THE NEW CRITIC
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POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Isabel Mehta and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Isabel’s essay “Beauty, The Last Taboo.”

Read Isabel's essay

Below we discuss what it was like studying English at Harvard University in the early 2020s and the trade-offs of postgraduate life. Isabel graduated in May 2024 and is an Assistant Editor of The New Critic.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

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ELAN You were at Harvard when that piece in The New Yorker by Nathan Heller came out, right? About the death of the English major?

ISABEL Yeah it’s funny, I am quoted in that article.

ELAN What did you think of it? I remember talking about it with people at Dartmouth.

ISABEL When the article came out, I remember thinking it made sense. It felt like the humanities were dying at the time. Everyone was thinking about the job market and about how to prepare themselves professionally.

That was something that people would say to me a lot, “It’s a good thing you studied the humanities. When you’re a consultant, you’ll need to be good at writing.” But what I cared about was the aesthetic experience of studying the humanities. No one said, “I study math because it’s beautiful.” Some people definitely do, but in Nathan Heller’s article, it didn’t seem like students cared too much about beauty, which was something I cared about.

ELAN You studied with James Wood and Jesse McCarthy at Harvard. Can you talk about the James Wood class? How was that?

ISABEL The greatest moments of change I experienced encountering literature have often come when I was suffering personally. There was a period in college where I was mentally very unwell. It happened to coincide with having all my core classes behind me. And so here I was, struggling to get by, and then I’m plopped in front of James Wood and told to read Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I remember reading that in the dining hall one morning and just crying, feeling a sense of being completely seen by Saint Augustine. It wasn’t a magic wand, but I think I started to realize the humanities are more than understanding history and learning how to think critically and public speak and whatever. There was something deeper to why I was devoting myself to reading and writing.

ELAN Augustine — that’s an interesting choice — because it’s not like you read Mrs Dalloway or something like that. Augustine is confessing to God, and he’s leaving behind a sinful life.

ISABEL I was raised Hindu, I lived next to an Episcopalian church, and I also went to Quaker school. I was raised by a conglomeration of faith. I’m a friend of God in whatever form he or she takes.

I do think that the reason why I was so drawn to especially book one of Confessions was, and I don’t think this is an exaggeration to say, that I thought, at that time in my life, I was falling short of my own potential, not because I had done anything terribly morally wrong, but because I didn’t feel particularly successful or important. I wasn’t doing very well in my classes; I wasn’t a particularly great athlete; mentally, I struggled; and so I felt like a failure. There’s this line in Confessions where Augustine lists all these things that are wrong with him, and then he goes, “Moreover, they are good, and they all together constitute myself.” I interpreted it as he had done wrong but that he ultimately may not be able to change, and that may just be who he is, and that’s okay. That’s what I felt like he was saying — “It’s okay.” No one in my life at the time was really telling me, “It’s okay.”

What was bothering me was a deep conflict about what I wanted to be. It was junior year. The shiny Disney world of Harvard had faded. Now everyone was sort of set on their paths — “I’m pre-med, I’m pre-law, I’m pre- this, pre- that.” And I also care a lot about what other people think. I have not worked to cultivate this sort of indifference toward what other people think of me, especially my family. I care a lot about what my family thinks of me, if they’re proud and happy with the choices I’ve made. My mom said, “You should try consulting and banking. You’re at Harvard. These opportunities are not afforded to everybody. They are potentially afforded to you, and you should take advantage of them.” So I waltzed around to all these info sessions, and you know, I’m good at things, so I was good at it.

RUFUS A lot of people go through this experience, and they do consulting or banking. Some people at Dartmouth are genuinely delighted by those jobs and love it. Other people feel deeply alienated, but they would never say it, and they would certainly never cry in the dining hall about it. It seems as if there was something quite literally grating against the fibers of your soul. Do you think Confessions revealed something about having failed yourself?

ISABEL I’ve always known that I’m a writer, but there’s a deep fear that I have, and that I especially had in college, that I was going to ultimately abandon that project to please other people. There’s nothing that terrifies me more than living a life for somebody else. Since I’ve graduated, I’ve realized how easy it is to give in.

When I’m not writing, I feel completely directionless and empty. That semester, I was not writing at all, so I think that was also part of it. I was casing, or I was doing discounted cash flows. The McKinsey framework is “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive,” so when you solve a problem, you want to create all the options — you’re essentially covering all the bases.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Isabel Mehta is a 24-year-old living in New York City. She writes Everything is Copy and is an Assistant Editor of The New Critic.

It was July. Every day felt hotter and hotter, and the hotness was melting my brain, and my brain was melting because I needed a job, and while my brain was melting, the flowers had fully bloomed, and I was sitting on a rock in Central Park while my friend walked, smiling, barefoot in the grass. We had been friends for a while at that point; we met in school. Our friendship was youthful, pure, and full of meaningful silence. I sat with my knees to my chin, watching him do push-ups. I was thinking about a job interview I had in two days.

He began running in circles around our little area of the park, barefoot. I didn’t want to join. I enjoyed watching him. Eventually he tired out, and we sat together at the top of the hill, on the rock. In silence, like we often were, we watched other couples picnic together with blankets and wine. The sun was going to set soon. We had nowhere to be, nowhere to go, and we both smelled like a garden. We bought ice cream from an ice cream truck — ice cream before dinner, ice cream for dinner — and we walked together on the sidewalk in the dusk trying to share the cone before the heat took it from us. The sun was never going to set. The days were so long you forgot they were going to end.

A few months earlier, the night before graduation, we were walking in the night, talking about some nonsense, eating chicken on a skewer and mango sticky rice. I fell asleep that night after he left, after a few hours chatting, and I slept so well, even though it was only for three or four hours. The next morning, it was hot and humid, and I had to put on a tight dress and a stupid hat and sit on folding chairs and listen to adults tell me things about my future. I hadn’t had a sip of water all morning and forgot to eat, and the sleep-deprivation-nausea came over me in a strong wave — so strong that right before the ceremony began, I snuck out of the hazy rows of graduates. Desperate for food or drink, I went to find a vending machine in the building where I had taken Spanish once. And he was there, on a bench, with a crisp red apple in a napkin, which he held out to me.

At Harvard, “Veritas” was the name of the game, and I was certain reading, particularly the aesthetic experience of reading, was the gateway to it. I found solace in St. Augustine’s Confessions (“moreover, they are good, and they all together constitute myself”); my heart jolted awake to the ending of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; I was transfixed by the brutal consciousness of Notes from Underground. The entrance to Harvard Yard reads, “Enter to grow in wisdom,” and I believed it was through my encounters with beauty in literature, through studying English, that I could do so. I learned from close-reading, sure, but it was often when consumed with beauty in the pages of a book — through beautiful language, a sublime image, or a character who reflected my life back at me — that I felt a true imprint on my soul. This, to me, was wisdom. This was truth.

In my senior spring, I enrolled in “The American Novel: Dreiser to the Present,” a canonical class taught by scholar Phillip Fisher. We read Faulkner, Salinger, Wharton, and Ellison, to name a few. The flowers had blossomed, the Charles River was warm in the morning, and I got to sit in that glorious class every Tuesday and Thursday with my coffee. I was content — until it was time to read Nabokov’s Lolita.

I had heard about the infamous, taboo novel the same way one does an old town legend: I was told it was important, but no one really said why. It was my first time ever reading Nabokov, too, a man whose triple-syllabic name sounds rhythmically royal, sophisticated, serious. But I couldn’t make it past the first 50 pages. I found both the characters (the charming pedophilic murderer Humbert Humbert and his 12-year-old victim Dolores Haze) tiresome and predictable and the plot (aside from two expected murders) mundane. Humbert drags Dolores from drab motel to drab motel, and interjects his tale with moments of bliss, anger, sadness, and arousal. He sleeps with her in a dingy bed, feels guilty about it, and proceeds to do it again. I did not like Lolita.

Nabokov writes in Lolita’s afterword that his novel has no “moral skew” but instead exists precisely for the sake of what he calls “aesthetic bliss,” or “a sense of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” But I felt no aesthetic connection to Lolita. Yet one does not have to feel something, or even finish a book, to write an essay about it. English students know this well. So I wrote an essay about the novel’s aesthetic value, how it justifies itself to exist because the language is beautiful, and in turn, I convinced myself of the value within Nabokov’s pages. What creates enough cultural and intellectual friction to sustain the novel through nearly 80 years of sexual politics is that Lolita — I remember now, yes — is a gorgeous novel about a terrible thing, and this is the point. Forget the narrator (a pedophile), forget the situation (the girl he is assaulting). The novel is dedicated to exquisite language, and the justification for that alone is a reason for a novel to exist. I then forgot about the novel until, almost two years after my first encounter with Lolita, the title re-appeared in my life in the most abysmal of places, the Epstein Files.

Yes, Jeffrey Epstein kept Lolita at his bedside, he etched lines from this novel on the arms and feet of his girls, and his private jet was known among friends as the “Lolita Express.” Epstein ordered the novel to his Kindle just 43 days before his trial. He even emailed University of Auckland professor and Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd to try and fund a book on Lolita.

That Epstein not only read but found some kind of psychological union with Lolita seemed to challenge my defense both of the novel and of reading in the first place. If reading arms us in our intellectual fight against a world corrupted by technology, power, and wealth, how could Epstein’s plane be called the Lolita Express? If reading is so powerful, and beauty is a virtue, how could this canonical novel serve as figurative fuel for abuse and destruction? If the novel has no moral skew, that it piqued the depraved and grotesque heart of such a man seemed an indictment of that very amorality.

Humbert Humbert, awaiting trial for rape and murder and under psychopathic observation, scribbles the notes that become the novel itself in a last-ditch attempt “not to save my head, of course, but my soul.” It dawned on me that Epstein ordered Lolita to his Kindle while awaiting trial because he wanted it to save him, too. I shuddered.

I wanted to believe that Epstein was an unintellectual maniac who had made a bad name for a great work of literature. Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, put it nicely: “More likely, Epstein confused Lolita for some kind of Booker Prize-level version of Penthouse Forum, which is a stupid error.” Lolita is not erotica. The novel teems with irony, not lewdness. What Lolita is “about” can be debated, but what it certainly isn’t about is sex. Reading Lolita as a Fifty Shades for pedophiles is plainly incorrect.

The 50th anniversary edition of the novel had floated with me from college to adult life. The annotations stopped where I had given up in college. I flipped to the back cover. Vanity Fair had called Lolita “the only convincing love story of our century.” John Updike said, “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written.” I began reading the novel again. The novel’s foreword is penned by the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., a psychiatrist. He introduces the manuscript (Lolita) as Humbert Humbert’s memoir — a memoir, he writes, that does not absolve Humbert from any crime, but rather shows “how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse!” Humbert, in other words, achieves charisma through language. His soul, as one could call it, emerges not just through his mechanically beautiful writing but also in his candor. He doesn’t understand why he has “an excessive desire for that child.” He’s just a guy with a weird kink or, as Harvard professor Elisa New put it in an email to Epstein in 2018, just a “a man changed forever by his impression of a young girl.” So maybe Epstein saw himself in Humbert Humbert: charismatic, flawed, trying his best. The existence of the “manuscript” suggests that maybe Humbert deserves a chance, that everyone has a shot at redemption.

But of course, one knows that Humbert is not simply an eccentric: for the entire duration of the novel, he is raping a child. It occurred to me that perhaps it had been a flaw on Nabokov’s part that the novel was so morally ambiguous. With Humbert at times personable or empathetic, Lolita risks welcoming in the actual Humberts, the Epsteins, of the world. If the novel doesn’t take a side, perhaps the reader doesn’t have to, either. Maybe Lolita could actually corrupt a person. I wanted to find a reason to defend Lolita, to defend reading and studying literature as a path toward universal goodness, but I could not find a way out of the argument that this novel, instead, paved an exit for Epstein.

But I hadn’t really been reading that much lately, anyway; maybe I couldn’t focus the way I could in college. I instead perseverated on questions that seemed more pressing to my newfound adult life: Did I care more about money or having the time to read? Did I care more about my friends or my solitude? When I rose from bed every morning, what, exactly, did I want to spend my time doing? All of these questions I could have answered intellectually in a heartbeat while still an undergrad. Of course I cared more about reading than money. Of course I needed to protect my solitude. Of course I wanted to wake up and read and write. My humanities education supported the idea that reading and writing would cultivate the knowledge to live a true and free life. I thought I had that courage. But two years out of college, I wasn’t working a job I loved, I wasn’t reading enough, and I struggled to get out of bed most mornings.

I had moved to my grandmother’s vacant apartment in Queens, which I had filled with all my lovely books. Yet my predominant feeling was loneliness. I’d always thought of myself as a person of ideas first and a person of the world second. But for the first time in my life, I thought maybe ideas and intellect and reading did not offer the wisdom I had spent four years accumulating. Books began to offer more of an escape than a blueprint for how to actually navigate my life. Should I choose a beautiful life, or should I make sure I can pay my rent? Are these two lives compatible? What is a beautiful life?

A friend told me there was an Epstein File search tool on the DOJ website, so naturally, I typed in a single word: “Lolita.” What I saw couldn’t possibly validate the goodness of aesthetic bliss. In fact, it made the very existence of such an experience, if it did exist, gruesome. There were photos of unnamed women with various lines of Lolita written on smooth-skinned body parts. The following line had been written on a woman’s chest in black marker:

“Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.”

I learned in class that Humbert’s fixation on the name “Lolita” as a purely sonic experience in the opening line of the novel is a quintessential moment of aesthetic bliss. But I determined, after seeing this photo, that if Epstein did experience aesthetic bliss when reading Lolita, when reading this line, the experience was a corrupt and hideous one that made him a worse person, or justified his worse intentions. This was the fault of the novel. The photo confirmed that.

I could definitively no longer see the novel’s goodness. I don’t know why I kept reading, then. Maybe it was the old humanities student in me who just wanted to finish the book in spite of my disillusionment. I made it past the first line and into the first dozen pages. I reached the scene where Humbert watches Lolita play tennis.

And sure enough, I felt something I had certainly never felt while reading Lolita in college: an eerie union with Humbert. “Drenched in a painful convulsion of beauty assimilation,” Humbert says, and the novel touched my heart, too. Yellow-tinted summer memories suddenly resurfaced as I trudged my way through the horrific story. I had a sudden, terrible thought — not that my brief resonance with the novel made me bad — but that my proxy, that Epstein, was perhaps was more human than I had given him credit for, that he truly had connected with the novel in the way Nabokov had intended, in the way I was now in “aesthetic bliss.” The novel itself, then, hadn’t corrupted Epstein — not as much as beauty had. Was Lolita an indictment of beauty?

I closed the book and returned to the DOJ search tool. I wanted to play around with it more. Epstein, of course, reminded me of Humbert, but they both reminded me of another character I had also encountered in college: Milton’s sympathetic antihero, Satan. In Book IV of Paradise Lost, Satan admits, “Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell.” I entered “devil” into the search bar, and what populated the search results was an interview in which Epstein is asked by a man behind the camera (Steve Bannon), “Do you think you’re the devil himself?” Epstein responds, “No, but I do have a good mirror.”

Humbert repeatedly admits to his crimes, to his “excessive desire for that girl,” but he cannot keep his nymphet, he does not succeed in love, and both Humbert and Dolores wind up dead by the end of Lolita. I was bored by the novel on my first read because Nabokov writes Humbert in such a way that he has no revelations, no change, no growth at all despite his obsession with beauty. Like Satan, Humbert cannot keep the beautiful thing; instead, he seeks to destroy it. In the face of beauty, both Satan and Humbert remain as they were, if not more monstrous. Both creatures’ love for beauty is corrupted — beauty motivates them to harm.

The memories evoked for me in reading the novel, though, never felt contaminated that way. I remembered those summer days. I remembered Central Park in its lush green glory. I remembered feeling the sun’s warmth on my tanned legs. I remembered a pure, crisp red apple in a napkin. And what I remembered most were feelings of tenderness and kindness, feelings so strong that they endured well beyond the summer’s end.

Yet I never felt the desire to rectify those moments. Even though I felt hopeless as I read Lolita, unhappy in my own post-graduate life, I remembered those days and was overcome by a feeling of safety, of comfort, that confirmed the goodness of the past. I was even motivated to create — hence why I am writing about it now. It was as if the beauty and purity of my memories became my own kind of faith, my own kind of hope. I believed in beauty again because it brightened my melancholia, because of aesthetic bliss and its infinite sustenance.

Change happens slowly. One does not wake up and suddenly know all of the answers. On “some distant day,” as Rilke says, we come to understand the resolutions to our deepest questions. Reading Lolita, remembering those moments, and slowly climbing back into a vague world — a world that was waiting for me to return to it nevertheless — felt like a slow, gradual arrival. It turns out your life will not abandon you, even if, for a brief period, you choose to abandon it. What this change looked like for me, materially, is hard to describe because I only realize it now: a lagged epiphany. What I can tell you is that beauty gave me hope, and hope held a mirror to the world. What I saw was goodness.

For Humbert, beauty functions more like a trick mirror than a real one. Humbert’s perspective is distorted: he uses his beautiful language to try and convince the reader of his humanity. Nabokov just gives the atrocity a tuxedo and a good haircut. That the novel uses beauty to both manipulate the reader and soothe the conscience of its sinful narrator is its genius. Nabokov cares little for mirrors. He knows his narrator was too weak to ever come across a real one. Epstein, of course, missed the point.

Lolita’s “meaning” is one degree removed from its characters because there is nothing, contextually, to them; the text resists interpretation in the classic sense: no meaning hides within its pages, its themes, its settings or dialogue. This is precisely Nabokov’s argument: that beauty is not always the truth, but beauty can trick one into believing it is. John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. presents the novel as evidence when, actually, there is none. The novel tricks the trick mirror. Ultimately, Lolita can tell us nothing about its narrator.

There it is! Veritas. Veritas…ver-i-tas: Veritas. I remember the Harvard seal imprinted atop our majestic library, beneath which ran rivers and tunnels of books — 3.5 million in count and 57 miles altogether. So many words, I thought as an undergraduate. So much knowledge. I had the feeling then that I was about to grow to accumulate it. “Enter to grow in wisdom, depart to better serve thy country and thy kind.” What would such wisdom entail? What would I come to know?

There is certainly so much to know: 3.5 million files publicly available in the DOJ’s Epstein Library, to be precise. I think Nabokov would find our attempt to understand a man like Epstein through the archive of his files ludicrous. It is the job of the modern academic, critic, sociologist — reader, even — to glean knowledge from a text’s material: Ezra Klein welcomed a “sociologist of the American elite” onto his podcast in February to dissect what the Epstein Files can show us about Epstein’s “masterful” deception and his “brilliant” ability to craft a global social network. He leads us to understand the emails reveal an “Epstein Class” that “sketches a devastating epistolary portrait of how social order functions.”

Just as I’m writing this, The New York Times pings me, inviting me to watch hours and hours of footage detailing Epstein’s private life. There will certainly be many more nonfiction books and many more podcast episodes and roundtables and think pieces — a full, bloated discourse — on the revelations of the files. Even after his death, Epstein, like Humbert, has convinced the whole world of his importance. How did he pull off such a globally lucrative and scandalous and salacious life? What an impressive, personable devil he was.

