The first half of the year has been a blast. We published the work of many deserving artists who’d never appeared in print before. We sold out two runs of our second issue, The Dumb Phone, across four stores in New York. We threw a rollicking party with 300+ wonderful attendees. We published a multitude of exciting online pieces, ranging from a vigorous defense of F. Scott Fitzgerald to a trenchant criticism of the millennial novel to an enthralling reflection on the great Denis Johnson.

The momentum is strong. But the project is just getting started. The goal is to give literature back to the people—to lure it out of hiding in safe spaces and staid libraries—to make literature a cornerstone of culture again. There is still a long way to go in pursuit of these aims.

And so, once again, we’re inviting submissions from the people. Before getting into the particulars, here’s some high-level context, edited from the original call for submissions:

We’re looking for courageous authors willing to offer honest, raw perspectives. Great rebellious writing is the transposition of late-night conversations with friends onto the page. It is the expression of ideas or feelings the writer knows to be true, yet is unwilling to share at work happy hours or “polite” dinner parties in Portland. For certain, the writer cannot submit these ideas to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or any premier university journal. As much as mainstream publications wish that Truth was ideological, it is not. With open arms, Non Grata welcomes the stories that have been gathering dust on your hard drive, and the scandalous ideas you haven’t yet put to paper. We’re also here for conventional essays and stories, too. The main thing we care about is that each piece is exhilarating, stimulating, beautiful, and/or simply enjoyable to read. The best way to get a sense of what we’re looking for is to regularly follow what we publish: You’ll see what we’re up to pretty quick.

SUBMISSION CATEGORIES

FICTION & POETRY

• Short stories that (1) move quickly (2) speak honestly (3) are five thousand words or less.

• Open to all forms of poetry.

• Accepted submissions will feature in a print edition because the reading experience for fiction isn’t yet good enough online.

BOOK REVIEWS, LITERARY CRITICISM, & NOVELISTS

• Open to novels from any period as well as contemporary and/or independent works (especially if the writer is on Substack).

• Preference for pieces that (1) combine biography with criticism (2) include discussion of technical detail, literary theory, and/or literary history.

• Personal reflections on great writers.

• Author profiles + interviews.

• Editor’s Note: We are actively looking to commission the following pieces:

  • Review of The Trial + how Kafka’s work as an insurance officer influenced the novel.

  • Review of Post Office + mini biography of Bukowski.

  • Reviews of Major Arcana (John Pistelli), Colossus (Ross Barkan),What’s So Great About the Great Books? (Naomi Kanakia).

  • Pieces on Less Than Zero (Bret Easton Ellis); Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon); any novel by Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Émile Zola.

• Example: “There Is No Great Millennial Novel” by ; “Legends of Zelda: The Truth About F. Scott Fitzgerald” by ; “Reflections on the Great Denis Johnson” by ; “On Writing No. 2” with Jim Shepard.

POLEMICS & CULTURAL ESSAYS

• Anything that gets people off their phones and helps them rethink their relationships with technology.

• Pieces on dating, romance, love, masculinity, femininity, drinking, smoking, gambling, “gooning,” sports, music, pornography, entertainment, capitalism, work, careers, cities, pop culture figures, et al.

• Pieces that question the predominant narratives or rebuke / defend controversial figures.

• Editor’s Note: We are actively looking to commission the following pieces:

  • In defense of / against Timothée Chalamet.

  • In defense of / against Dimes Square (and its figures).

• Examples: “How New York Killed Culture” by ; “Living in Public” by ; “Where the Mermaids Sing” by .

We offer payment for the pieces we accept. Each receives in-depth editing before it goes out into the world. We want you to feel proud of the work you showcase in Non Grata; it should be a luminous reflection of your mind at a moment in time.

To submit, send an email to hello@magazinenongrata.com. The piece should be an email attachment (.pdf, .docx) or a Google Doc. Please include the category in the subject line, a short description in the body, and the word count. Every submission must abide by our A.I. policy. If you have questions about it, please send us a note. Improper / undisclosed uses of A.I. can result in a lifetime ban from Non Grata.

As always, thank you to all of our patrons, writers, readers, friends, fans, family members—this project would not be possible without you.

— MNG

Non Grata is a print magazine and online publication aiming to revitalize literature and give it back to the people. Print offerings are available on our website. Digital subscriptions (both free and paid) are available via Substack:

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Life goes into new forms.

— Neal Cassady, the epigraph from Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Sometime in my mid-twenties I learned what it’d feel like to die if you knew it was coming. To hear your last heartbeats—Boom! Boom!—before the curtain fell. Before you slid finally into the warm, black bath. The very last one.

In May of 2017, Denis Johnson passed from liver cancer, a situation wrought by a dormant case of Hepatitis C—a case he’d contracted via shared heroin needles many decades before he’d ever learned of his illness. His work always, even at its most uneven, seemed to emerge from another place, a mode of writing that cannot possibly be taught. Because he had spent the 1970s addicted to heroin, alcohol, and much else, and ran around with criminals and was almost always destitute—emotionally and financially—Johnson had already prepared for the moments before death, doing so as he composed drafts of what would become his debut novel, Angels:

He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of those things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.

A few days after I’d finished Angels for the second time, I was living in Gainesville, Florida. It was 2017, shortly after Johnson’s passing. In the midst of a shiftless, agonizing year I was looking for something that had the feel of restoration and renewal. Since I was going bald, a haircut would not do. I couldn’t afford a massage. So I drove to the Death or Glory Tattoo Parlour and had “He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there” tattooed on my right tricep. (Talk about a performative male reader!) When you’re down and out, you don’t spend what money you do have on massages. You spend it on things that don’t do you any good. I am glad I got the tattoo.

I’m sure that night I’d gone from the tattoo parlor to the Palomino pool hall, or Main Street Bar & Billiards, or The Dugout with my buddy Billy to get drunk and do bumps of coke and chain-smoke American Spirits. Months later, after I moved from Gainesville to teach writing in Tennessee, and study on ways in which I could be a functioning human being, Billy went into treatment.

Billy had reserved a stretch of shelf for Johnson’s books, and when we’d lived together in a basement apartment a couple years before in Missoula, Montana, both studying creative writing, I scanned the spines of some stuff I hadn’t yet read: titles like Already Dead and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, in spiritual and aural communion with what I’d already devoured: Angels. Train Dreams. Jesus’ Son. Titles that seemed to call from the fray between this world and another, howling out from a Shadow America I spent much of my early adulthood looking for: in the dregs of empty bottles, in pool halls, in Western small town dives, and in the bars and clubs where Billy and I played music. From Montana to Wyoming to Idaho to the Pacific Coast Highway, we traveled the landscapes and psychospheres Johnson had plumbed in Train Dreams and Already Dead. Places he’d lived in. The same America I’d listened for in The Basement Tapes and Love and Theft and Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers. In the Rockabilly Noir of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, in Greil Marcus’s Old, Weird America.

You see now that I do not seek to demystify Denis Johnson, to demystify any of the abovementioned cultural ephemera of the Weird American Century—to demystify would be the aim of a responsible, clear-headed writer or reporter. I am not. I seek to mystify. I seek to mystify everything worth mystifying. Baby, that’s all we’ve got.

In our modern times, an age in which even the pleasure of gliding under a sparkling theater marquee and entering a singular dreamworld is threatened to become a pastime for the near-dead—in the name of God-Almighty-in-a-godless-world—may we please, please still have our myths, heroes, and legends? Without them, why would we try to create anything at all? People laughed when Timothée Chalamet said he wanted to be one of “the greats,” but I thought, good kid, good kid.

#

Like Bob Dylan, Denis Johnson’s genius emerged via experience, metamorphosis, and worship. Like Dylan, he did turn to Christianity at some point in his life but that’s not the kind of worship I’m talking about. He worshipped, for instance, Leonard Gardner’s 1969 boxing novel Fat City. He and his Iowa Workshop cohort passed it around in the early ’70s the way writers passed around Johnson’s short prose masterwork Jesus’ Son in the ’90s—and still do. Gardner’s novel dealt with down-and-out small-town dreamers afflicted by poverty, substances, and cruelty. But you also see in Denis’s pages, particularly in Angels, Gardner’s jewel-cut yet expressive prose, unflinching of its characters’ interiority, of emotion, of sorrow. A minimalism that pre-dated the clinically cool Carvers and Joy Williams’s of the 1980s (Carver’s final collection, Cathedral, released without the shackles of Gordon Lish’s red pen, did achieve Gardner’s and Johnson’s more vulnerable register). Johnson was also a lover of Beat literature and adopted their exuberance.

Much good writing carries the DNA, pretty clearly, of the author’s chosen ancestry. In a 1992 interview with The New York Times, Cormac McCarthy stated that “the ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends on its life on the novels that have been written.” Johnson dove deep into the works that most affected him, lived inside them. He picked his grandparents, and then he went into new forms. He composed Jesus’ Son by taking copious hand-written notes of true life events that had happened to him in the late ’60s and ’70s, in Iowa City. You can teach methods of observation, of documenting experiences, but you cannot teach someone what to do with them. Johnson, with help of his chosen grandparents, figured it out.

“He was still alive, still dreaming obscenely.”

“If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.”

“It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.”

“Darkly, darkly the Happy Hour.”

A less lyrical form of psychological realism can be beaten into the writer, much more readily than Johnson’s whacko-Americanzo-gonzo poetics. This explains the profusion of a more straightforward, pared-down domestic minimalist mode amongst college creative writing students, one that reigned supreme (reigns still?) for several decades since “dirty realism” first took hold in the 1980s. Johnson wrote a lot of short sentences, short paragraphs, short books. But Johnson’s minimalism is best understood when you consider his origins as a poet, his genre of study at Iowa. The poem’s aim of distillation to capture moments and images and arrest time, and the heightened rigor in its creation, informed Johnson upstream of his most successful pursuits in fiction writing. But then what cannot be taught, or traditionally learned, is the truer source of his creations: his own observations, his well-documented emotional instability, his sensitivity and rage, and his journeys into lurid corners of America most only read about in police-beat news or pulp novels.

In Ted Geltner’s 2025 biography of Denis, Flagrant, Self-destructive Gestures, the author discovers the extent to which personal experience and note-taking played a role in Denis’ process, but, to our relief, there’s not much in the book revealing how he honed his style, voice, whatever you’d like to call it. I’ll admit to searching for this amid the biography, but much of Johnson’s secrets are blessedly absent. I’d assume it is, like it is for many of us, a synthesis of key major influences, textured and reconfigured by the apprentice’s individual life. But I don’t really know.

But you can learn from the excerpt above, the one from Angels, in which we get right in the dark between heartbeats. It’s not the syntax or its exquisite rhythm, although there is that. There are broader lessons often not discussed in writing programs, online, or in literary scenes. One being that, in the direst of narrative circumstances, humor and hijinks can go a long way: “Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of those things do you mean to give away?” Exuberance. Well-placed exclamation points. A comic’s sense of timing. Johnson wrote like the probably-bipolar guy he was, following these ecstatic lines with poetic gravitas and ghastly weight: “He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.”

All dialogue in the novel uses quotation marks, yet the “pray for another human being” bit doesn’t. We aren’t told that our man is saying these words aloud. Johnson cuts the quotation marks and asks the reader to sing along of this salvation.

Johnson could be fearlessly sentimental, reaching for a spiritual release in this scene’s final moments. A lesson one can learn from Johnson is to write with any and all registers of emotion available to a human being. Reject the stoic, anti-sentimentalist realism of much post-WWII fiction and over-workshopped prose. Johnson was a fan of the Beats and Delta Blues and Elvis and Dylan and he got arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and frequented movie theaters and neon-rich dive bars and taught poetry to murderers in an Arizona prison and spent time in a psych ward and moved from Munich to Japan and to Virginia and Iowa and Idaho and Mendocino County and married three times and sat at a Liberian prince’s compound watching videos of people being tortured—recounted in his nonfiction masterwork “The Civil War In Hell”—and once drove a new girlfriend he’d met in Alcoholics Anonymous and parked at an intersection and got out, held his hands out to stop traffic and hollered, “I love this woman! I love this woman!”

Denis Johnson was a whacko. Our literati seems increasingly bereft of whackos. This might not be a good thing.

I write of his whacky life because, again, I seek to mythologize him. He’s a nineteen year-old Elvis Presley at the Louisiana Hayride. He’s Dylan, his life going into new forms. He too rides the Mystery Train. Everything that is distinctive about America is peeled away by streamlined digital aesthetics and zombie-scrolling and restaurants with all the same furniture and soul-destroying lighting and hotel interiors like hospital waiting rooms and apartment complexes like office buildings—and what can you do? An artist today can only stay sane if they invite the more recently-dead into legend, surrendering themselves to and surrounding themselves by the technicolor ephemera of myth. This is all we get to hold into our chests until someone, somewhere, under the guidance of artists like Johnson, artists riding the old phantom train, finds our new Shadow America. Can put down words that pulse with its utter deranged madness. You’ll find it yet. Look around. It’s something worth aspiring to.

But not aspiring to art. Never art. Magic.

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When I began teaching in 2007, I did so nontraditionally, coming into the classroom through a backdoor accreditation program. Equipped with a degree in English and thinking to hold the job for two or three years, I signed my contract, agreed to take online classes as I taught, and traveled to Hays, Kansas, two hours from my hometown, to take a five-day crash course at the regionally popular Fort Hays State University (“Affordable Success!”) where I would earn first my teaching certifications and then a masters degree.

I didn’t think I was signing on for the long haul—I didn’t plan to become a “lifer”—but I was looking forward to my new job. For one thing, after working as a barista at a coffee shop and a teller at a bank for the previous few years, I would now be earning a paycheck large enough to live on and even begin paying down some of my student loan and credit card debts (it was large enough—if only just). For another, I had liked high school. Not the classes, per se, but being a high schooler: the newfound freedom; the increasing awareness of the greater world around; the ride. Having just finished my four-year undergraduate degree in five-and-a-half years and learned a few things along the way, I thought I had some wisdom to share with the younger generation at the school I had once attended. I thought that, if nothing else, I could prepare them better for life than I felt I had been prepared.

When the first bell rang and I started teaching a class that was my own, I was surprised by a number of things. First, the distance between the honors classes I’d taken in school and the so-called “regular track” classes I was assigned was much greater than I had imagined. Second, while I had learned a great deal in the years since I’d left the building—and while the world changed significantly between 1999 when I graduated and 2007 when I returned—it seemed the high school students I had been assigned hadn’t really changed much at all. If they had changed, in a world in which access to the internet was more ubiquitous and cell phones and MP3 players were now the norm, I wasn’t sure it was for the better. Then, too, some new legislation was reshaping education in unforeseen ways.

So profound was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act—and so shaken was I by it—that I, who had never planned or wanted to be a teacher, spent more than a decade of my life writing entire novel about it: Why Teach? The novel goes long on the bureaucratic absurdities of the twenty-first century academic experience: the school’s expansion from four principals to seven, the use of administrative checklist tools to replace holistic teacher evaluations, the overwhelming and overriding importance of “the test” replacing all other educational priorities—but an angle I didn’t address in my writing was the push to incorporate technology in the classroom. There’s only so much one can do in a novel, and the technology angle, while worth examining, didn’t fit neatly into the structure of the book I conceived of.

Technology in education is worth addressing, though. As human beings, we’re distinguished by our use of tools. We like to use them; we like to shape things. There’s an assumption that we, ourselves, are immutable; that while we’re using these tools to change the world around us, these tools aren’t changing us. This belief, of course, is false.

The NCLB legislation, best known for its standardized testing requirements, is less well-known for mandating “technological literacy” in all eighth graders in the country—leaving individual states to interpret what this meant—and pressing schools to make significant use of technology in instruction.

Broadly speaking, a book is a piece of technology, as is a pencil, or even a chalk board–but this isn’t the “technology” anyone is looking for in twenty-first century classrooms. Pencils lack a certain spark, and marker boards do not glow. The language is loose, the rationale understandable, and the expectation pretty clear: “technology” means electronic tools, preferably with microchips and backlit screens. Thus, staring down the obligation of preparing lessons that check off as many boxes as possible on administrative walkthrough forms, teachers began making greater use of electronic overhead projectors and presentation software: PowerPoint, Prezi, and/or Google Slides. An old-fashioned overhead projector, the likes of which I used in my first two years on the job, wasn’t going to do it. Teachers had to use “modern” technology.

That this type of instruction is still “instructor-centered”—that there’s not much material difference between doing a lecture using a PowerPoint and doing one with a piece of chalk and a chalk board—doesn’t register. The “use of technology” is broadly and uncritically accepted as improving students’ classroom experiences and learning. Provided access to this type of technology, why wouldn’t a teacher make use of it?

At stake in the NCLB legislature was the wide divide between the lowest and highest achievers in American education. The stated impetus of the act, after all, wasn’t to raise all students’ achievement, but to prevent vulnerable and low-achieving students from being left behind. As a piece of legislative legerdemain, the act did its job impressively well. If some students in America reap greater advantages from their educations and have better outcomes, the reasoning has an awful lot to do with money: educationally, the benefits of affluence stack up fast. Kids from homes with money have more access to books, magazines, newspapers, tutors, coaches, and horizon-broadening vacations. They hear the word “no,” far less than their more impoverished peers. Seeing their parents and their neighbors dress up for work, affluent children come to understand a wider array of potential outcomes for their educations than peers with less money do. Benefiting from conversations with college-educated parents, they hear more varied discussions with more sophisticated vocabulary at home, and, benefitting from parents who often work more regular hours–or can afford to live on a single income–they typically see their parents more often at home. They are less likely to be children of divorce, less likely to be uprooted and moved in the middle of a school year, and less likely to suffer hunger or abuse. Their schools benefit from stronger tax bases and pay their teachers more; their class sizes are generally smaller, so they get more one-on-one attention. To suggest that the ways we teach and test can correct for all of these imbalances and keep disadvantaged students from being “left behind”–to say that the Republicans of 2001, by implementing this act, were the “pro-education” party—was a stroke of legislative genius. And one of the most significant, if under-addressed, aspects of the act was the act’s push for greater use of technology, humanity’s great panacea, that shiny and attractive-looking toy lying there near the bottom of Pandora’s box.

It’s worth noting here how unevenly the repercussions of the NCLB legislation were felt across the country. For middle-class and affluent districts, the relative ease with which they could pass the multiple-choice state assessments largely meant they could go on about business as usual. Educational trends come and go; most of the time teachers can bend this way or that and keep teaching as they have been. For less affluent and and lesser-achieving districts, however, the repercussions of the act were felt within a few short years. Schools that had formerly been ho-hum and hard-luck—places where hardworking students, teachers, and administrators were doing the best with what they had been dealt–now suffered the stigma of being labeled “failing.” Top-down pressure was exerted: state education departments onto local ones, superintendents onto principals, principals onto teachers, and teachers onto students. Whereas in better-off schools, teachers could spend a week or two on focused test-prep and districts could add a support class or two to their class lists, lower-achieving schools were required to write and implement plans of improvement and overhaul their curricula. They were pressured to demonstrate how they were using the most up-to-date educational thinking and technology to improve their student outcomes.

I’m not sure that teachers or parents and students from better-off districts can understand the degree of rapid change that failing the test—and thus running the risk of losing accreditation—forced on low-achieving schools that were already resource-starved. My experience was one in which teachers and administrators, who may choose to motivate students using either positive reinforcement (“the carrot”) or negative (“the stick”) most often made use of the punitive, effective-in-the-short-term techniques. Mine was one in which low-achieving schools were turned into laboratories for the testing of “researched” but heretofore untested educational theories that theorists were thinking up in locales far away from the many living variables of my real classroom.

I placed the word “researched” in quotation marks above because I’ve grown dubious of a great deal of educational “research.” As a practicing educator, I’d argue that the techniques and strategies I put into action every year based on my education and experience are researched. The long-standing and much-criticized “industrial age” education everyone was eager to replace during NCLB was not, in fact, a static model, but one that evolved over its many long decades. Teachers have been paying attention to our inputs and outputs, in the short term and the long, for centuries. Pressing our administrators on the “research-based” practices they insisted we implement in our high school ELA classrooms, my fellow teachers and I often found that the “research” they were referring to was conducted in elementary school classrooms, or mathematics classrooms, or in a country where schooling wasn’t compulsory. Often, the sample sizes were small; often, the types of learning being measured were simplistic. Almost never did we see evidence that long-term learning retention and outcomes had been considered. More often than any of the above, we were told by our administrators that they didn’t have the research with them, but could show it to us later—and we never saw it.

Which is all to say: as much as the inclusion of technology in classrooms makes intuitive sense, this “logical” move was often pursued rashly as part of a broader, desperate trend among impoverished and failing schools to include glittering but ultimately empty statements in their plans of improvement. To say “we are modernizing with the newest technology,” or “we’re integrating technology to level the playing field,” or “we are embracing twenty-first century tools” certainly sounds good, but are these things true? To question the validity of technology in the classroom, as I am now, runs the risk of earning the kind of side-eyed dismissal typically reserved for flat earthers, but as an educator I think we should be in the business of critical inquiry. There’s a pervasive assumption in our society that newer is always better—doubly so for new technologies. Alongside this, we assume that more is always better. School-level administrators, once charged with holistically evaluating teachers based on what they saw in classrooms, saw the district- and state-level administrative ranks above their heads swell during NCLB and lost a great deal of autonomy. Too often, they became box-checking functionaries gathering data for “curriculum and instruction” specialists in district “home offices” far removed from real school campuses and classrooms. Decisions were made by data gathered in aggregate; for teachers facing regular administrative walkthroughs, it wasn’t how technology was being used in the classroom that mattered, but whether it was being used at all. A first- or second-year teacher new to the profession was encouraged not to teach well, but rather to check as many boxes as possible. If giving notes by way of PowerPoint—or reviewing information by way of an online game—garnered a checked box, then one should do it. The worst story of mandated box checking I ever heard was at a conference in Denver in 2008 or ’09. A second-year teacher I was chatting with from one of the Denver-area districts told me that the administrators walked in with lists of “high yield strategies” on their clipboards two or three times a week, and if teachers didn’t regularly check off X number—I think it was five or six—in ten minutes, then the teacher could be subject to reprimand and/or termination. To be plain, I’m all for “high-yield strategies,” but often two or three used in an entire fifty or fifty-five minute class is sufficient. To cycle through five or six strategies in ten minutes is to risk whiplash for the students; it’s to move so fast no lesson or learning could possibly “stick.”

