too. And Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection by Holly Lewis is an easy read too that avoids a lot of esoteric jargon. Pinko, this collective of queer communists, has a magazine that’s excellent. Max Fox, one of the Pinko editors, also brought to life the posthumous work of Christopher Chitty with the aforementioned’s Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System published in 2020. Another Pinko editor, M.E. O’Brien, has done great work on family abolition which is a word that has engendered some pooh-poohing from lefties that wanna be as ‘normal’ as possible to win elections and such. But I’ve always loved O’Brien’s work, and, finally, definitely check out the Transgender Marxism collection out of Pluto Press too! ... Oh, but, finally, finally--the best work of gay, queer, etc. history is George Chauncey’s Gay New York. Actually, start with that one and then go from Freud onwards. The Bad Gays podcast is also top-tier. They’ll go through the biographies of queers like the gay head of the S.S., a man named Ernst Röhm or Jeffrey Dahmer, or, like, Alexander the Great or Little Richard. ... Okay, I’m done nerding out!

I’m back with a Q&A with Sam Adler-Bell, an amazing magazine writer and co-host of the popular podcast Know Your Enemy. Enjoy.

I found your essay on women leaving the New Right really fascinating. I think you report deftly on the fractures of the right and their ideology. What was it like talking to these women? What did you learn that surprised you and did the reception of the piece shift anything for you?

Thank you! I really enjoyed reporting that piece. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love talking to conservatives. (And although those women were leaving MAGA, they were basically all still quite conservative and religious.) I don’t like debating people, however. Basically at all. So it’s especially fun for me when I’m reporting — and not podcasting — because I can get somone on the phone and just have a long conversation, without pointing out all the little things we disagree about. (People love to be paid attention to, and they say really interesting things when you make them feel heard.) That piece was also challenging because I found I genuinely liked all the women; they were pleasant to talk to, curious, and at least somewhat searching and self-critical. They had been humbled by an experience and were trying to figure out what to do about it. Humility isn’t always in high supply on the right. That made me feel a special obligation to represent them accurately, to avoid being contemptuous or zoological. And I think maybe some people — on the left — who reacted negatively to the piece were reacting against that impulse in me, the lack of contempt in the tone. A more serious journalist would probably say it shouldn’t matter whether you like your subjects, or that you shouldn’t allow those personal feelings to bias your reporting. But I’m not a very serious journalist. And I don’t really believe those journalists are telling the truth anyway.

The reaction from the right was more or less exactly what I expected. Basically: “The right doesn’t have a problem with women, and I hope those lying bitches get raped and die!”

Your column at New York is mostly thinking about politics and culture on a tight turn around it seems, from Luigi Mangione to Gaza to Biden’s incapacity, how do you try to sort out the signal from the noise for these pieces? Do you find it difficult to illuminate something or do you feel ready to jump into the discourse? How did you get into writing a column?

I started writing columns at New York a few years ago to fill in for a staff writer who was on leave. At the time, I was very plugged into the daily churn of discourse, especially on the left, because I was addicted to Twitter. That made it easy to churn out takes. Nowadays, I am mostly repulsed by Twitter/X, and I get a lot more of my news from magazines and newspapers. I’m becoming a boring old person with conventional opinions. So it’s harder. But I think that can be an advantage, sometimes, because the audience I have in mind for the New York column is not necessarily “leftists” or even people who are particularly interested in politics. My column appears in the print, so folks who pick up the magazine to read the cover story (a celebrity profile, say) might flip to it. That’s cool. I just want the column to be stylish and morally serious and legible to people who aren’t politics nerds. I hope it usually is.

Your cultural criticism at Dissent and the Baffler is often interested in these sort of steely figures. Janet Malcolm, John Le Carre. I guess the Marvel World piece is a different scene, but you see my drift. And of course Know Your Enemy is also choosing often cold, enigmatic, sometimes intelligent right-wing figures. How do you decide what art and culture is worth writing about?

That’s a very interesting observation, Grace! It might also apply to the psychoanalysts I’ve written about, like Adam Phillips and Winnicott. My first instinct is to say that I’m drawn to people like Malcolm — who is so very poised and controlled and inheld — because I am not like that at all. I’m very talkative and bubbly and people-pleasing. I am incapable of cultivating an air of mystery about myself. I am always saying too much and betraying myself, which Malcolm never does. (But I aspire to reticence!) On the other hand, the thing I discovered about Le Carre, especially from reading his correspondence, was that he was much more neurotic and prone to excess than he seems on the page; very self-loathing and narcissistic and variously obsequious and resentful toward his peers. Today we would say he had a bad case of “imposter syndrome.” He exchanged a lot of letters with Philip Roth. And like Roth, he was obsessed with status and excelled at making money. I fear I have some of these impulses too.

As for how I decide what art and culture to write about, it usually finds me. I have a few recurring interests that my editors are aware of — Freud, spy novels, Bob Dylan, Jewish stuff — and they often assign me good stuff. I am supposed to be writing a book right now, so I say no to a lot of assignments. But the best editors are able to make me offers I can’t refuse.

Are there any political trends you think are being underreported on or strains of discourse you’re keeping tabs on?

I am very distracted by the book, so I’m not paying enough attention to know what’s being underreported. I would say that everyone should be much more concerned about what’s happening in Cuba — the suffering, and the very high likelihood that the administration is going to pull a regime change operation there — but I am now remembering that The Daily just did a Cuba episode. If Barbaro is on the case, it can’t be an underreported trend. Nonetheless: eyes on Cuba.

How have you been making sense, if at all, on the discourse of liberal versus leftist? Especially as the DSA tries to blur the gap.

I fear I also have conventional old man opinions about this. I am so happy that the socialist movement continues to grow and mature. I often say that I became a socialist when being a socialist was embarrassingly uncool and anachronistic. Like being a model train hobbyist. I think it’s fantastic that chic people are socialists now, and that socialists have learned how to win. We’ve come a long, long way. There’s no time to rest on our laurels, but I do think it’s worth remembering. I have deep wells of contempt for the parts of the Democratic Party that are still trying to marginalize and stigmatize the left. But I also don’t think they’re doing a particularly good job. It’s basically guaranteed that every viable 2028 candidate will talk about affordability, inequality, and Gaza. That’s amazing. And the left is largely responsible for that. I am perhaps less invested in policing the distinction between liberal and leftist; if the liberals are talking like leftists, that’s a victory in my book.

Rapid fire over/under

1. Raymond Chandler

Under

2. Zizek

(whispers) under

3. Reagan

Over

4. Video games

Over

5. The term neoliberal

properly rated

Image: Francis Bacon.

Charli XCX for The Fader.

Not long after graduating from college, I became convinced I was evil. I was gripped by and stuck on the idea that I was a bad person, that I was fundamentally unlovable and irredeemable. Arguing with the thoughts only made them multiply and my friends had no idea how to help. They looked me in the eyes earnestly and told me I was a good person, but I avoided their gaze. At the time it felt like the world was ending even if it seems like just another clear manifestation of OCD. People were not making little memes about having a mental breakdown. We were encouraged to tough it out. But my anxiety cascaded, sinking and cresting, only to return again stronger than before.

I went to therapy in a vague attempt to “get better” but mostly talked about my dismal romantic entanglements – inscrutable boys who would not text me back and whose rejection I believed was the primary cause of my emotional spiral. My therapist, a sweet, bald gay man perhaps ten years my senior, tried to get me to open up about my past, but I wanted to talk about everything but.

By the time my therapist suggested we try EMDR, I was having nearly daily panic attacks. I had diagnoses – a lethal cocktail of never-ending monikers like OCD, anxiety and depression – whose many treatments I had already tried: Internal Family Systems, Somatic Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, yoga, and even a little bit of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Why not add another acronym? My therapist had been gently pushing Buddhist worksheets and mantras on me every other session, “But I think we have to address your larger issues,” he finally pressed. “It’s time.”

Before we could officially start the EMDR we had to “take a history.” This meant I had to divulge the ten most painful moments of my life as my therapist furiously scrawled this list on a little notepad. He asked if I associated each memory with any sights, sounds, or smells, and how painful it was to recall each memory on a scale of one to ten. I finally moved beyond the boys who wouldn’t text me back and told my therapist about my conversion therapy and the sexual violence I’d experienced. Digging these memories back up, however, proved painful. I frequently struggled to stay present during our meetings. At the end of every session he meticulously locked his little notepad away in a separate room.

The week after we’d completed my “history,” my therapist pulled out the machine and delicately explained how the process would work. It looked bizarre: a light bounced back and forth on a thin black, horizontal electronic bar and I would have to follow the light with my eyes. Eye movement desensitization and processing meant almost nothing to me before this moment. I just knew EMDR was primarily recommended for those with severe post-traumatic stress disorder – war vets and rape survivors. The goal of the therapy was to work through my core memories, moving beyond the recollection to see what associations my brain was making. By activating my body through the eye movement, my thoughts would find room to breathe, move around, and make new connections. Perhaps eventually my depression and OCD symptoms would lessen.

We began. I followed the moving light with my eyes as I gently tapped two buttons. Left, right, left right. After a few moments my therapist told me to stop and asked me what I had noticed, or, “What came up?” I talked about my fears, memories, stray observations, and associations. I made connections I’d never made between current anxieties and past traumas. Between my religious upbringing and the belief that I was fundamentally bad or capable of causing great harm, often without any factual basis. It seemed so simple in retrospect. Of course the things I’d gone through had wormed their way into my body, warping my ability to move forward. It was not an entirely pleasant revelation, but my therapist warned me things would get worse before they got better.

Throughout the following weeks I took the elevator up to the tiny office and waited in a gray room filled with filing cabinets, ferns, and other patients. My therapist would eventually appear at the doorway, smile, and summon me back in. He would comment on the book I was reading. We would go past the white noise machine into the treatment room and I would sit down, terrified of revealing something painful. I did not want recovered memories spilling out, to experience the feelings that inevitably bubbled up with them. It was exhausting. I left each session bone-tired. I walked down to Columbus Circle and got on the train, drowning the world out with my headphones and ordering chana masala before collapsing in bed to watch Grey’s Anatomy. I wasn’t sure what to think anymore, so I tried very hard not to think at all.

EMDR was developed by Francine Shapiro in 1987 while she was on a walk in a park. She noticed that if she looked in different directions while recalling a painful memory, the thoughts became less intense and negative self-beliefs receded. She’d recently undergone treatment for breast cancer and had begun studying psychoimmunology which taught her that the body’s natural defense systems had a kind of personal memory bank. Suffering, Shapiro argued, was stored in the body. Just like physical pain had a long afterlife and doctors could tell where past physical trauma had left a mark, so too did mental anguish. Somatic defense mechanisms kicked in that metabolized emotional pain. But this defence could be harmful in itself, a kind of maladaptive coping mechanism. The body keeps the score, yes, as Bessel van der Kolk would say, and sometimes the nervous system can be triggered even if there was no immediate threat to safety.

Shapiro’s hope was that EMDR would force the body to expel its negative fixations. The brain cannot hold two different ideas simultaneously, one idea will lose out to the other. The process of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, as its name suggests, is to divert the mind from its usual routine rumination by introducing new patterns and pathways through physical stimulation. When the eye moves, new ideas may come up. New associations that may allow the brain to “move” through trauma.

Recalling the memories while experiencing bilateral stimulation doesn’t just de-intensify the negative feelings one has about their past, but allows them to establish new connections and hopefully rewire the way they contextualize their experiences. Perhaps, EMDR suggests, by going deeper in, one can get free of their past. Or at least one can not let it dictate their future.

The brain cannot hold two different ideas simultaneously, though. One will lose out to the other. Pain is blunted. Shapiro began volunteering at a veterans center and working with Vietnam war veterans before publishing her findings. In early interviews she argued that she began working at a particularly fertile time for trauma studies – PTSD had just begun being studied and the feminist movement had “forced a reevaluation… so that rape is listed second only to combat in the DSM III categorization of PTSD.” Just as talk therapy and psychoanalysis started to decline, the idea of trauma and somatics started to enter public consciousness. By the time EMDR rolled around, dissociated and shell-shocked individuals wanted something more than to just talk it out. Neuroses weren’t going away fast enough and talk therapy took too long. EMDR promised a more mechanical roadmap—not exactly a quick fix, but something closer to it than spending many years working through issues bit by bit. It was a crash course that promised a solution to a “fixable” problem.

Bilateral stimulation is Shapiro’s key ingredient that differentiates EMDR from traditional talk therapy. “What comes up?” They may prod, trying to inch their client out of a trance-like state. After the patient responds, the therapist may simply say: ‘Just notice that.’ Instead of asking “why” or “say more about that,” the clinician encourages their ward to simply make associations and see “what comes up.” This goes on for most of the session. Ideally, the painful memories began to ‘move’ in the body.

Shapiro passed away in 2019, just as EMDR began making national news. Celebrities like Prince Harry, Sandra Bullock, Jameela Jamil, Demi Lovato, and Miley Cyrus have all expressed their allegiance. While originally used to treat war vets and rape victims, its promise of a fast way to alleviate symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety mean it’s become trendy for practitioners on BetterHelp and Alternative Manhattan Therapy networks to list EMDR as a specialty – or at least an interest. Dabbling in multiple modalities is common.

Some, however, believe EMDR is a pseudoscience that the benefits of the therapy have no correlation with the bilateral eye movements, which is under-researched, and are instead the result of discussing the trauma and memory as a form of exposure therapy. That EMDR offers an unstructured approach to traumatic memories has also raised concerns about the possibility of encouraging false memories. Perhaps while so studiously focused on the murky web of memory, we can create patterns that aren’t there—or even fabricate events that we think may “explain” our neuroses. EMDR often brings up fragmentary memories in addition to the more fleshed-out lightbulb memories. By focusing so much on the past, on painful events, we can sometimes feel like we remember more than we actually do. Usually, however, this occurs due to suggestive proddings by therapists can enrich misconceptions of the past. Research on memory is highly fraught for this reason. There have been multiple high profile cases where defendants sued therapists for supposedly implanting false memories of abuse in children. Gary Ramona’s daughter Holly was apparently swayed by her therapist to believe her father had raped her. A variety of popular trauma-informed therapies, like Internal Family Systems, have suffered similar scrutiny over the past few years for their dubious roots and the possibility they too could induce false memories even if some researchers claim these allegations are without merit. For those who suffer from OCD, like I do, the idea that there’s a secret memory that could unlock everything is both alluring and terrifying.

Shapiro ardently defended EMDR against detractors who called it ‘the snake oil of the 90s’ and many clinicians maintain that EMDR is an ‘effective treatment for trauma’. The World Health Organization, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the International Society for Trauma Studies, U.S. Veteran Affairs, and the American Psychological Association have all endorsed the practice. “The feeling was that if it worked me,” Shapiro said, “then reasonably it should work for everyone else.”

I only saw my therapist outside of our sessions once, at the subterranean Whole Foods on Columbus Circle just a block away from his office. He was going up the escalator holding a salad and I was going down, an hour or so before our regular appointment. He smiled. I said nothing.