We don’t know why Epstein committed his crimes. No amount of novels, documents, or transcripts can bring us closer to the answer. But I couldn’t have known this as an eager young student, gazing upon Widener library. Sitting lonely in my New York apartment, surrounded by books, I felt empty of a true life. Consuming beauty does not bring one closer to the truth. We find truth when literature spurs a moment of aesthetic bliss, when literature touches the soul, and we are motivated to recreate aesthetic bliss for others, for the world. Literature exposes the reader to beauty, but beauty, if truly felt, instills in one the will to change.

Shortly after my day in Central Park, I was wandering the city, the way jobless post-grads do. Sweating in the heat, I decided to visit Rockefeller Center. By some miracle, I had a job interview at NBC in a few days. My desk would be housed in what is casually known as “30 Rock,” and I thought it might be a good idea to check it out, maybe say a prayer. Please, Lord, let me get the job. I also needed to pee. So I went inside to find a clean bathroom. The gold, sterile lobby blasted air conditioning at me, but there were no directions for the restroom to be found. A security guard kept glancing my way.

“Is there a bathroom near here?” I asked him.

“Have you traveled a lot recently?” he asked in return.

“Yes,” I replied.

“And you’re a writer?” he said.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Don’t tell anyone this,” he said. “But I kind of have psychic powers. That’s how I knew that. The bathroom is that way.”

I exited 30 Rock in a bit of a daze. I should have asked him, “Am I going to get the job?” I kicked myself. What did he mean by his mysterious response? Later that night, while lying in bed after dinner, I told my friend the story.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

He laughed. “I have no idea.”

I didn’t get the job, and my friend moved out west. It’s been almost two years, and I walked past Rockefeller Center just last week and laughed. Was that strange security guard still there? I didn’t know. What did it mean, what he had said to me? But that was never the right question. The better question was how that encounter would change me. It was a question I did not even have the knowledge, at the time, to ask.

We all know love can make us better people, and I wish I could tell you how it happened to me. But I don’t really know. There was an apple on a humid morning, push-ups in Central Park, a weird encounter with a psychic security guard, and then the end of what it was, which remained largely undefined. I don’t know, either, where things went wrong. That knowledge fails me. What matters is that whenever I think upon those few summer days, I still want to love other people.

That is how Lolita is a moral novel, because I read it, and I felt this way.

Lolita did not corrupt Epstein. The only kind of person who sees himself in the infamously odious Humbert Humbert is another Humbert Humbert, an Epstein, someone who, it should be said, would not know a mirror even if he sat before one.

When destruction reaches its last taboo — the violation of young women and girls — justice becomes the desire to create goodness. And when one encounters beauty, they face a choice: to sit “stupidly good” for a second, only to resume exactly as they were, or to seek to make the world more beautiful because it deserves to be made so. There is no beauty without change. There is no meaning beneath the Files, the commodities of scandal, the distractions from justice. Their meaning, and the opportunity for them to do any good, was lost a long time ago.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Will Diana is a 24-year-old writer currently living in Washington D.C. He is an Assistant Editor of The New Critic and writes fiction and poetry on his Substack, The Hermit Speaks.

Because I missed the opening night of the Polymarket pop-up bar in D.C., a hallucinatory associate of mine was explaining the strange events that may or may not have happened on Friday:

Early on, the floor-to-ceiling screens suddenly go black. What’s going on? Did the bomb finally drop? All around the bar, zombies, paranoids, and vampires of various transhistorical political stripes collectively let out a sports stadium cheer as they are plunged into darkness. Eight werewolves by the bathroom line lift their polos to reveal letters painted in black across their bellies: W-E-L-U-V-W-A-R. Twelve more scaly-skinned Hill-terns standing near the doorway lift theirs: D-R-O-P-T-H-A-B-O-M-B-Z. Pure joy spreads through the crowded bar: Nukes are falling, we’re all going to get rich!

But no bombz had fallen. A circuit had blown somewhere or something. No war, how unfortunate.

I wanted to know more, but my hallucinatory associate, shaking his head, only said:

Forget it, Diana. It’s Washington…

On Sunday, I gathered three of my friends and went in search of this mythic bar, The Situation Room, as more intel trickled in from my other associates. The Polymarket bar was only a weekend-long pop-up. They had rented Proper 21 K Street in downtown D.C., an abyssal dead zone haunted by dead-eyed corporate types, lantern-jawed lawyers, and sallow-cheeked lobbyists. You can expect to find bottom-feeding monsters downtown, not unlike those in nature documentaries. They’re long-unaccustomed to the sunlight, their bodies so transmogrified by their horrible labors that their eyes are sickly pale, their cheeks are puffy from the deep ocean pressure, their teeth are fanglike, and their skin has turned variously scaled or jellied by the strange leviathan logic of the ocean floor. The corporates that scuttle about in downtown D.C. only appear at these bars to drown their sorrows in five or six lonely afterwork cocktails before they return to their offices to burn the midnight oil. If anyone with hope left in their eyes happens to be lost at one of these bars, they are almost certainly only there for a corporate Happy Hour, where they will politely have one or two drinks, suck up to their bosses, pass typical conversation with their coworkers, and then hightail it to more hospitable climes where they can really indulge their perverted, Arlington-Dri-FIT-polo desires. In short, these downtown D.C. bars are haunts of America’s corporate extremophiles; they’re places emptied of any human emotions except those most beneficial for shareholder value, where no sane person would ever think to spend a night out. Proper 21 K Street is exactly one of these downtown bars.

I scrolled Twitter to see what more I could learn. The Polymarket bar was called The Situation Room, and according to the official Polymarket account, it was “the world’s first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation.” Cool shit...I like situations, I thought as, distracted by my phone, I walked into oncoming traffic and was nearly converted into bloodmist by a speeding, blacked-out SUV. Considering this ominous sign, I looked up and realized the Polymarket Situation Room was across the street.

The entire storefront was painted blue, a sight which would have been more impressive if it wasn’t just a small corner of a sprawling concrete-and-steel office building. I made one of my friends take a picture of me by the entrance while a Swedish-looking, 6-foot-3 man with blond hair down to his waist and a Berghain-approved, all-black fit watched me suspiciously. I, meanwhile, wore jorts I had jaggedly cut with a buck knife before writing my motto, “PEACE AND LOVE,” in bold sharpie letters across the bottom hem, a signed Kate Bollinger t-shirt, sandals, and a long orange piece of paracord that — as I had somehow lost my only belt — I was wearing around my waist. I’m not exactly sure why I dressed like this, but it felt right.

While my friend fumbled with his phone camera, the scary Swede eyeballed me. I started to wonder if I’d already been identified as an irrationalist idiot-schizo. Would the rationalists destroy me for being a freak? A vision entered my mind: a team of tall blond Swedes swooping down upon me — cleverly disguised as Soho hobos in their Issey Miyake outfits, or at least dressed strangely enough to distract from the P320s on their belts and earpieces dangling from their behooped ears — and dragging me into an unmarked van. They take me to a slaughterhouse-cum-grimy-club-basement-cum-Swedish-CIA-black-site, whereupon the whole lot of them subject me to cutting-edge shibari techniques as their ringleader, leather-clad and known only as “The Spider” (“Spindeln” in their native tongue) demands what exactly it is that I know and who sent me here — questions which, no matter what answer I give, are never enough to satisfy The Spider, who so cruelly continues to tighten the ropes. (Then, for some inexplicable reason, the tall blonde Swedish women of their group join in — variously being tortured and interrogated by each other, by me, and by the tall blond Swedish men — until eventually we all sort of just forget what was going on in the first place and decide to try out the Swedes’ suitcase of designer drugs before getting the hell out of Washington, D.C. in favor of a city where cool people actually hang out, a city where the Polymarket bar wouldn’t even be a noteworthy event.) Hurry up and take the picture, dude...I grumbled in my head as I stood by the entrance.

I got into the Polymarket bar just fine and stood blinking in the darkness for a moment. What was I doing here again? Where were the Swedish women? Where was The Spider? I looked around. Ah yes — the Polymarket bar, gambling, so on — I was reporting for The New Critic. After my eyes adjusted, I could make out finer details. The large interior had been stripped of almost all its tables to accommodate more people, but it was now nearly empty. A handful of people sat at the bar, politely chatting.

The walls had been covered with massive black curtains, in front of which dozens of TV screens were stacked to the ceiling. They mostly showed CNN, Fox News, and March Madness games. By the doorway, there was a touchscreen table where you could play a game involving gambling — without real money — but I gave up after a minute. The real attraction was the large LED sphere in the middle of the bar. It alternated screens, variously showing bets you could place on ongoing events around the world, a rippling American flag, and the unblinking alien-blood-blue Polymarket logo. A few people stood around the edges of the room, taking pictures or half-interestedly looking at the globe for a couple minutes before getting bored. One of my friends said the place was like a much sadder Dave & Buster’s. The Polymarket bar was shaping up to be a bad time.

I soon spotted a 24-year-old corporate vampire in khaki shorts and a Vineyard Vines quarter-zip taking pictures in front of the large sphere. Figuring him to be a former frat bro still ineffectually reliving his glory days in the DKE basement, I left the first round of drinks to one of my friends with a pat on the shoulder and approached Mr. Vineyard Vines.

“Want a Zyn?” I said, offering a 6mg Chill.

“Fuck yeah, brother. Thank you.”

“What do you think of this bar?”

“It’s kinda beat. I mean the only reason why I came here was to, like, monitor the situation, right? But you can’t even use Polymarket to bet on war or any of that shit. You can only do sports betting unless you, like, hack the system or something. I think I’m going to head to Dupont to drink in the sun.”

“Wait — you can’t bet on war?” I said.

“Nah man. Apparently it’s illegal or some bullshit. You can only do it outside the U.S. Fucking government regulations, man.”

“Shit, man.”

“They’ve got all these TVs with CNN and BBC and Bloomberg, and I’m here monitoring the situation as advertised, but I can only bet on March Madness, hockey, and women’s tennis.”

“A damn shame, man. Tell me, why do you want to bet on war in the first place?”

He thought about this for longer than I anticipated. Maybe he was a real philosopher who wore Vineyard Vines.

“I don’t know. To monitor the situation, I guess.”

When I returned to my friends, they had also been scheming. As I drank the Miller that awaited me, the friend who was sleeping on our couch told me he would go by the pseudonym Jake Patience Gittes, an out-of-town investigator with a leery gaze, a penchant for introducing himself as “Gittes, Jake Gittes,” a cigarette (invisible) that he was smoking indoors, and a strong suspicion that the Polymarket bar was hiding a dark secret. My other friend had taken on the impossible pseudonym Trevor Wellington McGuinness — a character from my recent short story about Polymarket — and my roommate was inexplicably now only known as Salamander.

“What do you know about this whole situation, darling?” Gittes was asking the server. “I’ve got a feeling this place is hiding something. Now, you’ve been here all weekend. Have you noticed anything suspicious?” He blew a long trail of invisible smoke into the air, dangling his invisible cigarette between his fingers beneath it.

“I can’t say,” the server said. “Your ash is looking a little long there…You know, you boys have a good time with your investigation, I need to go check on a couple tables.”

While my friends jabbered about their fictional investigation, I downloaded Polymarket on my phone, finally. The app required a picture of my license and my face. It has a pretty sleek design that makes it easy to place bets without having to think. After clicking everywhere in the app, I verified that there was indeed no way to bet on anything but sports. I wouldn’t be able to profit off death, torture, economic collapse, or human suffering in any way — and much to my disappointment, I found I was a little sad about this. I’d expected to place insanely evil bets on the exact number of missiles that would rain on a foreign city. Instead, I could only bet on some college basketball games.

I walked to the bar and chatted with a friendly guy who seemed to know what was going on. He informed me that prediction markets on Polymarket are regulated in the U.S., and it’s illegal to place bets on anything but sports. I asked if a VPN would work, but he shook his head and said something about the difference between geolocation and IP addresses. The only way I could bet on prediction markets would be to jailbreak my device or fly out of the country. Making an executive decision for the editors of The New Critic that it was not in the publication’s best interest for me to fly to Mexico to gamble, I decided to remain at The Situation Room, monitor the people monitoring the situation, and do some sports betting while drinking with my friends.

I chatted some more with the guy while waiting for my next beer. He was vaguely connected to the tech scene and had been here on opening night. The launch was initially restricted to a VIP list on Partiful. After the Partiful was leaked, Polymarket only let in people who they had specifically DM’d on Twitter. On launch day, a line stretched down the block as people waited for general entry. But the dozens of screens in the bar caused a power issue, and nothing played in The Situation Room for the rest of the night except for the glowing sphere, which lazily ambled between an American flag and that awful blue Polymarket logo. A band played their set for an hour while the VIPs monitored the situation in near-total darkness. The whole event was cancelled by 9:30, and the bar was closed.

Shaking hands with my new friend, I left to take a loop around the bar. I was feeling oddly jazzed. From my somewhat limited experience in tech circles, it’s pretty rare to meet someone with such an easygoing nature and as much enthusiasm as this guy. He was wiser than me in technological matters, but he also just seemed to be here for the ride.

Then I tried talking to the photographer. He was hard to miss in this huge bar that was populated by no more than two dozen people. Seemingly everywhere at once, he took pictures as people ogled the Polymarket sphere for their brief 30 seconds of interest; he took pictures of people drinking and chatting and playing at the singular game table; he took pictures of people allegedly monitoring the situation while only being able to gamble on sports.

For a couple minutes, I tried making small talk with him. I asked him if he’d seen anything cool, or whether he had any thoughts about the whole situation. He responded with stony boredom, saying he “only sees shapes on the screen,” and that he “doesn’t pay attention to what’s happening — only the image.” A true artist!

“I myself am somewhat of an artist,” I tried to explain as he sidled uncomfortably away from me, “Wanna take a picture of my jorts?”

By then, he had disappeared.

Now it turned out that Gittes and Salamander had each separately asked the photographer questions. Gittes had asked if he’d seen anything suspicious, to which the photographer understandably replied something vague and useless. Salamander asked if the photographer could point him in the direction of the bathroom, to which the artist-photographer apparently scoffed and told him that he only sees shapes on the screen — not exactly the conversationalist.

Throughout the night, however, I found that the artist-photographer seemed to have much better conversational skills when the fairer sex was involved. Immediately after I tried talking to him, I saw that the artist-photographer, a man who only saw shapes, had both his arms around the shoulders of two young blonde girls as he directed them to play with the game table before stepping back to take pictures. He was pretty lively with them. Throughout the night, I would see him hand the camera to pretty girls, invite them to take their own pictures, and shepherd these small groups around for photoshoots that involved a little inevitable contact while he demonstrated the exact right poses. A true artist indeed! He only saw shapes, but I started to wonder what sorts of shapes he was really staring at.

Having already exhausted available conversations with most of the characters at the Polymarket bar, I rejoined my friends to enjoy five or six light refreshments. The bar was basically empty, we couldn’t bet on prediction markets, and all four of us were severely hungover. None of this boded well, but I figured more beer wouldn’t hurt.

Well-refreshed at this point, I finally decided to start betting on Polymarket. I scrolled through the list of options. Having never gambled before, it all looked like gibberish to me, but the app made it delightfully easy to place bets anyway. One team had a lower percentage, and the other team had a higher percentage. The lower percentage had a higher return. I put $5 bets on everything with a close margin — games where the lower side had odds of winning around 40% — and closed my phone. All told, it only took me about 10 minutes to blow through $100.

Eventually, a man set up a laptop near us and started looking at several panels of code. At last! Here was a guy who looked like he was monitoring the situation at Polymarket’s Situation Room! After our series of increasingly impossible introductions — Diana, Gittes, McGuinness, and Salamander — we asked him if he was monitoring the situation.

“Indeed I am!” he said.

“Excellent,” I said. “I knew it. You looked exactly like the type of enterprising individual who would be monitoring the situation. Could you tell me what is going on with your laptop? What’s this stuff on the screen?”

He said he had established a “council” of “Claude bots” to analyze unusual “whale bets” on prediction markets. Whenever someone anywhere in the world bet big on something strange — like, say, $100k on the exact date that the U.S. attacked Iran — his council of Claude bots would receive that data, deliberate among themselves, and send him a brief memo regarding whether or not it looked like this whale had reliable insider knowledge. This system constantly monitored the situation for him, and while it sounded like a magical way to get rich quick, he told me it takes months to train the dataset for a decent return on investment. When I asked him what his return on investment was, he merely responded that it was a living.

I wanted to ask him more, specifically whether he could help me set up something similar for myself, but his friend called him over to the bar.

Pretty soon after that, we met a rather odd character. He came over to shake our hands, and he did not even bat an eye as we drunkenly belted our weird names. The man informed us that he was introducing himself to everyone at the Polymarket bar and that he had driven 45 minutes into the city for this exact purpose.

“You’ve an interesting phenotype,” Gittes hiccupped. “What’re ya, Ukranian?”

“Russian, my friend,” the guy responded.

He quickly told us his deal. He ran some sort of software that he described as “a free version of Palantir.” I have the name of it in my notes, but I typically try to make sure no one can make money off my writing unless they’re paying me — and besides, I don’t really understand what it is. After a brief conversation, he explained that he was really enjoying what was going on between Russia and Ukraine, that he was super excited about the war in Iran, and that he was super-duper-alley-ooper looking forward to what would happen next in Cuba. A man must have his passions, I suppose.

When he asked for our Instagrams, it turned out that everyone in the group mysteriously didn’t use social media much, except for me. That sucks for them, because now I have a buddy who could one day hook me up with the CIA for that sweet, sweet Paris Review funding.

Later, while Gittes and I were chatting up the bartenders, the photographer spoke past us to the (female) bartenders, informing them that there was a congressman sitting at the bar. Woah wait. Who? I asked. Which guy? The photographer looked at me as though I didn’t exist. Quickly, though, one of the female bartenders asked the same question, and the photographer pointed him out. I inspected the congressman while Gittes explained his theory about tunnels below the bar. The congressman had a nice suit, I guess, and was very photogenic as he leaned against the bar with a glass of whiskey in one hand. I considered going up to chat with him, but I took one glance at my jorts and paracord belt and decided against being dropkicked by a team of Swedish Secret Service agents who practice an alphabet of BDSM kinks in their free time.

The rest of the night went okay. The bar remained more or less at about 10% capacity. The photographer continued drooling stupidly as he followed around a small crop of young women. Everyone spoke politely among each other, looked up at the TV screens every once in a while, and seemed to be not really enjoying themselves all that much.

Based on people’s reactions to the bar on Twitter, it is probably safe to say my friends and I were the only ones having fun at the Polymarket bar. Last I remember, McGuinness and I were belting out a Marty Robbins song in the bathroom before we finally decided to make tracks. Gittes had a flight to catch, Salamander was still nursing his bad hangover, and I had a piece to start writing.

