But I wanted to record some quick thoughts on the other books as well, because they were great, and you might like them. My goal is to give you some ideas for what to read next. To keep this from getting out of control, I am giving myself two sentences per book.

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The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka

Like many of the books on this list, I was assigned to read The Buddha in the Attic for my upcoming MFA program. (That doesn’t count as one of my two sentences!!)

In gorgeous, lightweight prose, Otsuka tells the stories of a group of Japanese women who travel to the United States before World War II to begin marriages that were coordinated from afar. The magic of the book is the way it assembles a million individually profound fragments of different lives into a single coherent (and very moving) narrative; it’s a fantastic, accessible read, and I enjoyed it very much.

Running Through Beijing - Xu Zechen

This energetic novel about young people selling fake IDs and pirated DVDs on the streets of Beijing, trying to evade the authorities and save up enough money to improve their position in the world, was funny and poignant and a generally lively read. I look forward to reading more stuff from Xu Zechen, and from other contemporary Chinese writers, who—this book suggests—comprise a pretty significant gap in my experience.

Love Medicine - Louise Erdrich

I had trouble getting into this one at first—Erdrich writes in beautiful, often figurative language that can verge a bit dense, and begins this novel with the rapidfire introduction of a whole family of characters—but as I pressed onward the story of this family, told from many different perspectives over multiple generations, opened up for me in a wonderful and enthralling way. I understand why this is a classic and look forward to reading the work of whichever classmate in my MFA program is trying to create stuff like this (since that’s likely why it wound up on my summer assignment list).

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories - Angela Carter

These playful, ornately stylish fairy tale retellings by Angela Carter didn’t always work for me as narratives, but as dazzling and inspirational art objects I found much in them to appreciate. This is another example of writing assigned to me this summer that, if my classmates are trying to do something similar, I am very excited about that.

Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman

This is one of the minority of books I read this summer that I was not assigned; it’s a smart, bold novel that explores corners of human sexuality controversial enough to get it positively ripped to shreds on Goodreads; it’s not a book to read if you care very much about “what it means, politically, to write (or read) a book of this type” or “what the author is saying” (although in my opinion those are joy-destroying ways to approach your reading life); I understand this summary is somewhat cryptic; the direct version is that the protagonist is a queer woman who experiments with a heterosexual relationship; the critics point out that “we don’t need more stories like this” or “this is a tedious trope” and perhaps these statements are true in the abstract; nonetheless I found Fishman’s exploration of this particular character’s motivations and internal struggles given the social context embodied so well by those very Goodreads critics to be fresh and interesting; I’m cheating here with the two-sentence limit but suffice to say I liked the book and believe it caught a little too much heat, it does in fact add something to the world, in my opinion, even working with subject matter that’s been well-explored, which, let’s be honest, what subject matter hasn’t been.

In sum I think Fishman is a really skilled author, and really honest, and this first novel made me excited for her future work; if you’re looking for intelligent, sparsely-written modern-day novels about sex in 2026, consider Acts of Service.

A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness - Michael Pollan

A well-written, engrossing, approachable survey of the study of consciousness, by Michael Pollan (yes, the psychedelics guy), which I enjoyed very much. Some critique this book for not going deep enough into its subject matter (to which I respond, that’s not Mr. Pollan’s goal); others feel let down by the fact that it doesn’t solve anything, and leaves both author and reader more confused than ever by the end; but I loved it, because it filled me with wonder at the unending mysteries of the world, which is a sensation I very much enjoy.

Butcher’s Crossing - John Williams

A finely crafted (anti-)Western novel about wilderness and the human spirit, rendered in perfect prose, with perfect characters, everything about the book is perfect. Everyone who likes Westerns to the slightest extent… everyone who enjoys Cormac McCarthy even a little bit… every reader in America would benefit greatly from the simple act of sitting down to read this perfect book.

Very excited about the MFA program at UC Irvine that I’ll be beginning next month… come along on the adventure by subscribing to receive more book recommendations & et cetera in your email inbox regularly.

Dear readers, I have some very good news to share. Over the next three years I will be pursuing a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Fiction at UC Irvine. The program is small—only five fiction writers are admitted each year—and fully funded. I will teach some undergraduate composition and creative writing classes along the way, write a lot of short stories, and read a lot of books.

For the particular sort of person that I am, the opportunity to pursue an MFA—to write and read and study for three years alongside people who love to write and read and study as much as I do—is priceless beyond description. Especially at this point in my life, when I thought that door had closed. Not so: I sneaked underneath like a greased-up Indiana Jones.

So I’m grateful. I have been working toward this for a long time. In a medium as slippery as fiction, it’s hard to know when you’re good enough, or even if you’re getting better. You muddle onward. I’ve applied to MFA programs before. This time I got in, presumably on the strength of my writing sample. It may communicate the ambiguity of the aspiring writer experience that this is the first concrete indication I’ve had since college (yes, 12 years ago) that I am actually getting better! Those 12 years comprised a whole lot of muddling without any definitive sign that it was paying off. It is so, so gratifying to finally get a note from the universe that reads “Keep at it. You’re getting somewhere.”

The other sensation I’ve been awash in is WONDER. As I’ve approached middle age (what’s 35, am I there already?), found love, caught layoffs, and suffered freak concussions, the sensation that has gradually begun to overwhelm me is wonder. It’s miraculous to be a conscious lifeform on this planet, to not only live but to be capable of appreciating what an insane stroke of luck it was for life to coalesce here, let alone evolve into creatures with jet planes and air conditioning. The world is so INTERESTING, and everywhere you look there are wonders, and the fact that we get to experience those wonders, to write and read and talk and think about them, is miraculous in the extreme.

There’s also urgency, because all organized systems revert toward entropy, in other words life is short. You don’t have much time to appreciate everything.

I’m reminded of something Robert Olen Butler said in his very good craft book From Where You Dream:

What I want to nurture in you is the impulse: “I’m ravished by sensual experience. I yearn to take life in. My God! I’ve got this sense that the world has meaning. Things roil around in my dream space, and I’ve got to figure out how to make art objects of them.” That’s really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life.

I’m happy to say that I’ve gradually come around to this perspective. Ten years ago I think I was probably writing mostly to impress people. I wanted to bedazzle readers with my incredible style, the way I was bedazzled by the incredible style of the writers I was discovering. I wanted to say things, create parables that convinced my reader of some intellectual premise, made them say “wow, how profound.”1 And of course I wanted to make money. I thought about that all the time.

These approaches were all dead ends.

Different motivations propel me these days. Not commercial success, not even “writing something truly good,” as I used to say; the intense and urgent feeling propelling me onward is just that life is nuts and beautiful and complicated and bizarre and fascinating, and I have no choice but to try and capture that in some freaking art objects.

The traits I hope to cultivate in my fiction are honesty, specificity, function,2 and clarity. I’m thrilled to have three years to give that cultivation my full attention.

I intend to post regularly throughout my MFA program. I’m really interested in what it will be like, and will try to document in case you feel the same way. I will also likely post some special stuff, like story drafts or the personal statement I submitted in my application, behind the paywall.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate your support so much!

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William Stoner, the protagonist of John Williams’ cult classic “dark academia” novel Stoner, views life as something to be endured. This defining aspect of his personality might be attributed to his upbringing on a hardscrabble Missouri farm; his parents endure much suffering just to squeeze the humblest living from the earth, and there are few indications that any joy ever comes to their lives at all.

Sent to study crop science, Stoner instead falls in love with literature, becomes a professor, and marries the first woman who catches his eye. That’s pretty much the end of his youthful, inertia-defying moves, I’m afraid; from then on he refuses to deviate from his path, even when his past choices inflict heinous amounts of suffering on him. Exhibit A is his ill-fated marriage: these two people turn out to be terrible for each other. But Stoner displays an almost superhuman ability to withstand indignities that would send other characters over the brink. As readers, we beg him to declare that enough is enough, to take some extreme action to change his situation instead of continuing to consent to it. We want to shout: you would be so much happier if you just blew up your life, damn the consequences! But that’s not Stoner. He just flips up his collar, leans into the wind, and keeps trudging.

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The book is, therefore, viewed as somewhat fundamentally bleak. I guess I’m not arguing against that, although part of me wants to.1 The basis of my disagreement is that the gray fog of suffering does break at many points in Stoner—albeit typically in minor, prosaic, quotidian, small-potatoes sorts of ways—and these flashes of warmth and love and heroism feel monumentally more powerful than they otherwise would, thanks to the backdrop against which they are set.