We were still in the early stages of EMDR, but we had developed a solid treatment plan. This included ‘resourcing’, which was the process of building an imaginary safe space that I could retreat to when I was feeling overwhelmed, and crafting supportive figures to invite into difficult memories. It was a bit more touchy-feely than I was used to, but I was devoted to the process. At the end of each session, I was asked to put what came up in my “container.” My safe space, constructed from sense memories, involved visualizing a house in the woods with a cat. Scents had strong associative effects, so I added in cinnamon-spiced coffee. Predictable, but reliable cliches. I don’t remember what my container was – perhaps a clam? I’m not sure how good I was at putting things away in it – the boundaries between life and therapy were blurring.

“Don’t be surprised if you start dreaming again,” my therapist told me.

I did. Disturbing, visceral nightmares. My OCD flared up instead of calming down. My eating disorder was in full swing and I started obsessively exercising. Some of my friends were alarmed by the amount of weight I was losing.

“Yoga thins you out,” my therapist said, seemingly unbothered.

EMDR’s structure is meant to help the participant feel like they have a roadmap, even when the therapist plays such a silent role. When I went to psychoanalysis I often felt I was in free fall, whereas EMDR offered clear goal posts. However,for someone with OCD, which requires a puritanical devotion to purity, to order, to truth, recovering memories is a landmine. The idea that something is buried deep inside can only exacerbate compulsive behavior to uncover such an origin myth. My therapist’s goal was to guide me, though, not lecture or force me into a reckoning, which also meant that it could be lonely.

I tipped my therapist’s hands one day after a particularly distressing thought came up during our session.

“I need to know, in order to continue, if you think I’m a bad person.”

“I do not think you are a bad person,” he told me.

But we both knew that reply would only help me so much. Eventually I would have to believe it myself. Like the runny yolk of an egg, all my religious trauma was spilling out; memories bubbled up that I hadn’t thought about in years. Sometimes this led to epiphanies – linking my romantic patterns to the way I internalized spiritual guilt – sometimes I could not put the pain back into a container or a safe place and I rode the train home in tears. Locating the source of the pain, I discovered, did not automatically make me feel better. Instead, things had gotten worse. I felt like we’d taken a bulldozer to my life, upending and releasing a geyser of painful memories. There was no easy way to contain the flood.

In Season 16 of Grey’s Anatomy, Camilla Luddington’s character Jo undergoes EMDR. The episode was written by Elisabeth Finch, “Finchie,” who wrote on the show for years and often claimed to transmute her own intense, personal trauma into storylines for it. EMDR, her cancer, rape and holding her friend’s remains after the Tree of Life shooting had all been represented by Jo, the character who was so often Finch’s avatar. I first watched the episode on EMDR in 2019, as I was undergoing treatment myself. It felt kismet. No one else besides me seemed to be watching the show – it was not prestige anymore – and no one else I knew had gone through EMDR, so I found comfort in Jo when she went through the same messy steps I did with volcanic emotions, cresting and erupting out of nowhere.

It later came out that Finch had lied about a significant portion of her personal experiences. While she did attend a trauma center and claimed to have undergone EMDR while there, many of her ‘autobiographically’ informed episodes were later proven to be based on half-truths, other people’s experiences, and outright lies. Finch never had cancer. She was most likely not present at the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting. She had drawn from other people’s stories, like a “trauma vampire.” The details of the EMDR episode had been taken from her wife’s experiences, and the two have since been embroiled in an embittered divorce.

Reality, dreams, and fiction blurred. One woman’s healing journey became another woman’s profitable business venture. The episode had been a comfort at the time, but then became a personification of false memories and EMDR as fraud. Finch’s experience claiming others’ memories as her own is like a cracked mirror, a refraction of the very way Shapiro developed EMDR. The difference is that Shapiro actually had cancer and turned her trauma into a discipline. Finch only wished she did and from this creative wish turned into a vampire. But both women used their pain to create something. It’s simply not clear if Finch ever had a core traumatic memory, or merely enjoyed the performance. Therapy is like this. A two-handed play. It’s not uncommon on social media to hear from someone who talks about their sessions like a stand-up comedy special or a never-ending drama. In Finch’s world, this performance became a soap opera she could use both in her scripts and in her personal life.

“The past is present,” Francine Shapiro wrote in one of her many books on EMDR. While I could logically understand my symptoms as echoes of my past experiences with my conversion therapy, my body was in fight or flight. “Reactions that seem irrational are often exactly that. But irrational doesn’t mean that there is no reason for them. It means that the responses come from a part of our brain that is not governed by the rational mind,” Shapiro went on.

The goal is to help patients make new psychological connections. The result is not a coping strategy or the elimination of anxiety. Instead of remaining stuck, emotions, memories, and senses are remixed, allowing new latitude for their movement, but the anxiety can remain. Doubt is a part of all therapy. Wanting to quit, the breakdown, hitting the wall: all of this comes before the breakthrough, at least according to therapists. I wanted to put my OCD away in a clam, to stop believing I was evil, and to start over. I knew this play. I kept reenacting the same trauma. I tried to exorcise it through writing, but like Finch, it wasn’t enough for me to merely recreate the site of pain through storytelling.

Unfortunately, there is no cure for mental illness. EMDR is palliative, not a magic bullet, and OCD is not something I could “overcome.” After six months or so, I had only “cleared” one or two memories. But my emotions were moving around. Slowly, I found intrusive thoughts less debilitating. I would go weeks and eventually months without a panic attack.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, my therapist decided we should take a break from EMDR. I stared at the power lines outside my window and tried to make sense of the quiet expanse of warehouses in Red Hook just outside my door. I took a lot of walks, ambling around in the summer breeze of the Atlantic.

We started just talking instead of working on memories. We had not, in the end, finished more than a handful of the ten or so we had planned on attacking. Eventually, he went private and having no job or real health insurance at the time, we had to break up. “This is going to be painful,” he warned me.

I took a break for a few years before finding a new therapist. Problems continued to arise and I still faced the occasional crisis of faith. Eventually, I saw somatic therapists, psychoanalysts, eating disorder specialists and Internal Family Systems practitioners. Each solution felt like only a small part of the puzzle. Like any good therapy junkie, I kept hoping I would find the exact right modality—the one that would fix me. But the ghosts still haunt me sometimes. My nervous system remembers even if I’m not consciously thinking about the memories. But knowing the past informs the present doesn’t stop the anxiety. Nothing is linear, not even pain. The neat story of trauma being overcome and forgotten, fading into the mist, is just that. A story.

My current therapist works in a few different modes, sometimes EMDR. When we do utilize EMDR, it’s a choice. Feelings continue to bloom and wither. Sometimes I struggle to put them in my container.

“Justice notice that,” my therapist says.

Art by Setsuko Migishi.

Missouri Williams for Bookforum.

On Emma Cline and contemporary fiction for House House.

Get into Madonna for POW.

Defector column on the manosphere.

I’m teaching another class for Study Hall! Come!

In the Shirley Jackson-inspired world of Mitski’s newest album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, her new “character” is not a cowboy, a clown, martyr, or a spiritual pilgrim but a stifled housewife living in small-town Vermont. The claustrophobic woods and stuffy academic parties are suffocating her. She would prefer to live in a fantasy world, one full of fluffy white cats and folk art. She crashes her car and attempts a bimbo lobotomy to escape the world of buttoned-up, literary men. At least, that’s the implication. Mitski leaves the threat closing in on her protagonist a bit of a mystery. Her new album plumbs the depth with scuzzy guitars and moving ballads, showcasing a return to form and a sonic push that expands her usual palette. The songs are more bare than her previous work. She returns to spare folk and the occasional fuzzy rock freak-out on the desperate “If I Leave.” Sometimes a choir steps in to prop her up. “No one in this bar knows,” she croons.

In 2023’s “Bug Like an Angel,” Mitski, or one of her characters anyway, appears to be gripping with alcoholism. “As I got older/I learned I’m a drinker/ Sometimes a drink feels like family.” On “I’ll Change for You,” the second single from her new album, she returns to this idea of liquor as community: “Bars, such magic places/ You can be with other people/ Without having anyone at all.”

Mitski’s music has always featured women who hate themselves. This has often led to the diminutive moniker of sad girl music, but self-loathing is global, a universal negative oceanic feeling. Hating yourself won’t make you a better person, no, but it can be nursed and turned into a hobby. From “I Don’t Smoke” to “A Loving Feeling” to “Lonesome Love,” this often looks like pursuing someone who doesn’t care about you. But sometimes that’s the symptom of self-hatred, not the cause. It’s the chicken or the egg of self-worth. Did I choose someone awful because I hate myself or do I hate myself because I chose someone awful?

The visuals for the newest album sported many whimsical cats and equally ostentatious wallpaper. There was even a pop-up Tansy House that looked like something out of a story book. Nothing’s About to Happen To Me plays on Shirley Jackson and gothic revival fantasies, illustrating Mitski’s continual attempt to outgrow her sad girl reputation and move towards a new narrative that straddles the nineteenth and twentieth century. Mitski’s always been interested in a kind of haunted domestic horror. “Dead Women” culminates in a desolate, painful murder: “While I dream of flying, stab me twenty-seven times.” This from the woman taunting the listener, “Would you have liked me better if I’d died/ So you could tell my story the way it ought to be?”

This play with isolation and autonomy, the threat of being stuck inside the house as in the music video to “Where’s My Phone?” mirrors Shirley Jackson’s own biography and struggle for artistic and romantic integrity in rural Vermont. The narrator of Mitski’s new record only seems to have furry companions for creature comfort. Cats seem to keep multiplying on the record, perhaps an ode and paean to the animals that keep crazy women everywhere moving forward. “Our two cats, making sure I’ll be alright,” she whispers on the titular feline track.

If the music of Mitski soundtracked my twenties, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me feels like the painful act of growing up and still having to deal with loneliness. The righteous anger and bitterness of my personal favorite Bury Me Out At Makeout Creek felt like an album handmade for going through shameful college travails. Puberty 2 was a summer of heartache. Be the Cowboy felt like a weary but lost soul moving to the big city (the kind she sings on “In a Lake” that you can start over in). Laurel Hell was a thorny rebirth about making a living and getting things right in a world of social atomization. The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We was a breakthrough, a return to form that crystallized and remixed Mitski’s key themes.

Perhaps songs like “Bug Like an Angel” and “I’ll Change for You” are so endearing to me because I have begun to frequent my local bar. I rely on the ability to talk to the familiar faces of regulars who know my name while still being just one in a crowd. A Campari soda, a Negroni, a martini, or some amaro is the cost of admission. It feels like an older kind of socialization—meeting people of different ages, watching people go on dates, reading a book. People talk about Roth IRAs, Madonna’s new album, the fire that happened down the street at the old pharmacy, the rising rent. We play cards, we gossip, we make plans, we unload and destress. It is far from a perfect solution. But sometimes it can feel like grace.

Image credit: Chaim Soutine.

I have a few album reviews coming soon, so I thought I’d lead with a short piece that never materialized. Think of it as a reflection.

On trans femicide and Juniper Blessing for Vogue.

JD Vance for Lux.

A blog for Criterion.

Interview with Jane Schoenbrun for Filmmaker Mag, print only so far.

There are precious few “ambiguous monument[s]” still standing. Many periodicals like Lionel Trilling’s beloved Partisan Review are now extinct. The wages of the little magazines left standing are continually mocked online. Their purpose, however, is to serve those who “value their ability to live some part of their lives with serious ideas,” as Trilling put in his 1946 essay “The Function of the Little Magazine.” The ecosystem of criticism that existed then, exemplified by Edmund Wilson and codified by Norman Podhoretz in Making It, was robust.1 Now, critics like Becca Rothfeld mourn the death of The Washington Post books section. Established writers like Ron Charles are taking to Substack where nearly every month a new takedown piece arises and a new school of thought is birthed. AI is eroding people’s ability to read, interpret, and think. The work of critical thought has never felt more endangered. There are, of course, mighty magazines still acting as a fulcrum for inquiry. From N+1’s “The High Style of the Hater” to The Drift’s re-evaluation of Simone Weil to The Point’s diagnosis of liberal fantasia these small but nimble institutions build a counter culture that reinforce, break, and shift what criticism can do in the modern era—an ability AI lacks.

This calls to mind Trilling’s original assertion that “the politics with which we are now being confronted may be of such kind as to crush the possibility of that interplay between free will and circumstance upon which all literature depends. These conditions can scarcely encourage us.” Perhaps that sounds familiar. But the little magazine, he argues, is a “natural and heroic response.” These cultural institutions play a vital role in our world. Their goal is to keep our culture from becoming “cautious and settled.” Of course, even small magazines can create a new status quo and some accuse these vessels of culture of being gatekeepers. Open the blogs, they cheer. Editors, however, are the keepers of sanity. Their job, often thankless and exhausting, is to corral the writer and re-establish clarity. Everyone has read a Substack that was a Tweet, or a blog that needed a fact check. Nor does every piece of writing needs to be the length of a novella. This is not to say that Substacks and blogs can’t also play an important role in culture—there are essays that can only exist in such a format. Many great writers have risen on the website. There’s a watchdog component to Substack and similar outlets, a way to check the powers that be. I immensely enjoy reading the work of Seymour Hersh, Ken Klippenstein, Kate Wagner, B. D. McClay, John Ganz, Brandon Taylor, Sam Bodrojan, Rayne Fisher-Quann, and many others. But Substack is a complement to magazines, not a replacement. Infrastructure and healthcare are nice perks. Gatekeeping is a job that comes with benefits and resources.

Trilling, of course, was not very taken with the cultural output of his time. He was worried that people preferred optimistic slop to the “tough, complex psychology of Freud.” Heady interpretation was what separated the wheat from the chaff. This is the goal of all little magazines. Criticism and interpretation, like Torah Study or Sufi dervishes, molds and expands the mind. While blogs allow a new kind of wilderness, the little magazine is like a dam, protecting the alluvial nature of the swamplands—filtering down and shaping our minds. A magazine curates, a blog flows.

Perhaps this sounds snobbish. Trilling faced similar controversies for his exacting standards and ideas. Yet I don’t think holding a higher standard for literature or art is elitist. We can take lowbrow art just as seriously as Donald Judd or John Donne. Criticism can be approachable even if it’s metabolizing Kafka or Rilke. Look at the feral tenderness of Patricia Lockwood or the vicious buoyancy of Andrea Long Chu. Margo Jefferson writes about the music of her youth in Constructing a Nervous System with the flair of a playwright. Vinson Cunningham approaches the Knicks with reverent solemnity. These are the result of a life steeped in the process of thinking, working through the rubble of literature and politics. If novels are getting worse, criticism itself is not. I am skeptical of these cyclical pronouncements—that novels or criticism are in danger, that there’s a decline of some kind. In reality, I find magazines allow for a diversity of style and intellect, collecting a coterie of disparate writers and ideas that reverberate and echo, a symphony in the same key even if they utilize different chord progressions.