Sobering up after a cold shower and a couple hot coffees, I considered what it all meant. Like basically everything else in life, I wasn’t really sure: I’m a writer, not a thinker. Probably, if I really understood the connective tissue between all these things, I’d either be getting filthy rich using a council of Claude bots to hook me up to insider trading opportunities, or I’d have long since run away from this town to go hide in a cabin in the woods. Instead, though, I spent my day in the den of the beast, blindly fumbling for an exit with one hand and writing about it with the other.

What did it mean? I kept asking myself, a question which I envisioned the New Critic editors asking me in a week’s time. Why all the noise? I had written down all the details from the night, but I still wasn’t exactly sure why the whole thing made me feel so sick. I took a walk. I sat down in the park and looked at the stream. Bats flitted overhead. I walked down the dark trails, sniffing the new spring buds and the cherry blossom scents on the trees, and I couldn’t help but feel that The Situation Room was a vision of what the future could be.

If Polymarket is the future, then the future is a handful of people sitting around a near-empty bar in another one of those places that American progress has brutally gutted, reconfigured, and filled with people whose desires are atomized, packaged, and profitable.

The future is a handful of people not having a good time, awkwardly hoping to lick up whatever clout happened to remain on the floor from an event that didn’t really have any clout to begin with.

The future is a handful of people using predictive technology to passively make egregious wealth off predictive markets so that they can have more time to go to these shitty bars in downtown D.C. and talk about the predictive technology helping them make money on predictive markets.

The future is a closed loop spiraling ever more recklessly toward efficiency and progress, spiraling upward or downward or sideways but always toward these goals at the expense of everything else — an ouroboros eating its tail.

The future is a confederacy of technocrats hastening the apocalypse solely because they bet big on the end of the world and have no choice now but to chase the high of that postapocalyptic parlay finally hitting. If their cutting-edge, super-rational predictions are to be made accurate, then they’ve got to do everything to ensure they come true. And all of them are so caught up in the conceptual future of their utilitarian outcomes that they hardly stop to think about the apocalypse they’re hastening for no reason at all except to hasten it. But who am I to judge? I showed up late to the party anyway, when everyone was counting up whatever they’d won for the long winter ahead. I showed up so late to the party that everyone still lingering had forgotten how to party and mostly just sat around staring at their phones, alone together, only paying enough attention to wonder who the hell is that freak stumbling around in jagged jorts? Everyone there had already had their fun; I’d only shown up in time for the nasty hangover that the whole world would have to feel.

Why would anyone work so hard for a future they’ll never enjoy? What good will your money serve you when all the fun’s been killed? What good will your money do for you when you’re already dead?

When I checked my phone the next morning, I saw that my gambling had actually gone pretty well. Somehow I had turned my $100 into $160 after pressing random buttons in the Polymarket app — a 6% return on investment according to my math, not bad. So I guess everyone got what they wanted at the end of the party. Or, at least, those who didn’t probably won’t survive to tell the tale.

*Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to keep The New Critic alive.

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THE NEW CRITIC

*Von Bar, NY. Bleecker and Bowery. Friday, March 20, 2026.

The New Critic attends the “Lit Mags Party” of The Republic of Letters.

At a quarter past nine, we step to the microphone.

We are to deliver a manifesto to an uproarious crowd; a manifesto that will announce our secession from all who came before.

Seven editors present 42 theses.

We print those theses below.*

THE 42 THESES OF SECESSION

| No. 1 | 
   All of the world’s problems are the creation of our elders. 
      Now they want to make those problems our responsibility. 
         So be it. 
            We will solve all the problems in the world. 

| No. 2 | 
   We are the establishment establishment, 
      the anti-establishment anti-establishment, 
         the establishment anti-establishment, 
            the anti-establishment establishment. 

| No. 3 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC is authoritarian. 
      We are authors, and contrarians. 

| No. 4 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC is the gold standard. 
      THE NEW CRITIC wants your cash. 

| No. 5 | 
   You were there the day print died. 
      We’ll be there the day print dies again. 

| No. 6| 
   THE NEW CRITIC is always alive. 
      It will never die. 
         It has always been. 
            It always will be. 

| No. 7 | 
   Hurl no hate toward the antagonist.

| No. 8 | 
   When you love a woman, 
      that’s THE NEW CRITIC. 

| No. 9 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC wants to bring the real world to the internet 
      and the internet to the real world. 
         We want to make the two indistinguishable. 

| No. 10 | 
   We write the world as we experience it 
      and experience the world as we write it. 
         We never leave our rooms. 

| No. 11 | 
   We see ourselves as both shaped by and reacting against 
      the chief moment of our history. 
         September 14, 1982. 
            That was the day of the first issue of USA Today. 

| No. 12 | 
   The NEW CRITIC writer takes one afternoon to write their story
      and 10,000 years to live it. 

| No. 13 | 
   Write for no audience. 

| No. 14 | 
   To utilize Substack is to make love to the cyberspace, 
      to find one’s match across the cosmos of doctored user profiles. 
         All writers are virile and attractive. 
            Writing is indicative of other things. 
               Writers always have the blood pumping. 
                  So do non-writers. 
                     It is the way of things. 

| No. 15 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC writer doesn’t write at all; 
      they merely find their stories fully formed in the darkness beneath the earth. 

| No. 16 | 
   ALL NEW CRITIC writers write with typewriters.

| No. 17 | 
   ALL NEW CRITIC writers have nice eyes. 

| No. 18 | 
   The NEW CRITIC writer doesn’t believe in ideas. 
      They put their faith in the sword. 

| No. 19 | 
   We write from the heart of darkness to the heart of darkness. 
      The heart of darkness, 
         in other words, 
            is THE NEW CRITIC. 
               THE NEW CRITIC is the heart, 
                  of darkness. 
                     Darkness is the heart of THE NEW CRITIC. 
                        The heart is the darkness of THE NEW CRITIC. 
                           The darkness of THE NEW CRITIC is the heart. 

| No. 20 | 
   We write to get filthy rich and famous. 

| No. 21 | 
   The divine spirit moves between our sentences. 
      Our sentences are moved by the divine spirit. 
         Our editors move the sentences in our pieces. 
            We are our editors. 
               Our editors contain the spirit of the divine spirit. 

| No. 22 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC fashions something 
      lasting out of silly internet discourse. 

| No. 23 | 
   The best writers don’t think. 
      Introspection is not for THE NEW CRITICs. 

| No. 24 | 
   The internet runs in our veins;
      we refuse to drain our own blood. 

| No. 25 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC aims to break you down and build you up. 
      And break you down. 
         And build you up. 

| No. 26 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC has no resentment 
      toward the existing literary institutions 
         but also no mercy. 

| No. 27 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC stands among all of us. 
      We are THE NEW CRITIC. 
         We stand before you. 

| No. 28 | 
   The gen z NEW CRITIC writer is not “political”
      in the way that Gawker was political
         and not “not political” 
            in the way that The Free Press is “not political.” 

| No. 29 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC is all about the old critics. 
      We are writers. 
         We are birds looking at the frozen sea
            and flying past the frozen sea. 
               We seek warmth, 
                  the heat of summer. 
                     We leave the axing of the sea to others, 
                        to those who can lift the axe. 

| No. 30 | 
   The gen z essayist is aware of their tradition 
      and has read their Honor Levy,
         Emily Sundberg, 
            Dean Kissick, 
               Sam Kriss, 
                  Becca Rothfeld, 
                     Merve Emre, 
                        Christian Lorentzen, 
                           Lauren Oyler, 
                              Patricia Lockwood, 
                                 Emily Witt, 
                                    Elvia Wilk, 
                                       Alice Bolin, 
                                          Michelle Dean, 
                                             Molly Young, 
                                                Tavi Gevinson, 
                                                   Brandon Taylor, 
                                                      Vinson Cunningham, 
                                                         Wesley Morris, 
                                                            Leslie Jamison, 
                                                               Sheila Heti, 
                                                                  Kate Zambreno, 
                                                                     Lauren Groff, 
                                                                        Ariana Reines, 
                                                                           Garth Greenwell, 
                                                                              Benjamin Kunkel, 
                                                                                 Keith Gessen, 
                                                                                    Mark Greif, 
                                                                                       Chad Harbach, 
                                                                                          Joshua Cohen, 
                                                                                            Ben Lerner, 
                                                                                               Tom McCarthy, 
                                                                                                  Jonathan Lethem, 
                                                                                                     Emily Gould, 
                                                                                                        Gary Indiana, 
                                                                                                           Chris Kraus, 
                                                                                                              Eileen Myles, 
                                                                                                                 Maggie Nelson, 
                                                                                                                    Geoff Dyer, 
                                                                                                                       Will Self, 
                                                                                                                          David Shields, 
                                                                                                                             Olivia Laing, 
                                                                                                                                Hermione Lee, 
   Claire Tomalin, 
      Fintan O’Toole, 
         Colm Toibin, 
            John Banville, 
              Marina Warner, 
                 Ali Smith, 
                    Frank Rich, 
                       James Wolcott, 
                          Walter Kirn, 
                             Laura Kipnis, 
                                Daniel Mendelsohn, 
                                   Adam Gopnik, 
                                      Louis Menand, 
                                         Stephen Greenblatt, 
                                           Helen Vendler, 
                                              Michael Wood, 
                                                 Robert Hughes, 
                                                    George Steiner, 
                                                       Edward Said, 
                                                          Fredric Jameson, 
                                                              Terry Eagleton, 
                                                                 Harold Bloom, 
                                                                    Anne Carson, 
                                                                        Mary Ruefle, 
                                                                            Zadie Smith, 
                                                                                James Wood, 
                                                                                   Hilton Als, 
                                                                                      Margo Jefferson, 
                                                                                         Martin Amis, 
                                                                                            Christopher Hitchens, 
                                                                                               Clive James, 
                                                                                                  Julian Barnes, 
                                                                                                     James Salter, 
                                                                                                        Vivian Gornick, 
                                                                                                           Cynthia Ozick, 
                                                                                                              Joan Didion, 
                                                                                                                 Janet Malcolm, 
                                                                                                                    Susan Sontag, 
                                                                                                                       Renata Adler, 
                                                                                                                          Pauline Kael, 
                                                                                                                             Elizabeth Hardwick, 
   Mary McCarthy, 
      Hannah Arendt, 
         Italo Calvino, 
            Lionel Trilling, 
               Alfred Kazin, 
                  Irving Howe, 
                     Dwight Macdonald, 
                        Philip Rahv, 
                           Clement Greenberg, 
                              Robert Warshow, 
                                 Randall Jarrell, 
                                    John Berryman, 
                                       Robert Lowell, 
                                          Elizabeth Bishop, 
                                             John Ashbery, 
                                                Frank O’Hara, 
                                                   Kenneth Koch, 
                                                      James Schuyler, 
                                                         Allen Tate, 
                                                            Robert Penn Warren, 
                                                               Kenneth Burke, 
                                                                  Northrop Frye, 
                                                                     William Empson, 
                                                                        Hugh Kenner, 
                                                                           Frank Kermode, 
                                                                              Marshall McLuhan, 
                                                                                 Jacques Barzun, 
                                                                                    Gore Vidal, 
                                                                                       Truman Capote, 
                                                                                          James Baldwin, 
                                                                                             Norman Mailer, 
                                                                                                Saul Bellow, 
                                                                                                   Ralph Ellison, 
                                                                                                      Rebecca West, 
                                                                                                         Cyril Connolly, 
                                                                                                            Evelyn Waugh, 
                                                                                                               Graham Greene, 
                                                                                                                  Edmund Wilson, 
                                                                                                                     Joseph Mitchell, 
                                                                                                                        E. B. White, 
                                                                                                                           James Agee, 
                                                                                                                              Dorothy Parker, 
   James Thurber, 
      Robert Benchley, 
         H. L. Mencken, 
            Virginia Woolf, 
               Lytton Strachey, 
                  Clive Bell, 
                     Max Beerbohm, 
                        T. S. Eliot, 
                           Ezra Pound, 
                              Wyndham Lewis, 
                                 Paul Valery, 
                                    Andre Gide, 
                                       Karl Kraus, 
                                          Walter Benjamin, 
                                             Robert Musil, 
                                                T. E. Hulme, 
                                                   Arthur Symons, 
                                                      Edmund Gosse, 
                                                         Patrick Leigh Fermor, 
                                                            Will Diana, 
                                                               Charles Baudelaire, 
                                                                  Gustave Flaubert, 
                                                                     Friedrich Nietzsche, 
                                                                        Walter Pater, 
                                                                           Matthew Arnold, 
                                                                              John Ruskin, 
                                                                                 Thomas Carlyle, 
                                                                                    Heinrich Heine, 
                                                                                       Arthur Schopenhauer, 
                                                                                          John Henry Newman, 
                                                                                             Leslie Stephen, 
                                                                                                William Hazlitt, 
                                                                                                   Charles Lamb, 
                                                                                                      Leigh Hunt, 
                                                                                                         Samuel Coleridge, 
                                                                                                            William Wordsworth, 
                                                                                                               Johann Goethe, 
                                                                                                                  Friedrich Schiller, 
                                                                                                                     Denis Diderot, 
                                                                                                                        Voltaire, 
                                                                                                                           Jean Rousseau, 
                                                                                                                              William Shakespeare, 
   Edmund Burke, 
      Thomas Paine, 
         Oliver Goldsmith, 
            Samuel Johnson, 
               James Boswell, 
                  Edward Gibbon, 
                     Joseph Addison, 
                        Richard Steele, 
                           Jonathan Swift, 
                              Alexander Pope, 
                                 Horace Walpole, 
                                    Laurence Sterne, 
                                       Blaise Pascal, 
                                          Michel de Montaigne, 
                                             Francis Bacon, 
                                                Thomas Browne, 
                                                   Robert Burton, 
                                                      Samuel Pepys, 
                                                         John Donne, 
                                                            George Herbert, 
                                                               Philip Sidney, 
                                                                  Christopher Marlowe, 
                                                                     Ben Jonson, 
                                                                        Edmund Spenser, 
                                                                           Walter Raleigh, 
                                                                              Thomas More, 
                                                                                 Erasmus, 
                                                                                    Niccolo Machiavelli, 
                                                                                       Giorgio Vasari, 
                                                                                          Miguel de Cervantes, 
                                                                                             Petrarch, 
                                                                                                Dante, 
                                                                                                   Geoffrey Chaucer, 
                                                                                                      Abelard, 
                                                                                                         Saint Augustine, 
                                                                                                            Saint Jerome, 
                                                                                                               Plutarch, 
                                                                                                                  Lucian, 
                                                                                                                     Marcus Aurelius, 
                                                                                                                        Quintilian, 
                                                                                                                           Seneca, 
                                                                                                                              Tacitus, 
                                                                                                                                 Julius Caesar, 
                                                                                                                                    Cicero, 
                                                                                                                                       Horace, 
                                                                                                                                          Ovid, Lucretius, 
   Virgil, 
      Longinus, 
         Aristotle, 
            Plato, 
               Xenophon, 
                  Herodotus, 
                     and Homer. 

| No. 31 | 
   A specter is haunting writing, 
      the specter of dull writing by middle-aged men. 
         Why not replace them with young men? 
            All from the Ivy League. 

| No. 32 | 
   THE NEW CRITIC publishes those who have read at least one book. 

| No. 33 | 
   Be kind, 
      be curious, 
         do not look down upon those 
            who don’t choose to read or write. 
               Encourage them instead 
                  to take up these activities 
                     with patience. 

| No. 34 | 
   Always cry in public. 
      Always be suspicious. 
         Write only about love. 

| No. 35 | 
   What is waiting? 
      There is no such thing. 
         There is no moment when life aligns for action, 
            when the world sits at the ready. 
               If we see a building on fire, 
                  we run into it. 
                     If we spot a ledge, 
                        we jump from it.
                           If we sight a glimmer of life, 
                              we seize it by the throat. 

| No. 36 | 
   Seek not
      to take up arms 
         in whatever we call
            the culture wars. 

| No. 37 | 
   The NEW CRITIC writer only does what they love, 
      which is write. 

| No. 38 | 
   No one is a voice of their generation. 

| No. 39 | 
   The mission of youth is to be an icebreaker, 
      a glacier destroyer sent to explode 
         the cold, 
            arctic heart of the world. 

| No. 40 | 
   We write as if we will die tomorrow 
      but live as if we will live forever. 

| No. 41 | 
   At THE NEW CRITIC, 
      we edit as if our lives depend on it, 
         because they do. 

| No. 42 | 
   The deluge of thought is the deluge of THE NEW CRITIC. 
      THE NEW CRITIC is a deluge, 
         and you are standing in it.

| Signed |
   Tessa Augsberger
      William Diana
         Theodore Gary
            Elan Kluger
               Rufus Knuppel
                  Isabel Mehta
                     Owen Yingling

*Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to keep The New Critic alive.

Paid subscriptions fund our magazine. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions. 

If you read The New Critic and take any delight or solace in our project, please consider a paid subscription to this flesh-and-blood gen z magazine.*

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THE YOUNG AMERICANS

THE NEW CRITIC
—
POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Josie Barboriak and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Josie’s essay “Good Reading, Good Thinking, Good Writing.”

Read Josie's essay

Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our interview series, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions. If you read The New Critic and take any delight or solace in our project, please consider a paid subscription to this flesh-and-blood gen z magazine.

Subscribe now

Below we discuss The Magic Mountain, crushing on Markiplier, having CIA in the family, Mating, and the irony and attractiveness of critics.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

JOSIE …I have a bone to pick with how everything I’ve read by Merve Emre is described as ironic. Like, it’s all irony. It’s irony all the way down.

TESSA Can you say something about that? Because you do have that line in your piece, where you talk about how Emre says Rothfeld doesn’t understand Rooney’s irony.

JOSIE Yeah, with irony, it really puts a wall between the person who got the irony and the person who didn’t. It also ignores the fact that I think most people who read Sally Rooney did not really take it ironically. We’re like, Wow, this is a romance novel. I see myself in this character. And obviously anything that’s successfully ironic can also be taken straight, but it’s a hard tactic to use. And I’m sure I’ll end up talking about this later, but I’ve definitely been thinking about this in conjunction with my reading of Nietzsche. I’ve been pondering to what extent I should have actually written this piece using Merve Emre as some kind of occasion to talk about criticism, and how maybe this is a truth that I should have kept within the University of Chicago and the people who were in attendance at these particular events.

RUFUS Why do you say that?

JOSIE Because I think Emre’s an academic who speaks publicly, and it’s very hard to move through all of these different publics. Her podcast, which I haven’t really listened to, is called “The Critic and Her Publics.” There are so many publics, so many groups of people in which you may or may not be understood. When you’re trying to build up or understand critical authority, there are two kinds of risks all of the time, and I don’t know which is worse.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Josie Barboriak is a 21-year-old writer from Durham, North Carolina studying at the University of Chicago. She will begin training at Johns Hopkins University to become a sociologist in the fall.

I recently found myself in a spirited public disagreement with a famous literary critic. Onstage at the front of the theater, two critics sat, armchairs angled toward each other and the audience. The philosopher and public figure Agnes Callard was joined by literary critic Merve Emre (who writes for The New Yorker and is a professor of creative writing and criticism at Wesleyan University) for a University of Chicago “Night Owls” event. Emre stared me down, her legs crossed in furry, tall boots, and I tried not to shake in mine.

