So… now I really have to write it!

When you start telling people that you’re writing a private detective novel, there are certain questions that reliably come up.

One of those questions, in my experience, is: “Is it, like… noir?”

The first time someone asked me this question, I thought it would be easy to answer. But then I opened my mouth and no easy answer came out. Noir—everyone knows what noir is, right? But… what is it? Is it the way certain old movies look? Or the types of stories they tell? Or does it have more to do with the plots and styles of the novels those movies were based on? Certain tropes? Loner detectives who drink too much? Femmes fatale?

I started giving myself a crash-course in noir. I read about the darker, more pessimistic crime films American directors started making during World War II. I read about how, when the war was over and American films started being distributed globally again, French critics—now seeing all these movies at once—were struck by the darkness and started calling it noir. I learned about how the term then got retroactively applied to fiction of the type that had served as the source material for those original noir films. I read about Neo-noir, post-noir, California noir, Appalachian noir, Nordic noir. I watched more crime films and read more crime novels than ever, and I skimmed the genre-head skirmishes over what made this or that film or novel truly noir, or just noir-ish, noir-tinged, etc. I learned Fredric Jameson’s views on the subject. Paul Schrader’s. James Ellroy’s. Megan Abbott’s. My own private eye novel was taking shape, slowly (I was back in grad school to become a high school teacher, and still freelancing for magazines). I was able to think in a new way about whether it was noir, and, if so, what kind.

All of this is to explain what was bouncing around my reader/writer brain when I came across Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece” via Sarah Weinman’s crime column in the New York Times Book Review. Weinman praised the novel in the highest terms; just as intriguingly, she referred to it as “the noir novel of our time.”

The noir novel for our time? WHAT MIGHT THAT MEAN? WHAT DEFINITION OF NOIR WAS SHE USING? The die was cast: I had to read it.

I loved the novel from start to finish; any quibbles I had were carried away on a propulsive tidal wave of prose and plot.

I also found it to be a perfect complement to my noir crash course—a great case study in what makes noir noir, and how the answer can shift over time.

It was a real treat to write about “A Violent Masterpiece,” noir, and its relationship to an era’s master narratives for The New Yorker, where the piece is now live:

As for MY private eye novel: Is it noir?

Well, I… still don’t know.

Also: for the New York Times Book Review, I reviewed another widely-acclaimed recent novel, Nathaniel Rich’s “Cloudthief.”

This one I didn’t like much, despite Rich’s considerable skill. It’s about a data center heist, and I just didn’t think it hung together at all—not enough of a productive relationship between plot, theme, and style. Barry Gifford has called it “noir reportage,” which I think is a real stretch, no matter how you define noir.

This is my first August as a licensed high school English teacher in Illinois. So I’ll be in the classroom soon, covering freshman and senior courses for a teacher (the excellent ) out on sabbatical to finish a book of her own. Beyond this semester: ????? Whatever’s happening, I have every hope of continuing to squeeze in work on the private eye novel.

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This was the idea that got accepted. I was happy (I’m always happy when a pitch is accepted) but also worried (I always get worried right after a pitch is accepted). What if, by the time I wrote a piece and got it through the magazine’s editing process, “pope did 6-7” was stale news?

Thankfully, the pontiff has done me a big personal solid by continuing to 6 and 7 all over the place. And people have kept expressing their enthusiasm with pope memes and jokes. Why are Pope Leo memes so reliably appealing? My thoughts will appear in the print magazine this weekend, and are readable online now:

Big thanks to for getting on the phone to answer such hard-hitting questions as “So … Catholicism? Thoughts?”

I’ve been writing these “Screenland” columns for over seven years, along with occasional contributions to “Letter of Recommendation” (another recurring column in the magazine) and the Book Review. But there’s never been one place to see all these scattered pieces together: UNTIL now:

Many thanks to my excellent new editor, , for making this happen.

My essay on becoming an English teacher in the AI era, published by The Guardian back in May, has been made into a podcast on which it’s read by the (very accomplished!) voice actor Adam Sims.

For the first time in a good long while, I have enough sequential pages of fiction piled up that they feel destined to be a novel someday. Great feeling! It's a private detective novel set in Chicago circa 2010/11. Most of my writing energy is going in that direction, but I do have plans to soon share more Magazine Memories, plus to continue releasing Weezer Files over at .

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And/or: buy my first novel, PLANES, out now in beach-friendly paperback.

In short: the Minneapolis video that catapulted Shirley to the heights of success culminates in a bizarre, never-explained bit of classic QAnon messaging.

To clarify: I’m not saying “Shirley is a Trump-aligned conspiracy theorist, just like many QAnoners” (though that’s true). I’m not saying “Shirley makes some of the same rhetorical moves as QAnoners” (though he does). I’m saying that his Minneapolis video prominently features someone looking right into the camera and reciting QAnon talking points.

I find it beyond strange that no one has written about this, given the sheer volume of Shirley analysis that has been published and journalists’ perennial preoccupation with QAnon. It was something I was determined to include in my piece. But when I actually sat down to write, I ended up using Shirley as a jumping-off point for all kinds of other things, from the #FilmYourHospital videos posted during COVID to PizzaGate 2.0. I had a strict word limit, and a lot of my Shirley-specific material got squeezed out. The piece is better for it. But the QAnon part is burning a hole in my pocket. So, here we are…

Most of the 44 minutes of Shirley’s Minneapolis video are taken up by the influencer driving around the city, trying and failing to get inside daycares and social service offices, then claiming that this failure is meaningful. The final scene is different: he goes to the Minnesota statehouse, where he attends a congressional hearing on fraud. Afterward, he pesters a female Democratic representative—who, like everyone else in the video besides Shirley, is not identified by name—with nonsensical questions.

There’s another person there alongside Shirley, a young man in a dark suit and a backpack. The video never specifies who he is, or what he’s doing there. Did he just happen to be there when Shirley showed up? Or was their meeting coordinated? I suspect it’s the former—but who knows!

Much attention has been paid to Shirley’s main on-screen collaborator, a man he identifies only as “David” and whom journalists had no problem identifying as David Hoch, a lobbyist and serial failed candidate for public office who’d posted online that “EVERY Somali in Minnesota is engaged in fraud. ALL of them,” and that “Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims.” But much less attention—basically zero attention—has been paid to this young man.

Shirley’s default affect is, to put it mildly, flat. It’s a glib flatness. He reminds me of a teenager who is enjoying the hell out of bluffing his way through an in-class presentation while experiencing a deeply mellow high. The young man in the dark suit is, in this regard, Shirley’s opposite. He’s agitated. Almost yelling. When it’s pointed out that he’s shouting, he responds by saying that he’s a disability advocate who is prone to overstimulation. He appears to be livestreaming the encounter himself, or at least recording it on his phone. Shirley holds the microphone and watches, his face blank as always.

In the final shot of the video, Shirley and the young man in the dark suit are alone in an empty hallway. Shirley is there because he followed the woman from the hearing to keep badgering her with nonsense questions. But now she’s gone. Shirley turns back to the young man in the dark suit. And that’s when the QAnon stuff comes in.

“How many more people are going to freaking die?” the young man says, anguished. “How many more people are gonna go homeless? And how many more people are gonna get trafficked in our freaking system?”

Huh? The central allegation of the previous 42 minutes of video is that Somali-Americans are billing the government for childcare and other services that they don’t actually provide, then pocketing the cash. Why the pivot to trafficking and murder? Why the pivot to QAnon stuff?

When I watched the video again, I noticed a distinctly QAnon energy running through the whole thing, albeit in a repressed-below-the-surface way. At the level of manifest content, there are no allegations of child abuse. Logically, there almost can’t be: a crucial plank of Shirley and Hoch’s argument is that these daycares are empty. You can’t have abuse without kids there to be abused.