The panic over declining literacy rates, the book review, and media coverage at large, however, continues. With such pressure put on readers, it’s no wonder that, as Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote: “a Sunday morning with the book reviews is often a dismal experience.” Both writers and critics must contend with the apocalyptic mood. As institutions crumble, many erudite journalists are quick to defend the credibility of their livelihood even if they are no longer the vanguards of taste. We’re terrified about the lack of authority, the free fall of magazines. Everyone is seeking confidence, trying to believe themselves the arbiters of what is good and what is bad. Personally, I welcome that gauntlet. Say it with style.

But there’s a more grim undercurrent to this crisis of authority. The layoffs and closures are alarming. Equally concerning is the attempt by tech companies to outsource the life of the mind to robots that rely on deadly data centers. Some have argued that standards are falling across the board. “Bad criticism is bad not because it has been deflowered by political ideology but for all the typical reasons that writing is bad: it is poorly paid, hastily edited, and written mostly by freelancers with so little in the way of financial security,” Andrea Long Chu wrote in her 2025 collection Authority. Even movies like The Devil Wears Prada 2 are worried about the future of big magazines.

If once magazines launched major talents, it seems now there are fewer public intellectuals. Certainly no one is interviewed on TV like Susan Sontag or Noam Chomsky. But little magazines still face the uphill battle, the noble one, to try and explore the stories behind the headlines and the niche ideas, books, and events that deserve space on the page. There have certainly been attempts to interrogate their place in the cultural sphere. Writer Naomi Kanakia has recently been reviewing one periodical after another. Criticism begets criticism. But often I think back to the days when I longed to appear in those very magazines. I imagined there was a secret castle full of stiff upper-lipped editors drinking gimlets and eating caviar who only hired their friends. I was, of course, wrong. It’s merely a long, toiling road from one piece to another. Editors are mostly overworked and underpaid like the rest of us, many hold multiple jobs and contend with unruly inboxes.

As a child, I loved reading used copies of Harper’s from Half-Priced Books. I’m not sure I understood very much, but I admired the steely prose and unfussy fonts. Now, I also love devouring Bookforum and Parapraxis. A good critic can turn something on its head while erecting lyrical carnivals with the elemental bones of language. She can animate a subculture you’ve never heard of.

In Rothfeld’s elegy for The Washington Post’s book section she sets out what I believe is a very beautiful way to think about the (new) function of the little magazine and its readers: “What they often evinced was better than interest, better even than bibliophilia; it was the rare and precious capacity to be interested in what they didn’t already know interested them. It was a willingness to be changed.”

There’s a still wide field available for writers aspiring to grace the pages of little magazines—even if perhaps literacy rates are falling and NEA grants are being stripped away. Those who do pursue such a calling (I hesitate to call it a career) certainly still toil, but the resulting camaraderie can be a wonderful thing. Certainly, some writers can be cliquish, but not all. The trenches of freelancing and writing for small (and occasionally big) magazines is the only home I know. It’s not all doom and gloom either. Some organizations are thriving. Luckily, certain special grants are replacing the loss of the NEA for outlets like N+1 and the beloved Dalkey Archive.

No little magazine will appeal to everyone, nor should it. Perhaps it seems I write from inside the house, but I am not a staff writer or editor. I did not go to an Ivy League school or get an MFA. Of course, I don’t think it’s an easy career for anyone. I make my career hopping from one beloved little magazine to another, reporting and writing about the far-right, healthcare, religion, and books. I enjoy it. I enjoy the writers I get to write alongside both here and in outlets like The Baffler and Lux. The line between a big and small magazine is growing eerily thin. If the definition is merely about circulation it seems nearly every glossy publication is in trouble. Let’s just presume that we are talking about the outlets I’ve mentioned rather than a publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

It’s a magnificent thing to hold a magazine in your hand, smoke a Capri, and drink a Diet Coke or a glass of wine. Bourgeoisie? Perhaps. Yet these magazines often cost merely $40 a year. Besides, people from every walk of life desire culture. It seems more insulting to me to say that only a certain kind of people read a certain kind of magazine. (Let it be known that even e-flux has grown remarkably more readable over the years.) Those few of us who strive to be writers know exactly what Norman Podhoretz meant when he said “What I wanted was to see my name in print, to be praised, and above all to attract attention.” We know what he meant. We all have the magazine we treat like an avoidant boyfriend who won’t text us back. Our white whale. Even Sontag, for her part, dreamed of breaking into such a world through specific “little magazines,” as Benjamin Moser notes in his biography: “My greatest dream,” Sontag said, “was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.”

The “little magazine” shouldn’t be underestimated. No matter how widely read, they offer a beacon to the next generation of readers, devoted bookworms, and pseudo-intellectuals alike. I don’t believe in much but I believe in the sanctity of the little magazine. Reading, after all, is the godliest profession. In a world where everything is about being more accessible and more slick, the little magazine offers another way—an afternoon or evening spent trying to understand.

No, I’m not on X or Bluesky anymore. The echo chamber was a long time in the making and I unfortunately am trying to make a living off my writing. So I don’t know what latest discourse is or who’s mad at who. I’m still working on a few big pieces so this remains dormant until a piece ends up getting cut or I have an epiphany. Rarely do I lurk on notes other than to post work. In the meantime, I have a new slew of links.

This is a moving, potent essay on techno, dance, and the night by Aria Aber.

A great essay by my Bookforum editor David O’Neill on Lucy Ives and writing.

Killer profile of Alia Shawkat by Leah Abrams.

LOOSEY is always great. This is a knockout piece by Brendon Holder.

I was distraught I missed the show, but Hattie Lindert wrote a great piece on the Phoebe Bridgers pop up at MSG.

Unsurprisingly, I have underscores, the new Charli XCX, and Hole on repeat. I watched Edward Yang’s Mahjong with some friends—obsessed.

I’ve been revisiting our favorite bitter queen Gary Indiana. I love Resentment and Do Everything in the Dark. I also read The Tunnel by William Gass, a claustrophobic epic about fascism and the Midwest.

And here are some things I’ve written recently:

A short novella for Community Mausoleum. Fiction! Again! First time since Herculine.

On the closure of pediatric trans care for The Verge.

John Waters’ Desperate Living for Criterion Liner Notes.

Hello! A small update and a small amount of links. I’ve been trying to pick up work and deliver a new novel draft and a proposal of some kind. Pride month, it seems, for better or worse isn’t the season for freelancers it once was. So once again, I don’t have that many of my own non-paid thoughts. Instead, I have a small round-up of other people’s work and my own.

The new MUNA album is fascinating. Can pop music move past the corny and into the visceral? Certainly there are hooks. “Big Stick” is a fascinating modern protest song. Escaping the florid, innocent, naive quality to some queer art is difficult. There was a sea of Mapplethorpe and Hartley imitators in the wake of Tom of Finland and the commodification of Keith Haring. There's an initial wave of aesthetic imitators: scrawny twinks and BDSM muscle gays in painters alongside the prototypical photographer of male nudes who admires Classical art and arched backs. While this visual art movement gave way to good artists too like Hockney and Gregg Arakai both of whom parodied gay aesthetics, it also gave way to rainbow murals and queer capitalism, artwashing and worse. Campiness became key to the personas of Elton John, Liberace, and RuPaul--only to birth Queer Eye and gay influencers like Connor Franta. Queer Joy is Resistance became a slogan slapped onto watercolors and woodblock prints. Coming our narratives and sponsored posts became a way to make money, a way to write a memoir, and perhaps even get a TV deal. Text art was a big part of this, but so was writing itself as Paul McAdory wrote in a great essay about the sentimental gay novel. Tenderness has become taboo. Satire and irony reign supreme, we want our queer art but at a slant. Down with the earnestness of Sam Smith and music videos full of yearning. Hopefully I’ll write something more on this eventually.

In other music news, the shift of trans musicians to electronica continues with Jane Remover and underscores, both extremely talented pop artists with great vision and catchy gems. I’m glad they’re having a moment that seems to reflect SOPHIE’s legacy while moving it forward.

I’ve been thinking a lot about right-wing influencers and the way they’re scaling up their streaming efforts. The left has yet to really find a corollary they’ll embrace—Hasan Piker has received a lot of flack for supporting Palestine. This was a really interesting piece by Will Alden in Jewish Currents on Curt Mills.

This was a great read, a sharp review of the MJ documentary by Paul Thompson.

Zefyr Lisowski’s great piece on the state of trans publishing. It’s a necessary piece I highly recommend.

Like many, I’ve been enjoying the Wallace Shawn renaissance. Watching The Designated Mourner reminded me of discovering Ingmar Bergman as a college student in film school. Highly recommend. I’ve also been watching and enjoying Widow’s Bay with D and we both enjoyed going on date night to see Hokum in Astoria.

I am teaching a class on finding an agent! Sign up!

On Katherine Packert Burke and the trans killer myth for The Baffler.

Interview on criticism for Red Pepper.

Appearance on Translash about trans art.

On London Falling for my book column at Defector.

On the balls barn for The Nation.

Hello from Burnout Island. I’ve been writing a lot, freelancing is my full-time job, and while I have a few regular gigs it still requires a lot of admin to get enough work lined up to pay the bills. The industry is in decline, or at least in a lot of trouble—something that surprises no one. While there are only a few full-time, fully-employed book critics, I am a full time critic/journalist/writer. I just don’t get health insurance for my contributions. As such, I am trying to finish up a few big pieces soon. So, while I wish I could offer another essay or interview for you this week I am turning to a classic Substack genre. The recommendation list. I have mixed feelings on lists, perhaps because they’re often been a way for me to manage my anxiety or troubled ideas about canon (who’s in and who’s out), but I also think they can be a place of lifting others up and expanding. One rule—these are primarily things I am not writing about. Some some books I would recommend aren’t present below. Speculate away.

Articles:

“The Polycrisis,” Brandy Jensen, The Yale Review

Today a big theme is editors who are also great writers. This is one of the only good things written about polyamory. Read it. She also wrote a great piece on Nancy Lemann, whose Lives of the Saints is great and I just read.

A profile of Charli XCX for Vogue UK by Laura Snapes

Snapes is one of the best writers on pop music. Her recent profile of XCX is a master-class mash-up and she also just had me reconsider what I thought about the new Kacey Musgraves album. (She’s right, it’s genius.)

On Emma Cline by Jennifer Wilson for The Nation

Wilson is now at the New Yorker, but her book reviews for the Nation are what I turn to for inspiration. Clear, crisp, erudite, stylish and incisive.

Driving Academy by Nicolaia Rips for the Paris Review

The i-D writer and memoirist is so funny, she’s excellent at turning grief into tiny comic gems. Her recent essays are a treat.

On Neighbors by Tyler Foggatt for The New Yorker

Foggatt’s writing on Taylor Swift is some of the best, her criticism is so fun and ecstatic, the kind of thing that ropes you in like a lasso with its flashy subjects and careful critical consideration.

Rachel Syme on the Met Gala for The New Yorker

Definitive takes. Great context.

Also:

Naomi Kanakia on short stories and style, Centrist imaginations by Rayne Fisher-Quann, Rachel Aviv on Oliver Sacks, Jean Garnett on kid’s tv and divorce, Chris Gayomali on juicing, and Hermione Hoby on Infinite Jest.

Books:

A Left-Handed Woman, Judith Thurman

Her sentences are so lush and intricate without sacrificing anything. Their sparse perfection is so evocative. Read her on any and everything from Rachel Cusk to Commes des Garçons.

Wifey, Judy Blume

This was a trip. Raunchy, sexy, grim, funny. A slender, perfect novel that should be more widely-read. Where’s the reissue? I’d do an introduction on late-in-life affairs and the appeal of gross-out sex.

On Morrison, Namwali Serpell

I obviously have a soft spot for criticism. Serpell’s book is surprising, exacting, demanding, and beautiful. I love the way she weaves in Nettie Jones and Morrison’s editorial work. It’s a daring, pitch-perfect book with a lot to say about one of my favorite writers.

Murder Bimbo, Rebecca Novak

Alongside Famesick, this is one of the few books I’ve torn through recently. Novak has written a bleak comic satire with a lot to say about love, politics, and selling out. It’s fun, biting, and sharp. I want more. Novak’s bio about being a divinity school grad continues to shift the way I read this book.

The Crime of Sheila McGough, Janet Malcolm

She’s the best, what can I say? I’ve worked through all her books at this point and there’s simply no one like her. I’m excited for a biography I hear is coming later this year.

Image credit: Leonard Carrington.

Many thanks to LitHub for calling me a critic to watch!

Stories about time travel have always felt like a form of cheating to me. Instead of sticking to one timeline, they introduce a mysterious deus ex machina: a hack, a shortcut, a trick. In her septology On the Calculation of Volume, Danish writer Solvej Balle attempts to elevate the concept of the time loop into something literary. Her characters must wonder if they can use time instead of being used by time. Can they exploit their snow globe moment? Four of the projected seven volumes have been translated into English by Barbara J Haveland, Sophia Hersi Smith, and Jennifer Russell. Balle’s characters are forced to relive the 18th of November again and again–not unlike the karmic prison of other recent media like Russian Doll, Groundhog Day, Star Trek, I Who Have Never Known Men, or even Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. These films and books open alternative timelines that allow our characters to use their ingenuity to shift their future. They can right wrongs, redo awkward encounters, and rebuild society. Like sliding doors, they can see both the negative and positive outcome of their dilemmas and work towards resolution. In truth, it can feel like an author just wants to make up for lost time. They’ve written themselves into a corner. Each of these examples exploits the fantasy of time travel to allow its characters to live in a cozy fantasy or allows for neat answers to complex conflicts. It’s a way for characters to have a get out of jail free card. More recent books, like Balle’s for instance, use the stoppage of time as a way to consider the nightmarish quality of the contemporary moment. Maybe if time stops we can reckon with the polycrisis.

But for Balle’s protagonist Tara Selter and those she meets along the way, the failure of time to pass is not just an opportunistic plot device bordering on tedium and frustration, it’s a way to examine existential philosophy. The big questions of life come into focus when very little changes from one day to the next. Tara roams around and eats crisp bread, jotting stray observations down in her diary. Sometimes the prose can feel barren. “It is not a disaster. It is not nothing, but it is not much either.” Other times it attempts profundity through stark similes and metaphors: “The world is a place that throws you overboard.”

This can make, at times, for fascinating reflections from our narrator Tara Selter. The series is written like her diaries, her slow trudge from one November day to the next, at first alone and then much later with a few comrades in the war against monotony. Not everyone has the same idea of how to get back to their previous timeline and make the days begin again. Tara, for instance, feels like a monster, using up resources that don’t reset with the next November 18th. Those who come later are less worried about using up the natural world. Even while Tara is alone, she’s less concerned with exploiting the expected tricks of the time travel genre. It’s her companions who arrive later on who end up inevitably trying to use their snow globe moment to save the world. Can the glitch in the matrix allow for a new kind of morality to flourish? Can all car accidents, for instance, be prevented? What about natural disasters? Tara is more concerned with bringing her husband along for the ride. She suffers through the distortion alone, wishing he could join her adventures.

