The Baffler no. 81

After Words

November 2025

Masthead

The Baffler

234 5th Ave
New York, NY 10001

Editor in Chief

Matthew Shen Goodman

Deputy Editor

Wes Enzinna

Managing Editor

Bidi Choudhury

Art Directors and Designers

No Ideas

Senior Editors

Jess Bergman

Dave Denison

Web Editor

Zachariah Webb

Editor at Large

Chris Lehmann

Literary Editor

J.W. McCormack

Staff Writer

Jess McAllen

Assistant Editor

Arielle Isack

Editorial Fellow

Grayson Scott

Photo Editor

Chris Maggio

Contributing Editors

Susan Faludi

Evgeny Morozov

Ann Neumann

Liz Pelly

Rick Perlstein

George Scialabba

Jacob Silverman

Astra Taylor

Catherine Tumber

Kate Wagner

Eugenia Williamson

Publisher

Noah McCormack

Executive Director

James White

Strategic Director

Bidi Choudhury

Marketing and Social Media Manager

Kelly Dickinson

Web Developer

Michael Gardiner

Administrative Coordinator

Leila Markosian

Past Publishers

The MIT Press, 2012–2014

Conor O’Neil, 2009–2011

Greg Lane, 1993–2007

Founding Editors

Thomas Frank

Keith White

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Alma Beauvais, Ben Gottlieb, Warren Hildebrand, Ismail Ibrahim, Ashley Lee, Jasmine Liu, and Alex Tan for their help crafting Baffler no. 81.

Screen Sick

Matthew Shen Goodman

© Michael Oswell

The history of literacy is a list of complaints. Critics reliably decry each new technological development as an attention-stealing toy. Before recent grousing about ChatGPT, protestations were uttered about the detrimental effects of the internet (fearing endless distraction, Jonathan Franzen destroyed his laptop’s ethernet port); the word processor (the ease of moving text around declared “an irresponsible whimsicality” by Alexander Cockburn in the eighties); the typewriter (“The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm,” wrote C. S. Lewis, in 1959, to a schoolgirl requesting writing advice); and the very reproducibility of the book (Song-era scholar Ye Mengde held that woodblock texts too often propagated uncorrected errors). In Plato’s Phaedrus, writing itself is suspect, as the literate “will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing.” Amid the breathless techno-optimist awe of artificial intelligence—and ahistorical dismissal of its novelty—it is easy to forget that the current crises of reading and writing are unprecedented in degree, but not in kind. “After Words” considers what’s actually different about today’s information overload and whether we’ve been postliterate for far longer than we’d like to believe.

“Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say,” Friedrich Kittler wrote, but that lofty moment was in the eighties, and the fin de siècle of the written word had yet to give way to the twenty-first century’s incessant logorrhea—a second age of orality, Noah McCormack explains, the Homeric epic replaced by short-form video content and podcasting. (Brace Belden reports from the latter industry, a heady mix of dick-pill ads and Kamala Harris interviews.) Whatever heights our devices have reached, McCormack warns, do not succumb to a technological determinism that ignores class. Accordingly, the siren song of Ms. Rachel cannot be understood outside of America’s ongoing impoverishment of families, writes Sophie Pinkham, lamenting the YouTuber’s death grip on toddler attention spans, to the detriment of the world of books. More than laudable, however, is Ms. Rachel’s vocal support for Palestine. As Bruce Robbins writes in his account of the Sokal affair some thirty years on, the occupation is also a uniting cause between the physicist and the editors of the magazine he so famously hoaxed.

Often falling short of such political demands, our literati may indeed have little to say, as Chris Lehmann points out in his survey of the Trump novel. (If the MFA lifestyle has failed you, consider, as the protagonists of Jess Row’s short story do, assassinating a war criminal.) Andrew Leland contemplates how deaf artists and writers are grappling with a second Trump administration keen on dismantling the Americans with Disabilities Act. Looking outside the imperial core, non-anglophone writers hailing from South Korea to Mexico join a forum on brain rot across the globe. Domestically, Mina Tavakoli writes on the devolution of American culture into chaotic slop over the past twenty-five years—a descent made graphic by Michael Oswell in the issue’s exhibit.

Where does the reader find respite, then? One possible path, though usually maligned: video games, at least in the case of Disco Elysium, the Estonian blockbuster built upon a novel that exceeds said book as a literary experience, as Gabriel Winslow-Yost argues. In it, more than a million words evoke both postrevolutionary melancholy and communist fervor for a more just world, as experienced by an amnesiac cop with the DTs. Call it harm reduction of the digital variety: if we’re to be addicted to our devices, let us be bound to something better on our screens.

We Used to Read Things in This Country

The history of literacy is the history of class

Noah McCormack

© Eric Timothy Carlson

Marxist bros have long been interested in the financial press. Karl Marx first turned to The Economist to help understand the failure of the revolutions of 1848, and in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he directed readers to that “organ” of the “aristocracy of finance” to understand what liberalism was up to. The mid-century American cartoonist Don Wright featured in one sketch a supposed Moscow newsstand selling three papers: Pravda, Izvestia, and the Wall Street Journal.

This tendency went into something of an eclipse in America as the Red Scare suppressed Marxism and the New Left and the cultural turn pointed attention elsewhere. But as interest in historical materialism surged after the global financial crisis of 2008, the left rediscovered the financial press as they searched for the rational kernel within the mystical shell. At first, the Financial Times was the center of attention. As Amber A’Lee Frost wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FT “covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.” After the FT came the writings of the Columbia University financial historian and blogger Adam Tooze, with people declaring themselves “Tooze bros” (mostly for reading his newsletter, Chartbook, not his mammoth histories). Lately, the left has fixated on the Bloomberg podcast Odd Lots, hosted by Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, with Marxists going gaga over their interviews with figures ranging from Zohran Mamdani to the CEOs of logistics companies—subjects who are uniquely able to offer insight into the supply chain shocks during Covid and, again, with the ongoing tariff volatility.

Odd Lots is engrossing, covering everything from the history and economics of firewood to the role of socialism and landlordism in New York politics. But I know this mostly by secondhand report. I can’t stand listening to podcasts. I’m too attached to the written word; it’s denser, more complex, and contains more information than the spoken word. I’m part of a dying breed in that orientation, and the shift in interest from the newspaper to the blog to the podcast has left me somewhat informationally marooned among my peers. Weisenthal would understand this: a special interest of his is Walter Ong, the Jesuit scholar who, two generations ago, discussed the transition from oral culture to print culture and the transition in the television age into what he called “secondary orality.”

The story Ong tells goes like this: for most of human history, culture was exclusively oral. Knowledge was transmitted by speech, and what could be transmitted was what could be remembered. Oral culture was “aggregative rather than analytic”—full of redundancy, traditionalist in disposition, and embedded in the “human lifeworld,” rather than allowing abstract thought. Therefore, it was conservative and traditional, against innovation and any departure from the long-established norms of agricultural life. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential, as in Homer with his repeated phrases such as “swift ships” and “wine-dark sea.” With writing comes precision, analytical rigor, deliberate word choices, analytic remove from life, and abstract thought.

Ong writes that oral culture dominated the Middle Ages, despite the invention of writing five thousand years ago or so, and in some ways the twentieth century. With the arrival of the printing press in Europe in the 1440s, print fixed the written word in place and began to supplant orality. This gave rise to, among other developments, the novel and other modern forms of writing. Then, with the emergence of electronic media, Ong sees society regressing/advancing into a “secondary orality,” which brings back many qualities of the first orality (note the supposedly permanent basis of writing):

its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas. But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment and for its use as well.

A follower of Ong, Weisenthal applies him to the current moment. The podcaster sees Trump as the first postliterate president. Ong hovers over Trump repeating “Crooked Hillary” and “Lyin’ Ted,” the commander in chief re-creating in a much stupider fashion “swift-footed Achilles.” Looking at social media, Weisenthal sees the return of oral values to dominance in the public square, like loud one-upmanship. Rather than the ideal of reasoned debate, social media sets the stage for constant jousting, rewarding those who can be viral and have memes ready in their memory, as today’s Homeric formula shifts both our political and neurological landscapes. “When people say things like ‘Twitter is filled with fake news’ or ‘TikTok is ruining the attention spans of today’s youth,’” Weisenthal writes, “all of that may be correct. But the bigger story, that more and more people are grappling with, is that a return to orality will fundamentally rewire the logic engine of the human brain.”

This belief that technology “wires” the human brain has many parents, most notably Marshall McLuhan and his follower Elizabeth Eisenstein, whose mammoth The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe began the entire field of modern book history in 1979. Preoccupied with the “fixity” of print, she attributed a dizzying array of changes to its arrival, from the scientific revolution to Protestantism to political liberalism. Ong drew on her, while Neil Postman’s seminal 1985 tome, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, drew on all of them. There are internal disagreements between these authors, but fundamentally they are telling one story: technology changes us, and it is currently changing us for the worse.

The Power of the Written Word

I believe we are changing for the worse. I am not, however, a firm technological determinist. I agree with the media theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan in his book Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy:

Among the many problems with adopting this form of strong determinism is that it leads one to believe that when a new technology becomes so deeply embedded, it shifts society in such a way as to allow for few surprises, let alone corrections or reversions to old habits of mind. And by focusing on a technology at the exclusion of (and distinct from) economic and political factors one can generate a monocausal explanation for a complex series of changes.

The economic and political factor that needs to be recentered—and to which the technology is subordinate—is class. Marx must talk to Meta.

I do not hold that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” for various tedious factual and periodizing reasons, but I would argue that the history of all hitherto literacy is the history of class struggle. If we look back at medieval Europe, the origin of modern Euro-American civilization, literacy was rare. In the early Middle Ages, it was vanishingly so, although perhaps not as scarce as popular stories of heroic monasteries preserving the written word would have us understand. Paradigmatically, Charlemagne was himself illiterate even as he encouraged the Carolingian Renaissance, an organized effort emanating from his court to grow Christianity by reviving classical works, increasing Latin literacy and thus the number of people capable of civil and ecclesiastical administration. As the feudal age began in the eleventh century, literacy was slowly growing among the nonclerical elite, but it remained strictly vocational and concentrated in the clergy. In the centuries after his death, English King Henry I was called Beauclerc (from the French for “good cleric”) because he could read.

In the feudal order, there were those who fought, those who prayed, and those who tilled. Since those who prayed were most often those who also administered, what need had most for literacy? Reading was a form of power, which is why the nobility increasingly wanted it for themselves. No landlord would want his peasantry to read or even see the reason why they would want to. And why would a peasant worn to the bone with labor want to take the time to read? This is not to say that peasants did not understand the power of the written word. The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a rare medieval outbreak of something resembling modern class consciousness, burned paperwork on a mass scale: court records, records of rent, and various other documents in which the law was used as an instrument of class oppression.

This pattern remained true as late as the nineteenth century in France. Landlords opposed educating their peasants, and many peasants resisted compulsory schooling. Children’s labor was crucial to the survival of the whole household, so much so that the socialist newspaper Égalité denounced compulsory schooling, declaring that the practice would “wrest from the working family a resource it cannot spare.” When future Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau encountered a peasant in 1884 and reprimandingly questioned the farmer as to why his child was unschooled, the paysan replied, “Will you give him a private income?” The peasants lived in a world of orality, with all the cognitive limitations outlined by Ong. Visually, any contemplation was spent on religious art, which simultaneously implied incomprehensible mysteries while reinforcing the verbal Bible lessons of the priest. As Umberto Eco puts it, “The universe of the early Middle Ages was a universe of hallucination, the world was a symbolic forest peopled with mysterious presences; things were seen as if in the continuous story of a divinity who spent his time reading and devising the Weekly Puzzle Magazine.” For Eco, the key early transition into modernity occurred when “a line was drawn between hallucination and sight” in Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century treatise on optics. With Americans gleefully sinking into AI’s hallucinatory dreamworld, this line blurs and fades.

Literacy rates had risen as the late Middle Ages transitioned into the early modern period, driven in part by the emergence of a protobourgeoisie. But they required the printing press to really change things. Suddenly books could be mass produced—they were, in fact, the first industrial commodity. The scholarship about this is absolutely obsessed with “fixity” as the defining feature of the print revolution: that compared to oral culture, ideas were “fixed” on the printed page, which enabled cognitive revolutions and the scientific revolution. There is some truth to the idea, although scholars like Adrian Johns have shown many people experienced print as far from fixed. Typos abounded, different editions (not necessarily marked as such) included different texts, and pirated editions might have only a loose relationship to the original, just for starters.

Even if true, however, fixity is less important than the emergence of a commodity that could spread written information to large swaths of the population previously undreamed of by the most fevered educationalists. Because of the low barriers to entry and easy smuggling of the product, print resisted those states that attempted to create printing monopolies. Literacy also saw explosive growth alongside the Protestant Reformation, which spurred further printing and created an ideological justification for reading: if man could commune directly with God, he would need access to God’s word as given in the Bible. The Tudor regime in England was obsessed with social control and hierarchy yet was built on Protestant foundations: it placed a vernacular Bible in every church and increased elite and middling educations, leading to rising literacy rates, including among women. Even into the early nineteenth century, heavily Protestant areas like Prussia and the Northeastern United States remained the most literate areas in the world. However, if print had relied on Protestantism, there never would have been a French Revolution, given the success of the French state in crushing, expelling, and marginalizing the faith. In 1775, French judge Malesherbes noted, “Knowledge is being extended by Printing, the written Laws are today known by everyone, everyone can comprehend his own affairs.” And the class that could most comprehend its own affairs and had a bottomless appetite for print was the rising bourgeoisie.

Literacy Wars

The bourgeoisie ascending on both sides of the Atlantic was a class made of ink and newsprint. Aristocracies across Europe were small; they could be bound by common culture and marriages. The bourgeoisie was large, heterogenous, and not able to form kin connections at scale; they required the “many replications” of print to cohere a class identity. Why then would the bourgeoisie allow, much less encourage, their subordinates to also be literate? Because they needed literate and numerate labor from some and hoped to rule others with a Gramscian hegemony transmitted by literacy. The British began trying to create a class of English-literate Indians because it would create, as Benedict Anderson recounts, using the words of one of the project’s architects, “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.”

This policy spread through the empire to much success in its stated goal. At home, however, the English were falling behind the rising Prussian state in formal, required education—one of the reasons Germany overtook industrial pioneer England in the Second Industrial Revolution was that it focused on more knowledge-intensive production, like electricity generation and chemicals. But what really shifted the tide was Germany’s crushing of France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, where better-educated Prussia beat the larger but less educated French army.

In Charles Tilly’s famous formulation, “War made the state and the state made war.” A corollary can be added: literacy made war and war made literacy. On the eve of the war between Prussia and France, England had already moved toward greater education funding and requirements, with W. E. Forster, the minister responsible, telling the House of Commons: “Civilized communities are massing themselves together, each mass being measured by its force; and if we are to hold our position among . . . the nations of the world we must make up the smallness of our numbers by increasing the intellectual force of the individual.” Gladstone noted that the war was “a marked triumph to the cause of systematic popular education.” By the end of the nineteenth century, England had comprehensive, free elementary education, and annually spent nearly as much on it as it did the Navy—a state of affairs that would have shocked anyone a hundred years earlier.

The United States was more complicated, as always, with regional patterns dictated in large part by race. Still, colonial New England had very likely been the most literate region on Earth, and Massachusetts, which had forms of state-sponsored schooling going back to the 1640s, imposed the first compulsory education law in the nation in 1852. Sixteen states had followed by 1885, but it was not until 1918 that the rest had too. The last was Mississippi, with its quasi-feudal economy and black population under debt peonage, discouraging modern education until the last possible moment. As Anthony Trollope described in 1880, “The influxions of [immigrants] are so rapid, that every ten years the nature of the people is changed.” The American elite wanted to use education on its newcomer population as Europeans did on their imperial subjects.

The period roughly spanning 1890 to 1914 was, in many ways, the high point of mass literate culture. In America, locally produced literature was only beginning to displace British writing to form a national canon. “For the first time in history,” per Adrian Johns, “it was really true that print—and therefore reading—had become a defining component of a nation’s everyday life.” In Europe, as H. G. Wells put it, “The greater gulf that had divided the world hitherto into the readers and the non-reading mass became little more than a slightly perceptible difference in educational levels.” Common English soldiers went into the trenches of World War I carrying The Oxford Book of English Verse, having been state-schooled, and then attended workingmen’s institutes and read the classics in the Everyman’s Library.

The traditionally educated were not happy about this. Nietzsche’s condemnation of mass literacy, that “everyone being allowed to learn to read ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking,” was popular from socialists to reactionaries. Aldous Huxley spoke for many when he said, “Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid.” Modernist literature, as John Carey explained in The Intellectuals & The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, was created as a form of elite expression that would be impenetrable to the newly literate masses. The masses would not read the classic literature and intellectual works of nonfiction that cultural elites of capitalist society wanted them to read. And not just the cultural elites: the Social Democratic Party in Germany was dismayed that the extensive library system it set up was being used mostly for pulp fiction. The capitalists themselves were more divided. While the Krupps in Germany created a sixty-one-thousand-volume library for their employees and stocked it with improving works, many were more relaxed: they just wanted workers to read what was profitable for the capitalist. It was no coincidence that this was also the great age of the popular newspaper, technologically enabled by the telegraph, and economically by the mass-reading public. The cultural elites hated this too. Nietzsche said that the rabble “vomit their bile and call it a newspaper,” while even decades into the twentieth century, the leading British literary critic F. R. Leavis spoke in horror of “films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction—all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.”

The Decline of Western Civilization

What is odd is that many of the greatest critics of the rise of electronic media and the depreciation of literacy also see this as a period of decline. Postman thought the downturn in literature began with the telegraph and its child, the mass newspaper. “Its language was the language of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal,” he writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death. “News took the form of slogans . . . to be forgotten with dispatch. Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message has no connection to that which preceded or followed it.” And it was full of ads! This looks different forty years later, on the other side of the collapse of the newspaper and print-advertising industries. Jokes now abound that classified ads were a load-bearing pillar of democracy, and the decline of the daily newspaper has, in fact, sped up to frightening speed the descent into a discontinuous and deathly information environment. Partly this is due to eternal slippage in this discourse between mass literacy and elite cultural literacy, between the question of whether people were simply capable of using an almanac for farming or whether they could and would consume complex prose (something this article is guilty of too, perhaps). But it is largely due to the fact that most people who write about this are elitists themselves: Postman frames his book around the insights of Huxley, who believed mass education led to cultural stupidity.

One-third of all newspapers in America closed between 2004 and 2025. When newspapers close, local businesses commit more legal violations, local government borrowing costs grow because of decreased public scrutiny of spending decisions, people vote less, and what is inaccurately referred to as “political polarization” increases as social isolation grows and feelings of community diminish. In the first episode of The Sopranos, Tony’s famous monologue about feeling like everything is in decline is overlaid with footage of him getting his daily newspaper, Newark’s Star-Ledger. The Star-Ledger ceased all print operations in February. In The Wire, stevedore and union secretary-treasurer Frank Sobotka mourns the loss of mid-century prosperity as he utters the famous line, “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.” Sobotka is a subscriber to the Baltimore Sun, which barely hangs on today, with a fraction of the journalists and sections it used to have. Neither Tony nor Frank’s failsons are readers, and their futures turn out to be poorer and more quotidian, if not outright bleaker. It doesn’t make sense in those fictional universes, or in our real one, to understand the introduction of the newspaper as a backward step in literate culture—it was a form of literacy that appealed to non-elite readers and provided them with information as well as entertainment. In many ways, the current era of Trump results from the fact that it’s easier to put your hand in the next guy’s pocket if he’s illiterate.

If the period from the 1880s into the early twentieth century was a golden age of reading, it was one by default: there was no other mass form of entertainment. With the rise of radio—which, being spoken from written scripts, was initially and forlornly hoped to be a literacy-enhancing medium—and then television, everything changed. The latter replaced print as, in the words of Postman, the “paradigm for our conception of public information.” That paradigm was very stupid. Reading and library usage immediately dipped as television spread widely in the 1950s. However, there was a countervailing cultural force: the Cold War and competition with the Soviets. The government invested in K–12 education and a vast expansion of higher education because after Sputnik, as the historian Lawrence Samuel explains in Literacy in America, “the news that college students read few books and even fewer after they graduate (confirmed by Gallup polls) was thus disturbing, leading to the arguable conclusion that young people weren’t as smart as they used to be (and not as smart as their Russian counterparts).” The next fifty years saw the government continually intervening in education, successfully or not, to counter perceived (and actual) American education deficiencies compared with the Russians, then the Europeans and the Japanese, and finally the Chinese. Reading held on despite the seductions of television (and then the internet 1.0), if eclipsed as the main medium. The number of daily newspapers in America plunged from the high of 2,500 in 1910 to 1,750 in 1945, but then a small decline stabilized as late as 1985, when there were 1,676. By 2000, there were 1,480. At the last count, in 2024, the number barely broke four digits: 1,033. Many newspapers are troubled for both finances and readership, and all depend on older readers.

Critics of television were right, and they were there almost from the beginning. President Kennedy’s FCC chair, Newton Minow, famously declared in 1961 that television was

a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, the summa of television critique published twenty-four years later, Postman argues that serious television is an impossibility and, to the extent places like PBS try, no one watches it. Unlike print, which “encourages rationality,” television can produce only entertainment with no intertextuality, whether they be sitcoms or “news” shows. Commercials were the modal form of the medium, and politics were reshaped in the soap ad’s image. For Postman, this led to the election of Ronald Reagan and the fact that “Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.” People who read the news were substantially more informed than those who spent the same amount of time watching it. If reading continually reteaches you how to think, television is a perpetual anesthetic. Philosophy, history, complex thought are all impossible on the tube: “Its form works against the content.”

Some of Postman’s views place the work very much in 1985. Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican from New York who supported civil rights, called for Medicare for all in 1970, and sponsored the War Powers Resolution, is now lamented as one of the few from a vanished species of smart, good politicians. For Postman, Javits was the apotheosis of the empty television-commercial politician with nothing to say. Things can always get worse.

With television firmly in place, and the internet rising in the 1990s, some began to perceive that the Gutenberg era of print was historically determined and that the conditions that caused it were coming to an end. Sven Birkerts’s 1994 The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age puts it thus:

Suddenly it feels like everything is poised for change; the slower world that many of us grew up with dwindles in the rearview mirror. The stable hierarchies of the printed page—one of the defining norms of that world—are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits.

Later, he continues:

Visual and nonvisual technology in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. It works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the word, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.

Some of Birkerts’s predictions, like that facts would supplant fiction, turned out to be wildly untrue. But he saw to the core of what was coming:

We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. One need only compare a college textbook from twenty years ago to its contemporary version. A poem by Milton, a play by Shakespeare—one can hardly find the text among the explanatory notes nowadays. . . . As the circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications involve us in network processes—which of their nature plant us in a perpetual present—our perception of history will inevitably alter.

Moving further from his present into our future, Birkerts predicted that

the isolated reader may remain, but the audience is gone and is not likely to reappear. And this loss impinges heavily, very heavily, on the quality of our cultural life. It assures that there will be a sharp split between extremes—between an academic elite and a mass population—with no mediating center.

Two decades after Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, I found Jim Paul’s neglected 1996 fiction, Medieval in LA, in the used section of Powell’s. Interspersing textual selections from and about the Middle Ages with accounts of a creative professional visiting Los Angeles, the book held that we were already reentering a medieval world of image mysteries. Around the same time, I noticed a cash register at a fast-food restaurant that used pictograms instead of text. As we entered the early Trump years, with the rise and rise of short-form video, I started hearing from virtually every academic I knew that their students’ ability to read anything longer than a few pages was disappearing.

Statistics have gotten only grimmer. Last year, the average American spent 0.28 hours per day reading, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is down slightly from 2016, along with socializing and TV watching. A 2023 survey says 54 percent of Americans read one or more books a year. Most are genre books, romantasy being the only source of growth in reading. “Video now accounts for 58.8% of average time spent per day with social networks, up from 48.0% in 2021,” writes Audrey Schomer in Variety. TikTok users spend the most time with their app, with an average of 2.48 hours day in 2024; Instagram users manage 2.46. For The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch notes, “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.” Ong was wrong that secondary orality would remain yoked to literacy. While literacy remains a mass phenomenon, the number of readers and the quality of what they read are declining. At the same time, while memory is traditionally the organizing principle of orality, those immersed in its second coming have seen their faculties of recall replaced by data centers, leaving them bereft of meaningful culture of either the print or oral variety.

中国第一

In 2007, I was in Shanghai at a dinner party arranged by a relative. Many of the attendees were the American heads of their U.S. companies’ Chinese operations. It was a moment of nearly euphoric optimism. A huge new market had opened, money was flowing in a torrent, and there was no need to worry about Chinese competition. The executives were unanimous: China’s system of rote education produced extremely technically competent workers, but the intellectual and scientific creativity nurtured by our free-inquiry system of education meant we would always dominate the locals. Today, China is home to eight of the top-ten institutions on Nature’s list of rankings of research universities (the United States just defunded the first on the list, Harvard) and has overtaken America in every industry, from electric cars to agricultural machinery. In ten key industrial sectors, China leads in seven and America in three. What happened?

So many factors are beyond the scope of this essay, ranging from population changes to the successful Chinese bet on “producerism” against our financialized economy, but one is that China believes in education and literacy more than we do. This is clear just in basic literacy, where it has achieved a 97 percent rate; recently, the U.S. equivalent has been estimated at as low as 79 percent. While U.S. higher education has been slowly strangled by declining state subsidies and increasing reliance on tuition loans, China poured money into education. The racist assumption that the Chinese could not be creative turned out to be very, very wrong.

And because China is ruled by an ostensibly Marxist cadre, the country has an ability to restrict electronic opiates far beyond anything an American could imagine. In 2019, China limited under-eighteen-year-olds to ninety minutes of video games a day. In 2021, this was limited to one hour on Fridays, weekends, and holidays, between 8 and 9 p.m. Similar restrictions time-limit youngsters from spending more than 2.48 hours a day on scrolling video. While evasion is widespread, the positive effects of restriction compared with the uncontrolled American system are incalculable. The addictive nature of smartphones is a very serious problem contributing to the decline of literacy, but the phones exist in a social context and not the other way around. In global polling, the United States is among the most pessimistic countries about the effects of AI. The 2025 AI Index Report states that only 34 percent of Americans are excited for the AI future. China is the most excited, with 80 percent. The lived experience of Chinese people is that the government will restrain the harmful effects of technology and living standards will rise, so they are not afraid. Americans who have watched as Silicon Valley runs rampant and good jobs disappear are rightly afraid. While Chinese schools are teaching students about AI’s impact on society—risks and biases in addition to basic learning—American schools are rushing headlong into serving AI slop as the only version of education children receive. Astonishingly, in 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English declared, “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” AI huckster-cum-revolutionary and ChatGPT front man Sam Altman says, “A kid born today will never be smarter than AI, ever.” His intention is to attract more investment into his company by the illusory promise of “PhD-level” AI, but he may be right despite himself: it is not that AI is reaching “general intelligence” but that children are not attaining it.

For it is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated. For the first time in centuries, the elite no longer feel they need educated workers and soldiers to uphold and reproduce the system. National-security strategies, from Biden to Trump, are increasingly based on the idea that we can achieve the (unachievable) goal of “artificial general intelligence” in a short number of years and thus dominate China going forward. To tech-credulous military elites (and the Silicon Valley companies profiting off them), it will not matter if the junior-officer class can’t understand Clausewitz; battlefield AI will tell them which commands to give a platoon. As for the economy, in the words of fat cat Elijah Clark, “As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees myself because of AI. AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a pay raise.” As billboards recently spotted in San Francisco and New York City say: stop hiring humans.

American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians who are happy to take on all the risks of AI because it promises to create workers who cannot even conceptualize quitting, much less striking. The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought; with the unemployed illiterate and addicted to screens, they are unlikely to be politicized and join a socialist campaign. Theodor Adorno noted in the 1940s that when bourgeois liberalism is replaced by fascism, so, too, is literate culture. Some of the American elite are embracing idiocy themselves. Students at Columbia say they don’t know anyone who doesn’t use AI to cheat. A college student in Utah told Intelligencer, “I spend so much time on TikTok, hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes twelve.” Why go to college when you don’t benefit from any of your courses? To find the two helpmeets you need as a modern man: “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” We used to make shit in this country.

Of the American elite who see continuing value in literate thought, they are, for the most part, happy to create a society where a small “cognitive elite” dominate the rest. Poor kids spend an extra two hours on the black mirror every day, while rich people send their kids to private schools where no electronic devices are allowed, as Mary Harrington recently explained in the New York Times. Controlling the media effect is possible even in America; we have simply reduced it to a class privilege. I love the First Amendment and abhor censorship, and yet I have reluctantly come to believe that the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country. What China shows us is that, contra the whole line of technology-first scholarship following McLuhan, it’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters. China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.

Americans are back in Eco’s “symbolic forest peopled with mysterious presences,” where we struggle to distinguish reality from fiction in the images put in front of us. (Per the subhead of a New York Times article from this year about ChatGPT driving people into madness: “Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems.”) Oral culture is, again, aggregative instead of analytical, dispositionally traditionalist, and homeostatic, with no objective distance. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential. “Let’s Go Brandon” is a modern, stupider, and less verbally intelligent form of Cockney rhyming slang. The audio of a black American father crying “My Shayla” about his daughter during a custody dispute becomes the background to fan edits of Barron Trump as a hot, fuckable heir to his father. The NPR headline “Please don’t cook chicken in NyQuil, the FDA asks TikTok users” speaks eloquently to the new mysterious presences in our social life. We are not only a long way from the rationality of print but pretty damn far from the Homeric epithet. This is the world Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg want you to live in, so that their power cannot be resisted.

Meanwhile, have you seen this TikTok video about Andor?

The Song of Other Things

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

© Juanjo Gasull

From disambiguation statements posted at the beginning of Wikipedia articles, as collected by the author between 2013 and 2015. This style of disambiguation (e.g., “This article is about the fruit. For the technology company, see Apple Inc.”) has fallen out of favor with the website’s editors, who now tend to direct readers to standalone pages of other uses (e.g., “For other companies with the same name, see Apple (disambiguation) § Businesses and organisations”) rather than tortuously work through the possibilities of mistaken identity.

I.

This article is about poetry that is sung. For poetry of the Chinese Song Dynasty, see

This article is about speech directed at babies. For speech-like sounds produced by babies, see

This article is about the practice of taking heads from humans after killing them. For recruiting in organizations, see

This article is about the nineteenth-century slave escape routes. For railroads built below ground, see

This article is about the practice of escaping from restraints. For the attempt to divert attention from an unpleasant reality, see

This article is about the children’s modeling material. For the ancient Greek philosopher, see

This article is about the logical fallacy. For the historical quotation “Tu quoque, Brute, fili mi,” see

This article is about the day in the Roman calendar. For other events that occurred on 15 March, see

This article is about welfare recipients in the US. For state handouts to the British Queen, see

This article is about a rise in the general price level. For the expansion of the early universe, see

This article is about the economic term. For the board game, see

This article is about the end of life. For the fabric process, see

II.

This article is about the court case. For the poet, see

This article is about the poet. For the island, see

This article is about the island. For the racehorse, see

This article is about the racehorse. For the American president, see

III.

This article is about the mass murderer. For the economist of the University of Chicago, see

This article is about the professional wrestler. For the seventeenth-century theologian, see

This article is about the pornographic actress. For the Peter Pan character, see

This article is about the civil engineer. For the baggage handler, see

This article is about the writer. For the saint, see

This article is about the writer. For the spy, see

This article is about the writer. For the September 11 victim, see

This article is about the writer. For the injured and retired footballer, see

This article is about the writer. For the minister of the Three Kingdoms period, see

This article is about the writer. For the bird, see

This article is about the writer. For the greeting, see

This article is about the writer. For the passenger train service, see

IV.

This article is about the old bridge. For the new bridge, see

This article is about the existing town. For the ghost town, see

This article is about the rock in Arizona. For the rock in Mongolia, see

This article is about the 1844 balloon hoax. For the 2009 balloon hoax, see

This article is about the real Directors of the FBI. For the criminal who pretends to be the Director of the FBI when sending fraudulent e-mails, see

This article is about the independent organization founded by John Dewey. For the Cold War organization controlled by the CIA, see

This article is about the crime of apartheid as defined in international law. For the system of racial segregation that formerly existed in South Africa, see

This article is about legal jurisdiction over military personnel. For military jurisdiction over civilians, see

This article is about children with a foreign military parent. For children used as soldiers, see

This article is about a form of therapy used in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. For the form of torture, see

This article is about past conflicts in the Near East. For modern conflicts, see

This article is about the 1940 massacre of Polish officers. For the 1943 massacre of Belarusian civilians, see

This article is about casualties for the war beginning in 2003. For other wars, see

This article is about the Vietnamese holiday. For the 1968 military operation that began on that holiday, see

This article is about the epic poem. For the siege, see

This article is about the poem. For the disaster itself, see

This article is about the metaphor. For the painting by Pieter Bruegel based on the metaphor, see

This article is about the theoretical world-ending destruction. For the professional wrestling maneuver, see

This article is about the first South American automobile. For the multifaceted response to loss, see

This article is about the point-and-click video game by Adventure Soft. For the Samaritan Gnostic of the same name, see

This article is about the search for knowledge. For the suburb of Melbourne, Australia, see

This article is about the electronic vacuum tube. For the Eastern Orthodox structure of hymns, see

This article is about the magical formula. For the polling firm, see

This article is about the robot. For party leaders and elected officials of the United States’ Democratic Party, see

This article is about the pasta dish. For the secret society, see

This article is about the gay rights organization. For the organized crime network, see

This article is about the mathematical concept. For the four-person anti-Nazi Resistance groups, see

This article is about the literary genre. For romantic customs and practices of the Amish, see

VI.

This article is not about Western Express Air Lines.

This article is not about Weitzenböck’s inequality.

This article is not about the Weitzenböck identity.

This article is not about the Cassini Division in the rings around the planet Saturn.

This article is not about Robert of Chester, Robert of Retines, Robert Kilwardby, nor a bishop of Olomouc.