In the exchange between the philosopher who writes on literature and the professor of literary criticism trained in theory, both of whom frequently address the public, the difference that stands out most is stylistic. I say stylistic to refer to the ways it is possible to carry oneself and speak, in addition to what is visible from a photograph. After all, both thinkers clearly put energy into aesthetic presentation. Prior to the well-attended event, I had learned from a Business Insider profile that, between undergrad at Harvard and graduate school at Yale, Emre had worked at Bain as a consultant. It shows in her air of unflinching confidence, how she stares straight into your eyes and speaks clearly. Her features are sharp and birdlike, and her outfits for the UChicago event series consisted of jeans and slinky sweaters, low-profile items paired with the aforementioned fur-covered boots. Approximately a third of the reactions to her campus visit I heard, mostly from women, were some awed variation of, “Well, she’s so pretty.” It was like the statement had to be disclosed before further speech, as though some conflict of interest preceded evaluation.

Callard, on the other hand, looks into the distance while she talks and approaches the audience as if on a journey to her point. She wears a blue dress with an eccentric print that she says came from an old book jacket, pink tights, and metallic pink loafers I’ve seen her wear often. Pieces of her salt-and-pepper hair often escape her messy bun to frame her face, which typically wears circular glasses and an inquisitive expression. When speaking, her tone sort of flits around; she seems to be focused more on the unseen object of discussion, the novel or the philosopher at hand, than on the specific person to whom she is talking. Callard has drawn ire for her attempts to live out her practice of philosophy, which often seems unconventional; to give you an idea, she once spoke at a Valentine’s Day event proposing that achieving freedom of speech within a romantic relationship would require dating a person radically different from oneself — perhaps even a Nazi. Her intellectual hero, about whom she has written extensively, is Socrates.

My question posed to the two was some form, less eloquently phrased, of the following: Is criticism just discourse of one judgment opposed to another, or does it build to something? Is there any sort of epistemic ground by which we can judge one attempt to communicate a judgment to be better, or more important, than another? What is criticism, if not a systematic attempt to understand why a certain type of aesthetic object resonates with a certain group of people at a specific time?

In response to my question from the audience, Emre challenged the idea that criticism could create a knowledge claim. In return, I cited, as an example of a good and important work, one of my favorite works of criticism, Becca Rothfeld on Sally Rooney’s “Normal Novels” and the fantasy of achieving universally recognized excellence without interrogating one’s egalitarian ideals. Emre responded by saying Rothfeld was wrong about Rooney because Rothfeld had missed Rooney’s irony, and I could see that Emre and I were not going to agree about what made one work of criticism more important than another.

I said something resembling, “So is criticism really just that one person makes one argument, and then another person disagrees, and none of it goes anywhere?” then Emre said something like, “Why is that a problem if it is?” and I made some vague, hopeful verbal gesture at something more, and somewhere along the line, Callard came in and asked if the most important question to ask about literature wasn’t indeed about the ways in which novels teach us how to live, which she said is an undeniably moral question, and then they kept talking, but I had urgent reading to attend to before the end of the night and ducked out.

“That Merve back and forth was crazy…I would’ve been shaking,” my friend texted me a few minutes after eleven. Sitting in the library, I recused myself from my Nietzsche and, after clarifying over text that I had been shaking, began the long process of attempting to figure out just what it was I had been trying to say.

On the first floor of the library, I was joined by another friend — one who stands out to me for his halting, deliberate way of speaking while thinking (a habit which I exhibit occasionally myself but grows ever more pronounced when this friend and I get to talking in a situation in which what is being expressed feels difficult to capture but vital to do well, such that one must choose every word carefully, or backtrack and edit). His manner of speech reminded me of writing: one can write carelessly and with abandon and then revise, or one can write meticulously and slowly, with a weight to each word. Both encompass the assemblage of words akin to good thought, but to speak so eloquently off-the-cuff in response to newly asked questions seems, to me, suspect.

The Night Owls event had been preceded by a lunch in which Emre spoke to a small group of undergraduates of the literature-philosophy-magazine-writing sort in which she walked us through her career path from editing to writing criticism to writing about books for The New Yorker. Most surprising was Emre’s dismissal of “close-reading” as a standard of criticism: according to Emre, the long-lauded Humanities 10 course at Harvard, which served as her reference point, produced “readers,” not “writers,” and she left Harvard thinking that teaching people how to read texts well was an entirely different skill than teaching them how to write about them.

At the end of the lunch, I approached Emre one-on-one and said that different people might understand close-reading differently. After all, we were sitting in the room that typically hosts gatherings for the Fundamentals major, Chicago’s undergraduate course of study based around the close-reading of texts; many of those lunching with Emre had spent generative time agonizing over what it means to read different types of texts well and attempting to achieve it ourselves in our own writing. Her response was that what I was describing was similar to what she had encountered at Harvard in the 2000s, and what she was advocating for was something different. This felt too swift of a shutdown; it rubbed me the wrong way. Leaving the building, a few of us discussed, with some incredulity, Emre’s approach to reading and to addressing the students in the room as something between interlocutors and members of her audience. The friend who had sent me the Business Insider article, whose interpersonal style tends toward the brash, put forth the possibility that Emre didn’t really know what she was talking about.

To understand Emre’s work is to take for granted from the very beginning that she does know what she is talking about. She writes, in her reviews, of readers being “in on jokes” or failing to be, and she is fascinated by problems of categorization and typification of people in real life and of characters in novels. I suspect Emre enjoys thinking of literary type as a thing to be played with, which perhaps carries with it a tendency toward solid lines and sleight-of-hand.

At the lunch, Emre had referred to herself offhand as a sort of “literary sociologist.” As a person conducting research within the discipline of sociology, someone who feels a deep discomfort with the project of putting other thinking minds into categorical boxes, I felt myself bristle at the term. If one’s work is primarily literary, they operate in the domain of aesthetic value, which must necessarily be freed from responsibility to some external world; if one’s work is purely sociological, it is constantly implicated in its own responsibilities to the world it tries to understand. The struggle to apprehend the empirical reality of the social world outside of oneself, paired in slick conjunction with the artist’s eloquence, seemed to me to represent a curious kind of authority over knowledge, and it was an authority Emre took up swiftly.

In writing, that authority is constituted mostly within Emre’s verbose style, which is made up of long lists, oddly placed words that register as possible callbacks to works of theory, or emphatic phrases which seem to be trying to mean something. The effect is a kind of dazzling-by-confusion which tends toward agreement. Okay, sure, you think. I guess. It sounds like you know what you’re talking about. A few days after the exchange, I sat down to read what Emre herself had written about Rooney’s irony and found myself doubting my own powers of comprehension. Though her language looked beautiful, some of her paragraphs took me multiple reads to understand; they made sweeping statements whose justifications were difficult to track. Am I having a stroke? I thought. Even in writing, I found it difficult to understand what was actually meant.

As a reader-turned-writer, to admit confusion could seem to compromise the prospect of one’s own authority or leave one vulnerable to being blamed for misunderstanding. Looking for a sanity check, and appealing to a higher authority of my own, I talked through my attempted close-read of Emre’s piece in office hours with a professor. As we tried to make sense of the argument together, the professor concurred that her style was more confusing than it had to be. I wondered if the ambiguity in who was to blame for my confusion was part of the tactic itself; rather than the disclosure of some incommunicable truth being the point of the style, Emre was certain all the way through, and woe was the reader who found themselves on the other side of a brick wall, “not getting it.” The substance of her style seemed to lie in these moments of obfuscation itself. Instead of trying to deconstruct the wall, or attempting to scale it, the most natural response for the reader seemed to leap over it unthinkingly — to create the appearance of “getting it” by any means necessary.

Part of the problem of style for the critic is the difference that appears between the acts of thinking and of writing. Nietzsche put it well: “Most thinkers write badly because they communicate to us not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of their thoughts.” The thought is the argument which appears to the person reading or hearing it as formed and artful. Expressing a thought which one has previously prepared, one can, perhaps, make eye contact with one’s interlocutor and smoothly form the shapes of the words, delivering the idea through to its conclusion.

Thinking, on the other hand, appears in the stilted manner of some of the most enriching exchanges between friends or seminar contributions. The phrases come out in fragments which predate sense. A thought half-prepared will stall out before it edits and backtracks, returning to an earlier point in the sentence or newly recasting an earlier aside as the actual center of what one is trying to say. If a great written argument or piece emerges from such an exercise, it will be later, in writing, when the paragraphs settle and click into their positions on the page. As Nietzsche points out, if we were to try to transcribe thinking in the form of thought-as-appears-out-loud, it would be probably quite bad as a piece of writing.

Rather than the fluid style of a direct argument, readers need, particularly in times in which the gulf between the idealistic space of the academic and the “public” space of art-as-entertainment seems to be growing, the type of criticism which takes the form of an impasse, something that tries to hold, within it, thinking. Such a critic must combine the practice of the thinker with the banked knowledge of the scholar and the stylistic flourish of the artist. In addressing a public, her most important role is to demonstrate, and thus call the public into, the process of making a judgment. The critical posture taken up in a more Socratic style, which calls the audience to question, is one uniquely suited to address people in this way.

When I talk about criticism, I am referring to written work which makes a judgment about art (primarily literature). This judgment is oriented toward some public — not only professional readers and viewers of art but those who interact with it in their leisure time. We look, in our free time, for what we do not have in our working lives — perhaps intrigue, or mystery, or friendship. Thus, as critics, we must begin by knowing we are writing to the vast majority of people for whom literature functions as an escape.

One may bristle at the term “escape.” It could, perhaps, denote an unserious reader, or a reader whose engagement with literature cannot be but affective, shallow, or masturbatory. I say “escape” not in a pejorative sense but in a practical sense: reading allows people to keep alive parts of themselves which, for whatever reason, they do not get to exercise in their daily lives. As an alternative to the arbitrary frustrations of living or working in situations in which one feels stifled, literature’s ethical importance lies in providing a chance to exercise one’s imagination.

Like thinking, an aesthetic experience is passive; the person having an aesthetic experience removes themselves from the physical world to trouble or delight the mind in another one. Images fly through our heads as we sit enthralled in the world before us, the thinking world which offers an alternative to that of our immediate surroundings. Where the activity of thinking necessitates an inward turn, a judgment is an outward expression of an evaluation. Judging comes from imagining an art object from multiple standpoints — as others in a shared world might experience it — to determine the object’s meaning in a particular moment. The experience of an art object and the meaning we draw from that experience thus have a peculiar relationship: art can inspire some external creation of meaning — the judgment as public action — or preclude it by taking its place.

As it is located squarely within the experience of the individual, the aesthetic experience itself is morally and politically neutral. Consumption of looksmaxxing TikToks or romantasy novels certainly involves a great deal of feeling, but it’s hard to argue that any of what is being consumed is technically an impressive art object whose craft we ought respect, or that it is opening new and promising venues of human experience that speak to the present moment in a life-giving manner. Those who cry out, in reference to the state of popular publishing, “At least they’re reading!” miss this point. Art is and ought to be about more than having been conditioned to consider the sort of market democracy which draws together what David Foster Wallace once referred to as “The Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained.” Just because certain genres are popular or sell widely does not mean they are good. Just because a novel makes you feel good does not mean that it is.

Rather than attempting to communicate a purely subjective feeling, as an art object does, or advance a scholarly argument grounded in the history of literary movements, a work of criticism must find a way to enclose within it a process of judgment itself, and the critic must find a style which can perform this kind of invocation. One essay that exemplifies the thinker’s struggle to understand an aesthetic experience is not about any traditional form of art but about the sport of tennis. In Wallace’s essay “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” he describes the “kinetic beauty” of the top athlete as one which constitutes “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body,” beauty which is near-impossible to evoke or explain with only specific observation:

“The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws…He seems both more and less substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.”

You can feel Wallace struggling writing this paragraph; you can see his explanatory style in every sentence. He gestures at the metaphysical, hedges, asserts it again. Throughout the essay, he seems to be closest to what he’s trying to communicate when his words might seem the most outlandish; elsewhere, he falls back on the abstraction of the word “truth,” a great and lofty word beyond immediate presence, desperately trying to give the reader what he so clearly feels: that Federer’s greatness as an athlete has a sort of objective metaphysical component to it that commands attention — that his greatness is a sort of argument for a metaphysical ground to goodness.

Wallace’s task is impossible because the moral world does not allow such a simplification, such a perfect argument for equating strength, beauty, truth, and goodness. The essay is about Federer, but there is another presence in the text without whom it would be sorely lacking — that of honorary coin-tosser William Caines, a 7-year-old boy with cancer, who Wallace sees, and records, then seems unable to contend with, as a writer, in the piece he wants to write. It means that, while Wallace is compelled by the metaphysical force of the aesthetic, he cannot go without acknowledging the most difficult sort of truth, that “whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux that produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.”

Wallace’s narration looks at Caines by means of looking away from him. His decision to orient the logic of the essay around Caines is a deliberate one. In reading this essay for a college course on aesthetic encounters, a friend of mine said she found Wallace’s treatment of Caines as a character “totally disgusting” for trying to fit him into some grand story of metaphysics — using Caines, perhaps, as grist for Federer’s mill. Maybe what Wallace is doing here is repulsive. But at the same time, Wallace’s write-up can’t exist without the kid with cancer; it would be just as dishonest to omit him from the story as it would be to assert that all weakness is weak because it is bad. He’s a kid, you know. He didn’t deserve to have cancer. One knows this cognitively. Unfortunately, many children have cancer, and I don’t know most of their names. I only know William Caines’s name because he was in proximity to the great tennis player Roger Federer when the great writer David Foster Wallace was covering his game.

The task of criticism, then, can be seen as that of the negotiation between two domains: that of the beautiful — that which is aesthetically powerful and compelling and gives us an impression — and that of those who are not powerful — those who have not been allowed to exercise the highest potentialities of human freedom, who are waiting in the wings of history just on the edge of sight. Wallace cannot avoid being implicated within the piece, in praising his choice of subject in Federer and thus having to contend with all that does not fit justly into this praise. What is honest and compelling in Wallace’s writing is its appreciation of the stakes of being affected by art and its recognition of the clear impossibility of holding both of these truths in hand. He has managed to be both a thinker and a stylist.

As Theodor Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, “Abstract temporal sequence plays in reality the part one would like to ascribe to the hierarchy of feelings…The irreversibility of time constitutes an objective moral criterion.” There is an accidental element in why we come to know and love one work of art and not another, and this accidental element is directly contrary to freedom. In art, as in love, we are compelled without knowing why. To realize this is completely crushing. The element of the arbitrary is a more interesting way to think about all injustice which is carried, imperfectly, into the present. It is clear, for example, that despite the dominance of meritocratic ideology, the wealthiest denizens of private enterprise do not constitute their own sort of golden-souled person, that the injustice of hereditary wealth or status does not map plainly to any objective standard of goodness, either. In exploring these dimensions, art can draw attention to the mechanisms of injustice or show the world as it could be otherwise.

Indeed, by displaying a process of identification, the critic builds credibility. Here, she goes after the reader who is her own “kind of person,” considering her various chosen and unchosen affinities for and memberships in different social, political, or economic groups, for whom the work of art may have sparked a similar emotional response. When a critic who is attuned to the unseen logics and assumptions that govern the worlds that novelists create and the arguments that nonfiction writers build is also savvy about their own identity and placement within the world, they can meet the reader as a person who is deeply affected by art. It is only through demonstrating their process of observation and careful questioning of the text by the critic-as-reader that the critic-as-stylist builds authority and makes legitimate the call to a public to recognize the social fact of our own aesthetic engagement.

Adorno pulls out what Kant knew well about art, that we feel its beauty due to the sensation that every piece within it has a purpose which contributes to an ultimately harmonious whole. Characters serve their purposes as they are needed for the plot of a novel and are honored in being a part of its cohesion; real life does not work this way, despite how badly we might want it to be so. Simplifying and thematizing others, judging them before knowing, are also ways of making sense of the world; these acts do not necessarily make better people even as they draw groups and categories that are easier to understand. That gap between life and art is the reason why making sense of the world is not an inherently ethical project. In fact, the temptation to resolve can cut off one’s process of thinking about realities that really might be impossible to square — that both good and bad things happen to people who do not deserve them; that the world, unlike art, does not appear as a work of caring and deliberate design.

This complex and morally implicated relationship of the human to art within the world gives rise to the duty that critics have, to contend with the sweeping force of beautiful style. That means we must write about the works which captivate thinking people. When one particular work of art resonates with and affects many people in a particular historical moment, we can ask why it resonates and, with an eye toward history, what it means that it does. The critic’s task is to acknowledge, without looking down on the reader, what feels good about the art, and to still reach for something better — to defend better expressions of ideals from their semblances.

After all, people read criticism primarily in order to decide how to devote their limited time, to determine which art to experience, and with what sort of attitude. The purpose of a work of criticism is typically thought of as an exercise in judgment; a book review, for example, will contain within it an assessment of whether the critic believes the book is good or bad — for whatever reasons they may give — either worth reading or not. Over the course of the review, the critic may impart a positive or negative impression to the reader of a work of which they are not yet familiar, or they may change a reader’s mind about a work of art about which the reader has already formed an opinion.

It’s not hard to argue, though, that whatever judgment or “takeaway” emerges from a work of criticism is the least interesting thing about the piece. Readers come into criticism with an open mind, which could be changed by the critic strong-arming them into agreement or coaxing the reader’s mind into its own sort of questioning. While knowledge of a canon will serve a critic well, her judgments themselves are not the sort of knowledge production that produces a fact that stands against time. Neither is the critic a pure stylist. Eloquence is, as has been argued, an altogether different skill from writing well; if writers possess it, its presence is incidental. Beautiful style alone will bludgeon you to death with agreement. Its substance is the sheer force of like or dislike. Consider the story of Ion, Socrates’s interlocutor who, as a rhapsode, knows not where his art comes from. To put too much of an emphasis on the judgment of “good or bad art” itself, to speak of the ability to judge as divinely ordained, puts a wall between the reader and the critic who has been trained to speak and write beautifully and convincingly.

I am suspicious, then, of criticism that functions primarily as entertainment: real-time speech as overly neat or too-formed, written work that seems to bypass or evade struggle in coming to a judgment. No matter how extensively the written-out argument is edited, the authority comes from making the process of thinking clear and transparent rather than using style to gloss over these steps. Such work positions the critic as being possessed with a sort of gift, as speaking from a pulpit to tell the people what to like or dislike. When we intervene in a domain which is primarily that of enjoyment for the majority of people, we must counter the shallow sort of market force that tells people they must consume what is most popular and most readily pleasurable, or that a “reader” or an “intellectual” is an identity label to be touted and commodified. To practice criticism in the wrong way reinscribes the problems of the market with another sort of market: that which criticism sells by continuing to validate the reader’s own judgments or pleasurably overriding them. Either the reader continues to feel good about what they were already consuming, or, having been chided by the critic’s authority, they nod in the shameful delight of having been corrected.