In the first volume, Tara stays close to home in rural France, trying to remind her husband Thomas that the day keeps repeating. But as time accumulates, she begins to lose hope. In the second book, she tries to chase the seasons by traveling throughout Northern Europe. She later visits her family and ends up discovering, at the very end of the volume, that she’s not alone in the time loop. Tara is more interested in reading about the Roman Empire and how they fell than in the actual mechanics of the repeating days. One of her most prized possessions is a sestertius. In the third book, she finds out that there’s another man with her though the two don’t exactly see time in the same way. She sees time as a “container,” he sees time as “a long tunnel of days.” She ends up meeting a few others who have differing ideas about ethics, sustainability, and how to take advantage of their situation. They all move in together in a house, where in the fourth volume, they discover that there are hundreds of people reliving the 18th of November. By now, years have passed and Tara has given up on pulling her husband, family, or friends into her troubling timeline. The mechanics of the time loop continually evolve “like something out of a horror film.” During the first book, Tara is the only one aware that the day is repeating. Later when she meets others, some of them understand what’s going on and some don’t. She develops a kinship and eventually a commune with some of those who have become “loopers.”

The science of this strange phenomena is mostly relegated to short rambling paragraphs that toss out a few ideas without analytic grounding—not that most are reading Balle for the horology. This is not exactly science fiction in the strictest sense. Instead, it seems she’s working out a feeling that many experienced during COVID—the failure of the world to cohere into a forward-moving plot. Plenty of novels and films made or begun during the pandemic contain that claustrophobic, repetitive, haunting aura, the way many felt stuck or lost in the cosmic soup that opened up during lockdowns. Have we entered the twilight zone and crucially can we get out? Since 2020, we’ve entered an echo chamber of discourse, perhaps more reliant on our phones for community than ever even as IRL-communal infrastructure dwindles. As existential emergencies inspire fear and division, we look for more like-minded people. We act like this is for safety, to recoil inward, to seek those we’re aligned with. In Balle’s work, this tendency is found among the loopers, those caught in the world where the same day repeats over and over. They inevitably find each other. They create a sense of unity—a quasi-utopia in a big house. The world has changed, Tara Selter discovers in On the Calculation of Volume, and there may be no going back. Even scarier, however, is that she may not want to. The new timeline may offer something, even as it destroys the old ways. It may sound familiar to those who spent time quarantining during lockdowns, the loss and mourning, the eerily empty subways, the bizarre attempt to upload real life to the cloud.

I recently saw someone online describe the novels as a meditation on the dissolution of a marriage and it’s true, much of the novel concerns the fact that Tara’s husband Tomas has not become stuck in November 18th like she has. At least, he’s not aware of it. The shared intimacy of their union fades. Slowly, Tara sees Tomas as a ghost and feels like she herself is a monster. There’s a dual quality here, both sinister and cozy, in the way loved ones are protected from time and a prisoner to it. Balle is clearly aware of this dichotomy, using it to explore disintegration and preservation.

Many have found Balle’s novels to be a “literary sensation,” while some have privately complained, at least to me, that they’re boring. A private response to a poll by The Cut’s Book Gossip column scowled about “these horrendously tedious Calculation of Volume books from Denmark,” Perhaps I’m jaded but the literary series has often come to seem like a cash grab. Why publish a single book when you can publish five or even seven? Often these books are written by palatable kinds of writers. They provide nearly mythical fables with an existential twist. Not just other Nordic writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jon Fosse, and Dag Solstad but also Yoko Tawada. Thin books that can serve as markers of taste and status are in. Why publish a few volumes of Annie Ernaux in one when you can stretch out the extended literary universe? It makes sense. Book sales aren’t why they used to be and small presses need the money especially as the Trump Administration strips many of their NEA grants. It’s a dire literary economy. But I do find at times it can expose the threadbare nature of such books. Balle is clearly a talented writer, but often it feels like she was at the right place at the right time as we ease up on lockdowns and start to look back on the early era of the pandemic—her books have the kind of easily postable covers that can go viral that focus on “a fairly homogenous segment of the population.” Those stuck in time aren’t old or poor or wealthy and all speak English, German, or French. “Many held temporary jobs or were at a crossroad when the day halted… Doubters, people at a turning point… with loose-fitting identities and disoriented lives.” Perhaps this is a clue. Tara’s passivity is certainly tied to her privilege. The faint whiff of environmentalism and conscious consumerism she displays is nothing compared to the men and women she later meets who truly want to remake the world. Guilt can be a paralytic or a catalyst.

The passage and phenomenology of time is often described in spatial metaphors. Tara often conflates the two as well—she often reads “tales of pockets, loops, and labyrinths of time.” Such narratives blur the science of how we experience hours, days, and weeks. “It is often said that time seems to go more quickly, the years rush by, as one grows older—either because when one is young one’s days are packed with novel, exciting impressions or because as one grows older a year becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of one’s life. But, if the years appear to pass more quickly, the hours and minutes do not—they are the same as they always were,” Oliver Sacks once wrote in The New Yorker. This is how quarantine felt to me, the long and endless days of summer that I spent in a railroad apartment or walking around Greenwood Cemetery listening to podcasts. I felt like I was just passing time. Why not go the long way to CVS? I wasn’t sure how to productively spend the massive amount of off-time. I read a lot too, but I did not write the Next Great American Novel or write a hit screenplay.

In later volumes of On the Calculation of Volume, a character named Olga worries about finding the right way to approach the time loop, the way to maximize her ability to save the world. She frequently argues with others about the right way to do so and finds Tara to be an airhead who “just gazes out of windows, thinking about love.” For Olga, seeking justice is more important than personal problems. Tara doesn’t seem to know what to do. Her next move is shrouded in nostalgia.

Love and family frequently surface in Balle’s work as a proxy for forward movement. Volume IV ends with Tara’s husband Thomas becoming aware that November 18th continues to repeat, a stunning development that promises, at least, some kind of progression to Balle’s series. Another mechanical incident: a woman becomes pregnant while still stuck in the time loop. She loses her baby. Somehow Balle has crafted a frozen world where the future can still slip in through cracks. In many time-travel works, this would create multiple timelines. The multiverse as existential enlightenment. For Balle, it’s just the starting point for another philosophical quagmire, the ability to contemplate forward movement. It’s a grim crossroads that Tara finds herself at, but not one, it appears, without hope.

Image credit: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Closing Party (Hit the North). RIP.

On looksmaxxing for GQ.

On the New Museum re-opening for Frieze.

On naturalism for Mother Jones.

Anahid Nersessian is one of our best living literary critics and someone I’ve been lucky to meet on multiple occasions. She writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and anywhere else cool, chic, and thoughtful. Her work harbors a cool precision that’s still amiable—readable and layered, sharp and moving. She often writes about poetry, history, and the contemporary novel and has taken on behemoths like Walter Benjamin, Schattenfroh, Rachel Kushner, Keats, and Bjork. We talked about the idea of group reviews, taste, Marx, and being hot.

What is the substantive quality of a book or piece of art that you look for when deciding what to write about?

I like assignments, not because I mind pitching, but because I appreciate the opportunity to think about a book or show or whatever that wasn’t already on my mind or radar. My own tastes are pretty niche, so it’s not a given that I’ll pick up something a lot of people want to hear about. Luckily I work with editors who have great instincts when it comes to pairing a critic with an object. For example, the biography of Walter Benjamin that I reviewed for The New Yorker a few weeks ago wasn’t something I would have read on my own—as an English professor, I can’t say I feel in need of extra Benjamin—but Namara Smith, who’s an incredible editor, suggested it to me, and I thought, oh, yeah, of course! And that review turned out to be a blast to write.

I really loved your piece on Bjork---writing about Fossora for NYRB alongside so many other poets or translated literature---what was it like to approach writing about a musician in that way?

That piece is another example—Jana Prikyl at the NYRB asked me if I wanted to review the new Bjork album, and how could I say no? I listened to Bjork a lot in high school and a little in college, but I’d honestly sort of forgotten about her. (I’m one of the rare people who hated Vespertine when it came out, and my love for Bjork never really recovered.) I was the music editor of my college paper, and I used to want to be a music journalist: Lester Bangs and Ellen Willis are still two of my favorite writers, and I wait with baited breath between articles by my friend Carina del Valle Schorske, who for my money is one of the best minds on popular music out there. When I write about poetry or literature, I approach them the way I learned to approach music. How does this sound? What is its volume, its shape, what are its sonic and rhythmic references? So, in some ways, that NYRB piece just allowed me to do the kind of writing that is closest to my own practice.

There was a lot of ado about your “Nightboat School” moniker in a recent piece for Bookforum. How do you define the lyrical contours of such a genre? Or the social matrix poets like Rosie Stockton, Nora Treatbaby, or Kay Gabriel inhabit? To me it feels like a more opaque antidote to the glut of third-rate Frank O’Hara imitators. I think here too of your piece “Notes on Tone,” and the challenge of outlining trends.

I hesitate to do what you’re calling outlining trends, because I think it’s easy to jump the gun and do a disservice to something real: no shade but that “Brodernism” essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books comes to mind. Usually when a critic names a trend, she’s talking about something she doesn’t like or thinks is lame. That doesn’t interest me so much. I’m a poetry scholar by training, and after observing some of these writers—Kay, Rosie, Nora, Imogen Xtian Smith, lots of others—for several years, and feeling like Nightboat was just hitting it out of the park on a regular basis (here I’d also want to mention Lindsay Turner’s exquisite translation of the late Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life), I decided to think about the possibility that the press was allowing something like a “school” to coalesce.

Obviously throwing out a term like “Nightboat School” is tendentious, and of course people are going to be annoyed if they feel left out or like their work isn’t being “elevated” to the status of a movement—although I tried to make clear that I don’t think being part of a school means your poetry is good or bad, it just means it shares a robustly specific social and aesthetic character with poetry written by your contemporaries. I did hear some of that “ado” through the grapevine. A lot of it seemed to be coming from older male poets, many of them with a toehold in academia, either because they teach at universities or have PhDs or publish their work with academic presses. That’s a different milieu, and it’s an interesting one, and great poetry has come out of it. It’s just not what I was writing about. I was writing about young queer poets with precarious jobs, many of whom don’t have MFAs or PhDs, who publish with a Brooklyn-based small press. It’s a description, not a competition.

In your work there’s a lot of threads---the lyric form, Keats, Anti-Zionism, psychoanalysis, Walter Benjamin--how did you harness your interests? Or, how do they haunt you? Do you believe in taste?

If I have any kind of taste it’s very elastic, and I’m not a snob, except maybe when it comes to poetry: I find a lot of mainstream poetry, with its literalism and humorlessness and formal inertia, embarrassing for everyone, readers as well as writers. And if there’s a throughline to my writing, it can probably be explained by the fact that I went to graduate school and was trained in Marxist literary criticism, a method of reading and interpretation that also happens to align with my politics. Sorry but I just think leftists make better critics: Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Tobi Haslett, Lauren Michele Jackson, Ben Lerner…do the reactionaries have that deep a bench? I don’t necessarily foreground political topics in my work, but I see the world a certain way and I have certain values and beliefs about humanity and social life. If I thought those values and beliefs were dumb I’d abandon them, and then my writing would be different, and I suspect it would be worse.

Do you think the LA literary scene is fundamentally different from NYC? Howso? Your work seems to have a different sensibility, but I can’t label that or say how that manifests.

New York is the center of the publishing world the same way that LA is the center of the movie business. I think being on the periphery of your industry is good for you; it makes you feel a little out of the loop, not so saturated with information about what other people are doing. In general I’d say the literary scene in LA is less status-driven, more gentle and welcoming and—I know everyone says this—democratic. A lot of the credit there is due to people like Sammy Loren, Ruby Zuckerman and Evan Laffer, Joseph Mosconi and the Poetic Research Bureau, and David Horvitz, who curate or host readings in spaces across the city and bring all sorts of writers in front of all sorts of audiences. As for my own work, again, I’m pretty clueless—I have no idea who has a book deal or who has beef or where someone got her MFA, and maybe that frees me up a bit to follow my own instincts or preoccupations. I also just love LA, its vastness and improbability. I hope that love, and the city’s energy, makes its way into my writing.

How, oh how, did you approach reviewing Schattenfroh?

I was just talking about that book the other day! It’s an experience as much as a novel—a form of endurance art. Trying to capture that in a review while also giving readers some guideposts to what the fuck is going on was daunting, but as I wrote about Schattenfroh I found that Michael Lentz’s core commitments to narrative and the history of realism are much stronger than they might initially seem. The book is experimental but so are Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travelsand German Romantic philosophy and the other stuff it’s in dialogue with, work that’s become canonical over the years and that there’s a sort of cultural consensus on. It’s part of a tradition and less opaque when you consider it in that light. Also, Max Lawton’s translation is such a joy—buoyant and clear and just in love with language. There’s an immediate, sensuous pleasure in reading the novel that’s just as important as its avant-garde acrobatics.

Finally, we were both in On the Rag’s Hottest Critics blog post a few years back. How did you find that experience?

I mentioned Sammy Loren, the editor of On the Rag, already. I’ve found him to be an unfailingly positive, optimistic, and kind person, and for the most part On the Rag’s blog reflects that sensibility, even in an occasionally cracked or unhinged register. It’s all in good fun. What I loved about that thread was seeing so many of my friends recognized for being hot and beautiful and smart. That was lovely.

Overrated/underrated for Writers

“Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag.

I think this one has passed through canonicity, become banal, and now has risen again, like Jesus. Jesse McCarthy’s vintage n+1 piece “Notes on Trap” is a beautiful and hypnotic extension of the OG essay.

Autofiction.

Evergreen. It’s not always done well but when it is it’s delicious.

Astrology.

All esoteric forms of knowledge are undervalued even as they’re overexposed.

The Pitt.

I don’t watch a lot of TV but during the first season, I would be out on a Thursday night thinking about how when I got home I could watch a new episode of The Pitt. It scratches a certain existential itch for me because I wish I’d become a doctor. But the second season has been absolutely dreadful--so toneless and boring.

Reality tv.

The shows I find too stressful but that Netflix series ‘Trainwreck’ I will say is a joy.

Image by Richard Diebenkorn.

I wanted to share a brief update which is that I have a books column now at Defector. My first piece is a review of Ben Lerner’s Transcription. I am immensely grateful to my editor Brandy Jensen, who is a genius. The article starts by asking “Would you fuck Ben Lerner?” You can read it here.

Also, I wrote a short piece on the Supreme Court’s ruling on conversion therapy bans for The New Yorker.

More soon, and thank you for reading and sharing. This is a magnificent opportunity and I’m elated. More soon, as always.