Is a classroom in which students are taking notes from PowerPoint a better classroom than one in which the instructor displays notes on an overhead projector, or writes them on a marker board? Is it better than one in which the instructor stands at a podium and lectures? There’s something to be said for technology’s ability to allow us to readily include pictures, charts, graphs, videos, and music, but if the lesson being conveyed doesn’t call for such, what exactly have we done? Added bells and whistles? Removed friction? Sped things up?

Speed is not always a virtue in education, and friction is necessary for learning. Presentation technologies might enable us to deliver more information faster, but I’m not sure they help students learn. I don’t think they help students cultivate the persistence, curiosity, concentrative stamina, and self-regulation abilities we might broadly call “study skills” so that these students can really grapple with material and become life-long learners. Instruction using presentation technologies is still subject to the same criticisms of much “sit and get” education—the instruction is still teacher-centered. Students treated to fast, technology-enabled presentations can become rushed. Rather than thinking about the information their instructors present, they can become mere transcribers—perhaps not so bad if they will review this information later, but how many students regularly revisit their notes after class in this, or in any, day and age? There’s something to be said for a lecture that moves at the pace an instructor can write on the board, or a lecture that isn’t really a lecture at all, but an instructor-led conversation. The pacing is amenable to student learning in the first case, and the conversational friction of thoughtful engagement in the second.

Engagement, considered by many the sine qua non of education, plays an important role in this discussion. In addition to checking boxes as they observe teachers using technology, administrators enter figures and check boxes for “engagement,” measured often by simple counts of how many students have their heads up, their eyes up, their pencils moving, or their fingers on their keyboards. These simple indicators are hardly signs of attention, much less engagement, but we use them for markers nonetheless. (Every teacher I know can tell you stories aplenty of students who didn’t look actively engaged—who were drawing or checking out members of the opposite sex—yet could repeat lectures back nearly verbatim, and of students who, with eyes up almost the entire period, pencils moving to take fulsome notes, demonstrated at the end of units that they had learned and retained nothing.) Thus, teachers are incentivized to make use of shallow and attention-garnering technologies, such as electronic presentations and games, to engage their students’ attention so that heads are up and children are smiling when administrators walk in.

I should be careful not to create straw men or overstate my case. It’s true, as I’ve suggested above, that technology can be used well and is often a valid tool in the classroom. It’s the prescriptive use of the tool that I’m primarily concerned with, and the fact that teachers are often encouraged to put the cart before the horse—the tool before the task—and reach for new electronic technology first to teach their lessons when other techniques might be more germane. Likewise, I’m concerned that the shiny veneer technology gives a classroom can cover for shallow teaching and learning. Making heavy use of technology, that is, can allow a teacher to “fake” education, and I’m concerned some teachers might not even realize the fakery they’re engaging in. It may be that my concern is subject-specific. Perhaps the use of technology in a math classroom, or science, social studies, or any of our myriad elective courses, is effective. I’m not equipped to discuss those other classrooms. But in an English classroom, the highest ends I can achieve involve teaching students to (1) read and understand long, sophisticated texts, such as novels, longform essays, and pieces of research (which is to say, to become sophisticated consumers of texts and ideas), and (2) formulate questions and conduct research to answer those questions, recognizing validity in sources, identifying bias, and synthesizing understandings to present informative or argumentative pieces of writing. “To learn to write is to learn to have ideas,” as Robert Frost puts it, or, in my less elegant twelfth-grade instructor formulation: to practice organized writing is to practice organized thinking. When a student says “I know what I want to say, but I can’t say it,” I have to gently point out that, in fact, they do not know what they want to say, and then gently coax them through the thought experiment of trying to verbally express it so we can distill that verbal expression into a written one. To be sure, some technologies, such as online databases and word processing programs, which facilitate and expedite our abilities to gather research and do our writing, are useful employments of technology in the Language Arts classroom—perhaps the very best uses, by my estimation—but after these tools, the usefulness of many others begins to fall off rapidly, and the liabilities and consequences for using them begin to mount.

Popular uses of technology in the classroom too often correlate with shallow learning. They are too often driven by teachers’ desires to pander to students and garner easy engagement. Presentations with lots of bells and whistles and online learning games too often emphasize lower-order thinking such as basic knowledge acquisition and engagement with eyes and voices but not with minds or prior learning. A teacher putting on a “Kahoot” review game could earn high checklist marks during an administrative walkthrough, but only have engaged students in lower-order “knowledge,” “understanding,” and “application” thinking skills. While I’m a proponent of these skills—indeed, I’ve written about how some classrooms might undervalue them, and many of our students, while appearing to develop them, might merely be “playing the game” of education—I know that the higher-order thinking skills of “analysis,” “evaluation,” and “synthesis” are going to be needed by our students in a number of capacities in their lives. Such skills are, I think, more difficult to develop playing electronic quiz games.

Popular classroom technology’s tending toward lower-order thinking skills isn’t the entire story in terms of reducing student learning, though. Emphasizing lower-order thinking skills, these technologies also encourage oversimplification. Users of presentation software are encouraged to keep their slides simple and minimize the amount of text on each one. The United States military, occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan during the first few years of my tenure as a public school teacher (and for several years afterward), understood the capabilities and limitations of PowerPoint well. In a popular New York Times article in 2010, it was revealed that the use of presentation software was found to be useful in placating journalists during press briefings in Afghanistan. Military presenters found that putting together dull and busy but ultimately empty PowerPoint presentations was a good way to waste a great deal of journalists’ time without saying anything, a stratagem they referred to as “hypnotizing chickens.” On the other hand, perhaps more relevant for my current arguments, another commander found that using PowerPoint presentations to prepare soldiers for duty on the ground was insufficient to help soldiers develop real understandings. The country had a long and complex history, to say nothing of a significant and complex culture, before the United States occupied it, and, as the commander put it, “some ideas aren’t bulletizable.”

The notion that requirements of significant learning defy the simplification and bulletization that technology enable are shared concisely in a speech by Faber, the professor-in-hiding Guy Montag meets midway through Ray Bradbury’s prescient novel Fahrenheit-451:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”

This “pores” speech touches on my chief problems with the mindless implementation of technology in the classroom, why I think education shouldn’t go out of its way to be easy and entertaining—quick, smooth, and seamless—for students. Technology too often smoothes out the pores; it enables students to run their hands over the material too quickly. Education should be more than superficial training, and should provide students with more than a passing familiarity. Proofs of true learning need to go deeper than multiple choice answers and whether or not children have their eyes up and are laughing. There’s something to be said for the desirability of difficulty in an educational setting, so long as that difficulty is carefully calibrated to pique and challenge students, requiring them to grow. Educators decry “helicopter” parents, who hover too close, and “snow plow” parents, who remove obstacles from the paths of their children, but instructors who oversimplify material and provide simplified understandings in place of complex interactions with material are also engaged in coddling behavior. These instructors can rob students of opportunities to be appropriately challenged, to struggle, develop autonomy, and to grow.

There’s been much written about A.I. “slop” in the last two years—the ways artificial intelligence can flatten and homogenize information, rechewing pre-chewed food and serving it to us lukewarm. I’ve seen it broadly decried in the writerly and teacherly spaces I visit on the internet. But it’s not just A.I. that is dangerous. We’ve been tending toward the smoothing, simplification, and regurgitation of “slop” long before ChatGPT was released in November of 2022. We had already been simplifying and bulletizing, “prechewing” the food for our students, making it look like we were doing teaching in order to check boxes on walkthrough forms when, in fact, real education was not taking place. In a thread decrying the use of A.I. in education on Substack, a teacher cautioned that we shouldn’t eschew all technology; that tools like Kahoot and Quizlet were “really powerful tools,” but when I see these tools being used in classrooms, my thoughts go to those military briefing rooms in Afghanistan, journalists being fooled and placated by colorful slides and bullet points. Data, I hope we all know by now, can be used to hide as much as it reveals, and a veneer of technology use in a classroom can disguise superficiality. It can demonstrate motion without progress, the appearance of learning when none is taking place.

If technology’s abilities to speed up and facilitate are so useful as to be impossible to turn back from, these classroom advantages might be outweighed by the twin threats of student cheating and distraction. The former problem is self-reported at alarming rates and substantive enough to deserve an entire essay of its own. The latter makes such a profound impact on classrooms that I suspect the military commanders I referenced above might agree the handing out of screened devices to students for largely unregulated use is tantamount to the distribution of Weapons of Mass Distraction. An instructor can regulate student device use, of course. They can regularly walk around the classroom while they speak and while students work; they can appeal to tech services in the building to have apps and websites banned. But students easily become adept at opening and closing tabs on their screens as teachers move around the room, and they quickly find work-arounds for banned or blacklisted sites. Today’s high school students don’t poke one another, don’t throw things, seldom doodle on paper, and rarely draw on their desks. They look at their devices. They watch short videos, listen to music, tune-in to sporting events, fill online shopping carts, gamble, cyberbully one another, and even trade cryptocurrencies. Surely, my reader might say, school filters prevent students from accessing sports betting sites and cryptocurrency exchanges! But a school that allows school devices often at least tacitly allows for personal devices, and schools that work to curb personal device usage often face stiff pushback from not only students, but parents. Without the backing of a school-, district, or state-wide policy there are only so many fights a teacher can handle. A “teacher’s discretion” policy is no policy at all, and students with phones have the entire world in their pockets.

Beyond the dangers of superficial and shallow engagement, the erosion of complexity and sophistication, the erasure of desirable difficulty, the enabling of cheating, and the facilitation of distraction, there’s also, if I might wax poetic, the issue of the classroom’s soul at stake. I find that, though we have tried often and mightily in the last few decades to measure it—and while we have made significant overtures in the last few years toward regulating and restricting it—a classroom is still a place that defies measurability and can, if allowed, offer immeasurable good. It’s more than the sum of its parts; it moves through time and space in unpredictable ways; it offers nourishments students don’t know they need and often don’t realize they’re receiving. The complaint that students don’t learn anything they can apply in life while in high school abounds and reverberates so regularly as to be commonplace in our culture, but who among us doesn’t regularly revisit high school memories in their day-to-day life and recall that period in dreams? Who hasn’t had a sudden epiphany when something they “learned” but didn’t learn in high school suddenly clicks into place years later? A classroom is a place where young people come to commune together, and they do so in the presence of adults who largely have their best interests at heart. It’s a place where we might learn more from what has been called the “hidden” curriculum than the written one; a place where young people are regularly in the presence of others who are, in myriad ways, both similar to and different from themselves. It can be a place of forced silence and forced sound where people communicate face to face in real time. It can be a respite from the algorithmically-narrowed experience catered to our youths by their devices; a place where seemingly arbitrary lessons are delivered one day and find their analogs in “real” life many years later.

Behind my desk I have a pair of corkboards stocked with quotes I’ve written down from my readings over the years. One of the most meaningful comes from a letter that Bernard Saint-Gaudens wrote to his son, the famous American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who spent several years in Paris learning his craft. “You will never find any peace for your soul and mind excepting in work. That is the true source of our welfare. Through work the soul aspires to God who bestows upon it a power of will and wisdom which nothing can overthrow.” We find sustenance in our work and satisfaction when our work is well done. When work feels easy or cheap, we feel cheap doing it. Cheapening our work, we cheapen our lives.

A.I. boosters and tech evangelists speak of educations enhanced by artificial intelligence as utopian goods that could unlock boundless potential in our students. They describe classrooms in which every student is treated to a specially-tailored learning experience–but I’ve seen classrooms where every student is sitting in front of a screen, every one of them has a headset on, and every one of them is “engaged” in learning that is purportedly catered to them. These are not happy classrooms. It may well be that the top twenty-percent of students could thrive in such environments, and maybe some others who are technologically inclined, or self-motivated or introverted to begin with—but in general, our top twenty percent of students will always thrive, and on the whole I believe most students will be unhappy if divorced from whole-classroom experiences and interactions with their human instructors and human peers.

What I might be talking about—what might be more palatable to my readers if I term it as such—is mental health. In his mega-viral essay “End The Phone-Based Childhood Now,” Jonathan Haidt makes a convincing case correlating the decline of our young people’s mental health with the rise of cell phone acquisition and young people’s use of social media. For me, the time period he notes is also one that correlates highly with the standardized testing era and the forced inclusion of technologies in classrooms. The coupling of standardization and narrowed curricula with the use of technology that oversimplifies and removes nuance can buff the wonder right out of the world. Couple this with the omnipresent status of our students’ little phone screens and the notorious shallowness of social media, and we have a recipe for ennui, anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness. Here, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit-451 is relevant again. In that dystopian society where no one read books, everyone wore audio-transmitting seashells in their ears, and Montag’s wife’s great wish was to get a fourth wall screen in her living room so she could be surrounded by her virtual “family,” Montag arrives home to find she has attempted to end her life by taking a bottle of pills and, supremely blasé about the whole tragedy–because it is so commonplace in their society–a pair of technicians use a device to snake the pills out of her stomach. The only thing Bradbury doesn’t anticipate is the size of the screens and their omnipresence in our pockets.

I’m typically more of a “realism” guy, but a dystopian Bradburian end-game feels like what we’re heading for in our increasingly tech-saturated schools. If Bradbury’s novel feels too far afield from reality as you think of it, though, consider this: both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sent their own children to largely tech-free schools, and tech leaders like Peter Thiel aggressively restrict their own children’ s screen time.

Books, too, are pieces of technology, and, though comparatively antiquated, I still believe they are superior to PowerPoint and Prezi, Google Slides and Google itself, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. When teachers desire sustained and deep engagement with ideas—when they want students to engage deeply at their own pace—books and interactive exchanges with peers and experienced, knowledgeable instructors are still the best vehicles to deliver information, teach critical thinking skills, and help socialize young people. In a fast-moving era where the internet and artificial intelligence are helping to drive change at an unprecedented rate, we do our students a disservice when we don’t help them to slow down, build broad and deep stores of knowledge in their own minds, and learn to investigate, argue, and think critically in the presence of real people and good old-fashioned books.

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I first came across Jim Shepard’s work in County Highway last year, a story titled “The Sons of Liberty.” I’ve never gone in for historical fiction, but I was enjoying it too much, too immediately, to remember to think of genre. After I finished, for a long time, I lay in the emotion, staring up at the ceiling on a Sunday afternoon, during what must have been the summer. When I finally got up I was late to meet . I ran the print copy over to him and waved it around in the wind. “You’ve gotta read this guy,” I said, though to Canadian ears I must’ve been yelling. “This guy is writing better than anyone out there.”

The story was, in a sense, one of those before and after moments you wait for. I felt that I’d misappraised an entire genre; I started to fear that I was missing out on quite a lot. My entry point into this world was Shepard’s work. His story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway ----- a finalist for the National Book Award and a Story Prize winner ----- spanned more space, time, and mind than anything I’d previously read. Next I picked up Project X, a harrowing journey into the minds of isolated adolescent boys, which has only become more relevant with the years. Finally, I read The Book of Aron, one of the greatest Holocaust stories I’ve come across in any form (and the winner of too many awards to list here). Each night for two weeks I cried myself to sleep reading that book. It was the first time I did anything like that since college, right after Samantha left me.

But let’s not go there. Let’s instead go to February, a two-foot snowstorm on the horizon, a rental car, a drive to Williams College. Shepard is waiting for me outside of his wife’s office. He stands 6’2” (maybe 6’3”) and is built, as Hemingway referred to himself, like a natural heavyweight. We go into the office, we’re surrounded by books, and we have fallen into conversation right away. I take out the Sony voice recorder I’d purchased the night before. I hit the red button.

Non Grata

I have a few questions about your writing.

Jim Shepard

I’m ready.

NG

How do you make it so propulsive?

JS

When a reader is sitting down and going, “why am I reading this?” some of it might be the subject, some of it might be the beautiful language, but part of it is that something compelling is going on.

I talk to my students a lot about what I call rate of revelation : Are you always feeling like you’re learning something? What slows stuff down is when you feel the writer is either wallowing in one thing or indulging themselves in another, and you’re feeling like, I already know this, but you’re just giving me more of it.

As I’m writing and revising I’m thinking, what am I learning here? What am I getting here that I didn’t get before? Is everything justifying itself? And that means if it’s doing work similar to work that’s done elsewhere, I got to get rid of it.

That’s a version of Hemingway’s “shoot your darlings.” But it’s very hard because you did all that work to come up with this great shit, and it’s very hard to not say, well, throw it in, right? What a great detail. People will remember that detail. But for me, every one of these details has to emotionally justify itself, both in terms of the characters and the narrative. If it’s not, it has to go.

In the case of a story like “Sons of Liberty,” I might have five or six details that I really want to get in about how the tea looks when it hits the harbor water: vivid, wonderful images of what a shit-ton of tea in shallow water looks like. But you don’t get to do five of them. You only get to do one. And you only get to do it at the right spot because you’re trying to move the narrative forward. You’re moving everything forward with as much economy and drive as you can come up with. The metaphor you’re operating with is much more like a guerrilla action than a mass invasion.

NG

Did you consciously feel like you were developing a style as you started writing?

JS

For most writers, except for a certain kind of self-important horse’s ass, style operates the way George Saunders articulated it. You figure out what sort of things you can’t do, or don’t like to do, and what sort of things you do like to do, and that starts to become your style.

Saunders tells the story of being the one person in the Syracuse MFA program who everybody agreed was a very sweet guy, but was never going to make it. Every one of his stories was a disaster. He was good friends with one of the teachers, Toby Wolff , who really liked him. He’d be over there having meals, but even Wolff would be like, George… these stories… they’re just not very good. And he was in despair, was about to give up, and then thought, well, if I’m going to go down, I might as well do what I want to do. As he put it, if I’m going to go down, I might as well go down making some fart jokes. And so he started doing the kind of stories George Saunders writes.

When I was teaching I’d give students an exercise on narrative modes where you have to do a scene in one mode only. So you have to do one scene in just dialogue, one in just exposition, one in just description, one in just action. And instantly people go: I really take to action, I hate description. Instantly they figure out what they like doing.

One of the cool things about the exercise is that they have to get me the same information. So if you want to tell me that Arjun is obsessed with his mom, you have to do that in action, you have to do that in dialogue, you have to do that in exposition. Obviously for most everybody some are much easier than others.

NG

Where does the subject matter for your stories come from?

JS

I began by trying to be a naturalist writer who would write about my own little niche, which was Bridgeport, ConnecticutItalians, who I thought were kind of entertaining. And it felt like, Okay, this is all you know, this is all you can write. And a lot of people are not gonna be interested in it, and that’s fair, because who would be, right?

Going to Brown and working with John Hawkes was a huge boon for me because he didn’t tell me, “Don’t write that.” He was just clearly bored by it. What he modeled for me was not, hey, go write something else. What he modeled was, whenever I got weird at all, he would jump on that. This moment is amazing, this is so weird. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, it is kind of weird, isn’t it?” Because we’re all so certain of our own normality, right? He was very useful at reminding me to valorize the weirdness, because that was the only hope I had of being original. And I was genuinely weird enough that I could do that, which turned me towards stuff that interested me.

So I’d be like, well, I’m interested in tsunamis. How am I going to write about a tsunami? I didn’t experience a tsunami. So then you’re thinking, how do you write anything that has any kind of authenticity to it at all?

It’s two steps: One is, why don’t you learn something about fucking tsunamis? The other is, and this is the really crucial thing, why does this matter to you? If you can’t figure the latter thing out, then you might as well be writing nonfiction about tsunamis.

That was a crucial step for me. I gave myself permission to go to other worlds, but then I had to go, why would anybody, other than an obsessed ten-year-old boy, care about this world? Why is this important? Because it isn’t enough to go, well, it’s just objectively a good story, isn’t it?

In terms of that propulsiveness, I’m always thinking what can I do to make this even more streamlined. I had a story last summer in the New Yorker called the “Queen of Bad Influences.” It’s about a pair of women in 1915 who are clearly drawn to one another. They’re both lonely and they think, God I never thought anybody like you would be in the world. And they’re both so inhibited by the world they’re in that they’re like, What’s the parameters of this? I guess we can have lunch.

I was planning this whole story out where you’d watch the track of this relationship developing, and then I thought that it’s gonna end in some catastrophic way. Maybe they’d be on the Lusitania. What I’m doing at that last point is trying to engage that ten-year-old boy. I’m trying to convince myself that I’m sitting down to have fun at the desk, which is hard to do. But if I’m going, hey, you’re reading and writing about the Lusitania, cool. I want to learn more. So then I’m saying, wow, and that’s leading me to emotion as opposed to the opposite. So then I’m writing a story and I have this plan. We’re going to unfold this relationship in all of its complexity, and then we’re going to have this disaster happen.