How much beauty and meaning can be found in an ugly, unremarkable life?

John Williams, who also wrote the fantastic literary Western Butcher’s Crossing and some other novels I haven’t had the pleasure of reading yet, sets himself quite the challenge with this book’s subject matter. He tells us off the top that Stoner’s life was unremarkable, and even emphasizes that it had no impact on anyone and would be unlikely to be remembered:

He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.”

An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

So even the off-piste angles from which a hopeful reader might seek satisfaction—e.g. “his TRUE impact was in the lives of his STUDENTS, which he altered so fundamentally”—are immediately chopped off at the gangly knees.2 Every argument we might use to justify a mundane life’s meaning is shown to be inapplicable here. Did he leave behind works that, even if sparsely read, contributed to the study of his field? Nope. Did he influence the lives of the people he met? Nope. Did he at least lead an interesting, fulfilling life? Nope. Did he ever find joy, meaning, a touch of the divine?

Well, wait a minute…

Parts of Stoner’s life are beautiful. His earnest love for literature and its study. His uncomplicated love of the people around him—his wife, his daughter, his students, and others he meets along the way. He’s a moral person, a quiet hero, and small rewards for his heroism accumulate throughout his life. His life, one of the most mundane and grueling lives imaginable, is still a life—a good life, and therefore a kind of miracle.

This is why the book succeeds, and is worth reading. Williams succeeds, in my view, at his goal of making a life stripped of all traditional markers of success into a profound and compelling story. The humblest story you can imagine, with the most overtly “meaningless” outcome, and yet it feels meaningful. By achieving this feat, Williams creates in the reader—or in me, at least—a sort of runaway, bittersweet joy.

Which is not to say that Williams (fully?) endorses Stoner’s indifferent, grinding, self-sacrificing approach to life. I actually suspect it’s the opposite—Stoner’s willingness to be humiliated and mistreated, the rigid code of behavior that prevents him from prioritizing his interests over others’, the lack of ambition that keeps him mired in the University of Missouri all his life—these are flaws, shown to be punished by the world, and it often seems Williams is warning us against them.

I think what Williams is saying, through Stoner, is that life is something to be lived. And not even necessarily in the sense of “you only live once; visit Europe!”—although Williams does probably want us to learn that if we don’t take the initiative in life, it will swiftly pass us by—but also—whatever sort of life someone has, even if humble and filled with suffering and haunted by mistakes, has the potential to be profound, and moving, and beautiful, and—simply—worth living.

As Williams himself said (quoted in the foreword of my edition):

A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life… He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing.

So blow up your life if it’s broken, but also, find what’s profound in your everyday existence—focus on it, and appreciate it—because it’s there, if you look for it.

///

Anyway, I must agree with the Cult Followers professing that Stoner is a remarkable novel. Its doggedly mundane subject matter nevertheless produces moments and sensations and ideas that feel cosmic in scale. It’s as moving as anything I’ve read.

This is one I’d love your thoughts on. If you’ve read Stoner, or choose to read it after this, I’d be curious to hear what you think.

(First, read the book — it is very good)

Frank complains that American society is dishonest and inauthentic. He sounds like a loser so at first we get the idea that Yates disagrees with him. But it turns out we have misread the author’s contempt. He agrees with Frank about the dishonesty. His contempt comes from Frank’s inability to stop contributing to that dishonesty, despite having identified it.

Frank is the opposite of honest. He is obsessed with curating his image, not only at work but in the most intimate moments of his private life. So is everyone else. The only honest person in the book lives in a mental hospital.

I read Mary Robison this summer for the first time due to [REDACTED SECRET NEWS ABOUT THE VERY NEAR FUTURE], and I find her delightful. Her work tickles the same part of me that enjoys Lydia Davis and Donald Barthelme. Basically it’s ultra-smart, ultra-concise, ultra-adventurous, and packed full of zingers. Another way to describe it might be “What if Thomas Pynchon were easier to read?” It’s very playful work, down to the molecular level, where she moves words around in fascinating ways to produce lines that stick in your brain-folds.

I read the novel on Kindle and thus it is comparatively easy for me to produce the following list of my favorite lines/passages in the book. Descriptions, jokes, bits of dialogue… I hope these will be a tempting introduction to her work, and that you will join me in reading more of it…

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Protagonist is on the phone trying to get extra ADHD medication:

“According to our records, you’re not due for a prescription at this time.”

I say, “Annabelle, this is not what it appears.”

“Oh?” she says and waits because she was trained to wait and force me to do the synopsizing.

I will take that challenge. “There was a series of mishaps,” I tell her. “Some were spilled at the sink or ruined by moisture. Then a vial I use for travel got mislaid and they’re gone. I’m out,” I say. “Who can explain it?”

On flaws:

Overconfidence is a mistake for me. Not a big one, but it kicks open the door for several others.

The protagonist spends a lot of time driving around:

There are alcoholics all over the South. Many of them are inside the cars on this same highway.

Just a great little scene at a laundromat:

My car keys are where? They’re my only keys. I know I had them. I got here, didn’t I? Mightn’t those be they, clangoring around in the clothes dryer?

Mightn’t those be they, clangoring around in the clothes dryer? Damn. The music of that sentence cannot be overcelebrated.

Next: cephalopod plants!

…clay pots in which there’re hearty examples of the cephalopod plants that grow so very well down here in the country’s dumps.

It’s also courageous to use a contraction as ugly as “there’re.” But people say it. You say it. I say it. And I am a sucker for writers who incorporate the (often bizarre and awkward) conventions of natural speech into their prose.

Great little character interaction:

On the ignition system of the Boyfriend’s Jaguar is such a thing as an Intox Interlock. In order to start the car he has to pass a breathalyzer test, which he never can. So I’m driving but after I make a tiny error he says, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa-whoa-whoa!”

Glorious Denis Johnson-esque imagery alternating between the hideous and the divine:

I should turn back. Florida is a horrible toilet. There are a zillion snakes woven into this road and those clouds over there mean God’s coming.

Protagonist painted her keyboard gold:

And on the keyboard, I shouldn’t have coated gold on the numeric keys. The alphabet I can touch-type but the ampersand is where in the hell?

Maybe you read the above quotation and say “this is so mundane” but look. I think it’s funny. I like Sheng Wang’s comedy too. There is fun interesting profound stuff happening all around us if we simply keep an ear out for it.

Another interaction with Boyfriend:

He says, “I don’t see what’s the problem. Is it our age difference?” “Enough about that, you can drop that,” I say. “I’ve been lying all along. I’m the same age as you.” “I thought you were much-much older,” Dix says. I wait for him to apologize but he’s not going to. He’s an idiot! He says, “Honey, this is a huge relief. Here I thought you were like really-really old.”

OK one last one:

I ask her, “Mev? Whatever happened to that BMW you had?” “Uhm,” she says. “I spent it.”

Hopefully this has convinced you to read Mary Robison. Have a great 4th of July 2026!

Many of the worst events in Beloved are summarized in simple, clinical terms. And there are a lot of terrible events, because this book is about slavery in America, among the worst things human beings anywhere have ever done to each other. But it’s notable that these events are so often described so sparsely, when the little sensory experiences of everyday life, the good or at least bittersweet moments, and the emotional dynamics of survival and surmounting and recovery, receive so much more of the word count.

Here’s a small example of what I mean, the powerful final line from a chapter in the second half of the book, referencing the moment that a character tried to kill her children rather than allow them to be reintroduced to slavery:

Stamp looked into Paul D’s eyes and the sweet conviction in them almost made him wonder if it had happened at all, eighteen years ago, that while he and Baby Suggs were looking the wrong way, a pretty little slavegirl had recognized a hat, and split to the woodshed to kill her children.

There’s an immense amount of emotional content in those four words, “to kill her children.” Like a hammer blow, the end of the sentence is simple and quick; it’s the rest of the sentence that’s complex, as she lines up the hammer and gets ready to swing.

Another example, a brief story with terrible implications that isn’t mentioned any other time:

He had been in Rochester four years ago and seen five women arriving with fourteen female children. All their men—brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons—had been picked off one by one.

Notice all the numbers and the list of different relatives. We are given the plain facts; the emotion comes when we calculate their implications.

One effect of this approach is that horrible events haunt the work from a distance. Everywhere you look, there are ghosts on the horizon. Horrific facts about the world that the reader can’t forget any more than the characters can.