Maya Kotomori is a fashion writer, a critic, an editor, and a woman about town. She writes about sincerity, irony, sculpture, the Downtown Art scene, and currently works at Byline. Her work brings wit and grace along with a heavy dose of history to everything from Rick Owens to gloves to Laufey. So often freelance writers and editors don’t get the recognition or platform they deserve. For this series, I’ve been focused on bringing to light the art that goes into having a career in magazine writing and highlighting the work of people I think elevate the genre. Kotomori is a great example. We talked about Kanye West, career ambition, and normcore.

Writing on your ego and fashion, you wrote: “She dresses every day in styles cobbled together from fashion plates, she doesn’t check Instagram, she covers her knees not out of modesty, but as a statement.” I’m curious about the relationship between concealment, privacy, labor, and dignity. How do you navigate it?

I was really in my bag when I wrote that. I feel like a lot of people oscillate between romanticizing the past as a way of expressing disdain of the present/future of fashion, or the opposite; they romanticize the present/future to express disdain of the past. I don’t think it’s so simple! Fashion history, for example, focuses on gentry and royalty because back then, clothing was just clothing; if you were a fisherman you wore a special type of sweater to keep you warm and dry, hence the fisherman knit sweater. People who worked wore their clothes for that functionality, so we don’t have a lot of material evidence of those garments because, well, people wore them. To pieces! The evidence couldn’t be preserved for a museum like a piccadilly collar or a conical farthingale, those items existed for performance, because everyday wear in 16th century England was performance for royals. The industrialization of clothing in later centuries, leading up to today, has turned everything into choice; such is the laissez faire economy, the definition of neoliberal capitalism turning freedom of choice into the most valued commodity. There’s a power there that I want to encourage people to locate. Systems are only as valid as you would like them to be. If industry means all clothing becomes a choice—to be a fashion plate, to follow trends, to dress purely for utility—consumers can choose which systems they’d like to participate in. My ego wants to romanticize a past I’ll never know, a time before phones where clothing could just serve as adornment rather than the chief tool for identification or belonging, but instead of yearning that, I can mobilize choice not as something used to modulate my taste, but to ignore the systems I want to ignore, and support the ones I want to support. That can be as private or public as I’d like it to be. Because I’m a writer, I share a lot of that process but that’s how I approach all of those things.

As for concealment, my friend Mika Kol once said to me that covering your joints is the most dignified thing you could do, which led to a conversation about exactly how. You can cover your knees with kneepads (I have a pair, they’re a secret accessory-weapon I have), you can cover your elbows with elbow pads, you can cover your knuckles with special gloves, and the rest of your body could be completely naked, and that intentional concealment is almost kinky because you’re turning the joint into an errogenous zone, and turning the rest of you into the accessory. There are a lot of metaphors and woo-woo interpretations that can go into the errogenous-zone-ness of joints and what that can mean, but for the sake of cogency and wonderment I’m gonna leave that there, open for your interpretation ;)

What do you make of normcore? In fashion, as an ideology, as a form of or rejection of sincerity…

Normcore in fashion: an extension of industry, where industry is classified as I did above. I’m wary of origins (NOTHING is linear!!) but this feels like the first microtrend. Proto-social media, with roots in anti-fashion from the late ’80s through the ’90s, the pre-indie sleaze aughts blogger era, the post-indie sleaze “revival” in like 2012.

Normcore in ideology: I have a bit of a snowflake interpretation here. Normcore as ideology feels like a fetish of the canonical “normal guy”; in the western world at least, it’s a guy who goes to work 9-5 loves his friends wants a family has a family owns a house likes sex with cis women watches the big game etc. Normcore has also emerged in the past decade as blue collar fetish, it involves a lot of workwear which just gives obsession with working people, meanwhile we know how working people are treated by the federal government in this country. It’s the art student whose parents pay full price at a $35k/semester private art university hiding the Rick Owens their parents bought them in high school in the back of the closet, wearing only dirty Carhartts because they’re a “tradesperson.” No shade at all; I’m literally an NYU BA and Columbia MA holder. And, I also think there’s something we should mine there ideologically as to…why that, and also how has it become widespread enough where “Carhartt rich guy” is now a type.

Normcore as sincerity/not as sincerity: I love this one. So what you’re talking about, this idea of sincerity or a rejection of such, is the difference between sincerity and post-irony. Put simply, sincerity is liking what you like without concern of a zeitgeist that might thumb its nose at your taste. Post-irony is mobilizing that “I don’t care, I like what I like” as an aesthetic where the idea of actually being sincere is ironic. Natural question to follow is: well, then what do the post-ironic care about? Everything, nothing…we’ll never know. The surface of the joke contains all the meaning. The way something looks is where it begins and ends. Normcore is that for me; I think today it’s deployed post-ironically as “teehee the most interesting person you know is normal” and I think the most insidious thing about that is how hyperawareness of identity types and subtypes bred post-irony. Everyone is looking at each other and classifying one another to the point where believing something must be a joke? I…don’t like that. There really is no solution either, because what are you gonna do, ask everyone “hey are you doing that sincerely or because you want to look sincere?” People don’t even know that this has become the reading protocol for interpreting one another now, it’s a phenomenon I’m still trying to find the best way to explain.

I’ve been really enamored with this concept of post-irony since I was 24. Shout out to my friend and favorite editor Drew Zeiba for helping me write my very first essay on the topic a couple years ago; it was the first time I ever dared to put words to this really big idea and he helped me shape it in a way that now serves as a framework for all future iterations. (I want to write a book on it but every time I try and open conversations with Important Book People they tell me that no one will read a book on post-irony from someone under 30). Three more years to go.

Do you approach writing about art and fashion differently? How?

Not really, actually. Journalistically, both art and fashion writing hold hands in the sense that if you’re talking about a concept, you can get freaky and romantic with your wording; when you’re doing the necessary scene-staging you describe the piece/collection/show. I also feel like in NYC at least the scenes are all adjacent, the industries are parallel, the value systems for high-priced objects are parallel. I often times approach both with a bit of Kantian purity, analyzing the work in the context of the world it’s created in moreso than the world it lives in. Back to the systems thing I said earlier, both of these industries are systems. I write about them, I choose to put meaning on them. That doesn’t make them neutral, but it does mean I have a choice. It’s kind of like a separate the art from the artist thing but for my work. That compartmentalization is really important to me.

Do you feel more freedom to write your blog Responsible Gun Owner and also where did the title come from…

Absolutely. I reinvigorated my blog after I had ACL surgery in 2023 and was laid off of from a job I hated. Nothing quite like unemployment mixed with learning to walk again. Then I got a job as an editor at Document Journal and I started writing less because I did the work of someone paid three times as much as my “salary” (no one was formally employed there; we were all independent contractors). Then my former bosses owed me $10,000 in unpaid wages despite my going on work-stoppage strike twice (with only one fellow co-worker) so after what would be my last press trip to Copenhagen Fashion Week for the publication I made sure they ran me my money, and then quit on the spot. What’s a girl to do to enrich a slapdash freelance career? Blog.

Document was my first magazine job and I learned so much about how advertisements work, and how they affect critique. When you rely on Dior money, for example, you’re not gonna write a critical essay on the collection, you’re just gonna keep it to news. It’s not unethical if you just prioritize one kind of content, but it is, you know, one kind of content. One perspective. A lot of people take this fact and say, “oh well you can go on substack and do this,” you can go freelance and monetize yourself rather than working as an editor to monetize a magazine. And that can be a good idea for people! What comes with it, though, are similar constraints facing indie magazines, an obligation to be brand-safe to continue stacking partnerships and making money to pay for basic necessities. Freelancing doesn’t feel like it’s free anymore, from an ideas perspective, I guess is my point. The influencer-fication of freelance writers is really great for brands because they give their product to someone who seemingly has no skin in the game, get an honest, nearly always positive review, keep working together, etc. I’m lucky in that I’ve only received gifts (not for review, just cus!) from brands I actually really ended up liking, and honestly there are brands who have slid into my DMs that I’ve not been into and I just said “thank you so much for the offer but this isn’t for me.” Could those DMs have precipitated money, perhaps lasting creative partnerships? Yeah, they could have. But I freelance as a writer for hire, not as Maya Kotomori for hire. If you want to hire Maya Kotomori, however, I’m here and I would like to be an editor at a magazine again because that was my favorite thing to do.

Saying no is what Responsible Gun Owner is all about. I get asked all the time what it’s like owning a gun, and I actually don’t; I’ve never even shot a gun before. But the title comes from my love of guns as tools, as an idiom of American violence, as a mutilating object that sparks so much debate in America. A gun is a stand in for an opinion. Sometimes I want to use my POV as a tool, sometimes I want to call to attention the things politically affecting myself and my fellow Americans, sometimes I just want to eviscerate a previously-held notion that I particularly hate, or I want to defend an idea or artwork or movie that I love. Because I think my thoughts, I am armed and dangerous. My friend Marisa Nakamura always says that honesty without kindness is cruelty, and that’s what the blog is all about.

Tell me your thoughts on the new Kanye album, I know we DM-ed a bit about it.

It’s a soft 7 for me. I appreciate the soul chop ups, the North West prod credit. Despite this, I will say that there’s a level of connection that I’m not getting; like the head bobs, but it doesn’t bang. Still can’t quite put my finger on it but I do love the project as a whole, I love that the concept comes from the fact that Saint allegedly kicked a child for being weak, I feel the frustration and I feel the power and I feel the want and I don’t feel all of the invigoration I normally feel from a Kanye album. The other day, my dad (a psychiatrist, one of few good ones) was breaking down the magic of bipolar people in that the way their brains work makes them more attuned to other people’s energy, and we both fit Kanye into that. There’s also a lot to think about with public/privacy, his “crash outs” aka the times when his having bipolar was actually harming himself and others, rather than the different frequency of his mind offering him a creative edge. I would say more but I really really really want to write about Bully for a publication. If you are reading this please accept my pitch <3

Over/Under for Writers

1. Blogging: Underrated, it’s free, you can do whatever you want, it’s a great way to practice writing big ass ambitious pieces. I am pro blogspot just because it’s what I grew up with and my blog sometimes can be like my diary so I don’t wanna necessarily email-blast my every thought all the time. I will put it on the internet, but you can read it if you want to find it. Feels more consensual?

2. Drake: I can’t answer this one because I just do not listen to Drake. I grew up watching Degrassi: The Next Gen re-runs on The N (remember?) and it’s still really hard for me to take him seriously.

3. Sandy Liang: Overrated. The work does nothing for me.

4. Saltwater taffy: Underrated. Haven’t had it in years. Perfect chew but with a neutral sugar taste PERFECT for writing something itself that might be chewier…stickier, etc.

5. Addison Rae: PROPERLY rated as in she rightfully has all her accolades. That’s my GIRL. Her music is freeing it is pop it is fantasy it is fun it makes me feel alive. That level of “I am untouchable” is really important to me.

I don’t know if I’ll do this every week quite yet (though I have recently)—and certainly I may talk to non-writers in the future as well. I don’t always have new writing of my own to share, though I think next month will be busy so stay tuned. Sound off on what you think about this format in the comments. The above image is Cy Twombly. I do carefully choose each image, so feel free to draw your own associate analytic ideas.

Almost every week Tasbeeh Herwees has a new ground-breaking, watercolor report on the cultural scene of Los Angeles. My skepticism of the West Coast is hardly a secret. Nearly every time I go to LA, something bad happens to me. I was recently in town to report on a Bari Weiss talk that got cancelled. Everyone was talking about her recent essay on LARB. Her indispensable reporting continues to come out of No Bad Days. We spoke about Substack, free speech, local journalism, and smoothies.

How did No Bad Days in LA start? And can you guarantee this?

No Bad Days is less of a guarantee and more of a manifestation. There are always bad days, but it’s easier to get over the minor trials and tribulations of contemporary life when it’s consistently 70 degrees outside. I’ve never really lived anywhere else, so I can’t imagine what it’s like trudging through the snow only to be humiliated by a situationship. But of course LA deals its own unique humiliations, which even the sun can’t sanitize.

I started No Bad Days in May of last year. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for many years, but I finally decided to just do it because I had been laid off from my tech job in January 2025. I love local reporting, but didn’t find anywhere to do that besides the LA Times, which has its own issues.

I also really wanted to build something more community-focused. LA’s physical gathering places, like our beloved Taix, are at constant risk of closure and demolition. We no longer have a strong alt weekly reporting on the sub-cultures and underground communities that make LA really fun. I wanted a place where young writers could try out experimental forms of reporting or do things they can’t do at other outlets. I just commission some really fun work I’m excited to publish!

You have reported a lot on the hostile climate in the media world in LA, do you see any big patterns emerging? Especially in regards to free speech and the ongoing genocide in Gaza?

Absolutely. In my interview with Sara Yasin, we talk a little bit about how local media came after her for tweeting an article by Raz Segal, the Holocaust scholar. One of those people in local media was The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman. She published a number of articles parroting the claims that Sara was a Hamas sympathizer, which, for a Palestinian in that kind of position at a traditional media institution, is a career-ending accusation.

That was, what, two years ago? A couple of weeks ago Waxman tweeted about moderating an Oscars panel with Kaouther Ben Hania, the writer/director of the Voice of Hind Rajab. Which, by the way, was the target of a really ugly propaganda campaign.

It’s honestly pretty distressing to see all these people who worked so hard to silence dissent or even censor journalism about the genocide in Palestine suddenly and quietly changing their positions now that the truth is too hard to deny. Now that Rafah is flattened. Now that the Kushners are presenting plans for the redevelopment of Gaza. It’s becoming easier and easier to speak up about Palestine now that the ethnic cleansing project is near complete. I get fewer and fewer objections in my comments about calling it what it is. Organizations like the LA Review of Books are publishing work by and about Palestinians as if they weren’t involved in the censorship of that work just a few years ago. It’s insane to me that no one has the balls to say, “I made a mistake.”

Do you feel a freedom to represent your sources and subjects that might not happen in other more mainstream news outlets?

For sure. Anyone who’s worked for traditional news outlets has felt the pressure to make edits or changes that don’t necessarily align with how they think the story should be reported. Many years ago now, I profiled the three founders of the Black Lives Matter movement and ended up making a number of concessions to my editor, who was a kind of clueless white guy, that I regret making. I think the story was worse off for it.

I think my report on the LA Review of Books would have looked a LOT different had I published it with another outlet. I don’t think I would have been able to publish a lot of those anecdotes, even though I had a lot of supporting evidence and testimonies. The same goes for my interview with Sara Yasin. A lot of these journalism institutions are really held back by old ways of doing things.

How in the world did you get so much access for the LARB piece? Even if you don’t share specifics— it seems like a coup. Getting so many people to trust you and share there story. Ditto on The Key.

I’ve lived in LA my whole life and have spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with people in different industries. I think a lot of the people who spoke to me trusted me already. And they also helped me gain the trust of the sources who didn’t know who I am. I also try to approach sources with a lot of empathy and understanding. I think journalism school—which I went to—as well as working in traditional news journalism trains you to be a little cold and somewhat removed from your subjects. Or that you have to approach them with skepticism. I didn’t approach anyone with skepticism and made them feel like their story would get told with compassion.