But at the level of latent content, the vibe is completely that of the child-abuse or child-abduction investigation. Shirley and crew never get inside a daycare, which makes perfect sense: if my daughter’s daycare admitted a bunch of YouTubers, I would pull her out the next day. But the repeated denials of entry look like a story where something’s being hidden. Shirley and Hoch stoke the viewer’s sense that, whatever that hidden thing might be, it’s something awful. “Where are the children?” Shirley says again and again. “Have they been abducted?” Hoch barks.

From the contemporary content creator’s perspective, QAnon always had one big problem: a distinct lack of compelling material for short-form videos. No one was ever able to produce, for example, footage of global elites drinking the blood of children during ritualistic gatherings in the basement of a D.C. pizza restaurant (though, yeah, people tried). Shirley’s videos solve this problem by injecting the lurid frisson of children in danger under the superficial skin of citizen journalism. Some of his many imitators have filmed themselves knocking on the doors of in-home daycares on bland residential streets. Their videos are half To Catch a Predator, half Blue Velvet. Behind every suburban facade, they say, lies the truth: darkness, sickos, secrets—all the harms that daily life suppresses from our awareness but can’t actually eliminate.

I don’t think this is a thought-out strategy on Shirley’s part; he’s just throwing stuff against the algorithmic wall, trying to see what sticks. My guess is that he simply ran into the young man in the dark suit and backpack at the capitol, included him in the final edit on a reflexive whim, and hasn’t seen—or even thought of—him since. He knew he “fit” with the daycare fraud material—or could fit, for some viewers—even if he himself couldn’t begin to say how.

Shirley’s videos seem to follow the claim-evidence-reasoning structure, but it would be a mistake to evaluate them solely using that framework. They’re something more like paintings, where the components—this brushstroke, that splash of color, this figure—are arranged by the artist’s instinct more than anything else, and interact not in sequence but as a cohesive whole, “saying” something that, if reduced to words, would not be nearly as effective.

Like I said, I didn’t get to this in my piece. I focused on a different aspect of the video: its insistent use of absence as evidence, a common feature of conspiracy content in the short-form video age. I think it’s a good piece.

Read it

I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if future historians doing their deep dives on 2026 looked at what I wrote and thought: Wow, did no professional writer who took on this video spot the QAnon of it all? Why not? But maybe they’ll find this post. ✹

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Two years ago, at the age of 39, I began training to be a school teacher. I wanted to teach English—to help young people become stronger readers, writers, and thinkers, with a deeper connection to literature. After 15 years of working mostly as a freelance writer, and as a novelist myself, I felt confident that I had something to offer. But the further I progressed in my training, the more uncertain I felt. One particular question taunted me for my lack of an answer. What to do about artificial intelligence?

So begins my latest essay, published as today’s Guardian ‘Long Read.’ In it, I attempt to reconstruct my thinking over the last year about AI chatbots and the high school English classroom, focusing on what I saw and what I tried as I re-entered the classroom myself, first as a student observer, then as a student teacher.

Read It!

People are writing a lot about AI. I get it. We’ve collectively agreed to believe that AI is on the brink of changing, well, everything. Or at least a whole lotta stuff. And maybe it is! There’s a massive appetite out there for writing about what these changes mightlook like, for debates about how inevitable they actually are, and for broadsides about WHAT IT ALL MEANS and WHY MY OVERARCHING THEORY IS THE CORRECT ONE and WHY THE OTHER THEORIES ARE JUNK.

I confess that, as I began this piece, I was sorta looking forward to writing in this mode, maybe popping up on the AI discourse leaderboard for a day or two. It’s fun (or tempting) to write bigly about the big topic of the day. It’s fun to poke at insane quotes from tech executives and their boosters. I’ve always wanted to write a manifesto…

But after a few days of hammering away, I was forced to accept that the result wasn’t very interesting. I don’t know enough about AI—or even AI in education—to write a manifesto about it. (Neither do most people who write manifestos on these subjects—but c’est la vie.)

What I did know about was my own experience: the questions I faced, the anxieties I felt, the choices I made in the classroom, and how it felt to watch them play out. So this piece is focused mostly on that material. I’m hopeful that this makes it more valuable and interesting, albeit less sweeping or conclusive. No one will be nailing this to the door of a church (or even a data center) anytime soon.

The piece contains: a bit of World War I literature; a bit of post-colonial criticism; a bit of Freud; a bit of Mark Twain. Which bits? Read it to find out. I also speculate a bit about the baseline teacher psyche—and share some of the assignments I came up with in hopes of making writing interesting enough that teenagers actually want to do it. ✹

Read the piece

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“Proust had the madeleine; Baglin has fryer grease and fluorescent lights.”

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When we meet Claire—the protagonist of the French writer Claire Baglin’s slim debut novel, On The Clock—it’s 2020 and she’s a 20-year-old college student interviewing for a summer job at a fast-food joint. After she gets hired, we watch her pilgrim’s progress through the restaurant: cleaning the dining room, taking orders, making fries. The shifts are boring when it’s slow, draining when there’s a rush on, and essentially interchangeable, the only variety coming from the occasional injury, machine breakdown, or particularly rude customer. New employees come aboard. Old employees leave. The action never adds up to anything you’d go out of your way to call a plot.

Fortunately, Baglin lards the restaurant scenes with plenty of other pleasures. She has a keen sense not just for the literal work of fast-food—the disposal of the used-up grease; the refilling of the ice cream dispenser—but also for these restaurants’ distinct psychosocial atmospheres. Often, when we’re out to eat, part of what we’re buying is the relaxing experience of having the rest of the world temporarily cordoned off for a bit. At fast-food restaurants, though, life usually refuses to wait outside. Baglin knows all about it:

A dad dumps a bunch of centimes into my cupped hands. On the surveillance screen, a traffic jam. A motorcycle honks, a driver gets out and grabs hold of the motorcyclist. A man walks past with a piece of cardboard that says he’s hungry, customers close their windows on his fingers. In my headset, lane two, I hear a woman yelling into a phone for fuck’s sake the least you can do is show up for a date, Jonathan! If you can’t understand that, shut up shut up, you said that before so just shut up, I don’t want to hear it, no you listen to me, because last time you said, no, but you said you were ready, I can’t believe this, just stop! A baby is crying in the back seat. I finish counting the change and the dad bends towards me.
—Sorry, that’s from the kids’ piggybank.

On The Clock also nails the dynamic, instantly recognizable to anyone who has worked fast food, where a customer’s sheepishness (or even shame) about what they find themselves doing—trying, for example, to order a greasy, unhealthy sandwich, perhaps one with a cartoonish name (e.g. Wendy’s “Baconator”)—finds expression in a mix of performative ignorance and scorn for the employee trying to serve them.

—I’d like a bacon.
—I’m sorry I didn’t quite hear you, can you repeat that?
—A bacon thing, you know, I’m not sure what you call it, bacon something.
—I’m sorry, could you say that again?
—I said a bacon.
—I beg your pardon, I’m new here and I don’t know everything. I’m pretty sure we don’t have any burgers with just bacon, what is it exactly you want?
—Listen, you’re the one who works here honey, you know the sandwiches better than I do.

Intercut with Claire’s fast-food summer, we get scenes from her small-town, working-class childhood. The preoccupation with labor is still front and center but filtered through the perspective of a child who has never herself been an employee (though also, of course, through perspective of the adult author who has). Claire’s father, Jerome, a kindhearted but easily overwhelmed factory maintenance worker, is always either at work, tired from work, or trying—with mixed success—to untether himself from work and money stress long enough to enjoy a family vacation or weekend outing. He’s a poignant character, marked by contradictions in a way that feels fully human. “You’ve got to have hobbies, passions, things you can do on the weekend, and you can’t let yourself get sucked in, otherwise that’s it,” Jerome tells young Claire, but we sense he’s really—or also—talking to himself.