The restraint might also have some practical elements. Some of these events are referenced repeatedly, the way traumatic memories frequently recur, and it would hardly be elegant to keep citing the specifics every time. And Morrison, an absolutely first-class writer, wants to show slavery for exactly what it was, but she also wants to keep her reader from getting so overwhelmed by the weight of all that evil that they stop reading. And she has the first-class writer’s desire for maximum brevity, given the effect she wants to conjure—Baldwin’s oft-cited principle of “a sentence as clean as a bone.” Importantly, she also doesn’t want to sensationalize her subjects’ pain. She wants the story to lean, in the end, toward defiance, survival, and redemption.

Because Beloved, for all the pain and rage and sadness that courses through it, is a story about overcoming, or at least surviving, suffering. It is a story about determination and persistence, about the human spirit’s refusal, in even the most terrible circumstances, to lie down and die. It’s a deeply sad book, but it has a happy ending.

///

If you haven’t read Beloved, I strongly recommend it. Expect some difficulty—first because Morrison sometimes works in symbolic or indirect language that requires close attention to decipher, and second because the subject matter is very, very heavy—but persevere with the knowledge that you will be rewarded with a beautiful, inventive story, a sense of things both nameless and profound,1 and even a touch of brightness at the end.

Along the way, notice how well Morrison conjures the sensations—good, bad, and incomprehensibly terrible—that our bodies can experience. She writes with astounding physicality, which serves her well when she writes about suffering. We are all in bodies, and when violence is done to us, it is done to our bodies.

Also, if you happen to like ghost stories, I think it’s safe to say that this is the best literary ghost story ever written.

And if you finish this one and want more Morrison, I recommend Song of Solomon.

Song of Solomon is a perfect novel.

Happy to report that I’ve finally discovered Lydia Davis. I’m ashamed it took me this long; she’s exactly the kind of writer I love. Her stories, which are known for being extremely short, feel like daring experiments. These are stories that thrash determinedly against the boundaries of the form. I like that. That’s what gets my inner rhinoceros stomping and charging around.

Of course, not all the stories work for me. This is to be expected. The outcome of an experiment is inherently uncertain. The bolder the experiment, the more potential for surprise. Experiments also imply divergent outcomes according to changes in independent variables, i.e., in this metaphor, “readers.” Experimental writing is unpredictable and often divisive, appealing in different measure to different people according to their different sensibilities and tastes. Appreciating a writer who loves to experiment means looking past the experiments that don’t work for you, and treasuring the ones that do.

Let’s get into some EXAMPLES.

I have been on Twitter quite a lot over the past ten years. I have read quite a few profound and/or hilarious tweets. Perhaps this is why I tend to find the tweet-length Lydia Davis pieces less satisfactory. Consider this one, titled “Tropical Storm”:

Like a tropical storm,
I, too, may one day become “better organized.”

It’s clever, but I have read a lot of tweets that delighted me more than this, for instance this one from a couple days ago:

A matter of individual taste, perhaps.

There are also some longer stories where Davis pursues an interesting idea in a way, or to an extent, that ultimately fails to delight me. I felt this way about “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders,” a close academic analysis of letters written, in 1951, by students to a classmate in the hospital. Bold idea, fun in principle, but though its overbearing length seemed to be the joke, I regret I lost interest two thirds of the way through.

The Davis stories that work for me, however, are so categorically wonderful that I know they’re going to lodge in my hippocampus forever. My favorites so far (and I still have quite a bit of her oeuvre to crunch through, forgive me) are the ones that neatly slice into life’s minute absurdities—carrying a caterpillar down the stairs, or seeking the correct syntax with which to refer to a loved one who’s just passed away. Here’s a story called “Childcare” that I adore:

It’s his turn to take care of the baby. He is cross.
He says, “I never get enough done.”
The baby is in a bad mood, too.
He gives the baby a bottle of juice and sits him well back in a big armchair.
He sits himself down in another chair and turns on the television.
Together they watch The Odd Couple.

All the unspoken truths hidden in this seemingly mundane scene… the dry and mischievous humor… the deft deployment of simple words in just the right way (“well back in a big armchair”)… your results may vary, but to me this is a masterpiece.

Here’s a slightly longer story (God I hope it’s okay that I’m just typing these in, I’m reading them out of her collection Varieties of Disturbance, which I very much hope you will go out and immediately purchase) that I love for its spotlight on a certain Relationship Dilemma that I’ve heard hinted at1 but would never otherwise have fully understood:

“Good Times”

What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she thought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him would be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.

I think this story is so beautiful. It’s sad but also a touch hopeful, and of course, like most of her stuff, I think it’s really funny too. I also love the writing itself. Look at where she chooses to use commas and periods—shaping the sound of the sentences as they unfurl in your head. It’s really marvelous. I admire it so much.

Sometimes I feel self-conscious that the stuff I write here doesn’t rise to the level of proper literary criticism. That’s because the reviews I read in LARB or the New Yorker or wherever always seem to have a really smart analytical breakdown of what’s going on in the work, where it succeeds or fails, what it’s “saying,” and so on. I am not wired that way. I am wired to look at something that excites me and go “wow, sick, what a banger,” and then to turn around and share it with someone else. It’s not that I can’t come up with theories about why something is great, or why it’s working, or what the writer is doing to achieve the effect; it’s just that whatever I come up with always feels sort of profane and half-boiled, like I’m grasping at the fringes of something fragile and precious in the dark. I feel wonder, not understanding. I never feel like what I’m saying is particularly smart. When I try to analyze a story I love, I usually wind up throwing my hands in the air going “I don’t know man it just rules, it’s doing all these crazy things to me and it makes me want to achieve such things myself!”

I’d like to believe this is because I’m (clears throat dramatically) a Writer myself, that my relationship to the form is based in wonder and not analysis because what a writer needs to produce effective fiction is closer to wonder than analysis. However it’s also possible that I’m just not very good at this. (Yet?)

Either way, if for some reason this is the first newsletter you’ve happened across, if you’re interested in more posts that basically go “isn’t this piece of writing magnificent?”—I will now present the humble suggestion of a free or paid subscription:

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Have a good weekend, everybody. Appreciate you very much.

Here’s something that I guess would be best described as a work-in-progress short story, inspired by recent events.

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The short version is that there are enormous time lags involved, the same way there were time lags involved in the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent supply chain breakdowns. The time lags explain why we haven’t felt the bulk of the impact from the Strait of Hormuz yet; they also explain why, no matter what magical happy-happy peace deal the ketamine-snorting jesters currently leading our country pull out of their red MAGA hat in the next few weeks, the effects are locked in, and we’re pretty much guaranteed to experience them in the upcoming months and, yes, years.

Another way COVID is a good analogue for the current situation is that usage of oil declined during lockdown by about the same amount that it needs to decline today—except this time those barrels aren’t just un-bought—they are unproduced. We need to reduce our driving, flying, and factory usage as much now as we did during COVID—but the mechanism this time will be prices rising high enough to discourage all that activity. Because the barrels we need to continue our normal economic activity literally do not exist.

But don’t take my word for it—listen to the experts:

Collected Reporting From The Experts This Week

There’s really good information on YouTube if you stay away from the clickbait videos with thumbnails depicting a silly face + fire in the background. The good stuff tends to be on the channels of specialist investing firms with ~2,000 subscribers. For a detailed discussion of why the Strait cannot magically open and the oil shock is only getting started, check out this discussion between two energy experts, my favorite video of the week:

If you don’t want to watch the video I’ll summarize:

• So far we’ve had a deficit - we’re using more oil than we produce.

• We’re still running at full oil usage worldwide - very little demand has been destroyed. This is drawing down inventories at record pace (see below)

  

• By July the oil deficit will turn into a shortage - we’ll be out of reserves and price will need to rise to balance the market.

• A peace deal doesn’t save us because it will take many months to get the Strait back to normal traffic—if it ever gets back to normal traffic at all.

• Therefore oil is guaranteed to go a lot higher for a lot longer before this is over.

• The market is not pricing this in yet. It’s going to be a bloodbath when reality sets in, probably by the end of summer at the latest.

India is in an acute crisis already and Modi is warning it could get way worse. They are huge energy importers and located very close to the Strait of Hormuz, so they started experiencing the worst damage first. The rest of us won’t get off easy—as with COVID, we’ll end up experiencing similar effects, just after a delay.

Oil has received most of the coverage so far, followed by fertilizers, and these are certainly huge problems, but the sulfuric acid shortage is a huge problem all its own. You need sulfuric acid for all kinds of things, including making fertilizer and mining critical metals like copper. Also uranium. Good luck with transitioning to solar and nuclear when diesel is in acute shortage and so is sulfuric acid. Mining supply chain expert Craig Tindale wrote a great breakdown of this issue on his Substack this week that’s worth reading if you’re interested.