With the Key, Sara is a very old friend of mine and approached me because she knew that No Bad Days was the right place for it. It’s a small newsletter but it has a lot of reach, especially in the LA media community. I have a lot of heavy-hitter subscribers.

Why LA? Take it as abstract or specific as you want. I am but a humble New Yorker with a lot of confusion over West Coast culture and geography. Further, do you think there’s a big divide or rivalry between the two?

LA because it’s big and beautiful and diverse and misunderstood. LA is a city whose love you have to earn. And that love is literally and figuratively like feeling the sun beaming on your face. Learning how to navigate this city and building community here and making it a home is really gratifying because it’s so hard.

I’m never bored here. There’s always something to do and somewhere to be. I do think the places in New York that feel rarefied and difficult to access are not so here. You can sneak your way into any party or pool. I find that people are less interested in what I do for work here. There’s freedom in that. I don’t know what a lot of my friends do for work.

I personally find that taking public transit in Los Angeles, as rare as that is for a member of my demographic, has really made the city more enjoyable for me. It takes a little longer than usual to get places but it slows down the pace of my social life in a necessary way. It makes me feel connected to a greater human project, versus the loneliness that a lot of people experience in their cars. And it saves me a lot of money.

I don’t really pay attention to city rivalries. I’m sure that rivalry exists. But I love New York! I try to spend a month in New York every year. But at the end of the month I always want to go home.

Who are people in LA you think should be getting more coverage and respect?

What we lost with the alt weeklies was coverage on the subcultures and underground communities that make Los Angeles really great. For example, when I saw the LA Times publish an article about a “jazz renaissance” that neglected to mention any indie jazz institutions, I knew I wanted to publish an interview with Yousef Hilmy, the founder of Minaret Records, in response.

I think about Nacho Nava a lot. He was the founder of Mustache Mondays, but he died in 2019 before anyone could really profile him. He had an indelible influence on LA queer nightlife. You could go to Mustache Mondays and see Big Freedia, Kelsey Lu, Kelela. He was an incredible figure but no one really profiled him or the work he did until after he died, which makes me so sad. That was work that an LA alt weekly could have done. But we don’t have those! Nacho is one of the people I thought about when I started No Bad Days.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the wonderful gay guys who host Gay Guy Night at Taix, which will be closing down soon. I think about DJ Bae-Bae who founded Hood Rave. I think about places like the Smell, an all-ages punk institution that has nearly closed down too many times to count. I think about people like Maddie Phinney and Chloe Coover who throw these amazing perfume swap parties called White Smelephants. I think about places like Murmurs Gallery and Frank News. People have been panicking about the state of post-pandemic LA, about its “death spiral”. I don’t see that! Everyone I know is working on the margins of mainstream culture, making beautiful things and creating beautiful spaces despite what’s happening in the institutions. I’m personally having a wonderful time.

Over/Under for Writers

Hailey Bieber Smoothie

I’m neutral. I never had it myself but I feel like if you come to LA for the first time in your life you should try at least one overpriced smoothie! I prefer the overpriced smoothies at the Punch Bowl in Los Feliz (~$15).

The Scientology Headquarters

Quick story: In my 20s, I had freshly broken my nose and was experiencing a full body eczema breakout in some kind of psychosomatic trauma response to something that had happened to me. I decided to take a free tour of the headquarters with a friend from the internet and our guide was so distracted by the scars and skin rash she didn’t even bother to proselytize to me. She was just like, “Ma’am, what happened to you?” I do not recommend the tour, which is just an opportunity for them to collect your data. I’m also convinced their surveillance cameras are equipped with some kind of facial recognition capability…

In N Out Animal Style

Under! I tend to take In n Out for granted but every time I’m showing a friend from out of town around, I’m like, oh yeah, this is why people love this place. My personal order however is cheeseburger with chopped peppers.

Sally Rooney

Under. I’ve read only one of her books but it’s so refreshing to see a writer exhibit some courage.

Staff Writer Jobs

I’ve only had one, more than ten years ago, so I really can’t say. Can someone tell me??

Image credit: Ceija Stojka.

Brady Brickner-Wood is skilled at deciphering trends in the political weather. He came up as a music writer and performer, often writing for Pitchfork and The New York Times, before regularly writing for The New Yorker shortly before I started writing for the magazine (with the same, incredible editor). Brickner-Wood writes with the crisp clarity of someone who has good taste. He reports on podcasts, AI, Spotify Wrapped, pop music, rap, and occasionally books. For what seems to be turning into a series, we spoke about the relationship between art and liberalism and played a new game of Over/Under for Writers.

You’ve written a lot about the relationship between aesthetics and politics. How do you see your own work functioning in such a capacity?

I think I approach most of my subject matter—whether that be an idea or an event or a trend or a person or an artifact, whatever, really—through a primarily aesthetic lens, meaning I find it essential to determine how a thing is being consumed and culturally metabolized before assessing it on its own terms. This means I’m often thinking about the internet, how pretty much all information is now mediated and disseminated through algorithmically guided and profit-minded platforms. Our relationship with reality is completely enmeshed with, and thus guided by, the aesthetics and virtues of the platform-driven internet. It’s nearly impossible for me to divorce this fact from any earnest examination of modern life, political or otherwise—it’s the inescapable framework for everything. I like writing about things that people might disregard as stupid or vapid or unimportant because I find it that much more urgent to unpack the vast, intricate web of complexity informing whatever crudely determined assumptions underpin a given thing.

You wrote a great piece on Spotify Wrapped, but, what was on your last Wrapped playlist? Or Apple equivalent.

I make music, so embarrassingly my top artist is always myself. Otherwise, I think since 2020 my other top artist has been Brevin Kim, a brother duo from Massachusetts whose music I share an unnerving kinship with. Aside from that, my top artists this year were Bieber, Dijon, and Cameron Winter. For songs, Elio’s “Lucky October” and Ian’s “Shut it Down” were in my top five. These year-end data presentations are weird because I often find that what I spend the most time listening to doesn’t usually reflect what I deem to be the “best” or most accomplished releases of the year. When I work out or am toiling at my day job I’ll put a song on repeat until I’ve wrung out every last drop of its emotional power. The other day I listened to Choker’s new song “Good” for like six hours in a row and now I may never listen to it again. But I’m sure I’ve already guaranteed it a premier spot in my Spotify Wrapped.

3. Do you find writing on say Drake or Justin Bieber different from writing about AI or Adam Friedland, how do you approach such subjects differently? What comes first? I suppose part of this is also about the different functions of criticism and reporting.

To give a different answer than my previous, more abstracted one: Almost everything I write about is informed by a genuine curiosity and fascination, and I rarely know what I think about something until I write about it. I may have loose, unformed feelings about a topic, but writing helps me shape and clarify my ideas into something coherent. When I review a record or perform any sort of arts criticism, my aim is to understand my subject as dynamically and fully as possible, to contextualize its arrival and identify what about it feels vital, crucial, surprising, novel, staid, flat, enlivening—etc. As I’ve transitioned to writing more about politics and other cultural phenomena, this approach remains more or less the same. I start from a place of wonder and unknowing and move toward “truth” or understanding, no matter how circuitously or strangely I may arrive at it.

I think you’re one of the few writers I know who writes about the hysteria of liberal politics and their fear of change---in the Grammys or podcasts or protest. How do you manage to cut through the noise and find the signal?

I was born in 1993 and so belong to the bastardized generation that’s neither fully millennial nor really at all Gen Z but instead straddles the nebulous middle between the two. For me this means that I came of consciousness within the monoculture but truly came of age amid the fractured and schizophrenic era of the internet. I think this grants me both a sympathetic credence to the hysteria you referenced and an acute critical insight into its absurdity. What I find particularly maddening about the Democratic establishment, and every other end-of-history neoliberal, is that they operate as if the monoculture still exists, as if the titanic shifts in society and culture are incidental or irrelevant, that once the bad Cheeto-man leaves the White House then Obama-era optimism will return we will reestablish the “norms” and “values” of our “sacred” institutions. I am not immune to the romanticism of this messaging! It’s like a warm blanket. But it’s obviously been proven to be a farce. The “resistance” to Trump’s first term centered around the fantasy that we were a wonderfully progressive society and that Trump’s election was a wild aberration, a downward dip on an otherwise ascending chart. Our liberal leaders have spent much of the past decade daydreaming of our pre-Trump exceptionalism rather than urgently grappling with the contemporary conditions and factors that helped create and perpetuate the modern far-right movement. I have to think that part of the reason why the U.S. has come to be dominated by tech billionaire isolationists who nihilistically reject moral contemplation and community ethics is because they’re moving full-hog ahead, more or less suicidally, toward an odious vision of the world totally disconnected from the remembered beauty of what once was.

You live in Maine, or so I’ve heard. What should people visiting do? Without blowing up your favorite spots of course.

I’ve lived in Portland since 2022, and it’s a lovely city. I like to run in the woods beside my house; the city has great public trail systems. For visitors, I’d recommend a walk and picnic at Eastern Prom before hitting Izikaya Minato for dinner. Then you can grab a beer at Oxbow across the street. SPACE Gallery has great programming, too, so I’d check out whatever they’ve got going on.

I think writers should have a Pitchfork over/under. As such:

1. Bon Iver

Under – A tough one; Bon Iver is probably overrated because he’s seemingly every casual music fan’s favorite “real” artist. But 22, A Million is one of humanity’s great artistic achievements, and Justin Vernon is just undoubtedly one of my heroes. So: underrated, baby!

2. Apple Music

Over – As Spotify continues to come under fire for sucking—rightfully so!—I’ve noticed a lot of folks transitioning to Apple Music as if its somehow a more ethical alternative. Not sure if I’m buying that, but as someone who used iTunes since the aughts and was an early adopter of Apple Music, I do miss how seamless it was to incorporate your local files onto the service. Spotify is awful for that. So I don’t know. It’s all bad.

3. Call Her Daddy

Over – I’ve never been a listener of Call Her Daddy, and I’m clearly not the target demographic, but I do remember the podcast becoming a big deal in I think 2016, when it emerged as this raunchy podcast from two hotties who talked about sex the way frat guys did—carnally, frivolously. I was privy to the drama that eventually broke the hosts apart; I watched the entirety of Dave Portnoy’s tell-all video detailing the podcast’s theatrical departure from Barstool Sports. It seems to me that Call Her Daddy has since become just another vapid celebrity promotional engine. A monolith that’s lost its sense for the specific. The show now feels like it’s mostly a vehicle to maintain Alex Cooper’s celebrity. I don’t think at this point I could be less interested in it.

4. Negronis

Under – The Bon Iver of cocktails?? I’d pretty much only drank Natty Light until I moved to Austin, Texas, after I graduated college, and was introduced to the negroni by friends I met working at a fancy restaurant. I thought it was the taste of luxury then and still think it’s the taste of luxury now.

5. Limewire

Under – Growing up I shared a single desktop computer with my brother and parents, so it was very hard to get away with any nefarious activity like illegally downloading music. My brother and I were forbidden from using Limewire on our shared family computer, though we did try, and fail, to sneakily download it several times. When I went to friends houses, Limewire was like a holy grail; I’d spend hours downloading music and then burning files onto blank CDs. These remain some of the most electric moments of my childhood—typing in albums and songs into Limewire, downloading them, and later, at home, listening to my mixtapes with a violent fervor.

Image above is Mark Rothko. I don’t have a lot of recommendations this week but I found this article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus to be incisive and alarming. I found the Biennial to be mostly underwhelming except for a few really wonderful artists. It is, after all, a networking event.

Recent writing:

Review of Alpha for Screen Slate.

On Gavin Newsom’s book launch for the Lux Newsletter.

Sam Bodrojan (aka helmet girl) is a silky, incisive voice who writes about film, books, and culture while maintaining a passionate voice. This week I got to ask one of our brightest and most provocative critics a few questions about film writing. The young Chicagoan recently migrated to Substack where she’s written about everything from Wuthering Heights and Eddington to cats and hate crimes. We spoke about gooning, the pitfalls of IP and American cinema, thirst traps, and Magic Mike.

Your bio says your work as a film critic focuses on a bunch of genres and one is “filmed sex.” What does that mean exactly? Porn and stag films? Something else? I think there’s a possible link to your great work writing on Titane and body horror but I’m curious.

The term “filmed sex” has a great amount of versatility. Compare it to a similar term, like pornography; that’s a word with a slippery definition. How do you assess the primary goals of something as inherently multi-faceted as watching people fuck? Why differentiate between titillation and other emotional targets in the first place? Many types of audiovisual media are both artistic and erotic. I am not interested in delineating further. I am invested in discussing all of it, whatever it’s called.

Furthermore, I’m interested in ephemeral, functional, private forms of “filmed sex.” Think sexting, cum tributes, gooner self-tapes, the late Omegle. These are non-artistic forms of “filmed sex” - they are approximations of touch, they are digital interpolations of physical intimacy. That’s what interests me. That is the heart of a sexual culture where multiple generations have been digitally groomed en masse at one point or another, where incel lingo has fully inoculated into straight spaces, where trans people are being legislated out of public life. Everybody is building a sexual identity that incorporates audiovisual feedback, whether we like it or not. I’m not just talking about “sex that is filmed” I am talking about “recorded material that operates as sex itself.”

Anyway, thank you for mentioning my Titane review. That is probably the first thing I ever wrote where I’ve stayed proud of it. A lot of my writing, even my most well-received stuff, is a source of shame for me. I can see the function and tactics of my prose so transparently. It is ugly. This is an unremarkable observation, but that Titane piece is like one of five essays I’ve produced that I think are just straight-up good. Honestly, not a bad record!

Do you think movies are getting worse? Or, do you think we just enjoy pans as a culture? I feel like more and more of your pieces are, not takedowns exactly, but negative, perhaps. Your piece on Anora, your “hatewatch” of Wuthering Heights. Conversely, you are often a champion of films I find surprising.

Are the movies, on the whole getting worse? Not really. American movies are worse than ever, certainly. There are fewer movies and most of the incentives driving developing are actively working against creative impulses. It’s a totally barren landscape. In foreign markets, where there’s government funding and a bigger pool of investors interested in small-scale, arthouse fare, that’s how most of the work is getting made nowadays, even by American audiences. Everything is Paramount Skydance now, even the places that aren’t. Movies get made if they’re IP or horror, preferably both. Boutique distribution is a nightmare, even compared to three years ago. Getting a measly 200k for a feature is quite difficult. Cinema is always finding new and exciting ways to become irrelevant and unsustainable.

As for the cultural obsession with contrarianism, I feel like that’s a solved occurrence. We all communicate, in part, via digital spaces that engage in dark patterns of user retention, primarily through bad-faith engagement. There are ways in which I’m suited for this. Those who dislike my work, or at least my online persona, consider me too emphatic, passionate in a way that’s genuine but misguided. My enthusiasm belies that I have succumbed to a hype cycle, or that I’m being lazy, or that I do not have a good grasp of my own taste. I think those are all fair conclusions, frankly. I come from a long line of exaggerators. I doubt I’ll be able to shake that entirely. I don’t mind.