The coming-of-age sections have an implicit trajectory, one that’s long been common to narratives of working-class life. In a word: escape. Claire’s parents want her to have more options than they themselves had, and they do what they can to help her get them. Because she has some writing ambitions, they get her a computer she can type stories on. (Jerome scavenges it from a junk pile and fixes it up himself—unsuccessfully, it turns out, but the gesture remains). They take her to career day at the local library, making sure she’s learning about all the options that lie ahead if she applies herself. And, perhaps most significantly, they eventually send her to a boarding school that will prepare her for university.

The fast-food scenes are a pleasantly fine-grained portrait of a contemporary working environment that doesn’t get a lot of literary attention; they also constantly risk recreating the repetitious boredom they attempt to evoke. The childhood scenes, by contrast, shimmer with the heat of family life and coming-of-age. Fortunately, Baglin jumps between the two timelines frequently and fluidly, stopping the boredom from taking over and creating a pleasant sense that we’re surfing the waves of Claire’s memory, stumbling along the way onto the currents that connect her and Jerome across time as laborers. (Proust had the madeleine; Baglin has fryer grease and fluorescent lights.)

The more the book progresses, the more the richness of the childhood sections draws our attention to the narrow aperture of the 2020 material. We learn all about 20-year-old Claire’s time in the fast-food restaurant, but almost nothing else about her life. What does she do when she’s not working? Where does she live? We never see her have a conversation of any substance with a coworker—does she have friends? Baglin studiously avoids answering any of these questions; the narrative lines set in motion in the childhood scenes vanish, in the fast food scenes, from the surface of the text. Claire has made it to university, that classic way station of class mobility, but what has she been studying there? How does she imagine her future? What do her parents think about her life, including her fast-food work? Is she even in touch with them? Again: nothing. Claire’s parents’ absence from these sections of the text is so complete that I briefly found myself wondering if they were possibly dead, and if the blinkered narration was meant to be a kind of textual embodiment of her grief.

Squinting, I could sense the possible point of an argument being made about alienation in the modern workplace, à la Severance. I didn’t quite buy it, though. To be alienated, in any meaningful sense, is to be alienated from something. We don’t know enough about 20-year-old Claire to know what her '“something” is. If Baglin’s purpose is to suggest that Claire’s job is wiping her life away, the novel sometimes feels a bit too eager to play along.

And yet, the longer I sat with the novel, the more sympathetic I became to its approach. Here, I confess, I might be expressing my bias as a millennial forced to grapple with the decimation of at least two of the professional sectors—journalism and the humanities academy—that I once thought would help give me a home in the world. Claire has made it to university, but where will university take her? Perhaps not where her parents told her it would, and perhaps not to a place unambiguously “better” than their own lives.

On The Clock is, make no mistake, absolutely clear-eyed about the difficulties of Jerome’s job and the life it gives him: there is no missing that his work is dangerous, hard, and poorly paid. We also can’t help but notice that Claire’s fast-food job is in many ways appreciably worse. Jerome is in a union that subsidizes the family’s vacations; he has work friends; at work, he feels needed for his particular skills, which he’s able to take pride in. Claire, by contrast, is an interchangeable cog in the fast-food machine, operating with no guarantees, and living—we can infer from the book’s loud silences—out a long-term plan that might no longer apply to a shifting world. Sometimes, there’s nothing as alienating as the place where an old story used to be, and it’s this alienation—as much as or more than the alienation of the workplace itself—that might be Baglin’s true quarry.

It’s possible, yes, to imagine a book that tackles this alienation more explicitly—that has something more direct to say about it, or that shows us more of the arc of Claire’s life. But the staying power of On The Clock is in how powerfully it evokes this particular alienation without ever mentioning it directly: it’s just there, baked into the book’s architecture. We reach for Claire’s life beyond fast food and don’t find it—perhaps this is how she feels, too.

Toward the end of the summer, Claire’s manager gives her a perfect evaluation and offers her a promotion. She, too, can be a manager. Claire is supposed to sign her evaluation—to endorse its version of how she’s spent her summer—but before she can, the paper “slips to the ground and lands in the pooled water.” And that’s it. Fin. It’s possible to imagine Claire walking out that day, never to return. (“You can’t get sucked in,” we can hear her father whispering in her ear.) It’s possible to imagine her asking for the evaluation to be reprinted so she can sign it. But Baglin doesn’t tell us what happens. Claire doesn’t know what’s coming next. Neither do we.✹

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What I wanted most that spring—my last college spring—was to have something lined up at the New Yorker or somewhere in its general milieu: Harper’s, The New Republic, The Atlantic. Maybe Slate? I knew, in principle, that this was a long shot. These were sought-after positions, and because I’d come to this plan late, my resume was light (to put it mildly) on relevant experience. But I didn’t have another, let alone a better, plan. So I applied and applied and applied, desperate to know what I was doing next: with my summer, my next year, my life.

I started studying all those magazines like a general planning an invasion. I read every new issue cover to cover. I studied back issues in the Swarthmore library. I sought out memoirs by their former employees, scouring them for insights, fantasizing about a working life immersed in questions of language, argument, narrative, and culture. I scoured the alumni directory for graduates working at magazines and emailed them, shamelessly hoping one would open a secret door and push me through it. I had a few friendly exchanges with Dan Menaker (see, again, Magazine Memories 1). I was pointing my whole life in one direction, or trying to, and it was easy to confuse how this felt with actual progress.

When one magazine turned me down: no big deal. Of course. Lots of people applied for these. I only needed one acceptance. When the next two, three, four turned me down? Well… I only needed one. Then the day came when there was nowhere left to hear from. I was (1) shocked by what had happened—and (2) shocked that I was shocked. Yes, I’d known that at any given magazine my chances were low. But I’d been sure that I would somehow get something, math be damned.

Now and then, searching my email archive for this or that piece of editorial correspondence, I stumble across one of my old entry-level job applications. They’re awful. For all my obsessive studying, I didn’t have a particularly sophisticated understanding of magazines: how each has its own DNA, speaks its own language, and strikes some particular pose in relationship to the imagined communities that it both relies upon and helps bring into being. Looking back, I like to think I was beginning to understand all this—just not well enough to convey it in an internship application. But, hmmm, I don’t know. They’re bad.

On its face, the summer that followed resembled a pleasant one. I stayed in Philadelphia, house- and cat-sitting for a professor who had decamped with his family to Cape Cod. I had his big, classy grown-up house all to myself, rent-free. I had a part-time job at an independent bookstore that I could walk to. And, at the last minute, I actually got a part-time journalism internship! It was at City Paper, one of Philadelphia’s two free weeklies. Just as quickly as I’d become existentially fixated on working at the New Yorker or thereabouts, I now became an evangelist for the strengths—the superiority, even—of the alt-weekly tradition, embracing it with the zeal of a convert.

I showed up at City Paper with a vague, romantic vision of what daily existence there would look like. Boisterous, freewheeling, close-knit office culture. The thrill of picking up stories the big dailies were missing. Edgier, zestier writing. Spikier takes. Uncomfortable truths uttered. Older editors marching over to the interns: You! I need you at city hall, five minutes ago. Take this tape recorder—and use it! Or: I’ve got a hole to fill, people. Who can give me 500 snappy words on the new Dinosaur Jr. in [checks watch] 37 minutes? Tough, close editing that taught you how to write, how to have a voice. The adrenaline rush of a deadline. Afterwards, at the bar across the street: drinks and esprit de corps.

Who knows where this vision had come from? Maybe Between the Lines?

