On labor and liberation.
On a typewriter.
Gaddis, DeLillo, and the assembly line of ideas.
Ride a horse and read the book.
Calvino’s literature in the anthropocene.
On inheritance.
On cultural experiences
Action comics, Dostoevsky, and how to be good in the absence of God.
On data destruction.
On the vast beyond.
On preserving interruptions.
On what truth demands.
On Czech American history and the University of Chicago.
On Baudelaire’s beast of boredom.
On quarter-life panopticons.
On the logic of the underground.
Liberalism and the cruelty of the joke.
A correspondence on Merve Emre’s slick categories and living art.
A correspondence on sex puppets and participatory pleasures.
C.S. Lewis, Taoism, and the ouroboros of grief.
On avoiding sublimation.
Nietzsche and Pynchon on letting go of guilt.
The past, present, and future of water in the West.
On distractions from bravery.
Wittgenstein’s language games and large language models.
On new things and blessed problems.
Consumerism’s tailor-made alienation.
A correspondence on administrative neglect at the University of Chicago.
Running, suffering, and Sontag.
Loneliness and artificially intelligent boyfriends.
On Sex and the City.
On effing the ineffable.
Two new poems from Miles Cayman.
The new New York waterfront
Trans rights and the left.
The shoemaker’s dilemma.
How liberalism wrote out friendship.
The transformative experience of beauty.
Writing in the age of artificial reproduction.
On boredom, anxiety, and perpetual busyness.
What Hamlet reveals about the pitfalls of critical art.
Fearless journalism in Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia.
Cultural alienation and the humanities.
Rethinking technology’s ends.
Digital formation in Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making.
The problem of the twenty-first century.
Soaring mental health risks for girls.
The waning power of minimalist design.
Why you’re terrified of modern art.
John Ruskin and the imperfect worker.
Rediscovering Simone Weil’s critique of liberalism.
Our generation’s struggle with individualist activism.
The pernicious, underlying morality of therapy culture.