This also means, despite the fact that we are talking about art more often than ever, a lot of the “discourse” is poisoned. It’s combative, stan culture logic. It’s about wheeling out viral heuristics like “film grain is good” and “camp is when something is silly but nominally progressive.” The algorithms incentivize a lack of curiosity. Even Letterboxd! I made a bunch of friends on that site a decade ago; I’m in touch with them to this day! That’s a beautiful thing, something I’m sure young people are still experiencing. But where else do they go to develop their practice, to deepen their knowledge? I often think of my review of Magic Mike’s Last Dance. That’s the best review I’ve ever written, I think. It was a measured examination of the mediocre follow-up to one of my absolute favorite films, Magic Mike XXL. But basically nobody read it, because that movie wasn’t particularly polarizing, and my “take” was not eye-catching enough.

But all the most important criticism in my life has not come from an algorithm. It came from a book of translated Cahiers I got in high school. Quite possibly my favorite piece of film criticism ever was what Amy Taubin wrote for Film Comment about Chantal Akerman after her death. That’s barely nine years old, and yet it’s not even available online. Film Comment isn’t even in print anymore!

Look, there are fewer outlets than ever, there’s no money to allocate to freelancers, there are maybe two dozen salaried positions for a film critic. I genuinely believe there is value, especially in the nascent stages of developing a person’s taste, in talking to people who share aesthetic preferences, who have shared blind spots that they can explore together. But so often, on Tiktok or Twitter, I see people asking questions about the medium they have no idea have already been answered! Read old issues of Film Comment, or A.S. Hamrah, or David Bordwell, or Duras, or Dorsky. These are the people who gave me a language for seeing. That’s what having taste is. It’s knowing as much as possible so you can know what you like and can intuit when you don’t know enough to see clearly. I think people underrate the peculiarity of their own taste. I’m just very loud about mine. So there. That’s a meandering and insufficient answer to your great question.

Where does the term helmet girl come from? Biking?

So in Magic Mike XXL - there it is again! - the boys are all hanging out at this motel where they’re throwing a party. A girl runs in wearing a bikini and a motorcycle helmet. She says nothing, just runs in, headbutts a few of them in the abs, and runs out. Someone once told me I had her vibe and I’ve clung to that for god knows how long. I accidentally gave myself a nickname this way, which is funny, because I am generally opposed to nicknames. Since you ask, I’m quite a bad biker. I veer from side-to-side. I stop too abruptly. It’s a miracle. I haven’t been hit by a car yet, given how much I bike around Chicago.

What do you think is the relationship between glamour, hotness, and criticism? I know you’ve tweeted about that before. Do you think Substack is changing this at all? I know you’ve yet to leave Twitter/X.

You know, when I was a kid I idolized Sasha Grey and Jane Fonda. I have always been hypersexual and, despite being shamed for it pretty consistently throughout my youth, I always liked this about myself. I felt it was my default state, one that felt relieving to embody whenever given the chance. I refuse to not post slutty pictures of myself, basically. That’s something I like doing. For a while I thought it was healing, or because I wanted external validation. But in the end it is autogynephilic, I suppose, in the most tender way. I like reminding myself that I am absolutely ecstatic about the way that I present to the world. Perhaps that’s shallow or belies a deep insecurity about my own authenticity, but if so, that’s a rupture in my character I’ll happily entertain for now.

This has some knock-on effects, of course. I’m not naive; I know some people overestimate their own affection for my written output because of their attraction to me. On that same token, those who find my work hacky have exaggerated resentment for what they often see as undeserving attention. It all cancels out. It’s probably cost me a great number of job applications to have my tits show up when you google my full legal name. But I genuinely wouldn’t have it any other way. I am living in a way that makes myself proud to be who I am. This manifests in many deeper ways on an internal and personal level, but it extends to like, looking hot online.

Substack does not have thirst traps, which is good. But any type of blogging promotes a type of aspirational parasocial connection, of course. I feel the urge to produce a manicured image of myself in words much more intensely than in photographs. When writing a DTC weekly newsletter for an audience who genuinely just want to know whatever you are thinking, it’s easy to slip into a kind of paranoid narcissism. I cannot just present myself, because no one person is all that interesting; I must show off a persona that could only come from me. It’s been tough refining that while still writing exactly what I want to write, week after week. Before I started I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the schedule I’d established. This work itself, it turns out, is a non-issue; my Substack is rewarding and pleasurable, basically always. But on several equations I’ve stopped writing a piece halfway through because it was not something I actually wanted to share. I’m working on keeping more of my life private, not feeling compelled to process everything in the open. Sometimes I sense I am forcing myself to excavate my own emotions just to reincorporate them into something externally accessible. That’s dangerous territory for me. I have made my peace with being the subject of myriad parasocial desires/attachments/ projections. But I can’t let my obligation, in the most neutral sense of the word, to these phenomena take precedent over my own stability.

What is the worst film ever made?

I don’t think I have a good answer. Whenever someone asks me for my favorite film, I always give a different answer; there are many films for whom I harbor undying love. So every time, it’s an oppurtunity to give one its proper due. As for the worst? That answer is probably something racist and audacious. Son of Saul, Goodbye Uncle Tom, Crash, Cannibal Holocaust, etc. These are all self-evident failures not really worth discussing.

If you just want one of my personal, irrational grudges, I’d have to highlight Ruben Ostlund’s The Square. That is a movie whose entire purpose is congratulating the discernment of its audience, reassuring them that they are higher beings who can appreciate real artistry when displayed, despite how ludicrous so much celebrated work turns out to be. It is mean but toothless. And Ostlund has the single worst impulses of any filmmaker - all sharp, simple lines in his composition, no sense for blocking, coaxing flat and bug-eyed line reads out of accomplished actors. His one gimmick is holding on every joke so long that the audience becomes uncomfortable. This is a shortcut to a strong reaction. But not all unpleasantness is created equal. Compared to the ways, say, Bela Tarr or Roy Andersson use boredom in such variable, rewarding ways, Ostlund is so belabored. It’s like being on a broken down bus with a dead phone and a migraine.

I know we’ve had our differences about Kurosawa. In my opinion, he’s the greatest auteur of those early days. Who’s your favorite?

I want to clear this up: I like Kurosawa! I just dislike Ran, because I think it’s overwrought and the metatextual stuff annoyed me. Many directors have late style work that grates on me for similar reasons. You’re allowed to think I’m wrong about this; I probably am. It’s basically irrelevant that I dislike Ran to anyone except me, as a way of clarifying my own taste. It’s the kind of introspective work one must do as a critic from time to time but it’s important to remember that self-discovery is the least important vector of writing criticism. It should be an obligatory side-quest, at most.

Lubitsch is my favorite, obviously. He will always be one-of-one, because the conditions under which he produced work will never again arise. You need actors trained to be over-mannered, you need a production model that allows for meticulous rehearsal and blocking, and you need an audience who wants to watch that without snickering. It’s an impossible request. Take Billy Wilder; all his movies are the prime example of a great artist still failing to make something as good as the worst thing Lubitsch ever made.

Is there a director who has yet to announce a new film but you’re dying to write about?

Maren Ade. She’s made three feature films and they’re all masterpieces. All of them were rightly acclaimed upon release and have been quietly forgotten. They’re all extraordinary beyond words, really. They all appear, in screenshots, in trailers, like simple German realist films. However when you watch them they feel expansive. Every new scene is surprising, even the cuts between scenes can be equally revealing. Toni Erdmann, for example, appears to be about the social contract between an aging father and his adult daughter, until it becomes about how everyone routine crosses the boundaries of those around them, trade agreements in the EU, grand tragedy of the girlboss, and culture death. All in a three-hour movie where every scene has at least one punchline and it is never the same type of joke twice.

Grace’s recommendation corner:

Martine’s excellent show “Lottery” up at RYAN LEE, chronicling her take on Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. Up through April. If you’re in São Paulo, I always love Willa Wasserman. She has a solo show at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel.

Oscars season is coming up. I really enjoyed The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, both of which are worth checking out.

If you’re not reading Tasbeeh Herwees, you must. I also enjoyed Becca Rothfield on looksmaxxing, now at The New Yorker. I have a piece on looksmaxxing forthcoming.

Time to admit it, I love J Crew. Their Rollneck remixes and revivals are great, I wish I’d nabbed the one from Eckhaus Latta.

Image above is from Cecily Brown.

Recent writing:

On Bari Weiss for The Nation.

On CBK for SSENSE.

Brenda Goodman for Frieze.

You have probably already read an essay by Lily Scherlis and been hypnotized by her exacting, magnetic prose. Scherlis is a scholar of pop psychology with viral essays on boundaries, group dynamics, and therapy at large. As an acolyte of psychoanalysis and other similar modalities, I’ve found her to be a clear voice with an excellent bullshit detector. Her work has appeared in Parapraxis, N+1, The Drift, Harper’s, and elsewhere. (These are all, by the way, great magazines to subscribe to.) You should read her entire body of work and then come back to read a short conversation between the two of us. Her forthcoming book, People Skills, is on the way.

“Group relations is essentially a petri dish, as if you could take a sample of the swamp and model group behavior in vitro,” Scherlis wrote in a moving essay for N+1 about difference and Bion. Perhaps in a small way, this conversation can offer a similar lens on the “experimental enclosure.”

Okay, I have to ask. Do you advocate for any particular kinds of therapy having studied so much of pop psychology and group relations? Or do you feel agnostic?

I long to live in a world where everyone can try whatever therapy they want, including the labor- and time-intensive ones like psychoanalysis, rather than getting shunted into more cost-effective or “efficient” methods. Different personalities are organized differently and need different tools! I don’t like when people take a purity mindset here. It’s almost a cliche to cite the empirical data that shows that efficacy has much more to do with the working relationship between patient and clinician (and, well, clinical skill). Right now I’m a training case for a psychoanalyst in formation, which I highly recommend as an affordable way to get on the couch, if you live in a place where this is an option. (Or you might check out the Psychosocial Foundation’s telephonic clinic.) If I’m being deadly honest, I will confess that I experimented with IFS at one point and liked it a lot, even if the framework is a kind of manic overinterpretation of object relations (IMO it should definitely not be used in carceral institutional settings). Something I haven’t done that I think more people should really consider is analytically informed group therapy. It’s more affordable and, hokey or scary as it might sound, I think it has some major clinical advantages over dyadic therapy if you find a good group.

Your work often incorporates a strong political bend, a material analysis of the conditions of psychology. How do you think politics play a role in your criticism and essays?

Pop psychology is folk ethics: what should I be like? How should we treat each other? But no one knows that these questions are actually up for debate in the terms we use to describe ourselves and one another—that pop psychology is not merely a descriptive inquiry into how we apply Hard Pure Science to the mind, but prototypes of social norms jockeying for public belief. It’s like unspoken moral parameters are being determined by a constant poll that no one knows they’re taking. Even though ethics and politics are not the same thing: “the humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics,” writes Andrea Long Chu—ethical norms really affect how we go about political struggle.

I also think once you start seeing all the resonances between material and political-economic developments and cultural developments, you can’t look away. To put it in grad school terms, historicizing stuff that no one realizes they should historicize is a crazy rush, in the way that having a paranoid hunch confirmed can be deeply pleasurable even as it’s horrifying.

On the one hand, people deal with world events on the terrain of pop psychology without really knowing it, processing and making sense of them by adopting norms around things that feel more in control, like their bodies and minds and relationships. On the other, it sounds nuts, but I think things happen in the world because of pop psychology. Moving from small to big, media relentlessly personifies what’s nebulous in order to make sense of it too. If you listen to the wording Trump and others talk about geopolitics like it’s an allegorical play where all the countries are characters. This is also how soooo many people talk about Israel and Palestine. Nation-states just aren’t people. I don’t think it’s grandiose to think that there’s some conceptual spillage in both directions.

How did you decide to write about “soft skills” and how do you see its relationship to AI optimism? I thought that was a fascinating part of your article in Harper’s.

When I was growing up I was contantly told by random authority figures that emotional intelligence and social skills were more important than IQ, which is, well, not untrue, but I think it made me a much more socially anxious child than I needed to be. When everyone was talking about the loneliness epidemic and feeling socially “rusty” after shelter-in-place, I had to wonder if the idea that socializing is a skill cuts both ways. On the one hand, it makes it learnable; on the other, it makes other people something you can be bad at.

If you think about what a “soft skill” really is, in the context of historical definitions of skill in labor contexts, to have “soft skills” is to be a human that can skillfully operate other humans (i.e., manage them). Around the time LLMs became publicly available, business media seemed to erupt into a panic over a so-called “crisis of soft skills.” Meanwhile, LinkedIn reports were insisting that soft skills were more important than ever, “key sites of growth,” and so on, partly because human interaction felt like the most obvious activity that AI couldn’t automate into obsolescence. (Of course, now plenty of people are finding chat more pleasing to talk to than other humans.) Soft skills were a kind of human preserve for managerial types, which meant there could never be enough of them. I argued that people were displacing a lot of fear—about technological change but also about geopolitics—onto the “crisis” of soft skills, turning an abstract idea called “soft skills” into a kind of corporate messiah. Some of the more bonkers AI-optimistic social scientists were publishing peer-reviewed papers that made claims that improving our soft skills “will enable artificial intelligence and robots to use human brain capacity and creativity to boost process efficiency” and advocating “a strategic approach incorporating the perfect human partner and Cobots (collaborative robots) with human resources.” I was interested in how much attention “soft skills” were getting in these contexts while the labor of care workers gets socially devalued as unskilled.

Writing about protests and encampments alongside therapy and group dynamics is fascinating to me. It’s something hannah baer has done a lot as well. I’m curious about the impulse to compare and contrast the two. On the one hand there seems obvious overlap and echoes and on the other hand they seem to operate in very different registers. Maybe there’s something about utility or usefulness in both modes? Or “having a role?”

This is a really interesting question that’s very dear to me. I should say I am a random layperson who’s very lucky to get to hang out with a bunch of skilled clinicians like hannah baer, whom I love thinking with. We’re both in a working group oriented around this question, among others. Many of us would start by noting the very long history of the clinic as a site of political work and struggle. Beyond and before group relations, clinicians like Fanon and Tosquelles helped radically reinvent institutions; meanwhile, protests and encampments tend to devise inventive care infrastructures. I guess ideally they’re two sites where people are working hard on the question of how people can survive the historical and political present. Of course, a lot of therapeutic settings forget the “historical and political” part, or have been reduced to mere nodes on a circuit of institutions that shunts psychotic people from one inadequate holding place to another.

Clinical and political settings are almost always set at odds: so many of the magazine essays I see on self-help and therapy are still rehearsing updated versions of a reductive (and kinda trad) argument: stop focusing on fixing yourself and go to a protest!