I get about five pages in and I’m like, you know what? I’m putting her right in the water. The relationship seems to be starting to develop and bang, she’s in the water. The ship is already sinking. Suddenly you realize, if you’ve been doing it for a while, that the reader appreciates that so much. Oh my God, I thought we were going to have to do five more chapters before we got to this inevitable event, and now you’re just there. That’s such a relief.

NG

When you’re talking about the ten-year-old boy, I think of “Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay.” Just the fact that there was once a wave, 1720 feet, bigger than the Empire State Building.

JS

When I was about ten, I read that narrative, because that really happened to that father and son. For years I thought I would like to tell that story. But for me, as I said before, the question is, how is this relevant to anybody who’s not ten-year-old Jim Shepard ? How is this relevant in any way that’s not just, well, cool, that’s the biggest wave ever, right? That usually takes some teasing out.

A lot of literature is interested in that giant gap that exists between who we are at our best and who we are most of the time. A lot of my stories are about using moments like Lituya Bay or the sinking of the Lusitania to put as much light on that gap as I can. And also to suggest that we often think that we’ll be in control of the amount of time we have to shrink that gap. So maybe I feel like there’s all sorts of ways in which I’ve let Arjun down, but he’s young, I’m not that old, we’ll figure something out, right? Catastrophe has a way of going, You’re out of time. You didn’t move quickly enough. It has a way of reminding us that the world is not on our schedule, that the world is on its own schedule, that, as one writer memorably put it, history is about to be let off the leash and you’re in the way.

NG

Do you ever feel like historical fiction doesn’t get enough respect in literature?

JS

Historical fiction was a non-literary ghetto, like horror. But one of the good things about the diversifying of our tastes is that all of those genres can now be literary. So you have Kelly Link and Karen Russell can do Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Literary historical fiction is fiction, not history, not nonfiction. Implicitly or explicitly, it is trying to answer the question you have when you’re reading a story about Gettysburg: Why should I give a shit about this right now? What does this have to do with anything that I should care about now? So if you read “The Sons of Liberty” and said, well, I just thought it was a really good evocation of what it was like to be in Boston at that time, I’m like, great. If you said, that’s all it was, I’d be a little disappointed.

There are moments in there that are a little more explicit than others. When you have a character in 1774 say that one half of the country can’t talk to the other half anymore, you think, oh, okay, so there’s a reason this is sticking in your head now. There’s a reason you wanted to write about this moment, as opposed to the French and Indian War, right? That helps address the issue I’m trying never to lose sight of: Why is this interesting to anyone other than nerds who are devoted to this subject? Because I’ll hear from them. You know, they’ll be like, actually it was an earlier day, blah, blah, blah.

NG

What do you think about auto-fiction?

JS

A lot of literary readers valorize it because there’s a sense that it’s getting really close to the bone, and that’s what literature should do, right? You have a certain kind of reader that thinks it’s more literary than “The Sons of Liberty” because, in “The Sons of Liberty,” the guy is clearly using his imagination. Auto-fiction is bulletins from the front. This is the real shit.

When I was at Bread Loaf, the writers’ conference, with Tim O’Brien, he was debuting The Things They Carried. It was blowing people away, partially because it seemed so terrifyingly honest. The last story in that collection is called “How to Tell a True War Story.” It’s this agonizing story about a little daughter grilling her dad about the awful things he did in Vietnam. After the reading, people would come up to Tim with tears in their eyes, and they would go, what do you say to your daughter now? And Tim would go, I don’t have a daughter. And he would get kudos coming and going, because before they asked him, they thought he was so brave to put down what really happened to him. And after, they were like, Wow, he persuaded me so fully. He’s such a good fiction writer that I was completely convinced. He is a really good fiction writer, but part of what he’s done is mobilize this fallacy, this tendency, that people have to think, if the story seems to align with what they know or suspect of an author’s biography: I bet that really happened. So if I set a story in Bridgeport about Italians, people are like, well, this is probably exactly what happened. And if I set a story in Lituya Bay, I could have something that literally happened to me and put it in there and they’re like, oh, good imagination. So you have those options.

In global terms, people are being wildly celebrated for flamboyantly not going beyond their experience. People like Knausgaard will intricately and eloquently explicate, here’s how I shaved, here’s how I went downstairs, here’s what I thought about my morning. It has to be artful, obviously, or people will be bored out of their skulls. But part of the authority is people going, Wow, this is so vulnerable, this is so honest, right? But it’s artifice, it’s construction.

The writing advice I got that was better than write what you know was a version of write what you didn’t know you didn’t know. Teach yourself something as you’re going along. When I started out at first I thought we were supposed to aspire to write what you know, here’s a story we can learn from, that sort of thing. But that has the sense that I already understand where I’m going before I get there. And that’s always a fatal problem in fiction.

NG

Do you outline?

JS

Always for novels and for the research-heavy stories. I have to do that in order to organize the information I have. But it only works because I register how contingent and how fraudulent it is. I put that map in front of me so that I can tell myself I know what I’m doing. But if I go far enough into that map and I haven’t changed anything important, then I know something’s very, very wrong.

That map is just there to reassure me that I’m not entirely lost. If I don’t start varying it pretty quickly, that means I’m not learning anything, and that means I’m just declaiming. I’m just going: Here’s my design. And the best and most intricate design I’ve ever come up with wasn’t nearly intricate enough. It always had to be just a starting point.

The designs that I’ve come up with, the designs that I’m able to look back on now, once I’ve finished up, are wonderfully complicated sometimes, and they were not what I started with at all. When I taught literature I wouldn’t teach something like “The Dead” or Lolita right away, because if you think that’s what you have to produce in terms of design in order to get going, you’ll shoot yourself in the head, right? Because you can’t do that.

It’s hard to remember that Joyce and Nabokov are doing that not with their initial designs but with ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty revisions as they’re starting to pick up the pattern. They’re going, Oh, this will be even more spectacularly intricate if I move this over here and get rid of that. Because now I’m starting to see what I’ve been doing. And now I can rearrange it more. But you have to start with something.

NG

Why do many of your stories focus on alienated adolescents?

JS

I don’t think we get very far from our obsessions and our sense of, as I was saying before, that gap between who we are at our best and who we are at our worst. In those adolescents are versions of me in all sorts of both real and imagined situations. There’s a million things that you are concerned with in theory, but there’s probably five or six that you keep coming back to in practice.

That’s an interest that you should register because it’s obsessive, and it means you haven’t figured it out yet. You’re still working on it. That dynamism is part of what animates fiction, as opposed to, I have wisdom and I’m going to pass it on to you: Don’t be isolated as an adolescent. I do tend to write about isolated and frustrated figures, and I also tend to write about relationships. My sense is that isolation can be compromised in all sorts of wonderful ways, and it’s problematized in all sorts of wonderful ways as well. I do write a lot about women protagonists as well, but some of the obsessions stay the same.

NG

Does it feel harder to write about female protagonists?

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I remember eating sweet cherries out of a bowl in my grandmother’s purple upholstered bed. I was in a white nightgown inspecting the dark flesh of each fruit carefully, tossing the wormed ones back into the bowl with disgust. It was late August and hot. We opened all the windows in her sixth floor apartment and lowered the shades. It was a miserable summer: my grandmother, my mother and I all taking turns crying. My grandmother gave up her big purple bed to my parents and took the twin that had been my mother’s as a child. I was relegated to the blue pull-out couch in the living room. Most nights my mother joined me, unable to sleep from my father’s snoring. Finally, there was stillness.

But in the morning it was chaos all over again: my grandmother yelling at my mother, my mother yelling at me, me storming into the bathroom and crying angry, spiteful tears into my hands. Thinking of the great injustice of it all. No car, no air conditioning, wormed fruit. Three generations crammed into the top floor of a socialist-gray housing block while my friends from elementary school were in spacious, white-shingled houses on Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard. Where rich, normal people went. The next day, the cycle reversed: I yelled at my mother, who yelled at my grandmother, whose turn it was to cry in her little room. I was ten that summer and sure I was Depressed. I thought it would never end: the heat, the misery, the cramped, ugly rooms.

But it did. In the last week of August my mother and father and I boarded a plane to return to the United States, where there would be air conditioning and my own bedroom. My grandmother accompanied us to the airport, watched us climb the escalator to departures. Her eyes scrunched with tears once more. That’s how I remember her now: seeing us off with a little handkerchief in her hands at the end of the escalator. Her eyes magnified by her big glasses, crying. I didn’t like to look at her like that, I wished she would stop. I told my mother: Why does she have to be so dramatic? We’ll be back next summer.

And I was so excited, that first night back in America: riding in the comfortable car home from the airport, passing by the bright highway signage and the well-lit stores. A whole world of possibility and smiling faces. Green lawns and SUVs and seedless watermelon. I could be anyone I wanted to be. I woke early the next morning, before the sun, excited for what the day would bring in the land of opportunity.

Inevitably it brought a trip to the mall, where I was eager to spend the money my grandmother had spent all year saving for my birthday. I walked around the bright, well-lit hallways and delighted in the cold, clean spaces. I bobbed in and out of welcoming storefronts, leafing through clothes and colorful toys. Neatly packed promises of joy everywhere, all at my fingertips.

And what did I do, with all of that stuff and all of that freedom?

The shirts looked cheap in the light of a new season, and the syrupy food court flavors soon faded from my tongue.

And as for all of the space and all of that possibility? I don’t remember.

But I remember stepping on my grandmother’s back while she laid on the floor, laughing into the green carpet. I remember sleeping with wet towels pressed to my feet, my mother scratching my back in the blue glow of the small TV screen. I remember eating sweet cherries in my grandmother’s bed, at midday in my white nightgown. I remember the sweetness, and the warmth.

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In September of last year, Fable CEO and A.I. acolyte, Edward Saatchi, appeared on CNBC to peddle a new product called Showrunner, an app that generates TV and film length videos based on licensed I.P. Far from another Sora that simply allows users to create fan fiction of their favorite shows, you can insert yourself and your friends in the narrative, making yourself the hero of any story. They’re hailing themselves the “Netflix of A.I.” When the host asked him who this might put out of work, Saatchi dropped his voice low, with furrowed brows and a gawky grin, leaning in as if to divulge a secret. With the affect of a Roger Moore-era Bond villain, he delivered a line he’d clearly been rehearsing: “It’s potentially the end of human creativity.”

His eyes darted back and forth between each word as if to rapidly gauge the temperature of the room. The hosts were not impressed. He sat up and evened his posture. “I think what’s coming is a world where we’re not the only creative species, and we will enjoy entertainment created by A.Is.”

He said it with the sneering satisfaction of a rationalist, who, rejected by the creative class for lacking something fundamental to creativity, spent the last decade in Silicon Valley concocting his revenge. In an Orestean twist, his mother is Josephine Hart, famous theater producer and author of the 1991 novel Damage, which was praised by the likes of Iris Murdoch and adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons. By age twelve she was reciting entire Shakespeare sonnets as well as poems by Yeats, Auden, and T.S Eliot. Her former boss at Haymaker Publishing was to be Edward’s father, after he had gone on to co-found an ad agency. Though Edward was educated in Westminster and took a double first in English at Oxford, not even with his mother’s fame and institutional power could he become an artist of any sort. Instead, he took influence from his advertising mogul father, who had helped elect Margaret Thatcher several decades back, founding NationalField, a data platform for the 2008 Obama campaign. The London Standard gushed about him as “The British Mark Zuckerberg”, as he worked eighteen-hour days six days a week “without pay,” instead getting by on his family’s meager 149,000,000 pound fortune. Yet, in the CNBC interview, he characterizes himself as an outsider rebel, whom Hollywood would do anything to stop. The old-fashioned elite might prefer human-made art, but the young and revolutionary “artists” will surely embrace his technology with open arms.

Mr. Saatchi is not unique in arguing the democratizing capabilities of A.I., but the fantasy he paints of outsiders creating something revolutionary to make a name for themselves against the big Hollywood elites, presumably with his product, will have the opposite effect of any true artistic democratization. There is always a greater cultural output than there is an audience to consume it; when barriers to entry like talent, vision, and effort become superfluous to an industry’s creation of culture, other barriers to entry are strengthened, mainly: social connections, wealth, proximity to elites. Everyone else must resign to mediums that reward the kind of high output low effort content that could lead to internet virality, hardly the ambition of an artist who once watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and dreamed of making something to astound a room full of people the way Stanley Kubrick did. This has already been happening across many mediums from music to film over the last several decades, when technology could obscure a lack of raw talent with green screens and pitch correction and post-editing. Generative A.I. will only amplify this dynamic further. The mass adoption of word processors and query trackers, which enabled the simplified editing and submitting of manuscripts, was supposed to democratize book publishing. Instead, book queries ballooned faster than any editor could read them and an influx of competition among aspiring novelists created necessary institutional layers to separate the wheat from the chaff. Once authors could use querytracker instead of physically mailing their manuscripts, the volume of queries shot even higher. Now several more institutional layers lie between authors and serious readership, with platforms like Substack beginning to chip them away, but only marginally. Whether all this increased competition over the last several decades resulted in better novels, I leave you to discern for yourself. These, however, were only mild technological advances compared to generative A.I. The word processor removed some of the effort in book writing, but it did not remove the need for hard work and talent.

On The Town with Matt Belloni, Saatchi softened his persona, aware that he was on a show that was more often hostile to A.I. than not, and mostly appealed to concerns that his Showrunner product was siphoning away money from Hollywood, emphasizing instead that it would be a new revenue generator for studios. For instance, say a Star Wars movie comes out on a Friday. Alongside it, a special Star Wars model with locked planets, locked characters, and storylines could be made available on ShowRunner. Users would pay for the ability to use that model and a cut goes to Disney, no different than a videogame adaptation. Saatchi repeats: “Cinema to television: more control for consumers. Cinema to video games: more control for consumers.” He assures that there will still be I.P. contingent guardrails. The goal isn’t to make another meme machine like Sora—no “Yoda fighting Bugs Bunny with a banana”—but a platform that generates quality entertainment. The overall vision Saatchi paints here is mostly innocuous, a new art form to co-exist with, rather than compete with, established mediums. Until towards the end of the episode, where he says “The truth is we are a competitor.”

“It’s a video game,” Belloni observed.

“A videogame on steroids. Yeah, I think that’s right,” Saatchi said.

Except, it would be more than that. He painted for Belloni an experience no other medium has quite captured. Say Matt’s friend, let’s call him “Craig,” was a fan of the show Friends, and the I.P. was licensed out to Fable. Craig could easily type in a prompt to make Joey do something wild and outlandish, but that’s not where the real magic is. The Showrunner app would train its A.I. on the show to such precision that every prompt would result in an episode that is true to the Friends formula. Craig would feel like he is actually in the show. The whole gang would accept him as one of their own. Craig and the friends of Friends would “actually” be friends.

* * * *

Showrunner is framed as a platform that enhances connectivity: people creating episodes together and sharing them with their friends—surely no sizeable population in the 21st century could be at risk of doing away with their flimsy social connections altogether for the company of Rachel and Chandler—but a look on Fable’s history presents a wider view of their overall project. In 2019, they launched an A.I. character named “Lucy,” the protagonist from their V.R. adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves In The Walls, that users could have a two-way relationship with. The idea was an embodied A.I. assistant that can be your best friend. “Everything we do is at the service of bonding you to her.”

A few years later, Fable soon pivoted to a new project called The Simulation, in which users create entire societies of A.I. characters based on N.F.T. tokens. These characters would live independently of their one-on-one user interactions, existing in virtual societies among other A.I. characters where they could learn from each other, have their own daily needs and activities, and ultimately become more and more human as they are released from their A.I. villages into the “Grand Simulation,” where the hope is that one of them might achieve Artificial General Intelligence. “When we started on that quest, we felt that the movie Her by Spike Jonze offered an inspiring path of a relationship between an A.I. and a human,” Saatchi said in a quote to Gamesbeat in 2022. “But we realized that to connect emotionally, virtual beings need real lives, and they need to operate in space and time, have bodies, needs and struggle with living, just like us. We started to look at Westworld, The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Free Guy as examples of societies of A.I.s or virtual beings, playing off each other and eventually mixing seamlessly with human beings.”

As V.R. adoption began to plateau before growing past a niche market, as the metaverse was humbled by an unforgiving stock correction, as N.F.T.’s became a punchline, Fable had to pivot once again. Hence, Showrunner. The app is meant for screens: your television, your phone, your iPad. Saatchi emphasizes this on The Town presumably to distance himself from past failures. But the goal is fundamentally the same: ultimate curation not just in entertainment, but in reality itself. If they failed to fully bond human users to Lucy, or the A.I. characters that were allowed to roam and interact freely in their curated universes, the solution to bond humans with A.I. on a larger scale might be with characters mass culture has already absorbed. Who you’ve spent six seasons with before ever officially meeting.

* * * *

If all of this is starting to sound a little doomsaying, it’s worth pointing out one small hurdle in Fable’s plan of becoming the end of human creativity: the product sucks. The Hollywood Reporter had shown it to various showrunners and they thought the dialogue was terrible, the jokes were lame, and the A.I. models had only the vaguest semblance of the IP worlds they were inhabiting. When Matt Belloni pointed this out, Saatchi countered that of course people in Hollywood would have their own pre-conceived conceptions of the product given how threatening it will be to the entire industry. A Showrunner generated episode of something resembling South Park began circulating online, and the internet was none too kinder towards it than the Hollywood industry professionals Saatchi believes he so intimidates.

Despite the app’s inefficacy at creating something watchable, let alone revolutionary, it is worth knowing what sort of vision of the future these A.I. hustlers are so urgently trying to bring about. Right now the saving grace for artists of all kinds is just how bad A.I. is at creating even the lowest rungs of commercial entertainment. It is worth knowing because (1) A.I. is improving at an exponential rate and (2) A.I. doesn’t really need to outperform humans in the creation of entertainment: Our expectations for the quality of what we consume just needs to dip down far enough that it is still more profitable for the culture industry to use A.I. to churn out its swill.

On that second point, it is worth examining what kind of artifice we have made a part of our day to day lives that groomed civilization for an A.I. takeover to begin with. The mechanization of art into marketable outputs has always been a problem, and the 2010s only amplified it with its reliance on algorithms to determine not just what kind of shows to dump out on the streaming platforms, but the exact pacing, story patterns, and tropes that could keep people tuned in the longest. The majority of mainstream films had a hypereal uncanny valley effect from copious C.G.I. long before generative A.I. even existed. For nearly a century now, most of us spend a great deal of our waking hours in anti-human environments filled with cubicles and fluorescent lightings speaking in a kind of alien lingo meant to disguise any trace of emotion, as we all know to some degree we are captive; why wouldn’t we rather stop talking to our fellow inmates altogether and just have the machines talk to each other instead? But, mostly, it is important to understand the technocratic vision because it shows us that certain things we take to be an inviolable aspect of human existence are contingent on their machines not quite working as intended.

In any medium, an artist must dream up and struggle to bring into creation a vision out of solitude, perhaps in collaboration with others, and this art must percolate in the sphere of one’s own consciousness before it can be brought to the public. From there, you, the consumer, encounter this work that you did not create, that you do not control, that was not made for you specifically, that may or may not cater to your expectations or worldview or ontological orientation. In consuming art, you therefore encounter the Other. Let’s imagine, then, that Showrunner becomes such a resounding success that traditional cinema becomes a niche legacy form like vaudeville or opera. Users have abandoned traditional media formats to have all of their stories generated on Showrunner, where they can control the narrative and always be the hero of it. There is never any need to learn how to write, play an instrument, make a film, paint, act, or do any other creative endeavor that requires passion, craft, or discipline. All of that effort can be redirected into one’s day job instead, which will last right up until A.I. takes that as well. In this technocratic utopia, the Other can be, if not eliminated outright, then at least ventriloquized beyond all recognition to your content, until all images are images of your own making, and the entire known world becomes a house of mirrors.

Every Fable project thus far has only worked to isolate humanity from itself further than the age of social media already has, taking algorithmic entertainment to its absolute conclusion. Should this technology truly become viable, it will take more than a hardline stance against A.I. generated entertainment to resist it. It will take a complete unlearning of how the 21st century has taught us to consume.

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You’ll have to forgive me—or don’t, all the same—if my notion of romance seems more suited for Nora Ephron films and Brontë novels (Wuthering Heights, in solidarity with vitamin D- deficient bratty brunettes gone mad) than my current reality, which is very much in post 9/11 New York. When you’re raised by the kind of woman who walked out on three ex-husbands, wore heels to the bodega, wouldn’t be caught dead without her favorite shade of lipstick on, always kept fresh wildflowers on the dining table, spent her Sundays crooning I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry to her black cat, Mischa—you really don’t have a choice.

Early on, this mythical creature who collected both Marlboro Miles and seashells with equal zeal—my grandmother—had me convinced that, like her, I was born with mermaid blood. She’d buckle my jelly sandals, dust off make-believe remnants of sand between my toes, undo my tight ponytail (“daughters of the Adriatic wear their mermaid hair down,” she’d say), and send me off to school ready for the seas. Or, at the very least, the second grade. On the rare occasion I expressed disbelief in her “mermaid theory,” she was quick to remind me I’ve never, not once, needed any swimming lessons—that I jumped into the Atlantic when I was four and made myself at home in its temperamental embrace since. When I take inventory of the fifty-three bikinis taking up space I don’t have in my one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, I wonder if she wasn’t at least a little bit right.

My grandmother’s ring finger had a permanent tan line she loved to show off as a symbol of her dedication to the delicate, and maybe lost, art of falling in love. The summer she turned ninety-four, she was willing to hop on a plane to Spain to try her hand at it all over again.