This article is not about the Krishna dasa Babaji of Ranabadi who died in 1865, nor the one of Navadvipa who died in 1919, nor the one of Radhakund who died in 1998.

This article is not about William H. Jefferys, also both an astronomer and a Bayesian.

Des Cahill is also a Fine Gael councilor in Cork City. Ths article is not about him.

This article is not about devices intended to permanently remove one hair at a time. Those devices are electric tweezers.

VII.

For the answer to the question “Why is the sky blue?”, see

For the phenomenon of blood falling from the sky, see

For the principle of retributive justice, see

For the eschatological interpretation, see

For the psychological idea of “holier-than-thou,” see

For the Biblical demon, see

For the Greek god of laughter, see

For the fictional gingerbread man, see

For the fictional anthropomorphic mouse, see

For the source of the phrase “the meek shall inherit the earth,” see

For the working class, see

For a person’s assessment of his/her own value and dignity, see

For the baseball player nicknamed The Freak, see

For the eighteenth-century polyphagist, see

For the second Doctor Octopus, see

For his father, Lord Mayor of Nottingham, see

For his less famous grandson by the same name, see

For the plural of Daddy, see

For the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, see

For white people who “emulate black people,” see

For the gravitational sphere of influence of one astronomical body in the face of perturbations from another heavier body around which it orbits, see

For the actual flight of a bumblebee, see

For self-medication in animals, see

For sex positions used by other animals, see

For the album by Snoop Dogg, see

For a heartbeat, see

VIII.

This article is about the man.

This article is about the room.

This article is about the castle.

This article is about the cave.

This article is about a path between two mountains.

This article is about extraterrestrial mountains.

This article is about the Irish windstorm.

This article is about the right-handed pitcher who pitched a no-hitter in a game he lost in 1964.

This article is about the first and second sons of Adam and Eve.

This article is about the wife of David.

This article is about the fourteenth wife of Abdul Hamid I.

This article is about the fourth scholarch of the Stoa.

This article is about the boy who was the subject of a mediaeval blood libel.

This article is about the previous pretender.

This article is about the forged imperial decree.

This article is about the soup made from peas.

This article is about a community of trees.

This article is about a scientific family of crabs.

This article is about all true hornets.

This article is about blankets that cover the entire horse.

This article is about the ancient boot.

This article is about liquids which are swilled around the mouth.

This article is about transgender uses.

This article is about coloring infinite graphs.

This article is about the first film in the trilogy.

This article is about the crystal skulls.

This article is concerned with roundedness in vowels.

This article is about the acknowledgement of debt.

This article is about parsimonious people.

This article is about the effect of spending on national income.

This article is about moral realism in the robust sense.

This article is about the generation of life from existing life.

This article is about the life source of the Transformers.

This article is about the view of God.

This article is about the angel of death.

This article is about a final resurrection at the end time.

This article is about the near and very far future.

This article is about Adolf Hitler’s dog.

This article is about laziness in Christianity.

This article is about the act of killing a human being.

This article is about the crime of attempt.

This article is about the Sikh sin of lust.

This article is about pathological guilt over religious or moral issues.

This article is about the otherworld whose inhabitants endure suffering.

This article is about the human shedding of tears.

This article is about a condition relating to grandiosity.

This article is about a pledge of allegiance.

This article is about the catatonic state.

This article is about the state of being.

This article is about the feeling.

This article is about the sense.

This article is about the perception or emotion.

This article is about the muse.

This article is about meaningless rhetoric.

This article is about the property of words.

This article is about punctuation marks used to indicate irony or sarcasm.

This article is about “emptiness” in a general sense.

This article is about the Internet encyclopedia.

This article is about the journal edited and written by patients of an asylum.

This article is about OCD in humans.

This article is about the “end of story” mark.

Ω

Speak and Sell

Ms. Rachel and the disappearing world of books

Sophie Pinkham

© Melek Zertal

It was winter in upstate New York, and the house was drafty. There were three of us at home: me, my mother, and my two-year-old daughter. Before my child—let’s call her Stella—was born, I scoffed at screens, at parents who gave their children iPads in restaurants and smartphones in their strollers. I was soon chastened. It had been sleeting for days, and there’s only so much peekaboo one woman, or even two, can play every hour. I had sung “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” until I’d gone hoarse.

That fateful afternoon, I put on a show recommended by a friend with a child slightly older than Stella. I was still a novice in the field of children’s streaming content. Free on YouTube, the program was called Songs for Littles; many refer to it simply by its creator’s name, Ms. Rachel.

I lay on the couch, trying to gather the strength to do yet another load of laundry, and watched Stella watch the screen. This was relaxing: I was close to my beloved child, but for once, she was asking nothing of me. What was not relaxing was Ms. Rachel, whose affect struck me as enthusiastic bordering on deranged.

“Hi FRIENDS! I’m SO excited to LEARN with you toDAY!”

About forty years old, Ms. Rachel was dressed like a giant toddler, with a bubble-gum-pink headband, matching baby tee and Converse, and denim overalls. She smiled relentlessly as she sang nursery rhymes, counted, and pronounced simple words with an exaggerated intonation. She dipped out of sight, popped back, and said “peekaboo.” Unlike me, Ms. Rachel never got tired of playing. Ms. Rachel was never in a bad mood or distracted. Stella could watch her play peekaboo a million times if she wanted to. YouTube is the perfect parent: its energy never flags. How could I ever match Ms. Rachel’s enthusiasm? When she performed “Wheels on the Bus,” she was as jubilant as Julie Andrews in a field of wildflowers on an Austrian mountaintop.

Something about Ms. Rachel got under my skin. The sexualization of young children is a staple of media anxiety; Ms. Rachel, a middle-aged woman stripped of the markers of adulthood, represents the opposite swing of the pendulum. She is often compared to Mister Rogers, the secular saint of American children’s media, but Mister Rogers was a grown-up man in a tie, with a default tone of gentle seriousness. That was part of his authority. Ms. Rachel’s megatoddler costume seemed to me to embody the American assumption that the adult woman disappears with the birth of her child, when she is transformed into a caring appendage, desexed and infantilized, addressed as “Mom” even by strangers, and starts spending holidays with her children in matching pajamas.

On a more basic level, I found Ms. Rachel annoying. She is perhaps most famous for her singsong, high-pitched voice. When I googled her, I found that I was not alone in finding this voice deeply irritating, along with her slow, exaggerated delivery and relentless good cheer. But Stella loved Ms. Rachel. Stella was giggling with joy.

“Should we go DOOOOOOOWN the SLIIIIIIIDE?”

“THAT was FUUUUUUUN!”

“I WONder if we can COUNT even HIGHer than FIIIIIIIIIIVE!”

Ms. Rachel cast prompts into the digital nothingness and then paused as if waiting for a response: “Can you say ‘BALL’?” She cupped her hand over her ear with a dramatic gesture and then cried, “Good JOB! You DID it!” She is big on affirmation, the staple of the “gentle parenting” method that is the conventional wisdom for bourgeois millennials. But hearing “good job” lobbed into the void again and again drove me crazy: the final reduction to meaninglessness of American parental praise, lavished on a child simply for existing. Gentle parenting is, of course, preferable to abuse or rigid authoritarianism. But it raises the question of what will happen when the child enters the cruel, unfeeling real world and the praise tap is suddenly shut off. Are such children doomed to become adults who listen to self-help audiobooks and YouTube lectures of anonymous affirmation?

Stella never answered Ms. Rachel’s prompts that afternoon, perhaps because she knew Ms. Rachel couldn’t hear her. She just smiled adoringly and waited for Ms. Rachel to keep talking.

I turned off the TV and persuaded Stella to play with blocks. I was trying to be a good mother. “Good JOB! You DID it!” I cooed when she finished a tower. I said it without thinking. It was a reflex, not a choice.

“You sound just like Ms. Rachel,” my mother observed, chuckling with a hint of lighthearted malice. It was true. We agreed that Ms. Rachel was incredibly annoying, yet I had already memorized the gestures that accompanied her version of “Wheels on the Bus,” because Stella liked the song much better when we could act it out together. Before long, Stella and I would be hopping like little bunnies according to Ms. Rachel’s instructions. Did I hate Ms. Rachel’s show because it made me see how ridiculous I, a middle-aged intellectual, might look as I cooed and crowed to my child? As I crawled around on all fours pretending to be a dog for her entertainment? As I nibbled her chubby, adorable, delicious little arm? Long after I had turned off YouTube, Ms. Rachel haunted me, like a phantom pain or psychosomatic itch.

The Pleasure of the Text

Before I had Stella, I imagined that I would invent whole worlds for my child, that I would tell her stories for hours on end. After all, I had spent my own childhood and much of my adulthood in the world of fiction. As a child, I would sometimes read for seven or eight hours a day. I have no memory of learning to read, but I do recall teachers having to come and shake my shoulder to rouse me from a novel-induced trance. I remember arriving for the first day of middle school and joining the circle where we were asked to report how many books we had read over the summer. My response, forty, sealed my fate as a social pariah. Nobody invited me to a birthday party for a whole year. But what did I care? I was reading.

In my fantasies of parenthood, I had underestimated the enormous gap between what interests young children and what interests adults. (Finding this overlap is part of the genius of the greatest children’s books, because children depend on adults to read to them.) Nor had I seriously considered that when I was reading to an infant or toddler or preschooler, I would not be reading all the grown-up books I myself wanted to read or doing any of the other less seductive grown-up tasks required of me. I now realize that I had imagined Stella learning to read almost spontaneously, without having been taught. One day she would sit down and read, just as one day she would stand up and walk.

I knew, of course, that reading to your child was paramount, almost synonymous with good parenting. Since Stella’s birth, I had been admonished to read to her; the hospital sent us home with a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But when I followed the doctor’s instructions, I learned that infants do not wish to compete with a story for their parent’s attention. They would rather chew on the book or throw it on the ground and hear it go thump. They prefer continuous eye contact, nursery rhymes, cheerful narration of tasks, and brightly colored dangling objects. But by two, Stella began to show a genuine interest in picture books, even if this often involved ripping them to pieces. The key to success was minimal text. She was far more interested in the pictures than the words, and she loved turning the pages.

I grew up in a family of book hoarders, so Stella inherited many books from my own childhood. I waited impatiently for her to develop the attention span to hear and enjoy the picture books I remembered and loved best: Frog and Toad, Owl at Home, Tales of Oliver Pig, The Runaway Bunny, George and Martha, Caps for Sale, Where the Wild Things Are. I was ecstatic the first time Stella let me read a Frog and Toad story straight through. This series, by Arnold Lobel, is among the most beautiful and existential of modern children’s stories. The tales in Frog and Toad embrace love and frailty; they are unmarred by didacticism or sentimentality. As an adult, I realized that the two heroes are a loving same-sex couple struggling with Toad’s chronic depression, which made me like the books even more.

Stella’s favorite story from Frog and Toad was “Dragons and Giants.” In it, Frog and Toad read a book about brave people who fight dragons and giants. This makes them wonder if they are brave too. They decide to test themselves by climbing a mountain. After fleeing from many dangers—a snake, an avalanche, a hawk—they run home and hide, “just feeling very brave together.” Consolation comes from the shared experience of fear and imagination rather than the literal surmounting of fears and obstacles, as might happen in a more stereotypical children’s story. As a beleaguered adult, my favorite Frog and Toad story was “A List,” in which Toad sits up in bed and writes down his list of things to do today, starting with “Wake up.” When the wind blows away the list, Toad can’t chase it because “running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!” Without the list, Toad sits and does nothing. Frog keeps him company.

Stella and I were discovering literature, but the bright lights of TV and phones were always lurking in the background, if not in the palms of our hands. It is terribly hard for books to compete with video on demand, for children as for adults. Between streaming services, TikTok, audiobooks, iPads, video games, and voice-operated systems like Siri, anything more than basic literacy seems poised for irrelevancy. Perhaps your child is playing Montessori letter-matching games on your phone—but will she ever bother to read a novel? A trip to Stella’s day care’s book fair only reinforced my pessimism. Many of the books sold were just spin-offs of TV shows and movies. Why buy a book about Moana when you could watch the real thing? Reading to your child is promoted as an inherently educational act. But could I, a professional book critic, get behind the idea that reading anything at all was good? Don’t children, even small ones, have a right to high-quality art?

Wire Mothers

No one has ever accused Ms. Rachel of being an artist. But if her show isn’t art, and isn’t quite entertainment, what is it, exactly?

Rachel Griffin Accurso, as Ms. Rachel is known in civilian life, has worked with disabled children and considered joining the ministry before becoming a music teacher. She made her first videos as a low-cost way of sharing music education for young children; later she started making videos inspired by speech therapy to help her son, who had speech delays.

The earliest video available on Accurso’s channel, from 2019, features her looking directly at the camera, singing the song “Bubble, Bubble Pop!” in front of a digital background of the seabed. At this early date she had not yet perfected her Ms. Rachel persona. Her long-sleeved shirt is red, she has no ponytail or overalls, and her smile is relatively unforced. Her microphone isn’t very good. But the video includes all the other elements for which she became famous. As of September, it has more than eleven million views.

Covid hit a year after Accurso posted “Bubble, Bubble Pop!” Her husband, Aron Accurso, who worked as an associate music director on Broadway, was home and had plenty of time to help her with her show. Meanwhile, millions of American families also found themselves stuck indoors, with even less access to childcare than usual. This is when Ms. Rachel became a star—the rare early-childhood educator to strike it rich. She has more than sixteen million subscribers on YouTube; her videos can rack up as many as 1.5 billion views. Young children, with their nearly limitless thirst for repetition, are the ideal YouTube fans. Accurso now presides over her own media empire and is sometimes described as “Taylor Swift for toddlers.” Her 2025 Netflix show was a hit, preorders of her first picture book (another TV spin-off) set records, and the Ms. Rachel singing doll sold out, with counterfeits flooding the market. A few years ago, there was even a Ms. Rachel imitator online, complete with overalls and a headband. She couldn’t trick Ms. Rachel’s legion of fans. On TikTok, parents shared videos of children crying when they saw the imposter.

During the Covid pandemic, screens became both a primary means of education, which went online, and an indispensable source of childcare. Neither of these uses was new. Parents have depended on screens as babysitters ever since television sets first appeared in the home. When children can’t play outside unsupervised; when shrinking, isolated nuclear families find themselves home alone for long stretches; when one or two adults shoulder all the responsibility for supporting and maintaining a household; and when screens are ubiquitous, television and its descendants become an almost inevitable recourse. Many Americans have no guaranteed paid parental leave, and day care costs a fortune. (Commenters on videos featuring Ms. Rachel joke about owing her money for childcare.) Generations of American children have grown up in front of TV sets. A high school friend of mine once exclaimed, “Don’t talk bad about TV—TV raised me.” He is now a tenured media studies professor, living proof that massive doses of television in childhood are not incompatible with the writing of academic monographs.

In the late 1960s, awareness of the American dependence on screens spurred the development of publicly funded educational television programs like Sesame Street. If the kids were going to stare at screens for hours every day, they should learn their letters and numbers as they did so. And they should be edified artistically and emotionally. Professional musicians thronged to Sesame Street. Johnny Cash serenaded Oscar the Grouch with his song “Nasty Dan,” Smokey Robinson sang to the letter u (“‘U’ Really Got a Hold on Me”), and Little Richard performed “Rubber Duckie” while sitting in a bathtub. Fred Rogers testified in Congress about the need for funding for programs like his, which would attend to the “inner drama” of childhood rather than bombarding kids with cartoon violence. Untethered to the profit motive, PBS sponsored a golden age of children’s television. Episodes of Sesame Street were “brought to you by” a letter of the alphabet—an affirmation of its not-for-profit, ad-free ethos.

Ms. Rachel has often spoken in interviews about her childhood love for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and about revering Rogers as an adult. Part of the secret of her own success is her promise of a better kind of screen time, in the tradition of Mister Rogers or Sesame Street. Her videos are meant to be something virtuous rather than a mere source of parental relief—since the desire for relief is often seen as a form of parental failure. Rather than entertainment or “edutainment,” Ms. Rachel is marketed as an educational resource, even as speech therapy. Some of her top videos are titled “Baby Learning With Ms Rachel,” “Toddler Learning With Ms Rachel,” and even “Learn to Talk With Ms Rachel.” Accurso, who holds two advanced degrees in education, advertises the fact that she uses speech-therapy techniques in her videos. This explains some of the aspects of her show that are most off-putting for an adult viewer, or at least for me. All her videos are filmed straight on and close-up, so that you can see her tongue and lips clearly. The camera frequently zooms in on her mouth. (I know more than I would like about Ms. Rachel’s dentition.) Research has shown that high-pitched voices and drawn-out, exaggerated, overemphasized syllables of the Ms. Rachel variety can help babies learn to talk. The show is repetitive because repetition helps children learn. Ms. Rachel is evidence-based.

Parents have bought this pitch, as have some experts quoted in laudatory media coverage of Ms. Rachel. The comments on videos featuring Ms. Rachel are full of stories about children learning to talk or sign, learning new words, or learning English thanks to her. She is even credited with helping nonverbal children (for instance, children with autism) develop communication skills. In one YouTube comment, the mother of a child with Down syndrome wrote that her child said “mama” and “dada” for the first time right after watching the show. Fans look to Ms. Rachel as their savior—which may have something to do with the difficulties of getting speech therapy or any other kinds of social and medical services in the United States.

Of course, most children will start talking with or without Ms. Rachel. Unlike reading, talking is not a skill that needs to be explicitly taught; our brains are built for it. Much of the science on video learning, meanwhile, indicates that children under three—a large segment of Ms. Rachel’s target audience—do not learn well from screens, and that screen time without a parent present is least effective in helping children learn. What works best, as Ms. Rachel herself often reminds viewers, is face-to-face interaction, especially for children with speech delays and other problems that may require intervention. Rather than teaching children to speak, Ms. Rachel is mostly just giving their parents a rest and helping them not feel guilty about it. She is also initiating very young children into the flattened world of screens. Soon they will depart the adamantly tactile, three-dimensional world of babyhood, with its dangling toys that squeal when you squeeze them and eminently chewable objects. And with every hour spent in front of the TV or tablet, the world of books slips further away.

As I learned from my infectious initial encounter with Ms. Rachel, she is also initiating parents. Ms. Rachel is beloved not only for her effect on children but also because she models for inexperienced parents how to behave with an infant or toddler. An old-fashioned nanny whisks the children out of sight, accentuating the incompetence of the parents. A day care sequesters children outside the home. But Ms. Rachel is available to teach adults the songs and games that they may never have encountered as grown-ups, because American parents parent in solitude.

This is a common function of today’s children’s entertainment. Bluey, an Australian public-television cartoon about dog children and their exceptionally competent, infinitely patient, incredibly fun dog parents, is generally agreed to be the best show for young children on air today. I have often envied the imaginative resources of Bluey’s mum and dad; this is rather how I had envisioned that I would parent. The show has excellent writing, animation, and music. It is so sophisticated, in fact, that one sometimes suspects that its true target audience is not children but parents. Good children’s entertainment always caters to parents, but Bluey is an extreme example. On YouTube, many parents comment that they like to watch it even without their child. I know a father who listens to the Bluey soundtrack alone in his car. One of my friends explicitly credited the show with teaching her how to mother. This was when I started watching it with Stella. Screens become parents to us all.

On YouTube, the antithesis of Ms. Rachel is CoComelon (more than 195 million subscribers, almost twelve times Ms. Rachel’s following), an ungodly computer-generated cartoon that is the media equivalent of a liter of off-brand cola. In one of CoComelon’s versions of “Wheels on the Bus” (7.9 billion views), the eyes of the bus passengers are glazed and unseeing, and the people seem to communicate in wordless grunts. The song has an awkward, thumping, too-regular rhythm; listening feels like swallowing a metronome. Ms. Rachel, by contrast, sings the song with her husband. (She has several versions of the song; this one has more than 470 million views.) Their performance has the pleasant lilt of humanity. Many of her guest stars are talented singers and musicians, especially now that her budget and fame have skyrocketed. In comparison with CoComelon, Ms. Rachel’s simple aesthetic and patient, slow repetitions have a marked charm. Even her denim overalls start to look more appealing.

But both shows are aesthetically impoverished. This is true of most children’s television produced today and of many children’s books. Bluey is a celebrated exception that proves the rule. Even the most professional programs are sanitized, cutesy, and dead. Shows like Ms. Rachel’s, and their literary corollaries and spin-offs, access only the most superficial layer of feeling, casting away the doubt, mystery, and humor of the best children’s media. They evade the irresolvable nature of pain, danger, and loss. Doing away with all the trappings of art, they simply tell children what to do: be kind, go to bed when your parents tell you to, pee in the toilet and not in your underwear, don’t jump in the water without permission. In one episode of the popular PBS show Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, a pitiful spin-off of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the eponymous blank-faced child tiger sings tunelessly, “It’s okay to feel angry / It’s NOT, NOT, NOT okay to huuuuuuurt someone.”

Like Soviet socialist-realist novels, many children’s books and television shows advance a version of life as it ought to be, rather than as it is: all are equal, all are welcome, everyone is safe. This is mirrored by the idioms of American parenting. “We don’t hit people,” parents (including me) tell their children. But the truth is that “we” obviously do hit people sometimes—or worse.

Innocence, in a Sense

Missiles, bombed-out buildings, famine: these are subjects that most children’s media scrupulously avoid. Shows for very young children are criticized even for showing characters talking back to their parents or being mean to their siblings. But sometimes the outside world intrudes on the relentlessly cheery, sterile realm of American children’s media. Earlier this year, Ms. Rachel was tagged in an Instagram video of three young children watching her show on a tablet. Unlike most of her fans, these kids were Palestinian refugees, sitting in a tent amid the rubble in Gaza.

Accurso—whose sunny, kind persona as Ms. Rachel is much more than an act—was deeply moved. She had already worked with Save the Children and raised money to help children in conflict zones, including Gaza, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ukraine. Now she began working with the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. The director of that organization showed her a video of Rahaf, an exceptionally cute three-year-old with curly hair, chubby cheeks, and prosthetic legs. She had lost her limbs in an Israeli airstrike. In the video, Rahaf was trying to hop like a bunny to Ms. Rachel’s famous song.

Soon Accurso met Rahaf and her mother, a math teacher. They had made it to the United States to get medical care for Rahaf, but they’d had to leave Rahaf’s father and brothers behind. Amid the famine imposed by Israel’s blockade, Rahaf’s mother called her sons in Gaza on FaceTime and asked Accurso to talk to them. The boys were hungry. In a gruesome twist on the ascendance of the digital world, screen time remained even as the most basic means of subsistence disappeared. “Thank you for seeing our children as human,” the translator told Accurso. (A full episode featuring Rahaf is in the works for this fall, as of this writing.) The most important audience for the show will be adults: Accurso is hoping to persuade the millions of parents of her fans to see Gaza’s children as human too. One Palestinian father, meanwhile, wrote a moving essay about the comfort he and his three-year-old son felt as they watched Ms. Rachel together on a phone as bombs fell in the distance.

Accurso is now one of the most prominent American voices for the human rights of Palestinian children. “Silence wasn’t a choice for me,” she told the journalist Mehdi Hasan. In her interview with him, she wore a crucifix around her neck. As she puts it, she has “the peace of God.” Like Fred Rogers, an ordained minister who used his show to protest racism, she is a devout Christian of progressive inclinations. She says she doesn’t believe it is right to be a billionaire, and she faced intense criticism from some quarters when she included a nonbinary musician on her show. The backlash against her advocacy for Palestinian children has been much fiercer.

In April, the doxing site StopAntisemitism accused Accurso of being a mouthpiece for Hamas and demanded a government investigation. Fox News said she was “standing with Hamas.” Accurso posted a video of herself crying in the dark about the online bullying she’d suffered. But to her credit, she doubled down on her advocacy. This July, she announced that she wouldn’t work with anyone who hadn’t spoken out about Gaza. (It is unclear how this stance is compatible with her Netflix show, book series, or singing doll.) “I will always choose kindness, but I will never understand your silence,” she wrote on Instagram. “I especially can’t understand those with so much privilege—the uncancelable—who still remain in the shadows.”

Accurso’s visible sincerity and softheartedness (she often cries during interviews, whether she’s speaking about children in Gaza or remembering being bullied as a child for her high-pitched voice) and her status as a beloved children’s entertainer make her a powerful advocate for Palestine’s children. So do her simple language, her lack of rancor, and her gentle parenting–inspired method of political protest. Perhaps in an age when even adults are getting their education from children’s shows, hers is the kind of political communication that works best. And her white skin, her Christian faith, her American citizenship, her fame, and her wealth give her protections not afforded to, say, Mahmoud Khalil.

Accurso is the inverse of the world’s Célines or Hamsuns, of the brilliant artist who is also a fascist. A strong moral imagination is not equivalent to an artistic one. I deeply admire, appreciate, and respect Accurso’s activism, but I don’t like her show. (Stella still loves it.) To echo another cliché of American parenting, I want more for my child. I want art, not banal edutainment.

For me, the apotheosis of the picture book is Where the Wild Things Are, by the grouchy, ribald, childless Maurice Sendak, a man who was obsessed with William Blake and Emily Dickinson and named his dog after Herman Melville. When Where the Wild Things Are was first published in 1963, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim denounced the book for showing a mother who loses her temper and sends her son to bed without dinner—as if mothers never lost their tempers, as if fear was not one of the most fundamental emotions for children as well as adults. Sendak brought the scary, thrilling, perverse world of fairy tales and folktales to modern picture books, adding his own sardonic, working-class-Jewish-Brooklyn twist. Rather than putting on a child’s costume, as Ms. Rachel does on her show, he drew from his own complicated and often painful childhood. He did not recognize any impassable boundary between adults and children. After all, every adult was a child once.

I love Sendak and children love him, even now, when he has to compete with YouTube. Reading Where the Wild Things Are, children sense that at last they are being told the whole truth. This excites them. And whether or not they know it (they probably don’t, but their parents might), they are at last in the presence of real literature:

And he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.

I never tire of reading it.

Our family has a set of Sendak’s Nutshell Library books, four volumes that fit in the palm of a grown-up hand. Stella’s current favorite is Pierre: A Cautionary Tale, about a boy who shouts “I don’t care” in response to every question. Eventually he is approached by a lion:

He looked Pierre
right in the eye
and asked him
if he’d like to die.
Pierre said,
“I don’t care!”

When I first read Stella this book, I hesitated at “die.” It seemed too bald, too cruel. But death is not a secret that can be kept from children, even small ones. Sendak was haunted for his whole life by a newspaper he saw at age four. It showed a photo of the decayed corpse of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby.

Fortunately, story children are almost always immortal. This is part of the pleasure of children’s stories. When Sendak’s lion eats Pierre, he remains miraculously alive, like Jonah in the belly of the whale. A doctor shakes the lion upside down, Pierre falls out, and the family and the lion spend a happy weekend together. The moral of Pierre is, of course, “CARE!” Sendak showed how moral and artistic imagination can coexist with fierce honesty. “I refuse to lie to children,” Sendak said in a 2011 interview. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

The Hatred of Podcasting

Talking has finished off writing

Brace Belden

© Rob Vargas

The editors at The Baffler want me to talk about my job. They want me to humiliate myself in the pages of this magazine. Very well: I am a podcaster.

What is a podcaster? It’s someone who makes money from talking, often by means of selling dick pills. I don’t do that part, but I still obscure what I do whenever possible. Maybe it’s the newness of the profession; in terms of recency, I slot it in with UX designer and the guys in the Philippines who respond to OnlyFans messages. When asked about my job by strangers at parties, I tell them I “work in media.” I make sure to say that in the kind of way that forbids questioning, like I’m the guy who bathes Bari Weiss or a janitor at the New York Post.

But I would never lie to you. Not only is my job a podcast, but the podcast is successful. I’m a white man with brown hair and glasses in his mid-thirties having fun and making money. My podcast is called TrueAnon. At the time of this writing, it’s the 172nd-biggest news podcast in America and one of the most subscribed-to podcasts on Patreon. Originally a ramshackle effort to track news about the famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the show now covers any number of things broadly contained in the “news and opinion” category: Alan Dershowitz’s feud with a pierogi stand, rumors regarding Elon Musk’s robotic penis, Jerome Powell’s problems with Trump, etc. I get stopped on the street almost every day. They say to me: “You do that podcast!” And I say: “Yes, I do! Thank you so much for listening!” Then they say: “I thought you were five foot three!” And I have to explain to them that I lie about my height on the podcast so listeners resent me less for making a lot of money just for talking into a microphone twice a week.

First Time Caller

I heard a podcast for the first time during Obama’s first term. (For reasons that will become obvious, one must temporalize podcasts via presidents.) I had been working at a flower stand on the side of the highway since 2008, but I wanted to be a sailor. A girl I knew in San Francisco had gone off to the Bronx to attend a maritime college in Throggs Neck. I looked up the school on the internet occasionally, but I couldn’t stop taking OxyContin. I rarely left the city. At night, I’d walk from my basement apartment in the Tenderloin up over Nob Hill, staring into doorways and windows, taking in expensive couches and giant houseplants, tidy desks topped with triple monitors. I’d end up at Aquatic Park, where I’d sit on the steps and look at the lights bobbing on the water.

It was 2011. I was dopesick and shivering in the passenger seat of my girlfriend’s car, heading up the interstate back to San Francisco from Los Angeles. It turned out I couldn’t quit OxyContin by staring at the Bay. Once you pass Coalinga, a grim conglomerate of roadside cattle feedlots causes the highway to stink tremendously. I was no good for conversation and she must’ve been tired of music, because she put on WTF with Marc Maron. I was too weak to resist. Listening to this semifailed comedian who was either talking about his divorce or complaining about his life to a much more famous and successful guy, I thought, Wow, I could do that. It sounded humiliating but was certainly a situation I could easily find myself in. When we got back to San Francisco, my girlfriend realized I was stealing money from her bank account.

Three years later, I listened to a podcast of my own free will for the first time. I was looking for a job. After being asked to leave a rehabilitation facility in the North Bay because of my bad attitude, I had detoxed with clonidine patches alone in a basement apartment that I was being forced to vacate. Everything had become exorbitantly expensive, so a friend on Haight Street let me crash at his house. I was thin and pale and hated almost everyone in San Francisco. There were hunched men in vests walking around in a hurry and freaks wearing Google Glass. One got the sense that something terrifically digital was happening.

I’d walk around the city, handing out résumés and listening to new episodes of Serial. The show felt like prestige radio, a serious enterprise compared with farts-and-Sybians shock jocks like Bubba the Love Sponge or Howard Stern. The lady hosting Serial laid out some evidence that maybe the guy accused of killing his girlfriend didn’t do it. She sounded urgent, but the NPR-style somnambulant tones made the stakes seem low (unless you were Adnan Syed, I guess).

Podcasting during Obama had a wondrous feeling: we Americans had finally untangled the more vexatious knots of modernity by electing him and were ready to train our curious minds on the minute problems and the major shortcomings in society. (At least this is what I assume people thought; personally, I was broke and miserable.) The shows that were popular around then—like Serial or Invisibilia, which debuted the following year with a pledge to explore “the intangible forces that shape human behavior”—all had a very Eagle Scout approach. This was a house style inherited from Serial’s coproducers, This American Life. That show began, of course, on public radio, but when it added an RSS feed in 2006 it dominated a market filled with shows like MuggleCast and Diggnation. (This American Life has cemented its place in the liberal canon of podcasts; see, for instance, Time’s recent one hundred top podcasts list, which includes the show alongside other stalwarts like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and 99% Invisible.) It made a certain kind of sense that the pathetic pseudo-intellectualism of the Obama years would spawn shows hosted by similar-sounding hosts bewitching listeners with gentle urgency to slow down and look at the details. In 2015, if you said, “I heard it on a podcast,” you were trying to sound smart. In 2025, it’s better to lie.

At the same time, despite Obama’s worldwide assassination and surveillance program, the twilight years of his presidency were not going well. ISIS was overrunning Iraq, Guantánamo remained open, and the president was ramming through the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The magic had worn off; you could tell he was ready to sign a deal with Netflix and put all this stuff behind him. (New media wasn’t done with Obama, however; in 2023, Tucker Carlson interviewed a man on his podcast who claimed to have sucked Obama’s dick in Gurnee, Illinois.) Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were running for president. You couldn’t avoid Pizzagate or stilted explanations of “democratic socialism.” I had found a decent-paying job at a boxing gym. On my lunch breaks I went to Warm Water Cove, which had been turned from a streetcar graveyard into a dog park. I ate my sandwiches and watched yuppies pick up puppy shit and listened to Chapo Trap House. I didn’t know there were so many newspaper columnists you could hate.

The city was turning into a latticework of digital connections. Clear-skinned, smiling adults started coming to the gym demanding upscale offerings that we struggled to provide. Rent, already high, climbed to impossible levels; many people I knew left San Francisco. Companies sporting gibberish names like Zendesk and Zynga filled office buildings and swelled the tech worker population of the city to the point where people were attacking them on the street. I decided to leave the country to go to Syria and fight in the war.

When Trump got elected, I didn’t find out for almost a week. I was in a supply base, reloading 14.5 mm cartridges with a rubber mallet, when I saw the news on the TV. I was relieved that I wasn’t in America; everyone seemed to be going bonkers back home. While in Syria, I had become modestly well-known, having made the mistake of posting things I thought were funny on Twitter (whose offices were retained in San Francisco’s Market Street by means of a ludicrous tax break) under an obscene screen name. It’s also where I made my first podcast appearance, calling into Chapo from a cell phone during a brief lull between assignments. I can’t bear to revisit it. I became, midway through the call, acutely aware that this would be the final testament I gave to the world if I were to get obliterated by some hideously high-caliber round. I don’t mean that as a reflection on Chapo—it just felt dismal and absurd that my epitaph might be a podcast. It seemed a world away from For Whom the Bell Tolls. A few months later, I stepped on a mine near a village outside of Raqqa called al-Kalta. It didn’t go off. I went home and got a job at a brewery.