But City Paper wasn’t like that. At all. Most days that I came into the office, it was close to empty. There were other interns, but somehow our hours almost never overlapped, and I knew them mostly as names on the masthead. The editors (there weren’t many) sat alone in their offices, each overseeing their personal fiefdom: this section, that page. Interns were not invited to editorial meetings, which were often cancelled. Not once did I see a writer come to the office, and only rarely did I spot the editor-in-chief in his glass-walled room in the corner. I sometimes saw him smoking downstairs, on the street. It wasn’t cool, disaffected smoking; it was sad, desperate smoking—an expensively structured way to obliterate a bit of time. He looked tired, guilty.

My first assignment was to manage the “museums and galleries” section of the paper’s event listings. I attacked the job with gusto, determined to write the best exhibition summaries possible. My thinking was that the language of these summaries should not be cribbed from museum and gallery PR materials. First of all: if they wanted their copy in the paper… wasn’t that why we sold ads? Secondly: couldn’t we do things better? Or, if not better, then at least differently, in a way that reflected the core of City Paper’s distinct, and distinctly alternative, value? The museum and gallery listings in the New Yorker were unmistakably products of The New Yorker. Shouldn’t City Paper’s listings be unmistakably products of City Paper?

I worked hard on my listings, harder than anyone asked me to. I did contextual research on the artists. A few times, I even went to early press openings of the exhibitions, taking pages of notes I thought would make my one- or two-sentence descriptions superior. These descriptions were often entirely rewritten before publication. I’m sure most of them deserved it. For one thing, I was doing the writerly equivalent of trying to fire a cannonball through a pistol. For another, if you’d approached me at my lonely intern desk and asked me to describe this underlying spirit of City Paper I was trying to embody, I would not have had anything cogent to say. This was partially the paper’s fault (for its serious deficiencies in its underlying spirit department), but the fact remained that I was bad at my job—bad at understanding what I’d been asked to do and then doing it. There was never any communication about the rewrites—none of those line-by-line tough love sessions I’d fantasized about. I saw the final versions when the paper came out, like everyone else.

Once—only once—I was given an article to fact-check. A puff piece about a stunt charity project some Philadelphians were taking part in (think: “raising money for cancer by unicycling along the entirety of the Great Wall of China,” only a few notches more ridiculous). I was thrilled. Fact-checking was a central fixture of all that New Yorker lore I’d been slurping down. Dan Menaker and countless other luminaries had started out as fact-checkers, learning how to put magazine pieces together by taking them apart and holding each piece under the microscope. What I learned by taking this particular story apart was that it was nonsense: riddled with factual errors, fatally credulous toward the stunt project’s organizers, and blind to the fact that it seemed unlikely to raise more than a pittance for charity. I handed in my checker’s report with a mix of pride—I’d done my job—and guilt; I was sure the story would get spiked, and I imagined that wouldn’t feel good for the writer. The editor I handed it to thanked me without looking up from their computer. I never heard another thing about it. When the next issue of City Paper came out, the story was there, identical to the draft I’d started from. They hadn’t made a single change.

I came to dread my trips into the office. I made no work friends. I rode the SEPTA train home to my borrowed classy, grown-up house, realizing too late how much better it would have been to be living with other people, even in an apartment where I had to share space in a scary fridge or wait for my turn in a gross bathroom.

Sure, I had some fun. Two or three weekends, friends came to visit, making the house feel warm and full. I saw Built to Spill. I saw Wolf Parade. I went for some okay runs. Because I’d worked at Wendy’s for a few summers in high school, the City Paper food editor let me write about the debut of the gross “Baconator” sandwich. Because I liked movies, the arts editor let me write some capsule reviews ahead of a local film festival. But these consolations were too few—and, at the end of the day, not especially consoling.

After my slew of rejections from magazines, I’d written back to all of them, asking for feedback on my application—and for honest assessments of whether it might make sense for me to apply again. In late June, the internship coordinator at The Nation wrote back, saying I’d been very close to getting a summer spot. If I applied again for the fall, she said, I would have good odds—especially if I got some more practical experience in the meantime.

At that point, the main thing I knew about The Nation was that they took interns; unlike the other places I’d applied, my parents had never been subscribers. But now I knew something else, something wildly exciting: they liked something about me! (When I eventually learned why my application fared so well there, it made me a little amused and a little depressed. A story for another day.)

Like Schrödinger’s cat, the rest of my summer was sealed in a box, existing simultaneously as two summers at once until I heard from The Nation. Summer 1: having a shitty time at City Paper as a way station en route to magazine glory in New York. Summer 2: having a shitty time at City Paper. I knew this isn’t an incredibly wise way to look at life. But I couldn’t wiggle my way to another perspective. No matter what else I was doing—updating the museum and gallery listings, going for a run, watching Wolf Parade—I was really doing something else: waiting. I was always on edge, always tired.

Looking back now, here’s how I understand 2007: The internet—or, really, the machinations of people who saw in the internet a new frontier for profit-maximization—was already eroding the techno-cultural ties that made print publications a reliable magnet for advertising revenue. For free publications like City Paper, this was fatal. At the same time, the “alt” in “alt-weekly” was losing coherence. On the internet—let me simplify for a minute—a million alternatives bloomed, sapping away most of the label’s cultural coherence. We stopped talking about alt-rock and alt-country. (And we weren’t yet talking about the alt-right and alternative facts.) Back in 2007 I thought that, at City Paper, I’d stumbled into a weird dead spot in the business of culture. Now I see it as a preview of the future. The paper still existed, technically: movie theaters and music venues and sex workers were still buying ads; articles were still being commissioned, written, and sometimes probably even read. But it was all falling apart, rotting, a real village being transformed from the inside out into a Potemkin one. It feels mean to say this—like spitting on someone’s grave—but also true to the old alt-weekly spirit of calling things as you saw them. It’s sad and bad when alt-weeklies go away. Also: by the time they vanish, they’re often already mostly gone.

Toward the end of summer, The Nation emailed: I could be an intern, if I still wanted to. The next day, I updated all the City Paper museum and gallery listings one last time, then quit, eliciting almost zero response from anyone. In the years that followed, I sometimes looked at the paper, curious if anything might change. For a while, the paper did seem to enjoy a mini-Renaissance, running lots of hard-hitting local stories by Daniel Denvir, now famous as the Left’s very own Terry Gross. Still: in 2017, when the paper closed, it felt inevitable. I confess to feeling a touch of schadenfreude. Just a touch, though: the same forces that had hollowed out City Paper were, by then, quite obviously coming, knives out, for everything else I cared about, too. But that, too, is a story for another day—one that, in the summer of 2007, I wouldn’t have known how to narrate. Schrodinger’s box had been opened, revealing the central truth of my summer: it was just about over, and I was going to New York. ✹

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I plan to keep writing for magazines for as long as they’re around, but they’re no longer (for the time being?) a substantial component of how I’m planning to make a living. This sense of an ending has sent me skittering back across the memory-years, retracing how I came to be so invested in magazines in the first place. What have magazines meant for me over the years? How has trying to “make it work” in magazines related to my broader development as a writer? Back in the beginning, how was it that I came to be so invested in magazines in the first place?

That last question, at least, has a ready answer. It was all Dan Menaker's fault.

I’m mostly joking. Actually, my saga with magazines was the work of many hands (not least my own); I'll zoom in on different moments in subsequent posts.

But let's start here: it's 2007, my last semester at Swarthmore. I’m at a talk by Dan Menaker—then of Random House, previously of The New Yorker—that gets me thinking about magazines in a new way.

I’d grown up in a big magazine household. Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and others were always around, cycling through the house.

As much as I’d learned from and enjoyed these magazines—especially The New Yorker, a major source for my fantasies about what adult life looked like—I’d never given real thought to working at one. Through college, I’d mostly dodged the muggy fear that my writing ambitions aroused in me by downplaying those ambitions’ existence. But graduation was hurtling ever-closer. What would I do afterward? I’d majored in psychology and philosophy and already knew I would never be a psychologist or philosopher. What profession would possibly give me a home in the world? More immediately: what was I going to do for money?