Craig Tindale

The Global Reagent Squeeze: Supply Chain Vulnerabilities in Critical Mineral Processing

1. Introduction: The Invisible Constriction…

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4 months ago · 68 likes · 18 comments · Craig Tindale

Oil products are in everything. The shorter the supply chain, the quicker we feel effects; this week the discussion going around was about impending motor oil shortages:

Plastics and products downstream of petrochemicals will be hit next. E.g. detergents, food packaging, semiconductors, a million things we haven’t thought about yet.

Closing with a miscellaneous grab bag of interesting stuff.

1. Strait of Hormuz is still very much closed:

2. AI business models are heavily dependent on cheap energy

When Jeff Currie says in the video linked at the top that AI companies are basically “the world’s biggest energy shorts”… yeah. Worth paying attention to, given these companies are massively overrepresented in the S&P 500 right now. They also need copper, aluminum, and diesel in massive quantities. I think I already mentioned it but it bears repeating. In Currie’s view, which I share, this crisis is going to deflate the AI bubble at turbo speed.

3. Bond yields are ripping

The war has put a ton of upward pressure on US Treasury bond yields. This is bad for the economy in a bunch of ways—some simple examples include reducing the value of bonds already owned by banks, 401ks, and other entities (yields going up reduces value of existing bonds), increasing mortgage rates, and increasing the amount of the US budget that we have to spend on paying the interest on our $39 trillion dollars in debt. Ouch. Some pretty smart analysts, like Luke Gromen, believe those interest payments are about to get out of hand and we’ll have to print our way out of the subsequent mess, causing years of high inflation. Buy gold and copper once we crash, I guess.

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Here’s something I learned recently: extracting and refining copper requires sulfur. 50% of the world’s seaborne sulfur transits the Strait of Hormuz. Sorry: used to transit. What does this mean? We’re about to have a lot less copper.

What’s copper used for? Well, basically all technology, but here’s one particularly evocative example: electrifying data centers. In other words, it’s about to be a lot more difficult, or at least expensive, to bring a data center online. Data centers—you know, the one line item currently staving off an American recession?

It turns out another big miracle we live our lives within (or atop?) is the global supply chain. This broke down recently, if you remember, during COVID. Factories shut down, container ships stopped moving. Suddenly it was hard to get the stuff you wanted. Used cars became very expensive. Everything became very expensive.

This is about to happen again, except it seems like it’s going to be a lot worse. It’s already been three weeks since I wrote that the most likely outcome of the Hormuz closure was an extended stalemate, with Trump doing his best to keep markets from freaking out while he procrastinated on making the sorts of humiliating concessions that could actually end the war.

This is exactly what’s happened so far, and based on today’s news, it looks like it will continue until things break down in the sort of oil-price-rocketing way that cannot be “jawboned” into submission.1 We spent the weekend waiting for Trump’s response to the latest Iranian peace proposal (which was the same as every previous Iranian proposal—sanctions lifted, assets unfrozen, and they keep control of the Strait). The response:

Everyone, on all sides, is cooking him for this:

All that’s changed since my post three weeks ago is that we’re short three more weeks of the oil, petrochemicals, and fertilizer that used to transit the Strait, and the stock market is now up a lot. We are no closer to a deal and in fact I think we’re probably further away from a deal now than the average observer would have believed we were three weeks ago.

But the equilibrium can’t last much longer, and that’s because things are starting to break.

Plastics

You need the Strait to make plastic. You need plastic to make everything else.

Fertilizers

The Washington Post reported that farmers in Thailand are already dramatically altering their plantings because of fertilizer shortages. Food is going to get a lot more expensive, very soon.

COVID-Style Restrictions

With India facing worsening fuel shortages, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently gave a speech calling for citizens and ‌businesses to conserve fuel, postpone vacations, adopt the COVID-19 strategy of working from home, etc.

Expect more of this, worldwide, soon. As we saw during the pandemic, the reduction in activity will not be good for the economy.

Buckle Up, AI Bulls

The reaction on Wall Street has been hilariously dismissive, as this soon-to-be infamous quote in the Financial Times from an unnamed “high-powered banker” shows:

“Does anyone really care if the Strait of Hormuz is open?” You’re about to, buddy. Keep buying SanDisk and AMD and see what happens in a couple months.

A lot of people are comparing the euphoric run-up in AI names to the dotcom bubble’s 1999 blow-off top. One difference from 1999 that I predict will change the second half of 2026: in 1999, the Strait of Hormuz was open.

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If you only know one thing about László Krasznahorkai it’s probably that he recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature. If you know two things, the second is probably that he writes absolutely honking massive sentences, sentences that go on for pages, a stylistic quirk that some people love and others despise. If you know a third fact it’s probably that he’s Hungarian.

I like the sentences. I like the sensation of perpetual motion they create, the breathless, rapidfire switches between perspectives, the details crammed into every phrase, as if he’s not only interested in conjuring a world as rich and complex as the one we live in, but doing it in the most energetic way possible.

I particularly love it when one of Krasznahorkai’s vast, intricate scenes also turns out to be very funny. Recently I’ve been reading Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, which is very good, and there’s a scene like this that was so good I wanted to share it with you.

Of course it’s going to be hard to translate the full effect, since so much of what makes this scene fantastic was built up gradually over the 218 pages preceding it, and the scene itself is too long to transcribe the whole thing anyway—but I’ll attempt to get the essence across and you’ll have to let me know ““in the comments”” how I did.

Key facts to know in order to understand what’s going on:

• The Baron Wenckheim is a shy old man who lived in Argentina until very recently; he is now returning to his childhood home in Hungary;

• Everyone in his hometown believes that he has a massive fortune, and they are very excited for him to return, hoping he will inject tons of cash into the local economy;

• The Mayor has arranged, on short notice, an enormous welcoming party for the Baron when his train arrives;

• No one in this town knows anything about Argentina except that it’s featured in the song “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina;”

• Therefore, among the greeting party are some bikers who plan to play “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” on their bike horns at the moment of the Baron’s entrance; they are unaware that a local women’s choir has also selected this song to sing at the same moment…

Below, with some strategic elisions, you will find the sentence/scene in question:

All the flawless organizing had been in vain, the Mayor shook his head, in vain were the flawless sequence of events, the flawless distribution of tasks, in vain every effort they had expended in order to avoid things getting all muddled, things had gotten muddled, because […] when the train stopped, people suddenly went crazy, and everything got mixed up […] and the train didn’t even stop properly, and for some reason [the Baron] didn’t even want to get out of the train at first, well, never mind—what is certain is that when he finally started walking with him from the train to the main microphone, he suddenly heard the bikers blowing that Madonna tune randomly on their motorcycle horns, and then the women’s chorus—as if this had been their sign—started in on the same song, at which point the crowd began to yell all kinds of things, but not what he’d instructed them beforehand to call out from his megaphone, instead some were yelling: long live the Baron, some were yelling: welcome, others were screaming: bravo, yet others were yelling: well hail!; can somebody tell me—he had been posing this question for days now—what is “well hail” supposed to mean, well, is that the right way to receive such an important guest? he asked, no, he answered his own question, that’s not how it should be done, […] and every sound that came out of the chorus was nearly lost in the commotion, in vain were they amplified, they just tried harder and harder to see if they could somehow improve the situation, but they couldn’t improve anything, because those accursed motorcyclists, those bikers on the other side of the station—the women’s chorus had detested them for a long time now, because how many, but how many times had one of their rehearsals been ruined by those bikers revving their engines right below the windows of the Cultural Hall […] well, those bikers on the other side (and this hadn’t been agreed in advance, at least nobody had said anything about this) […] with their motorcycle melody horns they all began to blare out the same thing, the chorus members could hardly believe their ears, but well, it was that song, […] those accursed bikers were blaring out that song on their horns, and the women’s chorus became completely confused, because if somebody were to tell them now that they should be holding the right pitch and a clean melody while singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” and yet at the same time hearing exactly the same tune as if from a herd of bellowing cows—this had not been agreed upon in advance, no one had informed them about this—it was a provocation, they repeatedly said to each other when it was finally all over— […] in fact, though, it wasn’t [the bikers] who should be blamed, as this was only what [they had] agreed upon with the organizers, that was true, but something else had disturbed them, and completely understandably, namely the bikers couldn’t decide when it could be said that the great guest had disembarked from the train, because when he opened the door and poked out his head, then a few among them felt—and it must be acknowledged, not without reason—given the pressure of events that this was the sign they should be waiting for, and not the Leader’s hand signal, and so they began to press down on their horns at that moment; others still waited, however—partially because in the ensuing commotion they weren’t sure if they’d actually seen the hand signal of the Leader, and partially because they judged that the starting signal in this case should be the moment the guest actually got off from the train, but then he went back into the train, therefore—they reasoned according to their own fashion, namely, in the Biker Bar they slammed their pint glasses down on the counter or the table, depending on whether they were standing or sitting, as they truly felt that the “condemnation of the public” was unjust, accordingly it couldn’t be considered that the Baron had gotten off the train, because he hadn’t, they kept repeating, he only got off the train later; and by getting off the train, they meant—they explained, flourishing their pint glasses—that someone’s feet would be touching the ground, namely, when he got down from the last step and started off, next to the Mayor, toward the microphone, then they began pressing down on their horns when that occurred; but of course from that ended up a huge commotion, they acknowledged, as all of them began to press on their horns at different times, and because of that they also reached the end of the melody separately, they just kept pressing and pressing on their horns, and Madonna’s great hymn, meant to “coax tears of joy” from the guest—as the Leader had prophesied after his discussion with the Mayor and the Police Chief—the “great Argentinian masterpiece” turned into a completely muddled cavalcade; it was a montage—Toto tried to mitigate things, but without great effect—and it was to no avail that they themselves finally heard what they were doing and realized too late this wasn’t going to lead to anything good, they didn’t dare stop though, they just kept on pressing and pressing until the Mayor spoke into the microphone, emphatically thanking the participants for their role in the ceremony, and he began to utter his own words of greeting, which finally brought some semblance of order to the festivities.