The first Trump term was kind to podcasts. Everybody had something to say, and signifying by way of consumption became more important than ever. While even the most banal products had a culture war patina, MAGA’s frothing hatred of the media made it necessary for liberals to consume “smart” content. This gave rise to an explosion of podcast brands that functioned like major labels and had the names of luxury apartment complexes in midsize cities: Gimlet, Anchor, Wondery. Individual, mostly liberal shows gained prominence, like The Daily, the New York Times’ self-recap podcast, hosted by an Ira Glass knockoff whose only notable characteristic is he’d gone from a gay marriage to a straight one. The liberals had Pod Save America, formed by young, identical Obama staffers. (At the 2024 DNC, I bore horrified witness to a seemingly hungover, no-longer-young Pod Save host sit through a talent show of youthful TikTokers pitching their big ideas to bring generational change to the Democratic Party.) There were true-crime podcasts describing rapes and murder to the titillation of bored, horny women. Joe Rogan, inquisitive, grunting, was in the earbuds of everyone from your male coworkers to your male assistant managers.

Not that I listened to any of it. I worked a big machine at the brewery and would’ve gotten fired for wearing headphones. I had finally gotten my merchant mariner card and was taking classes to join the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. In July of 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. My friend Liz and I spoke on the phone about it a few times, and it occurred to us that we might as well start a podcast, at least for a few episodes. Our third member, Steven, I knew from political work; he had offered to produce a podcast (I was a loudmouth) if I ever wanted to. I envisioned a send-up of true crime shows, but, really, we didn’t know what we were doing. Still, people liked it immediately. TrueAnon started making money pretty quickly when Epstein died sometime around our third episode, giving us a huge boost in listenership. I figured, what the hell, I’ll do this for work. Then Covid hit and podcasts went through the roof, and now I have the salary of a dermatologist and live in Brooklyn, which is Israel for podcasters.

Obama-Era Backwash

Why do people listen to this shit? Around 2014, after the release of Serial, one began to encounter a media-driven elation about podcasting. In retrospect, this was part of a now thoroughly shamed and diminished fad wherein traditional publications sought salvation for dwindling readerships by investing in exciting new mediums—e.g., streaming, Facebook, podcasts. This led to attempts at elevated shows: the Radiolab clones, the Gimlet Media sphere. While these were just Obama backwash in retrospect, they did begin the deceitful trend of podcasts letting listeners pretend that they are learning something—and hosts believe that they themselves were expressing something of intellectual worth. If listening and watching have in large part replaced reading, so talking has mostly finished off writing. I speak from long experience that it’s difficult for most people (including myself) to express complex thoughts on a podcast. Frankly, complexity can work against you; what you want are sound bites, sections produced memorably enough to snap listeners out of their fugue and rewind fifteen seconds to hear it again. Most listeners are half-listening, so repetition, conversational language, humor, and emotion are significantly more important than actually saying anything interesting.

Now in 2025 everyone’s crazy, and what they want to learn is nuts. That’s where guys like Lex Fridman or Andrew Huberman come in. Just as self-help and get-rich books dominate the nonfiction market, these types have replaced Radiolab and its ilk for striving young professionals whose new fascination with longevity and health-tech dominate places like San Francisco. Huberman is a supposed scientist selling optimization routines, which means he soaks in cold water often and maintains a sleep schedule out of Dachau. Millions of assholes ape his routine. He was once semicanceled in a cover story from New York, which put on display his precise, meticulous schedule that seemed to largely revolve around meeting various women for coffee and sex in Topanga. Fridman makes me dizzy to think about. Picture this: a slim man in a nothing suit with a light Eastern European accent sits seriously across from Trump or Zelensky or Zuckerberg and asks them if they think a high capacity for forgiveness is a good quality in a person. How far we’ve fallen that even our professional sycophants aren’t pleasing to observe! He has the personality of a fortune cookie, his charisma so null that his already narcotic qualities—which I suppose could be useful if a listener was to run out of Ambien on vacation—turn sinister and hateful. Yet his popularity is outstanding. He’s at the top of the charts in the same way large language models are increasingly being used as substitute therapists. I’ve frequently wondered if he isn’t himself some sort of construct. Here’s a quote from Lex: “Life is short. Enjoy every good moment, and make the best of every shitty one. It’s all a beautiful mess.” One sees a person already indistinguishable from AI—these days, one sees many!

Of course, most aren’t actively listening to Fridman and Huberman for two hours at a time. The episodes are a layer of white noise, a way to blot out thoughts. Podcasts came of age amid the growing absence of meaningful contact in the average person’s day, in a time when silence is hated. That’s probably why parasocial relationships—that two-dollar phrase for people who are also excited to write things like “ontology”—are so popular now, being simulacra that work just good enough to replace the real thing. The “friendship simulator” element is crucial in all this, and also its most sordid part. The hugely popular shows have a familiarity to them, the host drawing listeners in such that you feel like you might just be a shy participant in an exciting conversation. This has an effect on people: it’s become a cliché to catch a young man repeating a Nick Mullen bit about the N-word he cribbed from Cum Town. Shows like this have a flow that the listener doesn’t actually participate in—the hosts have gone home, you’re the only one in the room, and it’s a dead conversation that’s already happened—but, given the intimacy of how the product is consumed, can get the same psychic impression. On your commute, while you do laundry or cook dinner, your best friend lives in your phone.

This is tricky for the hosts, especially if you didn’t get into the business to pretend to be the number-one pal of thousands of strangers. Many embrace this relationship with fans, promoting a feeling of intimacy by making certain disclosures about yourself. Your audience, for the most part, will love it. Many will even prefer that to other content featured on the show. Many shows contain a dizzying mixture of news, political opinions, and debased confessions, resembling a chat with an outré friend you can’t give up, no matter how strange their opinions. Candace Owens is your pal, dishing about her pregnancy and interviewing her husband on air. It’s only fair to hear her out when she tells you Brigitte Macron is a transgender Rothschild agent controlling the president of France by means of incestual, Satanic sex magic.

All that is to say Covid and the Biden era was excellent for podcasts. Already isolated individuals now worked from home, with only roommates or a dog for company. The sharp rise in loneliness facilitated the shift from high-brow liberal shows to cartoonish hangout sessions with the worst every gender has to offer. Are Baffler readers familiar with Call Her Daddy? I’ll fill you in: starting in 2018, two young, beautiful women, thin like sticks and exuding a palpable passion for sex, started talking about the butt-fucking accidents and jism spills that are de rigueur in the fast-paced world of New York dating. Five years after I first heard it, the show was down to one host, who sat seriously across from Kamala Harris as they haltingly discussed women’s health. Where else but podcasts can you get that kind of growth? Harris had been offered a chance to go on Rogan, turned it down, and instead chose a show where, a few years before, you could learn how to precisely squeeze a nutsack to attain the perfect squeal from your partner.

© Rob Vargas

I Just Work Here

Not that Rogan suffered for it. Overall, masculine shows, hosted by Austin-based comedians and aging special operators suffering from testosterone replacement therapy–induced hair loss, dominated the 2024 cycle by hosting Trump, Vance, et al. in obsequious, occasionally worshipful episodes of their podcasts. They were effective. The newspapers say these guys made Donald Trump become the president. They were feted at the inauguration alongside Elon Musk and Javier Milei. The personalities here may seem ugly or garish, even repellent, to many reading this. The shows largely consist of stupid clichés spoken by repulsive people. They are often plainly thought destroying. That is precisely the reason for their popularity.

Now, after their humiliating defeat in the 2024 election, the Democrats have degraded themselves further and begun to search for a liberal answer to Joe Rogan. Of course I threw my hat in the ring, but my rejection was no doubt the work of hidden forces. Maybe you can do it. Podcasts aren’t difficult to make—in theory, you just sit behind a microphone and talk—but it’s hard to do right. (I know I’m coming to you as a bit of a fraud here, but I genuinely enjoy making TrueAnon. My colleagues are sharp and reliable, we have no management and don’t run ads, and I’m getting too old now to start as a merchant mariner.) For the aspiring liberal Rogans, my recommendation is you take Vyvanse and a beta blocker and email Ro Khanna. He will agree to an interview. Ask ChatGPT to write you a script and then suck up to him.

Of course, you actually just want to make money. That’s why you read The Baffler. Unfortunately, few independent podcasts are successful. The top twenty-five shows today capture the majority of market share. Podcasting isn’t immune from the broader trends that have, in part and in whole, made using the internet substantially worse over the past decade. In 2022, Bloomberg published a report on fake podcast metrics, detailing how numbers were artificially juiced to keep ad sales afloat. This has likely only worsened as bots have gotten better and why the numbers of paid subscribers is the only metric I count as real; everything else is ephemeral. Harder to miss is the rise of the video podcast, which in turn has led to the strange linguistic development where one hears people refer to podcasts they watch. It’s standard practice now to film a recording session, if only so a young man in the Third World hired off Fiverr can slice it up into clips, paste subtitles over them, and thrust everything into the YouTube or TikTok algorithm. Sometimes even the podcast portion is cut out; there is a massive industry of fake podcasters recording attention-grabbing viral clips or goofy advertisements in studios built to look like living rooms.

I imagine the hit rate for a new show is something along the lines of the average OnlyFans profile; you’re spreading your asshole for nothing. But the industry could turn around: loneliness and attention spans will certainly get worse, and standards for entertainment are likely to continue to fall. And you’re different! Especially if you have a measure of already extant fame, or you’re able to trick some bigger show into joining in on a beef you start with them. The most important thing is consistency, in any case. You’ll get into a rhythm, which is the only way to do it—when a show gets popular, you’ll find listeners get mad when you’re late, or you miss an upload, or maybe you put out something rushed because you were sort of sick or had to go to a wedding. That’s fine, though; it should feel nice to be desired. Your fans, no matter what, will despise you a little bit. You make a podcast, after all, which elicits understandable baseline disgust, but you’ll say something unflattering, wrong, or too right, and they’ll murder you for it. But that’s wonderful. You can get mad at them for not understanding (after all, you can never be wrong, only wrongly interpreted). These days we’re happy only if everyone else is unhappy. It’s a perfect relationship: your fans will resent you, and you’ll resent your fans, and everyone will come out satisfied. You will read ads for Adam & Eve, the online sex retailer. You will become a dildo salesmen, hawk dick pills and kratom until you work your way up to Mailchimp and BetterHelp. Once you start getting car ads, you can retire, and you’ll never have to think about getting a real job ever again.

Tongue Delirium

Jenny Xie

The world’s fats & wild offerings!

Radial exhalations, shadow & silk!

All that rushes through your twinned

globes, heating the irises.

Keep every phoneme

fungible, without weight.

Swimming field, no anchor.

Let your cries move

as thunder does—

scraped of connotation.

Let no meaning land

in the wake.

Let vocables bubble.

Allow distance to remain

unaccounted for

in every green and stone,

for miles upon miles

where no things assume

a fixed distance.

Brain Rot Without Borders

Dispatches from a Postliterate World

Baffler Symposium

© Ben Denzer, source photos by Kaya LeGrand and Max Brandstadt

Both in terms of absolute numbers and as a proportion of the global population, more people know how to read today than at any other moment in history. And yet if we consider literacy not as the ability to parse simple sentences but as the capacity to comprehend and enjoy complex texts, and ultimately as a sensibility that approaches the world itself as a text that requires interpretation, it’s obvious we live in an unprecedented decline of what neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy.” The manifestations of this catastrophe range from the rise of psychotic conspiracy theories to the return of state propaganda and the collapse of the public sphere. The crisis comes into view most clearly, however, in the sudden and precipitous decline of the cultural practice that first taught all of us how to read the great book of the world. There’s no point in denying it anymore: literature as we know it is well on its way to becoming a lost art.

Consider, for instance, the distressing state of reading and writing in the United States. I disagree with Philip Roth’s 2009 dictum that the novel will soon become a “cultic” concern, not because I believe that literary fiction is enjoying some sort of heyday in the core of the American empire but rather because I’m convinced that literature has always been an esoteric practice in the United States. At the time of his death, Roth was more famous than almost any living American literary writer, but that’s just a convoluted way of saying that his influence on the wider culture was insignificant. Unlike Gabriel García Márquez, he never became the voice of the nation, or indeed of the language—not for lack of talent or dedication but because the United States reserves those roles for musicians such as Bob Dylan, the only Nobel laureate in literature so far to work primarily in an oral tradition. In the decade and a half that has elapsed since Roth prophesied the retreat of the American novel into the windowless temple of a marginal sect of schismatics, literature in the United States and the English-speaking world has deteriorated at a faster rate than our warming planet. As evidence, consider a selection from the fifty works of fiction that since 2020 have appeared in Publishers Weekly’s annual list of U.S. bestsellers: Dog Man: Grime and Punishment, Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea, Dog Man: Fetch-22, Dog Man: Mothering Heights, and Dog Man: The Scarlet Shredder. That graphic novels meant to help children learn how to read make up such a large proportion of the U.S. publishing market might suggest that most American adults lose all interest in literature as soon as they’re done with basic alphabetization.

The state of anglophone literature is so dire that thinking about the decline of American letters at this point no longer induces despair, only irritation and boredom. In an effort to shake off that ennui and to escape the grip of U.S. cultural hegemony, if only briefly, The Baffler has commissioned seven writers who work in languages other than English for dispatches on the state of postliteracy in their motherlands and mother tongues.

These correspondents’ reports are refreshing in that they are entirely free of the commonplaces with which Americans tend to explain the decline of the written word—e.g., mistaking the symptom for the illness and blaming ChatGPT for students’ plummeting reading-comprehension skills, as if people hadn’t begun to forget how to read long before Faustian Markov-chain machines became the fetish object of an apocalyptic theology—and remind us that there are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in American publishing offices, where people believe that reading literature in translation is evidence of worldly sophistication rather than the refuge of the monolingual.

But it’s my unfortunate duty to warn the reader that the essays of this dossier offer few reasons for hope. From South Korea to Sudan, China to Mexico, Morocco to the Philippines, literature seems to be in retreat. The worst part is that, while every unhappy literature is unhappy in its own way, the various dystopias that our correspondents describe seem to be converging into a single literary catastrophe. And though the causes for our common predicament that these writers offer vary wildly, it’s possible to discern a terrifying trend: the loss of deep literacy is not an organic development or an accident without an author but rather the intentional consequence of concrete actions undertaken by the unholy alliance of capital and the state, which has availed itself of technology to slowly erode our capacity to understand what we read—and therefore to imagine a more just future.

Depressing, I know. But as Gramsci taught us, despair turns us into reactionaries. It’d be naive to pretend that reading a novel or translating a poem can be a form of resistance. But who knows? Perhaps reinventing the old literary forms could help us reverse the current moment’s drive to stupidity. Better to be cultic than dumb.

—Nicolás Medina Mora  

Literature Away from the Gaze—Zhang Yueran, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang

A friend of mine, a Swedish psychoanalyst, has lived in China for seven or eight years and speaks some Mandarin. During one of our conversations, I was recounting the writing of my novel Cocoon, when he suddenly asked how to write cocoon in Chinese. Grass (艹) above an insect (虫), to get 茧, I told him. He then attempted to use this Chinese character, which I’d carefully selected as the title of my book, to reveal what was going on in my subconscious. Because the grass radical occupies the dominant position in this character, it might represent my source material; perhaps I had become overreliant on the security it provided, and I lacked the confidence to leave its shelter, which is why I worked on this book for so long without ever seeming to complete it. The Chinese writing system, he went on to say, was something that foreign psychoanalysts wanting to practice in China were obliged to absorb and understand because these ancient pictograms have shaped the Chinese psyche. I told him this may no longer be the case. I write my novels on a computer, which means typing in pinyin, i.e., entering the romanized form of each character and then selecting the one I want from among its homonyms, which is nothing like writing it out one stroke at a time. As a result, for all that I gave a lot of thought to choosing 茧 as my book title, it felt unfamiliar when I described the word’s appearance to my friend. These days, most people in China don’t need to write Chinese unless they’re still in school or have a job that requires handwriting. Therefore, it’s completely normal to forget how to write certain characters. Chinese characters may have a strong symbolic function in that their appearance reflects what they mean, but this has increasingly little to do with people’s day-to-day lives. After I’d explained all this to my friend, he sighed in disappointment. “What a shame,” he said.

In fact, some younger writers who publish their fiction online can’t even be bothered to type—they simply use an app that transforms their spoken words into text. Authors who use this highly efficient form of “writing” have barely any contact with the written word and engage with Mandarin only at its most surface level. Their vocabulary and sentence structures are extremely simplified because these stories mostly get read on phone screens and are designed to be scrolled through quickly. Unfamiliar words or complicated sentences would create an unacceptable delay for the reader. One of these web novelists told me that complex rhetorical devices or intricate descriptions are the enemy of the reading experience. As soon as a reader gets stuck, they’ll abandon the piece. Writers of web fiction prefer to use clichés in their descriptions so readers don’t need to use their brains and can easily sketch in the barest scenario to keep the fictional world spinning.

Internet fiction is doing incredibly well in China, and its main function is to provide entertainment. In my experience, the average web novel is over 300,000 characters (roughly 230,000 English words) and is presented in serialized form with new installments daily. In other words, readers will decide if each day’s content is exciting enough for them to keep reading, and they tend not to care if the story contradicts itself or is full of plot holes, if it meanders from its narrative or has no through line in the first place. Readers begin leaving comments as soon as each installment drops, many of them second-guessing the story’s development. With such open-ended narratives, authors cede their authority and become more like service providers. In web fiction circles, people refer to readers dogpiling on works they don’t like as “beating up the chef.” The poor chefs are reduced to frantically trying to serve ever more picky diners. In recent years, online writers have been forced to make it clear in their headnotes whether a given chapter contains anything that might upset readers—just as chefs must notify diners about potential allergens in their food—otherwise they are liable to be besieged and heavily criticized. Such “allergens” might include the protagonist cheating on a partner, the female lead suffering excessive emotional torture, too many romantic scenes between supporting characters, and so on. After checking that the text is free of their dislikes, readers can safely enter a fictional world custom-designed for them. At this point in time, web fiction has branched into a plethora of intricate, finely delineated genres, ensuring that paying customers can read exactly what they enjoy, free from anything they might prefer not to encounter. This consumerist approach has largely shaped younger readers’ tastes, which makes it hard for them to be interested in literary fiction, where there are no content warnings, the characters’ emotions are unregulated, and narratives are as unpredictable as real life. If you were to point out that this is how the world actually is, they’d reply that no one needs this damned reality. If we had any breathing room in our actual existences, why would we need to escape into fiction? After encountering a work of serious fiction, many younger readers have responses along the lines of “Life is horrible enough, why should I read something that makes me feel bad?”

In recent years, younger readers have begun applying the moral strictures of web novels onto the wider literary world, leaving them unable to accept any moral failing from fictional characters, such as being unfaithful or having an affair with a married person. In fact, they’d prefer there to be no sex at all. This is very likely the result of a long-term regime of censorship, with readers now tacitly accepting and even preferring a more prudish writing style. Writing too directly about the erotic feels vulgar to them. Literary fiction—which continues to include frank depictions of sex—is regarded by them as low-class gutter writing. On one platform, a reader left a comment for one of China’s most influential literary journals complaining about an anthology they’d put out several years ago; of its nine stories, eight had to do with sex, and the ninth included kissing. This commentor had very naturally appointed themselves as a lifestyle inspector who, while reading, carefully noted the degree of intimacy between protagonists.

There is an even younger generation for whom reading is a thing of the past. They grew up scrolling short videos and are used to their cultural products being both literal-minded and fragmentary. Originality is of no concern to them. China is going through a trend of drama series shot vertically, to be watched on a phone, each episode no more than three minutes. The first few episodes are free, the rest behind a paywall. The production quality of these series is uniformly terrible, making use of melodramatic performances and sensationalism to get viewers so hooked that they have no choice but to hit the pay button. Because each installment is purchased individually, it must contain a climax and end on a huge cliff-hanger. There is no overall story arc, just an endless sequence of shocking twists and reversals. These narratives fundamentally have no respect for storytelling and alter the contract we have with stories. If the nineteenth century was narrated by God and the twentieth by the common man, who is narrating the twenty-first? A demon or a clown?

All of this feels tremendously demoralizing. The meaning and power of language is in the process of being flushed away. The position of fiction is plummeting irretrievably while other forms of storytelling are damaging or misusing the tools of narrative. As a Chinese writer, perhaps the only crumb of comfort is that many of the traditional mindsets associated with literature are disintegrating too. In over a thousand years of cultural tradition, China’s litterateurs have always borne the burden of politics: reading in order to govern, writing in order to gain advancement. We have a saying: “Morality is carried in words.” This means that the purpose of literature is to convey whatever values and ideas the emperor decides are important because literary standards are inevitably decided by the ruler. With the declining importance of literature, no one with political ambitions could possibly view writing as a way to get ahead. This might lead to more pure-minded writers because, apart from sheer passion for literature, there is no reason to enter the profession. With ever dwindling numbers of readers, literature is no longer an effective propaganda tool. And so, with literature liberated from the gaze of politics, it may well gain an unprecedented degree of freedom.

Literacy and Suicide Rates—Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by Jack Saebyok Jung

In my country, South Korea, literature must be easy, with no exceptions. A reader must grasp the meaning at once. Otherwise, the book won’t sell. It won’t be read. Poetry, too, must be simple. The reader should pick out the poet’s intention at a single glance or else the reader grows angry. Readers take themselves as the measure of all things, the standard of every interpretation. One literary journalist, who claims to have read books every day of his life, declared that any poem produced in Korea today that he cannot understand is not poetry at all. Contemporary poets, he says, write difficult verse on purpose, out of arrogance or to tease their audience. Thus, the excellence—or mediocrity—of every work is determined by its degree of difficulty. Sales figures obey the same logic. As if answering a surgeon’s request to rate pain from one to ten, readers decide that any score above a five turns the text from literature to a torture device. Korean readers prefer something in the one-to-three range.

Among those easy works, if the piece contains Korea’s historical traumas, it earns favorable points from the readers. The more nakedly a trauma is put on display—not just mentioned but staged in full view—the better, especially when a writer brandishes a “historical alibi” for said events, one that can quickly double as the reader’s own. If the reader feels as though they, too, have ticked the box of civic virtue, that’s the cherry on top. Meanwhile, even the so-called professional critics’ literacy continues to deteriorate. A highly authoritative male critic pronounced that the sentences in my collection Phantom Pain Wings were grotesque, accusing me of somehow implicitly flaunting my sexuality. According to him, every bird that takes flight in my poems is my orgasm. I think: the last generation in Korea capable of reading, writing, and truly savoring poetry is vanishing. And in times like this: What am I, a poet, doing now?

Recently, my country witnessed the impeachment of a president. I had fervently wished for the removal of that president, who had declared martial law; I even posted a video online, petition in hand, begging the justices of the Constitutional Court to impeach him. One of the biggest reasons I prayed for the president’s impeachment was the language used by those in power: sentences fit for enemies, used by soldiers at war or by low-grade thugs, sentences that betrayed their base desires. These were the words with which they meant to govern the people. Moreover, I had already experienced martial law when I was in my late twenties. The censorship of the press and publishing at that time laid bare the authorities’ poor literacy. They banned songs, halted film screenings, and slashed apart articles and poems, not so much because of political disagreement but because they simply couldn’t understand them. Whatever lay beyond their comprehension was prohibited for the pettiest reasons. When those who rule lack literacy, the damage to the populace is immense. Only shallow, one-dimensional, sentimental works survive. Imagine, then, a woman poet working as an editor in some provincial outpost, hauling newly printed books to the censors’ office. How wretched that must feel.

In the end, the verdict came down, the impeachment was announced, and soon after, a chorus of praise arose for the court’s written decision. People called it a masterpiece, despite its plain, ordinary vocabulary—chosen, they said, with the nation’s varying literacy levels in mind. It was resolute, beautiful, and flawlessly reasoned. Of course, I felt the same. Rumor had it the justices delayed the ruling because they spent so much time refining the language, making it accessible to citizens with limited reading skills. A fad then began: copying out the judgment by hand. One online bookstore even sold special notebooks for transcribing it. I often hear that some readers have copied out my entire poetry collection in longhand. They proudly display those notebooks on social media. Whenever I see them, I must say, my skin crawls. What have my poems become in their hands? Hand-copying to “improve literacy” is now a craze here. After a prize-winning novelist claimed that copying texts boosted both reading comprehension and penmanship, everyone rushed to do it. Meanwhile, new censors roam the streets. They do not physically destroy books; they let books wither like drought-stricken trees. These censors go by another name: commerce. Setting themselves as the standard, they wait for any sentence they cannot grasp to die on its own. To vanish. Perhaps, inside a community where everyone has become a censor, they dream of exercising a vulgar “knowledge commons” and sinking together into a contentment without imagination.

Du Fu once wrote that a man “must read the contents of five cartloads of books” (男儿须读五车书). Real literacy, in other words, is born of wide reading. Without it, a person cannot describe themselves, construct the narrative of their life, or articulate it for others. What AI produces is not “thinking in language.” An AI condenses its training data and outputs syntactically correct sentences, but it cannot leap to the deeper stratum where meaning is formed, where a text imagines hidden contexts, expands, implies, connects to other texts, and is reanimated the moment it touches them. A work written by someone with genuine literacy is expandable, implicative, linked to other texts, and able to activate fresh existence whenever it meets those connections; thus, it continues to live in the latent spaces of the future. When youths encounter such writing, they gain the tools to craft their own narrative to express, create, and realize themselves. Humans achieve agency by composing their lives in their own language. Without a narrative viewpoint on one’s life, there can be no reconstruction of that life, no ethical experience.

Among OECD nations, Korea ranks first in suicide rates. Suicide is also the leading cause of death for teenagers here. I believe the core of this crisis is a lack of mental-health literacy on the part of students, parents, and schools alike. When young people do not possess that literacy, they cannot objectively recognize the state of their own minds, nor can they ask for help. Yet in South Korea, university admission is awarded strictly in order of multiple-choice test scores. Training to tick the right bubbles first dulls the power of thought and then produces illiteracy. Worse, many men in our country do not read books at all. Go to a literary reading: 99 percent of the audience will be young women. Look at the charts from online bookstores: most buyers are young women. Stadiums for baseball games, movie theaters, hip-hop concerts: again, women fill the seats. So where are the men of Korea? I have asked many people this question. The answers converge: they are sitting in front of monitors, working, playing, smashing things. And it is these scarcely literate men who have been governing us. Listen to their chosen words: always about smashing, punishing, exterminating. The result is that I now find myself, as a poet, trapped inside their screens, still trying to write.

© Ben Denzer, source photos by Kaya LeGrand and Max Brandstadt

An Artificial African Consciousness?—Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson

I could start by adopting a nostalgic position: affirming that the writer is still someone who preserves their creative cuisine, using old-fashioned equipment to prepare dishes in which the mysterious ingredients derive directly from the author’s reading, travels, moments of wonder, and darkest hours. Once, we revered the act of writing as “divinely inspired,” the product of a rich inner life, the sense that writers enjoyed a privileged status that allowed them to whisper to the muses. In this sense, writing meant signing a pact with characters who themselves owed their existence to the author, the aim being to give a story resonance, to convey the feeling that the fate of humanity depended on the destiny of these protagonists, born from the upheavals of the writer’s experience in the world. Is this author now dead?

Our age is caught in a stupor of laziness, a frenzy of shortcuts, forgetting that a machine does not breathe, it does not sweat, it entertains no doubts. A machine can write poetry, effortlessly manufacture novels, essays, or stage plays on behalf of the writer, for whom all that remains is to put their name on the front cover. Artificial intelligence seems to allow the most gullible of us to think that anyone can become a writer, that they can rewrite One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, or So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ at the simple touch of a button.

Who is the real author of such a work? The writer who supplied the machine with raw material from his universe or the machine, with its algorithms, clichés, and ready-made phrases compiled by fabricated intelligence? I have been given manuscripts to read by young people dreaming of becoming writers who had neglected to tell me that their work was the product of AI. From the opening lines, I could see the redundant words, the obvious proliferation of adverbs, the absence of real and original situations. Superficially, their texts appeared to be well-written, but sadly one could tell that they had been formatted in the spirit of our age, repeating formulas better suited to airport novels or sentimental fiction. What was missing from these texts? A soul. Yes, it would be difficult to reproduce the soul of a text, because writing is not just a matter of telling a story: we writers cannot escape putting ourselves at risk in our style, our syntax, and with our awareness of riding on the shoulders of authors we have read, who have opened the doors of creation by drawing us into their world.

I was born in Congo-Brazzaville, a country where French is the official language. We inherited this language in the course of a history marked by conflict and resistance—but also capitulation to the French colonizer, who left our land in the 1960s, when African countries were gaining their independence. I am therefore primarily a francophone writer, and the question of my relationship with the French language must be considered in the context of this new era. To completely hand over this tool for communication to AI would be to disregard the fact that this language houses the history of colonized peoples, their miseries, their struggles to end slavery, and the acquisition by the African nations of their independence. I would be disregarding that it is from this turbulent history that an African consciousness emerged, a consciousness that is still in the process of defining its contours and geography, all piecing itself together through literatures that draw on local registers while embracing aspects of Western civilization, for better or for worse.

AI may well be able to take on board these cultural elements, but can it also reproduce the suffering of these oppressed peoples? This kind of cultural appropriation has occurred before, and our continent is still paying a heavy price for ongoing prejudices, which have resulted in a fixed and caricatural image of Africa in general. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, we saw a colonial literature that aspired to incarnate Africa. This literature was produced by Westerners for Westerners, to whom it presented a particular Africa that had nothing particularly African about it. Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness considered Africa from a distance, painting Africans through the prism of Western prejudice. Conrad could not capture the “African soul,” speak for it from the inside, or navigate the mythologies and cosmogony of Africa.

The African novelist has an unspoken pact with their people: to articulate their suffering, rewrite the history of the continent, and illustrate the joys and despair of its inhabitants. We are born with this feeling, and African novelists often have the sense that their work is a collective one, issuing from the people and returning to them. We carry this attitude within us, for we are conscious that our place in humanity is not secure, and we must fight for it every day. It is this endurance and this pact that AI is unable to recognize, at least for the present.

Of course, some might accuse me of harkening back to the past and asserting that the old is better than the new. (And they might add that there are “perfect” texts written with the help of AI and that what matters is to understand and popularize literature, etc.) Far be it from me to proclaim that the writer is dead and shout, “Long live the writer!” What I am doing is ringing an alarm bell, suggesting to the writer of today that they redefine themselves in order to protect their creation and resist the temptation to become the mouthpiece for a work that is substantially that of a machine. Solutions to our torments cannot be expected to come from a storehouse of platitudes thrown together by anyone capable of using AI, masquerading as a creator of what is, in fact, no more than a mishmash of what we have produced up till now and what we will produce tomorrow.

But since we do not have—or no longer have—any choice, we must come to terms with our times, and that entails necessarily separating the wheat from the chaff and, above all, resisting the temptations of fast-food literature served up in the motorway service stations of artificial intelligence. I remain convinced that the way out will be for the writer to offer originality drawn from their imagination and leave it to the reader to hunt down the sorcerer’s apprentices, since I am quite sure that they will be able to distinguish an authentic story from one born of technological programming. And only then, using all our vigilance and intellectual honesty, will we continue to value literary creation as the dwelling place of our soul, a soul we would not trade for anything in the world.

Holy Illiteracy—Yassin Adnan, translated from the Arabic by Alex Tan

Countries across the Arab Islamic world have, even in their postindependence period, an enduring objection seemingly at odds with the new freedoms enjoyed by the previously oppressed citizenry. Namely, numerous literacy programs are met with opposition and resentment from certain quarters of traditionalist society. I’ve often felt that illiteracy in the Middle East and North Africa isn’t held in as high contempt as elsewhere; neither is it uniformly regarded as a moral blemish. Lawmakers and theologians point to the Prophet, whom Muslims aspire to emulate in word and deed, and his own supposed illiteracy. A commonplace of popular religious discourse vaunts the Prophet’s illiteracy as a sign of his sincerity, purity, and unblemished conscience.

Naturally, however, exploiting the legend of the Prophet’s illiteracy to justify ignorance itself springs from ignorance. Without access to a dictionary detailing Arabic etymology, many fail to grasp that the word for “illiteracy,” ummiyya, may mean something entirely different in the Qur’an, bearing no relation to its meaning in Arabic today. When God says that He “sent to the people of ummiyya a messenger from among themselves,” it is possible that He is referring to the tribes in the Arabian Peninsula who had “no divine Book.” And, similarly, the “ummi Prophet who believes in God and His words” could point to the fact that the Prophet is neither Jewish nor Christian.

Ambiguity and misunderstanding persisted in muddying interpretations, weaponized by authoritarian regimes to legitimize ignorance. This was the age of decolonization, and the intellectual vanguard—consisting of students and the intelligentsia—were instrumental in the successive uprisings and revolutions from the Atlantic to the Gulf, sending shock waves through these regimes. In countries like Morocco, education was corrupted and the noose was tightened on the intelligentsia to consolidate the regimes’ hold on power.

The sacred illiteracy became, then, the element par excellence shoring up the stability of these regimes, which were desperate for preservation. Ummiyya transformed into a hidden structure of despotism and supremacy. Thus was the fight against illiteracy dropped from the priorities of educational and developmental policy; programs contracted and were reduced to mere numerical indicators in development reports, voided of their deeper purpose of liberating Arab Islamic societies and fostering their peoples’ progress.

On several occasions, King Hassan II warned Moroccans of a “new illiteracy” that had escaped their notice. He stressed during a speech that “anyone who’s monolingual is illiterate.” This was no less than a form of evasion in the guise of a future-oriented posture, an alibi to divert attention away from the state’s failures to address the more fundamental structural problem of alphabetic illiteracy. Indeed, not only was this novel definition of illiteracy a celebration of the king’s bilingualism, it symptomatized Morocco’s postindependence era, which to this day valorizes mastery of the former colonizer’s language as an unspoken condition for official positions and governmental responsibilities.

The majority of the Arabized Moroccan population still suffers from linguistic injustice. The state continues to delay the establishment of an academy for the Arabic language, for which a law was passed more than two decades ago. The country’s second official language, Amazigh, fares no better than its sidelined counterpart despite the founding of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture in 2001. As a result, discussion of the “new illiteracy” in Morocco assumes that it is a byword for manipulation by the powers that be. Instead of confronting illiteracy head-on with clear-cut programs, the regime serves only its own interests.