The contemporary critic’s aesthetic judgment, with all its moral and political implications, is situated in time; it is about not truth, and therefore contributes to no bank of knowledge. Instead, it is about meaning. Meaning is the last remaining truth-claim, the truth which remains after the abolition of all truth: that the human mind will always be looking for a direction. It is the task of the critic to direct it — and to direct it, perhaps, against the force of the arbitrary, both in its thinking position toward the work of art and in how it ultimately frames and illustrates its judgment.

What is most important to the practical meaning that readers make from works of art is that art teaches us how to live through imagination, beyond the arbitrary. Good criticism is attentive to these stakes outside of the internal experience of art. We know, looking inward from our daily lives, that literature provides the appearance of escape. But what is the reality of escape? I’d posit it begins with thinking as the center of the reader’s judgment, which requires the critic to earn authority, first and foremost, by showing her work.

To criticize properly is to show the process of judgment as available to another person, to cultivate a reflective and critical attitude — to struggle with what we like. This means we should ask more of our readers. A more Socratic model of the critic is one with faith that judgment can be taught. A good teacher can think with you, and a good critic invites you into the practice of judging with them. The critic with this attitude towards the reader understands the connections between teaching good reading, good thinking, and good writing. Close-reading, allowing oneself to be affected by a text, understanding why they are affected by it, and wrestling with the text’s ideas, leads (by mediation of this stilted form) to the good thinking which can become that writing which truly is good. In the completion of this process, the stylist and the thinker are reconciled.

Perhaps the beginning stages of thinking are those which are not typically understood as beautiful; perhaps we might resist the embarrassment of uttering them ourselves. But I am arrested by this awkward form of speech and charmed by its honest struggle to communicate the singularity of aesthetic experience into that which is interpretable. In speaking, our singular experience disappears; we become trapped, implicated in meaning. Yet such is the only possible path toward understanding, toward being seen by another person. There are some of us who are metaphysically possessed with artfulness or trained in the mobilization of texts, and those are the people who most often end up as professional critics. But thinking, as the substance of criticism and of democracy, is that which is most necessary to teach. It is for us all.

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*What follows is an excerpt from a conversation between Josie Barboriak and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Josie’s essay.

In our conversation, we discuss The Magic Mountain, crushing on Markiplier, having CIA in the family, Mating, and the irony and attractiveness of critics.

Below is a just taste.*

RUFUS Where are you from, Josie?

JOSIE I’m from Durham, North Carolina. That’s where I am right now.

RUFUS What’s in your childhood library?

JOSIE Okay, let me look at what’s actually from childhood. I really like these books called The Penderwicks, which is just like these siblings having a fun time.

TESSA Oh, stop everything. The Penderwicks are my favorite…I was obsessed.

JOSIE I’m looking at what else I had as a child, like the Wildwood books, those were great, and The Hate U Give, from being an ally.

ELAN Never read that one.

RUFUS I never read that one either.

TESSA You know, me neither. Everyone was telling me to read it, so I didn’t want to read it.

JOSIE I read it. I was assigned it, but I read it like a month earlier than it was assigned so I felt better than everyone else, in, like, ninth grade.

TESSA Can I ask what your favorite Penderwicks book was?

JOSIE Oh my gosh, it’s been a while. I really like the one where they’re at the ocean — the first one, the main one?

TESSA The one where they meet Jeffrey?

JOSIE Yes, of course.

TESSA Were you attracted to Jeffrey in that book?

JOSIE Was I what?

TESSA Were you attracted to Jeffrey in that book? Were you like, Yes, Skye Penderwick, you should have a crush on him?

JOSIE I think I was too young to have a sexual interest at the time. I never really got attracted to book characters.

RUFUS Really?

JOSIE I’m lucky that I don’t have that kind of affliction.

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THE NEW CRITIC
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POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Sarah Miller, Charlotte Hampton, and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Sarah Miller’s essay “Chasing the Story.”

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Charlotte is from New York City and the editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth for the next three days.

Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our interview series, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions. If you read The New Critic and take any delight or solace in our project, please consider a paid subscription to this flesh-and-blood gen z magazine.

Below we discuss Charlotte’s 2024 arrest while covering Hanover’s encampment for The Dartmouth, the journalist’s exploitative and indexical urges, and the seriousness and salaciousness of running a campus newspaper.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

ELAN Charlotte, tell us the story of your arrest.

CHARLOTTE Yeah. On May 1st, 2024, there was national upheaval on college campuses. Nothing had happened really at Dartmouth yet, but a small group of pro-Palestinian students set up an encampment — about 10 students on the Green. I was the head of the news section for The Dartmouth, our campus newspaper, at the time. So I was reporting on the encampment and working with some more junior reporters leading the coverage, and we were texting updates to the executive editors who were in the newsroom across the street. The night escalated because the police were called, and they told everyone to get off the Green, and there was a big showdown between this group of protesters and police officers who arrived on the scene. And it really escalated because probably hundreds of people eventually showed up and created a massive circle around a couple tents with the students inside.

They formed a line of protesters opposite this line of police officers and the College called in state troopers as well, which also escalated the situation because there were guns and massive armed vehicles. I talked with the editor-in-chief at the time, Emily Fagell, about what we wanted to do about this escalation — because they were telling everyone to get off the Green — and we decided that I would be the one reporter who stuck around with my photographer, Alesandra Gonzales. The school’s communications department also had a rep there, and she told me it was fine for me to be on the Green with her, so I was part of this small group of journalists — national journalists, too — there was a Boston Globe reporter there and a Valley News reporter, our local paper. My photographer at some point was lying down on the ground filming a history professor, Annelise Orleck, be brutalized by the police, and when Gonzales stood up, she got too close to the police officers, and they started to take her. Because she was my photographer, and she was younger than me, and she was my reporter, I said to the police, Don’t take her, she’s a member of the press, and that’s when they took me, too, because I was moving forward or engaging with them.

So we were both arrested despite the fact that we were wearing press identification — we were very clearly identifiable as press — and, yeah, we were taken to jail in zip ties. We were taken to the station, and we got our mugshots taken, and I used a prison bathroom, which has no mirror, and no seat, and no soap — evocative little details that live in my brain — and our editor came and picked us up and paid our bail, which was 40 bucks a piece, or 20 bucks a piece, I can’t remember.

Then the College did not drop our charges. Instead they released a statement saying, We understand the student journalists from The Dartmouth feel they were wrongly arrested, and we stand by their right to vindicate that belief through the legal process. That felt like a bit of a screw you to us at the time, even though their comms person had said we could be there with her.

We didn’t hear anything from the administration directly. I got a lawyer, and I went to meet with my lawyer in Norwich — I biked my little bike over to Norwich to meet with my lawyer to try to get my criminal trespass charges dropped — and as I was sitting with him, he actually got a call from the prosecutor saying my charges had been dropped. So the College dropped my charges after a little more than a week —after national free speech groups kind of rallied around me and my photographer and advocated for our charges to be dropped.

ELAN And how were you chosen to cover the protests?

CHARLOTTE Emily and I talked about it, I think I called her, and I said, They’re saying that everyone who’s here is going to get arrested, and she said, Well, we need to get all the reporters off the Green then, and I said, like, Look, there’s this group of journalists, we need to have someone here, how can we not have someone from The D reporting on this? And so I stayed and wrote her phone number on my forearm in Sharpie for my one call. And I used her phone number that was written across my forearm in jail as my one call. So yeah, there was definitely some sense that we were risking something, but also, you know, I felt like we needed to have someone from the school paper there reporting on it.

TESSA How do you conceive of The D’s role on campus? What coverage do you see as fundamental to The D versus personal essays and columns? What does better for you, and what are the metrics for success?

CHARLOTTE I mean, politically important, breaking articles definitely get a lot of clicks. Clicks and campus buzz kind of go hand-in-hand. Our “Verbums,” which are editorials, tend to get a lot of clicks when they’re controversial.

TESSA I know Elan’s op-eds get a million, bajillion views.

CHARLOTTE I mean, Elan is the key to our success — no, that’s actually not even a joke, like, you do consistently get a lot of clicks, Elan, but I think it’s just because you have — actually, no, it’s because your columns are good. It’s not just because of the headlines. They are good columns.

And there’s also “Freak of the Week,” what can I say? My directorate introduced this, you know, sex advice column called “Freak of the Week” at the request of two of our magazine columnists, and it gets so much attention. And I hate it, but people love it. People eat it up. Everyone’s talking about “Freak of the Week.”

SARAH “Freak of the Week” is a great name. Yeah, I think anything salacious does well at a college paper. So that could be something personal, like writing about starring in a nude project. That piece made Middlebury’s alumni blast, which was crazy. I mean, it was about the porn class I took at Middlebury, so they sent it to the alumni and put it on the school’s alumni Instagram.

CHARLOTTE I loved reading about your nude modeling.

RUFUS Charlotte’s also a famous nudist, you know.

TESSA She’s a nude model for the studio art department.

CHARLOTTE Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of chemistry here, Sarah.

SARAH I love it. There was also a big corruption scandal at the end of my senior year where the student activities board was found to have embezzled significant amounts of money to buy themselves Aritzia Super Puffs and also to get Flo Rida to play on campus. So a story like that also got a lot of attention. It was really insane. And like, you could track it, via Yik Yak. Do you guys have Yik Yak?

CHARLOTTE Fizz. I had to delete Fizz freshman year because I wrote this one column that was just getting way too much hate on the app.

SARAH What was the column?

CHARLOTTE It was called, “Just Another Bitch On Your Frat Lawn.” One of the lines was, “Did they think I had arrived to give them all blowjobs?” It’s just like, oh, what the hell? [Laughs.]

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THE NEW CRITIC

Sarah Miller is a 24-year-old writer living in Brooklyn. She studied Creative Writing at Middlebury College and currently writes the drawing board.

When the first of those tents appeared on the College Green, I was determined not to miss the story. Middlebury’s encampment sprang up on a Sunday morning in April. The night before, many of our revolutionaries had donned face paint and swayed to student cover bands at Nocturne, our annual performing arts festival. As part of the program, Middlebury’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter had staged a “die-in,” which despite the wave of student protest sweeping the country, I had brushed off as mere theater (not dissimilar from the attempt at a Boiler Room set by the president of The Otter Nonsense Players, the premier on-campus improv group, which served as the festival’s closing act). We were in the waning months of the Biden administration then, and there was nothing to argue about and no one to argue with.

The next morning, the tents went up; I had underestimated my peers. In solidarity with the national movement, the students demanded the College divest from arms manufacturing and war profiteering and that the College declare its support of a ceasefire. But the encampment at Middlebury differed significantly from campus encampments in the news, in which students warred with counter-protesters and administration crackdowns. Owing to our student population’s much-editorialized lack of diversity, the SJP leadership was mostly composed of white students. Many Jewish students were in key leadership positions, and the student activists tried to cover all their bases by hosting workshops like “Let’s Talk About Anti-Semitism” and “Pinkwashing.” Most of the tents had been rented out from the College’s gear room.

The College began to take more of an interest as the encampment approached the one-week mark; the students had set up the tents where graduation was held, and the College needed to work on trimming the grass. During the middle of that week, the editor-in-chief of our campus newspaper asked if I wanted to cover an SJP-led walkout. This was a baby story, passed off to me because the exec team was doing the real work. Yet I was thrilled: here was a story I could sink my teeth into.

In a 2011 Fresh Air interview, Joan Didion told Terry Gross, “I myself have always found that if I examine something, it’s less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw — if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn’t going to bite you. And that’s the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.”

I grew up in Philadelphia amongst the fauna of mottled pigeons and flora of scummy rivers, where the only snakes I saw were kept behind panes of glass. Yet when I was a child, I adored a book of snakes I received as a gift and hoped to find them in the wild. I cannot remember why I did not fear them. Now I fear everything: microplastics and radiation, rising temperatures and rising cancer rates, AI, whether I will be able to make a living. I say a prayer every time the plane takes off, though I know, as all anxious fliers do, that I am far more likely to die in a car crash. But over the course of the 2020s, I began to realize that I could look a snake in the eyes; I could access a strange calm when I waded into the emotional fracas with the bulwark of analysis.

If the political chaos of our times has any parallel in American history it is the Sixties, when the collapse of the institutional was symptomatic of a lost sense of shared reality. I intimately understand how reporting on that collapse can grant certain writers the panacea of control. Didion opens Slouching Towards Bethlehem with her typical, stylish method of self-deprecation, declaring, “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests…writers are always selling somebody out.” I cannot count the number of times I’ve seen this quote superimposed over a moody natural landscape on Instagram or Substack. I am not inarticulate, but I am small and clumsy and sometimes say ditzy things. My glasses exist in an almost permanent state of smudginess from how often I push them up my nose, and I wear a lot of skirts. Twice in my 24 years of life, I have accidentally set my hair on fire. While this is not a costume, it is its own type of camouflage. People talk to me.

To my delight, the encampment organizers made us wear bright orange vests with blue tape to identify us as members of the press. This felt right to me. I held out my phone and recorded the organizers when they spoke. They yelled “Shame!” at the school president’s office, and I took pictures of their backs. The Middlebury Campus newspaper had agreed not to photograph any of the students’ faces. I noted when the organizers said, “This is our Vietnam.” It embodied the story. And after the walkout, I circled through the Green to talk to the protesters. I talked to a Palestinian student who said kindness was a value of his people and a young white woman who said she was willing to put herself on the line for the encampment. This was also part of the story.

Just over a week after the first tents came up, the school ended the encampment by sending out a communication brief in which they committed to calling for a ceasefire, wrote they were “exploring” ways for Middlebury to support displaced Gazan students, and said they would “discuss and debate openly the complex questions involved in managing an endowment.” The response in the dining hall was muted. Mostly, I think we were relieved that we would finally have a normal graduation. The SJP said it was a good first step, but they would be watching when the school discussed divestment in the fall. They claimed a tentative victory. I couldn’t understand how they failed to see the emptiness of the administration’s language. Could they not see that it was a commitment to nothing? The following fall, Middlebury announced it would not divest from the list of student-defined war profiteering companies, as it had determined it was not profiting from war. Middlebury was famous for one of the many free speech blowups that characterized the 2010s (“the infamous Charles Murray incident”), and a certain ideological inflexibility still strangled our discourse. Legitimate critiques of the encampment were equated with cosigning genocide, neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and the military-industrial complex. I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of campus controversy during the last weeks before graduation. So instead of properly conveying the complexity of the encampment, I wrote a few benign personal essays and accepted my diploma on a cloudless day in May. I knew, however, that I had failed to get the story.

I wanted to be a Didion. But somehow, in my senior year of college, I wound up a Carrie Bradshaw.

I had begun writing a column for the student newspaper in the first months of my senior year. My first article was an impassioned defense of the English department after news broke of proposed budget cuts. From there, I wrote about getting mugged abroad and affirmative action. After a bruising Halloween return to an on-and-off college fling demonstrated that, barring any sudden plot twists, I would graduate without experiencing a college boyfriend, I wrote an article exploring my real, self-flagellating grief at my realization. It was not my best-written or best-argued piece, but I wrote it to exorcise my feelings. My emotional constitution is such that when I can turn pain or humiliation into material it releases some of its hold on me. Even lying distraught on the floor of my best friend’s dorm room, I thought, “Here’s some material.”

With this piece, my column took off. Many of the accomplished young women on our small campus felt the way I did: insecure about failing to acquire such a hallmark of the college experience and then doubly insecure about the vacuity this want implied. We were ashamed to want male validation and love, even as our fear of being too intellectually superficial, too feminine, was configured again along masculine lines.

After the article was published, my DMs were flooded with enthusiastic praise. Young women came up to me in the library and the local bar; when men approached me, it thrilled me doubly. Here was affirmation that I was a real writer. Next, I wrote about SSRIs, the Western literary canon, and tried to make an argument for the economic cost of body image on female professional advancement.

Then I wrote about a class I took on porn. It was the first such course in the College’s history. Drawing on my course readings, I argued that porn’s potency as an ideological force demanded we discuss it seriously. Over the course of my drafting, I came to believe it was some of my sharpest writing, but I still needed an ending. Naively, I decided to write about a nude project I did as a freshman where I set out to explore the tension between objectification and empowerment by writing the contradictory ways I felt about my body (for example, cellulite on my thighs) on my body in black marker. Then a friend of mine took pictures of me posed in various positions that sought to articulate that tension between objectification and empowerment.

I should have found a different conclusion.

I was stuck answering questions about the project for the rest of the year. Before my “American Women Poets” class, a friend told me, “My house wants to know if you did the project in the nude or if you were being hyperbolic.” I told her I didn’t believe in hyperbole. Instead of questions about the ideology behind Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat or the link between violent porn consumption and attitudes toward rape victims, I fielded queries on how many people had been in the Zoom room when I showed my nudes and what my parents had thought.

“You’re my Carrie Bradshaw,” one girl DM’d me. It was sweet; I wanted to gag.

I wanted to write about books, politics, sex, and the travails of my stupid heart and didn’t see why writing on one topic should constrain me from writing about another. I wanted to be taken seriously. So after the porn piece, I published an evaluation of the student body’s political apathy called “Did we kill debate?” At a pop-up student-run bar, a fellow editor on the paper came up to me and said he liked this new article because, “It was serious. Unlike your last article, it didn’t make me laugh out loud.” Oh, I wanted to say to him, “I’m so glad you think I’m serious,” but I held my tongue. This was copy.

I put the exchange into my final column for The Middlebury Campus, and during Senior Week the editor and I laughed about it some more so I could show I was cool, not one of those overly sensitive women. I resisted the urge to ask if he found the article unserious because a rigorous argument about sex made him uncomfortable. Instead, when he told me that he and his friends had pored over my article for an hour, which, he noted, was more time than they had spent on any other piece, I thanked him. I laughed.

Joan Didion is enshrined in the public imagination for “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the titular essay in the collection that made her famous. Often read as critical, if not downright contemptuous, of the Sixties’ “flower children,” the essay ends with a description of a 5-year-old on acid. In an interview with KPFR, Didion said, “Usually on a piece there comes a day when you know you never have to do another interview. You can go home, you’ve gotten it. Well, that day never came on that piece…That piece is a blank for me still.”

Over the course of a storied career, Didion’s style evolved from the shiny pyrotechnics of New Journalism to masterful essays in which she excavated political mythologies. Published under the legendary New York Review of Books (NYRB) editor Robert Silvers, Didion believed these political essays represented the best work of her career. Yet these are the essays for which she’s least remembered.

Didion got her start writing pithy self-help essays for Vogue with titles like “On Self-Respect” and “Take No For An Answer.” The essays from this period address the issues young women wrestle with as they come of age: self-actualization and heartbreak, leaving New York, and growing older. However, Didion is careful not to write about sex or the specifics. Her forensic self-reflections are always delivered from the safety of the retrospective; Didion writes after the disaster has been assessed and surveyed, after she has conquered the pain.