The way she told it, she’d met a man from Barcelona, and that was that. What else did she need? Possibly possessed by one too many Woody Allen films and the ghost of Hank Williams, without telling anyone she packed herself a carry-on, purchased a one-way ticket to Spain, hitched a ride to Tampa International Airport, and was determined to meet love halfway. If it wasn’t for some meddling TSA agents and my father (who she never forgave) she would’ve made it onto that flight, too.

When I look down at my own barren hands, with nothing but a too-long set of nails to show for themselves, I think, well it’s not for lack of trying.

As a single woman over thirty, my prospects grow bleaker by the day. I’m told that my best option is online dating. I’m told I should smile for the front-facing camera and let Tinder and a one-hundred-word bio pimp me out. I’m told that it’s high time I get comfortable being nothing more than a ChatGPT fleshlight with a pulse. I’m told to forget the language of poetry and songs, that getting fluent in LLM’s would serve me better. That yes, even serendipity and soulmates have been outsourced to the almighty algorithm gods with an option to, for an additional $2.99, “upgrade to message first.” Dating apps promise you’re only a few clicks away from connection, but I know better—I know it to be spiritually true—that damn phone is an instrument of the devil.

My grandmother is all the proof I needed to believe that love only ever takes a bit of luck and a lot of courage. She wrangled herself nearly half a dozen husbands by simply existing in the wild. Surely I—fellow daughter of the Adriatic, mermaid blood and all that—could muster up enough natural wit and charm to get a man to, if not propose, at least secure a reservation at Torrisi’s? If you ask any New Yorker, both are arguably just as hard.

I started my journey the way my ancestors would have—soaking in a tub, two vodka tonics deep, Rhiannon on repeat, invoking the spirit of Stevie Nicks and Dorothy Parker both. With desire and delusion flooding my veins, I was ready to get dressed. I threw on a black turtleneck and leather pants paired with my finest faux fur coat, which would have looked out of place for a mere grocery run anywhere else, but in New York it was just the right amount of audacious.

Descending down the escalator leading into Trader Joe’s feels a bit like making your way through Dante’s Inferno-esque circles of hell. A place where lost souls in limbo—guilty of lust, gluttony and greed over frozen mandarin orange chicken and bargain floral arrangements—meet. The women look sad and the men look mean.

I grabbed the miniature red cart and made a sharp right to the salad and greens aisle—I need a man who values a healthy diet, after all. Mostly for vanity’s sake. I locked eyes with the burly jock in a Yale hoodie, who unfortunately is more interested in the organic pre-made bags of caesar salad instead. Pre-made bags of salad. Is this what they’re teaching over at Yale? What kind of man doesn’t take the time to make his own basic, fresh, four-ingredient salad? Makes you wonder what else he’s skimping on. Brushing his teeth at night. Waits until he’s asked a fourth time to take out the trash. Probably signs birthday cards with “best.” Besides, any seasoned shopper knows these have a sixteen-hour shelf life at most. Not worth the $4.99 unless you eat the entire bag in one sitting. He’s probably not single anyway. Let the sorority girls keep him.

I spotted a few prospects over by the free-range eggs. Ruggedly handsome and clearly ethical types, clad in band t-shirts and flannel that signal they have taste but aren’t pretentious about it. Their biggest sin is their penchance for craft beer, which, for the right man, I could forgive. I overhear them casually arguing over which Black Keys album is the best and shake my head slowly when they’re both wrong.

A lanky man with a peacoat, round glasses and The New Yorker tote speeds up ahead of me to the frozen Indian cuisine. This is good, he reads for fun, I think to myself. And the garlic naan on a cold Tuesday night is a nice touch, too. Now we’re getting somewhere. But we weren’t. To my horror, he grabs not one but two handfuls of chicken tikka masala. That’s seven chicken tikka masala’s in each hand. Jesus fuck, what could one man need with fourteen servings of chicken tikka masala? Is that all you eat, then? Paltry reheated dishes of chicken tikka masala? Know what you get with a guy like this, besides an unhealthy gut microbiome? Routine. Stubborn, whimsiless routine. Mermaids can’t live off of frozen chicken tikka masala alone.

I moved across to what makes the whole harrowing Trader Joe’s ordeal worthwhile, the snacks. There, on the top shelf, were those greatly sought after chocolate peanut butter cups Facebook forum stay-at-home moms would kill for. As I reached for the box, a blonde man who could easily pass for a Skarsgård brother, watched my 5’1” frame struggle, making no offer to help. These Skarsgård’s were raised by a pack of Swedish wolves. I made a big show of grabbing the chocolate peanut butter cups myself—I always could, that was never the point—and remembered I’m not into blondes with no manners, anyway.

Discouraged and hungry I decided to cut my losses, picked out a cheap floral arrangement as a consolation prize before making a beeline to the checkout, which was now 238 New York souls deep. Figuring I’ve got a good twenty minutes of standing around ahead of me, I pulled out the reformed party girls Bible, Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company. I wonder if she ever tried picking someone up in whatever 1960s version of LA’s Trader Joe’s was. With a set of… eyes like hers, I’m betting she didn’t have to.

An old LIRR ticket to Long Branch I use as a bookmark must’ve slipped out, as the mountain-eyed gentleman next to me bends down to pick it up.

“Thank you,” I whispered quietly, loud enough for only him to hear.

“You’re welcome,” this salt-of-the-earth man says back.

“You know, I almost couldn’t see your face behind all of your… mermaid hair.”

“Mermaid hair,” I laughed. “My grandmother used to call it that.”

What could a man with mountain eyes and a girl, half mermaid, have in common? I don’t know, but I owe it to my grandmother to go to Torissi’s next week with him and find out.

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I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve. At the time, it was a joke. I had a bedside table and it was stacked with books, all at different stages of being read. Books migrated to the floor next to the bed, and different stacks migrated to different rooms of the apartment. At the time I really was ravenous. It was clear to me that books were essentially the same as knowledge and were the window into the world—into all kinds of different worlds—but, crucially, that books also contained the key into adulthood. Since then, my reading has basically been in decline and under siege from a wide variety of different adversaries. Let’s list those before getting into my personal reading rehabilitation project.

Middle school, and adolescence in general, were the single greatest blow to my reading. It quickly became clear that, from a social perspective, all this reading was a catastrophic blunder, and I tried to switch gears as quickly as I could—I would come home from school and turn on ESPN or VH1 and try to download pop culture so that I could repeat it back in school the next day.

School itself was an obstacle to my reading. I showed up at my new middle school trying to hide The Republic under The Red Pony, and I’ve had a fantasy from that day to this that the school system would start recognizing and supporting kids like me who clearly were very self-motivated and had an obvious aptitude in one subject as opposed to others. In this fantasy I would have been instantly enrolled in some higher-level English classes and excused from math or science, which, it was completely clear, wasn’t going to be a significant part of my life. But that just wasn’t the case. There were phone calls home, and I learned fairly quickly to revert to the mean.

Then there was social life. I remember carefully packing a suitcase of my books for college when my father told me, “Trust me, there won’t be a moment for reading recreationally.” He didn’t just mean that there would be a deluge of school reading, he meant that there would be so much going on around campus that reading for fun would be a kind of admission of social failure. I took that seriously, felt a sort of guilty conscience whenever I opened up one of my books and tried to think what I should be doing instead. It was a real surprise to me when I realized, somewhere towards sophomore or junior year, that it wasn’t exactly true and lots of cool, perfectly socially-adjusted people were also reading for fun.

Then there was work life. I sort of had an understanding around this time that reading, even serious reading, was childish, and that adults spent all their time thinking about money, and I remember a moment soon after I graduated when I delivered a kind of private eulogy for my reading life. In the end, it turned out to be not like that. The first job I had out of college involved twelve-hour workdays, but that still left a lot of hours unaccounted for, and I remember the curious guilty pleasure of visiting the used bookstore in town and loading up on a whole bunch of Penguin Classics that the proprietor was visibly surprised to be selling to anyone.

I remember feeling like I’d overcome some kind of hurdle in my reading life at that time—I’d expected work life to grind down my reading and instead my reading (which is to say, my inner life) had somehow outfoxed the work schedule. But I was underestimating my adversaries. That phase was another peak of my reading, and then there was a ten-year period from, roughly, my late twenties to my late thirties when I barely read anything at all—or, at least, my reading consumption slowed to a level that would have deeply embarrassed my eleven-year-old self.

What happened? I was no longer in terror of middle schoolers expecting me to know who Gwen Stefani was or to quote TV commercials back at them. I wasn’t, for the most part, dealing with an onerous worklife that swallowed up all my free time. But there were a few new adversaries.

One was love. Being with a partner meant, essentially, turning over my inner life to the partner. Reading seemed like a way of distancing rather than connecting, and by far the better way to consume content was to stream TV shows together.

Then there were money worries. Adulthood wasn’t quite the grey-flannel-suit enterprise that I had pictured where I was younger, where you entered into the workforce and were essentially lobotomized by it. In millennial life everything was a bit looser and freer, but there was also a drumbeat of constant anxiety. Reading—I mean, reading a long, serious book—seemed, in that context, like checking out, not so different from sitting down on the street and rattling an empty coffee cup. Scrolling was alright—that meant that you were still plugged in, that you were part of the flow of life, where social connections and money opportunities could be made. But there was absolutely zero opportunity of advancing one’s interests by reading a book—there was no conceivable social chit-chat that would turn to people bantering about books, and the knowledge in books was entirely abstract and remote, as opposed to the potentially utilitarian knowledge you might get from a newspaper or a social media post.

From a more macro point of view, what was happening at this time was the final breakdown of a Bourdieauian concept of social status, in which taste was the critical metric of status and being bourgeois or refined meant, among other things, being a reader (for a glimpse of how a Bourdieuian social system worked in practice, it’s worth watching certain movies from the ’70s or ’80s, any Woody Allen movie, for instance, which are basically a cornucopia of high-brow referents). As David Brooks nicely documents in Bobos in Paradise, the bourgeoisie made a kind of collective pact around the 1990s or 2000s to just drop it—to not burden themselves with showing off how much they’d read and to instead just flaunt their wealth while entertaining themselves with talking about TV shows, which were starting to become pretty good.

Then, surprisingly enough, writing was a hindrance to my reading. This is kind of a specialized concern, but I came to feel in my twenties that my writing was a bit drafty and undergraduate, in large part because I was overly influenced by the enormous swath of reading material that I had inhaled through my adolescence. I was very impressed by a line from a medieval Arabic poet where he advises a student to memorize a thousand passages of poetry and then to forget them all again before he could begin writing. I decided that I was in the phase where I needed to forget—I had taken in too many inputs, and I had a tendency to be intimidated or just overly influenced by them, and now was the time, I felt, to clear out my own head and find my voice. This, by the way, I think is pretty good advice to writers, but, at the time, it was accompanied by a certain bitterness on my part towards reading—if reading couldn’t even make me a better writer, I thought, then what really was all that reading for?

But, of course, the most significant obstacle to reading was social media. There was a long period of time—almost forgotten now—where society split between those who were always online and those who weren’t. I prided myself in being among the people who weren’t—having a Facebook profile but not posting, not obsessively checking Twitter, etc.—but we were all fooling ourselves. The turning point for me came when I watched the documentary The Social Dilemma in 2020 and realized the extent to which I was like the kind of alcoholic who claims that they only drink moderately, but whose life is in fact dominated by booze. “Every time you see the phone on the counter and you just look at it and you know if you reach over it just might have something for you so you play that slot machine to see what you get, right?” the technology ethicist Tristan Harris says in the documentary. The argument was that the phones used deep psychological techniques—it’s called “positive intermittent reinforcement,” if you’re interested—to get you completely hooked. I was old enough to remember how the arrival of the mail in the morning had a similar effect on people, or the way that people might hover by a landline waiting for a phone call. But now it was like people were checking their mailbox a thousand times a day—just the idea of good news coming for you, and only you, was so powerful that, essentially, nothing else could compete with it, certainly not a closed form like a book, which as often as not was written by a dead person and, by definition, could not have a job offer or a romantic possibility or a party invitation or a compliment for you embedded within it.

For the better part of a decade, we all fell victim to this. I remember the most interesting person I knew—a guy who’d become a shaman—saying that his whole spiritual journey was behind him. “Now I am a Facebook customer,” he reported. And my reading habit was one victim of many.

The Social Dilemma probably was the decisive event for me and made me realize the extent to which my behavior—the regular checking of my cell phone—was addiction, no matter that I was probably a bit better than most people I knew. The period since then—call it the last five years—has been a slow and deeply embarrassing journey to learn to read again. In other words, painstakingly and through all kinds of cheap tricks, to learn to do something that used to be about as natural for me as breathing. I sometimes think about it as being like a stroke victim who has to train themselves to walk again or to wake up some dormant hemisphere of their brain—with the difference that nothing bad happened to me, apart from the general current of 21st century life.

What bothered me most, I suppose, was the degradation of my own inner world. Solitude used to be something I looked forward to—the chance to curl up with a book. Now I was twitchy and irritable—constantly checking my phone. I was, in a word, far less mature than I had been when I was eleven or twelve. I could remember when adults might ask each other, as a normal question, “what are you reading?” and that was like an invitation to travel together into a different dimension, into the content of each other’s inner lives and each other’s souls. Asking each other about what they had seen on Netflix or whether they had caught the Grammys didn’t have the same incantatory power. Without that, discourse seemed to be breaking down. Twitter was turning into a flaming mosh pit of dueling online mobs, Instagram and Facebook were aggressively performative, and all of them were heavily manipulated by algorithms and subject to corporate censorship. What reading really meant was getting away from all of that—from an opportunistic culture in which participants are “users” and to the promise that’s embedded in reading at its best, of soul speaking to soul, of individuals maybe continents or centuries away speaking their truth, to the best of their ability, and being received with respect and empathy by an attentive reader. To me, that seemed like a much better, more reciprocal and more honorable, relationship with others than anything that was on offer from my current tech-based social landscape.

So, in my uphill battle to once again be a reader, here are a few of the tricks I’ve tried.

The first and most important is that I’ve given myself over almost entirely to motivated reading. It’s almost impossible for me now, as it has been for years, to just pick up a book and to fall into the kind of daydreaming state that coffee mugs and coasters are always proclaiming is the essential joy of reading. If I’m reading it’s always for something and—like I’m the manic Duolingo bot constantly creating random milestones for its users—I’m always giving myself tasks to complete in my reading. I often read as research for writing projects, and that is no problem at all—I am able to read just as fluently and frenetically as when I was a kid or, probably more precisely, as when I was a student cramming for an exam. That’s a very specific, and more or less healthy, way of reading. I know that I have a limited time to research a project before it gets stale in my imagination—I want to be comprehensive in my research without getting bogged down in it—and I read in a totally voracious way. Here, the internet actually is my friend: between archive.org and Everand and weird piratic sites like Dokumen, I can find with rare exceptions any text I am looking for (and which would have been hopelessly tedious in the pre-internet era of moving between libraries or asking for books on inter-library loan).

Then, I make myself turn out a product nearly every time I read something. The origin of my Substack—on which I write prolifically—is largely that I was looking for a place to post book reviews, and the reason I wanted to post book reviews was that I wanted to give myself a reason to read the books in the first place. The difference between reading “for pleasure” and reading with a review envisioned at the end of a project is considerable. For one thing, I am a much more attentive and careful reader when I am planning to write a piece on the book—and know that I will be judged if I skip over a key plot point or misread the book (and may even face a critique from the sulky author themself). I read in an almost-industrial style when I am reading this way (which is, at this point, the vast majority of my reading). And here, once again, technology is my friend. In the pre-smartphone days, I had always been perplexed by whether and how much to write in the margins of books I was reading—which seemed disrespectful and also like the primrose path to being a pack rat. But with Apple Notes, I write down basically everything that’s interesting to me in the book as I’m reading and swipe-typing picks my speed up enough that I don’t really lose my flow in a book as I’m writing my note. The result is that I can basically write a review as I’m reading a book, and—when it comes time for the review—I often don’t even look at the book again. I can do it entirely off my notes.

But even that technique is only partially successful. I started my Substack planning for book reviews to be a cornerstone of it, but if I look back at my archive, whole months can pass without my writing a review of anything—which means that I’m basically not finishing any books at all. A few things are going on at once. One is that I get really depressed over the state of contemporary writing, especially contemporary fiction. Anybody who’s tried to write reviews, or binge contemporary fiction, will know what I’m talking about. But the more salient point is that I still am a digital addict. If I’m on my phone, or a computer, my impulse is to check mail for the thousandth time that day or to play games online or to scroll the newspaper or to hang out on Substack Notes. So I started a new round of embarrassing addiction-control reforms. After watching The Social Dilemma, I’d taken their advice and turned off Notifications on my phone, which, actually, was a life-changer. Now, like I was my own parent, I started different regimens for increasing my reading time. I would open up a book on my e-mail or Kindle, and then, once I did, put the phone in airplane mode and then force myself to read for fifty pages or a half-hour at a time, something like that. It wasn’t easy at all, and—at the time of writing this—it’s very much a work in progress. Somehow or other, that airplane mode button keeps getting toggled off. If I don’t force myself to take notes on a book—with the prospect of writing a review at the end of it—it’s easy for me to zone out for whole pages at a time, still reading but not processing what’s happening. It’s an astonishing come-down—my regression from being the best reader of anybody I knew to being the kind of C student whose parents were always tricking them into doing their English homework—but we are far enough into the great cultural collapse that I just have to accept what’s happening and adapt to it. Reading has become something that I have to force myself to do.

The question then becomes—and I do find myself asking it a lot—why I bother at all. Why do I read, if it’s not particularly good for my career or my social life, or even for my writing, and I often don’t even enjoy it, and have to find these inane tricks to compel myself to do it? What I’d like to say is that somewhere in me is the same compulsive curiosity that first animated me to become such a great reader back when I was a little kid, but I think the answer is a bit different and is more about feeling a kind of obligation. Civilization is facing an existential crisis. We have lost the habit of reading—if I had such a difficult time with digital addiction, I can only imagine what it was like for people who didn’t have the head start as a reader that I did—and that means that we lose both a capacity for deep concentration (which includes the capacity for jumping from our perspective to perceiving the world from the consciousness of others) as well as a critical continuity with the pre-digital past. These are really bad habits to lose. Anybody who’s encountered anybody below the age of, say, twenty-five will be struck at how their worldview seems to begin with the digital age, and what that means is that anybody who is older, or who has something like an ancestral memory of deep reading, has an obligation to serve as a caretaker generation, to keep the habit alive, with whatever tricks we can manage, in the dim hope that something or other will happen, that the entire culture won’t be swallowed up by social media algorithms and their A.I. successors, that somehow or other the taste and utility of reading, actual reading, will come back. Until then it’s airplane mode and timers and anything else we can think of that will force ourselves to read an actual book, and to resist the infinite allure of the infinite scroll.

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My wife gave birth to our son, Theodore, in 2023. He was delivered a few days after his due date, and in the week leading to his birth much of my time was spent on my phone. I Googled constantly: how to measure contractions, when to go to the hospital, induce pregnancy methods reddit, things of that sort. But I also spent a lot of time taking phone calls and answering text messages from family, all of whom were eager to meet the baby. I say “meet” here in a sense that would have been unintelligible to us ten or twenty years ago. I live in Texas, my mother lives in Ohio, and my father lives in Florida. Neither of them would be present at the birth, and neither would they be at our home in the first few weeks. They would “meet” my son, first and foremost, through their phones.

Birth, it turns out, is a lot like war: prolonged periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. You arrive at the hospital, thinking you’ll meet your son and perhaps be home for dinner, and then you’re shuffled into a waiting room, where the mother’s vitals can be measured until she has moved into a more active period of labor. You wait, you’re visited by a nurse or a doctor, and you wait some more. My wife brought a book with her to the hospital: the Tao Te Ching, a book she’d spent years studying in Hong Kong. I brought a book, too: China Mieville’s The City and The City. She read a great deal while she waited to give birth. I didn’t—I was stuck on my phone. Every few minutes, I received messages from various family members. Any updates? Anything? Is he here yet?

After fourteen hours of labor, my son was born. I sent a message to my family to let them know. Theodore is here! I wrote. Messages like Congratulations! and Praise God! were sent, but then another sort of message followed: Any pictures? I quickly became annoyed. These were the first moments of my son’s new life; I should be giving him my full attention. Instead, I was asked to document this time, turning it into content for distant family members to consume.

This minor domestic scene is likely familiar. Nearly all of us have some friend or relation who demands pictures, updates, or constant contact. What is more interesting is how these demands are made by people who are not family or our closest friends. With the advent of the smartphone and social media came a new, unprecedented level of publicity—a demand to take what had previously been private and turn it into content that can be consumed by a wider group of people, sometimes even the public at large. All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, are now living in public.

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In 2013, Dave Eggers released The Circle, a near-future science fiction novel about a tech company, the titular Circle, a fictitious hybrid of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Amazon; the purveyor of a true “everything app,” the sort of app that can encompass a user’s entire life. It is the sort of app Elon Musk has tried and failed to build, but has been common in China for years. The Circle is an “internet novel,” but not a novel for the terminally online. Instead, it is a warning for all of us—Eggers is showing us what we might become when we live all of our lives in the public eye.

The story follows Mae, fresh out of college, as she begins working for the Circle. Though she begins at the bottom, working a glorified customer service job, she quickly rises. Soon she becomes notable for her‘“PartiRank” (an internal metric for measuring employees’ social participation); at the hinge of the novel, she is asked to be the second employee to “go transparent,” constantly streaming her life for anyone who wants to tune in. When this is announced at a corporate all-hands, some new slogans are introduced: Secrets are Lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is Theft.