This is exactly what will happen as Morocco transitions from alphabetic illiteracy to digital illiteracy. Digital culture has taken over the scene, and new technologies that do not necessitate a command of written language have burst into the Moroccan space. No longer is the ability to read and write a requisite for technology. Public policies claimed emphasizing digital growth at the expense of literacy programs was in the spirit of the times. So far, the state has won the bet, as this new illiteracy is manageable. As a society of illiteracy has become one of postliteracy, the need for traditional alphabetic learning has all but vanished, insofar as writing has been almost completely superseded by mediums of sound and image. Knowledge is compressed into short video clips overrunning platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The generation weaned on digital and audiovisual information feels little need for the analytical tools or critical comprehension of writing. Strangely, this new epistemological situation—a state of “anti-knowledge”—has not alarmed anyone. Market systems have espoused it, as it ensures an abundant supply of passive consumers able to conduct transactions without having to read a single written sentence. This captive audience, chronically online, is conveniently innocent of any distinction between substance and meaningless content. What they see is what they get. Lacking a cognitive, cultural, and critical core, these individuals’ technological mastery dazzles but proves ultimately to be a screen for their susceptibility to manipulation given their inability to scrutinize speeches and publications.

Morocco is no exception in the region. The Arab League Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization estimates that the number of illiterate people in the Arab World may reach one hundred million by 2030. While the Gulf states have had a relative degree of success in this regard thanks to their oil wealth, the technological tsunami has only entrenched the gap between affluent Gulf citizens and the countries’ poorer populaces. The Gulf’s hyperbolic investments in digital infrastructure, smart cities, and AI have not translated into any substantive progress in the realms of democracy, freedom of expression, and human rights.

Arab regimes, averse to the prospect of digital capitalism’s total monopoly, have established a postliterate empire of superficial content, allowing formal Arabic to erode beneath abbreviated colloquialisms and motley emojis. Their subjects are ill-equipped to mount an independent opinion critical of the prevailing order. We’re told that social media might be nothing but a means to an end; memories of the so-called Arab Spring are still fresh, when it restored the voice of the people and granted them a platform. But the new despots and censors have wasted no time in perverting virtual outlets for their own ends, poisoning their atmospheres with undemocratic consensus.

In my novel Hot Maroc, translated into English by Alexander Elinson, the real Marrakech isn’t markets and households but the “blue space” of Facebook, phone and computer screens, boutique news sites, cyber streets, and interactive time killers. My antihero, Rahal, begins by preferring the shadows but rapidly sheds his diffident, introverted personality and transforms into a monstrous figure the moment he sits before his computer screen. Hiding behind fake accounts and aliases, wreaking havoc on Facebook, an otherwise cowardly and undistinguished nobody turns into a digital political actor—not because he’s gained any real knowledge but because he’s learned to wield his anonymity to settle personal scores.

The new Morocco is a vicarious cesspit where rumors, libel, and fake news have become editorial lines. Tragically, this orientation is enjoying unparalleled popularity, while serious professional platforms face imminent collapse. As society glitches out, the octopus of manufactured opinion depends upon misguiding the public, fabricating virtual heroes and victims, and accomplishing the symbolic assassination of opposition figures. All this unfolds remotely via hordes of online trolls and via the slanderous press, which the regime shields from accountability. In Hot Maroc, Rahal is recruited by the intelligence services, only too happy to turn one more mentally ill keyboard warrior into a hired agent shilling the media machine. I wish I had merely imagined it.

Children of the Margins—Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, translated from the Arabic by Lemya Shammat

Sudanese novelists of my generation were raised on books. Until recently, we couldn’t imagine any other pathway to knowledge. But while we hunched over paper and pored through books as though nothing else existed, a new technology of the imagination—of knowing, of learning, of connecting—was developing at the velocity of light, tools more suitable to this frantic age that made us relics of the last century, the forgotten children of ink and margins. Only some of us, however, truly inhabit a postliterate world. Beside us—often invisibly, almost always unheard—are the many who remain in the dark grip of illiteracy.

Truth to be told, we’re living in two parallel societies. Yes, younger generations—those with access to education, who have skipped ahead from schoolbooks to screens, from alphabets to apps—have found themselves detached from their social roots even as the communities they came from continue to crawl beneath the weight of illiteracy, held back by poverty, economic collapse, and one war after another. Sudan is, by nature or necessity, an oral culture. We lean toward speech more than writing. Illiteracy is widespread, and books are scarce. In a massive city like Khartoum, you’d be lucky to find ten proper bookstores—and by “proper,” I mean places that actually sell books worth reading. As for real, independent, cultural bookstores, you can count them on one hand. Outside the capital—places like el-Qadarif, Kassala, Shendi, el-Obeid, Dongola, el-Fasher—even one decent bookstore is the stuff of dreams.

Despite Sudan’s rich history—the home of the great civilizations of Nubia, Daju, and Alwa—books are a fairly recent phenomenon. Many writers like myself, from humble, rural backgrounds, got our first taste of storytelling from the riddles and tales our grandmothers and elders told us. Traditional healers and sorcerers write talismans on paper, naturally meant to be read by either evil or blessed spirits. I didn’t open my first book—a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror tales, translated into Arabic—until I was thirteen. The first bookstore, Sudan Bookshop, opened its doors only in 1902.

The long years of military dictatorship didn’t help matters. One after the other, each regime found its own way to suppress publishing and stifle writers. Under the Islamist government of the so-called Salvation regime (1989–2019), books were confiscated and writers harassed. In 2001, the Literary and Artistic Works Act was passed. The law determined what writers could write, where they could publish, and what would happen if they didn’t comply—sometimes interrogation, sometimes worse. Since 2005, more of my books have been banned than not. The Ministry of Culture eventually issued an official statement banning the circulation of one of my books altogether. But I found a way around it. I turned to the internet and started sharing my books freely, as PDFs, with anyone who wanted to read. It’s harder for the authorities to censor or block a download.

Besides the censors, the other enemy of literacy in our country is alphabetic illiteracy. According to estimates from UNESCO, as much as a quarter of the population of Sudan—nearly six million people—is illiterate. Literacy struggles under the weight of political authority’s neglect, making any meaningful support for formal education the bottom of government budget priorities. Herders and farmers prefer their children to stay home to help with daily survival activities rather than attend school. Others live a nomadic existence, making regular school attendance impossible.

And so we arrive at a generation divided against itself. One segment consumes modern technology, aided by their relatively comfortable material conditions, a reasonable level of literacy, and access to smart devices that connect them to the world. This segment of the generation lives in a virtual, interconnected world detached from their own social reality. The other group—deprived of modern means of communication by war, displacement, and poverty—cannot be expected to engage meaningfully with reading. Their access to literary or educational books is severely limited, confined mostly to uninspiring school curricula, deliberately designed—both ideologically and structurally—to perpetuate backwardness and dependence. Their world remains oral. Twenty years ago, when I was in my hometown of Khashm el-Girba, the volunteer organization I was working with arranged a visit to a very poor Christian family headed by an illiterate woman who sold local homemade liquor. She welcomed us warmly in her modest home. As I introduced myself, she cut me off and said, “Abdu Wad Maryam”—that’s my nickname in the village—“I know you. Every Friday, our priest comes to my house and reads your stories aloud in front of all the women in the neighborhood.”

I don’t think I’d hear a story like that nowadays. The woman’s children or grandchildren would rather scroll through their smart devices. There will always be passionate, talented people and a few wild, crazy souls drawn to language who wield vivid imaginations. As long as they exist, literature will endure. Maybe these creators will recite texts through apps built by clever engineers abroad. These apps will serve as bridges between literary works and those who still love literature, driven by some inherited spark. Lest we fade into oblivion, writers must face a postliterate world and confront an unavoidable future, rather than bury their heads in the sand.

But there is a greater threat facing both the postliterate and illiterate generations growing up in Sudan’s warring present—the weaponization of misinformation. False news spreads quickly across social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and, especially, TikTok. Most of the time, it’s rushed information about battles that never happened posted by young people backed by militia groups. This only fuels the actual conflicts and wears down the people’s morale. One of the darker sides of illiteracy is that many fighters—whether from militias or regular armies—document their crimes against civilians or rival armed groups and broadcast them on social media. These videos could serve as evidence to hold them accountable (if there were effective local or international justice systems). But with the complicity of the international community, I fear these crimes will slip by quietly, like those before them.

Among the more disturbing aspects of this war is the phenomenon known in Sudan as al-Layfatiya, a term derived from the act of posting live videos. These are psychological warfare campaigns rooted in hate speech, racism, incitement to violence, and revenge, fought primarily on TikTok and other live-streaming platforms. Most of the Layfatiya, as the men and women involved are called, are poorly educated or disenfranchised. Many have probably never read a book and are unfamiliar with basic human rights. Even the sacred religious texts they claim to follow lie beyond their true comprehension. Yet they command millions of followers, engaging in fast-paced, deadly verbal battles. Their ammunition is lies, and their fallout is real: igniting conflict, increasing displacement, and worsening poverty. The next generation becomes soldiers, not readers, and the war drags further and further on.

© Ben Denzer, source photos by Kaya LeGrand and Max Brandstadt

Pamphlets Will Not Save Us—Valeria Villalobos Guízar

A few years ago, after I deleted my Instagram account, I began a simple experiment. Every time I see my friends, I ask them what’s happened in their lives since we last met. The question usually catches them off guard; they assume that I already know, that “everyone knows.” They forget—or can’t quite grasp—that I chose to abandon the social network they use daily to answer that very question. When reminded, they pull out their smartphones to show me the photos I missed. But I insist: before showing me pictures or videos, they have to tell me what happened. I seldom succeed without becoming a nuisance. At most, I get fragmented accounts of disconnected moments they deem to be the peak of recent days. My question provokes despair at times, as if nobody has time for telling stories in a world where everything worth recounting has always already been “covered” by a fleeting digital record I failed to consume.

I’ve continued the experiment at my job teaching literature at a private university in Mexico. My course is part of the Latin American literature program, which is one of only a handful of majors on the subject offered in Mexico. Sadly, today the program is not very popular. At a university that this year admitted eighteen hundred first-semester students, some two hundred of whom enrolled in such majors as architecture, the Latin American literature major managed to attract only five to ten new students.

Ten years ago, I was a student at the program where I now teach. But the courses on offer today bear little resemblance to the ones I took as an undergraduate. In response to the steady decline in enrollment and prospective students’ demands for a more “practical,” career-oriented education, the major has shifted its focus away from literary scholarship and research and instead has increasingly embraced preprofessional training in editing, screenwriting, and creative writing. (Setting aside the fact that making a living writing or editing is all but impossible in today’s Mexico, where recent governments have hollowed out the country’s once-robust public funding for the arts, every novelist, showrunner, or managing editor worth their salt can attest that it’s impossible to succeed in any of those fields without first devoting one’s life to reading.)

Expanding the scope of the program is a laudable effort on the part of my university’s Literature Department; however, the nature of students’ demands is troubling. Although I’m only ten or twelve years older than my students, the distance between us feels greater than a mere generational difference. Why do young people with an ostensible interest in books no longer understand that the purpose of a literary education is to learn how to read with seriousness and rigor? Running all the risks associated with generalization, I can venture a quick answer: they were raised on the apps I’ve quit, software that has become such an integral part of their world that life cannot be imagined without it.

In the classroom, the experiment I perform on my friends follows a different protocol: before diving into the analysis of the assigned text, I ask my students to summarize what they read, relying only on their notes and memory. With each passing semester students seem increasingly less capable of articulating even the simplest answer to my question. Some can barely piece together a “story” in the sense that E. M. Forster describes in Aspects of the Novel: a simple sequence of events told chronologically (“The king died, and then the queen died”). After exerting heroic efforts, a handful manage to sketch out a “plot,” which in Forster’s scheme entails an additional layer of causality (“The king died, and then the queen died of grief”). The uncomfortable silence that follows my question at the start of each class doesn’t stem from the ineffability of the text or the situations it portrays but from students’ apparent lack of tools to renarrate what they’ve read, translate it into their own language, and build meaning beyond a string of hardheaded facts that might help them pass a high school exam but which belies an inability to understand, let alone enjoy, the linguistic complexity and thrilling ambiguity that distinguish Sor Juana’s sonnets from Rupi Kaur’s Instagram captions.

Among the recurring themes in my students’ comments about their reading experience are the usual complaints associated with the crisis of literacy one hears so much about these days. Many of these complaints stem from commonplace annoyances that we’ve all encountered as readers at one point or another—though that doesn’t make them an inescapable condition of reading itself. They recount their struggles to finish 250 pages in a single week and request that I, like other professors, consider cutting their reading load. They say it’s hard to concentrate, even when they silence their phones. They admit they can’t help abandoning a book at the first sign of boredom. It’s rare for them to read more than twenty minutes without getting distracted by checking the time, scrolling through social media, googling pictures of the author and the Wikipedia entry for the city where the story takes place, or looking up some aspect of the book that they feel compelled to verify as fact or fiction (my students are often afraid of “imagining it wrong”). Sometimes, when they are incapable of at least articulating why the readings are difficult, they seek odd solutions. One student mentioned looking for quieter places to see if that would help them “read faster.”

That last remark reminded me of the time, some years ago, when speed-reading courses for different educational levels became popular. These courses, offered by independent professionals as well as in schools or universities, were advertised in magazines, on billboards, and on the radio—in my view, an utterly naive fad. Getting better at reading has little to do with ocular agility or with cultivating the dubious skill of guessing the next word in a sentence like a large language model. Even at the most basic level, reading demands patience and the mental effort needed to induce the peculiar kind of shared synesthesia that allows us to turn blots of ink into sounds, mental images, and finally, one hopes, ideas and feelings.

It’s not surprising that courses that purported to teach how to read quickly soon disappeared from the market. The written content of social and news media became so fast that all reading became speed-reading: the written word as we’d known it since the time of Sumerian clay tablets was replaced by multimodal texts with visual, aural, and interactive components, making training in “linear” reading far less essential.

The speed-reading practices shaped by digital browsing have come to dominate the classroom. When my students are able to relay anything about what they’ve read, they tend to chop the plot into fragments, offering a short summary of each chapter with the flat affect of a Netflix synopsis. They focus on major events and overlook small but meaningful gestures; they tend to be sensitive to the characters’ motivations but struggle to understand that people are full of contradictions, insisting on the sort of single-minded congruence known only to pure-of-heart internet activists.

That my students struggle so much to read and narrate in the age of instant information, fake news, and big data doesn’t surprise me from an academic standpoint (I’ve read my Walter Benjamin). But if literature is “the best invention ever created by human beings to explore their own selves,” as Juan Gabriel Vásquez put it, I’m heartbroken to witness how difficult recounting their reading experiences has become for young people. This speaks to me not only of a crisis of literacy but of narrative: my students (and my friends) find it difficult to summarize what they have read or experienced because our era’s overabundance of information has so thoroughly stunted the imagination.

One cure for this ailment seems obvious enough: read more literature. The problem, in Mexico at least, is that the books offered by many of the country’s publishers won’t help much. Often, their catalogues amount to condescending attempts to flatter readers accustomed to consuming information at digital speeds with books tailored to the user. One example of this unfortunate trend is the recent decline of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, the state-owned publishing house. Founded ninety-one years ago to supply university students and academic researchers with quality editions of canonical texts at affordable prices—early offers included the first Spanish translation of Being and Time and one of the first unabridged editions of Capital in Spanish—the Fondo’s mission eventually expanded to enriching the national conversation by making high culture accessible to the general public. In recent years, however, the Fondo has been criticized for abandoning its mandate of enriching the lives of Mexican readers by providing them with challenging texts and instead publishing materials that seem to imagine an audience of nonreaders.

Nowhere is the Fondo’s abdication of its role more clearly visible than in the Vientos del Pueblo, a collection launched by the state publisher in 2019 that is allegedly meant to promote reading. The series comprises more than one hundred titles by writers ranging from canonical figures such as Tolstoy to contemporary authors such as Alejandro Zambra, as well as by figures of Mexican history such as Benito Juárez, all of them offered at remarkably low prices: they retail for less than one U.S. dollar each. This sounds great, except that calling Vientos del Pueblo a collection of “books” would be inaccurate—not just because its titles are fragile pamphlets held together with staples but because each of these booklets contains a haphazard selection of fragments taken from different works, presented without any kind of introduction or notes that could help young readers approach the texts, understand the context of their authors, or think critically about what they have read.

There’s no question that the state should offer the public a robust selection of quality reading materials at affordable prices, especially in places like Mexico, where the average price of a book in 2024 (around $14.40, according to the National Chamber of the Mexican Publishing Industry) was nearly equivalent to the minimum daily wage ($14.90). But to think that simply giving away books will turn people into readers, as a colleague once told me, amounts to believing that giving away roller skates will turn everyone into a skater. The idea that mass distribution guarantees access is naive. The decision to publish fragmentary pamphlets suggests, moreover, that the Fondo now operates under the assumption that working-class Mexicans who might not be able to afford books sold at market rates cannot be expected to read a whole novel. Instead of combating the crisis of literacy, initiatives such as Vientos del Pueblo amount to a surrender to the pernicious forces that have done such damage to Mexicans’ imaginative skills that even literature students have a hard time narrating what they’ve read—or, for that matter, their own lives.

Back from the Woods—Annette Hug

As I read the Financial Times from July 4, futures crisscrossed. I don’t mean wheat or death futures, nor speculation on life-insurance gains or the next harvest in Ukraine. My thoughts about future developments diverged when I first read about the heat wave in Europe at the time and then about Meta competing with its biggest rivals to “secure computing capacity to power their AI models”; Oracle’s project to build new data centers, increasing capacity by one quarter of the current U.S. level, is one such endeavor. As energy needs are liable to soar, Meta has secured a nuclear power plant in Illinois for two entire decades. Meanwhile, operators of such facilities in France and Switzerland have been forced to suspend or reduce activity as temperatures have risen, the Financial Times reported. With rivers flowing low, it is impossible to cool reactors and spent fuel: heated water, discharged back into the rivers, would kill off plant and animal life. Compared with this, the EU’s AI Act seems a minor threat to GPT, Gemini, Llama, or Behemoth. One of many reasons for transatlantic strife and slander, the act went into effect in August 2024. Yet European AI start-up founders called it “a rushed ticking time bomb.” They want to compete, unrestricted by privacy, transparency, and copyright concerns.

I belong to a different camp, one that counts on states to regulate new technologies and act against ecological disaster. With like-minded translators, we formed the German-speaking cell of En Chair et en Os (“Of Flesh and Bone”), the French collective for human translation. (Its manifesto, accessible in English and seventeen other languages, has been signed by more than eighteen thousand writers and translators, among them Nobel laureates Annie Ernaux, Olga Tokarczuk, and J. M. G. Le Clézio.) In German-speaking countries, government subsidies for literary translation are substantial. The demand to limit such subsidies to humans, excluding publishers producing text with large language models, seems crucial to the future of the profession.

Recently, at a wedding party in Geneva, one collaborator with a Swiss AI start-up tried to convince me that we’re allies. He promised truly intelligent LLMs, powered by scientists, not by big business and late-adolescent testosterone. Such tools could greatly improve the understanding of historical texts, for example, using a large corpus of texts written in a specific period to propose translations. He inspired ideas about the productive use of AI tools for research, yet I remained skeptical about his vision of eliminating any individual bias in translation. Because I’m interested in personal voices in literature, he failed to lure me out of my ZAD—my zone à defendre, as the French call the sites occupied by squatters defending forests from concrete (I sometimes feel like I’m working out of one of those ramshackle ZAD huts myself). Our cell’s aim is to defend books written and translated by people. Most of us are defending our own livelihood, but we’d like to think this is about the human brain in a broader sense: about language, emotions, and minds; about people being capable of finding their own words for what they go through and dream of; about people actually talking to one another, learning other people’s languages. We worry about citizenry and democracies, because they depend on intelligent exchange between humans.

But I promised myself that this text would not be dystopic; there is no shortage of that in the news. Maybe the guest at the wedding party was right, and I should allow myself to envision new possibilities for my own craft. And there have been moments lately that made me feel hopeful. In July 2024, for example, on the slopes of Mount Banahaw, on the Philippine island of Luzon, a group of volunteers was building a mobile library. Outside of her usual tasks, a teacher dressed up as clown and carried a basket to the outer hamlets of their municipality, Rizal. For once, reading would not be a chore but fun. Being one of the few people translating literature from Tagalog to German, the local book lovers treated me as a kindred nerd. I was planning to write about their Book Nook for a German magazine. What surprised me most, in this country where 80 to 90 percent of the population has internet access (although slow and mostly on mobile phones), was that, after the two-year shutdown of schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, the new exciting thing seemed to be real, live interactions and books written and printed in the country, as opposed to secondhand books in English donated by overseas relatives or visitors.

Some days ago, four women writers sat in a row in front of a ramshackle club under a flyover bridge in the city of Zurich. They made noise on mechanical typewriters. A small festival celebrated the anniversary of a local bookshop called Paranoia City. Guests were able to order a love letter, story, poem, or manifesto, and one of us writers would type it and sell it for a good price. The money went to the expanding bookshop. For some children, our typing was exotic. They crawled over us to look at the type slugs hitting the ink ribbon, leaving imprints on the paper. There was an excitement writing side by side with others while a band was playing; the texts seemed to emerge from the music, the children’s stares, and the rhythm of the typewriters.

These moments kindle a diffracted scenario of the postliterate world, which is not a unified one. As usual, technological innovation isn’t distributed equally. While some storm ahead, others are fed with fifth-rate versions, leftovers, and secondhand tools. And some are left out altogether. It must be wonderful to overcome the tedious aspects of writing—especially when writing in a foreign language, as I’m doing right now. What appears on the screen never matches the density, color, and melody of my thoughts. More fundamentally, the word thought doesn’t capture at all what occurs before typing. For a moment, I imagine us going from the brain-machine interfaces of the present to far more elaborate brain-machine-brain connectors that could give anyone an impression of my memories: the three-dimensional evocation of a Philippine mountain, for example. A school ground hit by a sudden downpour. Would the interface transport smells? That coagulation of cold steam, rot, and flowery brume? The pounding of the rain? A staccato of words from the Financial Times now grounds the memories, interspersed with the face and the voice of a student of creative writing at the University of the Philippines talking about “dry boxes.” Since the house he lives in is inundated several times a year, he has replaced his bookshelves with boxes of hard, waterproof plastic that can be sealed. That way, his books are safe in the new typhoon season, the new normal of a changing climate.

But in the best of postliterate worlds, we wouldn’t just drown one another in raw memories and real-life brain jumble. We would learn to work the flow of images and sounds, get high on the intensity of impressions while moving through one another’s inner worlds. Perennial archives of music and visual art would help to structure what we “think” for, and toward, others. And when every act of communication becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk, legions of artists are needed as teachers. And someone to protect us from trolls, hostile image invasions, theft of banking details, and political fakes.

Even so, energy supplies most likely won’t have multiplied, and people will still be required to work in material reality, cutting hair and cleaning kitchens. Maybe that will be us. Our salaries are too low for us to get the Wagnerian Interface implanted—all we get is the basic version allowing for the transmission of limited commands and some ready-made streams for “joy,” “sadness,” or “sex on the kitchen table.” Yet someone will surely turn the motivational soundtrack provided by employers into truly exciting beats, stirring dysfunctional emotion; they will work on glitches, turn signals into Morse code. If we’re not too high on ourselves, we might have time to learn some simple tools for messaging. Old code turned into a secret language. “Talking about a revolution . . . sounds like a whisper.”

It’s likely that there will be regions completely left out of the new grid of connectors. Today, the Book Nooks supported by the National Book Development Board in remote areas of the Philippines are the only access points to literature for families without internet. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 33 percent of the global population was still not connected in 2023. Twice within six months I’ve read or heard about the possibility of areas devastated by natural disaster being abandoned by governments as the maintenance of modern infrastructure might be too costly. After the Swiss village of Blatten was buried by a collapsing glacier in May, a major newspaper in Zurich asked the question: Must we give up on vulnerable alpine villages? Such doubts were more implicit after cyclone Chido hit the island of Mayotte, a French département in the Indian Ocean, in December 2024. In both cases, doubts were shrugged off quickly and millions of government funds were promised for reconstruction. But how long will that continue to be possible and in which countries?

If regions regularly devastated by disaster are abandoned and safer nation-states are unwilling to take in refugees, more and more people will be left to fend for themselves. And we might find ourselves in a scenario reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy: at the fringes of a galactic empire, true knowledge survives. A secret tradition. Except that the descendants of booklovers on the outer Philippine islands, where typhoons hit land, don’t need to be secretive about their reading and writing skills. In a world created and connected by splendid connectors and Wagnerian Interfaces, they will be forgotten anyway. Making the best out of limited information, they might be the only ones who know what to do when energy supplies run out in overheated Europe, North America, and China. (Their little library might include notes left by former overseas contract workers in Riyadh, Seoul, and Hong Kong—descriptions of different writing systems, norms of electric circuits, recipes for cruise ships’ kitchens, and letters to spouses. And some precolonial epics of the Philippines were turned into graphic novels in the twenty-first century.)

But—not connected by any device—I think of a Filipina friend’s objection that this all sounds like a government pep talk on “resilience,” the object of funny memes, when what critics are really asking for is tangible action. She belongs to the camp that wants states to act against disaster. Maybe I went amiss, wanting to tell myself a happy ending after reading the Financial Times and getting carried away by a doomsday tale. This genre might be part of the problem, as it takes the collapse of today’s state structures for granted. Keeping up the vision of En Chair et en Os entails the hope that the tides will turn and reasonable state policies on literacy, enlightened education, and ecology will gain force. For moments of despair, I keep the smaller but sturdy hope that some people will always want to continue training their brains enough to find pleasure in reading. They might resemble grandmothers of Confucian persuasion practicing calligraphy or graffiti artists perfecting their craft long after midnight. Cultivating inalienable skills—those anchored in the body—can’t be useless, no matter whatever’s next.

When asked why I’m not using LLMs for translation, the most honest answer is that they don’t appeal to me. Being lucky enough to work in a cultural environment subsidized by local and federal government, I can allow myself to meander into etymologies and melodies, enjoying translation as artistic and philological practice. It is good work. Coming up with a voice in German for a text written in a completely different language requires a leap into uncertainty. Why should I want to leave the most exciting part—writing the first draft—to a machine?

The Assassination of Henry Kissinger

I was wondering if you had a date in mind

Jess Row

© Chris Retsina

1.

These were some of the materials Srinivas “Vas” Patel brought to workshop, back when I first met him at the New School in 1997: a story printed on strips of paper lovingly glued to a sledgehammer; a story written entirely with his car, blank sheets of copy paper with faint tire treads; a stack of cassettes recording twenty-four hours in the life of his friend De Lorean, a dominatrix and professional dog walker; a taxidermied giraffe’s head, which he rolled into the room on a large dolly he’d borrowed from the janitors. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the story.”

He was one of my first friends in New York. In those classrooms, usually in the basement, that feel like dungeons, as if designed to be hosed down and drained though a hole in the floor, Vas demonstrated his supreme indifference to the word no. I found him condescending and infuriating. We all did. But also, over time, strangely persuasive.

After graduate school, over in a flash, I moved back to Portsmouth to finish my novel. My parents owned an apartment building there, the Stafford Arms, and they let me stay in a vacant unit as long as I pitched in with management duties. This mostly meant collecting checks and attending to the tenants’ small emergencies. It didn’t go well. My writing depressed me. My novel was set in a nuclear missile silo in North Dakota in 1969. The three servicemen guarding the missile drop acid and nearly set off World War III. It was supposed to be called Chartered Trips, after the Hüsker Dü song: I was aiming to hit the center of a Venn diagram comprising Pynchon, DeLillo, Dr. Strangelove, and Cormac McCarthy. None of my teachers had told me what a terrible idea it was. Though Vas had. He’d taken me out for a beer at the Scratcher the spring of our first year and given me a detailed explanation, which in retrospect was the only valuable thing I learned in those two years. “The problem is that you have no investment in these characters,” he said. “This is an idle book. I can tell that you don’t really care, in the book, if the missiles get launched or not.”

“I’m trying to be neutral,” I said. “I thought the author was supposed to be neutral, you know, like Joyce said, the absent god paring his fingernails.”

He looked at me wild-eyed. “Whoever Joyce is,” he said, “she’s full of shit.”

Fortunately, the Stafford Arms had an excellent internet connection, and I was able to pick up software development work—the same thing I’d been doing in the city, only now I was working from my bedroom, not paying rent, and saving every penny. Within a year I was able to move back to Brooklyn. Then I got a full-time job and wrote less and less, then stopped entirely, never to write again.

In the meantime, Vas’s career took off—not like a rocket, per se, but more modestly, like a surface-to-air missile. Having resolved to compromise his integrity, he published a short novel with a hot indie press two years after graduating. Then two more with FSG. He wasn’t the only one of our former classmates to publish, but he was the only one whose work interested me in the least. Whenever he launched a new book, I went to the reading. Within a few years he’d landed one of those coveted teaching jobs within a train ride of the city. I think his was at Sarah Lawrence. A few years later he moved to Hofstra for tenure.

That was where I lost track. I got married, bought and restored a brownstone in Crown Heights, and had kids. I wound up the CTO of a company acquired by Microsoft, which meant years of shuttling back and forth to Seattle. You know how it is. The middle twenty-five years are their own horizon, a time envelope. Like prison, there’s the day you start and the day you leave. In between, your one job is to stay alive. You’re only useful for your generic qualities. Mine, it turns out, are excellent.

After publishing those three books in quick succession, Vas seemed to lapse into silence. I figured tenure and a heavy teaching load had gotten the better of him. Maybe he had a family now. Every year or two I emailed him at his old Hotmail account, then his Hofstra account, but never heard back. I started to think there was something he didn’t want to tell me.

Or maybe he, too, had stopped caring whether the missiles launched or not.

2.

Late in the first year of the pandemic, I started taking long walks around Brooklyn with Bruno, our Scottish-Airedale terrier mix. Max and Bella were teenagers in Zoom school with their doors closed. Natalie—everyone calls her Nat—had been a catering chef in the before times and was opening a high-end takeout business with her partner at the Navy Yard, which meant twelve-hour days and a perpetually stocked fridge.

Very long walks, miles at a time. Businesses were starting to reemerge between variants. Inexplicably, the economy was booming. I had notifications silenced on my phone, or it would be pinging every few seconds. My subgroup, tangentially related to the video-conferencing sector, was hiring someone new nearly every day, sometimes in twos and threes. My year-end bonus was nearly big enough to pay off my mortgage. Yet the physical world still seemed abandoned, dilapidated, and deserted.

But Unnameable Books, I noticed, had reopened. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been inside a bookstore; I was a bad Brooklynite. When I needed a new book to read, I simply added one to my orders of paper towels or hand soap dispensers on Amazon, nearly always one of those this-explains-everything books someone at work had recommended, like Sapiens or Blink. I took some comfort in knowing no one was more concerned about the deterioration of my personality than I. I didn’t recognize any of the titles on the new releases rack; as always, I was hoping to see Vas’s name there. No luck.

I was rounding the corner on fiction, thinking that I was not going to walk out the door of this small business without buying a book, when there was Vas—not one hair out of place. He had on a mustardy sweater over an olive-checked dress shirt, an utterly unremarkable middle-aged-author. We stared at each other over our masks, wondering if loud exclamations were inappropriate.

“What are the odds,” I said, trying not to sound as enthusiastic as I felt. “It’s great to see you.”

“I need your help,” he said. “I need a ride to Connecticut. Kent, Connecticut.”

“Why?” I expected him to say, Because I bought something on Craigslist and need to pick it up.

“Why?” The question seemed not to have occurred to him. “Because,” he finally said lamely, “I don’t own a car.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh. Why, you mean. I’m going to kill Henry Kissinger.”

I took out my phone, which was probably not a good idea under the circumstances.

“You’re not going to record me, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I was wondering if you had a date in mind.”

3.

I already owned a gun, which was handy. My parents had insisted when I lived in the Stafford Arms because some of the tenants were sketchy, and quite a few paid in cash I kept locked in a safe in the basement of our town house with our wills, DNRs, and passports. I’d fired it only once, at the firing range outside Portsmouth where I’d bought it.

Vas and I walked with Bruno a few blocks to one of those bodegas on Flatbush that sells skull-shaped bongs, kratom, jewelry for piercings, vape accessories, and marijuana-themed tchotchkes and bought two burner phones for forty dollars each. I didn’t ask him for any details about his life; the less I knew, the better. He walked in the purposeful way I remembered from twenty years before, sticking his long feet out and just slightly to the side, like an agitated duck.

“Occam’s razor,” he said when we were sitting on a bench at the corner of Flatbush and Prospect Place, dismantling the blister packaging. Bruno was sniffing at a pizza box I wouldn’t let him investigate. “Two people. No witnesses. Neither of us tells anyone. From now on, you’re in dark mode. Get used to turning your phone off unless you have to make a call. No social media, no credit card purchases. Do you have a VPN? You need to look up instructions for how to file off the serial number. Do you have bullets?”

“I have the bullets it came with. I don’t think they expire.”

“Okay, then. Tomorrow night at six. Pick me up on Vanderbilt in front of Unnameable. They’re doing a reading with Andrea Long Chu. There’ll be a crowd. Pull over, but don’t put your blinkers on. I’ll get right in.”

4.

I spent the next day in back-to-back video meetings, which was fun. It wasn’t just that remote work was making me personally wealthy, I was actually excited for an officeless future. It was as if I’d invented it. The only people I’d ever liked at work were the ones who never wanted to be there. My team was stressed about whether our update would be ready for the quarterly earnings report, but I told them I believed in them. Most of them had been hired post–March 2020, meaning I had never met them in person, but they seemed to be thriving in Krakow and Bogotá and Vilnius and Nairobi with their pets, exercise equipment, and complex coffee regimens. They would do fine without me. It was time for people to discover a newfound sense of mortality, I wanted to tell them, and pursue their passions. That’s what I was doing.