Menaker got me thinking that maybe my answer(s) lay in the world of magazines. He talked about leaving Swarthmore with a philosophy degree and not knowing what to do, about finding a home at The New Yorker, where he started as a fact-checker and eventually became a senior editor shaping the magazine’s fiction department. He name-dropped authors whose work I’d enjoyed: Mavis Gallant; George Saunders; Alice Munro; Michael Cunningham. He talked about the work of getting inside their writing, understanding where it was trying to go, trying to help it get there.

Suddenly, I saw all those magazines I’d grown up reading in a new way. They weren’t just stapled-together pieces of paper. They were places I might enjoy working.

This was, in retrospect, a slightly perverse takeaway from Menaker’s talk, which had an explicitly pessimistic slant. The woods adjoining the Swarthmore campus were called the Crum, and his title was “From Crum to Dumb,” encapsulating his belief that over the course of his career he’d witnessed mostly cultural debasement: reduced attention spans, increased pandering, a steady erosion of literary culture and the type of attention it required by television and, more recently, the Internet. Menaker recalled being pushed out of The New Yorker by Tina Brown as she sought to transition the magazine away from a “10,000 Words on Oranges” (I joke—a little) to “This Season’s Hot New Orange, Photographed by Annie Leibovitz” (I joke—a little). He was grateful to have found a second career in book publishing, but also dismayed by how much of his time he had to spend on budgets and marketing, and how little he got to spend actually reading and editing, and the uphill battle—more uphill every year—he had to fight to get books he found truly ambitious and interesting published.

So, on the surface: hardly a bright beckoning vision of an intellectually satisfying Life in the Business of Letters.

At the same time: Menaker seemed to have carved out a good enough time for himself, rough weather and all. Later, I would get a much fuller sense of his story: his red-diaper baby childhood in 1940s New York; his unhappy chafing against the decorous internal atmosphere of William Shawn’s New Yorker; his tutelage in fiction editing under William Maxwell; his willingness, unique among the magazine’s editors, to support the unionization drive of younger staffers in the Seventies. I would read his own fiction and memoirs, plus just about every article I could find about his career, integrating it with the vast pile of stuff I’d read about The New Yorker’s internal history. (Cold War CIA agents had the Kremlin: I, for many years, had The New Yorker.)

But while I sat listening to “From Crum to Dumb,” that was all in the future. In the moment, all I knew was that Menaker was radiating a cheerful sense of an adult life well-lived, despite (and perhaps, in part, thanks to) its defeats and compromises. Okay, he’d had to sit in some budget meetings. Okay, the world had changed around him—was still changing. But still: he’d spent his days reading and evaluating stories, figuring out what made them tick, smuggling them into the culture. And that had paid the bills, had given him a life. I’d never seen his apartment—of course I hadn’t—but I could imagine it perfectly, because it was, in my mind’s eye, every grown-up apartment from every Woody Allen movie. Which was what I wanted.

Also, look, it was 2007. I didn’t know what was coming down the pipeline for magazines. For literary culture. For __________. The Nineties were totally over on the calendar, and mostly over in geopolitics, but alive and well inside my soul. Somewhere inside, I seem to have believed not just that there was a firm bottom limit on how bad anything could get, but also that everything would basically get better—or at least better for me.

Something like that. It’s all murky now. Maybe it was the Long Nineties, maybe it was Being Young. For whatever reason, I didn’t look at Menaker behind the podium and see a cautionary tale, or an avatar of an all-but-bygone era. I saw, instead, exactly what I’d been looking for: a path forward.✹

Next time: Having aimed for the stars (something illustrious in New York), I land… on the roof (a disintegrating alt-weekly in Philadelphia).

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A Democratic Congressperson singing a Jason Isbell song with new, Epstein-themed lyrics? AI-generated Muppets massaging Trump’s feet on Epstein’s jet, soundtracked by an AI-generated Kendrick Lamar song? Democrats trying to TOTALLY PWN Republicans on Twitter? A Congressional PAC publishing an official “Epstein simp list”?

Yeah, this club truly has it all. (And… it sucks!)

Something I hoped to touch on in the piece—before I ran out of room—was the bipartisan nature of conspiracy thinking.

For most of my readers, I assume the contemporary American right-wing conspiracy fetish needs no introduction: “they” are stealing our elections, sex-trafficking our children, and targeting us with space lasers. There is, for devotees of these theories, tons of evidence supporting them—and don’t worry, even more that’s about to be revealed ANY DAY NOW.

And once those last key bits of evidence are revealed… oh boy.

But Democrats go conspiracy mode, too. About a third of Democrats told pollsters that Trump didn’t legitimately get enough votes to win the 2024 election. A similar fraction believed that his assassination attempt in Pennsylvania was staged. To spend any amount of time on the more Democrat-friendly byways of social media is inevitably to run into one or another “BlueAnon” theory: about Melania Trump’s body doubles, about Biden being drugged by Russian agents (hence that debate performance), about files hidden in Ivana Trump’s coffin. On BlueSky, the immensely popular “Alt National Park Service” account, which claims to represent an anti-Trump “resistance” team within the US National Park Service, has embraced the very QAnon strategy of occasionally posting random numbers, attempting to create the impression that they are broadcasting coded messages to their secret network.

The difference between Republican and Democratic conspiracizing is that Democratic politicians haven’t lately spent much energy directly stoking this stuff. Now the coordinates of the Epstein affair are tempting them in that direction, lured by the possibility of hoisting Trump and MAGA Republicans by their own petards.

While there’s something genuinely novel about this—hence my piece—there’s also deep continuity with an essential aspect of the Democratic party’s view of politics in recent decades. Again and again, the party has treated the political landscape / the electorate / voters as this frustrating puzzle that it would be best to solve with the fewest moves possible. With one neat trick. With the “right” candidate at the top of the ticket. The right catchphrase. The “leftist Joe Rogan.” The expedient, one-bite definition (“we are not Trump”).

This comes from a lot of places, including the complete atrophy of the various socio-political infrastructures that used to bind the party to the people it claims to speak for. It’s also, at the formal level, fairly textbook conspiratorial thinking. Conspiracies, however complex they might seem, are always an attempt to simplify. The real world is an endlessly complex mix of intention and accident and randomness and emergence. That complexity is overwhelming. Far simpler—far more comforting—for there to be a powerful cabal controlling everything. It’s displacement, and often layered with more displacement. For example: adults abuse kids in their lives all the time, but we mostly can’t face this fact, so instead we talk obsessively about evil, powerful networks of child-abusing strangers.

Back to politics. Winning enduring political victories—ushering in new normals, creating structures that improve people’s lives for decades to come—is never going to be a “one neat trick” undertaking. It’s not even going to be “better policies than the other guys” plus “one neat trick for communicating about those policies.” It’s… a whole lot of things: better policies, coherently and authentically linked to a worldview and principles, and communicated in a way that radiates understanding of voters’ lives and relationships to the political sphere. But the Democratic Party does not want to admit this, because doing so would mean admitting that, as presently constituted, it is not capable of winning, not in any real sense. Instead: a constant search for The Thing That Will Work: ditching trans rights, talking solemnly about the Constitution, talking a lot about Russia. “The leftist Joe Rogan.” And now—Epstein.

This is not just a childishly mechanistic view of politics (Find Right Button —> Press Button —> Win). It’s also a conspiracy theory, or something pretty close. The truth is out there. Look at all this evidence. And don’t worry, even more is about to be revealed any day now. And when it’s revealed… we win? There’s plenty of displacement in the mix, to boot: the Democratic Party isn’t inclined to do the real work of securing enduring victories, but it mostly can’t face this fact about itself, so instead… EPSTEIN!