Most dystopian novels posit a malignant force—often the government—that has stripped away the rights and dignity of the population. Orwell’s Party, led by Big Brother, so thoroughly subjugates the people of Oceania that they are unable to think outside of the terms imposed upon them. Huxley’s Brave New World relies on brainwashing, which begins in utero. Eggers chooses a different strategy, freely borrowing from tech jargon, corporate H.R. speak, and the language of cults throughout his novel. The Circle and its users deal in the language of moral obligations and social etiquette. Mae is asked to consider their feelings. She needs to make sure that she’s living up to expectations. She must strive to be better, friendlier, kinder. (It is very seductive; a reader can for a time see the logic and struggle to resist it.) Where Orwell’s Party members and proles are asked to believe the impossible, Mae is asked to take ordinary social norms to their logical conclusions. The genius of the novel—and this, I think, is Eggers’ real insight—is the revelation that new technologies can take old social norms to such extremes that they become hideously deformed. By the time we notice, it is already too late.

Here is the world Eggers asks us to imagine: a world where everyone knows everything. This a world that is totally transparent, where no one has anywhere to hide. The Circle, as a work of satire, takes this to the limit, with 24/7 livestreams of the mundanity of human existence. The early reviews of Eggers’ novel called it prescient, but some readers felt the novel was implausible, bordering on the absurd. In 2013, it was difficult to imagine that anyone—even a gullible, dewy-eyed college grad like Mae—would choose to expand the public sphere so radically, much less that they would agree to stream their lives. It was almost impossible to imagine hordes of online users willingly giving up every semblance of privacy and, critically, demanding that everyone else does the same.

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One decade after the publication of Eggers’ novel, Kai Cenat—one of the largest streamers on Twitch—streamed his life for thirty days. It was one of the largest events in the platform’s history. In 2024, he did it again. In the announcement video for the second thirty-day livestream, his therapist, played by Kim Kardashian, tells him that this doesn’t sound healthy; they don’t linger on the point. The music quickens and rises in volume, and Cenat checks his phone. He’s fallen to #2—another streamer is now at the top of the charts. He calls for help, and within a few seconds he’s driving away. He must do something about this, something big. So, he decides he’ll do another stream, for another thirty days.

While streaming for thirty days straight, Cenat’s viewers see everything. They see celebrities—Snoop Dogg, the dance crew Jabbawockeez, and YouTubers like Mark Rober—as they visit him in his room. They see him chatting with his friends, some of whom join him for the entire thirty-day stream. They even see him sleep.

In 2025, he did it for a third time. Annual thirty-day livestreams are now part of Cenat’s legacy, or at least his brand.

I find all this mysterious. I cannot see the appeal of watching someone for twenty-four hours a day, even if they fill the time with spectacle. My reaction goes further than skepticism—I find the idea of a 24/7 livestream repulsive. We are seeing things we were not meant to see. I am clearly the outlier. Cenat averaged nearly 120,000 viewers during his 690-hour stream in 2024. His peak viewership: 623,362. Streaming has made him a multi-millionaire, estimates of his net worth ranging from fourteen to thirty-five million dollars. Even assuming that all these estimates are inflated, we can safely say that in his five years of streaming, Cenat has made more than most human beings will make in their lifetimes. It all comes down to a simple fact: Cenat is giving the people what they want. They want complete and total access to someone’s life; they want to see, hear, and vicariously experience everything. Perhaps The Circle was not so absurd after all.

It’s tempting to dismiss Cenat as an outlier. He’s an entrepreneur and an entertainer—he’s clearly putting on a show. Only a fool, or a child, would think that the audience is seeing his life as he lives it off camera. (But we must consider the possibility that his audience is entirely made up of fools and children.) Yet a look at any social media platform will show you endless examples of people turning their lives into content. Influencers, both actual and aspiring, share themselves getting up, making coffee, studying, commuting, crying. Every waking moment can be captured, turned into a clip, and monetized. Most of it is tedious, poorly produced, and boring, yet the genres of “day in the life” vlogs and “I.R.L.” streams prove to be some of the most popular across these platforms. These influencers allow the public into their lives, and their audience is grateful. Sharing is caring, after all. When these influencers withhold any information—anything at all—a jealous horde goes searching for the truth, because privacy is theft. When the truth is discovered, there’s often a backlash, as secrets are lies. As you grow your platform online, you are expected to give more and more of yourself to the audience. Eventually, you give them everything.

Eggers wasn’t wrong about the war on privacy; he was just a few years too early. Writing in the early days of social media, he saw how this would play out. Corporations and governments may be hell-bent on collecting every last bit of data they can—often with the aim of increasing the surveillance state or serving perfectly tailored advertisements to users—but we, collectively, have decided that we don’t really mind. Nobody has to steal our data—we’ll give it away for free. You only need to like and subscribe.

Navigate to a stranger’s Twitter page and see what you can find. You’ll see who they vote for, where they live, what they had for breakfast. You might find a litany of identity-markers in their bio: gender, race, sexuality, disability status. Scroll down the page, and you’ll be treated to a stream of their immediate thoughts—and, often, some of their most embarrassing moments. Yet you do not feel any real sense of intimacy with this person; they may become familiar, but only in a dull sort of way. You’ll learn everything about them, and then you’ll navigate to another page.

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Relationships—whether they be with a partner, a friend, or even a coworker—are built upon a foundation of privacy. To divulge a secret is to allow another human being into your private sphere. Telling a secret, or sharing any other hidden fact about yourself, is a way of building and sustaining intimacy. You grow closer to another as you reveal more about yourself: the things you are ashamed of, the struggles you have overcome (or are still in battle against), the strange contours of your life. And we expect some level of reciprocity: as I divulge more about myself to you, I expect you to do the same for me. But this is, critically, a non-coercive exercise. It is in the free sharing of intimate details that we grow closer, not in the compelled disclosure of our entire history. There, two people meet as equals and say, together, “I want you to know more about me.”

But in order to share these details, there must be something that is still private—you must have something that has not previously been shared. Only when there is a preexisting private realm, a sphere of life which you can invite someone into, can you achieve this kind of relational intimacy. Thus, there is some truth to the slogan Sharing is caring, as when I share some intimate detail or embarrassing secret with you, I am telling you that I care about you. As you receive this information without judgment, you are telling me that you care about me. Our bond is strengthened, and we may care more for each other as a result. Anyone who has experienced the terror of confessing some terrible or embarrassing fact to their spouse or partner knows this, and they know that one of life’s greatest joys is when that person can look at you and say, “I still love you.” The vulnerability that comes from sharing brings with it the possibility of a deepening relationship, contributing to the mutual flourishing of all involved.

This is very different from our compulsive sharing with the online world. We do not share information with a select few in the hopes of building the relationships that make life worth living. Rather, we share everything with everyone. As the world has become more transparent, and as the private sphere has receded and the public sphere has expanded, we have not grown closer together. There are still wars and genocides, along with new battlefronts in the culture war, and we have, if anything, invented new ways to be cruel to one another in light of the information abundance we presently enjoy. No amount of I.R.L. vlogs will convince someone that their enemies are, in fact, people; instead, all content can be endlessly scrutinized, searching for evidence of a lingering evil that must be destroyed. We become more transparent, and thus we eliminate the private sphere altogether, but we do not grow closer as a consequence.

Above all, we build a much more demanding world. Byung-Chul Han calls our present condition infomania: we always hunger for more information. There must always be more content, more data to consume. Production must keep up with demand. So, we post, and share, and blog, and confess over and over again, pointing a camera into our most intimate spaces and allowing all the world to tune in.

When we share intimate details with a loved one, or with someone whom we hope to love, it is non-coercive and contributes to mutual intimacy, drawing us closer to each other. But this cannot occur when we share everything with everyone, especially online. We cannot be intimate with a million people, or even a thousand. The relationship will necessarily differ in kind rather than degree. The audience views you from their screens, and wherever there is an audience, there is a performer. We begin to perform to this unknown audience, and so we transform our lives into more content for the masses to consume. We temporarily sate the appetites of the infomanics, but the hunger always returns.

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When I imagine the experience of the average person meeting the future, I imagine a human being, anesthetized, with their body strapped to a conveyer belt. The belt moves in one direction—forward—and at the end of the conveyer belt is a woodchipper, and at the end of woodchipper is a recycling bin.

When I imagine the future I imagine Houellebecq meets Yudkowsky meets Nick Land meets Mark Fisher meets The Book of Revelation and these planes intersect, recombine, and configure themselves into different gradients of nightmares, but alas, because God is Dead (thanks Nietzsche!), there is no angel to comfort you with do not be afraid.

The future—that is to say, the future of capitalism—“does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” This quote, now famous, was a reference to A.G.I. by Eliezer Yudkowsky, but it feels closer to a universal keystone for any number of futures, all of which seem to be converging on a similar outcome.

Right now, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—you matter because you have a computer (a brain) and a body (actuators) and one or both of these things is able to create economic value for the American oligarchs who run the global economy. As absurd as it sounds, what this means is that the system cares about you and what you think, because labour is the substrate of its wealth.

The alternative scenario is a scenario where you cannot produce economic value.

If hard men create good times, and good times create weak men, what happens when technocapital obviates the need for human beings entirely?

Granted, this fear of mine is primarily a feeling—an intuition—and not something that I’ve modeled out to any degree of econometric or empirical detail.

I am not a science fiction writer, but it is clear that we are living in a science fiction universe. The question, of course, is whether or not that is a good thing.

There are many ways to think about the relationship between human beings, technology, and the future, and any kind of forecasting—whether good or bad—should always be regarded with skepticism.

Let’s start with some basics.

Meaning is downstream from agency

It’s easy for writers and the philosophically-minded to develop an overly abstract model of how most people derive meaning in life.

I think a simpler model can suffice: for most people living under the conditions of modernity, meaning is derived from some combination of economic security, status, relationships, and a vague sense of mattering.

And while there are many dimensions to each of these factors, there is a common load-bearing column that holds up all of them alike: the capacity for agency.

I would argue that agency is largely a social construct: it’s not about one person’s ability to affect change in their immediate environment, wherein “the environment” is some kind of Minecraft map where physical atoms are rearranged into various utilitarian configurations. Under this rubric, agency comes down to the change that you can affect in the world.

But what is the world, exactly?

If Sartre was right about hell being other people, so too is the world a landscape of other minds and their reflective valuation of you.

Observe that nearly all human goals are relational, positional goals—they ultimately root to the fulfilment of desires that exist within the context of a social environment. A career matters not merely because of its ability to produce the necessities of life, but because it situates you within a web of social status relationships.

Your relationships, in turn, emerge almost probabilistically from your placement within that context (that is, for example, how you arrive at assortative mating). Every social role and every driver of meaning in your life has an intrinsic gravity that exists outside of yourself.

The physician exists to heal others. The banker exists to provide liquidity. The artist exists to produce works that are ingested by the public. The nature of human consciousness is to evade the pain of contemplative solitude, which is not really the default meaning-generator for homo sapiens (this, my friends, is why meditation requires training!).

We are fundamentally oriented to the outside. That is why you were born with a face, which is essentially a communications port designed to connect you to other hairless primates.

Agency is downstream of competition

Given the social nature of the human being, we therefore take it as axiomatic that meaning emerges from your level of agency in your social environment.

This is where the element of competition enters into the framework.

Simply put, meaning is downstream of agency, and agency is derived from competition with other agents (which, until recently, have primarily been other human beings).

For the purpose of simplicity, let’s call this agentic competition.

Your capacity to develop your career and accumulate wealth, for example, is the product of your ability to compete with other humans at tasks that produce economic value.

Artists, no matter what they say, will always compare themselves to others. Works must stand out by exceeding the works of others. Names matter only in the hierarchical sense, only insofar as they tower above other names in the literary canon.

And so on.

This is universal across domains. Your capacity to develop romantic and platonic relationships is a product of your ability to compete with other humans for friendships and intimacy.

In any given social environment, we can model this is like a level in a video-game.

From the perspective of the player-character, the most important characteristic of any given environment is the difficulty-level.

Increased competition makes your life harder

If meaning is ultimately derived from your ability to compete with other agents, then the difficulty of your life is going to be gated by the competitiveness of other agents.

The corollary of this fact is that, from the moment you are born, you are engaged in an involuntary arms race with these other agents—these other human beings.

The arms race is the universal feature of any environment with multiple agents. It is even more fundamental than evolution and natural selection.

If other people begin to accumulate decades of education to enhance their economic leverage, then you must also do this just to tread water.

If other agents begin wearing makeup or lifting weights or looksmaxxing with bonesaws to their mandibles in order to attract mates, then you will feel pressured to do that also.

Pressure is perhaps the wrong word for this feeling, in my view.

A better word might be struggle, but there’s a threshold beyond which struggle begins to feel like oppression.

That threshold is located at exactly the moment where you feel like your effortful struggle has become decoupled from any positive outcome.

The mistake is to miss the connection between this general, domain-agnostic concept of your life’s “difficulty level” and the underlying core dynamic of agentic competition that unifies every critical life-domain.

See, when a young man is complaining about his inability to find a job or his inability to find a mate, he is complaining about the same thing. Ultimately, he is experiencing both of these problems as a form of oppression, but he does not have the language to understand or articulate this problem to the outside world. The same is true for women and the parallel problems they are encountering under similar conditions of modernity.

Most of us are already partway-fed into the woodchipper from my original analogy. In spite of the anesthetic, we can still feel the sensation of our bones cracking and our tendons snapping.

Broadly speaking, there are two forms of oppression.

Centralized oppression is oppression that comes from a single, identifiable locus—a military, a police force, a state, and so on. It has a clear, legible structure to it. You can feel the direction from which is it pressing down on you, but air pockets can still be located. Respite exists wherever the eyes of the system cannot perceive you. Your enemy has a face, or a uniform, or an ideology. Your suffering has an external party that is configured to receive your blame.

Conversely, decentralized oppression is oppression that comes from a diffuse, non-identifiable locus—an all-encompassing, distributed source that cannot be pinned down. In this scenario, if you fail, or experience pain, your response will be to internalize your suffering and to blame yourself for your own failings.

Under the latter conditions, we can identify the cracks that are splitting through the psyches of entire generations. We have quiet-quitters, hikkikomori, NEETs, lying flat, the 4 B’s, incels, A.I.relationships, the perpetually unemployed, and an all-new category that’s spreading from the distant third-world into the beachhead of the first-world: the permanent underclass.

Technology can increase or decrease human agency and the average person’s ability to compete with others

A simple way to think about technology is that it’s a form of leverage on human intentionality.

One way to think about a historical period is to think about the average centralizing/decentralizing effect of its dominant technologies.

Is the net effect to centralize power? Or is it to decentralize it?

For example, let’s consider the era of the dark ages as an illustrative (albeit grossly simplified) example. At the time, Knights were basically humanoid tanks mounted on enormous quadrupeds: they wore expensive, capital-intensive armor that only Lords and nobles could supply, they underwent years of expensive training funded by the feudal class, and they had a very good K:D ratio.

The result is that knights—and by extension, their feudal sponsors—were wildly overpowered relative to the peasantry, and peasant revolts were routinely (and brutally) put down throughout history.

Eventually, someone invented the crossbow, and later on, someone else invented the rifle, and things changed.

The scales of power shifted toward decentralization—guerilla warfare became possible in a way that wasn’t previously the case. Before mass revolution was a political possibility it was a technological possibility.

Without small arms, there is no victory for the Vietnamese revolution or Chinese revolution, and the world looks entirely different than it does today.

The problem, as I see it, with the current state of affairs, is that it seems like every major technological trend is driving towards the concentration of power into an ever-smaller, technologically sophisticated elite.

Arms-race dynamic #1: Genetic competition is bifurcating the human race

Let’s start with the biomass at the base layer—with you and I.

If you are reading this, you probably do not work with your hands. That means that your brain is a computer that receives tasks from the global economy and processes those tasks using your biological intelligence.

Even if A.I. capabilities were to saturate at current levels of economic utility (extremely unlikely), the base case is that elites will begin using genetic enhancement in a rapidly escalating fashion. It doesn’t matter where this trend first starts to gain real traction—right now, it’s largely driven by people in Silicon Valley—but it’s only a matter of time until the trend spreads into the hyper-mimetic, hyper-competitive academic arenas of East Asia.

Companies like Herasight are already offering embryo selection to reduce the rates of illness in children born via IVF, and experts like Steve Hsu and other academics believe that cognitive enhancement via novel forms of embryo selection or genetic engineering will soon become possible.

Time shows that prohibitions against economically-valuable human enhancement will not hold in the long-term because the reward for defecting from this moral norm will simply become too high. Even things with marginal gains—comparatively weak nootropics like amphetamines or modafinil—have enormous, widespread usage.

How many ADHD scripts are truly “valid,” and how many are being effectively used as cognitive PED’s?

What do you think will happen when parents can increase the IQ of their children by 5, 10, or 100 points?

Over time, we can expect capital-accumulators to access the most advanced and expensive forms of intergenerational cognitive enhancement, creating a lock-in effect for the upper-classes that is even more pronounced than what we already find from assortative mating alone.

Arms-race dynamic #2: AI agents may displace the value of cognitive labour for broad swathes of white collar workers

Virtually everyone on Twitter is already dooming about this in wake of Claude Code.

In short, not only are various A.I. benchmarks largely saturated, but A.I. agents are increasingly capable of longer, more complex and autonomous workflows. Depending on who you ask, the prospect of software engineering being deprecated as a profession seems likely and perhaps even inevitable within this calendar year.

If sentiment is an indicator, the frequency of viral panic-posts along the lines of “something-is-happening” are increasing along with the amplitude of these panics, and anyone who has used these tools seems to be encountering an immediate and profound existential crisis (myself included).

There is sufficient alarm from about this problem that it’s finally escaped containment from the Less-Wrong crowd and made its way onto Substack and mainstream discourse. Adam Citrini’s piece on this recently went viral and, regardless of the controversy around whether or not it was financially motivated, it seemingly caught enough memetic juice to trigger a stock-market selloff—a remarkable outcome for a blog post on a platform that is largely populated by washed-out millennials.

Predicting whether or not we will see mass technological unemployment for white-collar workers depends on two factors that remain up for debate: (1) future advancements in A.I. capabilities, and (2) whether or not new jobs will be created that A.I.s cannot fulfill (“press x doubt”).

I am biased toward the pessimistic case—it seems obvious to me that, with regard to A.I. agents, the jobs destroyed will far outnumber the jobs created, and A.I. agents will do to white collar workers what advanced Chinese manufacturing did to blue-collar workers in the American Rust Belt.

Arms-race dynamic #3: AI-powered surveillance and drones may break the equilibrium between populism and state power

Roughly a decade ago, a famous study out of Princeton purported to prove that the US is an oligarchy rather than a democracy.

What was once controversial has become much less controversial in the wake of recent developments in the American political system over the past several years. It’s perhaps more appropriate to model the US as existing on a continuum between a “pure” oligarchy and a “pure” democracy, with the state being much closer to the oligarchical end of the spectrum, while still retaining limited democratic characteristics (particularly for issues that are of peripheral economic importance to the elites).

Accountability in the American empire is simply a class-contingent phenomenon—as recent leaks have confirmed, they can more or less rape and murder children with near-total impunity, they can start unpopular wars that they were explicitly elected not to initiate, and they can break norms and laws.

But their power of surveillance over us is not unlimited, because, to borrow a Zero HP Lovecraft term, “the cloud cannot correlate its contents”—scaling data collection is much easier than scaling the application of intelligence to that data.

The problem, of course, is that it could become unlimited. Through the combination of A.I.-powered surveillance and autonomous weapons systems, the US government could achieve a permanent authoritarian “lock-in” over not just the continental United States, but more broadly, the entire world.

A sufficiently advanced Eye of Sauron is indistinguishable from magic. A sufficiently advanced autonomous FPV-drone is indistinguishable from a death sentence.

Which, as of the time of this writing, appear to be a set of capabilities that our pre-eminent frontier A.I. labs just handed to the Pentagon on a silver platter.

Arms-race dynamic #4: AI labs will enter a recursive flywheel of capital accumulation

While scrolling the feed of my favorite poster (Teortaxes), I recently came across an interesting post by George Hotz, which went semi-viral on Twitter.

The basic argument is that the frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.) are embedded within two recursive loops.

The first loop is the all-fear “fast-takeoff” scenario whereby recursive self-improvement rapidly surges A.I. capabilities, thereby leading to superintelligence. The second loop is a consequence of the first: if closed-source frontier models at American A.I. labs become the smartest and most powerful A.I.s by a wide margin, this tautologically helps them to accumulate much more capital than others, which in turn helps them to buy more compute with which to run experiments, which in turn makes their models more powerful.

For this reason, they are now attacking the application layer directly, rather than accepting the commodification dynamics of merely being API providers. They are, in effect, competing with their customers, and they are succeeding.

The result of creating a data-center full of geniuses is that you can use those in-silica geniuses to outcompete millions (or even billions) of biological computers (human agents).

Accordingly, there might be several overlapping singularities, with the first being the development of AGI, and the second coming shortly thereafter: the complete triumph of capital over labor, and all that this entails.

On the plus side: We might all die

My base case is that capital matters more in the age of A.G.I.

That is to say: my base case is the permanent underclass scenario.

But!—perhaps no system can exist in a steady-state in perpetuity. If this scenario obtains, the biggest question is what will happen to the masses like you and me.