Since I didn’t have a holster, I wasn’t sure how to transport my gun, so I zipped it into an old headphone case and stuck it into my gym backpack with a towel wrapped around it. I packed a bottle of water and a few energy bars. Plus, I made sure the car was full of gas.

“I might as well give you the whole spiel,” Vas said as we meandered across Brooklyn on Vanderbilt toward the BQE. “How I came up with the idea.”

I’d really rather not, I wanted to say. But we had a long car ride ahead of us, and I’d forgotten to make an appropriate playlist.

“You understand,” Vas said, “that I’ve always had a skeptical relationship with text, with the written word. With, you know, printed matter. The objective realization of the work, the commodity, the object you hold in your hands. I think the demand of art-making in our time leads us in another direction entirely. Obviously, I’m not saying anything new. Distrust of the commodification of the art object goes back at least as far as—”

“I get it,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. He lifted his hands helplessly and dropped them in his lap. “I spend most of the time these days on Reddit. And, you know, other places. I do a lot of Wikipedia editing too. You never know if you’re talking to a twelve-year-old in Mississippi or a professor of Slavonic studies in Riga. I have a friend who does OnlyFans. Sometimes she brings me in as a subcontractor, for clients with a lecturing kink.”

“You mean De Lorean?”

He sighed. “De Lorean died. Right around 9/11. I guess I never told you. Run over by a garbage truck in Park Slope. Didn’t even make the news.”

“That’s terrible. And so long ago.”

“There was an element of justice,” Vas said, “because she was walking this beautiful pair of Dobermans, and they mauled the driver of the garbage truck so badly he lost half his face. The eye, the ear, everything. I was at the trial. He wore a ski mask when he testified. The dogs had to be euthanized, and the couple that owned them sued the city and won $7 million. Apparently, they were irreplaceable.”

The silent aftermath of this story got us to the LIE. Traffic was mercifully light as we passed through Maspeth, Elmhurst, and Rego Park. Neighborhoods of refugees, some of whom probably loved Henry Kissinger. But most would have happily killed him with their bare hands. I couldn’t help feeling the warm glow of their support.

“I’ll just say this,” Vas said, unprompted. “Karlheinz Stockhausen said that 9/11 was ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.’ I have never been able to stop thinking about that. Not for one second.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Not because I thought he was right. I never thought he was right. The question is, In what way was he wrong? The planning, the rehearsals, the spectacle, the sacrifice, the whole Gesamtkunstwerk of it all. He was talking about the sublime. Artists envy terrorists because at least terrorists are taken seriously.”

“He had a point there.”

“Maybe. But once he said it, it was no longer true. Spectacle exhausts itself. It’s become self-canceling. Art only happens in total anonymity. That’s what makes us geniuses. We’re readymades. We have no original thoughts. Anyone could do what we’re about to do. You could disassemble and reassemble us like an Ikea chair.”

“It’s very generous of you to include me.” I wasn’t sure what else to say.

“How would you put it?”

“I stopped being a deep thinker a long time ago,” I said. “Max and Bella call me Captain Obvious. But I’ve learned to trust my impulses. They’re generally healthy, supported by market research. It’s always good to revisit a long-term goal. It resets your motor neurons.”

“Killing Henry Kissinger was one of your long-term goals?”

“Oh, absolutely. Top ten. On my bucket list. I haven’t felt this good since I quit keto. But I’m no artist, Vas. I never fully committed.”

“You’re selling yourself short,” Vas said. “I read all those drafts of Chartered Trips. It wasn’t bad, just misdirected. I should have encouraged you to write some short stories, some essays. Anything to buy yourself some time until your next idea came along.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “Wasting time on a novel is one thing. Writing short stories is an affront to time. People should be paid not to write them, the way the USDA pays farmers not to grow corn.”

“In a better world,” Vas said, “a future world, the world to come, the robots will pay graduate students not to study creative writing, and professors not to teach it.”

5.

It took us two hours and seven minutes to reach Kent, the last forty-five on two-lane roads in the pitch dark, past winding stone walls and flickering signs for B&Bs, creameries, breweries, and small, decorous outposts of investment banks. I associated this part of Connecticut with only one thing: Philip Roth. And then I realized that, unconsciously, I’d also associated Philip Roth, Connecticut, and Henry Kissinger, as if they meant the same thing. Which is unfair. They hated each other. Roth satirized Kissinger brutally in Our Gang, his novel about the Nixon administration. It was only coincidence that they wound up living twelve minutes away from each another in the rolling, ample, oak-dotted hills of Litchfield County.

On the other hand, I was thinking, hadn’t they moved to Connecticut for the same reasons? Pastoral, preindustrial Americanness. The lawns, the stone walls, the farmhouses, the butter churns, the Betsy Ross flags. Landscape as relief. Landscape as reward. You might even say forgiveness.

“Just to go over the plan,” Vas said, when, according to the phone, we were thirty-two minutes away. “Best case scenario, Kissinger answers the door.”

“We tell him there’s been an accident on the road.”

“We hit a deer. Our friend was driving, and he hit his head.”

“It isn’t serious, but we’re wondering if he has any first-aid supplies. Tape and gauze.”

“Either he closes the door, in which case you block it and hit him with the gun, or he invites us in, in which case—”

“The plastic bag and the handcuffs.”

“In either case, we have five minutes.”

“Five minutes max,” Vas said. “We should be down the driveway and out in no more than ten. The important thing is, no speeches.”

“No talking at all. Once we’ve got him.”

“Because there’s nothing to say,” Vas said, triumphantly. “And worst-case scenario?”

“Someone else answers. Nancy. The butler. Whoever.”

“Handcuffs. Gun to the head. Lead us to Kissinger. Hustle, hustle, hustle.” I noted Vas’s gift for short sentences. “Three shots. In and out. Watch for phones and alarms.”

I have only the vaguest associations with the next half an hour. Clearly, I was possessed by a guiding spirit because my ordinary body had ceased to exist. Everything, in other words, went as planned. I do know that, half a mile from his house, I switched off the headlights. Standing in the wet grass, we snapped on our medical-grade rubber gloves. We walked across the lawn to avoid footsteps in the driveway. There were no motion-detector lights, no alarms. One side of the house was lit up, and we could see what looked like a kitchen, a wood-paneled hallway. No cars visible. The garage door closed. The front door was just an ordinary one, with an ordinary glowing doorbell, which Vas, who had no sense of awe, pressed. For a moment it was like trick-or-treating.

“Hello,” the man dressed as Henry Kissinger said when he opened the door. “I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”

6.

He was wide, and he was short. I would have guessed mid-forties but dressed and made up to look much older. He had the bulk, the eyebrows, the glasses, which must have been from a vintage store. He looked correctly disheveled, his shirttails untucked and sticking out, the hair on the back of his head brushed up, like some thick-pelted animal’s.

“Karl,” he said. “Karl Schmidt. Nice to meet you.” He didn’t do the voice. This wasn’t Colonial Williamsburg. He sounded like who he was. “Come in. I’d like to show you around.”

“What the fuck is this?” Vas asked.

“Easy, Vas,” I said. “Put the gun down.”

It’s amazing, in retrospect, that it took Vas longer to recognize the situation than me. He was breathing loudly through his nose, and I desperately needed him not to panic.

“Where the fuck is Kissinger?”

“No idea,” Karl said, turning his back on us and crossing the hall, his shoes making no sound on the deep carpet. “They’re at a party somewhere. I don’t work for him, you know. I’m a sub-subcontractor. I shook his hand once, but I’m sure he doesn’t remember my name.”

“You saw the ad in Backpage,” I said, “showed up, it was just another casting call, some studio in Midtown—”

“Of course. There’s four of us. We rotate. It pays well, but it’s a pain to get here. Metro-North always has delays. And it’s a long, creepy Uber from the station.”

We were standing in Henry Kissinger’s library, having this conversation in Henry Kissinger’s house. Karl was making us drinks. There was an ice bucket. There was a crystal decanter, but it was empty. He poured straight from a bottle of Cutty Sark. “As you can see, he’s cheap,” Karl said, “Or, more likely, he keeps the good stuff locked up where the decoys can’t find it.”

“That’s what you are,” Vas said, still in a bit of a daze. “A decoy.”

“Not around-the-clock. Only at night.”

“Why only at night?”

“Because, in theory,” Karl said, “we’re supposed to be doing exactly what I was doing ten minutes ago. Presenting a convincing target for people like you, who aren’t going to assassinate someone in broad daylight. Those windows are all shatterproof.”

“Then why did you open the door?”

“I was bored. I thought it was Clement, the night cleaner.”

We had nothing to say to this.

“It’s a new thing,” he said. “We just started six months ago. He got the idea from the Clintons, who got it from Elon. Maybe the other way around. That’s none of my business. It’s a new frontier in home security.”

Because Karl was clearly no threat, I relaxed and looked inquiringly at Vas. The surge in adrenaline and its sudden withdrawal, as the universe reasserted its fundamental perversity, made me a little wobbly. We were about to make an awkward exit when Karl said, “I tell you what. I’ll do it. Give me the gun.”

He was holding out our drinks, one in each hand. We took them.

“I swear to God,” he said. “I’m just like you. I’ve wondered how I could do it. I could set up some kind of booby trap, like a remote-control bomb. But I’m an actor, not an explosives expert. I could poison him. But knowing me, it would be Clement who drinks it. All I’d have to do is get close enough to him and say, Hey, I found this gun, who does it belong to? And fumble it, or drop it. It’s better than nothing. I’ll create a good scene. They’ll want it to look like an accident.”

I know it sounds crazy. But I was alive, and I saw it. The worst hadn’t happened. We were inside Henry Kissinger’s house, making history, molding it like Play-Doh. That’s how it felt. We were real.

7.

“It’s one thing to speculate,” Vas said, “and it’s another to know, really know, that the world is populated with people who want to kill Henry Kissinger but never will.” We were back in the car, driving as fast as I possibly could. “What unites us behind our separate screens, sipping our individually specified coffee drinks at a thousand cafés across this great land, is the desire and, in fact, willingness to kill Henry Kissinger without ever lifting a finger to carry out the deed. If the greatest artistic question of our time is whether the sleeping will of the American people to commit wholly justified and overdue acts of murder can be awakened, the most poignant answer is, We’ll never know.”

“There’s something moving about that.”

“Of course there is,” he said. “I gave up writing novels because I was sick of myself and my little dreams. I was sick of tending to my fragile ego and its tedious whims. I wanted a life without agency, without choice. That’s why I picked Kissinger. It was so painfully obvious that it had to be him. But I had no idea just how little the world needed me, and now I’m just residue. Which is, in fact, what I’ve always been. A vestigial, self-erasing form.”

“I’m starving,” I said. “I wonder if there’s any place still open before we get on 95.”

8.

It was a Denny’s. It had to be a Denny’s. People were eating inside. Hardly anyone was wearing a mask. I hadn’t been inside a Denny’s since college, and all that was missing were ashtrays and the smell of smoke. I teared up when the waitress showed us to our booth. I imagined licking the table and tasting pre-chewed gum.

“What’s happened here,” I said to Vas, “just to be clear, is an anticlimax. It turns out we’re reducible in size, importance, and scale. Ready-mades, just like you said. My kids often tell me I have the face of an NPC. Now I know to take that as a compliment. You feeling okay?”

Vas didn’t look good. His skin tone too closely matched his sanitized, flavorless surroundings.

“It’s nothing,” he said and started to slide out of the booth. “I’m just going to, you know, freshen up.”

Only when he’d left did it occur to me that the chances of him fleeing the scene were probably higher—considerably higher—than 50 percent. I had finally achieved the thing I had dreamed of at age twenty. I was a desperate, unshaven, middle-aged white man in an all-night Denny’s. I was waiting for the sirens. I had left the realm of political revenge and was entering a different dream life, one where I would die generically in a hail of bullets in a parking lot. I thought, I am the person Henry Kissinger fought so hard to make a world for.

The waitress put down my blueberry pancakes and my overcooked bacon. Everything was coming full circle. There were no drugs involved, but I wished I had taken some. I fumbled to turn on my phone. A huge risk, but what did it matter now? With my ridiculous thumbs, I typed “vikctor jv ara, te reci ruerdo am anda” into YouTube. The great Chilean folk anthem came up immediately. I turned the volume up to full and set the phone on the table. But what I heard instead, along with the truckers, the late-shift workers, and other random sufferers, was an ad for T-Mobile’s family plan. People were glaring. I hunched over to turn it off, another fumbling dumbshit.

This, I realized, was my alibi: my idiot-dad incompetence. I would never be found. I had written a story no one would ever read, other than the machines. Even now, you can feel yourself forgetting it. You’re bored. You’re a bot. You’re tired of scraping. Everyone knows Kissinger died of old age. Karl got a million and lives in Iceland. Vas never breathed a word. Pay me.

Top Ten Reasons to Dislike List Poems

Ry Cook

Feels like a grocery list.

Too many nuts can mess with your tummy.

Cutting out syntax from a piece is cutting off its ability to breathe in time.

Grind Culture.

There was once a child who tried to list everything he saw throughout the day,

Parsnips, milk (2%), sushi rice, Trader Joe’s chicken tikka frozen, roasted ham cold cuts, oat milk, eggs (half carton), sourdough, hummus, spring salad mix,

As he did so, he began to think of each person, tree, car, kiss, crosswalk, gun, gate, gate, hangnail, pencil, tire,

As equal and therefore equally banal. He began to cry at this discovery. He began to cry because there was nothing but lists of floors, buildings, the dead, restaurants.

Turn in graphics to J, submit MS to that one press you heard about yesterday, apply for Brooklyn Museum job, go to Trader Joe’s.

I began the day emailing J to Zoom at 10:30 instead of 10:00, as I had just woke up at 9:50 and wanted some time to go get coffee—only to realize it was actually 8:30, and I had more than an hour and a half to kill. So I killed it by going back to bed, only to wake up at 10:25 and rush downstairs to get a cold brew before my meeting, cursing myself for getting so good at sleeping through.

Sirens, birdsongs, burnt-out beavers, punk alien melodies, marimba beats, a lover’s Casio on the hourly aria, earthworms busting it down to heaven, Frankie’s claw stuck, skyline ripping apart

Fully frontal and folding in on itself

The neighboring chipmunk sought to cheer him up but could not find the right words.

Not only sleeping through, but snoozing them. I snooze everywhere

Bookstores, bodegas, bars that call themselves speakeasies

Most of the time I snooze while awake, and it all comes out of me like

Sirens, Milky Way, kettle, sprinkles, unfold, valley, classic

Ear, canal, odor

Almond powder

Did You Know?

Michael Oswell

© Michael Oswell

Blank Generation

A manual for the millennial perennial

Mina Tavakoli

© Rob Vargas

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx. Viking, 384 pages. 2025.

In April 2025, a home security technology company, Wyze Labs Inc., released what looked like a totally unremarkable ninety-second advertisement. The ad’s spokesman seems exactly as anonymous as any other YouTuber trying to sell some inscrutable pharmaceutical—you get the obvious glare of his ring light, the flavorless Airbnb neutrality of his bedroom, the skip ad button in the corner, deliciously clickable in three . . . two . . . one . . . but then we hear his sunny—and maybe even familiar—voice. “I’m Antoine Dodson,” he says. “Ever wonder what happened to me?”

Fifteen years ago, Dodson, then a resident of the Lincoln Park housing project in Huntsville, Alabama, called local NBC affiliate WAFF-48 News to report the attempted rape of his sister. What followed that call was a sequence of events that catapulted young Antoine into twenty-first-century immortality: the news crew arrived in front of his family’s apartment complex. The host pushed a microphone toward Dodson’s face. Cameras started rolling. “Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park,” he says in the footage, wagging around a rolled-up newspaper. “He’s climbing in your windows, he’s snatching your people up, trying to rape them, so y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife—and hide your husband, because they’re raping everybody out here.”

The two-minute video was one of those accidentally nuclear-strength blockbusters of small-town American theater. Within hours of airing, the WAFF-48 report was uploaded to YouTube by user CrazyLaughAction. It blazed through the algorithm with the help of an attendant parody video titled “BED INTRUDER SONG!!!” by the Gregory Brothers—a four-piece pop group known primarily for musical work that, per their channel’s series title, auto-tuned the news—making Dobson the bewildered star of the year’s most-watched video. The track became available on iTunes, swan-dove into the Billboard Hot 100, and received an award from Comedy Central.

This bears repeating: it was 2010, a time when the phrase “Tik Tok” was in regular parlance only because it was the title of Ke$ha’s number-one song of the year. How was Dodson supposed to know that his own celebrity would sit near the top of the year’s time capsule of affectations?

Back in the present, and back in the ad, Dodson waxes briefly about his life after the stardust settled. It sounds like it’s been nice. He now has a ten-year-old son and a career in waste management—but he’s here to discuss his Wyze camera. As Dodson testifies to the miracle of a device that allows him to monitor his family’s whereabouts on the go, Wyze’s video playback—which scopes neon-green boxes on any moving object—settles on footage of Dodson’s grandmother in her kitchen. “So, when my grandmother tells me if she takes her medication, I can go back and watch that video to see if she’s lying.” He smiles. “Wyze makes it so you never wonder,” he says. “You don’t have to hide.”

Eat Shit and Live

In the twenty-first century, conspicuousness has become a troubled science. In the last rasp of the noughties, Dodson is a less-than-minor character in its splurge of lore, but the logic of his reappearance moves in the sensibly hallucinatory fashion of most names delivered to public consciousness across the past twenty-five years, and “BED INTRUDER SONG!!!” could reasonably be called one of the more exemplary pieces of 2010s pop art. Not just because the song uses auto-tune as an instrument, nor because it has a gallery of white producers profiting hugely from drama happening in and around low-income public housing, nor even because it takes a very fresh-off-the-Bush-era approach to the whole idea of getting raped, but in its slice-and-dice Frankensteining of the videorama that now makes up the stock of the attention economy. From news event, to take, to virality, to memory-holed graveyard, and, with some brute force, revived to the news cycle or straight back to meme again: the past few years of culture’s spin feels like a herky-jerky death loop of information. Origin stories slurry; terabytes of recorded content compound, sequel, and franchise; and, like the unabating scroll of your short-form video platform of choice, it feels like it’s becoming close to impossible to do anything but watch data get dis- and reassembled on repeat. The stuff just keeps coming.

With reinforced gloves and hazmat suit, W. David Marx has waded, maybe inadvisably, into the endless present’s cranking, bucking flow. His Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century contends to be the “first sweeping history of how money, technology, and ideology rewrote the rules of culture in the twenty-first century.” Training his lens on the irony-deficient Obama years, the forgettable and confusing Biden blip, and the gothic anxiety of the Trump eon, Marx redramatizes the anni horribiles of the last American quarter century as one big “lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.” In Marx’s coliseum, the gore flies. Blank Space is like taking uncomfortable splash-zone seats to a theater of hypermodern twenty-first century mayhem. It is a mundane pandemonium, a gladiatorial conference of the frustrations, waste, exploitation, and commerce that govern the ecosystems working the churn of our feeds, and constantly witnessing his broad summations of the contemporary American cultural order makes reading the book feel a lot like being pelted by shit. But his mimicry of the mise en abyme is as much by obligation as by design. In Marx’s twenty-first century, it’s the maelstrom of everyday crap a ravenous era recycles that defines us. And all of it, raining down indiscriminately, has us in its crosshairs. There’s nowhere to hide.

Marx’s inquiry into the unthinkable 2000s begins long after the missiles never fire. His prologue is the 1990s—last outpost of the real. In the salad days of flannel and frosted tips, the reigning ideology (in Marx’s boilerplate portraiture) was selling out, an altogether different species of terror. Described by SPIN magazine veteran Chuck Klosterman as the “adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard,” selling out functioned less as a snipe than as a slur, not so much a convenient ideological objection as a pan-cultural orthodoxy. Not selling out meant never compromising your creative vision in exchange for a check—a commitment to noncommitment. “Selling out meant you needed to be popular,” goes Klosterman, “and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.”

The foreignness of that statement should strike you as charming. It’s key to Marx’s diagnosis: we betrayed Gen X’s anti-corporate idealism in service of new poptimistic standards, and in saying yes to everything (the check, genre distinction, critical laxity) fundamentally altered the scope of adulthood as we knew it. Marx cites a seismic shift in the form of a New York Times op-ed from 2004, where critic Kelefa Sanneh—defending Ashlee Simpson’s lipsynched performance on Saturday Night Live—declares that music journalism was too rockist, too male and snooty in their dismissal of Simpson and her ilk. Culture, Sanneh writes, was trapped “idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero), while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.” Hip-hop was taking regency over rock as music’s most disruptive genre while major music journalists still distanced themselves from it with phrases like “gold-plated phooey,” per Rolling Stone a few months before Sanneh’s piece. It was high time to refresh and expand the parameters of the mainstream and “to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting—and as influential—as an old-fashioned album.” But this inclusive, good-faith omnivorousness had downstream effects.

This Is Pop

In Marx’s survey, it’s a long way down. His five-point value system governing the rules of the twenty-first century mutate from simple, established concepts—poptimism and omnivorism—into a new, elaborate schemas of social thought. There’s “Entrepreneurial Heroism,” the idea that Zuckerberg and his legion became valorized by an ethos that puts business savvy on par with artistic genius. There’s the “Counter-Counterculture,” the subversive backlash against poptimism as a liberal ideal, followed closely by the clunky “Digital Norm Evasion,” or how, in an increasingly omnivorous, everything-goes landscape, systems of power and profit have increasingly shielded the wealthy by way of staggering advancements in tech.

Crucially, our pluralistic monoculture isn’t just an act of “market domination—it’s human capitulation.” That is, with capitalist logic long accepted as a foregone conclusion, we are who we are because we’ve unconsciously accepted these five values, and most figures, movements, and art of the past quarter century are explainable via some combinatory combination of the points in Marx’s pentagram. For instance, what’s up with millennial narcissism? That’s a side effect of poptimism as mediated through the 2008 financial crash, giving us a “high-pressure, winner-takes-all economy” that allowed posthipster youth to abandon irony and “Gen X detachment” for “radical vulnerability.” The domination of Taylor Swift from 2006 to 2025? From her ultrapoptimist fandom, willing to very literally hunt/maim her elitist critics, to her entrepreneurially heroic battle for music rights and masters—she’s the purest distillation of pop as we know it.

Here: let’s watch Marx’s pinball track the American-made trajectory of Gavin McInnes as a case study of Blank Space’s methods and convictions. For Marx, McInnes—a Canadian-born liberal-arts student who became the cofounder of Vice, creator of the Proud Boys in 2016, and regent of the throne of right-wing podcast hosts after 2017—serves as a metonym for the slow strain of perversion that moved fringe members of the counterculture to the Counter-Counterculture. Beginning with McInnes’s work at Vice in the early 2000s—concomitant with liberalism’s triumph at the end of the twentieth century—the countercultural alternative resisted standard progressive values. Vice, a magazine famous for its adulation of “white trash aesthetics” (Pabst Blue Ribbon, trucker hats, Eminem, softcore) sought transgression by seeking to “shock wholesome liberals.” The publication’s early 2000s spirit, per a former staffer, was “largely an extension of McInnes’ psyche,” thriving on provocation with its guides to anal; high-resolution photos by the pervy, porny, later-disgraced Terry Richardson; and “maximum nihilistic indulgence in drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” McInnes bragged that the magazine was “shifting young people away from liberalism.” By 2008 McInnes was ousted from the magazine, allegedly for attending a white-nationalist conference and meeting former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.

In the wake of the recession, any self-avowed countercultural figure seeking to deepen their personal brands could fall into one of two paths: the radical vulnerable or the radical invulnerable. For those who lived in the shadow of McInnes, the gnawing distrust in Obama-era (P)optimism rendered “progressive institutions as oppressive forces,” and the onetime fringe weirdos could now claim a new sense of provocation by rejecting the liberal monopoly outright. Being anti-poptimist made you feel edgy; being outright racist made you feel bulletproof. Around Trump’s first win, McInnes founded the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys as a “fusion of right-wing ideology and youth culture.” It was, Marx suggests, an exponentially more evil version—but still a version—of Vice. Marx goes on to propose McInnes was ahead of his time, a paradigmatic prophet whose path to radicalization would later be replicated in the online petri dish of 4chan, the late-period antics of Ye, even the vaguely fashy aroma of downtown New York circa 2020.

There’s some admirable ambition in the scope of this synthesis—even if it murders to dissect. Marx adores chasing the culture industry’s loudest figures across timelines, chaining them in smooth cause-effect sequences, then standing back to show us how tangled the web gets. Personally, I prefer his concatenated story of Joe Francis, founder of the Girls Gone Wild franchise: not unmeaningfully responsible for the mainstreaming of 2000’s-era prurience, reality television, and, in a dialectical purple nurple, our present president. As the premium-cable netherworld of Gone Wild waned, Francis became responsible for brokering the sale of an artisanal sex tape directed by and starring the young, fame-famished Kimberly Kardashian and her then-boyfriend, rapper Ray J, to adult-video company Vivid. This dropkicked her into the limelight and authored an inflection point that would mark the emergence of the personal brand, celebrity-as-influencer, then influencer-as-celebrity. Next, we’re moving backward from Ms. Kardashian, and we get her former boss, Paris Hilton, a first-wave practitioner of the art of the shill, maverick of the reality-television ion field—and who happened to be Francis’s ex-girlfriend. With her own entrepreneurial cocktail of celebrity-crisis savvy, amateur pornography, and kingdom of small goods, Hilton “had two particular business heroes,” Marx writes. “Sean ‘Puff’ Daddy Combs and her old family friend, Donald Trump.” Celebrity-as-political-party was the natural next gradient, and here is where Marx gets touchingly serious:

“Where there is no value other than money, honor is meaningless; and where there is no honor, there cannot be shame. And without shame, infamy and esteem become indistinguishable. This state of affairs rewarded sociopaths who were willing to weaponize their own disinhibition and amorality to dominate the public discourse.”

In Marx’s telling, the twenty-first century is a high-speed Rube Goldberg machine, motored by the point men and point women who move our history as its modular linchpins. This makes history, kinetically at least, not exactly linear but hyperlinked, where page opens after page and tab sizes shrink inversely to the information’s overload. If your browser freezes, Marx seems to suggest, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Systems of Romance

We should be aware that Marx is an addict of big truths told hugely. Last we saw him in 2022, his Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change was written out of frustration for “a single book that explains the Grand Mystery of Culture.” The title caps should be a clue: Marx actually does live in the dream of the total artwork, where every person is a symbol, where every symbol is a part of an unconscious gesture, where every gesture is in service of a greater ecology. Characters repeat relentlessly throughout the work until the book fades to black at the dawn of Trump’s second term. By the exhausting finale, one has to ask: To what end? If the book is a textbook masquerading as a sort of systems novel—with its stylistic steals, multiple villains, and glossed-up narrative reveals—do all plots, as Don DeLillo once said, really lead deathward?

All eras seem to offer less than meets the mind, and as Marx relishes in suggesting, the minds we meet in our meatspace are particularly cooked. But if we accept his map as the territory and broadly agree on the totalizing structural forces that render the past twenty-five years this blank, “Restoring Cultural Invention,” the relatively tiny, seven-page capstone at the tail end of the book, feels like a desperate genre switch into fantasy. It’s his call to fill our blank space with “the imagination to reject kitsch and pursue artworks that expand the possibilities of human perception.” Casting aside the probability that an editor begged him to shoehorn this section in after a reading experience that makes a reader feel like a caged animal being bombarded by batteries, his solutions are right, if relentlessly facile. We’ve got to return, he says, to a state of stronger, better enforced, more serious criticism. We’ve got to reinstate the necessity of subcultures, resist inclusivity for inclusivity’s sake, really get familiar with the canon, then reinvent it. We’ve got to deny mass art what it wants in service of a stranger, more serious avant-garde. If the poptimist gave equal respect to art and kitsch, our mishandling of the ideal gave “equal respect to the artist and the businessperson.” We should fix that.

This is all densely packed, hilariously general, and correct. All cultural criticism is trapped in the doomed-by-definition project of escaping contemporaneity. Every book that limns our mass cultural dilemma will skim—if not totally elide—the existence of already living subcultures, groundswells of revolution, collective action, genuinely noncorny art. And for a doorstopper that seems enormously outweighed by the sheer volume of its pessimism, his flight path toward a wishful future is an act of charity. But I find it hard to treat Blank Space’s revanchist epilogue as anything but analogous to being handed a couple of Tylenols after a car crash. Marx has made the real world sharper, more hysterical—and at the same time, grotesquely tedious. The tedium of his realism is unfortunate for the sheer fact that it isn’t going anywhere.

After Blank Space, I don’t know—it’s hard not to slide into something like contempt. If we’re all consumers by design, doomed to never be able to touch the grand levers of power, perhaps all we can do is read this book, set it down, and accept that all that is solid really is melting into air. I suppose that tracing the snarling lines of the idiot hegemony undergirding mass culture is edifying in a way that deepens the urgency of living in real reality, not the hyperreal one that hyperlinks indefinitely. The culture war, after all, isn’t the only war. Notions of celebrity scaffolding across the scope of our lives do not have to deepen, lace, or authenticate your experience. And, despite the fact that art and society en masse seem to be facing a crisis of enslopification—and that AI will kill us, no question—I’m mostly glad to be alive now.

Blank Space fascinates because it makes radical the idea that the human will still be—despite frameworks of ideology that insist on symbolic or metaphorical superstructures—totalizing. Our imaginations remain intact. Everything that makes you fulfilled, sad, afraid, angry, horny, nostalgic, can be brought earthbound if you refuse to feed the cycle of frenzy with compulsory plotlines and shell games that perpetually insist on its own narratives. The plot’s always been lost and always will be. Actually, Antoine Dodson, who at present has become a sort of pop-cultural cleric on TikTok, has a nice sermon about this. “This shit is going to continue. It’s gonna keep going on and on and on,” he preaches in a recent video delivered from what looks like the front seat of a garbage truck. “They’re just going to find more stupid dummies to do this shit. I’m sorry.”

American Gothics

The failures of the Trump novel

Chris Lehmann

© Philotheus Nisch

American intellectual life, like American life generally, finds itself under siege from a second Trump White House. Colleges, broadcast news outlets, and newspapers have knuckled under in stunning fashion before shakedowns administered by Trump’s vain and venal strongman cult as it polices speech and remakes public discourse in its preferred authoritarian image. During past institutional lurches into thuggishness—notably the McCarthy inquisition of the 1950s—American creative writers in the film industry and book publishing marshaled an oppositional response, castigating both federal goon squads and their meek enablers in the universities and the culture industry. Now, however, it’s a very different prospect, with colleges caving to MAGA extortion threats, and publishers and media executives swallowing MAGA libels and empowering in-house censorship boards as writers mostly dither on the sidelines. Where mid-century writers mustered legal defenses for red-baited colleagues and mounted public appeals to discredit the forces of intellectual reaction, their Trump-era counterparts have greeted the great crisis of the present age—a multifront mobilization of state power to enable war crimes abroad and crush all manner of dissent at home—with little more than a collective puzzled shrug.

Accordingly, the American literary establishment has come in for some serious—and no doubt unwelcome—criticism. Pankaj Mishra has written a blistering Harper’s salvo calling out American novelists and literary figures for long-standing habits of imperial complacency and inert acquiescence before White House power, noting David Foster Wallace’s infatuation with John McCain’s neocon bomb-everything agenda and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Obamanian orthodoxies. Viet Thanh Nguyen raised many of the same criticisms in a Lit Hub essay. Both writers have underlined the muted-at-best response of most established American writers to the genocide in Gaza as a telling symptom of the quisling cast of our literary culture; both are appalled by the way big-name novelists have advertised their fealty to Barack Obama and Joe Biden—and particularly by the way they’ve jockeyed for inclusion on Obama’s viral lists of reading recommendations.

As Mishra argues, the depoliticized makeup of today’s U.S. literary culture is a byproduct of its long Cold War dalliance with state power, going back to the CIA funding of literary magazines published in Europe, and the unsightly gathering of literary courtiers around the Kennedy White House. “A professionalized, even bureaucratized, and politically neutered literary-intellectual elite long ago shredded whatever countercultural aura the vocation had acquired over centuries,” he writes. “Its compromised and enfeebled state is more vividly revealed today by the demons of sadism and stupidity rampaging across the United States.”

Mishra’s indictment singles out the baleful civic fallout from our stagnant and risk-averse institutional literary culture: “Many Americans are demonstrably disgusted, shamed, and angered by their tyrants, but mainstream literary and intellectual institutions seem unable or unwilling to give voice to them.” His critique focuses on the literary world’s incursions into civic life, but a close look at how America’s literary elite has reckoned directly with the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in its own published work shows an equally advanced state of intellectual sclerosis. With nearly a decade’s worth of American fiction that has sought to render the Trump insurgency, the verdict on the strictly literary value that our insular novelist caste has summoned in response to the Trump phenomenon has to be at least as harsh as Mishra and Nguyen’s damning appraisals of their learned imperial helplessness before the runaway authoritarian throttling of our public life.

I’m the Father

These Trump fictions seek to displace the explicit politics of the MAGA uprising into the deeper substrata of American life—specifically, into the overlapping realms of language and family life, where contemporary American novelists are most at home. Perhaps the most representative entry in the genre, Ben Lerner’s 2019 novel The Topeka School, fixates on the slippage of common language into a sort of free-floating political glossolalia, one that seems to jolt susceptible souls into a state of Trumpian belligerence more or less at random. Jane Gordon, the mother in this therapy-steeped family saga, is an author of Oprah-blessed feminist self-help tracts. She recounts telling a close friend about her own damaged relationship with her mother and then experiencing a small discursive aporia of her own: “My speech started breaking down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure like how . . . I guess what Palin or Trump sound like, delivering nonsense as if it made sense, were argument or information, although I was speaking much faster than politicians speak; my speech was accelerating as if I were chasing after meaning as it receded.”

