Everything is a party: Modern life is a hot mess—or so claims Deniz Kurdi in the first response to our winter letter prompt, “The party’s over.” In democratizing media and access to knowledge, we have become inundated by information to the point that none of it matters. Present-day culture, as Kurdi puts it, is just a long, vapid party whose “perpetual weightlessness” has caused us to lose our center of gravity. It is hard to engage meaningfully with ideas or events when everything is subsumed into a stimulating current of newness, decontextualized or softened into a blip of “now … this” as the conversation moves on and the party goes elsewhere—and nowhere. As we fall deeper into our digital dependence, Kurdi sees little hope beyond further distraction. Hypocrite lecteur beware: the party isn’t dying, it’s raging all around you. To save ourselves, we—and now, a cat video.
Brady Santoro, senior editor
Bad book friend: Like many of Yiyun Li’s other novels, The Book of Goose (2022) is not just a novel but a meditation on the ways our closest relationships can simultaneously damn and save us. The novel opens with an adult Agnès receiving a letter from her mother about her childhood best friend. Fabienne, we learn, has died from childbirth complications and will be buried in their village in rural France. As children, Agnès and Fabienne were close in the sense that binary bodies are: Orbiting each other, ever more closely, until they violently collide. Agnès instinctively knows she will not return to visit the grave, but the news dredges up memories of her childhood and the way Fabienne altered, defined, and ultimately ended it.
The characters and the world they inhabit are expertly crafted, but their relationships—and, consequently, the novel itself—are much less so. Fabienne is as morbid as she is cruel and despite all her razor-sharp prose, Li leaves unspoken why Agnès, with her ability to see through pretense and into people’s inner lives, subjects herself to Fabienne’s cruelty. Conversely, the precise fault lines on which the relationship shatters are also left open to the reader. By the end of the novel Agnès and Fabienne have outgrown each other completely, but perhaps by learning the intricacies of their relationship the reader outgrows them too.
Nora Holmes, contributing editor
Performative luddites: We’ve all been practicing the worst kind of escapism. Or so Kathryn Jezer-Morton proclaims in her most recent column for The Cut, as she enters into her year of “friction-maxxing,” internet-speak for reconditioning ourselves to do things rendered effortless by technology in inconvenient ways. This resolution will, apparently, let us take back our lives as tech companies incentivize iPad-scrolling over reading, replace grocery aisle browsing with ChatGPT meal planning, and drive parents to track their children’s location virtually. You get the gist. Jezer-Morton explains how she cultivated her children’s love of reading, which is to say, how she force-friction-maxxed them against the odds. TL;DR, she moved with her children to Southern Mexico and prohibited iPads on the van ride there.
I tend to agree that we should resist dizzying technological shortcuts in an effort to make life more meaningful. But calling this resistance “friction-maxxing” makes the endeavor into its own form of a rat race. “Maxxing,” whether by “looks-maxxing,” “sleep-maxxing,” or “status-maxxing,” asks us to optimize our lives in pursuit of some extreme ideal. Friction is good, but intensifying it may lead us closer to performative luddism for bragging rights’ sake—not for our very necessary edification.
Elena Eisenstadt, contributing editor
Image: Pieter de Hooch, Interior with a Young Couple, oil on canvas, ca. 1662–25 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).