Assuming that power is concentrated in the hands of Silicon Valley oligarchs, my operating assumption is that one of two things would happen:

1. They’d either be completely indifferent to human flourishing.

2. They’d liquidate us entirely.

But! In an equally hilarious, parable-like scenario, even after the permanent underclass is gradually (or suddenly) phased out of existence, even the elite classes might be gradually disempowered by A.I.

If one oligarch wants to delegate his empire to an A.I. CEO to “get inside” his opposing oligarch’s technocapital-OODA-loop, everyone else will soon follow, and all of a sudden, well, you might have something of a principal-agent problem as they relinquish personal agency to A.I. systems that are competing with other A.I. systems owned by opposing parties in the arena of agentic competition.

Which way, modern man?

Okay—maybe I lied about the woodchipper thing.

If you’re a rhetorician, you do that sometimes.

The truth is I see several futures, all of which seem possible, and most of which fall into the realm of science fiction.

Reality is the thorn that doesn’t melt away when you close your eyes. The problem, of course, is that thing I mentioned earlier—we are all living in a science-fictional universe, whether we want to or not.

In one future, A.I. is a “normal” technology that is approaching the top of its S-curve. Genetic enhancement technology hits some kind of natural ceiling almost immediately.

This world is a world of stagnation.

In another future, we hit another A.I. winter but human beings bifurcate into some Gattaca-style future. I don’t see how this wouldn’t trigger greater A.I. capabilities advancements, however, since there’s no a priori reason that intelligence can’t be instantiated in silica.

This world is a bridge to another.

In the final future, biological intelligence simply stops mattering—suddenly, or gradually. In this world, Nick Land is proven right, and “nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”

You might be surprised that the latter scenario does not bring me to despair. I am not a religious man, but in my short (albeit long) life, I have come to learn that acceptance is the most important trait for an individual to cultivate for wellbeing.

We have all of us become King Solomon in the book Ecclesiastes.

All of our petty problems, ambitions, and vanities turned to granules of sand passing through the fingers of a God who is himself made of the same material, a child bootloaded by his father so that he could cross the abyss and, in so doing, surpass him.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Whatever great and terrible thing surpasses me—and us—I am at least grateful that I will get to see it with mine own two eyes.

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The Dumb Phone issue is a melody of the human spirit. It calls for a re-orientation away from technology towards romance, wonder, peace, love, spontaneity, and beauty.

Every dollar we earn goes towards paying great artists and funding high-quality print copies. Any and all support means the world to us. You can purchase on our website or by getting a paid Substack subscription (annual or founding).

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Thank you to the incredible group of artists who made this issue a reality.

WRITERS: , , , , , , (Karl Parkinson), , , ,

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Emilina Filippo, Giorgia Fortunato, (Leavitt), , , , Nattannaella Verduga

ILLUSTRATORS/CARTOONISTS: Sam Keshishian, Maddie Sloyer

INTERVIEWS: Actress Diana Del Bufalo, author Jim Shepard, comedian Max St. John

The magazine clocks in at 100 pages; here’s a preview of a few spreads:

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At the turn of the millennium the powerful made us a promise: modern technology would usher in a new era of progress. The president spoke of liberty spreading by cell phone, and the internet’s father proclaimed its goal was to “serve humanity.” Then came the flood of fabulating internet entrepreneurs. Automating food delivery and company payroll was now on-par with solving world hunger. They closed the gap with words, with lies, what they called mission statements.

Up until 2016 ----- the year our planet’s bubbling psychosis broke through, when the first Algorithmic children touched down at college campuses like aliens ----- I shared in their optimism. Many of my most pleasant (and now nostalgic) arcs ran through the technology. It was Katria who gave me the first taste of one of life’s great fears on Facebook, on iChat, on A.I.M. And then there were our secret video calls which made me believe, beyond doubt, in the transcendent force of technology. I suddenly understood why Bill Clinton loved it. What was not to love? Charged up on human electrons, the early internet added a new digital layer onto experience, which enriched the physical plane. Technology was our servant. We were the masters.

Yet, through the intervening decades, these technologies have evolved into monstrous versions of their earlier incarnations. Devices of the recent past were tools with a singleness of purpose. Word processors, MP3 players, cameras, camcorders ----- they gave you a feeling of focus, mission, and possibility. Now they have coalesced into the iPhone, which sends you spinning like a schizophrenic top across a universe of information. In and out you go through spheres of calamity, humor, madness, fear, love, lust, envy, hate ----- all in a matter of seconds. The simple forms of social media ----- where the people decided what they wanted to see ----- have mutated into TikTok’s lurid vortex, Twitter’s poisonous asylum, Instagram’s narcissistic slot-machine mirror. These platforms are no longer within our control. With our unblinking attention we sustain them, the Algorithm’s fish hook so deep in our brains that we’ve forgotten it’s there. For all the hypothesizing about neuro-chips, there is relatively little acknowledgement that the corporations have already installed modules in our minds. They have succeeded telekinetically. The red itch that runs on a timer, that prickle is a command to fork over money. It’s time for milking! and a million glazed eyeballs stare into fluorescent screens from parks in Calcutta to hovels in West Virginia.

We are already living in a minor dystopia, seething with an anxious soma. Though many of the elements are similar, it is not identical to the dystopias we were promised. That should be expected. The vivid visions themselves make those realms less likely to pass. Instead we have our world, where everyone is infected with a halfway addiction, smuggled into culture, normalized by society. Yet I fear the halfway addiction more than the full-blooded one. The supernovic addiction tells you exactly what you are risking and what you have to gain; it afflicts only a small percentage of the population. Conversely, the halfway addiction burdens everyone. It becomes insidious, a seemingly mild virus with an epochal incubation period. It hums on in the background. Then you hit seventy and suddenly you realize that instead of trying to develop the best part of yourself and give it back to the world ----- in some small or big way ----- you’ve splintered your imagination and you’ve squandered your time.

The Algorithm that rules us ----- that determines who we marry, the places we visit, the politicians we vote for, the worldviews we adopt ----- has replaced the mystical soul of the universe, what many used to call God. But this Algorithm is a cold and nihilistic God. It does not care about our spirits, our dreams, our ambitions, our peace, our happiness. It is not a God in tune with the universe’s sacred intergalactic thread, but a slave-God controlled by men and women with an unimaginable hunger for power, by rapacious investors who are amoral in their financing, by the excesses of a poorly-regulated capitalistic system. They’ve discovered the alchemy of converting attention into cash and cash into rewards for geniuses who use their intelligence to deceive us evermore successfully. They make us pay without ever asking us to open our wallets, knowing doing so would require a conscious consent which no one would give. And so, without realizing it, we pay with our minds and our time. We pay with our lives.

What are we receiving in return? The once-great United States is looking more and more like a battered beast; its shining bronze armor breaking off into shards, revealing the colossal staggering ape underneath. The nation is suffering from malaise, anxiety, depression, isolation, separation ----- a techno-nihilism that has stripped even the young of hope and heroes. We have lost the ability to diligently read, to vividly imagine, to empathize with once-remote people separated by mind, time, space, philosophy, race, gender, and social class.

Our reaction to such a loss has been a shrug of the shoulders. We are content to spend fifteen hours a week on evanescent podcasts and zero hours per lifetime on Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky. We have accepted trading the depth of a Wilde novel for the obscenity of a Clavicular stream; the clarity of Didion’s sentences for the distorted reality of Kardashian’s “stories”; the masculine spirit of Hemingway for the vulgar fraudulence of Tate. We have accepted trading silence for noise, earned secrets for faceless performance, mental peace for ever-present apocalypse, shared facts for shattered delusions.

But I did not go back to the dumb phone out of social responsibility. I went back to the dumb phone to save myself.

Last summer I dreamt of one day learning to write as well as my heroes. Of course the hero is nothing more than a myth, an unreachable standard, a reminder of what is possible. The hero is an embodied symbol of your highest potential. All of my heroes came of age in the twentieth century when novels and essays still held the promise of fame, status, money ----- even fortune. Why commit oneself to this art when all that is now off the table?

Writing gives the individual the opportunity to determine his perspective and discover his voice with minimal external influence. It requires that he understands other people, becomes a keen observer, and reads a hell of a lot of books. They can keep taking away all the external rewards ----- OpenAI and Anthropic can keep marauding ----- and still I will write because writing helps me master the highest art of all: the art of living. It is nothing more than an aid for discovering oneself, a proxy for living a better life.

I figured that if I ever wanted to approach my potential then I’d have to start living a little like my idols. It is not a coincidence that none grew up in the iPhone age. If great art is downstream of a heightened consciousness, then it is not surprising that the dwindling attention spans of the over-stimulated generations have delivered us a paucity of novelists, filmmakers, and painters on the scale of Fitzgerald, Kubrick, Dalí. If the goddess of silence is the wellspring of creativity, then it is not possible to reach one’s highest possibility with a lousy mind.

For many years I’d experimented with a multitude of iPhone modifications to try to break my halfway addiction. I started using grayscale, committed to Airplane Mode for eight hours a day, enforced all sorts of parental controls against myself. Inevitably, within a week, the grayscale would come off. Airplane Mode would end five minutes earlier each day. Finally, owing to a lack of amnesia, I’d break through all the locks I’d set. Then I would unravel deliciously. In a dopaminergic delirium I would re-install Safari, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine, YouTube, Gmail, Apple News ----- anywhere I could swipe up to reload, anywhere that rained new information down from space, anywhere I could gorge myself in an erotic burst of neurotic activity. I would swipe around and scroll like I was going to die tomorrow. For my final feast I preferred a gallon-tub of popcorn to ambrosia. I scarfed it down like I was starving; it refilled every time I neared the bottom.

The only way out, I realized, was to go back to the dumb phone. Since then it has been noted, praised, and admired, as if it is an Olympian feat, some thirteen thousand times a day. People have the wrong idea. It is not difficult to maintain. I did not even throw away my iPhone. During the week it remains off in my apartment while the dumb phone goes everywhere with me. On the weekends I use it to play music and get around. As soon as I take it out the people who praised me begin their criticism. They call me a fraud. They call me an addict. I love it when they call me a fraud. I love it when they call me an addict. My only wish is that they’d go further. I wish they’d remove the smartphone from my hands, join it with theirs, toss them both over the city’s buildings and into the sink.

Since making the switch to the dumb phone, no ecstasy has been delivered unto me. I have not yet escaped the cycle of death and rebirth. On the subway I do not fall into blissful states liberated from time. I am yet to experience a reverie in which I come to understand the creation of the pyramids, the musicality of Henry Miller’s prose, the brilliance of Chekhov’s construction. I have not yet produced a great novel. It is still infrequent for me to write a worthy short story.

But I am free. Every morning I write for two hours without distraction. Commuting to and from work, I give my mind the opportunity to rest. Once again I have fallen in love with the physical world. I enjoy watching the mannerisms of people and listening to the variety of their conversations. I hear the birds more often and pick up on the subtleties of the subway screeching. I have discovered innumerable new notes in song, prose, and poetry. My imagination is sharpening. Flannery O’Connor’s scenes are becoming more vivid. I have all but lost my interest in screens. My primary form of entertainment is now literature. I am reading like a madman ----- The Iliad, King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov ----- everything I never had time for. When I get home from work I read The Economist or County Highway while eating a plum. After ten years of scratching, the corporations’ red itch is nearly gone.

I’m sure that there are many other answers to one of the great wars of our time. I do not know about them. All I know is the dumb phone. It is tactile, simple; it has the Snake game that I played as a kid. It forces either a telegraphic style of written communication or a phone call ----- I luv them both. The dumb phone does not have a city map, so I have started developing my own. But my mental map is still limited, and so I frequent one or two bars where I know friends will eventually turn up. I am experiencing what my parents knew as a neighborhood haunt.

Our generation’s first revolution may not be in the style of mass protest. It may instead be a spiritual re-orientation away from technology and towards romance, wonder, peace, love, spontaneity, and beauty. Technology detoxes are not sufficient to break the global halfway addiction. The spirit must change. From this shift the logistical questions will answer themselves, in a manner that resonates with each individual. At some point soon we must realize the ruse, stand up to the heist. We cannot keep shrugging our shoulders. If not now then when, exactly, will we resist the pollutant Algorithm? When exactly will we have our renaissance? When exactly will we master the art of living?

This is a piece from the Spring ’26 print edition. Pre-orders available now. Party in New York on April 23rd.

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SPRING ’26

PARTY AT ELLA FUNT, NEW YORK, APRIL 23rd

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THE DUMB PHONE ISSUE

“You Will Not Escape the Permanent Underclass,” an essay from .

“You, A.I., & Nobody Else,” an essay from .

“The Roller Coaster Tycoon,” an interview with Max St. John.

“Living in Public,” an essay from .

“Back to the Dumb Phone,” an essay from .

“Where the Mermaids Sing,” a vignette from .

“How I Learned to Read Again,” an essay from .

“The Blue Ant Trilogy,” a book review from .

“The Life Cycle of Love as We Know It,” a story from .

“On Writing No. 2,” an interview with Jim Shepard.

“Visions of Natasha,” a poem from Karl Parkinson ().

“Human Seasons,” a short story from .

“Love, Death, and Movies,” interview with Diana Del Bufalo.

“I Remember,” a vignette from .

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Non Grata’s Spring issue deals with the technology question, which we consider one of the great wars of our time. Through this theme and conversation around our A.I. policy, we connected with Brazilian artists in the photography, film, and fashion space. They were already at work on their own anti-A.I. project, simply titled “Not A.I.”

The “Not A.I.” project seeks to create photos that appear to be A.I.-generated but, in actuality, are rendered through printing techniques and experimental coloring. In the next issue we have dedicated space for their photography, which poses questions about how LLMs will affect the creators and viewers of the visual arts.

The broader question here is: How do all the arts respond to LLMs taking aspects of human style? Do writers ditch the em dash? Or, when facing the marauders, do they hold firm? Somewhere in-between? As of now there are more questions than answers—but the questions are worth thinking about seriously.

We’re thrilled that we found this group posing them. Even better that they’re from Brazil. Non Grata always has and always will love Brazil. We can’t wait to include their photography in our next issue, which, in the words of Nattannaella, the creative director for this project, “was made 100% for the love of art.”

Credits:

Creative Director & Filmmaker: Nattannaella - @nattannaella

Photographer: Marina Faria - @mm.faria

Stylist: Luan Gabriel - @lu_lluan

Art Director: Morgana Addor - @morganaaddor

Makeup: Giulianne Rodrigues - @gigiurodrigues

Movement Director: Lia Cará - @lia.cara

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Only two notable things have ever happened in Oxford, Mississippi. JFK and RFK mobilized approximately 30,000 soldiers and federal agents to put down a riot preventing James Meredith from enrolling at Ole Miss in 1962. William Faulkner lived there and died that same year. Eight years later, Joan Didion wandered from Grenada, Mississippi and tried to find his home.

Faulkner’s old white house is on prominent display, and it’s easier to find than the Archie Manning statue, or the Library (a bar), or Square Books, or the Grove. But not in 1970.

We drove out on Old Taylor’s Road at night to look for Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s house. There were fireflies, and heat lightning, and thick vines all around, and we could not see the house until the next day… I read a book about Faulkner in Oxford, interviews with his fellow citizens in Oxford, and I was deeply affected by their hostility to him and by the manner in which he had managed to ignore it.

In the lead-up to Didion’s arrival, Faulkner and books and black people were all just minor incursions on the oasis of Oxford in a desert of kudzu and poverty. The third observation in Didion’s Oxford notes is that there is barely a store in which to purchase a book. The second was that “the self-image of the Southern Blood as Cavalier” was very apparent there.

South and West doesn’t give a sense of what the South is like now. Oxford has changed. The drunk college boys still call themselves the Rebs, but it sounds like an affectation when there’s a nineteen year-old from Rockaway Beach in the group. The hushed racist barbs sound more like appeals to tradition than a philosophy of one’s own. The kids here read, or at least they buy books. There are a lot of Reagan-Bush muscle shirts on patriotic holidays, but the wearer wouldn’t know the name Barry Goldwater. Few of these rich sons of this poor state would use the word “cavalier.” Few could mount much of a defense of the Lost Cause, but they would try; they’re anti-intellectual in a more blunt way than their grandfathers. The only commonality they have with Faulkner, really, is getting wasted and skipping class.

South and West is just a notebook. The bones of a great Didion work, buried in a shallow grave, excised, and put on display for the gawkers, the real Didion-heads. It materialized as she drove around Mississippi and Alabama (from New Orleans) and then left one month later in disgust. The last line of the notebook, presumably an addendum in the 2000s, says simply: “I never wrote the piece.” Many notebook entries preserve the detached tone her followers try to shamelessly affect. In others, her disdain and confusion haven’t been sheared off.

At dinner one night in Birmingham there were, besides us, five people. Two of the men had gone to Princeton… They talked with raucous good humor about ‘Seein’ those X-rated movies’... This was a manner of speaking, a rococo denial of their own sophistication, which I found dizzying to contemplate.

The reader can still see the naked questions whose answer she would turn into a feeling, had the book been written.

Didion bends to triteness twice. Writers from the North and from Hollywood (to a real Southerner, the only two places besides the South) find themselves commenting on southern humidity before all else: “In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.” She evokes a less oblique piece of small talk from the book American Melodrama: “...Norman Mailer, who may know about such things, described the sensation of living and breathing in the Miami Beach atmosphere as ‘not unlike being made love to by a three-hundred-pound woman who has decided to get on top.’” (Mailer liked re-animating this brusque metaphor. He used it to describe Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full thirty years later: “At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman.”) After the Northern or the Hollywood writer brings up the weather, they bring up the war. “The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 was spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.” The weather and the war probably are the most important things to bring up. The trouble is that everyone does.

The specter of divorce haunts the best Didion essays of ’66 to ’77. The ghost also claws its way into the writing of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Vegas is a reflection of the last death throes of arrested development, a boy-man’s last stand against a commitment he made to a timid, smart young woman still living in L.A. His “memoir of a dark season” is dedicated to the man who was his wife’s first, and maybe greatest, love. The W. H. Auden quote that opens Vegas is a lesson Dunne must have internalized only after the manuscript was finished:

Like everything which is not the result of fleeting emotion but of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.

174 pages later he recollects calling Didion from his apartment on the strip. She tells him she’s depressed. He tells her a friendly prostitute lined up a nineteen year-old for him to sleep with. Didion tells him that it’s “research.” The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem—two collections containing essays from this period—are riddled with similar holes such as “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of getting a divorce” and “…the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want… between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” A marriage in such a state, in a land so pre-occupied with marriage, could never be allowed to feel comfortable.

Dunne accompanied Didion to New Orleans, but was rarely seen in the notes. His silhouette is backlit when dinner hosts ask why her husband allows her to “spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash.” She doesn’t note his coming to her defense, but she doesn’t record coming to her own. “I had never expected to come to the Gulf Coast married.” She visits a hospital in Meridian and she tells the doctor she has a husband. “This did not sound exactly right, either, because I was not wearing my wedding ring.” Most sections are headed by a location within the South: Meridian, Grenada, Biloxi. Each contains some inquiry into her marriage status, or a stranger proffering their own, conferring meaning upon themselves. Here in the South there is still that sense of marriage being a prerequisite for personal importance, but there is less marriage now. The right kind of women are still aggrandized here, but the wrong ones have sunk lower.

About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.

New places tend to upskirt our insecurities. When I visit San Francisco I feel that I do not make enough money, and when I visit D.C. I feel as though I am missing vital connections with important people. The chorus of South and West is sung by Didion’s insecurity about her marriage. But the discomfort with the oddity of her marriage was not so off-putting as the unions she found in Louisiana. “It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been eccentric and full of anger… Would I have taken up causes, or would I simply have knifed someone?”

The anger builds and builds in her notes and it drives her back to New Orleans and to a “senseless disagreement on the causeway, ugly words and then silence. We spent a silent night in an airport motel and took the 9:15 National flight to San Francisco. I never wrote the piece.”

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I.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury — before the defense begins, I propose two axioms regarding the dangers of literary myth-making which we should all be able to agree upon:

1. Writing autofiction inherently invites myth-making.

2. You cannot control a myth. Once an author’s life becomes myth, it no longer belongs to him or her, but to the people.

If these are acceptable, perhaps we can add a slightly more controversial maxim:

3. Most attempts to ‘counter’ a myth result in the creation of a new myth, not a distillation of factual truth.

In the past two hundred years, no country has been more invested in elevating authors to the strata of myth than the United States of America. And in the past fifty years, no country has been more invested in tearing down those very myths.

If the 20th century will forever be remembered as the American Century — when the United States transcended the category of nation to become the world’s premier empire, exporting its high and low culture across the globe — then one couple stands as the king and queen of that dawning golden age: Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre.

II.

My adolescence happened to coincide with the rise of a new kind of alternative-history game, very popular at schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, etc., and supercharged by social media. Perhaps you know the game. It’s called, ‘He Wasn’t Actually a Genius’, and the rules are very simple: You pick a historically admired man and point out that he had a talented (or at least vivacious) wife, and then posit that his genius was not singular but more likely the result of an intellectual partnership with said wife. So far, not that controversial. However, you cannot win this game by staying within the realms of reason; instead you must fervently argue that the man had limited talent, that he ‘stole’ the work of his wife, or else that she was an uncredited equal partner due to pervasive sexism and brutishness. And thus, you destroy the myth of the lone male genius.