Anyway, I think this advice is dumb, or at least not useful. If people are neurotically fixated on their deficiencies, sure, it’s partly because the powers that be wants to turn us into self-obsessed sheeple, but it’s also because staying attuned to the world is a lot to bear.

For me, “having politics” is about getting intimate with this question: how is my silly little psychic life bound up in a totality of massive systems that seem to wholly transcend me; how is my life tangled up in the lives of faraway others? Some people are forced by circumstance to confront all too obvious answers to this question. Others find very acrobatic ways to avoid asking it. Indeed, if you can avoid the question, it takes a lot to keep thinking about it without totally losing your mind or psychically abandoning yourself and your immediate relationships. If something horrific happens that you cannot look away from—a genocide, a slew of federal abductions, a war—too often we find ourselves self-abandoning in the face of it, choosing one scale to focus on. This can be therapeutic in its own way—as you suggest, feeling genuinely useful is everything. It’s healing to have a meaningful role in a meaningful project (which is what the famous theorist of groups W. R. Bion tried to provide as a form of treatment in WWII psychiatric hospitals). But when it involves wholly losing track of your individual experience, it can be a form of spiritual bypass—a recipe for burnout. There’s this principle in some schools of somatics that as you grow you become able to hold wider and wider scales of existence in the field of your intuitive, somatic awareness. I think there’s a difference between this multiscale awareness and self-abandoning out of political rage. Being able to hold multiple scales in mind without becoming psychotic requires real psychic resources. This is one reason I go to therapy.

Church Bulletin

Thanks for reading. Image credit: Philip Guston. You can read recent articles I’ve written below:

On vagueposting for DIRT.

On VROOM VROOM by Charli XCX for The Fader.

Why is the Right so appealing to young women novelists? The protagonists of Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth and Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs are enamored by incels and Info Wars, soldiers and QAnon. They also care about God, or at least they enjoy the spectacle of ritual and purity. These two books by the co-founders of Forever Mag offer an opportunity to consider the e-girl novelist whose reactionary Dimes Square world masquerades as princesses with personality disorders. Their attempt to outline the contours of modern womanhood often becomes its own trap. The Right and Left vie for erotic triumph with emoji-filled irony.

Anika Jade Levy is a very funny writer, even if her book occasionally fails to connect the dots into a coherent political framework. Dimes Square is a hell many enjoy taking down, even those on the inside. In Levy’s novel Flat Earth, two young women navigate college and the twenty-something dating world, one takes the ethical route and one takes the aesthetic. It’s been marketed as Renata Adler’s “Speedboat for the Adderall generation,” but it’s more like Elif Batuman’s Either/Or for the girl who loves Brandy Melville and preferred Lolita to philosophy class. Down the drain they go, twirling around flat earth conventions, purity balls, and right-wing dating apps while chasing clout. Her narrator Avery continually scrapes her finger on her cracked phone screen while she and her best friend/creative rival Frances travel through “postindustrial towns ravaged by QAnon and synthetic opioids and dead factories” to create a bizarre avant-garde documentary. Avery enjoys the company of fascists and would “would rather kill [herself] than give up dating taxicabs or having [her] hair professionally washed.” Frances, on the other hand, becomes an art world sensation. Jealousy, of course, ensues.

Cash’s debut novel, Lost Lambs, features its own bonkers zombie right-wing ideas through a more surreal, magical realist tint. It also features—what else?— a Jeffrey Epstein stand-in, a cult, and three disaffected sisters chasing a twisted American dream while their parents try out an open marriage. “The Flynns’ marital ‘arrangement’ seemed neither exploratory in the swinging-sixties sense nor justified in the new age liberal poly-whathaveyou sense but rather a creative avenue through which each spouse could inflict pain upon the other and their three daughters,” she writes bleakly. It’s a “nonconsensual nonmonogamous spell.” Imagine if Jonathan Franzen’s America crossed paths with “Mean Girls” by Charli XCX. Coquette, casual, Catholic. It’s The Bee Sting by Paul Murray for the vaping crowd, those who have retreated from neo-conservatism to a sort of middle ground now that Zohran and pronouns are back in. Lost Lambs shifts focus between three sisters, each displaying their own boutique spin on masochistic femininity, their mother, and father both of whom are pursuing their own romantic leads---all while disaster looms, shrouded in Pynchon-esque puns.

In “Hostage #4,” an earlier short story by Madeline Cash, all politics and events are flattened into one deadpan send-up of girlhood: “I’m twenty- four and everyone on Instagram has been sexually assaulted and I’m allowed to roll my skirt up as short as I want now because of #metoo and because there is no God and Trump’s railing Adderall and Lauren Myracle died of cervical cancer and Dante went to jail for vehicular manslaughter and Lacey McKelvy is on OnlyFans and Mr. Gayworth adopted a beautiful baby girl and the dry cleaner man was deported.” Cash’s prose levels both the personal and the political into one nihilistic whirlpool, almost as if to suggest each event is as bad as the other. Instead of dramatizing the difference, she collapses it.

Cash and her contemporaries attempt to marry sign to symbol inside an empty belief system. So far, e-girl novels have not exactly broken into the mainstream, not outside the online literary bubble at least, but can they rehabilitate themselves for a mainstream audience outside the bubble of a certain cultural milieu? The success of Lost Lambs seems to suggest so. Many even think it’s an industry plant of coordinated press, though the truth is far more quotidian. Some books have a publicity team and get a bigger push. Some books, especially those by cis white women, get more coverage. It’s also not Cash’s first book, she previously published a book of short stories with CLASH. There’s no conspiracy in the combination of privilege and hard work and it’s clear these authors do work hard. They write often and make connections. Isn’t that what we all want to do? Certainly, the reaction online is also backed in misogyny and jealousy—the fact that Cash was so successful, that she isn’t a man, that her press team is clearly on point.

That’s not my gripe with these books. My frustration is their tendency to masquerade as something they’re not. These women pretend to satirize the conservative world they inhabit when in reality their belief system is a dog whistle for conservative far-right values. They use internet aesthetics (emojis, Epstein satire, Dimes Square Catholicism) as linguistic currency to obscure the emptiness of their beliefs. In interviews they say they’re writing about flat, archetypical women as a way to skewer male perceptions. But merely depicting misogyny, sex work, conservatism, the shallowness of internet culture, and eating disorders is not inherently radical or progressive. Their novels are about “flat” women who only want men and sex and to be skinny. (Anika Lade Levy went so far as to say she purposefully attempts to write two dimensional female characters.) Each novel follows a Catholic young woman who wants to be loved---often told in fragments and sketchy asides that don’t add up to much. While they’re seeking erotic fulfillment, their values don’t allow them to enjoy sex. Conservatism is always anti-body. If you can’t enjoy your body, how can you enjoy sex?

Perhaps these women writers are trying to excavate misogyny by perpetuating it. But even as they try to distance themselves from their right-wing sisters, their work often ends up enshrining the same conservative values. Their politics are incoherent because their work is about referencing politics, not wrestling with ethics. These writers seem to think they are writing about the Right and misogyny from the outside. They’re not.

There was an uproar after UnHerd, a typically conservative outlet, published a pan of Flat Earth. (Though, admittedly, I would not want the full-on MAGA Red Scare girls coming to my support in such a tumult.) The author of that review then went viral for fatphobic bullying of Vogue writer Emma Specter. But that seems like a convenient smoke-screen to ignore the fact that there are already people calling out the misogyny these writers perpetuate in their work by crying wolf. Instead of focusing on the content of the review, or later a pan in Bookforum that merely called the novel boring, readers could ignore the content of the negative article. The problem is sometimes multiple truths can exist at the same time.

Regurgitating what you hear your Downtown friends say is not inherently skewering them. Just look at Brock Colyar’s piece on the Downtown Republican scene. While profiles (and novels) are not endorsements of the politics they depict, they certainly lend credibility to the reactionary party scene. Matthew Donovan has written a fascinating piece in this vein about the platforming of Clavicular by fashion designers like Elena Velez. The tricky thing for writers is to understand the difference between endorsements, satires, and reporting. Media literacy is down, of course, and the political responsibility of a writer is a tricky thing. Ivy Wolk recently posted a few Instagram stories wondering why men are allowed to platform or profile Clavicular without backlash while women were often punished for the same activities. Where do we draw the line? If we argue we’re just following the trend and writing about the same controversial figures as everyone else, aren’t we, at some point, just as culpable? This isn’t just woke for the sake of wokeness. At some point it’s complicity. Is it possible to have it both ways? Can we hang out with our problematic favs while keeping our leftist values in tact?

Authors like Madeline Cash and Anika Jade Levy offer a shallow attempt at positioning themselves outside the conservative mediasphere even while these books enshrine the normative values of cis white womanhood: power, beauty, men, family. The narrators in Dimes Square-adjacent books like Flat Earth, My First Book, Paradise Logic, and Lost Lambs are skinny, white women with eating disorders addicted to using their beauty for social cache while looking down on other women. There’s no output for their misery, instead they internalize it, wishing and hoping for men to pay attention to them and give their lives the guardrail of meaning. “Why was I always seeking permanence in places where women are disposable?” Levy’s narrator Avery wonders.

There are plenty of tradwives, erotica writers, online magazines, and it girls with the same kind of political gambit. The downtown scene is full of those enacting a glamorized, sexualized it-girl routine. Levy and Cash’s Forever Mag regularly publishes these kinds of stories. Cassidy Grady’s “hi i’m holly” features a woman who wishes to be kidnapped and sold into white slavery. It’s a bizarre, striking example of an inflammatory attempt to court right-wing readers.

If Honor Levy came out guns blazing for neoconservative anti-MeToo talking points, Cash and Anika Jade Levy offer a reformed version of the Hegelian e-girl. (Though even Honor Levy has seemed to soften her reactionary edges in more recent interviews.) There’s a daisy chain for this kind of cultural byproduct. The Red Scare girls are often at the top of the waterfall, directing the politics that flow downstream. This is not to say some of these writers aren’t shifting their focus, intent on joining the pronoun Mecca, perhaps even by canvassing for Zohran. But it’s difficult to do an accountability tour when one isn’t actually repenting. These writers want it both ways. They don’t just hate patriarchy, they hate women too.

There’s a kind of depressing heteropessimism here as Arielle Isack has previously referenced in a review of Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic. Isack found the work “outright hostile to female readers like myself, if not womankind writ large. I guess it doesn’t matter though—anything goes. Existence is meaningless and random, the market for contemporary fiction even more so. YOLO.”

This is a hollow value system that refuses to move toward something, merely contracting instead. These writers try to take on bigger ideas like the church, sex, beauty but instead merely replicate beauty norms, the nuclear family, and sneering at sex work. But the value that’s really apparent in these novels is self-punishment, not a feminist critique of it. The attempt at farce seems to say more about their autofictional morals. Flat Earth follows a woman’s struggle to be interesting and compete her “best friend” and Lost Lambs follows a family collapsing after they open their marriage and their kids lose all sense of their values. Womanhood, these books argue, requires total self-abnegation. The yonic is empty. No wonder they run with the boys.

Ann Manov also critiqued Flat Earth in The Baffler for its anti-feminist limitations, citing both the narrator Avery’s obsession with sexual value and her inability to become a successful writer: “When I did manage to write, there was no plot, just prose.” The book’s mix of first-person narration and oblique omniscient Twitter-esque dialogue never rises above its obsession with fertility (“Gynocracy has failed, and everyone agrees that we are moving toward a masculine vision of America”). Manov asks the essential question: “does Flat Earth actually exist outside the ecosystem of female identity it critiques?”

“The Girls of Forever Magazine Have No Editorial Standards,” one Interview Magazine headline jokes. Cash and Levy are more interested in QAnon and Pizzagate as fictional fodder than political phenomena. The ambition of these novels is profundity through referencing politics in passing, never engaging. This is not how critique works. As bell hooks wrote, cynicism is not progressive. The worst thing these protagonists fear is aging, their breasts sagging. They fret over their competitive female friends more than their patriarchal foes.

“All my exchanges with men felt like prostitution,” Levy writes in Flat Earth. “It’s true that I have a technically perfect body, but I’m hopeless at sex and secretly conservative,” she states elsewhere. Cash’s book is no less full of such diatribes. “Perhaps sex was the secret to religious adherence,” her characters half-jokingly confess. They know that “any huge conglomerate was probably a little evil,” but they rarely care. The girls of Lost Lambs date soldiers and pay lip service to liberal democracy before they say the quiet part loud.

Satire isn’t protection from scrutiny. Portraying the suffering of women through eating disorders and sex work is an attempt at wallpapering character motivation instead of developing interiority. Cash is certainly aware of the way such narratives are mobilized. The religious cult in Lost Lambs encourages young girls to tell their stories to earn luxuries, “tales of neglect, disordered eating, sexual assault.” But rarely is their “sincere vulnerability” rewarded, instead it’s ammunition. The same can be said of these authors’ dramatization of suffering. I think writers owe readers something by the end of the book. If the message is just “being a woman sucks lol” followed by a lot of emojis or writing-as-trolling, it’s justifiable---important even---to critique that. It’s important to consider the way we consume and contemplate these “uwu it-girl” kinds of literature, it’s not just playful but can be harmful and relies on stereotypes while acting as if it’s subversive. Their nihilism comes from the limited roles they allow women to take on, how much they punish their narrators for their desire. Arielle Isack critiqued Honor Levy’s short story “Love Story” for a similar reason: “the digital world serves up an unlimited vocabulary of alienation and self-hatred.” Instead of offering us community, the internet serves as a cauldron of vicious comparison and feral feminine competition.

Of course authors are not their characters, but I think merely pushing aside their ideology as a pure aesthetic gives them too much of a pass. “All complex female characters need conflict and adversity,” Cash writes in Lost Lambs. Their novels portray the self-degradation of women with little redeeming qualities in their narrators. What is the point of that? I’m not trying to cry woke scold, not entirely, I’m pointing out that this satirical bend is a foggy fictional tool that these women can hide behind. I don’t think fictional narrators have to be unimpeachable, but don’t their authors have to stand for some sort of value system beyond mere cynicism? Do authors get away with poor politics and cold prose in defense of cool girl, I’m-just-quoting-someone-else posturing? Authors don’t control how their books are marketed, but they do have to defend the aesthetic and political values their books purport to explore. Even if we can’t say an author’s characters are espousing morality (and certainly no novel should be read for moral qualities alone) the authorial intent and vision of a book must still stand for something. The narrative distance of a book is always telling.

Renata Adler was able to tap deep wells of political weather and crystalline, biting prose—reading her fiction you’d be forgiven for thinking she was anti-politics altogether. A stylish nihilist. Not so with the e-girls, they wear their flimsy beliefs on their sleeves: make money, stay beautiful, hate the body into submission. More than a Catholic revival, they believe in self-hatred. Men offer canvases for masochism, trophies they don’t even want, and women offer competition for empty prizes. If the prose wasn’t so brutally barren, it might just offer a distraction from their cruel politics.

Image above is a painting by Lee Krasner