This scene is so loud and, at least to me, very deeply hilarious. I’m a sucker for writing that does things only writing can do, and in my opinion that’s what we have here: in written narration you can leap from perspective to perspective, forward and backward in time, with many rapidfire transitions, all in the course of a single sentence, conveying a vast trove of information and characterizing all kinds of different people at breakneck speed; imagining this as a sequence in a film is a lot harder—you could certainly show the chaos, but it would be hard to explain the chaos; I’d venture to say that you’d need many shots, and several minutes, to convey everything going on, whereas Krasznahorkai can just explain it to you, in a way that—for all the length of the sentence—I’d argue is actually quite direct and economical.

There are points in the long meandering sentences where he repeats certain phrases, but I think those repetitions serve a critical role; they give the reader a reprieve, moderating the intensity to preserve an enjoyable rhythm. It reminds me a bit of the purposeful repetitions in work by Jon Fosse, another practitioner of the gigantic sentence—though Fosse is, for my money, significantly less hyperactive, a lot more soothing.

Another unique affordance of literature is the ability to get deep inside someone’s head, and Krasznahorkai is particularly adept at getting inside the heads of idiosyncratic characters whose minds, subjected to the relentless absurdity of modern life, are melting down. (This sounds a lot like Benjamín Labatut, another writer doing a great job capturing the Looney-Tunesian character of the modern world). Here’s a sample of Krasznahorkai’s internal exploration of a professor who has vowed to immunize himself from the toxic influence of thought itself:

You could start from anywhere—from the inconceivability of the essence of the water’s surface, through the meaning, forever hidden from us, of vegetable and animal life, right up to the weighty error storm deriving from the cult of measurements, the main thing, thought the Professor—because right at that moment it was 3:41 p.m., even in his current circumstances he couldn’t leave off his thought-immunization exercises—the main thing is that I can attack these questions from any direction whatsoever, because I attack gravity, I attack the entire absurdity of the observation of time, and if I want to, I can also attack the trashy flea market of our ideas and throw these useless—albeit valuable-seeming—objects every which way in this flea market […] it’s time now to go down to the fundament, to examine what has remained there of the essential, and in that way not just to attain, in this catastrophic world history of misapprehensions, the meaning of these misapprehensions, but to get to their use as well; […]

The way this guy uses words is just so interesting to me. What do you think? Drop a 300-word sentence of your own in the comments.

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Let’s try to view this thing from the least partisan perspective possible. Pretend for a moment that we have no allegiance to either the United States or Iran, discount the tweets from both sides, and assess the situation based on the facts that seem most inarguable.

First would be the fact that the Strait of Hormuz, through which many of the world’s most vital resources normally pass, is still running at less than 10% of its capacity, 7 weeks into the war. We can verify that the Strait does in fact remain closed by reviewing AIS data of tanker flow. (As of this morning, April 18, the IRGC has announced the re-re-closure of the Strait, a point they punctuated by opening fire on a couple of ships attempting to make the transit.)

Second is the fact that the longer the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the more damage it does to the world economy. We can argue about the scale and speed of this damage, but every expert agrees that it will be severe. The contrarian case is not that the Strait’s closure couldn’t send us into a worldwide depression (!!)—with famine claiming millions of lives—but that it will open (and return to full traffic, which is actually a complicated assumption all its own) long before that happens.

Third is the fact that the United States and Israel recently attacked Iran, initiating the war, damaging a lot of Iran’s infrastructure, killing military and political leaders, and causing the deaths of many civilians, including schoolchildren.

Fourth is the fact that Iran demonstrated the ability to penetrate missile defense systems in the Gulf and strike critical military and industrial infrastructure in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Iraq. This ability did not diminish significantly as the conflict progressed. There were always more missiles, always more drones.

Fifth is the fact that the fighting stopped, and a ceasefire was declared.

Sixth is the fact that, in the only round of peace negotiations so far, Iran and the United States proved to have demands that were very far apart. According to many sources, there were disagreements about subjects including: Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, the presence of US military bases in the Middle East, Iran’s support for regional proxies like Hezbollah, Iran’s control of the Strait (from which it hopes to extract tolls), sanctions relief, Iran’s desire for a nonaggression pact cosigned by the United Nations, and so on.

These are the facts. You’d be hard-pressed to find an informed person who disagreed with anything above.

Now let’s take a look at the story being told.

How’s Donny Trump Gonna Wriggle Out of THIS Jam?

If you ask Donald Trump—and believe me, everybody is—things are going splendidly. Yesterday he went on an absolute media heater, announcing not only that peace was imminent, but that it would be on American terms, that Iran was giving the US everything it wanted, including its enriched uranium, that Iran had promised to open the Strait and never close it again, and on and on.

The market liked this, continuing a record-breaking recovery from its (comparatively minor) declines of a few weeks prior; and of course that was the point, because the primary audience for the tale that Trump is spinning is not even the American people, but the American stock market.

Refutations from the Iranian side came quickly—no concessions had been made, new peace talks weren’t even scheduled, they certainly weren’t going to relinquish control over the Strait—but these protests were ignored, at least by market participants.

The New York Times dutifully reported what both sides were saying, but because it’s the New York Times, it didn’t take a stance on which side was correct. We are not so restrained here at Narrative Designs.

Trump is telling the story that Iran has been defeated and is on the verge of capitulating, that the United States will not have to make major concessions, that the war is almost over because the Iranians are desperate and afraid. Bluffing like this has almost always worked for him. Maybe, the market thinks, it will work this time too. But he’s not the only character with agency in this story. Let’s look at what he’s saying, from Iran’s perspective, and imagine if it were true.

Imagine you’re an Iranian military leader. You have just watched the US and Israel launch a massive attack on your country. You have watched bombs fall on your factories, energy facilities, police stations, military bases, residential areas, and schools. You have retaliated against vital infrastructure in the Gulf States and closed the Strait of Hormuz. You have shot down American planes and forced the evacuation of American military bases and embassies. The US and Israel have accepted a ceasefire, despite having achieved zero of their principle aims, since you continue to rule the country, you retain the ability to strike targets with missiles and drones, and you retain possession of your nuclear material and the knowledge to produce more. You also now control the Strait of Hormuz, which is something you could not have said before the war. It looks to you like you won. It doesn’t even look like the victory was particularly close.

Now, according to the story, you are going to give it all back. You’re going to give Trump the nuclear material, open the Strait and promise never to close it again, and disavow support for your regional proxies. Maybe you’re even going to dial back your missile program. Why are you going to do this, again? Because your navy is gone? Because Trump is such a good negotiator?