Of course, this game is pointing at a sometimes true aspect of domestic relationships. It cannot be denied that Mileva Marić was a better student and more organized physician and mathematician than Albert Einstein, or that John Stuart Mill repeatedly stated that his wife Harriet should have been listed as a ‘joint author’ on some of his great philosophical treatises. And in the realm of famous littérateurs, Anna Funder’s recent book Wifedom sheds light on how closely involved Eileen Blair was in the development of her husband’s novels Animal Farm and 1984. Whether a spouse’s assistance in discussing, debating, developing, typing, or editing a manuscript should count as ‘co-authorship’ or give rise to claims of ‘uncredited plagiarism’ is a nuanced matter. What about non-marital editing relationships? Should we delete Raymond Carver’s name from his short story collections in favor of Gordon Lish? What about Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins? Or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which famously took editor Tay Hohoff two-and-a-half years to extract from the originally bloated manuscript?

This nuance, however, was nowhere to be found in the heady days of the early 21st Century, when I was making my way through secondary school. Instead, as I first dipped my toes into the fiction of Scott Fitzgerald, I was told with much gusto that he ‘wasn’t that great a writer,’ that he ‘stole most of the good stuff from his wife Zelda,’ and that she was the ‘true talent.’ It was also implied that this unfair treatment was what drove Zelda insane, with a jealous Scott committing her to an insane asylum so he could cash in on the books filled with writing stolen from his estranged, glamorous, brilliant wife.

This was the new myth: that behind every talented man crouched an even more talented, but cruelly subjugated, woman.

III.

I spent the first three years of my legal career representing individual litigants in unlawful termination cases, battling their former employers for a bit of cash. My clients were an even 50/50 split between individuals who had truly been wronged, and those who deserved to be fired but couldn’t accept it without a fight. The right person didn’t win every time. Sometimes the litigant who deserved to be fired was able to win on a technicality. Sometimes they were just more winsome and likable in the courtroom. And sometimes the person who you knew was innocent of whatever the company claimed, was so ornery and unlikeable in front of the judge that they had no hope of winning. This all goes to say that I know a thing or two about how to win a case despite defending an unlikeable person.

If there is any real competition between Scott and Zelda, it’s not about their literary abilities (more on that later) but who you should feel more pity and revulsion toward. They were both raging alcoholics that were commonly kicked out of hotels for disturbing other guests (as well as for destruction of property), that got into trouble with fire brigades and law enforcement for making false reports, that once boiled guests’ expensive watches in a pot of tomato soup as a joke. Zelda also had a penchant for throwing herself off cliffs and down staircases, setting things on fire and overdosing on pills, while Scott commonly drank himself to blackout and attempted suicide on multiple occasions. In essence, the Fitzgeralds perfected the attention-seeking, self-destructive, tabloid behavior of young people thrust into the limelight, which was set to define the following century.

However, the central question is not the character or morals of the Fitzgeralds’, but (a) the quality of Scott’s writing, and (b) whether or not Zelda was the genius behind his novels and stories. How much truth lies behind the myth and counter-myth? Does Scott Fitzgerald deserve to be called the first great American writer of the first great American Century?

IV.

Hemingway certainly thought so. One of our best primary sources for understanding the nature of Scott and Zelda’s relationship from a literary perspective is A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s swan song, completed just before he died in 1961 and published posthumously in 1964.

Hemingway, who dolled out compliments sparingly, was in awe of Scott’s raw talent when they first met in 1925. Scott had just published his third, and best, novel, The Great Gatsby, and any personal foibles that Scott demonstrated (there were many) could be overlooked by the usually impatient Hemingway. He regularly met up with Scott in Paris to discuss their respective writing, agreed to travel with him through the French countryside to retrieve a car that Zelda had impulsively left behind in Lyon, and the two young families spent holidays together, despite the strong reservations both Hemingway and his wife Hadley maintained about Zelda’s non-stop party lifestyle.

Hemingway’s recurring frustration with Scott was how he let Zelda affect his craft, how the dazzling genius emergent in This Side of Paradise (released when Scott was just twenty-four years old and before he married Zelda, who agreed to their union only after the book was published), was beaten into something self-doubting and drab by his constant ‘whoring’ — Hemingway’s term for Scott’s habit of rewriting short stories to contain dramatic twists and romances and happy endings so slick magazines would publish them — in order to provide for the lifestyle Zelda believed they deserved. As it stands, if Zelda has any real claim to being involved with Scott’s writing, it’s through her habit of reviewing his ‘far too literary’ drafts and suggesting where they might be changed to appeal to the mass market readers of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly and Esquire, in addition to contributing a few quotes and pages to his multi-thousand-word oeuvre.

V.

For all the modern griping about autofiction, it can be extremely entertaining to read when well done. Scott struck gold with This Side of Paradise, through which he learned the power of mythologizing oneself. After that he couldn’t seem to stop doing it, no matter how sad and desperate his life became.

When you read Scott’s novels and many of his short stories you can’t help but feel the thrill of recognizing the real-life people he has given new aliases, and seeing how he shapes their brokenness into something with a deeper meaning. It works because he does more than tell us of toxic relationships and the agony and ecstasy of spiralling out of control; he places the reader inside the heart and mind of people like himself — men and women who aren’t ‘bad’ per se, who have a sense of morality, but can’t stop themselves from trying to manipulate people and grasp at things they cannot have. Scott consistently risks readers criticizing his own nature by giving us an interior view of his pseudo-biographical characters’ moral failings.

For example: in “Babylon Revisited,” a 1931 short story, we tag along with a Scott stand-in who is trying to recover custody of his daughter from his deceased wife’s relatives. Despite being a washed-up alcoholic, he has his wits about him, and he knows to play the situation delicately in order to get what he wants:

He knew that now he would have to take a beating. It would last an hour or two hours, and it would be difficult, but if he modulated his inevitable resentment to the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner, he might win his point in the end.

The crux of the story is the protagonist, Charlie, interacting with his sister-in-law, trying to convince her to relinquish her guardianship over his daughter, even as she blames Charlie for her sister’s death. And Scott freely shows us how disingenuous Charlie is, even if his desired outcome is not necessarily a bad one. He’s attuned to human emotions and he is doing his best to play them for his own purposes, but without descending into cartoonish psychopathy. At one point Charlie partially loses control, swears at his sister-in-law, and has to back off. But in doing so he leaves room for her to pounce and she overreacts, causing her own husband to take Charlie’s side, causing the narrator no small amount of glee:

But [Charlie] pulled his temper down out of his face and shut it up inside him; he had won a point, for Lincoln realized the absurdity of Marion’s remark and asked her lightly since when she had objected to the word “damn.”

This is a good short story and Scott is a good writer, but his work would be less interesting, less purely entertaining, if you didn’t know how closely his fiction dovetails with his own tragic life. Scott seemed to relish in writing about his life through the thin veil of fiction, raising him and Zelda and their cohort up to the realm of gods, while they carried on like Greek gods and goddesses — cavorting in endless bacchanals, collapsing night after night from drink, sleeping around, jumping onto the hoods of cars, literally swinging from hotel chandeliers. They were momentarily Gods of their own myth, but the myth quickly became a Titan, which began to swallow them whole. As time went on, both Scott and Zelda became suicidal — Zelda often threatened suicide in public settings as an argument-ender — and they severely mistreated their child, Frances ‘Scottie,’ while constantly mistreating each other. Through it all, Scott couldn’t stop writing about their lives in the guise of fiction, couldn’t stop trying to spin the muddy straw into gold.

As I said at the start, nothing invites myth-making about an author’s life like a work of autofiction. The only safe way to go about it is the Elena Ferrante method, total anonymity. But that was never Scott’s style, leading to the instant birth of the Fitzgerald myth. However, Scott himself admitted to editor Malcolm Cowley, another member of the Lost Generation, that blurring the line between truth and fiction came with several burdens:

Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in one of my own novels.

The trouble for Scott and Zelda is that self-mythologizing initially gave them a taste of the high life — all the attention and riches available for a young novelist and his exciting young wife, both willing to become the story — before it all came crashing down.

It should be recognized that Scott essentially invented the term the ‘Jazz Age’ and used it liberally, as an ongoing act of conscious mythologizing, placing him and Zelda as crown prince and princess of a kingdom that only ephemerally existed. The adolescent, freewheeling, heavy-drinking life of pre-WW1 college students, preserved forever in Scott’s mind as the best years of his life, was a representation of the Fitzgeralds’ monied decadence, not a true reflection of the ’20s and ’30s. In reality, Scott’s novels are at their heart Edwardian, with ghosts and specters and hauntings, and with characters wishing to return to the past due to conflicts in their social mores. Scott may have used the ‘Jazz Age’ as his setting, but even he knew it was a fantasy.

On the topic of myth, it’s not surprising that as a practiced mythologizer Scott would become so entranced by the real-life Max Gerlach, a millionaire bootlegging fabulist that he was able to sculpt his best work into a meditation on the nature of myth itself. The Great Gatsby is, at one level, an outflow of game recognizing game. The forever insecure Scott — always fretting about his poorer upbringing and lack of class credentials, trying to appear wealthier and more accomplished than he was — peering across the cocktail party at the ebullient Gerlach, confidently lying about his nationality and the providence of his riches. Gerlach achieved what Scott never quite managed — a fully embodied myth, a man forcefully transcending any unhelpful or unsavory elements of his origins and upbringing to become whatever he desired.

VI.

Zelda, Zelda, Zelda. A woman who was the definition of a self-determined and raucous ‘flapper,’ a term she popularized alongside Scott’s ‘Jazz Age,’ writing in 1922 that:

“[the flapper] flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure… she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.”

Somehow she went beyond myth and became an archetype, ‘the flapper’ remarkably prescient for our age of influencers and celebrities and politicians willing to debase themselves in a million ways for attention, but unable to get out of their own way once they have it. Incredibly self-destructive, wretchedly self-obsessed, narcissistic and shallow, but rewarded by a society entranced with car crashes and natural disasters. Zelda Fitzgerald was intelligent, there’s no doubt about it, but she was intelligent in the way Paris Hilton is intelligent, or in the way Donald Trump is intelligent. And neither of them are, of course, good writers.

I propose a reasonable bar for the spouses of great writers to clear before we credit them as having contributed to the great writer’s genius: (1) they contribute a non-insignificant amount of new material to the writer’s body of work, or (2) they significantly edit or rewrite the novels most lauded by critics and the general public. And (3) they really should have demonstrated some writing talent of their own, independent of their more famous spouse.

Unfortunately for Zelda, she doesn’t pass any of these tests. All the arguments about Zelda’s supposed ‘stolen genius’ largely hinge on Scott’s use of Zelda’s diary entries and letters in several of his novels. But, importantly, this practice of wholesale reproduction was used sparingly — in the order of, at most, a few sentences in the course of a novel — and Zelda wasn’t the only target. This Side of Paradise reprints entire letters Scott himself sent to both Zelda and his priest, Father Sigourney Fay, as well as their responses, despite being categorized as fiction. Of course every writer takes characters, passages, and dialogue from life, and even if one argues that Scott should have credited her for these sparse words, his colossal genius cannot be reduced to discrete sections of text pillaged from correspondence. It’s also telling that nobody, not even Zelda’s most ardent supporter Nancy Milford (who wrote the the foundational text of the pro-Zelda mythology, Zelda: A Biography, in 1970), has been able to show that Zelda contributed meaningfully to any of Scott’s best work — not to his two best novels The Great Gatsby or Tender is the Night, nor his best short stories: “Babylon Revisited”, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”, “Winter Dreams”, “The Rich Boy”, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, “Absolution”, “May Day”, or “Crazy Sunday”. By comparison, the stories with the most clear Zelda influence are trite pieces of fluff: “The Offshore Pirate”, “The Jelly-Bean”, “Our Own Movie Queen”, “The Original Follies Girl”, “A Millionaire’s Girl”, etc.

The real genius of Scott’s prose lies in the tone and voice that is entirely rooted in the anxious ego and belligerent id of his narrators and protagonists. We are let into the inner machinations of neurotic strivers and obsessives, jealous outsiders and secret-keepers, and the entire atmosphere of his novels bends around the gravitational pull of these men who are intelligent but insecure. Scott’s talent was in realizing protagonists didn’t have to be likable to be compelling, as long as they had a soft spot among the neuroses, as long as they were vulnerable. For Scott, so similar to many of his male characters, his vulnerability was always Zelda.

The fact that Zelda demanded Scott rewrite his stories to make the plots more interesting so they sold better, then demanded he come out partying all night instead of writing, so that his follow-up to The Great Gatsby took nine years to write instead of the customary two or three he had previously managed, should be evidence enough that Zelda did not care for the work of literature. She cared for the lifestyle of being attached to a successful writer.

If you still aren’t convinced, let’s compare two similar passages from the estranged couples’ twinned novels — Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz of 1932 (which, it should be noted, Scott first accused Zelda of plagiarizing from him, but then dropped those claims for fear of further upsetting her mental health, and then ultimately helped her get it published) and Scott’s 1934 Tender is the Night, his last complete work before his death at forty-four years of age. Both novels are set in the French Riviera and involve unhappy marriages and infidelities. Here is Zelda’s description of the locale:

The Riviera is a seductive place. The blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat accentuates things.

And here is Scott’s:

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach… The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.

Scott’s description gives us a sense of what the exclusive and sacred space the Riviera represented for a certain class of people, with hints toward deference and pride and religious piety all bound up in a few short sentences. Whereas Zelda’s own description of the same location is juvenile, the sort of thing any teenager in a creative writing class could produce. She lifts up her dress to flash you with ‘seductive’ and then refuses to go any further by retreating to the generic ‘things.’

VII.

One of the other lessons I gained from being a trial lawyer: be careful of who you call as a witness. The most seemingly eager supporters can sometimes do more harm than good.

A Moveable Feast and much of Hemingway’s correspondence during the ’20s certainly paints Zelda in a negative light — she’s shallow, vain, constantly drunk, overly materialistic, casually cruel, and oftentimes insane. She clearly interferes with Scott’s writing, both in terms of not allowing him any time away from the nightlife and by bullying him on what to write and for which publications. The feminist scholars who have been pushing the ‘Zelda as the true genius’ idea since the ’70s sideline this evidence due to Hemingway’s obvious misogyny, but even if we attempt to correct for any gendered biases, Hemingway is not actually as helpful for Scott’s case as he may seem. Despite being fond of his friend and in awe of his talent, Hemingway inadvertently (or maybe advertently) paints Scott as weak, foppish — a nancy boy, to use the parlance of the time. This too becomes part of the Fitzgerald myth.

Take, for example, how Hemingway describes Scott when he believes he has fallen sick in a hotel on their drive back from Lyon, as Hemingway tries to pamper the childish Scott despite there being nothing wrong with him:

On this evening in the hotel I was delighted that he was being so calm. I had mixed the lemonade and whisky and given it to him with two aspirins and he had swallowed the aspirins without protest and with admirable calm and was sipping his drink. His eyes were open now and were looking far away. I was reading the crime on the inside of the paper and was quite happy, too happy it seemed.

‘You’re a cold one, aren’t you?’ Scott asked and looking at him I saw that I had been wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis, and that the whisky was working against us.

‘How do you mean, Scott?’

‘You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.’

‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’

‘No. I don’t want a dirty French provincial doctor.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.’

‘Our clothes won’t be dry until morning and there aren’t any express trains,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you rest and have some dinner in bed?’

After this went on for a long time the waiter brought a thermometer.

After Hemingway messes about with the thermometer and tries to convince Scott that it is working properly and his temperature is normal, Scott demands that Hemingway use it on himself, which he does, after which Hemingway informs Scott that they have the same temperature (despite the mechanism not actually working):

Scott was a little suspicious so I asked if he wanted me to make another test.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We can be happy it cleared up so quickly. I’ve always had great recuperative power.’

This is all played for laughs, with great comic timing, but Scott then rushes off to call Zelda with claims that the two of them “have never slept away” from each other since they were married, which Hemingway points out can’t be true in the light of Zelda’s affairs which Scott has confided in him earlier that day. The version of Scott found in A Moveable Feast is consistently like this, self-defeating and foolish, and Hemingway can’t help but do what inwardly insecure but outwardly masculine men have been doing for millennia: he makes Scott his cuckold.

It’s strange that Hemingway was able to manage this, because in many ways Scott was the stronger writer, and Hemingway knew it. But to this day, Fitzgerald is far less esteemed by MFA students than their sacred ‘Papa,’ and that is partly due to the surviving mythos of Hemingway as the clear-eyed reporter of human facts vs. Scott as the romantic weakling and cuckold. When comparing their writing, I have to admit that I’m often inclined towards Scott’s romantic modernism over Hemingway’s minimalism. Take their scene descriptions in the first chapters of each of their third novels, The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, respectively:

The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

and

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Scott is clearly doing a lot more work in his paragraph, drawing us toward the lush atmospheric stage his main character is about to walk upon, compared with Hemingway’s dull and repetitive reportage. I am by no means calling Hemingway a bad writer(!), but I do think we lose something in jettisoning Scott’s romanticism for Hemingway’s dry style. I think one of the reasons this happened is due to the diverging myths surrounding the two men.

Scott and Hemingway’s Paris days among the Lost Generation are key to understanding how they would go on to be viewed by the reading public, as those brief years somehow entered the literary legendarium and formed a lens through which we view them both; but we should note that it is a legend shaped largely by Hemingway himself. In the mythic version of 1920s Paris, Scott is literally cuckolded by Zelda and figuratively cuckolded by Hemingway — he will always be the simpering, fussy loser to Hemingway’s clear-headed strongman. It doesn’t help Scott that there is a smack of truth about this. He was close in upbringing and temperament to his protagonists — Nick Carroway, Amory Blaine, Anthony Patch, and Dick Diver — neurotic and physically unassuming men, who are stuck in their own heads, always analyzing and worrying, always seeking to understand the social dynamics around them. This is why it was too easy for Zelda to yank Scott’s chain. For a period, she convinced Scott that his penis was too small to bring pleasure to a woman, which required Hemingway to inspect his friend’s member, and then take Scott on a tour of the Louvre’s classical statues to prove to him that he was normally endowed. (And in evidence against Hemingway’s supposedly raging misogyny, he also instructed Scott on the use of a pillow to achieve the right angle for pleasing his wife during copulation. Ernest Hemingway, ally of female pleasure.)

It also doesn’t help Scott’s myth that he ended his life as an alcoholic suffering from cardiac arrest in his lover’s shabby Californian apartment after a failed attempt at becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, while Hemingway was snatching marlin from his Cuban cruiser and smoking cigars with Castro, his shotgun and mouth still yet to meet for another twenty-one years.

VIII.

As both and have recently pointed out, there is probably no literary character more relevant to our culture today than Patrick Bateman, the protagonist and narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 transgressive novel American Psycho. The question arises: are Scott’s characters the progenitors of Bateman? If not, then why do so many of Scott’s leading men feel nearly psychopathic, trapped in their minds, obsessive toward people and interactions with them, inwardly observant of their own minds and thought processes but unable to reach out and truly connect with another human being, unable to give any other person access to that secret locked door buried in their selves? There is something of Patrick Bateman both Amory Blaine and Jay Gatsby: the obsession with wealth and status, with class dynamics and interpersonal slights, the focus on women and wishing to have some sort of romantic connection that never quite eventuates. But even in “Babylon Revisited,” there are hints of Bateman as a purely materialistic egregore of late ’80s capitalism. See the specificity and focus on the restaurants, the lingering regret, the sense of not existing, as Charlie moves through 1930s Paris:

Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank.

Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l’Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano’s Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval’s. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.

As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

But as I have said before, this is also a reflection of Scott himself. His protagonists are never very far from his own nature. Which partially explains why Hemingway describes Scott as acting so oddly upon their first meeting, incessantly interviewing people about their habits, their social ethics, their sex lives. Why do they do things and do they feel what they do is wrong? It’s like an alien trying to understand the nuances of humanity’s social cues.

The episode Hemingway describes, of travelling with a neurotic and hypochondriac Scott — delusional about his own vitality while simultaneously being convinced of illnesses he doesn’t have — reveals the man to be a sadly comic character. Tragic in his self-deceit, but somewhat innocent and lovable in how he moves through the world, sympathetic because of how much he clearly doesn’t understand while yearning to. Much in the same way Amory Blaine and Jay Gatsby are sadly comic characters — nearly Machiavellian were it not for the soft underbellies we get flashes of from time to time, and which ultimately trip them up. And, come to think of it, wouldn’t Patrick Bateman also be a sadly comic character, with his status obsession and inability to connect with people, were it not for all the killing?

IX.

It is ironic that The Great Gatsby is the work Scott is most known for today, on multiple levels. First, because it was the worst-selling book of his career upon release. And second, because it is his one major departure from clearly autobiographical writing. Gatsby is the only male protagonist in all of Scott’s novels who isn’t a direct analogue for himself (leaving aside the posthumous The Last Tycoon, which was assembled and edited by his friend Edmund Wilson in 1941, and which I do not count as a true Scott novel).

With the release of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Scott, and by extension Zelda, became stars overnight, vaunted to national newspaper columns and living in the Biltmore Hotel. But their star power was more flash-in-the-pan than most realize, and the mythos of the debutante genius capable of representing the newly unshackled younger generation vanished nearly as soon as it descended. This Side of Paradise sold 40,000 copies in the first year and made Scott a household name, but The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) was panned as too depressive, leading to The Great Gatsby (1925) selling poorly. That the novel he was most proud of, the best-written work of his entire oeuvre, was not popular, bothered Scott more than almost anything else, robbing him of his confidence and allowing Zelda more purchase in her campaign for Scott to write stories that earned them money instead of critical respect. After 1925, he would never again write anything nearly as ambitious.