In Lili Anolik’s deliciously trashy study of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, Didion & Babitz, Anolik writes, “That Joan wasn’t straitjacketed into the role of Woman writer was neither luck nor chance. She did it being very, very good…a masculine kind of good.” The book seethes with resentment for Didion. And while Anolik openly admits her partiality for the fun-loving, unabashedly feminine Babitz, the very conceit of her book relies on a binary of female success. Either you’re a prude or a party girl, either you’re a master or a mess. You’re either Didion or Babitz.

But even Didion couldn’t escape her gender. After her death, journalists began to link Didion’s name to a (mostly forgotten) former giant of mid-century writing, Noel Parmental Jr. He is alternatively figured as “the man Joan Didion left behind” and her “first and searing love.” I can’t deny that I avidly followed this coverage. The part of me that looked to Didion as a guide (my junior and senior year dorm rooms were decorated with the famous Julian Wassner picture of Didion posed before the Corvette — you know the one) was gratified to learn she was mortal. If she’d had her heart broken by a raging alcoholic who refused to marry her, and then went on to so eclipse his career that his obituaries were linked to her name, then maybe I could outrun the girl who bubbled up on drunk walks home, the girl who asked her friends if anyone would ever love her. If I couldn’t extinguish that girl, I would overpower and outmaster her emotions, her tremendous need, through language. Still, I recognized a grubby impulse in these biographical excavations that sought to essentialize Didion by reducing her to a lovelorn girl trailing after a great man. At last, the immortal Didion, flung from her perch!

Didion & Babitz epitomizes the lazy misogyny threaded through this line of criticism. She quotes from lengthy interviews with Parmental in which he says, “Without me, there might not have been a Joan Didion. I invented Joan Didion.” Anolik takes him at face value. That she fails to interrogate why a writer of middling stature might be motivated to claim responsibility for one of the 20th century’s greatest illustrates the eagerness which even women writers will demonstrate to subordinate another woman’s career to a man’s. Nobody dares try this trick on Ernest Hemingway or Philip Roth: “I invented Hemingway?” Please.

In my teenage years, I read a short piece Zadie Smith wrote for Oprah Magazine where she cited Middlemarch as “a work of genius. But — more important — and from a purely selfish point of view — a woman wrote it. This might seem ridiculous, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius.”

Though women now make up the majority of published authors, most intellectual heavyweights — most of those whom society considers geniuses — remain male. And when a woman is a genius, she is “a woman genius,” degraded by the condition of her gender. When I confess my admiration for George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, or Zadie Smith, I do so with what I know is an unworthy self-consciousness. I try to explain that I don’t like them because they are women writers but because they are geniuses, pure and simple.

Didion’s 2001 anthologized collection of political writing, Political Fictions, begins with a foreword in which she describes her trepidation when Robert Silvers asked her to cover the 1988 political campaign: “A presidential election was a ‘serious story,’ and no one had before solicited my opinions on one.”

At this point, Didion was 54 years old, the author of four celebrated essay collections and four well-regarded novels. She was one of the most famous figures in American letters, but she still wasn’t sure if she was serious enough to cover politics. Didion procrastinated the assignment for several months, prompting new deadlines and panicked calls from her editors, until there “seemed, finally, no real excuse” for her not to write about the California primary. This essay would become “Insider Baseball,” a sharp critique of the increasingly Hollywood-like showmanship of political campaigns.

Originally a staunch, Barry Goldwater Republican, Didion was revolted by the party’s capitulation to the socially invasive preoccupations of the religious right by the 1980s. That she saw herself as alienated from political parties granted her the rare ability to privilege criticism over ideological allegiance. In a 1998 essay, published two weeks after the release of the Starr Report, she derides Bill Clinton’s “familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent,” while in another essay, she condemns his critics for their self-interested moralizing. She saves some of her most impassioned criticisms for Reagan, the Republican she blames for the degradation of the party. Throughout Political Fictions, Didion’s most damning indictments often come from her own subjects. In the collection’s final essay, “God’s Country,” she warns that “the distinct possibility that an entire generation of younger voters might see no point in choosing between two candidates retelling the same remote story could benefit only one campaign, the Republican.”

Twenty days after I read this sentence, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and, 29 minutes later, appointed his chosen successor, Kamala Harris. The press breathlessly covered Harris’s rise and declared “Kamalot,” but I worried about a candidate solely built on desperate anti-Trump fervor and hallucinatory memes. Many of the people I talked to in Philadelphia felt only marginally better about Harris than Biden. Some asked me if it wasn’t a little suspicious about the way the Democratic Party rushed to nominate her without a primary. If Harris couldn’t win the youth vote in Pennsylvania, she was in trouble. As we approached November, my fury mounted at Biden, the craven Democratic Party elders, and a press who had abdicated their responsibility to scrutinize the political class. I was not surprised when Harris lost.

After Trump’s election in 2016, the legacy press criticized the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, et al. that lingered in the middle of the country. These were interrupted by occasional sympathetic profiles of “forgotten America,” of which the glossy movie adaptation of future Vice President JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy is a symptom. When Trump won again in 2024 with large gains from men of color and gen z men, I was forced to concede his appeal was not an aberration: Trumpism, whatever that meant, was now part of the American program. So it was my obligation to try to understand it. I diversified my media diet. I switched between podcasts across the political spectrum. Recently, I read a mammoth biography of William F. Buckley Jr. by Sam Tanenhaus, annotating furiously in the margins. And I’ve tried to talk to people who think differently from me.

A few months ago, I met a young Trump supporter at a bar. I was accompanying my friend there on her quest to get over her ex. When she started talking to a shaggy-haired guy with a cross necklace, I mostly tuned out, until I heard him say, “I’m a Republican, don’t hate me.” Again, because I am from Philadelphia, the young men in bars who admit to voting Republican are the young men who swayed the election. I asked him why he had voted for Trump.

“Immigration,” he told me. “And unchecked capitalism.” He was concerned by Blackstone buying out homes from the American consumer. Swiftly, he added he wasn’t such a big fan of Trump anymore. “Trump’s not America-first.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Tell me more.”

He mentioned Israel, he mentioned foreign involvement abroad, he mentioned Nick Fuentes.

“You know Nick Fuentes is an anti-semite,” I said. “And he hates women.”

The guy told me he had sisters and that he trusted them more than anything. He insisted the prejudice was a character Fuentes played up. Sure, I thought: here’s the story.

In a 2006 interview with Hilton Als in The Paris Review, Didion explained her mid-career turn toward political writing by remarking, “I was bored. I didn’t want to become Miss Lonelyhearts.”

I didn’t, either.

Writing about the Middlebury encampment showed me the kinds of stories I wanted to follow after graduating. The encampment presented the kind of intellectually knotty, emotionally explosive issue in which each side was determined to flatten the story. Students, taught to close-read, jettisoned nuanced analysis for binaries and channeled their anger over the devastation in Gaza into colleges with no say in foreign policy. This disconnect was especially acute at Middlebury, as the administration did not invest in arms manufacturing. Consequently, the SJP arrived at a broad definition of war profiteering — any companies that helped or profited from the war effort — largely meaning any companies that did business in Israel.

At the same time, the legacy media’s analysis disappointed me with its insistence on figuring the students as either intrepid heroes or, more often, kids too dumb and too privileged to know their history. Every side was beset by hysterical one-dimensionality. Of the few professional journalists who deigned to enter the encampments, no one seemed to listen critically to what the students had to say. As I saw it, the legacy press failed to credit the opening salvo of a generation born between foreign wars whose anger was as much rooted in America’s imperial creep as it was in the fact that this generation was projected to be less successful than their parents.

In the winter of 1991, Didion took on the case of the Central Park Five for The New York Review of Books in a magisterial essay that deconstructs the myths underpinning both the case and New York City. Didion is forensic from the jump as she notes that the jogger’s anonymity allowed her to become “a sacrificial player in the sentimental narrative that is New York public life.” She notes the slew of dog whistle and outright racist headlines that defined the case, and she reminds readers of all the other reported rapes (particularly of black women) that did not receive mainstream coverage. As always, Didion is laser-focused on the ways in which illusions reinforce and rely on one another in the service of convenient narratives. The essay is often framed as a defense of the Central Park Five — a willful misreading, as Didion questions the evidence against the boys but does not defend them. To advocate would violate the distance that was the source of so much of her authority; in the ruthless pursuit of meaning, Didion is disinterested in sympathy.

As a fiction writer, I am overly interested in sympathy. My preoccupation with moral complexity equips me less to write about the baldness of evil than to search for nuance. There’s a privilege inherent to this remove; when a writer imposes distance, they protect themselves at some level from the horror of the subject. In a scathing book review published in Vulture in 2023, the critic Andrea Long Chu, who seems to have made a career target out of Zadie Smith, accuses Smith of “an almost involuntary tendency to reframe all political questions as ‘human’ ones.” In a later piece, written in the context of the war in Gaza, Chu condemns Smith’s “enforced literarity.”

I see Chu’s point. The essay she takes specific issue with is one Smith wrote for The New Yorker. In it, Smith praises the bravery of the national student protest movement while critiquing the rigid emptiness of their rhetoric. Smith argues for what she sees as the only concrete action: a ceasefire. Until a ceasefire is achieved, she repeats, nothing else matters. Zigzagging between defending and critiquing the protests, commenting on the slippery nature of “ethical zones of interest” in which, on many liberal campuses, Jewish students might be the oppressed political minority, and then once again calling for a ceasefire, Smith’s essay feels contradictory at times. It lacks Chu’s cogency or moral clarity.

And yet I still find Smith’s piece more resonant. While her style is different from Didion’s, both writers share the forensic attention to narrative construction that puts them at odds with simpler moral readings. Smith attributes her “ideological inconsistency” to her biraciality. Perhaps because I’m biracial, perhaps because I’m a novelist, I can only see a thing from multiple sides, too. This is both a strength and a limitation.

Most of our able political writers are polemicists, essayists, or necessary fact-gatherers. The two most talked-about political releases last year were Alex Thompson’s and Jake Tapper’s Original Sin, a work of reporting that has all the prose strength of a PowerPoint, and Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto — the former Washington correspondent at New York Magazine not only committed the cardinal sin of sleeping with a source (over Facetime) but also doubled down on her sin by writing turgid, elliptical prose that still protected her former lover.

Nuzzi’s downfall is a cautionary tale for writers who love Didion too much. In a media ecosystem saturated with op-ed writers, there is no shortage of voices eager to stake out some bold new take. Didion stands apart for her radical curiosity about her subjects’ interior lives. It’s the combination of this curiosity with her tremendous voice that curses her to a league of shallow imitators.

I know what it’s like to fall under Didion’s spell. In college, I tried to imitate her concise, emotionally fraught sentences until enough feedback from my writing workshop convinced me to change course. What I tried to skillfully restrain came across as dull and lacking insight. Didion remains my high watermark for a sentence, and I am tormented by the fact that my own will never achieve her irresistible gothic intelligence and observation told with cowboy flair. But the Didion instinct can be a trap. Her voice tells me to aim higher — revise, revise, revise — but it also tells me to bottle it up, to feel if you must, but keep it safely confined to the sentence. Keep it tight. In Didion, these tactics make for an American genius. In my own writing, they represent elaborate cowardice, a way of getting half the story. I couldn’t be Joan Didion if I tried.

In an interview from the late 1970s, Didion professes her skepticism that human problems can be resolved by politics. “I’m hardly ever conscious of issues,” Didion says. “I mean they seem to me like ripples on an ocean.”

Unlike Didion, I am highly conscious of “issues,” which to me are only like ripples in the ocean insomuch as ripples lead to waves. I lack both the nihilism and the kind of romantic naivete to believe a world without government would be a utopia. Perhaps I could adopt this attitude if I hadn’t cried when Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016 or watched my state elect a self-identified progressive who now consistently votes in favor of the Trump administration’s war apparatus.

As it is, I am not a cowboy or a protester. I am only a writer.

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*What follows is an excerpt from a conversation between Sarah Miller, Charlotte Hampton, and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Sarah’s essay.

Charlotte is the editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth for the next five days.

In our conversation, we discuss the journalist’s exploitative and indexical urges, Charlotte’s 2024 arrest while covering Hanover’s encampment for The Dartmouth, and the seriousness and salaciousness of running a campus newspaper.

Below is just a taste.*

ELAN Charlotte, tell us the story of your arrest.

CHARLOTTE Yeah. On May 1st, 2024, there was national upheaval on college campuses. Nothing had happened really at Dartmouth yet, but a small group of pro-Palestinian students set up an encampment — about 10 students on the Green. I was the head of the news section for The Dartmouth, our campus newspaper, at the time. So I was reporting on the encampment and working with some more junior reporters leading the coverage, and we were texting updates to the executive editors who were in the newsroom across the street. The night escalated because the police were called, and they told everyone to get off the Green, and there was a big showdown between this group of protesters and police officers who arrived on the scene. And it really escalated because probably hundreds of people eventually showed up and created a massive circle around a couple tents with the students inside.

They formed a line of protesters opposite this line of police officers and the College called in state troopers as well, which also escalated the situation because there were guns and massive armed vehicles. I talked with the editor-in-chief at the time, Emily Fagell, about what we wanted to do about this escalation — because they were telling everyone to get off the Green — and we decided that I would be the one reporter who stuck around with my photographer, Alesandra Gonzales. The school’s communications department also had a rep there, and she told me it was fine for me to be on the Green with her, so I was part of this small group of journalists — national journalists, too — there was a Boston Globe reporter there and a Valley News reporter, our local paper. My photographer at some point was lying down on the ground filming a history professor, Annelise Orleck, be brutalized by the police, and when Gonzales stood up, she got too close to the police officers, and they started to take her. Because she was my photographer, and she was younger than me, and she was my reporter, I said to the police, Don’t take her, she’s a member of the press, and that’s when they took me, too, because I was moving forward or engaging with them.

So we were both arrested despite the fact that we were wearing press identification — we were very clearly identifiable as press — and, yeah, we were taken to jail in zip ties. We were taken to the station, and we got our mugshots taken, and I used a prison bathroom, which has no mirror, and no seat, and no soap — evocative little details that live in my brain — and our editor came and picked us up and paid our bail, which was 40 bucks a piece, or 20 bucks a piece, I can’t remember.

Then the College did not drop our charges. Instead they released a statement saying, We understand the student journalists from The Dartmouth feel they were wrongly arrested, and we stand by their right to vindicate that belief through the legal process. That felt like a bit of a screw you to us at the time, even though their comms person had said we could be there with her.

We didn’t hear anything from the administration directly. I got a lawyer, and I went to meet with my lawyer in Norwich — I biked my little bike over to Norwich to meet with my lawyer to try to get my criminal trespass charges dropped — and as I was sitting with him, he actually got a call from the prosecutor saying my charges had been dropped. So the College dropped my charges after a little more than a week —after national free speech groups kind of rallied around me and my photographer and advocated for our charges to be dropped…

Read the Postscript

*Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our interview series, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions. If you read The New Critic and take any delight or solace in our project, please consider a paid subscription to this flesh-and-blood gen z magazine.*

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THE NEW CRITIC

Despite the grousing from out-of-age commentators about “The Death of X” and “The End of Y,” there are young Americans advancing the yoke of tradition into the muddy battleground of the future, we who smoke from the hookah of experience and imbibe the intoxicants of struggle and youth.

Amidst the great whorl of consternation regarding our generation, The New Critic is a flesh-and-blood gen z magazine. We publish writers who are too young to remember the fall of the Twin Towers and old enough to have borne witness to the nativity of ChatGPT. We publish The New Critic for our friends and our peers, and we ask our writers to answer ever greater questions about their experiences, their traditions, and their selves.

Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely (and depend!) on individual donors to support the magazine. If you read The New Critic and take any delight or solace in our project, please consider a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions.

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Paid subscribers can expect a weekly installment of Postscript, our conversation series — free subscribers be tantalized. Below are the nine conversations we have published thus far.

• No. 9 | “The Manifesto with No Name,” Ramsey Alsheikh on the eros of activism

• No. 8 | “Holy Fool,” Theodore Gary on Joshua Block, middle school boys, and Fyodor Dostoevsky

• No. 7 | “Strangle Your Idols,” Will Diana on lunar nightmares, faraway lands, and Covid psychosis

• No. 6 | “What Troubled You in 2025?” An end-of-year symposium with New Critic contributors

• No. 5 | “The Crazy Train,” Matthew Adelstein, Noah Birnbaum, and Amos Wollen on effective altruism

• No. 4 | “Beyond Pain,” Bond Almand IV on cycling and the Pan-American world record

• No. 3 | “Learning the Machine,” Rhea Madhogarhia on machine learning and AI interns

• No. 2 | “The College Combinator,” Danylo Borodchuk on Y Combinator and dropping out of college

• No. 1 | “Two-State Friendship,” Ramsey Alsheikh and Elan Kluger on Israel-Palestine

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With spring, snowmelt bears new life and more editors. We are chuffed to welcome four new assistant editors to the New Critic masthead, friends and travelers from the far reaches of the earth who take shelter beneath the lips of David Bowie and the wings of the New Critic Rook.

One shot of elixir for , bard of Shenandoah.

One quickly downed spirit for , prairie rebuttalist.

One spritz of holy water for , epicure of character.

One spume of incense for , expatriate of letters.

Long live these New Critics.

– Founding Editors Tessa Augsberger, Elan Kluger, and Rufus Knuppel

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THE NEW CRITIC

Cathy Li is a 22-year-old living in Brooklyn. She recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s in English Literature and writes the Substack catharsis.

The age of the manifesto is over. Luigi Mangione’s 242-word untitled, handwritten document the internet dubbed ‘the mini-festo’ is not the Unabomber’s 35,000-word Industrial Society and Its Future nor Valerie Solanas’s wonderfully evocative 40-page S.C.U.M (Society for Cutting Up Men). And yet the spirit of the manifesto haunts contemporary writing.

Self-published personal essays on Substack can read just as urgent and propositional. People used to read the Bible and now they read personal essays. I am not exempt from this. As the feminist activist Carol Hanisch once said, “The Personal is Political.” There is a magical, seductive quality to the first person — the easy accessibility into the author-narrator’s life, how the nature of the “I” offers a claustrophobic proximity to all the sordid details of a personal experience aided through shimmering images, poetic prose, threaded storylines. In the past, the dominant mode for narration was the omniscient third person, providing multiple perspectives across time and space. But the most influential prose from the past decade, in both fiction and nonfiction, is written in the first person. Contemporary prize-winning novels like My Brilliant Friend, The Goldfinch, Conversations with Friends, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, as well as voicey, diaristic novels like Karl Knausgaard’s My Struggle series and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, are just a few of the literati titles that come to mind.