If this were a novel, the motivations wouldn’t make sense. What should the reader imagine would compel the IRGC to give up what it’s gained? Fear that a US blockade will choke out Iran’s economy? The US has been trying to choke out Iran’s economy for years; by any expert estimation, Iran now only needs to hold out a few months and the world economy will collapse. Should Iran fear US military escalation? Iran is huge, several times the size of Iraq, and mountainous. American tanks are no good there. American planes get shot down there. The American public does not want the kind of long, grinding, brutal war that would be required to force regime change in Iran. For Iran, there is little reason to fear such an outcome. What about an escalation in the air campaign? Strikes on power plants and bridges? Iran can retaliate against the Gulf countries in far worse ways, turning them back into barren deserts, devoid of oil infrastructure and desalination plants.

If you ask the IRGC, the US has no strategic option that does not worsen its own position. So why should the IRGC make any compromises at all? They seem to hold all the cards. They fear nothing that can be done to them. They await only the American realization of this fact, the humiliating capitulation that Donald Trump will eventually be forced to make.

This is the brick wall that Trump has run into at his typical speed of five hundred miles an hour. It’s—finally, after decades of successful bluster—a bind he cannot lie his way out of. He can deny reality for a little while longer, spin increasingly elaborate stories in which his enemies are on the verge of surrendering—but the rude facts lurk underneath, fangs bared, growing hungrier all the time.

Experts have been hoping for what now-borderline-famous oil and gas analyst Rory Johnston calls the “Unilateral TACO” (TACO = “Trump Always Chickens Out”), where Trump admits defeat, leaves Iran in control of the Strait, and retreats while declaring victory. I have come to view this scenario as unlikely, and here’s why: you cannot lie about the things Trump would need to concede. Either Iran controls the Strait, or it doesn’t. Either sanctions are in place or they’re not. Either Iran has the enriched uranium we’ve already admitted they have, or it doesn’t. Trump is discovering that he cannot lie about these facts. If he pulls out, these facts will be widely reported. He will have suffered the worst strategic defeat in American history. Everyone will know. His time will be over.

So I don’t think this ends with Trump admitting defeat. I think this continues as an ever-deteriorating stalemate, Trump spinning tales as long as he can, until the brute force of reality leads to other people dragging him, kicking and screaming, from his big golden chair. Once he’s out of the way, whether through impeachment or some other sidelining, the necessary concessions will be made. The only way this doesn’t happen is if Iran breaks first somehow, and the IRGC’s confidence turns out to be misplaced. Until the very last moment, Trump will be holding out for that.

Benjamín Labatut is a Chilean author whose work charts the lives of great mathematicians, physicists, and scientists. His books (I’ve read When We Cease to Understand the World and The Maniac, both fantastic) are well-researched, riding the line between creative nonfiction and fiction. They’re also incendiary, bursting with a chaotic and irrepressible energy. His characters, all real people, are haunted and besieged by their own discoveries of great, inhuman facts about the universe—discoveries that have come to define science in the last two centuries.

What seems to interest Labatut is this: After a long period of apparent progress, during which humans seemed to be making ever-greater sense of things (“What is the Moon made of?” “What causes disease?” etc.), we began to discover the limits of what was possible to know. The rise of uncertainty, whether expressed in quantum mechanics or A.I. models so complex that even their creators don’t fully understand them, is inhuman and terrifying, and it now seems to define our world in more ways than just scientific discoveries. Labatut connects the dangerous irrationality of modern science to the dangerous irrationality of Nazism, nuclear weapons, and the modern military-industrial complex. His subject is entropy, the universe’s fundamental tendency toward disorder, which is a core element of how it feels to be alive today. The result is searing and scary and ultra-compelling. It also feels real and true in a way not all contemporary literature does.1 He’s captured something unsettling about our world, and traced it to its origins. It’s a marvelous artistic accomplishment.

Back in 2023, Labatut gave an excellent interview to the cheery lads at the Hatchards literary podcast (I guess Hatchards is a bookstore in England?). I found the episode a few months ago and really enjoyed it. Figured I’d share some of the highlights with you folks. I’ll be curious what you think of his perspective. (I’ve added some italics for emphasis; hopefully they’d match his intent.)

“We are all looking to be transformed. That’s the reason to read, and to write. We shouldn’t forget that. Books should burn… They should touch that part of you that has been dumbed down, quieted down.”

“A good piece of art should touch a nerve, and that nerve should… make you feel that sense of awe and fear… that is the transformative experience that we’re really lacking these days.”

Here, I think Labatut gently puts forth his contribution to debates about art vs. entertainment, and the relative value of each. Note that he does not cite pleasure in his description of what art should do, nor does he describe an experience that sounds pleasurable per se. He is advocating for art that burns, that inspires big overwhelming feelings like awe and fear… according to him, art is not necessarily supposed to be easy to consume; it’s not necessarily supposed to comfort you; it’s supposed to make you feel difficult, transformative, mind-expanding things. Think about the books and movies you’ve read recently—which ones would satisfy this definition? Do you think most people are in fact seeking out transformative experiences, or do they instead seek out media aimed purely at pleasure?

Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive properties; I find Labatut’s work intensely pleasurable, in part because it’s so searing; clearly many different kinds of pleasure can be derived from a work of art. There does seem to be a value judgment in Labatut’s argument, however, about the relative merit of different sorts of pleasure.

I think sometimes people view arguments like this as a way for pretentious snobs to tear down popular things. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying The Mandalorian. Who cares if it qualifies as art? But broadly popular things do tend to be simpler and less emotionally complex, leaning toward inciting pleasure for pleasure’s sake. The transformative, challenging effects described by Labatut seem like something else entirely.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to contribute to this discussion myself. In my personal work I tend to treat pleasure as a principal aim. I want the reader to enjoy what I’m writing, so that they want to keep reading. But I also love the idea of pursuing higher-order aims, like those Labatut describes here, because I love the experience of reading something like what he’s written. His work, like that of many great writers, makes me feel like my understanding of (and appreciation for) the world has been deepened and enhanced—often in complex, emotionally challenging ways that are difficult to express in words.

Back to the interview—Here’s another quote I really liked:

“The thing about the modern world is that these miracles happen all the time, and we’re just completely immune to them! I think that’s what literature should do. It should take a little step back and say: what is happening is miraculous, and you should regard it in that way. You should understand that these things are happening right now that we have dreamt of for centuries. Our wildest dreams are coming true, and maybe that’s why common-day reality is starting to feel like a nightmare.”

Here Labatut describes the specific fascination that animates his work: the modern world is miraculous, it’s a dream come true—but it’s also incomprehensible, terrifying, enormously complex, and changing all the time. This somehow seems even more true today than it did when he gave this interview back in 2023. That’s why I think he’s one of the most exciting writers working today.

It’s also why I keep writing about the Iran war and its potential economic effects. Global supply chains are so incomprehensibly vast and complex that it’s impossible to forecast the effects of an event like the one currently happening in the Persian Gulf. But whatever happens, it’s going to be big, affecting billions of people. So I hope you’ll forgive me, because having finally gotten this piece about Benjamín Labatut out the door, I’m not going to be able to stop myself from writing about that whole mess again in the next one.

In the meantime: pick up When We Cease to Understand the World or The Maniac. They’re fantastic.

Thanks so much for reading—I appreciate your support very much.

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Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my favorite writers. His approach to science fiction relies heavily on research: study the world, explore how it’s changed in the past, examine changes in progress, project those changes into the future. He’s a master of character, plot, and pacing, but what distinguishes his work is the intricate, convincing, and compelling way he charts shifts in the structure of human civilization.

One point history has made again and again is that people tend to think current culture, politics, and economics are far more stable than they actually are. The magic of near-future “hard” science fiction is to show us how things we take for granted might change more than we thought.

Robinson does an amazing job of this in Ministry For The Future, which is the best novel about solving climate change I’ve ever read. (Please read it.) One of the dilemmas faced by policymakers in the book is how to shift incentives away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. The logic goes that outlawing fossil fuels is likely to prove difficult as long as countries are incentivized to use them by economic realities.

In the book and real life, the concept of a carbon tax is often suggested, to charge companies for their use of fossil fuels so that other forms of energy become comparatively more desirable. One dilemma tackled by people in the book, which has thus far stumped policymakers in real life too, is how to build the sort of international authority structure that could impose such a tax.

To my aspiring speculative fiction writer’s eye, however, the current situation in the Persian Gulf demonstrates that you might not need international consensus to impose a global disincentive on the use of oil and natural gas. You might be able to achieve it all on your own, as Trump has done in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iran War’s Impact on Renewable Energy

“I am really curious what Kim Stanley Robinson thinks about this,” I say constantly about any major development in the world.