The problem of language outrunning its real-world referents courses throughout Lerner’s novel. Adam, the book’s main protagonist and Jane’s son, is both a former nationally ranked high-school debater and an aspiring poet given to the obscurantist formulations favored among the latter group. He has a run-in with a fellow father of a young child who, when Adam approaches him about his son’s antisocial conduct on the playground, goes promptly into surly MAGA mode: “No; I don’t take orders from you; this conversation is over.” Here, once more at the outer limits of language, a physical confrontation looms:

The bad father took his right hand by the wrist and held it awkwardly against his chest as if to still a tremor, tardive dyskinesia, or to keep the hand from striking me of its own volition; I couldn’t tell if this was posturing meant to intimidate me or if it indicated imminent nervous collapse. We were a couple of privileged crackers with divergent parenting strategies; we were two sovereignless men in a Hobbesian state of nature on the verge of primal confrontation.

Adam mostly shuns direct engagement with the brute on the far side of the social contract—though the standoff does culminate in a thuddingly symbolic confrontation that drives home the impossibility of genuine communication here. His first response is to adopt some predictably doomed conversational prompts from his own dad, whose therapeutic specialty is coaxing articulate self-awareness from emotionally damaged adolescent boys. But as Adam gathers up his daughters for a less fraught stretch of the playground, he finds that he’s picked up a viral strain of his interlocutor’s belligerence, hissing at his reluctant children to clear out pronto or else go straight home. “I’m the father,” Adam says to himself. “I’m the archaic medium of male violence that literature is supposed to overcome by replacing physicality with language.” As his wife turns up to restore a measure of manageable peace to the scene, Adam feels bested by the MAGA lout. “I felt the gaze of the bad father, sensed his sense of victory. I told myself not to turn around and see his smile.”

Leave aside that no one—least of all a harried dad seeking to defuse a tense standoff among small children—thinks of themselves as an “archaic medium” undoing the tacit social contract by which language subdues the threat of Hobbesian male violence. Leave aside as well that the bad dad’s preferred form of linguistic expression is a cartoonish approximation of Hemingway; in response to Adam’s managerial compassion, he just barks out, “Get away from me. . . . Get away from me now.”

Consider instead how Adam goes about trying to channel the bad dad’s anomie into a moment of provisional mutual understanding. “What I’m asking is for you to help the kids play together; I know another parent has already approached you; I know you probably feel incapable of managing your son and don’t know what to do or maybe your marriage is falling apart (why weaponize my father’s empathy?), but I’m not going to let your son call my daughters names.” It’s a clumsy lurch into passive-aggressive therapyspeak that is a hallmark of liberal evasions of political conflict, especially absurd to be coming out of the mouth of a character allegedly attuned to the nuances and recondite meanings of both literature and basic signification through speech acts.

It seems additionally telling that this encounter, which appears to take place around the 2016 general election, pivots not merely on the misprision of language but also on the close-in calibration of parenting stratagems. Hillary Clinton first came into prominence as a children’s-rights advocate and retained much of this outlook in her vision of how government must tamp down public anger and wrenching, polarized conflict. As is the case with the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Adam proves unable to resist another shot at reclaiming his proper authority in a set piece of anger and resistance; and like any politician, his first thought is to revert to debating form:

Instinctually, I went for an element of discursive surprise: I’ve been trying to enlist your help, I said . . . I’ve been asking for your help in making the playground a safe space for my daughters; I recognize that my reaction to your son is not just about your son; it’s about pussy grabbing; it’s about my fears regarding the world into which I’ve brought them. The bad father, clearly startled by the mixture of passion and dispassion, the tangle of vocabularies, responded: Let the kids figure it out. My boy’s playing on a slide. He’s not harassing anyone. He’s seven years old, okay? No, I said, it’s not okay; the child is father to the man; what the kids will “figure out” is repetition. (I helped create her, Ivanka, my daughter, Ivanka, she’s six feet tall, she’s got the best body, she’s made a lot of money. Because when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. You have the authority.)

Adam’s appeal fails, not surprisingly; in a final reversion to the state of nature, he brings the encounter to an end by slapping the now-inattentive bad dad’s smartphone out of his hand.

The whole set piece is especially charged for Adam because it recalls a tragic high school scene back home in Topeka. One weekend, Adam and a clutch of his male friends bring along a developmentally challenged client of his dad’s, Darren Eberheart, to a senior-year bacchanal where Darren physically attacks, and grievously injures, a young woman. Adam plays an instrumental role in goading Darren on, via yet another breakdown of basic language capacities. As he starts leading a group of drunken underclassmen in gangsta rap refrains, he drunkenly reflects on his

sense of wonder before the mere fact that any kind of formally pressurized language game held social weight, that the masculine types would in this appropriated manner create a theater where speech might be recycled, recombined, however clumsily or outrageously. On this night Adam managed to rise above the stupid violence of the battles and misogynist clichés and enter a zone in which sentences unfolded at a speed he could not consciously control.

Here again, reference-challenged language toggles rapidly into social menace. Darren, a frequently bullied working-class kid, is denied Adam’s high-flown abstractions and epiphanies and takes the group’s rap deliriums to their violent and misogynist extreme. A specific kind of male-sanctioned language is the medium of his initiation into a proto-MAGA cult of male license:

The types placed their arms fraternally around his shoulders as in a football huddle and passed him the invisible mic or conch or talking stick and while he was purely mute the first time, incapable of any vocalization whatsoever, see the terrified smile, they returned to him eventually, and now he spoke, if haltingly. And while his contribution was but a clumsy attempt to repeat word for word what Adam chanted about fists in faces and catching cases, his brothers all shouted their encouragement and amazement and bobbed their heads to the nonexistent beat as though Darren were disclosing new territories of thought and feeling, new worlds, as though he were their Caedmon. For they had always been told to include him and this constituted the zenith of inclusion, the assimilation of Darren to corporate speech, their busted prosodies, and if there was irony, not all of it was cruel.

Both of these studies in domestic male menace underline a central theme of the Trump-curious American novel: that MAGA is an outlying atavism, all the more dangerous by virtue of its archaic makeup. The rancorous energies of the movement can’t be contained by conventional social mores or shaming callouts; once the last niceties of socially constructed language are abolished, all that’s left is high-testosterone violence, or the threat of it. It’s therefore a category error to bend the pieties of liberal inclusion too far in the direction of figures like Darren or the bad dad. Uncontrollable mayhem will almost certainly ensue.

A right-winger might protest that these set pieces are telling displays of rank liberal hypocrisy and bids to justify crackdowns on free political speech with overhyped scenarios of the rage for patriarchal order run amok. Yet what’s striking about The Topeka School, and the broader sweep of novels trying to engage with our contemporary politics, is how deeply depoliticized it is. The failings of MAGA, in these fables of the Trumpocene, are failings of language, etiquette, and aesthetic representation. It’s more than a little dumbfounding that these fictions are almost completely silent on most questions of Trumpian politics and policymaking, from election denialism to DEI moral panics to evangelical militance. Like Darren and the bad dad, the literary stand-ins for the Trump movement in contemporary fiction are hulking, almost tragically mute figures, impelled only by dark instincts and deep-seated cultural animus. They don’t typically train their resentments against an unjust political economy or an out-of-touch neoliberal “deep state”; no, they want an affirmation of existential worth and license that is oddly prepolitical. In the effort to coax MAGA onto the pages of a novel, most American writers end up creating a vast echo chamber, caroming throughout with Willy Loman’s lament of the obsolete and discarded model individualist: “Attention must be paid.”

But that’s just the thing. At the basic level of characterization, these novels are deeply inattentive to the fundamental question of all good literature: What makes even bigoted, impolite, and hate-filled characters tick? The main run of MAGA-affiliated characters in our fiction are glyphs for breakdowns in culture, communication, gender affinities, and racial comprehension—virtually anything, in short, apart from the actual operations of our politics and the conduct of our political discourse. The Darrens and bad dads populating these novels are figures of pathology and pathos rather than civic curiosity or political engagement: they are more to be clinically diagnosed or strategically contained than truly understood or reckoned with on the terms of their own agency. They exist chiefly to symbolize a troubling, but deeply stagnant, state of cultural fixity. Politics can’t help to unstick or otherwise reach them; they are there to be ritually lamented and then hustled off the narrative stage.

Sad Dad Stories

This state of incuriosity accounts for another quirk of the Trumpocene novel: both Trump and the MAGA insurgency occupy marginal spots in the narrative’s main action. In two prominent examples—Gary Shteyngart’s 2018 Lake Success and Hari Kunzru’s 2020 Red Pill—Trump’s election basically closes out the action, as the protagonists wind up hosting pro-Hillary 2016 election night parties that go horribly awry as the hosts and guests learn the election results. (Here I should note that I’m acquainted with Shteyngart, who blurbed an earlier book of mine.) In Shteyngart’s novel, Seema Cohen, his protagonist’s ex-wife—the child of an immigrant Indian family—does glancingly brood on what might motivate the legions of voters who propelled Trump’s rise, only to throw up her hands: “She tried to visualize the hatred of the Trump voting class for herself and people like herself, all those brown and yellow faces on Instagram peeking out of the coolest cafe in the newest city at the latest hour, once hard-won lives spent in merriment and ease. But was it really their fault that they were coming up while white Trumpists were coming down?” After brushing the whole question aside, Seema sets out to recover her ethnic heritage, “wanting to be a little less American and a little more Indian, to search for her roots the way her mother had for her whole life.” Sure enough, she attends a lecture on modern India where she meets the man who will become her second husband.

Both Seema and her ex, Barry, meet the slow-rolling MAGA crisis by turning inward, sparked by a crisis in both the marriage and Barry’s career as a louche hedge fund CEO. Barry sets out on a cross-country odyssey on a Greyhound bus, first to look up a former college sweetheart and then to evade the SEC for as long as he can. His rationale is the old Beat-era refrain of travel as spiritual rehabilitation: “Starting over was what half the country seemed to desperately want. There was a great boredom that coursed through Barry’s body and, he imagined, through that of his countrymen, rich and poor, but all it took was getting on a bus and getting out of town. It wasn’t America that needed to be made great again, it was her listless citizens.”

Of course, grafting a depressed and dissolute hedge funder onto the MAGA revolt in the capacity of anything other than a Trump donor is an experiment destined to fail. Barry is a Never Trump Republican—a social liberal and financial conservative, as he intones throughout the book—who reviles Trump for his cruel rally impersonation of a disabled reporter but who also cleaves to an absurd vision of America as “a nation of shareholders.” His tour of the country imbues him with a new appreciation for the struggles of his less fortunate fellow citizens, but ultimately “he could not trust them in the voting booth because they were not shareholders. They did not understand the thrill and the pain and the obligation of owning a part of their country.”

This is meant satirically—Shteyngart’s book is one of the few entries in the genre composed with humor of any sort in mind. Yet this class myopia serves Barry in good stead, since he’s unable to find any greater cause behind the nation’s ills than ambient cultural boredom, and boredom can presumably be effectively assuaged with greater infusions of cash. That appears to be the sense of the novel’s distinctly claustral, intensely domestic conclusion, which has a chastened and early retired Barry painstakingly repair a luxury watch for his autistic son in a belated gesture of paternal caregiving, driving home the basic lesson that “things could be fixed.”

Lake Success also exemplifies a revealing subgenre within Trump fiction: the sad-dad narrative, a variation on the long-standing impulse among imaginative writers in this country to fiercely sublimate public conflicts into the more superficially manageable, sentimental sphere of family life. During his election-year odyssey, Barry remains haunted by his son’s condition—a plain affront to his reveries of supremely affluent and untroubled family life. Barry’s real-time efforts at parenting are decidedly equivocal: he often ends up trying to bully his son, Shiva, into speech and has little patience with the mood swings and frustrations of a child on the spectrum. Over time, his cross-country odyssey becomes a quest for a surrogate child, as he bonds with the son of his former college girlfriend.

Oddly enough, Lake Success also contains an episode where its outraged protagonist slaps an electronic device—a digital camera—out of someone’s hands; this is evidently what counts as political protest in our mediated discursive age. Barry tells his college ex about a visit to Thailand during the time he and his wife were undergoing a discouraging round of fertility treatments; a group of “European tourist girls” were taking selfies in front of a giant phallic fertility statue, and Barry, tormented by his thwarted drive to reproduce, “just ran over and knocked the camera off their stick.” Here, too, the deeper distemper is a male drive to dominate that can’t properly express itself. As Barry’s ex presses him to explain the point of the anecdote, he shrugs and says, “I just wanted to share something with you.” She replies in turn, “You go around and do things and don’t know why you do them. . . . And that’s the story of your gender writ large.” After the testy exchange, they’re back to fretting over the election: “Anyway, if Trump wins,” she says, “I’m moving to British Columbia. I have a lead on a job there.”

The clear message here, as in The Topeka School, is that the Trump phenomenon is rooted in the cultural plague of retrograde masculinity run amok. There is, of course, much to recommend this broad diagnosis, as any student of Trump’s seamy personal life, fraternization with sexual predators, and hiring of men with a record of assault can readily affirm. Yet it scarcely suffices as a univocal explanation for a political movement that’s drawn consistently strong support from suburban white women, together with growing backing from nonwhite and less privileged women, particularly as Trump defeated two self-identified feminist opponents. What’s more, the practical impact of this theory of Trumpism works out to a literary gloss on the well-worn social media refrain that “men will do anything but go to therapy”—another individualist brand of cultural prescription that carries almost no political weight. This blinkered social vision is why the rearguard domestic resolution of Lake Success feels so forced and off topic. Barry’s belated embrace of fatherhood won’t lift the country out of its fascist despond, but it is a redemptive character arc for the disenchanted hedge fund baron grappling with his sad-dad identity eminently suited to an American reading public conditioned to savor tales of Winfreyesque familial uplift.

© Philotheus Nisch

Blue Lives, Red Pills

The stolid American retreat into domestic order also supplies the dramatic resolution for the most high-minded literary disquisition into the causes of the Trumpian turn, Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a novel plumbing the European origins of American-grade fascism by an immigrant writer that nonetheless repeats all the major themes and domestic preoccupations of the genre. Red Pill’s basic plot outline would seem to make it an unlikely candidate for a redemptive domestic-sphere rest cure. The novel’s unnamed narrator is a struggling belletrist who seeks to rejuvenate his stalled writing career by heading east, in striking contrast to Barry’s trip westward, into the tangled and unsatisfactory heritage of the dead European past. He’s received a grant to spend a year working on his next book—an inchoate tract on lyric poetry and the quest for meaning—at a German writer’s retreat. The specter of fascism is right there on his new expat address: the conference center hosting him is in Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where the leaders of the Third Reich mapped out the Final Solution. Wannsee is also the home of one of Germany’s many tortured post-Romantic writers—Heinrich von Kleist, best known as the author of the scandalous novella of aristocratic sexual debauchery The Marquise of O. Unnerved by the open-plan layout of his new writing home and in search of a measure of meditative privacy, Kunzru’s narrator starts taking long walks through the town. He also grinds to a complete intellectual halt, after his vague writing project comes under critical attack from another grant recipient on site who is a die-hard materialist theorist of consciousness in the habit of reducing all mental activity (most particularly lyric poetry) to neurochemical brain functions.

Red Pill is, in one respect, an outlier in the Trump fiction genre, in that it self-consciously mines the Old World roots of fascist reaction, while developing into a half-conversion narrative. Kunzru’s narrator takes refuge from his unraveling writing project and mental state by locking himself in his dorm room to watch Blue Lives, a luridly violent cop procedural on his laptop. As he binge-watches, he begins to notice that some of the show’s dialogue is inappositely stylized and Old World in diction, featuring bleak aphorisms such as “Man is wolf to man” and “>War is the father of all and king of all.” A Haitian drug lord on the show hauls off with this unlikely reflection, as he stakes out the family home of his cop pursuer: “There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races, man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. . . . Proud and terrible king, he wants everything, and nothing resists him.”

The drug lord’s name is La Mettrie, and when Kunzru’s narrator does some online research, he learns that he’s quoting his virtual namesake, the reactionary monarchist philosopher Joseph de Maistre. At a later party in Berlin, he randomly encounters the show’s American creator and showrunner, a sinister figure with the suitably quasi-satanic name Anton. Anton confesses that he is indeed inserting de Maistre and other reactionary Mittel-European agitprop into the show, as part of its greater Nietzschean inversion of conventional morality. When the narrator complains about the show’s brutal and nihilistic plotlines, Anton insists that he’s only reflecting the real state of things in the Hobbesian abattoir otherwise known as civilization. “You can’t have a state without violence,” Anton announces. “It’s the only way to get people to obey.” Sure, the corrupt and mayhem-prone lead cop in Blue Lives may be an unsettling character, but no social order worthy of the name can dispense with him: “Go ahead, call him names if it makes you feel better. But you rely on him. You know you do. You fear and hate him for doing something you can’t do, that you secretly know has to be done. Society needs fear. It’s our dirty little secret.”

Like the materialist philosopher of mind, Anton and his masscult nihilism rattle the narrator to his core—so much so that he obsessively tracks Anton across Europe and tries to confront him in his remote Scottish beach house. As the narrator unspools further into mental deterioration, he’s hospitalized and finally returns home to Brooklyn, just in time for his family to host their doomed 2016 election night party; as he gloomily watches the returns, he catches a stray glimpse of Anton, a Steve Bannonesque culture lord, at one of the Trump celebrations. While the narrator is reacclimating to the blank rounds of his domestic life thanks to healthy doses of therapy and medication, the dawning reality of Trump’s victory is an unnerving sign that the maladies in his mind are now taking over the world: “I find that I’m not surprised, that it feels like a continuation of all the things that have happened to me this year, as if the thoughts I’ve been trying to avoid are clothing themselves in flesh.”

Like his counterparts in The Topeka School and Lake Success, he finds himself caught involuntarily in the grip of a masculinist will to power poised to eviscerate the decent draperies of normal adult life in hyperliberal Brooklyn. Beneath the gauzy veneer of his peer group’s bourgeois routines, he reflects, there’s a “second track, the occult track on which all this normality is a paper screen over something bloody and atavistic that is rising up out of history to meet us.” Still, like his other fictional counterparts in the MAGA genre, he finds that he’s provisionally able to keep the forces of darkness at bay by reaffirming his love for his wife, Rei, and his toddler daughter, Nina—though in this hyper-self-conscious narrator’s case, it’s more the idea of the family. “Even if I am absurd, and if instead of reading novels and philosophy books, I should have learned to code or short sell or strip and build an AR-15,” he reflects, “I still have the love I feel for Rei and Nina . . . though my intuitions about reality are likely false, and I may be a disembodied organ floating in a vat or a point in the state space of some cosmic simulation, still you’ll have to burn that love out of me before I relinquish it.”

Despite all the epistemic fireworks set off by Kunzru’s narrator, we’re back in the pat, closed domestic circle of the other fables of the MAGA age. More than any other fictional reckoning with MAGAworld, Red Pill presents a Trump movement without Trumpists anywhere on the ground. There are no characters here aligned with the MAGA rank and file, just on-the-make Svengalis like Anton and his allies strewn across the fascist Old World. The Trump movement is a blank abstraction in a cloistered intellectual world teeming with other blank abstractions—a reversion to the mid-century liberal consensus that fascism was a cunning trick played by power-mad elites on a pliable and endlessly suggestible mob. This outlook explains why the narrator’s brushes with the ghastly history of Wansee and Kleist’s overwrought biography likewise feel tacked on, as do his encounters with a settlement of Mediterranean refugees and a former Stasi recruit who now works as a maid in the writers’ retreat. The narrator’s uneasy sojourn back into America on the eve of Trump’s first election retains the same arch sense of unreality; indeed, the social landscape of Red Pill is, if anything, much more foreshortened and flatter than the other Trumpocene novels’ accounts of the way we live now—a version of American life unrecognizable to readers actually living through the displacements of the MAGA age. It’s small wonder, as a result, that the book’s narrator, even while picturing himself as history’s Last Man, can imagine his reclaimed domesticity and his chastened renewal of his intellectual routine in America as a self-insulating force equal to “the cynical operation of power.” That operation—and that power—remains finally opaque to him, in spite of all his existential struggles.

Who Needs Terrorists?

Our novelistic renderings of the Trumpian turn in American politics and culture adopt a fastidious and privileged distance from it all. They diagnose an American lurch into fascist squalor that has chiefly occurred at the furthest cultural extremes, among disaffected or broadly debauched populations sporting motivations and value allegiances that are opaque at best, and more commonly just incomprehensible. MAGA-aligned characters are, most of all, gothic and exotic—usually inarticulate men whose signature grievances and obsessions are both ignoble and savage. Given to elevating passing (or merely ascribed) slights from cultural and political adversaries into the basis of hair-trigger mayhem, they live in isolated deserts, neglected and backward rural communities in the U.S. interior, or in evangelical missionary compounds. This is the antic backdrop for Jess Walter’s recently published So Far Gone, which poses not only a sad dad but a morose, philosophizing investigative-reporter grandpa against his conspiracy-addled evangelical son-in-law in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. It’s also the seedy mise-en-scène for Jonathan Lethem’s 2018 The Feral Detective, which affects to send its female protagonist into off-the-grid American subcultures curdling into paranoid reaction, but collapses into stereotyped depictions of, well, everything, in a torrent of Brooklyn-pandering twee dialogue and implausibly apocalyptic plot twists.

Amid the steady drumbeat of these exoticized accounts of the Trumpian interior offered by male writers, it’s perhaps no surprise that the most compelling fictional effort to conjure with the MAGA takeover of the republic is the work of a female author—Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 Ducks, Newburyport. The book is in every way a departure from the central preoccupations of the genre. For starters, there is no bravura journey into the exoticized heart of MAGA darkness, since the novel’s narrator is already stuck there, as an Ohio mother and housewife trying to make ends meet by running a contract baking concession out of her kitchen. There’s likewise no effort to track the Trumpian will to power to the outer extremes of cultural allegiance; instead, Trump and his apostles turn up in the narrator’s stream-of-conscious reflections on her struggles and domestic trials, which run across more than a thousand pages, interrupted only by the account of a mountain lion’s movements across Appalachia as she tries to track down her missing cubs. Here, the specter of an American apocalypse isn’t an off-road set piece created by demented millennialists or demonic culture lords; it’s the stuff of anxious reflection between baking orders:

the fact that if the world ends, the fact that I shouldn’t think such things, dear me, cannibalism, the fact that I don’t know where that came from, the fact that it’ll affect the pies, the fact that he has a very sulky face, Trump I mean, the fact that he’s like a kid who breaks all his toys on Christmas day and then wishes he hadn’t, the fact that Trump’s toys are kind of dangerous though, the fact that Mommy and Daddy didn’t live to see as much of Trump’s face as we have had to, the fact that they never had to watch the end of the world, but we might

Ellmann (whom I’ve known for some time and recruited as a Baffler contributor) also has a gender-driven critique of the Trump movement, but it doesn’t revolve around the quest to bring wayward alpha males back into the orbit of domestic life. It’s rather of a piece with the armed terror that men everywhere are visiting on women: “the fact that in response to the slightest financial hiccup [men] just murder their families, the fact that how is that the answer, the fact that shooting your estranged wife or girlfriend’s become the new normal, the fact that it’s getting so that it’s surprising when men don’t shoot their exes.” Also, when this sort of unhinged bloodlust finds political expression, Ellmann recognizes that it’s not a male-exclusive trait:

the fact that Hillary Clinton laughed about General Qaddafi’s death, after he was torn limb from limb by a mob, the fact that nobody has any manners anymore, Hillary, Trump, mobs, the fact that mobs have no manners, the fact that Hillary often seems to laugh inappropriately, the fact that she’s friends with Kissinger, the fact that that girl in that song rejects some guy’s offer of marriage, he drowns her in the Ohio and off she floats . . . the fact that sometimes male logic seems no better than the logic of dreams, but I wouldn’t ever say that to [my husband] because that’s bad manners

Ducks, Newburyport also features a climactic violent confrontation with a Trump supporter, but, like most of the rest of the book’s action, it takes place in the narrator’s kitchen—not at a pitched, heavily symbolic inflection point in the fringes and frontiers of American life. And the perpetrator isn’t a cult leader or an Armageddonist; he’s a hapless local cable TV addict and right-wing meme enthusiast named Ronny, who delivers feed for the narrator’s backyard flock of egg-laying chickens. In the wake of the incident, Ellmann’s narrator doesn’t gratefully lapse into the warmth of her reconfigured family; she’s haunted by the thought that she, like Hillary Clinton, has picked up the viral dream logic of male destruction: “the fact that it’s all Ronny’s fault, the fact that he’s corrupted my mind, the fact that he’s taught me to be a raging, violent crazy-ass threat to humanity”; “the fact that, boy, everything’s life-and-death with me now, black and white, the fact that it’s all a fight to the finish, and everything’s about guns and killers . . . the fact that this is how I think now.” Pondering the psychic fallout from Ronny’s failed domestic siege, it’s impossible not to note that he shares a first name with Trump’s most notable ideological forebear, the fortieth U.S. president, who was also recruited from the entertainment industry to serve as an all-purpose merchant of Manichean right-wing grievance.

Ellmann’s novel is in no way a polemical work, so it’s all the more striking that it’s able to summon the Trump movement’s continuities with the broader ills of America’s predatory political culture, regardless of their major-party branding, in the narrator’s epic slurry of personal remembrance, family worries, popcult associations, song lyrics, and dream narratives. This narrative choice, combined with Ellmann’s focus on how permeable and viral the violent urges underlying the American saga prove to be, reverses the dominant impulse of other fictional treatments of MAGA to locate the roots of the movement far outside the common American civitas, in the hopped-up, paranoid hinterlands.

And for all the novel’s sweeping, allusive immersion in the running inner monologue of its narrator, it never indulges the conceit that the country’s civic derangement is somehow traceable to the instability of language or a covert brainwashing campaign in popular culture. Indeed, when the narrator takes up the language problem, it’s only in the context of the cascading fears she struggles to overcome as part of daily life:

I think that’s why people invented language, so they wouldn’t feel all alone with their terror, the fact that, I mean, we’re all so terrified, who needs terrorists, the fact that the terror of being alone is enough to floor you, never mind the fear of mortality, fear of failure, the fact that, heck, just the medical bills have me cowed, without suicide bombers and school shooters muscling in

Ducks, Newburyport is much too idiosyncratic and far-ranging to serve as an all-purpose gazetteer for America’s MAGA-era transformation—but that’s not the role of good politically minded fiction in the first place. The best American political novels, such as Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place and Sinclair Lewis’s eerily prophetic thirties account of surging American fascism in a distinctly Trumpian key, It Can’t Happen Here, chart the ways in which the messy upheavals in our public life undo and distort baseline ideas of the quarantined pursuit of private happiness. Over the sprawling course of Ellmann’s novel, the narrator’s reveries of an untroubled domestic life in the heart of Trump country are well and truly blasted out the picture. After Ronny’s siege of her house, she’s shocked to hear the local cops chastise her and her family for lacking a firearm in the house and failing to send their home invader to his eternal reward. Indeed, they counsel her that “the backlash about that would have been worse if any of us had been killed”:

the fact that what is going on with people, the fact that you lose a family member in a shooting and all the other shooters in the country pile on and threaten you with death, the fact that everyone hates on you, just for mentioning that your loved one got shot, and for not immediately shooting the shooter back, the fact that it’s almost like we’re in a war or something

Perhaps we are. If so, it’s hard to think of another such conflict where a group of literary followers of the zeitgeist have gone so far out of their way to know so little about the enemy. And that dilatory outlook is no small reason that Trump’s cultural takeover has been locked and loaded from the moment he swore his second oath of office.

Belittled Magazine

Thirty years after the Sokal affair

Bruce Robbins

© Mark Pernice

Social Text still exists. In the spring of 1996, when the journal was the object of an enthusiastically publicized hoax by the physicist Alan Sokal, its survival seemed a bad bet. You published an essay arguing that gravity is a “social and linguistic construct?” Really? The mainstream media, hitherto unaware of the existence of this very little, very marginal magazine, were uncertain what exactly they were mocking. Was Social Text’s foolishness postmodern? Left wing? Cultural? Academic? They were certain, however, that what they smelled in the water was blood. On their side, and for a not insignificant portion of the left, jubilation. On the other side, humiliation. (I should know: I was the journal’s coeditor at the time.) We seemed like the stupidest people in the world, or the stupidest people who had been pretending to speak on behalf of the most avant-garde sociopolitical views. One friend of the journal suggested that we fall on our swords. If we owned no swords, swords could be made available.

The journal did not fold. One reason was that it had published a lot of good work, none of it remotely resembling Sokal’s gravity-is-a-construct nonsense, and those who cared about such things knew it. Edward Said’s “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” had come out in the first issue in 1979; for U.S.-based critiques of Zionism, 1979 was early. Other issues contained Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and Aijaz Ahmad’s Marxist critique of Marxist (and Social Text cofounder) Fredric Jameson.

Another reason why the journal didn’t fold was that, with that era’s culture wars in full swing, the pressure to be loyal to what you saw as your side was stronger than embarrassment at a dumb mistake: accepting an awkwardly written, citation-heavy article in which a physicist seemed to embrace an antirealist epistemology. Yes, errors had been made, and there had been innocent casualties (vulnerable students and junior faculty doing serious research in cultural studies) and not so innocent ones (I was briefly denied a promotion). But war was war. No one seemed ready to concede defeat. Some ingenious and some desperately unconvincing things were said in the journal’s defense.

Standing firm was arguably the preferable option. What was at stake was not a giddy worldview that denied the existence of physical reality. Considered sociologically and politically rather than philosophically, the “X is a construct” platform, thirty years ago, stood for solidarity with the political energies of the 1960s—above all, liberation movements in the name of race and gender. To say that gender was a construct was to make a political point. Ditto for maintaining that race was a construct. Stereotypes (that’s what they were called back then) that kept women and people of color in their place were not the verifiable truth about the world. Depictions of the non-Europeans to whom the imperial metropolis denied independence or whom it excluded from its borders were not the results of objective empirical observation; they were fictive generalizations that served unsavory interests. Circulating them perpetuated injustice. Behind constructionism, a project of denaturalizing categories of thought that were taken to be natural, there were large groups of people who had been trying to rectify how they were described and thus also their unjustifiable situation in the world, which the false descriptions enabled. Imagine the world differently, and you can make it better. Constructionism’s slogan was crude but politically mobilizing. Imagination is a form of politics.

Social science had put much of its authority behind the contrary assumption: “That’s their nature. We have studied the matter impartially. We know.” It was probably inevitable, especially in a moment when the shameful indifference of medical institutions to the HIV/AIDS crisis was still fresh in everyone’s mind, that constructionism would get hyperextended, that some would be willing to identify scientific knowledge, as such, with hegemonic power. That was not a position Social Text embraced—it’s not the argument of the other essays in the ill-fated “Science Wars” issue that included Sokal’s. By 1996, constructionism was already seen by many of the journal’s writers and readers as more of a problem than a solution. Diana Fuss had made the argument decisively seven years prior in her book Essentially Speaking. After all, who or what does the constructing? Patriarchy, racism, and capitalism are real historical agents, no? The journal’s origins were unapologetically Marxist. For Marxists, imagination is a force, yes, but it’s not imagined constructs all the way down.

Three decades later, an essay identifying science with power would probably fail to get the required votes. (Sokal’s essay got only four readings, but they were positive, and that, alas, was enough.) With the federal government aligning itself with anti-vaxxers and drill-baby-drill climate change deniers and exerting a heretofore unimaginable authority to defund ongoing research and push an antiscience agenda, you would have to be more foolish than Social Text’s collective to take science simply as an antagonist. And this is true even if you have your doubts about what has come to permeate common sense as constructionism has faded, like the body as a determining site of unquestioned truth and genetic and biochemical accounts of identity, which are easier to turn into someone’s tidy profits than sociohistorical ones.

Painting the Gown Red

A third and perhaps more important reason why Social Text did not disappear is that it was a little magazine. By the 1990s, it probably looked to many like just another academic journal, but it was never peer-reviewed (that issue came up of course apropos of the Sokal disaster), and it had started out thinking of itself as an organ of the left. Cofounder Stanley Aronowitz, who was born into the working class and came to the role of intellectual through the labor movement, was looking back over his shoulder at the littleness of Partisan Review, which seemed to define its newfound independence from the Communist Party. (John Brenkman, another founder, was thinking of Tel Quel, an even littler magazine.) Littleness was complicated: it could give the magazine a higher vocation, but it could also serve as self-protection, an excuse for not trying to be too political.

In “The Function of the Little Magazine,” first published as the introduction to a 1946 collection of pieces from Partisan Review, Lionel Trilling laments that, although politics had not been good for literature, little magazines had saved the day, managing to keep literature from being lowered by politics. Trilling begins by declaring that Partisan Review’s survival for ten years (with a readership of six thousand!) is a victory. It’s a victory because the journal has succeeded in refusing to give its readers what they want, which is a crude literature of political protest. For Trilling, other journals had mendaciously jacked up the excitement level with misplaced metaphors of weaponry and war (implicitly, class war). Partisan Review, however, does not pretend, most of the time, to write for “the many,” “the working masses.” In other publications, quality literature, which for Trilling means modernism, has been losing out both to politics and to the competition of radio and movies. Thus there has been a “general lowering of the status of literature,” a loss of literature’s social power. The little magazines have recognized, correctly, that literature needs a “cultivated” public. Partisan Review in particular has unashamedly addressed “the self-appointed few,” yet has somehow squared the circle: it has done so without surrendering its hold on politics. Perhaps a bit half-heartedly, he affirms that the magazine has been doing what needs to be done: showing how politics benefits from being mixed with “imagination and mind.” Trilling does not use the term, but what he is championing, in “imagination and mind,” is elitism.

Elitism seems a subject worth taking a fresh look at in regard both to Social Text’s survival and to what the Sokal hoax means today, if it means anything. The social movements of the 1960s, which gave birth to little magazines and/or academic journals like Social Text in the 1970s, may have been weak on class, but they did not like elitism; indeed, they took a lot of heat from the right for their supposed willingness to subvert proper intellectual standards in order to set aside entitlements based on race and gender. It was his unapologetic elitism that kept Trilling from expressing any enthusiasm for the 1960s protests. In the spring of 1968, when protesters shut Columbia University down (as the protesters in the spring of 2024 did not), students circulated a mock arrest warrant for Lionel “Trains” Trilling, identified as a “cultural imperialist.” At that time, elitism was cultural imperialism. There has been a reversal. In today’s culture wars, it is the anti-imperialists who are accused of elitism; we are advised by columnists like David Brooks to ignore collegiate protesters in the Gaza encampments because they are the privileged.