As I say in the piece: I do think there’s a lot more left to learn about the Jeffrey Epstein saga, much of it squarely in the public interest, much of it surely damning to powerful individuals and institutions. I’m not disputing that. I’m saying that this isn’t “one neat trick” territory, in part because in politics as elsewhere, there’s simply no such thing. ✹

The relationship between repression and narrative art is a longtime interest of mine as a reader and novelist, and Haushofer’s writing has long figured in my thinking on the subject. As I wrote the Times piece, I found my thoughts on the subject overflowing my word count: that overflow eventually became this email.

For a long time I was obsessed with a letter that the novelist J.M. Coetzee wrote to the clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz. This letter—published in The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy, but first encountered by me in Harper’s—takes up the concept of repression, or more precisely how repression is represented in literature. In novels, Coetzee argues, secrets exist for the purpose of being uncovered; the past cannot be escaped; when people try to reinvent themselves by burying uncomfortable, shameful, or inconvenient memories, they fail. Repression fails; it’s inevitable.

Imagine a story, Coetzee writes, that tries to teach “that our lives are ours to make and remake as we wish, that the past is past, that secrets can be freely buried and forgotten.”

Can there be such a story that works as a story? Can we have a story that ends, “And his secret was forgotten and he lived happily ever after?”

Insofar as it ends in a paradox—the secret is not really buried, since the reader knows it—you cannot have such a story, at least not in its straightforward, unironic version […] But what if the true secret, the inadmissible secret, the secret about secrets, is that secrets can indeed be buried and we can indeed live happily ever after? What if our culture, perhaps even human culture in general, has created a form of narrative that is on the surface about the unburiability of secrets but seeks to bury under the surface the one secret it cannot countenance: that the past can be obliterated, that justice does not reign?

Typing up Coetzee’s questions now, I can think of some serious objections. But when I first read them, they struck right at the heart of my literary life. For several years, I had been working on a novel, trying to get at… something. Something about torture. Something about how, in the early 2000s, images of Americans and American allies subjecting people—mostly brown-skinned, Muslim men—to intimate physical and mental domination became an undeniable fixture of our national consciousness, always in the air but also constantly avoided, constantly repressed. Everyone had some fuzzy ambient knowledge of these images and of the scenes they implied, but the vast majority of people didn’t talk about them much (or at all), and in fact couldn’t have talked about them with any specificity. These images made a temporary splash when they first surfaced, but quickly got swept under the psycho-cultural rug. Now and then, we bumped into them—Oh, those? Ewww—and quickly moved on, often so reflexively that we didn’t register it happening.

I wanted to get at this aspect of early 2000s America in my novel—really get at it, not just by writing some sentences like the ones in the paragraph you’ve just read, but by somehow encoding it into the basic DNA of my novel: its form, its shape, its tone, its style. And this was why Coetzee’s letter struck me so. How would I evoke the repression I was interested in? One option, of course, was to show some characters encountering the images, then show those images slipping from the front of their minds, slipping even further back, into the zone of repression—then lurching toward the front again, pulled up by a new headline, an offhand comment, an oddly similar image—then slipping back again, again, again.

But I was intrigued by another option: to never introduce the original images. To never really identify this thing I was trying to “get at.” To focus on evoking torture’s sticky psycho-cultural residue—without making explicit where it came from. To write a post-9/11 rendition and torture novel with no scenes of rendition or torture. Without even the words 9/11 or rendition or torture. I didn’t necessarily need to give my characters, per Coetzee, a “happy ending.” I didn’t necessarily need to show repression altogether “succeeding.” But maybe, I thought, I could/should write a novel that was radically true to the nature of repression (or something like that)—by being fundamentally repressed itself (or… something like that).

This path was extremely tempting. Coetzee was right, I thought (and still think): we really can pretty much forget, or mostly forget, or forget more than we remember. The truth will out: well, no, not always. Sometimes what’s repressed stays repressed, or half-repressed. Sometimes people don’t come to understand why they did or didn’t do whatever they did or didn’t do. And it’s possible for narrative art to not just narrate this truth about life but also embody it, often with thrilling results.

During the years I spent working on my torture novel, I found myself drawn again and again to works that took this approach.

Like: Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret, my favorite cinematic treatment of post-9/11 America. Part of its greatness lies in how it never explicitly identifies itself as a post-9/11 movie. The characters don’t see themselves as living out especially post-9/11 storylines. Instead, there’s this curdled atmosphere hanging over everything: this desire to blame and to punish, and to avoid any real thinking about the psychic life and function of these desires. Aside from a few loaded shots of planes flying low over New York, it’s the viewer’s job to feel their way to the context. And maybe they never do: that’s a chance the storyteller takes.

Like: Marlen Haushofer’s The Loft, which is full of signs—or possible signs, loud but never conclusive—that it’s a tale of repressed Austrian awareness of Holocaust complicity. There’s a lot of smoke, a lot of ash. A woman rendered deaf by psychological forces she can’t name. A man screaming confessions that no one hears. Middle-class characters preoccupied with reading about military history on weekend afternoons. Surely—surely?—all this is pointing toward… You know… But the book never says so. As I say in my Times piece (re: Killing Stella—but the same applies to The Loft): “The sense of danger suffusing the prose is all the more potent for its murky origins. What’s more petrifying than something we sense is lurking in the closet at night, but we can’t see or name?”

There are so many great works that take this approach; I admire them immensely. Someone could write a great little book about them. Someone probably has.

In the end, though, it’s not the approach I ended up taking. It is simply not possible to miss my novel’s preoccupation with post-9/11 torture. At the same time, I think it’s easy to see that it’s also preoccupied with the question Coetzee put to Arabella Kurtz, preoccupied with how much we’re able to forget, preoccupied with the aesthetic question of how to “truly” represent different forms of forgetting. Characters lie and don’t get caught, keep secrets and don’t get forced to reveal them. The images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are a major presence in the novel, but never described directly. People try to remember where they saw them, and when, and they can’t. Torture is a major presence in the novel, something that has altered the course of characters’ lives, but no scenes of torture are shown directly. In scenes where characters read accounts of torture, I don’t relate what they’re reading in any level of detail. It’s mostly blur, mostly residue—but I don’t obscure where it came from.

I remember wondering, as I finished the novel, if this was a form of cowardice. If I was chickening out, helping along the daily effort by which we, as Coetzee puts it, “bury under the surface the one secret [we] cannot countenance.” But in the end I didn’t lose much sleep over the question.

Lately I’ve been wondering what this novel would have ended up like if I’d been working on it this year. 2025. Where once again we’re shipping men abroad, outside of any legal process, to be tortured and held indefinitely. Where scenes of their domination are again circulating through our national image-culture—this time not thanks to leaks and investigative journalists, but because Trump regime figures post them online directly, celebrating what they’ve done.

I’m sure I don’t have the answer. In the end, I think, finishing a novel means putting aside all your lofty ideas about what novels should do and instead just throwing yourself into the nitty-gritty of making the book that you’ve ended up writing—for reasons you understand and reasons you don’t—as seaworthy as you possibly can.

History, as they say, is the part that hurts; art mostly just follows along, finding a way —and there’s always more than one—to trace the wounds. ✹

Also: I’m once again posting short pieces about music and life — some by me, some by friends/guests — over at !

writing to share some recent proof that I’m still at it, including:

• My New Yorker piece about (among other things) a straight-to-Substack novella that was my favorite new piece of fiction I read last year.

• My New York Times Magazine piece about the Studio Ghibli-style AI image trend, the Trump regime’s communications strategy, and what one has to do with the other.

• My recent short piece for my Tracks on Tracks project—on an unplanned hiatus of late, but creaking back to life—about my knee tumor, waiting for test results, and Jeff Tweedy’s “Summer Noon.”