To me it looks like this:

• Thanks to the Strait of Hormuz closure, oil is north of $100 per barrel and rising. This is a meteoric increase from previous levels. The problem doesn’t seem likely to resolve itself any time soon. Escorts won’t work. Release from the world’s strategic reserves won’t work. Prices are going to keep rising.

• Countries reliant on importing oil and gas are getting absolutely slammed. In Europe, they were already getting slammed by the cutoff of Russian natural gas after the invasion of Ukraine. Now it’s even worse.

• The closure of the Strait is basically a massive carbon tax. Oil and gas are going to be way more expensive for at least several months. Even coal is more expensive since countries are falling back on it.

• If you’re a company that makes solar panels, the number of people who want your solar panels in the short term has just increased dramatically. The amount they’re willing to pay for those solar panels has also increased.

• China has spent the past several years striving for energy independence, in large part by expanding solar power and electrification. This now looks extremely prescient. As leaders in renewable energy, they are an enormous winner from this whole scenario. They also have loads of extra solar panel production capacity lying around, which they’ve been putting to use serving customers around the world.

• Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow, I think countries are going to take a serious interest in energy independence moving forward. They won’t want this to happen again.

• If you’re a country without significant fossil fuel production, your best option for energy independence is renewables. Once solar panels and wind farms have been installed, they can’t be disabled simply because somebody has started a war in a fossil fuel-delivering chokepoint elsewhere in the world.1

The countries that produce fossil fuels are not countries you want to rely on in an increasingly polarized world. Why give Russia, the Gulf States, Iran, or Trump’s America the power to torpedo your economy? It’s a grim reason to turn to solar and wind, but from a climate change perspective, any turn from fossil fuels to solar and wind is significant. And you have to admit that there’s a delicious irony in a President who has tried so hard to suppress renewable energy creating a situation that effectively punishes anyone still trying to use fossil fuels. If you wanted to create a situation that incentivized more investment in solar and wind power worldwide, it’s hard to think of something that would have a bigger effect than what’s been done in the Strait of Hormuz.

To top it off, this oil shock may tip the global economy into a recession. While this is bad news for a lot of reasons, it is likely that it would slow global emissions, and therefore climate change. Demand for energy craters in a recession.

While the current administration certainly had no desire to reduce the amount of fossil fuels consumed globally during their tenure, if there’s a deep recession and a pivot toward renewables, that will be exactly what happens. Not to mention that if they crater the economy they’re going to get their butts kicked in the midterms and 2028, bringing in progressives who will accelerate the energy transition and the demise of oil and gas.

Arduously Turning the Unwieldy Oil Tanker That Is This Newsletter Post Back Toward Literature

Can you build a good piece of speculative fiction out of thinking about stuff like this? Obviously there’s a lot more that goes into it. But I have to believe that whatever part of me thinks this is a fun idea for a newsletter post (sorry) is also part of Kim Stanley Robinson’s desire to write the books that he does. There’s something interesting about studying the world and predicting its future. At least for some of us. And since one way of thinking about what you should write is “write something only you could write,” maybe if you’re interested in this kind of thing it’s a signal worth following.

At least that’s what I tell myself when I’m reading my 55th Iran War news article of the day. Whatever interests you, there’s a fair enough chance you can turn it into writing that will interest someone else.

I keep saying I’m going to write about Benjamin Labatut and I swear to God that is actually going to happen in my next post. He’s not a speculative fiction writer, but his work is heavily researched. It treats the world as a primary source of inspiration. Lately, I’ve been finding that an especially alluring direction myself.

Reviewing the historical record you will find that such sudden spikes in oil prices have almost always triggered a recession, and this may be the sharpest oil price spike ever to occur:

Stock market futures, which had already been looking sort of jaundiced and sickly from a technical perspective, dropped off a cliff shortly thereafter:

The reason oil prices are about to take a Godzilla-sized chomp out of your 401k is Trump’s unimaginably stupid war in Iran (and vice versa; one of the many reasons the war is so colossally stupid is that it was likely to lead to these oil prices taking a Godzilla-sized chomp out of your 401k).1

20% of the oil extracted from our poor, wheezing planet passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Since the war broke out, no oil at all has passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Kuwait, Iraq, and other Gulf states have been forced to stop production. Refineries are on fire. You get the picture.

The best piece of writing I’ve encountered about the war and its nihilistic, cruel, self-defeating, childish nature is this essay by Sam Kriss. Fine by me if you want to stop here and go read that instead. We are going to need to clobber the current leaders of our country in the midterms to begin turning things around. Let’s get voters fired up, elect some progressives, and start impeaching the dead-eyed bozos responsible for this catastrophe. In the meantime, wow, what a freaking tragedy. It hurts one’s stomach just thinking about it.

My approach here is about what the resulting recession is going to do to industries the readers of this newsletter care about. I guess this feels worthwhile to me because one of the basic, fundamental causes of America getting in stupid wars is the average American failing to understand the blowback that is likely to result from those stupid wars.2

I would love to approach this recurring political dilemma by convincing people that war is evil. I would love to convince people to stop voting for nightmarish warlike xenophobes by appealing to altruism & love for one’s fellow humans regardless of nationality & so forth. That approach actually does work sometimes, believe it or not. Some people, however, will need to be shown that avoiding war aligns with their self-interest. Here are some stats and stories via which you may attempt to change those stubborn individuals’ minds, assuming they care about videogames and/or books.

Videogames During a Crash

Nintendo stock crashed during the 2008 and 2022 recessions. It is also crashing now:

Take-Two Interactive, owner of such properties as Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto, lost 66% of its market capitalization during the 2008 crash:

The videogame industry has already experienced historic levels of layoffs over the past few years, so maybe that will insulate things from further losses. And if unemployment skyrockets, people might have more time to play videogames. From what I’ve read, this seems to have happened back in 2008. But I’m not optimistic. People might have more time to play games, but they’re going to have less money to spend on them too.

Case study: Microsoft

Microsoft employs somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 videogame developers, but the company’s free cash flow is approaching zero because all the money is going to data centers supporting generative AI:

Here’s what Microsoft’s stock price has done over the past 6 months:

If generative AI doesn’t pan out, and personally I don’t think it will, Microsoft execs will have to make some hard choices. They’ve done it before: in 2009, at the height of the great financial crisis, they laid off more than 5% of their workforce.

If more layoffs do hit the videogame industry, it will result in fewer games, and less support for the games that already exist. As a result, players may lose out too. And because games take so long to make, the industry may be affected for years after companies begin to hire up again.

Books During a Crash

Recessions are bad for the publishing industry too. According to the New York Times, hardcover book sales fell 13% from 2007 to 2008. Big-picture, the publishing industry has been on a much-talked-about decline, with 40% of publishing jobs in the US vanishing since 1990. Sales & profitability data are somewhat more heartening—Publisher’s Weekly in September 2024:

…despite the significant decline in publishing jobs, industry sales are still growing—although that growth is not keeping up with inflation, and even in absolute terms it appears to be slowing. During the 1990s, for example, sales growth in publishing exceeded 5% annually. By the early 2000s, it had slowed to about 1.5% per year and hit $25 billion in 2007,3 according to data from the Association of American Publishers. Meanwhile, the most recent AAP numbers show sales in 2023 were $29.9 billion.

While publishing industry data is notoriously tricky to pin down given shifting accounting methods and data sources, the trend lines are nevertheless clear: book publishing employment has dropped by about a third, and sales have ticked up modestly.

Certainly, profitability has improved. At the 2022 U.S. Book Show, Morgan Entrekin, longtime head of Grove Atlantic, pointed to the growing pressure on publishers—especially publicly traded ones—to deliver higher margins. “In 46 years, [trade book publishers have] never seen these levels of profitability,” he said, noting that historically, profit margins in the 5% range were seen as a healthy return. Today, the four of the Big Five trade publishers that report their financial results (next year it will be three with S&S now private) typically have margins above 10%.

More recent industry overviews seem fairly chipper, given the circumstances—here’s Publisher’s Weekly again just the other day:

Connor, who specializes in the U.S. book market, said the company had identified a “clear pattern” of people “pulling back from discretionary purchases” in order to buy food and necessary household goods in 2025. Yet, despite unemployment and higher prices on essentials “putting a squeeze on consumers,” Connor said, book sales are stable and have "settled into a new, higher baseline.”