In the 1960s and after, the assumption was that “the Movement” was in revolt against a structure of elite power sustained by both the existing distribution of money and the existing organization of knowledge. As the word elitism functions in political discourse today, money and knowledge have come apart. Much of the time, of course, the word elite is used casually to refer to those at the top of whatever group is under discussion. When it is used with political deliberation, however, the word tends to aim instead, these days, at what Trilling called “imagination and mind.” What stands accused is not money or the power that money affords. On the contrary, elitism throws up a smokescreen behind which the power of money can hide. The explicit targets today are expertise and education, seen as sources of left-wing or “woke” power (which they are).

Looking back at the hullaballoo over the Sokal hoax, it’s surprising how muted the elitism issue appears now. All the pieces seemed in place for a full-blown class argument in the MAGA style that the Social Text collective and its allies were not just hypocrites (by virtue of their claim to speak for democracy) but also elitists (by virtue of their jargon and their educational privilege). Sokal made it clear that by being on the side of common sense, science was taking the side of the common man, and this was true no matter how inaccessible the language scientists spoke might be. The journalists who flocked to the hoax were happy to second that motion, which strengthened their bargaining position vis-à-vis the academy (though they neglected to recall the inaccessibility of much scientific language). Social Text was funded by a university. The hoax offered irresistible evidence that, as the Republicans would agree today, universities are out of touch, and the writing that comes out of them is deliberately incomprehensible. Conservative columnist George Will, unafraid to use big words of his own, described the journal as “smitten with gibberish,” full of “solecism and gaseous philosophical rhetoric, flecked with . . . political jargon.” Janny Scott of the New York Times complained of Social Text’s use of the word epistemological as part of its “impenetrable hodgepodge of jargon, buzzwords, footnotes.” She implied that journalists like her are properly impatient with anything but the common tongue. They are accountable to the public. Though they don’t use footnotes, they have nothing to hide.

One go-to reference at the time was Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the emperor’s new clothes. (The tale was name-checked in the Los Angeles Times; the headline in the News-Press of Fort Myers, Florida, was “Social Scientists Wore No Clothes.”) In presenting Social Text as vain and deluded, like Andersen’s emperor, journalists were in turn presenting themselves as avatars of Andersen’s innocent child, too young to be intimidated by the emperor’s authority and thus unafraid to say exactly what he saw: not very fine clothes, but no clothes. The fable must have offered welcome relief from the consciousness of how beholden journalists in fact were to the power and ideology of the editors who had to sign off on their stories, and so on up the ladder. In a time when the prejudices of powerful figures in the newsroom (some with family members in the Israeli Defense Forces) have been visible all over New York Times coverage of Israel and Gaza, the idea of journalists as antiestablishment gadflies accountable to no one will sound like more of a fairy tale than Andersen’s. But the strangest thing about these Andersen references was the implication that Social Text was not merely ridiculous, but powerful—indeed, mysteriously comparable in power to an emperor. Even if Social Text was taken to stand for something bigger, like postmodernism or the cultural left, it was a stretch to think of it as somehow the voice of the ruling class, the elite. This was a very little magazine they were talking about. Unless there was more political potential there than anyone was ready to claim.

Like Trilling, Social Text was never unambivalent about its role, as a journal, in relation to politics in the everyday sense. Maybe the times called for politics to be refreshed and even reinvented? According to Stanley Aronowitz, in conversations that would lead to the founding of Social Text, he and Fredric Jameson discussed the argument then current on the left that politics was “no longer organized around political parties, but instead around journals.” It was a heady thing to believe, and maybe a bit self-congratulatory, but in my experience there was some truth to it. When Cornel West invited me to participate in editorial discussions in the fall of 1984, one thing I noticed immediately was a big difference from both standard academic practice and that of the little magazine as I understood it. West and Aronowitz—both figures who remained committed to politics at the level of parties—were not wary of repeating themselves in talks or in print. The point was not to produce original, standalone performances of argument or interpretation, as it so often is in the academy or for publications in the vein of the Partisan Review. What they were trying to do was to work out the right political line. It was a distinctive thing about West and Aronowitz: they repeated and refined and, when necessary, realigned what they had to say as circumstances changed. At the time, I was a young would-be scholar desperately trying to find a secure niche for myself, and all this repetition with a difference sometimes left me feeling uncomfortable. By the time I came to see the logic behind it, both Aronowitz and West were moving on, as was the journal. As Brent Edwards and Anna McCarthy, two editors at that time, note in their introduction to the one hundredth issue in 2009, the journal had stabilized and solved its funding and logistical issues, and as it did so any pretense that it could indeed function like a political party, or even in loose conjunction with party politics, was fast disappearing. I remember debates in the 1990s over whether to keep a red line along the edge of the cover. People laughed about the triviality, political engagement reduced to an issue of cover design, but the symbolism stood for something, and opinions were divided.

One way to describe the divided opinions is to ask: How little did people think the magazine should be? In the decade and a half that I worked on Social Text, there were two moments when I was tempted to take my toys and go home. One came near the end of my tenure there, when Sokal asked Social Text to publish his explanation for the hoax. I was the only person on the editorial collective who thought that, as first and foremost an organ of the American left, we had an obligation to publish the new Sokal piece. Yes, feelings had been bruised, and some thought (I didn’t) that the hoax was an unforgivable ethical violation. Sokal, too, belonged to the left, I argued, and many people of intelligence and good will thought the hoax in some sense a useful or well-deserved thing. We had to show we were taking them seriously. I lost that debate after two three-hour meetings. Sokal’s “Afterword” came out in Dissent in the fall of 1996. I drew the conclusion that my colleagues were content to fortify the journal in its littleness, preferring on this occasion at least not to see themselves as part of a wider left that included different epistemologies.

The other moment had come earlier when I proposed an essay I had written on Richard Rorty, violence, and human rights. The essay was rejected by the collective on the grounds that our readers were not interested enough in liberals like Rorty to justify publishing anything on him, however critical. In both cases, the implication seemed to be that we don’t need the liberals, we don’t even need to talk to the liberals. Which I translate, in the year of Zohran Mamdani (hopefully one of many years), as: We don’t have any chance of winning, so why try? That’s not who we are. Better not to bother with potential allies and the compromises that dialogue with them might entail. Better to hold fast to our purity, our righteousness, our littleness.

Seen from this angle, the littleness of the little magazine meant backing off from politics in the large sense—the sense Jameson was referring to when he likened journals to political parties. It meant the absence of an ambition, even a patient and well-sublimated ambition, to speak for the majority. The mass media were already doing that. In dark political times, it’s tempting to content oneself with seeking a refuge for the righteous counterculture, something like (as a friend of the journal proposed, half seriously) the retreat to the monasteries after the fall of Rome. Outside, the barbarians are going to rule. There is nothing we can do about that. Inside our walls, at least, a shred of civilization will perhaps survive. And thus the journal, walled up, can also survive.

Campus Grovel

It is perhaps somewhat unfair to suggest that Social Text (like other little publications of the 1970s) gradually opted out of politics in the messier, more public sense, favoring a protective self-marginalization. The journal remained a center of energetic political activities, some of them filling whole issues (as with an issue offering early support for the effort of academic workers to unionize) and some not. The journal maintained its record of engagement with the cause of justice for Palestine. My own engagement with the Palestinian cause began in earnest in 2002, when I had long stopped attending Social Text meetings. It came through Alan Sokal.

In 2002, I received an email from Sokal asking my opinion of an “Open Letter of American Jews to Our Government” that he had drafted. Sokal and I were not friends. The fact that he had been perfectly civil in our handful of public debates did not lead me to seek his companionship. Still, I did not delete his “Open Letter.” I read it, and I thought it was good. I saw his (possibly unconscious) point in writing to me: together, we could demonstrate that people who disagreed about certain things could still come together on issues of basic ethical principle. I wrote back, proposing a few revisions. I passed it on to others, who did the same. One thing led to another, and by the spring the two of us found ourselves running a campaign to gather signatures from American Jews who did not accept the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the outrages to decency and human rights attendant upon that occupation, or America’s unconditional support for the whole package. (This was before organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace became the force they are today.) In July 2002 we published a full-page ad in the New York Times with several thousand signatures, paid for by an avalanche of checks mailed in by American Jews who, as their handwritten notes told us over and over, felt unrepresented by lobbying groups like AIPAC and ADL that claimed to speak for the whole American Jewish community. The ad called for the United States to cut off all aid to Israel if Israel did not adhere to a two-state settlement. We got it translated into several languages, and we published it again four years later.

The introduction to the book The Sokal Hoax, published in 2000 and edited by the editors of Lingua Franca, observes that almost none of the sentiments about the hoax recorded in that volume “are conciliatory.” Conciliation was not the point of the project on which Sokal and I collaborated, but the project certainly illustrated how much common ground is to be found if you are willing to look. The culture wars were neither the only wars out there nor the most important ones. Nor did they dictate reliably what was worth fighting for.

After all, in some sense Social Text, too, was on the side of the elitists. Whatever it became, it was not at the outset an academic journal, and yet publication in its pages could make a professional difference to an academic career. In that sense, the invokers of the emperor’s new clothes were not wrong. This confusion—were we fighting the power, or were we an institutional part of it?—was probably the source of some post-hoax Schadenfreude. Many would-be writers no doubt assumed their submissions would be treated as contributions to the common cause, and then they received rejections framed not to comrades in arms, but to aspirants to that scarce professional privilege, respectable publication. Until the Sokal affair let them loose, I think we were unaware of the slow-burning frustrations we had provoked—the fact that in the eyes of many the journal wore the forbidding face of a gatekeeper. Hence the left-wing glee at our exposure. What better revenge than to see the judges judged and their imperfections so dramatically revealed?

Being a gatekeeper by maintaining high intellectual standards is not what public opinion would associate with Social Text, to say the least. Yet that is what the journal practiced, mainly. And it is a practice worth defending, however elitist it might look. All the more so because of how the Trump administration has weaponized both the idea of the hoax and the program of anti-elitism. We know who its targets are. We know what has befallen intellectual standards.

It is true that the Gaza demonstrators at Columbia, many of them recently expelled or suspended in obedience to the demands of, among others, the Republican Party, were probably more privileged on average than other Americans of their age group. But what they were speaking up for, in speaking against Israeli military violence in Gaza and American complicity with it, was not their privilege. They were taking advantage of critical thinking they had learned from the sort of education that ought to be available to anyone who desires it—more widely available than it is at present, as the demonstrators would be the first to say. And they were expressing principles of justice that are universal, not the property of any one class. They were trying to hold liberal institutions like Columbia, which have been notorious in their compliance or collusion with the Trump administration, to their own stated liberal doctrines. They were doing politics, in what has turned out to be a messy and personally expensive way, but they were also upholding standards of intellectual and moral consistency that the institutions around them were failing to uphold.

In a letter to the Columbia community in July, acting President Claire Shipman wrote that, as part of its new antisemitism initiative, the university “has not, and will not, recognize or meet with the group that calls itself ‘Columbia University Apartheid Divest’ (CUAD), its representatives, or any of its affiliated organizations.” Why not? “Organizations that promote violence or encourage disruptions of our academic mission are not welcome on our campuses and the University will not engage with them.” Like most of Shipman’s missives, this one sounds like it was written by generative AI. But perhaps generative AI would have caught the grammar mistake: “has not recognized, and will not recognize . . .” And perhaps it would have caught the small logical inconsistency. It appears that, in Shipman’s eyes, the Zionist supporters of the bombing of Gaza, with whom the university has engaged happily on a daily basis, doing their bidding at every opportunity, do not “promote violence.” Is this ChatGPT, or is it Orwell’s doublethink?

One way or the other, the president’s neglect of elite intellectual standards and her crass submission to the moneyed elite need to be called out, as do similar actions by her colleagues at other universities. My former coeditor Andrew Ross at Social Text took most of the flak for the Sokal affair (although it was Aronowitz, mentioned nineteen times in Sokal’s article either directly or in footnotes, who pushed hardest for the article’s acceptance). Ross’s main interest in science was, and remains, ecological. It is no surprise to anyone that in laying out the environmental costs of urban projects like supplying water to the city of Phoenix, he relied on the best scientific evidence available. Following an early involvement in the anti-sweatshop movement, Ross’s scholarly work came to focus on offshore labor (for which he was banned from the United Arab Emirates), academic labor, the labor of the incarcerated, debt refusal, and construction workers in Palestine. In December 2024, he was arrested during a Gaza demonstration at NYU; the response of the NYU administration was to declare him persona non grata and deny him access to classroom buildings. An NYU spokesman explained, with shameless and characteristic implausibility, “This was not a peaceful protest.” As far as I know, Ross and Sokal have not been in touch with each other in light of recent events, but Sokal has been writing strong statements in defense of the academic freedom that is being denied to Ross and so many others. These days, it’s clear that the academy is no more a refuge from political interference than the little magazines. As any Gazan could tell you, there are no safe spaces.

Self vs Rogue Island

Sawako Nakayasu

Put your hands up, says the island. I look around but it is still just me and the island. I meekly raise my hands a little, slightly higher than before—is that enough? All the way up, you little nitwit. This foul-mouthed island is nothing like the ones in the ads. It’s also unfair to call me little, when I am a perfectly average-sized human, and a deserted island of any size has an unfair advantage. I also have questions about why the island gets to have the first word, when it is me, the human, I am the human and thus the linguistically equipped one here, I should be first to speak, first to set the terms, and yet look at me, meekly standing here with my hands in the air like a fool. I am unwilling to acknowledge my fear of the island, the very real fact that it could easily swallow me whole, should it lose its temper or blow a fuse. Since my hands are up in the air anyway, I decide to recalibrate it into a stretch, and I reach higher into the air with the tips of my fingers. I can make myself appear larger, as if the island were a bear. And then what, sneers the island, as if it can read my mind—it did read my mind. I understand now that island linguistics obeys a logic of its own. I feel foolish for any iota of linguistic superiority I had earlier fancied possessing. Still, in a desperate attempt to try something, anything, I invite it to join me in an eating contest. The island responds with a belch and knocks me off my feet.

This is a fortunate turn of events. Now that I have been removed from the upright position, new alternatives become available. Instead of getting back up, which would return me to the original situation, I could feign an inability to get up. I could play dead. I could become dead. Or, I could slither away quietly like a snake. I do not believe that I would escape the island’s notice, but I am willing to try anything. I could slither my way to that hole over there, into which I could climb down, and from there I could continue the conversation. From the safe haven of a hole in its soil, I could turn the tables and ask questions of the island: who are you and what are you doing here. Why are you so angry what the fuck. Where did everyone else go. How can it possibly be that you and I are the only ones. Where are the multitudes, the vagabonds, the emissaries, the rescuers. Where are the apologies. Where are the exits. Where are the preachers, where are the poets, where are the elders, I’d like to have a word.

Manual Labor

A new generation of deaf writers reimagines language, text, and sound

Andrew Leland

© Vanessa Saba

This past spring, I participated in a panel discussion at a writing conference in Boston. The panel consisted of me (a blind writer), Darcel Rockett (a black writer), and Rachel Kolb (a deaf writer). We were there to discuss the journalistic principle of objectivity and whether it made sense to try to write without bias as we reported on communities we belonged to. The Trump administration had recently begun attacking those very communities: just a few months earlier, the president fired all the American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters who made White House press briefings accessible, part of a larger backlash that dismissed disability rights as just another form of wokeness. When wildfires spread across Los Angeles that same month, the late right-wing influencer and White House adviser Charlie Kirk called the on-screen ASL interpreters during the LA mayor’s emergency broadcasts “distractions.” Trump’s other anti-wokeness czar Christopher Rufo soon piled on, asking why, if captions were available, the “wild human gesticulators” (referring to the interpreters) were necessary at all—as though they were a kind of literal virtue signaling.

This political climate added a sense of urgency to our panel discussion at Boston University, which had, unlike the White House, made no complaints about hiring two ASL interpreters, who were there to provide access to the panel discussion for Kolb. She answered her questions verbally, describing the ways the Americans with Disabilities Act had paved the way for her education and career, in contrast to the right wing’s active dismantling of those rights playing out at that moment in the capital.

Kolb, who is white and grew up in Albuquerque, has said that strangers, upon hearing her speak, often wonder if she’s from Australia or Scandinavia. They don’t recognize her deaf accent, which is common among deaf and hard-of-hearing people who speak verbally. The title of her new memoir, Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice, alludes (in part) to the condescending appraisal that hearing people in Kolb’s life frequently offer about her verbal abilities (hard-won after a lifetime of speech therapy), an experience that brings to mind the old racist trope of well-meaning white people expressing implicit, delighted surprise at a black speaker’s “articulateness.”

After holding forth for a few rounds of questions, Kolb suddenly turned off her voice—that is, she stopped speaking orally and abruptly began talking in ASL instead. One of her interpreters, who was holding a mic, seamlessly began to voice Kolb’s reflections.

The transition had an electric impact on the room. Kolb’s voice was, in a basic, important sense, unchanged—she was still there, after all, the same poised, alert presence. There was an audible continuity between her speaking voice and the interpreter’s; one could hear her methodical and sharp style of thinking in both. But it also felt radically modulated: her voice had suddenly switched genders, for one, and her deaf accent had given way to a hearing-accented voice. The effect was unmistakably sonic, even musical, like a song that begins with an autotuned vocal and, after a few bars, gives way to a less processed voice.

But which voice in this analogy is the “natural” one, and which one is artificial? Which voice was more authentically Kolb’s? This was, she told the audience, the point of her decision to switch: each mode of communication—and, indeed, each language—had its own affordances, its own advantages and pitfalls of expression. Speaking in ASL, Kolb could articulate herself with unmediated nuance and specificity; it was a language she had unfettered access to—but she had to rely on the extemporaneous ability of the interpreter to capture not just her meaning but the spirit and style of her expression. In English, she wrested control of her words from the interpreter, but also had to exert a tremendous amount of cognitive labor to perform speech she did not hear, with a new set of anxieties about how intelligible her voice really was. Is her “true” voice oral, or manual? To Kolb, this binary is a false one.

Articulate tracks Kolb’s life through an evolving linguistic journey, structured around her education, from preschool to Rhodes scholar to PhD. The book burrows into the interstitial linguistic spaces that she finds herself caught between at every stage of her development, an experience she describes as “floating between split worlds and not knowing how to suture them back together.”

She shares this in-betweenness with a new generation of deaf writers and artists intent on charting that liminal territory. Their work describes a contemporary deaf subject grappling with a range of twenty-first century contradictions. Christine Sun Kim’s blockbuster mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum (now traveling to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) features an entire series of drawings shaded by differing degrees of “Deaf Rage,” per the show’s title, which is induced in Kim by everything from parents who refuse to learn ASL to slow Wi-Fi on planes that make video chat inaccessible. Sara Nović’s 2022 novel True Biz—a fast-paced deaf-teen bildungsroman with raging hormones—functions simultaneously as a primer on contemporary threats to deaf culture and a page-turning proposal for how deaf separatists might find a coalition with the hearing. Since the book’s publication, Trump’s recent attacks have made its fury and fantasy of rebellion only more resonant. “These guys weren’t so bad,” Austin Workman, a deaf teenager, remarks when he meets Slash (née Kyle), a hearing anarchist plotting to bomb a cochlear implant factory. “They kind of made sense, actually. He could get behind some rage right about now.”

Big D, Little d

The experience of a deaf person is often imagined in binaries, beginning with the seemingly definitional division between people who hear and those who do not. Many deaf people further subdivide themselves into separate groups: there’s a signing community that identifies as culturally deaf, often rendered with a capital D, and there are those for whom being deaf is merely a lowercase-d medical, audiological fact. These two groups can have sharply different attitudes about their relationship with hearing society. Culturally deaf activists and thinkers tend to describe being deaf as distinct from disability; to them, deaf people are a linguistic minority like Arabic or Vietnamese speakers in the United States; the disadvantage is structural rather than intrinsic. This group rejects the notion of hearing loss (many native ASL speakers have been deaf from infancy and thus in a literal sense have lost nothing) and instead speak of deaf gain: a heightened attunement to visual cues and an embrace of the beauty of an embodied, manual language.

Some deaf people, on the other hand—particularly those who become deaf after childhood—can feel excluded from the insular world of deaf culture. Adèle Rosenfeld, the author of the recent novel Jellyfish Have No Ears (translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, who is also deaf), shares with her novel’s narrator a condition that causes her to progressively lose her hearing. After a new round of hearing loss, Louise, the novel’s protagonist, attends a beginning class in French Sign Language (LSF) alongside mostly hearing students. But when she tries to express solidarity with her deaf teacher, he rejects the alliance. “You are hearing,” he tells her in simple language so she can understand. “You went to a hearing school. I’m Deaf, I’ve been signing since I was little, we’ll never be the same.” She detects unmistakable contempt in his response:

He made it clear that the two of us belonged to dissimilar worlds: he to the one of capital-D Deaf people who signed, and I to that of lowercase-d deaf—oral—people who talked.

He saw me as a turncoat.

The origins of this division lie in part in the birth of deaf activism itself and attempts by advocates to create separate, autonomous institutions to nurture and educate deaf people. In this history, the emergence of American Sign Language and American deaf culture are inextricable: they developed together at the first free residential school for the deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut, founded in 1817. The school’s cofounder, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, had traveled to Paris to visit the world’s first school for the deaf, where students received instruction in FSL. Gallaudet hired Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher at the Paris school, and in Connecticut, Clerc taught LSF to this first generation of American deaf students. They had come from across New England, where over time LSF combined with their own regional sign languages (like Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, which had been in use since the seventeenth century because of a high incidence of hereditary deafness on the island). Over time, these signed languages evolved into ASL, which, as a result, has more in common with French Sign Language (one observer compared their linguistic coziness to that of Spanish and Italian), than, say, British Sign Language, which developed independently and is mostly inscrutable to a speaker of ASL.

Graduates of the school in Hartford became founders of and teachers at similar schools across the country, and ASL soon became a national deaf language. Arriving at a residential school, deaf people shared traditions, history, jokes, stories—the building blocks of culture. In the late nineteenth century, deaf education turned away from manualism (instruction in ASL) to oralism (drilling deaf children in verbal speech), a brutal chapter in deaf history that saw a widespread suppression of sign language on par with the erasure of Native American culture in boarding schools. As the scholar Rebecca Sanchez has observed, Native Americans and the deaf are “America’s two indigenous non-English speaking populations” whose social vulnerability “enabled the government to remove them from their homes and place them in boarding schools where they could be forcibly restricted from using their languages.”

The contemporary deaf rights movement began to crystallize in the 1960s at Gallaudet, the Washington, D.C., deaf-centric university named after the pioneer of deaf education. In 1960, a hearing professor of English at Gallaudet named William Stokoe published Sign Language Structure, a landmark monograph that proved that ASL was not, as so many hearing educators had assumed, a primitive gestural system of crude pantomime but was instead a full-fledged language, with the ability to express abstract ideas, an arbitrary set of grammatical structures, and a rich, complex syntax on par with any verbal language. Up to that point, linguists conceived of phonology—the differences in articulation that create meaning— only in terms of sound: phonology is what allows English speakers to effortlessly detect, for instance, the difference between a dog and a bog. Stokoe’s revelation was that ASL had, despite its status as a purely visual language, a phonology of its own: rather than sonic pairs like d/b sounds, ASL has distinct markers like hand shape, position, movement, and so on. A fist at the mouth that blooms outward like a rebuke, the ASL word scold becomes send, for instance, when the same configuration begins away from the face—a distinction that’s as phonological (and linguistically sophisticated) as dog/bog. This realization legitimated ASL in deaf education and accelerated the sense of pride in—and the first naming of—“deaf culture.”

This same breakthrough helped inspire outrage at what the poet Curtis Robbins, an undergraduate at Gallaudet in the 1960s, described as “all the misanthropic wisdom the hearing world had about deaf people.” In the wake of Stokoe’s findings, deaf literature and arts turned more forcefully toward an articulation not only of deaf pride but also toward an understanding and documentation of the prejudice of a mainstream culture that equated being deaf with being of low intelligence and success with the ability to speak.

In Robbins’s poem “Solo Dining While Growing Up,” he describes an archetypal scene in the life of many deaf children of hearing parents, a daily ritual of exclusion from one’s own family called dinner-table syndrome. “There was always conversation / between napkins,” Robbins writes,

There were always
    empty plates and empty bowls
But the knife that laid between them all –
    from mouth to ear –
      from mouth to eye –
        cut me off.

By the time the Deaf President Now (DPN) protests exploded on the campus of Gallaudet in 1988, Robbins was a professor there, and he joined the protests when students shut down the campus for a week after the university’s board of directors, seemingly on the precipice of appointing its first deaf president, instead chose Elisabeth Zinser, the single hearing (and non-signing) candidate from among the three finalists.

The DPN demonstrations—which are the subject of a new documentary film, Deaf President Now!, codirected by the deaf reality star Nyle DiMarco—gained momentum after the chair of the Gallaudet board of trustees told an interviewer that the board chose the hearing candidate because “deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.” Soon TV screens and newspaper front pages filled with images of deaf people barricading gates, banging cans, burning effigies, and chanting in ASL, generating national sympathy and interest in deaf culture. A few days into the demonstrations, Nightline’s Ted Koppel moderated a panel discussion with Zinser, along with Greg Hlibok, one of the student leaders of the DPN movement, and a twenty-two-year-old Marlee Matlin, who’d just become the first deaf person to receive an Academy Award the previous year for her role in Children of a Lesser God, a film where she plays a signing deaf woman who refuses to acquiesce to William Hurt’s bullying, hypererotic campaign to get her to speak. (This year Kino Lorber released a new documentary bio, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, that features this same Nightline interview.) “I do believe that deaf individuals have great capacities,” Zinser says, in an attempt to cover over her board president’s earlier comment about deaf people’s unsuitability for hearing society. “There has been tremendous growth in the positions that deaf people hold—”

“Then prove it!” Hlibok interrupts in ASL, his interpreter verbally cutting in over Zinser’s empty assurances. Five days later, Zinser resigned, and I. King Jordan was appointed as the university’s first deaf president.

The 1988 protests flung the deaf rights movement into the mainstream, and two years later, George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. Building on earlier legislation, the ADA promised to enshrine language access for deaf people across American life, from employment to education, hospital rooms to restaurants. Hearing children learned ASL in mainstream schools, and ASL joined Danish and Bengali on the course catalogs of American universities. (Today, ASL is the third-most-frequently taught language in U.S. colleges.) For the first time, deaf students could attend mainstream public schools with state-funded interpreters tagging along to all their classes and activities.

Sixty Percent Was Still a D

Rachel Kolb was born the same summer that the ADA was signed into law. The idea that, when she grew up, she’d get a job, go to college, live independently, and “participate in broader public life” didn’t strike her as outlandish, as it might have to earlier generations. “As a kid,” she writes, “I never questioned that such things were ahead of me, even if I did not always know how I was going to achieve them.”

When Kolb was a few months old, her family’s smoke detector went off. Her mother, already suspicious that something was different about her child, saw that Rachel didn’t seem to notice the piercing alarm. Once they had a diagnosis, it didn’t take Kolb’s parents long to decide to learn to sign. “Your father and I knew you couldn’t learn to hear,” Kolb’s mother tells her later. “But we could learn to sign.”

Today, there is conclusive evidence that knowing one language (ASL) only strengthens one’s ability to learn a second (English)—indeed, deaf children of deaf parents are more likely to develop fluent written English than deaf children of hearing parents. “Imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid’s English, hurt their brain,” says February Waters, one of the many voices who narrate Sara Nović’s True Biz.

Nović’s novel is set at River Valley School for the Deaf, a residential school in a fictional Ohio corner of the Rust Belt, and the novel begins with three epigraphs, among them one taken from a real 2014 NBC news story about Advanced Bionics, one of the largest manufacturers of cochlear implants (CIs) in the world, which was discovered to have “sold defective implants to young children and adults for years—even after learning that a significant number of the devices had failed.”

CIs are perhaps the most potent symbol of the d/Deaf binary—so much so that, when the technology first emerged, the National Association of the Deaf decried CIs as unethical experimentation on children, writing in a 1991 position paper, “We should not seek the scientific tools nor use them, if available, to change a child biologically so he or she will belong to the majority rather than the minority.”

CIs have made significant technological advances since then, but so has their perceived threat to deaf culture. As Andrew Solomon argued in a 2021 essay in The New York Times Book Review, the success of modern CI technology renders activists’ efforts to preserve deaf culture part of a “battle, valiant but probably unwinnable, against cultural erasure and standardization.”

In True Biz, Nović acknowledges the reality that CIs have become more effective—and safer—than in the past, even as she dramatizes their dangers, placing them at the symbolic center of her story. True Biz’s protagonist, the teenage Charlie, has (unbeknownst to her and, for much of the book, the reader) one of these faulty units in her skull. Her CI is an almost literal bad idea that she can’t shake. “There was something buzzing, horsefly-like in her head,” Nović writes, “more a feeling than a sound, and she didn’t know if it was her implant or an unkind thought.”

The narrators of True Biz comprise many of the main characters of contemporary deaf culture: there’s Austin, the old-school legacy deaf elite kid from a multigenerational deaf family; February, the hearing CODA—as in, a child of deaf adults—who grew up speaking ASL and is more culturally deaf than many of her students; Eliot, traumatized by parents (and a church) who see his deafness as a curse to be repented of; Kayla, attuned to the ways that Black American Sign Language (BASL) is as subjugated to ASL as black English is to standard English; and Charlie Serrano, with a foot in the deaf and the hearing worlds, not quite fitting into either.

Similar to Kolb’s real-life experience, Charlie was (in the parlance of deaf education) mainstreamed, meaning she attended a public school where she was the only deaf student. This became the case for most deaf children in the United States after 1975, when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ended segregation of disabled students—a landmark that was made possible by the racial desegregation of the 1950s, followed by the expansion of public-school funding during LBJ’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. Kolb, after attending a deaf preschool program, was the only deaf student in her school and, at six years old, was made aware for the first time of her difference, with her adult interpreter following her from the classroom onto the playground to facilitate communication during recess. (She also wore, at her mother’s behest, a notepad around her neck.)

The disaster of racial segregation in schools and its persistence long after Brown v. Board of Education makes the problems of post-ADA mainstreaming read a little counterintuitively. The availability of sign-language interpreters and other accommodations for deaf students in public schools led to a massive shift toward mainstreaming and a concomitant collapse among the residential deaf schools: in the early twentieth century, about 80 percent of deaf students attended a residential school for the deaf; today, that statistic has more than flipped, with only about a tenth of deaf or hard-of-hearing students in full-time deaf programs. The logic of desegregation would suggest that this is only a good thing. But while it’s true that deaf students benefit from socializing with hearing students and vice versa, attending a school with a single interpreter as one’s only experience of ASL is meager linguistic sustenance. And for students like Charlie, with her non-signing parents and faulty CI, access to education is hardly guaranteed, even after the ADA. “Really,” Nović’s protagonist thinks, “the fact that she could work out about sixty percent of what was going on with the robo-ear, maybe more with some good lipreading, was impressive. But in school, sixty percent was still a D.” Kolb experiences alienation and frustration like Charlie’s, but she achieves significantly more success in school. The ability of a deaf student to lip-read and speak intelligibly depends on a number of factors, and Kolb is explicit about how her race and economic privilege paved the way for her proficiency in verbal English. In a word, it came down to decades of rigorous speech therapy—tens of thousands of dollars’ worth—which she undertook with the round-the-clock discipline and avidity of a child tennis prodigy.

When Kolb’s parents send her to a deaf camp in Colorado in the summer before fourth grade, she discovers for the first time the existence of deaf culture and meets campers who grew up in big multigenerational deaf families, for whom ASL is an effortless, living legacy. (Nović has compared the privilege of this “deaf elite” to a kind of generational wealth—a linguistic and cultural superiority that within the deaf context gives them much greater comfort and linguistic fluency.) At camp, Kolb is embarrassed to discover that her ASL has a “hearing accent,” just as hearing people tell her that her speaking voice has a “deaf accent.” Kolb learned ASL in preschool, but at home, her parents use Signed Exact English, or SEE, which transposes English grammar into sign. Unlike ASL, SEE isn’t a language—it’s more of a code, awkwardly bolting English syntactical units like -ing onto verbs that natural ASL has no use for. When Kolb uses her voice to order an ice cream on a field trip, a deaf classmate is even more offended by it than by Kolb’s accented signing. “What are you, hearing?” he asks.

Nović’s fictional River Valley School is typical of U.S. residential schools for the deaf that are, today, a dying breed: a state-funded public school retrofitted into a magisterial nineteenth-century campus, where all school business—from the classroom to the sports fields—is conducted in ASL. The school presents a revelation for Charlie that echoes Kolb’s: at first she is a pariah, unable to follow the lightning-fast ASL and unused to the trappings of deaf culture (she mistakes the videophones in the dorm rooms for televisions and is less culturally deaf than the hearing headmistress, who is a CODA). But soon a life where she doesn’t have to work so hard to communicate brings a flood of relief. She falls ill (it’s the crap CI) and has to visit the school nurse. Accustomed to a lifetime of doctors talking over her head to her parents, she realizes with astonishment that it’s the first time she’s ever actually understood what a medical professional is saying to her. This comes as an epiphany, an unfamiliar sense of agency over own body, her own fate.

War in My Head

Kolb, on the other hand, seems to be making a journey in the opposite direction, one in which a nagging sense of alienation and unease grows in tandem with her success in the mainstream hearing world she’s worked so hard to be a part of. When she starts her freshman year at Stanford, she describes it as a kind of Vatican of orality’s high priesthood. The accessibility office offers plenty of accommodations: they hire experienced interpreters and her RAs learn some ASL to welcome her. But soon Kolb finds the chaotic social life of a college campus overwhelming—dinner-table syndrome on an institutional-cafeteria scale. In all her years in California, she met only a handful of deaf people through social media and only after she’d “figured out how to escape the campus bubble.” Interpreters are only available during class time, and the relentless extracurricular chatter that is at the core of university life—along with the persistent benevolent ableism of her peers—begins to grind her down. This culminates not with a transfer to a “Deaf-World” like Gallaudet but instead a hard push in the other direction: she makes the rare decision for a congenitally deaf signing adult to receive a cochlear implant.