Toward the end of last year, the writer gave readers of her newsletter advance notice that she planned to send them a 15,000-word novella she’d written. I didn’t plan to read it: I don’t really like reading fiction on screens, and I knew I wouldn’t get around to printing it out.

Then the novella, “Money Matters,” showed up and I instantly devoured it. After I read it a couple of times, I had that distinct feeling of wanting to learn more about it—and, specifically, to think about it in the way I only end up thinking about things when I write about them. I also wanted to honor the story by spreading the word however I could.

Usually, when I have feelings like this about some new writing I come across, I fire off a pitch to an editor. But these circumstances weren’t usual: for various reasons (some understandable, some indefensible), the publications I write for are in the business of reviewing (almost exclusively) new books from a certain coterie of publishers, not novellas people have posted online for free. So I had to do a bit of convincing—but in the end not as much as I anticipated. It helped that, in my pitch, I was able to point to the growing number of authors and readers who are flocking to Substack for various reasons; after an opening consideration of Kanakia’s novella, the piece turns to that broader context. It also spends some time with a new, conventionally published novel that began its public life as a serialized work on Substack.

Here’s the piece. I admit it feels kinda cool to write something like this—a literary “report from a new frontier,” really going to bat for something from “outside” the normal boundaries of the prestige review system. That was a new experience for me. I have many thoughts about everything the piece brushes up against—the business of publishing, literary culture on Substack and beyond, etc.—that didn’t make it in. Maybe I’ll take them up again in a future story. Or maybe I’ll just yammer them out on a podcast someday…

Oh, also: As I was typing this up, the latest installment of Kanakia’s newsletter landed in my inbox. In it, she gives her perspective on the review, plus elaborates on her bullish view (more bullish than mine, I think) on Substack and literary culture. A great complement to my story.

Thanks to the new ChatGPT, everyone started turning normal photographs into cartoons aping the style of the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. Then the Trump administration started doing the same thing. Why? I pondered this question in a short piece for the New York Times Magazine. (That’s a gift link that bypasses the paywall.)

Tracks on Tracks, the newsletter/magazine of short, stylish essays where people (sometimes me, sometimes guests) reflect on their relationship to individual songs over time, has been on a bit of a hiatus lately. In short: I got too busy. I’ve put a pause on billing for paid subscriptions, but I’m not shutting it down yet. there’s more I want to do there! Yesterday, I posted a short piece about of my own about my mysterious knee tumor, the medical waiting game, and a great Jeff Tweedy song that kept me company throughout.

That’s it for now. Be in touch. —Peter

For this past weekend's New York Times Magazine I wrote this short appreciation of instant coffee — or, really, a celebration of how the seasons of life change our relationship to our routines.

People love coffee and love comparing notes on routines, and I had more fun than usual scrolling through the comments (a low bar, to be sure).

“Today … I Shall Begin My Report.”

Short version: I reviewed Marlen Haushofer’s 1962 novel The Wall for The New York Review of Books, and the piece is online and on newsstands now. 

Less short version: Fifteen years ago I walked into a used English-language bookstore in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome and bought an English translation, published in the UK, of Die Wand (The Wall), a 1962 novel by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer. I'd never heard of the novel, nor of Haushofer. Like a lot of people, I find my way to new books a bit more spontaneously when I'm traveling. 

I'd come to Rome because my brother was studying there. But most days I had no other plans beyond meeting him for dinners. I walked around, sticking mostly in Trastevere, getting a feel for the neighborhood, drinking coffee, eating pastries and pizza, reading, taking naps. During my trip, there was a Richter 5.9 earthquake in the nearby medieval city of L'Aquila. Several friends emailed to ask if I was okay; I hadn't felt a thing.

The Wall fit perfectly with this vacation. It tells the story of an Austrian woman who finds herself trapped alone in a mountain valley by a mysterious force field. From the earliest pages she is without human company; the novel is about the life she makes in the aftermath. 

Of course, in Trastevere, I wasn't facing any challenges to my survival. But I was spending the great bulk of my days alone, deciding entirely by myself what to do next. Haushofer's novel is powerfully immersive, drawing you into a drama of physical survival and also — just as grippingly, or more so — mental reevaluation of life and how it forms and changes, sometimes gradually, sometimes overnight.

I liked the novel so much that I didn't think much about exactly what made it so powerful: I just read, hour after hour. When I was done, I went back to the bookstore and bought something else (a DH Lawrence novel, I think, though I can't remember which one.) After this vacation was over, I mostly forgot about The Wall for a few years, when I read an excellent Nicholas Spice piece about Haushofer in the London Review of Books, which alerted me to the fact that she had two other books available in English (both, again, published in the UK but not the US). 

I went back and read The Wall again. By this point I'd spent almost four years organizing my life around attempts to write fiction myself. This had changed my default reading style. I was more inclined, this time, to sit and ask myself how books I loved worked, trying to lift what I could for my own toolbox. I paid closer attention to how Haushofer played with — sometimes borrowing, sometimes deviating from — conventions from other stories about people stranded by catastrophe. I also tracked down and read Haushofer's other two books, noting how there too she played against readerly expectations, building anticipation for something that never really comes. All the important secrets stay buried; no one gets out of the trouble they’re in, not in any final or meaningful sense. I can't say for sure, but I'm thinking my admiration for this approach probably informed the approach I ended up taking in Planes. 

I was excited when New Directions gave The Wall a proper US release last year. And I'm happy that the New York Review of Books gave me the chance to write about the novel (and Haushofer's other two English translations), the mechanics behind its beguiling nature, and its relation to other "last man" (or, more rarely, last woman) novels. My review is out in the current "Spring Books" issue, online and on newsstands now.

BREAKING: The combined forces of investment capital and complacency continue to erode the arrangements that once made it possible to get money in exchange for the labor of writing. Still, here we are.

Until next time,

—Peter

Hi again.

Sometimes being a magazine freelancer means finding new ways to convince editors to let me write about my deepest preoccupations in ways they’ll deem fit to publish and pay me for.

Other times, though, it means seeing something in the world and thinking something like: huh, I bet Editor X would let me write about that for Recurring Slot Y (a particular column, for example).

All of which is to say: For this coming weekend’s New York Times Magazine, I wrote a “Screenland” column about the widespread fascination with Dakota Johnson’s “raw,” “authentic,” “chaotic” press tour for her latest film, the superhero flop Madame Web. The piece is now online; read away.

A funny sub-chapter from the writing process: Watching dozens of TikTok highlight reels of people’s favorite recent Johnson Moments, I kept coming across an interview where she says she hasn’t seen Madame Web yet, but “from what I have seen, it looks really good.” I wanted to include this because (a) it’s hilarious, and (b) it set up an ending line that I liked about how we don’t really know our favorite celebrities, even the “candid” ones (“but, from what we see, they look really good”)(get it?).

Anyway, none of these TikTok reels made clear where the interview had originally come from, which I knew meant the line wouldn’t survive fact-checking. So I spent a couple hours emailing TikTokers, asking if they could retrace their steps and find out where they’d originally snipped the footage from. Several of them enthusiastically tried—none of them succeeded! RIP, line I thought was clever and probably would have been cut anyway!

More soon, —Peter

After Khaled’s release [from the hospital], he is granted political asylum. Because he can’t be sure whether any photographs from the protest showed his face, or whether the Libyan security forces had sources in his hospital, he doesn’t know if he’s a marked man. He doesn’t know if he can safely return home. He doesn’t know if his family knows what happened to him, and — aware that, as a matter of course, his letters home are being read, and his calls being monitored — he can’t tell them, which means he can’t explain why he isn’t coming home, or enjoy the pleasure of narrating his life to those who know him best. The loneliness of forging a new life abroad is compounded, wrenchingly, by a dense fog of fear and secrecy.