The coinciding meteoric rise and sales success of autobiographical, lesson-laden memoirs like Michelle Obama’s seminal Becoming, Tara Westover’s Educated, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love in the literary market is more than a mere indicator of shifting tastes toward the “I.”1 In many of these first-person pieces, there is often a clean interpretation of the narrated events and an implied lesson at the end of the story, whether that be about the plight of modern dating in The Cut’s Sex Diaries or about more sobering topics like the complexities of solidarity and identity politics within marginalized communities in Cathy Park Hong’s essay, “An Education,” from her 2020 collection Minor Feelings. There is a shared link between the personal essay and the memoir in style and sometimes in form: both genres prioritize knowledge but only through the perspective of the knower, equating an individual’s introspection as interpretation of an ultimate, universal truth.2

After college, I was fatigued with writing about my personal life, especially since I had written a monstrously long, 15,000-word blend of personal essay and film analysis for my thesis. The project aimed to parse loneliness as it impacts intimacy, estrangement, isolation, and desire by focusing on three Greta Gerwig films while also exploring the narrator’s coming-of-age story (mine) to investigate the solitary nature of growing-up and city-dwelling. For months I obsessed over this project, from the literature review to the granular syntax structure of my sentences. My favorite part was carving an objective argument about the media I consumed, interrogating portrayals of contemporary issues to write widely about what that says about our cultural imagination.

I was always more fond of literary analysis and interpretation than writing fiction. Compared to my peers, it seemed quite obvious by the many quiet half-nods in workshops that I lacked the gene many already had for writing fiction and poetry: the ability to grasp at something amorphous in the imagination and render it material through prose. Literary criticism was infinitely more desirous because it required me to treat the text with mathematical precision, to pry it open for meaning and interpretation. I was better served utilizing my judgment and discernment to enjoy the feelings of artistic experience rather than channeling it into creative exercise. Every time I knifed up the text, I was looking at the radical contexts I lived in and how they shaped me, rather than the other way around.

While the project aimed to pair film criticism with personal reflections so as to break up the media’s pathological analysis of “loneliness,” the mental and emotional exhaustion I felt from mining my life for content alerted me that this sort of writing was not something I could sustain in the long term, that my energy could be better utilized elsewhere. Writing about loneliness in particular made me feel, well, lonely. In the throes of it I shuttered myself in a small-town Airbnb outside of Burlington and wrote on yellow legal pads about female friendship, interpersonal fallouts, and young adulthood. My friends often joked that I was “practicing for my thesis” by avoiding any social obligation and declining to go outside that semester.

It was also the constant appearance of the “I” in my writing that was off-putting. “I” was a constant reminder that no matter how I tried to imagine myself out of discomforting emotional situations, I was only ever writing in isolation and to myself. I began to long for something beyond the confessional, defensive style reserved for the personal essay — something equally provocative but much more energized, dazzling, and largely untapped. It meant a great deal to me to have a hermeneutics to describe what it felt like to be young.

My braided essay ended up being fine, though a little rushed; it garnered no departmental recognition. I doubt that in the end a few glimmering paragraphs meant anything to the panel readers.

Despite my best efforts at convincing myself that my senior creative writing thesis would become my magnum opus, I failed to make a grand, gestural statement with my undergraduate degree in English. The week after I walked the graduation stage in May, I pondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to write a novella or a dense collection of obscure poetry instead of spending the past four years anxious about my social obligations on weekends or positioning myself well for summer internships.

It’s bad right now to be a college graduate. The job market is unforgiving and bleak. After June, I moved back home, and while adjusting to post-college life, I have found myself shackled to my algorithms, consuming whatever the cyberspace deems worthy to put on my plate (which is very often AI slop and listicles from celebrity gossip magazines). My friends, unemployed and employed alike, have expressed similar sentiments, struggling for the right language to describe living out in the oligarch-governed real world of big-data divination and tired politics, equating post-grad life to sleepwalking.

Disillusionment is not new. Cinematic explorations of this existential plight are plentiful, from Mike Nichols’s 1967 The Graduate to Noah Baumbach’s 1995 Kicking and Screaming. There are even more essays like this one about the listless ennui of entering society as a young individual teeming with potential and the golden resource of time. Post-grad blues didn’t just appear out of nowhere, nor did the anxieties about where our global economy is headed and the dangerous polarization in our politics.

When summer rolled around, I tried to temporarily sedate my anxieties by preoccupying myself socially. I wanted to avoid lounging around long enough to be asked questions about what my plans for the future looked like after my magazine internship. In early June, my friend announced they were writing a manifesto about Neo-Luddism, a modern, leaderless movement that opposes modern technologies.3 Its origins are based in the 19th-century Luddite movement that spawned in response to the Industrial Revolution, in which English textile workers revolted by destroying the automated machinery they believed was destroying their lives. In my friend’s telling, however, Neo-Luddism seemed less about destroying smartphones and data centers and more about abstaining from the internet and returning to print media. My friend was always talking about going analog and moving to a “dumb phone”: a Nokia-esque device with all the basic buttons for call communication and texting without the distraction of social media content. I’d never heard of Neo-Luddism up until then, and I felt a gravitational pull toward the argument for a less distracted and more embodied existence. My interest in manifesto-writing was similarly piqued; here was a new form of introspective analysis that did not hinge on gutting yourself for views.

If you look up the term “Neo-Luddism” with the word “Reddit” attached to the end, one of the first things that comes up is Ted Kaczynski, more commonly known as the Unabomber. If you click around a little more, you end up with links to Kaczynski’s 1995 manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future. And if you look up Industrial Society, somehow you end up reading about Luigi Mangione and his mini-festo.4

Aside from its brevity, Mangione’s alleged manifesto, which has been largely removed from every Reddit thread to align with guidelines regarding violent content, is most striking for the confessional voice attributed to the committed murder.5 The manifesto is loose in style, abstract, and barely fleshed out in the points that it appears to make. Mangione’s lackadaisical approach to content and rhetoric are especially evident in these lines: “Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and I frankly do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.” He further defers to those who have already expounded on corruption and greed in the American healthcare system in his references to journalist Elisabeth Rosenthal and documentarian Michael Moore and invokes the first person to legitimize his sentiments and, in turn, his actions.

Unlike Kaczynski’s or Solanas’s manifestos, whose authors went to great lengths to disseminate their work, Mangione’s manifesto was found on his person, along with a slew of other items, including a handgun and a silencer, when he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania for the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson. In contrast, the other authors distributed their ideologies with intent; Solanas sold S.C.U.M by passing it out as a pamphlet on the street herself, charging $1.00 for men and $.50 for women, and Kaczynski, whose writing style and specific phrasing was so identifiable that it cost him his secrecy and several consecutive life terms in prison, threatened further mail bombings if The New York Times or The Washington Post refused to publish Industrial Society.

Mangione’s manifesto reads more like a suicide note in its ineffectual flourishes and melodramatic prose:

“I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming… It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

Compare that to the opening lines of Industrial Society and Its Future:

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.”

Depending on which Latin dictionary you consult online, the word “manifesto” is either derived from the word manifestus or the neuter manifestum, both meaning clear, plain, obvious, or unmistakable. Oxford English Dictionary primarily defines “manifesto” as:

“A public declaration or proclamation, written or spoken; esp. a printed declaration, explanation, or justification of policy issued by a head of state, government, or political party or candidate, or any other individual or body of individuals of public relevance, as a school or movement in the Arts.”

Historically, the manifesto as a written declaration has had a direct relationship to the printing press. Martin Luther’s set of theses for example, thrived due to the invention of Gutenberg’s press, spearheading the Protestant Reformation. Similarly, the move from the traditional wood-framed screw press to modern rotary presses in the late 1840s allowed for faster, cheaper production of pamphlets; since then, the word manifesto has been popularly linked with political opposition and revolution (most notably, The Communist Manifesto).

The manifesto, despite being incendiary for its centripetal individualism, engages abstract audiences, a collective “we,” and is anti-descriptive. Distinctive for its stylistic urgency and the certainty and conviction with which it delivers its arguments, the manifesto aspires to become an inflection point, to spark a radical movement in history. As is the case with The Communist Manifesto, the ensuing movement dates back to the document that inspired it.

Art manifestos are a separate entity altogether, though they are also conceived during turbulent sociopolitical times when the people are apathetic (e.g. with the rise of modernism in response to World War I).6 Often, art manifestos read as a set of theses rather than a set of proclamations, more as how-to guides for making art and rationalizing the changing nature of aesthetics with empiricist frameworks than explicit calls to action. Furthermore, art manifestos are lyric, while the political manifesto is not. Despite this distinction, political manifestos and art manifestos exist on the same continuum; art manifestos like Filippo Tommasso Marinetti’s The Futurist Manifesto and Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism end up inspiring sociopolitical movements that often bear the same name. The example of The Futurist Manifesto, in particular, points to how art can influence politics by proclaiming broader cultural change, as the rise of futurism in Italy coincided with the nation’s overthrow by fascism. In this way, manifestos, political or not, are often conflated with propaganda, as they can easily serve many motives.

The manifesto’s ultimate goal is to incite reaction; when compared to the defensive confessional style of memoir and personal essay, it is always writing on the offensive. It knows its audience and, more importantly, the ideas and people it is up against. A manifesto’s intentions must be clearly outlined, and they have to be accessible, written in a way that could be digestible to the average reader. In Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, for example, his language is measured, but the document as a whole maintains itself as a searing attack on leftist politics and the ideological institutions governing the masses.

Kaczynski’s is one of the more effective manifestos. The enthusiastic Mangione, whose vast digital footprint includes a shitposting Twitter account during his time at Penn, praises Kaczynski’s manifesto, rating it 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads.7

With all the talk on the internet about the power of reciting mantras and affirmations (like Esther Hicks’s viral soundbite on TikTok, “Everything is working out for me at any given moment in time,” and “Lucky Girl Syndrome,” a viral tactic to attract your desires by speaking them into existence), it is curious why our generation does not yet have its manifesto. The reason why could be due to a variety of factors: our generation’s obsession with nihilism evidenced by the empathic embrace of meaning-subjective content, shitposting, lolcowing online, and doomscrolling on social media; the slowly bleeding-out state of the publishing industry; declining rates of media literacy and so forth.8 There have been attempts to emulate the Kaczynskian event of the manifesto (not the 20-year mail bomb campaign but the widespread cultural discourse that circulates after a manifesto’s publication), like the Dark Mountain Project’s self-published pamphlet Uncivilisation on the ecological crisis, Harper’s Magazine’s 2020 open letter “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” against cancel culture, and to a much lesser extent, the “Manifesto” corporate value statements printed all over Lululemon’s posthumous cherry red shopping bags.9 And while Substack is a less bureaucratic route for publishing than, say, a magazine or any other legacy print periodical, I really doubt that the next great American masterpiece manifesto will be disseminated on the platform. Manifestos in the digital form have, in the past, fumbled distribution efforts compared to their print predecessors. On the internet, text becomes iterative; it morphs into image in brightly colored Canva-templated infographics and loses its original meaning through reposts, AI summaries, and botched interpretations. If the next manifesto is digitally published, its message would be constantly stripped of its context in quote tweets and resposts, butchered, reassembled into some uncanny, bastardized version of itself, and then fed to us as “influential content.” I think of videos from Neo-Luddites who exasperatedly admit that the next great revolution against modern technology is going to have to take place on online forums like Reddit and gain significant, algorithmized attention on Instagram and TikTok feeds before the Neo-Luddites can ever come close to achieving their goals. In the digital age where distraction is imminent and attention is rampantly filtered, I can’t help but wonder if there is enough momentum for this movement to move beyond its theory and into praxis.

Times are tough. I am boiling in existential doom and I would like my experiences to mean something. We don’t experience the world directly, like we did in the 19th century, but instead through interpretations of life on our screens. Everyone I know who has a job hates their job, and everyone I know who is unemployed hates their life. I’m in my twenties, the decade of my life in which I’m constantly soul-searching for answers. I would like to be useful. Audre Lorde once said, “You need to reach down and touch the thing that is boiling inside of you and make it somehow useful.” I would really, really like to be useful.

This is my predicament: I really want my life, and I want it to be my own. I know it is impossible for the self to exist in a vacuum, as we are always interpolated by others’ perceptions of us and inundated with messages that shape us unconsciously. We are always subjects.10 Even as I pen this essay, I render myself an object, as many narrators do in their stories about coming of age and becoming. I can’t help but claw at my life, at the worst bits, for some sort of meaning that hardship always culminates into a useful lesson. I have yet to write my own set of proclamations or present theses on how my life ought to look, but I know I want desperately to become, to move myself from a theory of self to the realized thing.

Writing was almost always my coping mechanism in college. I loved to follow my thoughts to a logical conclusion, particularly admiring the fact that a thesis ordered interpretation. It was easier to follow my head than my heart.11 I truly believed that in the end, a narrative would liberate me, cleanse me from the collegiate troubles of dorm life, whisk me away from the dizzying interpersonal spats that set my world on fire, and sedate my anxieties about entering a politically and economically turbulent America after graduation. In plumbing all my experiences for a message, I would exorcise all the insecurity that plagued me about my past and present so that I could bend myself to live less blindly or carelessly in the future. I reasoned that everything could be easily abstracted, that feeling could be reordered into fact. Something as commonplace as heartbreak can be whisked into the world of theory and interpreted to death until the real meaning is visible, dead center.

It is no wonder why personal essays remain so magnetic to me, because the best of them suggest that a life well lived is always imbued with meaning. Every single experience, however minute and meaningless at face value, can be transgressive if squinted at hard enough.

Unlike the personal essay, manifestos are special because they don’t merely interpret events for what they mean, but they envision a whole new world, instead. Writing a manifesto requires reading yourself to the highest extent, thinking beyond the personal and sublimating the self into a collective “we.” It means contextualizing an experience you had into a broader societal reality and orienting it toward a call to action to see the self beyond its self-importance, beyond self-analysis, and reject the need to “do the internal work” a la therapyspeak. Writing a manifesto means self-actualization to the highest degree. It necessitates a deft attention to the world that is akin to prayer.

I want to move beyond the hermeneutics of self-interpretation into action, like a sort of Nietzschean aesthete. I want to be the real thing. I remember in sophomore year, I badly wanted for someone to really read me, to crawl into my skin and see the world through my eyes. I understand now that feeling came from profound loneliness, out of the inability to articulate myself with the limited language I had. As Wittgenstein once aptly put it, “The limits of language mean the limits of my world.” Our vocabulary shapes what we know. Language, after all, is only real if it can be pictured in the real world.

It might be impossible for me to write a manifesto, at least for now. I am too inexperienced and naive to dedicate 5,000-plus words to what the world ought to be, let alone figure out who I want to become. The medium itself is multi-faceted — it is theory on its way to practice, philosophy critically interrogating how to expand itself beyond the philosopher’s sight-line, how to solve a problem of “how to be” by always being in conversation with histories and potential futures.

Manifestos are ultimately about connection and process. Movements are ultimately long processes in the making. In this way, manifestos, with their imaginative qualities, slip in and out of the realm of nonfiction and into fiction’s sphere. Ultimately, manifestos are perspectives.

Some days I lurk on Penn’s English department website and parse through the professors I could have had and the classes I could have taken, wondering if I really squandered my opportunities to make the most out of a prestigious English education. It is easier for me to fantasize being a better writer, an artist worthy of having my words arrive at something material, instead of retroactively seeking martyrdom from a past experience, static in refuge within the genre of creative nonfiction.

The lines are blurry. I am still on my quest to find meaning, despite the pessimistic moment. I turn to the manifesto’s singularity. Instead of the personal essay’s declarative relatability, the manifesto’s urgent tone dares us to keep dreaming.

The manifesto radiates from the self but sublimates into another thing. In this radical transformation, the manifesto speaks for itself in a voice beyond the realms of first person and third person, asking “What is to be done?” In this speech act, the manifesto is almost human-like in its empathy to become something new behind the collective statement of “we.” In order to carry out its ambitions, the manifesto necessitates the collective dreaming for a better, or more articulated, future condition of thoughts and of self. This determined state of the “we” is more inspiring as it is a responsible self lifting up another self.

The self is something I am no longer trying to access through deep examination of contexts and subtexts, but something I want to become. The only way out is not through theory or analysis but through the manifesto as a form of prayer.

I leave with a quote from the famed personal essayist Haley Nahman, who warns about the shortcomings of constant self-analysis and narrative interpretation. She writes, “There’s a certain narcissism to self-deprecation, to the belief that you are exceptionally bad or wrong. The resulting ‘need’ to turn inward enables a familiar spiral. Moving onward and outward, meanwhile, requires a surer foot.”12

It is a soul-less venture to pick at the self for some sort of abstract meaning. Knowledge of the self is not the ultimate project — existing in it is. If a surer foot is what it takes, then we need to know what the stakes are before we step.

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*What follows is a conversation between Ramsey Alsheikh and the founding editors of The New Critic. We met Ramsey our freshman year at Dartmouth taking Arabic classes. We ended up on a study abroad together in Rabat, Morocco in the summer of 2023 and became good friends. Ramsey’s reputation for the polemical and his 6’7” frame precede him. He is the former president of Dartmouth’s Palestinian Solidarity Coalition and the outgoing opinion editor of The Dartmouth.

In our conversation, we discuss the eros of activism, brain-rotted manifestoes, and Ramsey’s relationship to the political imperative through memes, fiction, and law school.

Below is just a taste.*

ELAN Do you want to write a manifesto in the future?

RAMSEY I mean, despite everything I’ve been saying, I still think the manifesto is sexy. I think it’s cool. Why wouldn’t I want to do that? It’s on my bucket list. But I think we need to be realistic, write when you have something to say. And I don’t think if I wrote a manifesto now, just for the hell of it, it would be very interesting. A manifesto, for it to be interesting, has to be a document born out of, you know, a real political need in a certain political moment, right? Kaczynski was forward-looking, forward-facing. Even if, again, for the sake of my future self, I’m not condoning pipe bombing. Not every manifesto is going to be interesting or worth reading. It’s easy to be loud, but it’s much harder to actually do the work…

Read the Postscript

THE NEW CRITIC
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POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Ramsey Alsheikh and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Cathy Li’s essay “THE MANIFESTO IS DEAD! THE MANIFESTO IS DEAD!”

Read Cathy's essay

We met Ramsey our freshman year at Dartmouth taking Arabic classes. We ended up on a study abroad together in Rabat, Morocco in the summer of 2023 and became good friends. Ramsey’s reputation for the polemical and his 6’7” frame precede him. He is the former president of Dartmouth’s Palestinian Solidarity Coalition and the outgoing opinion editor of The Dartmouth.

Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our interview series, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions.

Below we discuss the eros of activism, brain-rotted manifestoes, and Ramsey’s relationship to the political imperative through memes, fiction, and law school.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

ELAN At the beginning of college, you were known for your propositional, manifesto-like op-eds. How do you view those now?

RAMSEY Laura Ingraham came to campus last week, and we were sitting in this igloo on the Green as a protest. We covered it in a bunch of flags and banners. I wrote an op-ed as a kind of manifesto in a moment of anger against the Dartmouth Political Union (DPU) for hosting her as a speaker. My argument was that the DPU claims to be about hosting dialogue, but it’s mostly about their own status: that’s why they bring all these high-profile speakers who mostly represent the status quo. It’s a way of bolstering their own image while repeating the same arguments over and over again. And I tied Herbert Marcuse into it. I thought I was very smart for doing that [laughs]. I presented it as a criticism of this rhetoric of “dialogue,” which has very much been at the center of a lot of campus discourse since the Palestine protests. I think that frustration — that nothing’s happening even while we desperately want things to happen — is what leads to manifesto-like thinking.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Theodore Gary is a 22-year-old senior undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying English and History.