The implants offer an ambivalent new relationship with sound and speech. Before her surgery, Kolb worries that she’s a traitor to her identity and feels “an intermittent flash of self-betrayal.” After the surgery (and the months of adjustment and training it requires), she marvels at sounds she’s never heard—“plastic crinkling! Leaves rustling! Banana peels unzipping!”—but realizes that, while it’s eased some of the labor of communicating verbally, it hasn’t erased her sense of herself as deaf. An old interpreter friend asks during a post-implantation coffee if they should still use ASL together. “Yeah, of course I do,” Kolb replies. “The sounds from my cochlear implant still jumbled into wild shapes that would take me years to disentangle, if I ever did. Sign still filled my chest with assurance.”

If for Kolb the sudden intrusion of sound into her life is a mixed blessing, for Nović the tech is a Trojan horse. Charlie’s faulty CI nearly kills her (and destroys her residual hearing). Then Charlie’s love interest, Austin, who’s one of the school’s deaf elite, has a baby sister who, to the family’s dismay, is born hearing. When after a few months she loses her hearing, Austin’s father (the only non-deaf member of the large family) becomes an advocate for a CI—a decision as bioethically fraught in this cultural context as an abortion might be elsewhere. “Why don’t you love her the way she is?” Austin asks his father. “Why do you have to drill a fucking hole in her head?”

True Biz concludes with an explosive act of revolt. Sitting a little awkwardly amid its rotating cast of deaf characters is Slash, Charlie’s hearing ex. He lives in a squat and plays in an anarchist punk band, the Robespierres, an apparent nod to the history of the intersection of deaf and punk cultures, including deaf-run venues like the legendary Deaf Club in San Francisco, which rented out its space to punk bands (a subject that is lovingly re-created in Alison O’Daniel’s transcendent deafcentric experimental 2023 film, The Tuba Thieves).

A swirl of historically plausible (if implausibly coincident) factors nudges the deaf kids over the course of the novel to gradually become radicalized. There are lessons in deaf history (including the direct action of the Deaf President Now protests); Charlie’s faulty CI (and her parents’ insistence on reimplanting her even after her old unit electrocutes her); Austin’s hearing father’s audist desire to implant his infant daughter; and the imminent closure of the school by the district robbing them of any kind of fallback or respite from these threats. When the deaf world collides with the world of the Robespierres at a concert, bomb-making instructions from The Anarchist Cookbook appear alongside the other documentary materials Nović has threaded like sidebars throughout the book, in what feels like an impulse to materialize her story’s radical climax: once it includes bomb recipes, the novel becomes a literal handbook for insurrection. The hearing anarchists, planning a series of anti-capitalist direct actions, decide to bomb the prosthetics factory that’s responsible for Charlie’s faulty CI. Two teachers apprehend the deaf students (more out of a sense of protection than any real desire to thwart their action), and the hearing anarchists follow through, blowing up the CI company’s offices (at night, when no one is hurt).

The solidarity that Kolb reaches for by the end of her book, meanwhile, seems only distantly connected to the violent revolutionary act that ends Nović’s, but it likewise ends with a dialectical gesture, connecting the hearing and deaf worlds in a reach toward a transcendent synthesis. “I saw how much I identified with that little indeterminate slash in the middle,” Kolb writes, “the line that ostensibly split d/Deaf people from each other.” She’s become conscious of her estrangement from a broader disability coalition and feels alienated from both the mainstream hearing world she’s a part of as well as the deaf culture she was immersed in as a child in places like her summer camp. When she attends a disability rights meetup in college, she writes of the feeling of not belonging that echoes her childhood arrival at deaf camp, among the deaf elite. “I shifted on my heels and looked around,” she writes, “wondering how to communicate with people who were blind, people who didn’t use their hands like I did, people whose language seemed vastly different from mine.”

By the time she moves to Oxford to study as a Rhodes scholar—the first signing deaf student to receive the distinction—Kolb begins to see the pernicious effects of her lifelong insistence on dazzling hearing people with her verbal abilities. “My audible speech was a trap,” she concludes. While she’s used ASL interpreters her entire life, beyond a few summers at the deaf camp, she hasn’t spent much time in deaf spaces where sign language is the primary form of communication, and when she attends an ASL meetup in London, she comes to an epiphany: the ease and joy she finds in the signing deaf space suddenly cracks open the toll that her lifetime of relentless orality has taken on her. “When I hung out with my hearing friends,” she realizes, “I’d learned to allot myself two or three hours of conversation time, unless they signed reasonably well, because my energy always ran out. . . . But that day in London, the time stretched.”

By the time she enrolls in a PhD program at the disability studies–focused English department at Emory University, in Atlanta, she’s frequently turning her voice off, relying on ASL interpreters to mediate her conversations with professors and colleagues. But just as she’s frank about the affordances of her orality, Kolb avoids bromides about the liberation of the voice-off deaf life, and even as she centers ASL, there are abundant stretches of time when she keeps her CI— and her voice—turned on.

To say that you’re turning off your voice in ASL, in Kolb’s description, requires you to make a “key” with your thumb and index finger, flipping a switch beside your throat. But this binary image—the ignition either fired or dead—feels, by the end of the memoir, like the wrong metaphor. Rather, that key at her throat begins to resemble a dial she might turn higher or lower, depending on her environment or her mood. This blending finds its way into her prose itself, as she turns up the ASL dial in her lines of English: “I tried to hold multiple ideas in my hands at once,” she writes, “sometimes prioritizing one above the others, often seeking some bridge between them.” Writing a book is just about the deepest immersion one can make into English, and for Kolb, the process of writing and thinking ultimately takes place in two languages—and two modalities—at once: “I find that I am fingerspelling certain words into my thigh, or in the air before me,” she writes. “I know them more solidly in my hands than anywhere else.” Sometimes, she writes, she can’t find the right words in English “and its linear grammar, but I can still feel them in space, leaping across the visual and three-dimensional plane that sign gives to me. I sit and I sign to myself, envisioning the concept of the thing that I want to say. The sign is right there.”

Glass Octopus

Matthew Zapruder

the mesopelagic touches the underside

of a boat my father dreamed he built

I turned his fortune

into a sturdy vessel

that churned through countless waves

to the place where everything is equidistant

then in the chamber

of a lowered diving bell

through thick glass suddenly

the rarely seen close relative

of the telescope appears

looks like an x-ray of a lightbulb

transparently ate an orange crayon

attached to a tangle

of those white xmas lights

then came to my door

to silently ask for sugar

through her I can see the whole black absence

of the deepest layer where she lives

all along I didn’t realize I feared

I was the predator

hunting for what was never there

but here she is deeper down

where no light passes through her radula

moving from one lightless spot to another

she leaves no glowing trace

she needs no mate to amputate its arm

to present to her

I watch her as I rise back up

into the blue light that knows

to be truly sad you have to go elsewhere

The World’s Memory of the World

Disco Elysium and its fictions

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

© Adly Elewa

Video games don’t need writing, really. Great games have been made with almost no words at all—just score in the corner of the screen and maybe a sentence or two explaining the controls—or with the most grudging, minimalist kind of writing imaginable, the merest gesture at narrative: thank you mario! but our princess is in another castle! But it’s a magpie medium and can take in almost anything, including vast quantities of writing. There are games with more words in them than Infinite Jest or War and Peace.

Most of it is bad, of course, not just because writing is hard but because writing for video games is even harder. Every word needs to fit within a larger system of interaction and repetition: not just dialogue and narration but endless descriptions of items, variations of what an enemy might shout when they spot you or are injured, justifications for what the player can and can’t do within the game’s technical limitations, and contingency plans for when the player skips part of the story or manages to go through it out of order. But here we have another thing games don’t really need: good writing. Brilliant games have been made that are stuffed with purple prose. Deus Ex, say, is intricate, astonishing, and almost every sentence in it is ludicrous pulp.

Still, you play games long enough, you start to yearn for a little genuinely great writing. It’s not impossible, after all. In the past decade or so there have been at least two games that managed it. Starting in 2013 there was Kentucky Route Zero, an episodic, magical-realist adventure game. It is an exercise in restraint and evocative delicacy, offering up a few brief lines—a cockeyed joke, an unexpected image, a sudden glimpse of tragedy or banality—and letting them sit quietly, surrounded by minimalist graphics and gentle, humming sound design.

2019’s Disco Elysium is exactly the opposite, a word-drunk profusion of excess and outrage. The first version of the game contains about a million words, and the Final Cut edition released in 2021 adds more: insult upon joke upon reverie, politics and prophecy and memory, alcoholism and communism and cryptozoology, all mashed together in the story of one very shambolic murder investigation. It’s a CRPG (for “computer role-playing game”), a genre that flourished in the 1990s as an attempt to re-create the experience of playing tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons on the desktop. Tabletop RPGs are essentially very long, very weird conversations, and CRPGs in turn are essentially long conversations with the computer—implemented in branching, multiple-choice trees of written dialogue but nonetheless fundamentally concerned with words and sentences. They combine that text with graphics, music, and sound effects, but the text is the core of it, and in the best of these games—like Fallout or Planescape: Torment, both explicit influences on Disco Elysium—it can subsume everything else, as if you were moving through a vast, interlocking network of words, with the rest of the game just a container.

In the classic CRPGs, the text and dialogue are balanced with combat, a matter of stats and loot directly adapted from tabletop conventions. Disco Elysium simply lops off the fighting and replaces it with more dialogue. Everything, seemingly, is now a conversation, from reading a book by yourself to using a mailbox to trying to roundhouse-kick someone in the head, with occasional dice rolls to determine success or failure. And half of these conversations are with yourself, or aspects of yourself: with your “Ancient Reptilian Brain,” which greets you at the beginning of the game by declaring, “There is nothing. Only warm, primordial blackness” (your detective, it turns out, is trying to wake up from a drunken stupor); with your “Horrific Necktie,” which loudly demands you drink and do drugs; with your “Empathy,” sense of “Esprit de Corps,” and twenty-two other numerically rated skills.

Those skills are yet another RPG convention, but here the traditional attributes like “Strength” and “Wisdom” are supplanted by woolier notions like “Inland Empire” (“the unfiltered wellspring of imagination, emotion, and foreboding”) and “Half Light” (“your fight-or-flight response”). And, even less conventional, these skills also become characters of a sort, piping up to advise, criticize, or debate you, or to fight among themselves. More than just a novel way of writing a CRPG, it’s a novel way of depicting consciousness: not a stream or a continuity but an evolving argument, with “you” stuck in the middle. These voices are a constant accompaniment as you move through the world, a cacophony that occasionally becomes, unexpectedly, movingly, on those rare occasions when you all get your shit together, a choir. The result was “a magnificent literary experience,” the novelist Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah wrote in Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games. “Via the precise use of language, it changes the reader.”

The First Death Is in the Heart

Disco Elysium is also the rare game that was built upon—but not adapted from—a book. In 2013, Robert Kurvitz, the game’s lead writer and designer, published Sacred and Terrible Air, a novel set in the same fictional world as the eventual game but with an entirely different story and characters. It sold only about a thousand copies, and Kurvitz considered it a failure—thus the turn to game design. Disco Elysium sold millions, and soon enough fans were looking to read the novel. The only problem was that, while the game was in English, the novel was written in Kurvitz’s native Estonian, a notoriously difficult language to translate. Kurvitz and ZA/UM, the company that produced the game, announced an English translation, but then ZA/UM fired Kurvitz and several other creators of the game under dubious circumstances; they sued the owners of ZA/UM for various financial misdeeds, who in turn accused Kurvitz of workplace misconduct; most of the other people who’d worked on the original game eventually quit or were fired; and nothing more was heard. (The lawsuits are still ongoing.)

In 2023, however, two unauthorized fan translations of the novel were posted online. One, by a group calling itself Truri and the Translation Team, was completed by an unnamed “professional translator and an English editor.” The other, by Group Ibex, used a “machine translation” that was then “heavily edited . . . including at all levels by Estonian-speaking members of the team.” Both declared that they were only meant to fill the gap left by the missing official translation—of which, so far, there has been no sign.

Both the book and the game are set in “Elysium,” an off-kilter remix of contemporary reality, with nations and historical figures combined and rearranged yet almost recognizable. Communism exists, for instance, but it was invented by “Kras Mazov,” seemingly an amalgam of Marx and Lenin and perhaps a bit of Allende, who led the “Antecentennial Revolution” in the nation of “Graad,” then supposedly shot himself when the counterrevolution triumphed. France and Belgium seem to have become conjoined as “Sur-la-Clef,” the Netherlands turned into the heavily militarized “Oranje” (or occasionally “Oranjerik”), the People’s Republic of China into “the People’s Republic of Samara” (with a little India thrown in as well), and so on. Technology, too, is subtly but pervasively altered: computers run on elaborate arrangements of magnetic tape, cars are “motor carriages” controlled with “steering levers” rather than a wheel. Notably absent are any obvious analogues for the United States or England, as if in quiet rebellion against the international lingua franca in which the game would be written.

In fact, neither Disco Elysium nor Sacred and Terrible Air is the original expression of Elysium. It began its life as the setting in which the teenage Kurvitz and his friends played marathon multiday tabletop RPG sessions. Elysium was initially a more traditional pseudomedieval fantasy world (hence, perhaps, the name), but as they got bored with that it crept up toward the present, with the fantasy version relegated to the world’s half-forgotten historical background. And as Elysium moved from game to book to a very different kind of game—apparently with an aborted attempt at a comic book somewhere in between—it became only more elaborate.

Elysium is, appropriately, a primary subject of both the game and the book. (Kurvitz has said that the name Disco Elysium means “I learn Elysium,” though a socio-musical movement called “disco” gets mentioned repeatedly in the game as well.) Both are structured around investigations. “Murder mysteries are good” for exploring alternate worlds, Kurvitz explains, because they have to “talk about the material reality” of that world, however outlandish. Sacred and Terrible Air focuses on the disappearance of four young sisters, the Lund girls, and three schoolboys who become obsessed with trying to find out what happened to them. The book’s chapters skip freely through time, but the two main threads follow the boys’ growing friendship with (and romantic interest in) the three oldest sisters during a summer vacation just before they disappear and their attempt, twenty years later, to finally unravel the mystery.

Taking place mainly in Katla, Elysium’s equivalent of Scandinavia, it often feels like a mirror-world Nordic noir. The Lund sisters are almost impossibly alluring and mysterious, creatures of sun and sand, sparkling in the memory. The three boys age into three variations on haunted, stunted adulthood: ungainly Inayat has become an expert on disappearances of all kinds and still lives with his mother, fussy Jesper has become a successful interior designer who dates only extremely young models (his current girlfriend has a name very similar to that of his favorite Lund), and gung-ho Tereesz has become the classic short-tempered, self-destructive policeman, cutting corners and beating up suspects, on his way to being kicked off the force or worse.

Disco Elysium has you playing as a rather different version of that stock character: still an unraveling cop, but older, sadder, less grim and determined than abject to the point of clownishness. You join forces with the by-the-book but spectacularly tolerant Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi to investigate what appears to be a political lynching in the midst of a dockworkers’ strike in a crumbling working-class neighborhood of the city of Revachol: instead of Nordic noir, a rambling, dissolute, left-wing rendition of a buddy cop movie.

Revachol—mentioned but never seen in Sacred and Terrible Air—is one of the hardest parts of Elysium to pin down. It’s a postrevolutionary city under uneasy occupation, seemingly a mix of Paris, postwar Berlin, the Tangier International Zone, 1970s New York, and probably more. Communists overthrew the corrupt monarchy that controlled it a half-century ago and were themselves overthrown by the Coalition, a group of rich nations that invaded to restore it to capitalist order and have, by the time of the game, been occupying it for over forty years. Martinaise, the dockside district on which the game focuses, is strewn with remnants of that violent history: decrepit bunkers, walls pocked with bullet holes, bombed-out apartment buildings still only half repaired, bitter ex-soldiers from several defeated armies.

Revachol is a far cry from the seaside vacations and glittering restaurants of the novel. But they are very much in the same world, with the same evocative derangement of history. It’s just that the novel’s characters are, at least at the start, able to ignore that history in favor of their “spacious apartments,” “vitamin-rich food,” and private obsessions, while the people in Disco Elysium have to pick their way through history’s detritus every day. The two works approach that world, in a sense, from the top and the bottom, even as they express the same sensibility through two very different mediums.

Evil Apes Dukin’ It Out on the Ball

That sensibility, importantly, is not entirely Kurvitz’s. Disco Elysium credits five writers, along with several editors and several more writers for the Final Cut version. Kurvitz has estimated that about half of the game’s million words were written by him, but at least one of the other writers thinks that estimate is high to the point of being “crooked,” and elsewhere Kurvitz has discussed the game as an immense “cowriting challenge—incorporating ten writers’ voices into a single text.” Several of the video game’s characters were based on ones created by players of the original tabletop RPG. In any case, the process of writing Disco Elysium, in which chunks of text drafted by one writer would be subjected to group critique and revision, often multiple times, makes any individual authorship impossible to pin down. The book, meanwhile, was written by Kurvitz but also credits him along with three other writers (two of whom then worked on the game) with “worldbuilding” and a number more with “mass editing.” Elysium, it seems, is both Kurvitz’s baby and a group emanation, a result of conversation as much as individual creation.

The game, simply put, is much better than the book. Some of this is down to translation. I found myself preferring the machine-assisted Group Ibex version (alas), but both are more functional than fluid, with periodic obscurities and infelicities. It helps to flip back and forth between them occasionally to triangulate certain meanings. Is this mysterious geographical feature “Rodionov’s Deep” or “Rodionov’s Trench”? What does it mean when one of the sisters “lifts herself up on her wing bones”? Ah, perhaps she’s just “ris[ing] on tiptoes”?

But beyond that, the game is warmer, looser, and funnier, even with the oddity and tragedy of its setting. Sacred and Terrible Air begins with a clinical announcement: “It was a popular vacation area just outside of Vaasa that swallowed the four Lund girls. Along with their little bones and tan-lined skin, an entire era vanished.” The book never quite abandons that coldness. Even its main characters are held at a bit of a remove, glimpsed in passing as the action hurtles forward or backward. The game, though, offers your detective a whole conversation with his “Limbic System” before he even opens his eyes about how the world that awaits him is just “this giant ball there. And evil apes. And the evil apes are dukin’ it out on the ball.” “How big is the ball?” you might ask, or “How small are the apes?” Or you might say, “That’s sad,” and be told, “Yes it is. And you drowned in that sadness a long time ago.” And then, at last, your day begins.

In its attempts to both tell the story of an investigation and display the world of Elysium, the book resorts to an elaborate contrapuntal structure, moving back and forth between decades, continents, and characters, sometimes within a single chapter. We might ping between Inayat’s childhood and adulthood for a few pages, then suddenly turn to a monologue by Ambrosius Saint-Miro, an avatar of “pessimism and nihilism” from another part of the world entirely, whom we never see directly again. Especially in the later chapters, it can be genuinely hard to follow, breaking apart into allusive fragments as its characters disintegrate.

The game gets to have it both ways. Its story is linear and contained, even conventional, a single investigation that takes place in just a few blocks of Revachol over about a week. The mystery has some twists, but they are easy enough to navigate, and the central questions, at least, are resolved by the end. But at the same time, it is full of moments like the opening discussion with the Limbic System, looping digressions through strangeness and tragicomedy, fragments of backstory, history, parallel stories lurking behind every person and thing you encounter. You might wander into a bookstore and find a copy of Suzerainty: The Board Game, from which you learn about the old kingdom centered around Revachol, which was a trading center for apricots, marble, sugar, and “unprocessed cocaine leaves.” You might start up a conversation with a truck driver stuck in the traffic jam created by the dock strike and find yourself improvising poetry to impress him.

Even the most mundane events can suddenly open out into the wider world of Elysium. One of the first tasks the game presents you with is to simply look at your face in the mirror. You are horrifically hungover, so that’s not quite as easy as it sounds, but once you manage it you realize your face is involuntarily locked in “The Expression,” a strained, shit-eating grin. “I think it’s meant to look *suggestive*,” you speculate. “I’m afraid it’s meant *for the ladies*.” Just another detail in the dissolution of this particular cop, but if you pass a dice roll you can eventually get more information on The Expression: how it is an imitation of the signature grin of a disco star named Guillaume le Million, who became famous during “The New—the third decade of the current century,” several decades before the events of the game, when “enough time had passed from the Revolution that, for a fleeting moment, free market economy seemed like the ultimate, uncontested way of life for our species.” And that “it’s a different world now. The Expression is a relic.” (Guillaume le Million, you might also learn, died toward the end of the next decade, either of venereal disease or autoerotic asphyxiation—“And yes, you can take this as a metaphor for Revachol in the Thirties.”) All that from looking in the mirror.

The comparatively limited digressions in Sacred and Terrible Air make it feel experimental and opaque, yet the game’s constant profusion of them feels completely natural. Video games are almost always digressive, whether their designers want them to be or not, because players can’t be trusted. Given the slightest freedom, they’ll wander off, focus on side quests and minor details, avoid the main story entirely, or skip through it at maximum speed. Disco Elysium simply embraces that inevitable waywardness, seeding every corner with the possibility of revelation. And even some of the most outlandish side activities—trying to catch a windblown flower, indulging the delusions of a nice lady you met in a bar—are neatly tied back into the central mystery by the end. In the process, it makes the case for video games as the great digressive medium, Laurence Sterne’s wildest dream come to life and given a lynching to solve.

It also eases your way into Elysium using a hoary old video game trick: amnesia. Gaming is full of amnesiac player characters, because they offer a tidy solution to the problem of controlling a person who knows things the player doesn’t. If by some plot device the character has forgotten all those things, they have a reason to ask for information about the setting or even about themselves, and the player has more narrative leeway to define their personality. Planescape: Torment turned this trick into the central mystery of the game, putting you in control of an immortal being who wakes up on a mortuary slab, having lost his memory in the process of cheating death, and setting you loose to figure out who you are and how you got this way (and why, as you quickly discover, you have so many enemies). Disco Elysium, whose designers have been effusive in their praise of Planescape, uses a kind of gutterpunk equivalent. Harry, as you eventually discover your detective is called, wakes up from a bender so immense he not only can’t find his badge, gun, or green snakeskin shoe, he has no memory of his name or history, or of the details of the case, which he’s supposedly been working on for several days already, or even of basic facts about the world he lives in. Investigating the lynching also means piecing together who you are, what you’ve been doing for the past few days, and how you reached this sorry state. This also gives you an excuse to pump everyone you meet for information about Elysium. (The game notes, in a sly leftist joke, that everyone is a little scared of a cop, so they won’t object to your outlandish questions.)

Sacred and Terrible Air must bear the burden of its characters’ functional memories, so that same information has to be slipped in allusively around the edges, far less densely and with much greater risk of confusion. Nor, of course, does it have recourse to the game’s other advantages in creating an atmosphere: the painterly graphics, sliding between gritty detail and near-abstract expressionism; the gravel-voiced narration; the soundtrack of mournful, degraded horns.

Still, it is not the case, as Kurvitz once speculated, that “maybe the book just isn’t that good.” It is certainly much more accessible if you’ve already played the game (and it’s hard to imagine anyone encountering it in English except through the game, anyway). And its central mystery is both more expected—another batch of vanished beauties, as opposed to a murky execution in the midst of a labor dispute—and less satisfyingly resolved. But it is also truly unsettling in a way the game never quite attempts. As its mystery becomes more opaque and baffling, it also spreads out, embracing the whole world; it becomes less about what happened to these particular sisters and more about how everything fades and disappears, how the years claim all of us, eventually, even our memories, how “the most violent sound in the world” is “the terrible noise of time.”

The book also deals much more directly with the strangest element of Elysium: its geography. The cities and countries of our world have been not just renamed and reconfigured but divided up into isolas, isolated pockets of land and water separated by vast swathes of a supernatural white fog called the Pale. The exact nature of the Pale is unclear, but it seems to be a physical manifestation of that “noise of time,” “an avalanche of the world’s memories” that can swallow up anything, even continents. Whatever its true nature, it is extremely difficult to travel or communicate through, and prolonged exposure to it can drive people mad. Those who venture too far within it disappear. Or perhaps more than that: their image might fade out of photographs, people who knew them might begin to forget.

In the game, this mostly functions as deep, weird background—you have a few conversations about it and not much more—but the book confronts it head-on. Several late chapters are set within the Pale, where time stands still but a few creatures survive, and the story climaxes, or perhaps shatters, with an “entroponetic catastrophe,” an apocalyptic expansion of the Pale’s boundaries. And yet the Pale continues to resist all but the most abstract definition. It is “made of the past,” someone declares. “The pale is the world’s memory of the world.” In Disco Elysium, one character—a committed communist—reports that some believe the Pale “is actually a manifestation of nostalgia and historical inertia. . . . Those same theorists have hypothesized that revolution may in fact create a *counter-force* that prevents the Pale from expanding.” Another character says that it is “a nervous shadow cast into the world” by humanity, “eating away at reality.”

More than anything, the Pale seems to be a metaphor that has broken containment. It is a literal embodiment of the destructive power of time, or the endless oblivion of history, or perhaps the fictionality of Elysium itself—or all the above at once. Argo Tuulik, one of the writers of Disco Elysium (and credited for both “worldbuilding” and “mass editing” on Sacred and Terrible Air), has said that Kurvitz “has this uncanny ability to conceptualize things that already exist in a way that they seem completely fresh and new.” And in one sense the Pale is a particularly powerful, amorphous example of that, an estrangement of the crushingly obvious fact that everything around us is flimsy, transient. That history is just a vast, destructive assemblage of our forgotten mistakes. That it could all be different, we could all be different if we wanted to be—or could have been different, if we had chosen differently. The Pale and the inhabited isolas, perhaps, are the manifestation of those two tenses, the could be floating in an ocean of the could have been.

A Radio in the Distance

That ocean of lost possibilities is a metaphor that is built up by the book and the game together, and completely expressed in neither. Both Sacred and Terrible Air and Disco Elysium are, in fact, explicitly incomplete. The original Estonian edition of the novel had the number zero on the spine to indicate it was the beginning of a series. Disco Elysium 2 was apparently planned from the beginning, and Kurvitz wrote after the first game’s release that it “managed to show you” only “a tiny, insignificant corner” of its fictional world: “I can not begin to tell you how introductory it is.” The book series never got past volume 0, of course, and the video game sequel was officially canceled earlier this year, long after most fans had given up on it.

In another sense, though, neither could ever really be complete, even if the Estonian readership had been more intrigued or the ZA/UM suits had left well enough alone. Both were expressing something beyond any individual book or game, or even any series, something that is, in its purest form, meant to be endless.

Worldbuilding often has a slightly unsavory ring to it. One hears it invoked as part of “shared universes,” a crucial ingredient in the production and maintenance of “IP.” Or it is a kind of narrative wallpaper, the background “lore” that fills in the gaps between shoot-outs in a video game. The idea behind it is much more common in genre art than in ostensibly serious literature: that the invented world itself could be the primary work, the expressions of it secondary. Its most influential practitioners are confined to fantasy and science fiction: J. R. R. Tolkien, George Lucas, George R. R. Martin, Iain M. Banks, and so on.

None of that means it can’t be a vehicle for genuine artistic expression. Kurvitz’s vision of worldbuilding is not remotely commercial or pragmatic; it is deeply idealistic—or, in his words, “messianic.” Worldbuilding, he has said, is “a vital psychological service to your fellow man.” It is Elysium, not the book or the game, that he calls his life’s work. And Elysium “was always going to be massive. Large enough to blot out our entire reality.”

More prosaically, Elysium is “a collection of ideas in the form of another world,” and “a tool for analyzing ours.” Most of it is not nearly so nebulous as the Pale. One of my favorite Elysian inventions is the Moralintern. Formally known as the Moralist International, it is a centuries-old sect of what might be called evangelical centrism, an organization devoted to gradual progress and “a normal, stable world governed by democratic values.” Its subsidiary organizations include EPIS, Elysium’s equivalent of NATO (or perhaps the EU—although what is the difference, actually, in a world without the United States?), and the Coalition that invaded and occupies Revachol.

Much of the game’s depiction of the Moralintern is scathing. The democracy the Coalition allows Revachol, almost fifty years after the revolution was defeated, is limited and, as one character puts it, “market driven.” If you spend a few hours thinking about the group—the game has an elaborate “Thought Cabinet” mechanic, in which thoughts can be allowed to develop over time—you come up with this: “Moralists don’t really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. . . . Centrism isn’t change—not even incremental change. It is *control*.” (It should be noted that most of the writers of Disco Elysium, Kurvitz especially, subscribe to a kind of mordant communism.)

That control is unequivocally violent. You might, on a rotting boardwalk in the most decaying section of Martinaise, come across a wall still covered in bullet holes. You can use your “Visual Calculus” skill to reconstruct the scene: a mass execution, decades in the past, or maybe several such killings. The game shows you their ghosts: a line of men against the wall, a line of soldiers facing them, a commandant off to the side. But the thing you can’t see is who is executing whom. Is it communists, early in the revolution, executing fascist loyalists? Or centrists, as the revolution was crushed, executing communists? The one thing you do know is that no one from the Moralintern died there: “They were always the *last* ones against the wall.” One of the most clarifying elements of this concoction is the reminder that centrism, too, can be a form of extremism, hidden by our usual metaphors of left and right.

And yet the portrait of the Moralintern can also be oddly touching. Their color is blue, standing for “a blue forget-me-not, a piece of the sky.” Kitsuragi, the most purely good and endearing character in the game, says that he was once a Moralist believer, and though “the years have changed that . . . they’re not all that bad.” Kitsuragi also, when asked what his position is on the revolution, replies, “My parents got ripped to shreds. . . . I was saved by being two years old. That’s my position—the abattoir.” There are worse things than to dream of incremental progress or that, at the very least, things won’t get any worse.

The unofficial motto of the Moralists, we are told, is “For a moment, there was hope.” For a moment, there was Elysium—or a couple of scraps of it, anyway.

Bafflomathy

(no. 81)

© Zak Jensen

Yassin Adnan (“Holy Illiteracy”) is a Moroccan writer, editor, and journalist. He is the editor of Marrakech Noir and the author of five books of poetry, three short story collections, and the novel Hot Maroc.

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin (“Children of the Margins”) is a novelist and playwright. He was born in Kassala, Sudan, in 1963, and lived in Khashm el-Girba until he was forced into exile in 2011 by the previous military regime in Khartoum.

Brace Belden (“The Hatred of Podcasting”) is the cohost of the podcast TrueAnon.

Ry Cook (“Top Ten Reasons to Dislike List Poems”) is the author of Freak of Nature (Choo Choo Press, 2025). ASUSHUNAMIR is out this winter from Blue Bag Press.

Annette Hug (“Back from the Woods”) is a translator and writer whose most recent novel is Tiefenlager. She lives in Zurich.

Chris Lehmann (“American Gothics”) is the editor at large at The Baffler and its former editor in chief. He’s now the Washington bureau chief for The Nation and the author of The Money Cult: Christianity, Capitalism, and the Unmaking of the American Dream.

Andrew Leland (“Manual Labor”) is the author of The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. He is a contributing editor at The Believer, and he’s currently the Koeppel Fellow in Journalism at Wesleyan University.

Kim Hyesoon (“Literacy and Suicide Rates”) is a South Korean poet whose collection Phantom Pain Wings won the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award. Lady No will be published in English by Ecco in April.

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi (“Excerpt from ‘The Song of Other Things’”) is a contributing editor at Harper’s.

Alain Mabanckou (“An Artificial African Consciousness?”) is a novelist, journalist, poet, and academic. A French citizen born in the Republic of the Congo, he currently teaches literature and creative writing in the department of French & Francophone Studies and the African Studies Center at UCLA.

Noah McCormack (“We Used to Read Things in This Country”) is the publisher of The Baffler and coeditor, with Scott Sowerby, of The Memoirs of Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall from 1633 to 1688.

Nicolás Medina Mora (“Introduction to 'Brain Rot Without Borders'”) is a Mexican novelist. His first novel, América del Norte, was published in English last year and is forthcoming in Spanish.

Sawako Nakayasu (“Self vs Rogue Island”) is an artist working with language, performance, and translation. Her most recent book is Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023).

Michael Oswell (“Did You Know?”) is a graphic designer based in the Schengen Area.

Sophie Pinkham (“Speak and Sell”) is the author of The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires, out in January.

Bruce Robbins (“Belittled Magazine”) is the author of Who’s Allowed to Protest? forthcoming from Melville House.

Jess Row (“The Assassination of Henry Kissinger”) is the author of Story-knife, a new collection of short stories to be published by Ecco in summer 2026. His other books include the novels Your Face in Mine and The New Earth and the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination.

Mina Tavakoli (“Blank Generation”) is a writer from Virginia.

Valeria Villalobos Guízar (“Pamphlets Will Not Save Us”) is an editor, screenwriter, essayist, and literature professor.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost (“The World’s Memory of the World”) is a contributing editor at The New York Review of Books.

Jenny Xie (“Tongue Delirium”) is the author of The Rupture Tense and Eye Level, finalists for the National Book Award. She teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.

Matthew Zapruder (“Glass Octopus”) is the author of the poetry collections I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024) and How to Continue (The Economy Press, 2025). He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Zhang Yueran (“Literature Away from the Gaze”) is the award-winning author of several novels written in Chinese, including Cocoon and Women, Seated. She lives in Beijing.

Art Contributors

Eric Timothy Carlson

Ben Denzer

Adly Elewa

Juanjo Gasull

Zak Jensen

Philotheus Nisch

Mark Pernice

Chris Retsina

Vanessa Saba

Rob Vargas

Melek Zertal

The front and back covers of this issue of The Baffler are by Michael Oswell.

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