Matar is one of my personal favorite living novelists, and his work on life in the long shadows of Libyan government violence, torture, and disappearance was a major reference point for me as I worked on Planes. As I worked on this review, I wondered if this made me the perfect reviewer—or the least-qualified one. Sometimes it’s harder to write about—to look productively at—the work that’s meant the most to you. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying now and then. As is often the case, writing the piece showed me new things about Matar’s work—but by the time I spotted them I was up against the deadline. Plus the word count. So, optimistically, I got a bit of it in and I’ll take the rest with me into the future. Most writing is a palimpsest of failure. Happy New Year!

The Planes hardcover and paperback designs were featured in a recent roundup, also in the NYT, on “The Fine Art of Paperback Makeover.” They interviewed John Gall, creative director at Knopf, and Linda Huang—designer of both jackets, and my friend from college—about their goals for both covers. Some similar territory from when I interviewed Linda about her design process for LitHub in 2022.

I stuck a little something in my bio note under the Matar review, in part to create a bit of pressure on myself to make it real …

Be in touch, —Peter

Hi all,

Today at The New Yorker I have a review of Joanne McNeil's "Wrong Way," by my count the first serious novel of this new era in which driverless cars aren't just imaginary objects, but instead real vehicles you can hail on American city streets. (How well these vehicles work is, as I note, an open question. But they're here.)

McNeil, a great writer of criticism about the Internet and the world it has made,  plays cleverly with the fact that, even as these vehicles have arrived (become “real") they're still also in large part illusions/fictions. Here's the piece.

I've been interested in and writing about self-driving cars for several years now, but this is the first time I've been able to touch on the long and influential history of self-driving cars in fiction and movies.

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Later today I’m Zooming into a meeting of a book club that read Planes. I love Zooming into book clubs meetings. Getting reviewed is extremely gratifying, but reviews—by their nature and for good reason—tend to be written mostly from a few miles up: the plot, the themes, the overall approach. In books club meetings, people are free to be a few miles up one second, and right down in the dirt the next, making observations and asking questions about very specific moments: this line of dialogue, that description of a meal, the scene narrated on page 111, the scene implied-but-not-narrated between page 200 and 201.

For me, getting looped into those conversations has the wonderful effect of making the book feel alive and interesting again—but without creating any need for me to work on it anymore. That’s a very sweet sweet spot.

Invite me to your book club! Recommend me to your book-club-participant friends!

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Bye,

—Peter

I've been off Twitter the last few months, in part because it feels less fun than it used to, in part as an attempt to make room in my head/day for a new novel while raising two small kids. I'm mostly enjoying this change, but I do still miss some of the interactions, and the forum for sharing my writing. So I'm going to try––he said for the umpteenth time––to start sending these dispatches out more often, in hopes of connecting with you all more often. If you know anyone who might enjoy my writing or appreciate these updates, please forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe.

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I wrote about "Now and Then," the "new" "Beatles" single, made possible by advances in Artificial Intelligence, for last weekend's New York Times Magazine. You can also read it online.

I love The Beatles (more on which below), but my take on the song is skeptical: I didn't much like it as a piece of music, and––more importantly––it made me worried about the future of cultural production, and the threat of endlessly ballooning rehash culture.

The Beatles were the first band I loved. In many ways, my Beatles fandom set the template for my musical attachments going forward. It wasn't just that I liked the songs (it's never just about liking the songs, is it?). It was also that I liked a story I felt flowing behind and between the songs, from album to album. A story that was partially the story of each of these four men, and partially the story of their time together. It was also something bigger, not a story but a shape where other stories could go. The songs could become part of your life, and when they did, your life became part of this bigger thing, The Beatles.

I caught my personal case of Beatlemania as a result of the "Anthology" series of television documentaries and archival albums, released in the Nineties, when I was in junior high. That was when I started buying their albums, first on cassettes, then on CD. In seventh or eighth grade, three friends and I were The Beatles for Halloween (as I recall, this basically involved not much more than wearing dark suits and singing the opening lines of "Can't Buy Me Love" while holding out our candy bags). I read books about the band, and the books told me what to listen to next: who influenced them, who they influenced, who they competed with, the worlds they lived in, the culture they shaped. It was because of these books that I listened to the Beach Boys for the first time. And Chuck Berry. And the Rolling Stones. And so on. 

What's the story? How does it relate to other stories? The stories of other bands, of genres, of the broader culture, of history? How does it relate to me, to my story? What is my story? This is still how I think about music, especially when I'm writing about it.

Listening to "Now and Then," the story––the intertwining stories––felt ... not so good. So that's what I wrote about. 

In the comments, lots of readers share their more positive experiences. They talk about the song reconnecting them to treasured, Beatles-inflected memories: to the past, to their past selves, to the flow of time. They love the Beatles, and loved the sense of hearing from them again, despite the barriers of time and death.

I didn't have space in the piece to get into my own deep Beatles love, which remains undented by "Now and Then". And I suppose that's why I've written it down here.

More soon,

--Peter

PS --  My novel, Planes, remains available in paperback, small and light enough for a stocking. If you'd like to gift someone a signed copy, let me know and I'll mail you an adhesive bookplate with my signature.

I wrote the “Screenland” column in this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine. It’s on the new thriller movie “How To Blow Up A Pipeline,” which is about a group of young people trying to destroy some oil infrastructure in Texas. I zoomed in on one fascinating feature of the film: the way it seems to be trying to look back on itself from a future it knows it doesn’t have access to. What will this story look like in 10 years? Twenty years? Fifty? It’s natural to ask, and impossible to say. These unanswerable questions are of extra-special relevance to the first-ever mainstream film to treat ecologically-minded sabotage as a possible answer, as opposed to something only undertaken by villains, cult members, or well-intentioned fools.

I’ve been writing these Screenland columns for a few years now. Screenlands can kind of be about anything as long as there’s at least a scrap of footage involved. More than any other “slot” I write for, it’s resolutely a print magazine product. It appears in the same place in the magazine every week, and while the pieces are of course designed to work on their own, they also draw context from the ongoing thread created by whatever else has occupied the slot. This thread is one small part of the relationship of the magazine to its readers. I love stuff like that.

Sometimes, though, I notice people online are clearly coming to these pieces without any understanding of this context. It’s not their fault: it’s kind of how the Internet works. But it can influence how people understand (or don’t) the piece. This is especially the case when I write a Screenland about a new movie or TV show. Some people start reading and assume, quite reasonably, that what they’re reading is a review. And then they start thinking––again, quite reasonably––something like this review is kind of strange. It’s not doing some things I expect a review to do! (For example, in this piece, I don’t talk about the acting at all, and only glancingly about the cinematography. I also never really say how “good” or “bad” the movie is.) Sometimes these people post things online like what a weird review!!!

I don’t have a grand conclusion from all of this. Just observing that it sometimes feels strange to be straddling the print culture that drew me to magazines and the online culture where so much of my work is consumed today. I suspect the most successful digital ventures of the future will be the ones that find a way to create and develop contextual threads for different kinds of writing in the ways print was—and still is!—so good at.

In case you’re wondering: I do think “How To Blow Up A Pipeline” is very much worth seeing. It’s not a perfect movie, but it has fantastic energy, and represents a clever marriage of very contemporary concerns (about climate) with a classic narrative format (the heist film, basically), in a way that really set my mind fizzing.

The movie was loosely adapted from a pro-sabotage climate manifesto published by the Swedish political theorist Andreas Malm in 2020. The best thing I’ve read about the strengths and shortcomings of Malm’s argument is this piece from last year in The Nation by the political scientist Thea Riofrancos. I recommend it to absolutely anyone with any interest in climate politics. It’s a perfect companion to the movie.

—Peter