But this nod to discretionary spending raises a worrisome point… will spending on books withstand the much greater economic pressures that would accompany a real recession? In simple terms—if you’re paying $8/gallon for gas, or if you just lost your job, does that reduce the likelihood you’ll purchase a new book?

Most American publishers aren’t publicly traded companies, but one of the largest, Simon & Schuster, was sold to the private equity company KKR in 2023. Those who’ve been following Business News will hear the alarm bells… KKR, like other private credit firms, has been investing heavily in the AI craze…

The KKR Global Infrastructure team has been investing in data centers since 2019, building one of the most active and globally diversified portfolios in the sector. We’ve now established five major data center platforms spanning hyperscale, colocation, and edge infrastructure.

Over the past six years, we’ve committed $31.3 billion in equity capital to digital infrastructure investments, reflecting our conviction in the theme.

Nice, guys. Very cool. Now to hope that good times continue to come Simon & Schuster’s way, I have to hope that the much-vaunted KKR Global Infrastructure team has not misplaced their faith in generative AI? Where is my thumbs up emoji, I need to use it seventeen times: 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 very cool guys very cool 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

Here’s KKR’s stock chart by the way (every private credit company is getting blasted right now because people are beginning to suspect they’ve invested in a bunch of garbage, and Blackstone and Blue Owl have halted redemptions from public-facing funds):

Conclusion

If indeed there is a massive recession on the horizon, it’s going to cause lots of pain and hardship for everyone in this country and pretty much every other country too. Maybe recessions are inevitable, broadly speaking: the free market’s ungainly way of correcting periods of overeager investment in things that don’t prove to be a worthwhile expenditure of human time and labor. But this recession, precipitated as it will be by some ultra-selfish and dead-eyed decisions by American business & political leaders, is, in my opinion, especially cringe.

As things develop I will continue to write about them, along with books I love (Benjamín Labatut is up next), so feel free to toss a subscription over here, or share the newsletter with your friends:

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Appreciate you all very much. Stay safe out there.

I wanted Highguard to succeed. I knew some folks on the team: lovely, incredibly talented people. Many players who tried Highguard enjoyed it. Like most new multiplayer games these days, however, it failed to shake off the aura of Certain Doom that hung around its release. Shortly after launch, the studio laid everybody off (I’ve been there), and the game shut down, taking years of everybody’s work with it (been there too).

This collapse prompted the usual questions. I was familiar with these from my time working on SUPERVIVE, another multiplayer game, which failed to su(pe)rvive despite overwhelmingly positive reviews. Whenever a big, expensive game fails, which is quite often lately, gamers want to know: Why did such a thing get made? On a related note, they want to know (although usually they’ve decided they already do know): Why didn’t it work?

Most explanations of why these games keep coming out, and also why they tend to fail, are in my opinion incorrect. At best they are missing the point. This includes the vast majority of opinions from popular games commentators and personalities. Everyone is wrong. Except me. I will tell you the truth. The truth awaits you, beneath the paywall.

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Wanted to share some links to excellent articles I read this week, in case you’re looking for something to dive into over the weekend.

• “Child’s Play,” by Sam Kriss, in Harpers

Stupefyingly entertaining safari through Silicon Valley’s AI startup craze. Kriss is such a great writer when it comes to contemporary culture. It’s silly out there, folks. This was my favorite essay in a minute.

• “The Migrants in the Ancient Forest,” by Elizabeth Flock - The New Yorker

Really moving piece on migration across the border between Belarus and Poland. Belarus has basically weaponized the desperation of people fleeing places like Somalia and Afghanistan by flying them in and shipping them across the Polish border to rile up anti-migrant sentiment there. The messed up thing is that it’s working. Poland is now enforcing their border with xenophobic brutality that will be familiar to anyone who’s heard of ICE.

With climate change sure to generate ever-increasing migration in coming years, we face a major moral crisis, and I hope we’ll rise to the occasion by cultivating societies that are as loving, welcoming, and generous as possible. Pieces like this do a great job of humanizing the people trying to immigrate to safe and prosperous places like Europe and the US. Not to belabor the point but I think fighting xenophobia has to begin with spreading compassion and empathy for refugees, and I can’t celebrate Elizabeth Flock enough for her efforts to do that in this piece. Read it!

• “The Russians Turning to Google Maps in Search of Missing Soldiers,” by Sophie Spiegelberger, in the New Yorker

Sophie Spiegelberger deftly charts the difficulties Russian families face in determining whether their sons and brothers have died in Ukraine. Failing to receive answers through traditional channels, some have begun posting inquiries in the Google Maps reviews of military hospitals. Absurd, heartbreaking, late-internet-age stuff. Sorry for articles that are a bummer but on the positive side both the New Yorker pieces above are really well-written and demonstrate (albeit with bleak clarity) ways to a better world (in this case: less war please).

• “This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby,” by Joseph Cox, 404 Media

404 Media is a journalist-owned company that breaks a ton of stories about questionable practices at the edge of the tech frontier. In this case they’re writing about the rise of smart glasses, which are getting more subtle, and leading to more cases where people get recorded without their knowledge.

The folks at 404 Media are definitely worth supporting if you can spare the monthly subscription. I also really like their podcast. It’s a great way to keep up on trends in surveillance, AI, and tech writ large.

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Of course there are lots of reviews like the following, a review of Anna Karenina1 from “Tyler” in 2008, which are bad because they try too hard & take themselves too seriously—but these aren’t good enough to qualify for the Deranged Goodreads Review of the Week award. We’re looking for something posted by a true sicko, not just a person who recently learned what “excoriate” means and wants to show it off:

Nor can we seriously consider sweet expressions of frustration from people who were genuinely trying and just couldn’t get into it—I may think you’re missing the point, Cathy M., but I can’t blame you for sharing your honest feelings—in fact, I find your 2013 review of Anna Karenina kind of beautiful:

This is basically how I felt when I tried to read Crime and Punishment just after college. I needed a few more years in the world and another attempt, at which point it became one of my favorite books ever. (Thanks, Kyungseo Min, for prodding me to give Dostoevsky another shot.)

And to be clear, it’s absolutely fine to dislike a book, even a very famous one. The objective here is not to make fun of people who didn’t like Anna Karenina. It’s more about celebrating the diversity of human experience, the uniquely human characteristics that lead people to share Goodreads reviews you could never have imagined in all your years of exposure to the multifarious internet. (Some of these uniquely human characteristics are what inspired Tolstoy to write the book in the first place.)

We’re looking for a take like this:

Basically this is the Lolita take extended to garden-variety infidelity. But as funny as it is—“loved the book, can’t approve of the cheating though: one star”—I question how serious the reviewer is. We need something with conviction behind it.

Runners-Up

Second Place

I love the idea of actual Russians flaming this book. The explanation for the length of the book is, if true, hilarious. Bonus points were awarded for sneaking some Dostoevsky slander in there. And of course, the idea that someone might love Chekhov but hate Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is delicious. That is a person of convictions. I would like to interview Anna H.’s mother for the newsletter, so if anybody knows her, please have her get in touch.

The Winner

My selection for Deranged Goodreads Review of the Week 2/26/26, Anna Karenina, goes to Mark:

Maybe you question my choice. Maybe you think this review, while certainly extra, does not qualify as “deranged.” Let me outline my argument:

• Unsorted list of mostly unrelated books & authors the reviewer liked better (I wouldn’t mind if this were standard practice in all takedown reviews tbh)

• Ayn Rand is on that list

• Quick little humble brag about reading speed

• Deftly speedrunning every other 1 star Goodreads review of the book in just a few lines (“Needed more Anna Karenina, why is there all this stuff about hunting, people who say they like this just want to be seen as intelligent”)

• Liberal use of all-caps for emphasis

Anyway this review is marvelous and it brought me a perverted joy to read it. Thank you Mark! I hope you enjoyed Notes from the Underground.

It’s a great time to write such a retrospective, because Overwatch is currently enjoying a renaissance. This is a well-deserved reward for the team’s persistence & hard work over the last few years. They’re releasing an unprecedented avalanche of playable heroes in 2026, including, importantly, a cat with a jetpack:

AAA videogames like Overwatch are a big part of our culture (Overwatch is famously played by, among other celebrities, Vince Staples and Luka Dončić), but it’s actually pretty rare to find a piece of writing about what it’s like to work on one. Either AAA devs don’t write a lot of retrospectives, or the ones they do write don’t gain a lot of traction. The best pieces I’ve read tend to concern classics that were released a long time ago (see: this excellent oral history of Shadow of the Colossus development). Consider this piece my humble contribution to that tradition.

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