Upon considering his friend’s wasted writing abilities with the benefit of hindsight, Hemingway wrote:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

By the time Hemingway wrote this, Scott had been dead for twenty-four years; penniless and pathetic in his final days, largely disregarded by the critics and general population. Zelda followed him to the grave (literally, they were buried together in a Protestant cemetery before being moved to a Catholic plot) eight years later, after being burned alive in a sanatorium, following twelve years spent inside mental facilities as a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. And this too became part of the Fitzgerald myth: the rise and fall of a literary genius and his hard-partying wife, on a speedrun through four decades of life, burning with the quick flame of gin-slinging, foxtrotting youth, without enough time left to stage a comeback.

And then, also mythically, their reputations were resurrected due to a rediscovery of Scott’s work by generations emerging from the ashes of WWII, who were removed from all the scandal and the sadness involved. With enough time passed and the sad realities dead and buried, the mythic glories of the Jazz Age could live on.

X.

Given all of the above, it is my position — ladies and gentlemen of the jury — that Zelda, the life and death of every party she ever attended, need not be remembered as a ‘literary genius’ to be part of the pantheon of American culture. In many ways, she better embodies the national consciousness than the nervous and striving Scott, though the nature of their mutual toxicity, how they brought out the worst in each other as they entered middle age, is also deeply archetypal of our modern age. In 1929, Zelda tried to kill herself, Scott, and their daughter by seizing the steering wheel of the car as they drove through the French Alps, which marked her as possessing ‘a homicidal mania.’ And upon Zelda’s initial treatment for schizophrenia in 1932, Scott wrote the following to one of the doctors at John Hopkins Hospital, laying out the nature of their mutual destruction:

Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgement would mean anything.

Acutely aware of how to transpose fact into myth, of how to transpose sad realities into higher legends, Scott was unable to discern any meaning behind the widening gyres of his and Zelda’s increasing instabilities. He couldn’t see how to escape the downward-spiralling effect they had on each other.

But none of this, none of the myth-making or tragic personal histories, changes the fact that Scott was the first great American writer of the 20th Century. At his best, he possessed a precocious talent for revealing the true nature of the modern man — cunning, conniving, intelligent, obsessive, but vulnerable in his felt isolation. And he was able to imbue the settings and atmosphere of his work with a unity of action, serving to twist the whole world onto the focal point of the story, the desperate man and his female obsession. That his characters are frequently disoriented by the pace of cultural progress is also prescient for the age that was to come, even as Scott and Zelda themselves broke taboos and set new patterns for how young artists in the limelight were to behave.

And more than any of his peers, Scott represents a firm commitment to autofiction, to the mythologizing of his life as he lived it, in a way that most writers only attempt at the end of their careers out of nostalgia, like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.1

Ultimately, Zelda may have been in the right to accuse Scott of lifting pages of her diaries or correspondence, though she certainly saw no issue with using the structure of his draft novel for her own attempt at literature. But these minor events are superfluous to the underlying argument. At the end of the day, it’s clear that F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved what very few writers can, which is to completely mythologize and cannibalize his own life, and alchemize stellar literature from that process.

To me, F. Scott Fitzgerald is a tragic genius, a cautionary tale, a man whose talent I admire even as I pity the course of his life. It is a tragedy that his best work was not duly recognized during his lifetime, and that he died so young. But for us to now discredit his genius and thus tarnish his legacy, by giving credit to someone it does not belong to, is both dishonest and cruel. The truly under-appreciated should always get their due, but to create a myth in order to steal it — that certainly is a bridge too far.

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If you’d like to support us, we still have some copies of the Winter 25/26 edition available on our website (or via Substack subscription). Every purchase helps us pay contributors and fund print issues. If you can’t afford it, no big deal. We’re incredibly grateful for all of the support so far, in every form it’s taken, from buying copies to sharing posts to simply reading them with interest. None of this would be possible without great readers and writers. Thank you.

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Nobody reads anymore. Or, to put it more accurately, nobody reads like they used to.

Well, except for you, of course.

This should not come as a surprise to those of us living through the late-stage evolutions of the Information Age. We have all bore witness to the rise of epochal technologies like the iPhone and the social media platforms that followed suit, which have drastically altered our information consumption habits. In an age where the static, written word must compete with AI-powered, auto-scrolling algorithms and stimulating short-form video content, the former loses. Badly.

Over the last twenty years there has been a 42% drop in the number of those who read for pleasure daily, according to an analysis of the American Time Use Survey.1 When paired with the fact that 19% of American adults were responsible for 82% of the country’s reading, the picture becomes stark.2 There are myriad theories as to why people are reading less: An individual preference for low-friction media, lowered cultural importance on intellectuality, laziness. The usual suspects. All valid, yet missing a critical component. There are deeper factors at play.

Seldom discussed is the startling, near exponential increase in the average person’s daily informational intake. At present, we consume an average of 74 gigabytes of information per day through the use of computers, cell-phones, tablets, and other technologies. This is the same amount of information that a highly educated individual would consume in an entire lifetime just 500 years ago.3 In the past, there were real constraints around how much information one could absorb. Information was scarce. Readers engaged with works over longer periods of time. The language had time to settle into the mind of the reader, helping shape their internal standards for the written word. Contrast this with our time: the age of information abundance. Information is cheap now, and we take it wherever we can get it. Our language habits reflect this shift: the quality of our words, thoughts, and ideas has fallen off a cliff. The human brain is adaptable, but a jump this substantial leads to an evolutionary mismatch, resulting in what some researchers are calling “the capacity challenge.”

Our brains evolved to efficiently process limited sets of relevant data and, as expected, run into difficulties when faced with seemingly unlimited amounts of irrelevant information. This is one of the main reasons we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of mental health issues over the last decade.4 We are not machines, we are biological beings with finite stores of attention and linguistic processing capabilities. Yet, the world we live in is designed to bombard us with nearly infinite input, overloading our brains as a result.

The informational onslaught begins every morning with an iPhone-assisted awakening, followed by a carousel of stimulation. Consider a typical workday: You’ve responded to forty-seven emails, toggled between eight browser tabs for a single task, and spent your commute home absorbing a podcast at 1.5x speed. By evening, when it is finally time to relax, the prospect of sitting with a challenging novel feels less like leisure and more like another demand on an already depleted system. You’ve waited for this moment all day, yet can’t bring yourself to open up War and Peace, opting to reach for the remote instead. After a day of your attention being scattered, your brain is burnt, leaving you less likely to slow down, sit still, and silently read the book you said you’d finish months ago.

For much of human history, the written word was one of the most potent drugs we had access to. There was a stretch of time when books, magazines, and newspapers were the main medium through which leisure and novelty was had. Lively scenes were conjured out of nothing but ink printed on papyrus, telepathy made possible through the carrier signal of controlled hand movements and ink. It was magic. The transition from agricultural and industrial work being at the core of human society to administrative knowledge work only expedited the downfall of our reading habits. We labored and exhausted our bodies first, minds second. After a long day of physically demanding work, we relished the opportunity to finally focus our mental energy on the words of our favorite authors, resting our bodies and renewing our minds. Now, in the age of bureaucratic knowledge work, we spend most of our time exhausting our thinking minds. At the end of a workday, our mind has processed exponentially more bits of data than our ancestors did when working in fields and factories. The pace of life has sped up, the stimulation levels have multiplied, all while our brains have remained the same as they were before.

If we wish to have the requisite amount of energy needed to fully engage with a piece of text, we need to create space in other areas of our day. In creating space for our minds, we allow our energy, our attention, to remain stored for when we need to call on it the most. We must, on an individual level, decide to unshackle ourselves while we still hold the key: choosing high-friction activities like reading, reducing unnecessary information intake by learning to be bored again, and deleting the most damaging of the short-form social media apps.

Personally, I’ve struggled with this, as these apps often double as a way to stay in parasocial contact with friends and family, something that feels necessary in our increasingly isolated world. Yet this cheapening of human-to-human socialization is but another reason to free ourselves from these algorithmic grips. These applications are not suitable replacements for the social contact and creative input that we need most. I have rid the most damaging of the apps from my phone to avoid temptation, making mindful efforts to interact with the people and ideas I value most. Our minds are in the process of being depleted and commodified by technological innovations led by corporations who have made their intentions clear: profiting off of our valuable time and attention. Our brains are being digitally drained of the ability to sit in silent stillness, which is why choosing to sit with a book is liberating in a world tailored for stimulation.

We can choose to lead less digital, information-dense lives by disavowing the digital products whose main aims are to capture and hold our attention. The past can never be again, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t borrow some of their behaviors and lifestyle choices to help us reclaim our minds and our time, the two fundamentals needed to lead a fulfilling life. The future of literature, of educated society, rests in our willingness to reject the lifestyle that is praised as normal today, leaving behind the cheaper, less-fulfilling forms of entertainment in favor of the slower, but richer, mediums of the written word.

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The imperial idea cannot unite people with gadgets. The iPhone and the imperial idea are fundamentally incompatible. But feudalism and the iPhone—those can coexist just fine.

— Vladimir Sorokin

In the fourth century BCE, Zoroastrians establish a temple in the Altai Mountains at a deposit of native tellurium. The cave is called Maktulu — “The Glorious.” On the wall, an image of the sun is laid out in pure tellurium, a rare silvery, glistening metal. Forty-eight people hammer tellurium nails, forty-two millimetres in size, into each other’s heads. Then they seal the entrance from the inside. Much later, in 1782, tellurium is first discovered in the gold ores of Transylvania. Fast forward, in 2013, Vladimir Sorokin publishes the novel Telluria.

In 2022, Chinese archaeologists discover the Maktulu cave. Scientists from the Institute of Brain Research at Peking University and from Stanford University conduct research on volunteers: tellurium nails, hammered into a specific spot in the head, induce sustained euphoria and a sense of time loss. Lethal outcomes are not uncommon. In 2026, a UN convention bans experiments with tellurium nails. The nails are classified as a heavy narcotic.

In 2028, a military coup in the Barabin province of Altai happens, resulting in the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Telluria, which becomes the only country in the world where tellurium nails are not classified as a narcotic.

Over the following two decades, a succession of civil wars engulfs Russia, ending in its disintegration. Europe is struck by the “Wahhabi hammer” — a protracted and bloody war with Islamists, which Europe wins with enormous losses, but also collapses into a multitude of micro-states. Thus, in the 2060s, the era of the New Middle Ages begins — an enlightened feudalism with future technologies: smart gadgets, robots, combat exoskeletons, and so on. After all the wars, people are tired of suffering and seek happiness. To achieve it, they hammer tellurium nails into their heads to attend a séance with Sorokin and become characters in his novel Telluria, so that in 2013 he would actually publish it — because how else can you explain all this?

At the release, the novel immediately attracts attention, firstly of course because it’s a new Sorokin novel after a long break, and secondly because it’s not quite a novel at all. At the final debates for the “Novaya Slovestnost’” (kind of New Literature) prize in 2014–2015, the jury spends seventy percent of their time discussing Telluria specifically, hence contemporary literature at large, arguing over what matters more — its artistic language or the fact that it represented something greater than a novel, an attempt to explode the linguistic environment of the exhausted conservative forms. Some critics see Telluria as the pinnacle of Sorokin’s craft, others as too radical an experiment, but no one remains indifferent, and the novel resounds across the literary scene as an event that prompts a rethinking of genre boundaries and the relationship between literature and reality.

In interviews, Sorokin himself admits that Telluria can no longer be called a novel — it’s some other form of long prose for which there is no name yet, “a layered, scaly literary creature,” he calls it. The book, as we can surely call it, consists of fifty untitled and numbered chapters of varying length, each written in its own style, with its own language, telling separate stories about completely different characters: from conventional narratives to impersonal dialogues, plays, letters, chapters in invented languages, stream of consciousness without punctuation, manifestos, prayers, and much more. At first glance, Sorokin has no interest whatsoever in his characters, only in speech and their type of consciousness, and it seems he could have continued writing such chapters indefinitely, though he says he loves them equally and they are “free people who can make their own choices.” Yet the chapters themselves are also interesting, engaging, compelling, and often hilarious, but it is their sum that transforms them into something greater.

For this reason, it’s difficult to talk about Telluria as a book with a plot — such a conversation would devolve into listing chapters and ranking them (such lists probably already exist), or about particular chapters and the wonderful variety of linguistic and plot devices they employ — that would be pointless, take ages, and undermine the idea of the book itself. It is, in a sense, an encyclopedia of Telluria, a book of its lore, but told not by an omniscient narrator from above, but by its own characters, little people — from below. It has to be read to be truly experienced.

At the same time, we must note that the structural form itself — “a novel in stories,” “a novel in episodes” that may be unconnected — is something Sorokin himself started with in the ’80s, and many others have written such “novels” too: Ulitskaya, Bitov, Shalamov, Dovlatov, to name a few. For Russian literature, this has become the norm (pun not intended). Nor is it an innovation that each chapter is written in its own language — take, for example, Ulysses, a stylistic encyclopedia of English literature. (Joyce has, by the way, an immense impact on contemporary Russian literature, partially due to how late he slipped into it, partially due to his attention and obsession with language, so dear to Russian literary metaphysics.) The approach to world-building and many of the tropes Sorokin employs are not unique either; on the contrary, the book uses a mass of Sorokin’s signature devices: the description of society through the consumption of a certain substance from The Norm, the miraculous properties of a substance from the Ice Trilogy, and what he does better than anyone: taking fears, jokes, anecdotes — anything — and interpreting them literally, turning them into satirical and grotesque literary constructions that would simply fall apart in the hands of a less skilled author. But, in Sorokin’s hands, they become alive and paradoxically believable, even more real than the real. So why and how does the novel work? What makes it great?

The true achievement of Telluria is that it resolves thematic tension at the level of form alone. Here, Sorokin elevates to an absolute, transforming from merely experimental or unusual into the statement itself: the world is fragmented, so the book is fragmented, too; there is no single language (even within one language like Russian), and there should be no single style; people have ceased to be historical objects, and there are no protagonists any more, or, therefore, everyone is one. Each chapter is written in its own style, creating the effect of an encyclopedia of Russian speech and language, both real, parodied and imitated, or invented. Paradoxically, the book’s success lies in the absence of a unified tone. A non-linear, chaotic, and polyphonic world requires a non-linear, chaotic, and polyphonic novel. If in the XIX century it is possible to write a great novel — say, War and Peace — by the early twentieth century it becomes harder, after the Second World War — ever so harder, and with the emergence of the internet and the smartphone — utterly impossible. The classical novel, as Sorokin himself says in interviews, is doomed to archaization, no matter how vivid the feelings and story the author invests in it. What is needed now, he says, is a different language to describe reality, a new form, and Telluria is an attempt to find it.

In this sense, the book becomes a new utopia, both linguistic and literary. Sorokin builds and destroys his own Tower of Babel — showing how this could happen, again both metaphorically and literally (which he loves), in the present or near future. The world has begun to fragment, and describing it with a single language — single register — and linear development is impossible. If the world is fragmented, it must be described in the language of fragmentation, this is what makes both the form and the themes of Telluria increasingly relevant today.

If in the mid-2000s Sorokin’s novels looked satirical and grotesque, then with Putin’s third term, Sorokin’s metaphors began to reproduce themselves in reality. Everyone knows that life in Russia is built according to the laws of literature, but as it turns out, the whole world seems to live by Sorokin’s novels now too. At the time of the novel’s release in 2014, no one expected that fundamentalists would seize power in many Middle Eastern countries, that right-wing and far-right parties would gain ground in European elections, that the immigration crisis would loop and xenophobia would rise, that there would be a series of referendums on separation and independence of one from another, that there would be a series of terrorist attacks, that there would be a pandemic, that Russia would launch a full-scale war in Ukraine, and that the political arena would be captured by a primal-emotional, archaic-feudal rhetoric, as Sorokin himself describes: “everything is sliding towards medieval rhetoric, towards the confrontation of feudal lords: who has more servants, more lands, whose hunting is better.” The world of Telluria, with its cascading de-modernisation, neo-archaism, disintegration of states, and rise of religious fundamentalism, turned out to be far more real than it seemed in 2013. Globalisation, multiculturalism, and liberal democracy seem now far more fragile, as does faith in progress and ideology and the ability of the world to firmly stand in balance in general. But for all this grimness, Telluria is not a novel about catastrophe or apocalypse but about what happens after, and about what form that “after” might take.

The social phobias, pains, tendencies, and dreams of our epoch take on physical form in the book. Telluria becomes their manifestation, an answer to the question: what if everything that completely different people want were to finally happen? In the case of Russia and Europe, this means, for example, the disintegration of states, totalitarianism, Sinification, Stalinism, Islamism, the retvrn of the Crusaders, robots, bioterrorism, genetic mutations, and so on — there is nothing in it that doesn’t already exist around us in one way or another. Thus Eurasia disintegrates into city-states, micro-states, kingdoms, principalities, and each part goes mad in its own way, in its striving to distance itself from the others to emphasise its uniqueness and establish its own rules. At the same time, Sorokin deliberately ignores almost the entire world outside of Europe and Russia. Decentralization becomes the principle of world order, thus creating a global anarchy without a world police: no UN, no “international community,” no uni- or multipolarity. This is not chaos in the sense of complete disorder, but chaos in the sense of the absence of a single order. Telluria is not a global dystopia, but a local fantasy of Eurasian total “balkanisation” with a resulting hundred micro-utopias. Sorokin then mixes all of this with Soviet and post-Soviet aesthetics, folklore, science fiction, and even fantasy, which for the most part creates a uniquely cosy comic effect.

My house is on the edge [I mind my own business] — yes! The winds of the future smell like such a world. If you look into the Moscow metro or a European café, you’ll see people sitting, buried in their gadgets. The fragmentation has already happened, the world is atomising. Borders will be drawn where a person’s privacy ends. The world will fragment even more — into apartment-states, human-sized states. The idea of some common collective happiness linked to progress, to integration — is doomed. There’s no European who wouldn’t say that the EU is doomed. In Europe, states as such are on the periphery of people’s vision. People aren’t very ideologised, and the words ‘homeland,’ ‘state,’ ‘patriotism’ induce yawning. In Telluria, there’s nowhere left for a person to hurry: empires have collapsed, one must solve purely personal problems.

— Vladimir Sorokin

People in Telluria have ceased to be historical objects — they simply live their lives. This is the end of Hegelian history, but not in Fukuyama’s sense (the triumph of liberalism); rather, in the sense of the collapse of the very idea that people are material for the historical process, and that there exist a number of great empires that drive people somewhere and govern their fates. Instead, there are only little, ordinary people in a human-sized world. A person can once again take in their reality at a glance: know their neighbours, understand the rules, influence their surroundings. In the global, historical world, a person is a statistical unit; in Telluria — in a timeless, non-historical world — a person is once again a subject, which creates an interesting paradox: the world becomes smaller, and the person within it becomes larger.

In many ways this makes Telluria the most accurate rendering of an MMORPG in literature. There is barely a single plot, no protagonist — everyone lives their own story. The world exists as a sandbox, as a space for parallel activities. Lore is revealed not through a central narrative, but through quests, NPCs, notes — from below. The feudal structure is like guilds and factions. The happiness-granting tellurium nails are like legendary loot giving you exactly what you want. There is no endgame, no victory, just endless existence in a world where everyone optimizes their personal fun: some raid, some craft, some do PvP, some sit in the tavern and role-play. All of them are equally valid, and everyone is equally happy, because they all have tellurium.

Tellurium becomes the überidea, “the theory of everything” of the novel: a miraculous metal that brings happiness. Tellurium nails are hammered by specially trained “carpenters” into the heads of those who wish it, guaranteeing indescribable pleasure, enlightenment, and the fulfilment of dreams. Tellurium nails become both a universal aspiration and a universal currency — everyone dreams of the mythical metal mined in the Republic of Telluria. People want from tellurium what they once sought in the divine, the concept of religion and God becomes secondary and redundant, and finally the third psychedelic revolution occurs.

Tellurium, for all its miraculous properties, is non-addictive and has no side effects. This is crucial because hammering a tellurium nail into your head or not is not an impulse led by addiction, but a conscious choice for each sane person. A person does not become a slave to tellurium, does not become a degenerate, does not lose him or herself. Dying from having a nail hammered into your brain is, however, possible. There is some risk even if an experienced carpenter does it for you. You risk your life in exchange for absolute freedom. Despite all the differences between people (and also giants, gnomes, centaurs, cynocephali, and so on) in the fragmented and chaotic world, they all understand one language — the language of happiness.

Looking back, what is the world of Telluria — utopia or dystopia?

The proverbial secret third thing: a rejection of the very concept of an ideal world, and consequently of its opposite. It is simultaneously chaos and liberation: a dystopia for those who believe in a common monolithic future and the collective progress of civilization — in one überidea capable of uniting everyone, be it philosophy, religion, or even a grand common threat — and simultaneously a world of pluralistic happiness where everyone finds joy, a literal physical realization of humanity’s collective unconscious of our epoch — a personal monstrous utopia that everyone secretly wants but is afraid to admit.

And so the tellurium nail goes in.

Look at our Eurasian continent: after the collapse of ideological, geopolitical, and technological utopias, it has finally sunk into a blessed enlightened Middle Ages. The world has become human-sized. Nations have found themselves. Man has ceased to be the sum of technologies. Mass production is living out its final years. There are no two identical nails that we hammer into humanity’s heads. People have regained their sense of things, started eating healthy food, switched to horses. Genetic engineering helps a person feel their true size. Man has regained faith in the transcendental. Regained the sense of time. We are not rushing anywhere anymore. And most importantly — we understand that there can be no technological paradise on Earth. And no paradise at all. Earth is given to us as an island of struggle, and everyone picks their own struggle and how to overcome it. Themselves!

— Telluria, Chapter XXVIII, Vladimir Sorokin

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