I watched a man with an intense face shamble into the university library three years ago. He sat down at a computer, turned it on, and maneuvered with fits and starts to Facebook. I watched surreptitiously, careful to avoid eye-contact. He either rocked back and forth, snorting and grunting, or sat sinisterly still. He scrolled quickly and roughly, without any discernible scheme, leaning slowly toward the screen, his eyeballs right up against it. He picked up the phone and called, I assume, his ex-wife. They discussed a little boy of unknown origin. He had not, it sounded, had a good experience at somebody’s home. From my side of the one-way conversation, I learned that the bathroom had been fixed. I also learned that things were safe, and that it was time for the boy to visit his dad. I did not get the impression, from the angry noises the man made when the phone call ended, that this was going to happen. He frantically searched Google, and then he left, and the library was quiet again.

I have ever since then wondered what he looked at after the call. His ex-wife’s Facebook? Pictures of his son? I remember he was on YouTube at one point, listening to music. What is his algorithm like? What is he marketed? Does Google know he is mentally ill, that he is wandering around the University of Illinois’s main library? Is there a little checked box for that sort of thing in his data profile? Does Google know about his lost son? His divorce? Maybe the algorithm could procure for him a diagnosis, a treatment facility, a battery of pills, and the kind of father’s rights attorneys they advertise on sports talk radio. That would be nice.

As it stands, Google does nothing. It neither helps nor hurts the poor, twitchy man. I suspect its products even provide him validation, joy. It must serve him that which it also serves us: pictures of family, clips from beloved movies, songs from favorite bands, conspiratorial podcasts — all aimed at manipulating those pathetic neuroses we share collectively, inspiring pain and joy, fear and love, endless possibility and stifling inertia. The internet is an ambiguous place. It has no character. We consume it. We populate it. We consume ourselves. It, like a court eunuch, shapes our desires while yielding to our commands. It is a refuge from everyday life and a ceaseless reminder of it. I wonder how much content is created by the wandering and crazy? How fast could I find a picture of the twitchy man’s wife and son? How fast could I track down his life’s wreckage? I could imagine an enjoyable hour, maybe two, spent sifting through that.

I would like to find his accounts. They are intensely interesting to me. Here is a real man, an unpretentious human life, laid out in pictures, in Facebook comments, in Instagram reels — all of it in fine quality and perfect detail. What a new frontier in entertainment, something truly wilder, weirder, and crazier than its precursors. I would like to watch him smoke meth on Instagram live. This would enthrall me, my sheltered upper-middle class mind — a glimpse of disgusting and intriguing social disorder. On the internet, where we all are equal, I — cocooned in a blanket — may catch a glimpse of those awful, strange things. The algorithm notices, and feeds me more, and an industry is born.

The internet is a freak show like the old circus. Step inside the tent; see the hermaphrodite, the bearded lady. Enjoy it, but never admit it. You weren’t there. You’d never go. You don’t know anything about it at all. And though much has changed since P.T. Barnum, there remains a serious, well-funded industry of promoters and managers and marketers whose income depends on their association with the physically deformed, mentally ill, and socially maladjusted. These people — famous for their ugliness, homelessness, binge-drinking, and public freakouts — are these days called “Lolcows” by the internet; that is to say, they produce “lols” like a cow does milk — endlessly, or at least until they die.

The best-known among them must be WorldofTShirts — Joshua Block, to use his given name. Josh is an autistic, gangly twenty-something forced into a liver-shredding alcoholic stupor over the past half-decade by a series of noxious handlers. He has 4 million followers on TikTok. His account blew up during the pandemic, as he, still young and fresh-looking, posted videos of himself doing goofy dances and reviewing various boba teas. In 2021, a video of him screaming the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind” in Times Square amassed 27 million views. So, clever as he is, Josh did it again, and again, and again. Soon enough, he was on a Times Square billboard. Dixie D’Amelio followed him shortly thereafter.

Sometime after his original first surge in popularity, he takes a trip to Mexico. Josh drinks his first drink here, then chooses to have quite a few more. He loses his phone in an Uber. He turns 21 soon after, and with this Josh has had enough of boba tea. He now drinks liquor, as much as he can get. The songs persist, now sung drunkenly, and a manager enters the picture: Michael Quinn. The former owner of Feltman’s Hotdogs, an oval-faced, barrel-chested, strangely tanned, heavily accented New Yorker, Quinn comes upon Josh’s budding fame and decides to grab a piece of it for himself. Armed with a compulsive need for attention and the money to secure it, he sets about dragging Josh and his roller backpack to the bars, restaurants, and pizza shops of New York City. Together, they have a goofy, silly time. But all is not well. You wouldn’t know it yet, but the man is becoming more erratic, his content more unhinged. Unsupervised by Quinn, Josh records himself licking the subway floor.

Around this time, Josh meets Jason Itzler, Jeffrey Epstein associate, Josh’s second manager, and the King of All Pimps. In the mid-aughts, Itzler became a sort of small-time New York celebrity as the owner/operator of the high-priced escort service New York Confidential. Sent to Rikers in 2005 for his operation of the company, he reemerged in 2008 as a bit player in the prostitution scandal that scuttled former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s political career. In 2011, he was identified as an occupant of the apartment where 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Julia Sumnicht overdosed on GHB. Now on Kick — which is where they send you once you’re banned by Twitch — he streams under the name Mr. Based. Flanked from behind by a gold statue of the Buddha, a human-sized gnome, a replica sarcophagus, and a several-feet-tall Tony the Tiger, he now spends his nights like a dirtbag cam-girl: $50 to take a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, $200 to smoke a blunt, $300 to huff Galaxy Gas.

Itzler, I’m sure, needed no advice worming his way into the life of a naïve twenty-something. Isolate. Manipulate. Make him reliant on you. The content became meaner, the fans more rabid, as Itzler established himself in Josh’s life. Gone was that silly and sweet stuff in Josh’s videos, replaced instead by an unrelenting drumbeat of triggers designed to make him go ape. Fans on the street, egged on by Itzler, would yell, “Put the fries in the bag.” “Fuck you, bitch!” Josh would yell back. Mostly, the two sat in Itzler’s opulent apartment, with Josh away from the camera and Itzler right up next to it, drinking until collapse, until Josh went limp. These streams, hard as they are to watch, function as something like a real-time account of Josh’s descent into hell. In a clip pretty neatly summarizing their dynamic, Josh huffs nitrous oxide from a balloon. He jerks and flails and suddenly stops, looking terrified. “I feel lightheaded,” he yells. Peaking over his shoulder, Itzler laughs and points his thumb toward Josh, a smile plastered on his lips. “Look at this guy,” he says. The clip has over 300,000 views.

Itzler is out of the picture now, relegated once again back to the status of depressing middle-aged man, but the Joshua Block money-making operation churns ever onward. Managed today by MAGA influencer and cocaine aficionado Tony Beam, Josh and his entourage can be found on Parti — which is where they send you when you’re banned by Kick — engaged in the same crap. Josh goes to a bar and gets blackout drunk. Josh gets punched for saying something racist. A sampling of the top posts on his subreddit read, “Josh Confuses a block of cream cheese for his phone,” “Josh block crashed out on me and smacked my phone,” “Josh crashout in Austin,” “Josh says N word hard R,” and so on. You get the picture.

It is miraculous that the scheme continues. So self-evidently awful is it that even Nick Fuentes, beacon of moral clarity such as he is, considers it “unethical.” Josh’s viewership is down, sure, but based on the arrests, scandals, and international incidents, he should be done, out of the public eye. But, of course, the craziness is the point. Algorithms reward attention, and if you can’t get the good kind, then the bad will do. What is inevitable, since private people will never do it themselves, is state intervention. One day, Joshua Block will have to be institutionalized and removed from public life forcibly. And mercifully, that process has begun. As of January 23, having complied with a court order, Joshua Block is now in rehab. He no longer has access to a phone.

Did you know that in 2005 Itzler, pathetic as he is now, had the clout to command a serious profile in New York Magazine? I was surprised when I stumbled upon it, though maybe less so when I considered the preoccupations of mid-aughts tabloids. I think Britney Spears was then at her peak. For them, Itzler must have been a fascinating creature. His combination of stupidity, shamelessness, and success anticipates our own time. Interviewed in jail — I imagine him sitting a table away from Johnny Sack — Iztler thoroughly enlightens us on the theory which animates his mind.

“I thought I could save the world if I could bring together the truly elite people, the most beautiful women with the most perfect bodies, best faces, and intelligence, and the elite men, the captains of industry, lawyers, and senators. This would bring about the most happiness, to the best people, who most deserved to be happy.”

If Itzler’s goal was to bring together the best people, the most powerful minds and bodies, then what is he doing with Josh, a man who once tried to eat his own phone? It doesn’t need to be so thoroughly explained, of course. It is plastered across his taunting, giddy smile. If he can’t indulge the best, then he’ll settle for torturing the worst. Deep within that superficial, childish mindset, I have no doubt he considers Josh to be at fault for his own suffering. The mockery and public humiliation is deserved, I’m sure he’d claim. “Get your shit together, man,” I can hear Itzler say, as Josh slurps down his fifth Twisted Tea.

Though Josh is not the first person to have their life placed on public display, he is among the vanguard of a type of new reality TV. Unlike past exercises in public bullying, his story takes place in real time. You watch him live, like an NBA game. You make a comment; he responds. And though he follows in the tradition of internet creators like Filthy Frank or Idubbbz who also marketed themselves as gross freaks, he is not engaged, as they were, in some kind of low-brow performance art. His art involves no performance. His freakouts are real freakouts. His tears are real tears. His drunkenness is real drunkenness. He is the content, and there can be no differentiating between the one and the other.

The internet demands this anti-performance and a similarly warped authenticity. Better a forthright monster than a hypocritical one, says the attention economy. Contrition, that humbling of oneself before others, is hard to watch and harder to monetize. Under the current scheme, the worst a man can do is not to cause others pain but to pretend that he does not. All the lolcows, whatever else they may do, act forthrightly as themselves. From Grace VanderWaal obsessive Daniel Larson to the brony Chris Chan, all share an absolute divorce from reality. For us, the content is a joke cruelly played. For them, it is the real world. If you take social media to function something like Foucault’s panopticon, then the lolcows don’t even know they’re in jail. They feel instead that they are noteworthy and influential people — celebrities, in the true sense of the word. As Chris Chan told the police during her arrest, “I’m famous on the internet.”

The content is laughably simple. In Josh’s case, somebody carries around a camera, points it at him, and films as he drinks in a bar or Itzler’s room, or walks around some city, or rides in an Uber, or picks his nose. And so strange is he, that watching him do even this is interesting. What is he thinking about? you wonder, Why is he fidgeting? Watching Josh, I feel as I did while observing that man on the library computer — like I have seen an alien or an animal escape from the zoo. I gawk, is what I’m trying to say, and anyone else watching Josh has done much the same. He has jokes played on him. He is tormented in ways he cannot and does not seem to understand. He is examined as if he were a bad work of art, every detail scrutinized in order to come up with an ever more complex explanation of the same dull truth — that the man is disgusting.

What is supposed to keep people from seeking this out, if that’s what they want? The instant Josh’s drinking slows and his life improves, some other attention-starved dirtbag will step right over his healing body to supplant the celebrity he’s crafted over five long years. For Josh to retain his place among the attention-elite, he must continue to drink, and he must continue to act crazy. He might even need to become crazier, since appetites for the grotesque and the extreme, these days, seem to know few limits. To keep his celebrity and his sanity is impossible. He has to choose. And let me assure you, Josh will not choose correctly.

Because, poor guy, it’s not up to him. Josh is trapped, but not by the handlers who buy his drinks and exploit his ignorance or the systems which deliver and monetize his content. No, he is trapped by his fans, the everyday people who watch, comment, like, and share. The responsibility for his grotesque state of affairs lies with them because they are active participants in his life. He acts as he does because he is told to. Through their comments and likes, they encourage his worst impulses. When confronted with the consequences, they react as all bullies do, throwing up their arms with an expression of horror, explaining, “I didn’t tell him to do that!” His fans, in all cases, push him toward further degeneration, toward a more intense meltdown. You know, I’ll give Itzler this, that forthright scumbag: he is right to treat Josh the way he does, if only because he has correctly intuited the audience’s desires. They want to watch Josh reach the limit. They want to see him die.

Explain it to anyone, get them to think about it for a minute, and they will cringe, because Josh is suffering, on camera, for money. But why, if the suffering is so self-evident, isn’t the content rejected wholly and immediately, like a cake baked with salt instead of sugar? I don’t think most people search him out. On the algorithmic hamster wheel, Josh simply bubbles up. One moment you’re watching a cat stuck in a jar, the next you’re watching Josh, with a BAC of 0.3, fight a 16-year-old. Maybe you watch a little. Maybe you scroll away. But Josh comes back, and you watch some more. It may be gross, but next to car crash compilations, it’s not that big of a deal.

Giving in makes sense. Reconciling to the assumption that chaos is endemic and confusion is inescapable might be the only plausible way to interact with content that overworks the conscience, making it unable to distinguish good from evil, fact from fiction. And yet, despite its dopamine dependencies, society remains a collection of individuals, all with an equal capacity for reason and compassion — all capable, in equal measure, of scrolling past Josh’s big dumb face.

There is a strangely earnest faction in the comments beneath Josh’s videos. They write little notes like, “this poor suffering soul,” and “hope you’re doin okay buddy,” or “be kind Josh.” They hope, so far as I understand, that he will quit drinking, that he will return to the goofy stuff that first made him famous. What these pity viewers do not understand is that their views count the same as every other. They help him not at all, since Josh is doing it for them, for their attention, and the only way to stop him is to grant him none.

One helpfully self-aware poster on the WorldofTShirts Reddit seems to get it:

“He’s been locked up for almost a month now, and I’m starting to forget about fry boy. If Josh graduates rehab and tries to stream sober, who will still watch? Honestly, I’m not interested in listening to his yelling, screeching voice, or what he claims is singing. I don’t want to watch him scream and wag his finger around in front of a camera. I only watched Josh to see him get sloppy drunk and run around unhinged in NYC. I watched for the crashouts and racial slurs. If I don’t see those, I’m bored.”

What do you do about a person like that? About somebody who enjoys the suffering of others?

About somebody with a conscience so lazy he can’t be bothered to move his thumb half an inch upwards? This is a morally diseased person, a true nihilist, but can he help it? I said earlier that we are capable of making the right choice, and I believe that, but you have to understand that these people, the people who watch his streams, who pay him money and who ambush him in the street, are more than voyeurs. They don’t feel sickened; they feel nothing. They grew up on car crash compilations, on ISIS beheadings, on the most visceral porn that you can imagine. Submerged in an ocean of shit, does Joshua Block smell worse than anything else?

The main room of the University of Illinois’s (UIUC) Student Union is best known for its Starbucks. There’s a little one tucked into the room’s eastern corner, which, with its faux-leather upholstery, doubles as a fake café. Engineers are hard at work, future executives consult ChatGPT, humanities students waste time — for six-and-a-half days a week, the noise level never rises above a gentle patter. But those who arrive after seven o’clock on Wednesday evening are greeted by a very different scene. An island materializes in front of the room’s modest stage as four of five of the café’s small tables are pushed together by a single group, dressed to the nines, that has gathered for the week’s main event. It is karaoke night.

Katie, the karaoke czar, is up on stage and wants to let us know that “Sign-ups for karaoke are open!” The call goes largely unacknowledged, except for on the island, where a great deal of activity has begun. These people are not here to study but to sing. Michael Sligting, who has a great voice, and Dan, who trails in his wake, are first up on stage, singing Backstreet Boys’s “I Want It That Way.” Allison and Bella gossip quietly on the side before getting up to sing “Do I Wanna Know?” Allison has come to karaoke every week for the last four years because, as she says, “No one is judgy. You can dress up and be yourself.” There is also Tom, who for some reason has a hammer looped onto his belt, and Ray, who seems to exclusively sing German heavy metal. Gary, a large and solid man, shuffles a deck of cards. Terry, who has the best voice of them all, sits quietly on his computer. The celebrity, the man I am there to see, Michael DeCoste, has just finished his set.

Bearded, standing at a lanky 6-foot-3-inches tall, and with the softly angular features of Jacob Elordi, Michael is unmissable. He’s sweaty, offering a monotone “Hey” as I greet him. His well-worn trench coat is set aside on a nearby chair, and exposed atop his green button-down shirt is the heavy silver cross which never leaves his neck. I’d arranged to meet him days before. But even had I not, locating him would have been no trouble. At 6:20 p.m. he posted a smiling thumbs-up selfie on Snapchat, reminding the world to join him at karaoke night. He did so again at 6:55 p.m.

Across the various social media platforms onto which Michael uploads his content (Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok) you will uniformly find videos of his version of Risk Astley’s 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Dressed in the full Rick Astley outfit — striped tee, white collared shirt, suit jacket — Michael replicates the exact Rick Astley moves — snapping fingers, shaking hips. The rickroll, that old meme, he has transformed into a signature. And you cannot attend karaoke without watching him perform it.

The thing is, Michael can really dance. He’s genuinely good. There is something seriously captivating about the confidence with which he executes the absurd movements. It’s not smooth or suave or charismatic but representative of somebody who has overcome their neurosis forcibly, through absolute determination and will. The performance does not come naturally, but it is executed flawlessly, and there is something deeply admirable in that.

The Michael Decoste character began on Star Wars day in a cafeteria at Parkland, the Champaign-based community college where Michael spent his freshman year, when an acquaintance’s ironic karaoke performance of John Legend’s “All of Me” caught his attention. He snuck on stage to mimic his friend’s performance with his arms spread wide in a sort of operatic caricature. He got a laugh. He was asked to sing. He thought about it for a moment, ran through his rolodex of jokes, and settled on the classic meme, the rickroll.

“It kind of started as a joke,” Michael said when I spoke to him in December. “And then it became a bit more serious like, ‘Hey, I can make a little gimmick out of this. A niche gimmick of a few people.’ And then it was [at] the end of sophomore year that I finally was like, you know what, I can make this a whole thing.”

Soon enough, he began recording his performances, uploading them to the university’s shared Snapchat story (you are added after supplying Snapchat your student email). The attention came immediately. “A lot of people started adding me, and they were like, ‘Wow, I love this. This is hilarious. I love it so much.’ And I was like, ‘You know, I’ll just post a little bit more on here,’” Michael said.

And post he has. So far as I can tell, a single week has not gone by in the last three years without a minimum of one Michael DeCoste post on the UIUC ’26 Snapchat story. They usually come from karaoke night, but sometimes he throws something else on there, too — a reupload, a sponsorship, or a goofy workout video. The key to his success must be at least partially attributable to his sheer persistence: annoying at first, curious after a while, and then sincerely beloved, he is a celebrity by way of Stockholm Syndrome.

Though Michael does not drink — he is a devout Catholic in that way — you may, on a Friday or Saturday night, find him dancing for the benefit of those waiting in line outside the major UIUC bars, where wait times regularly reach 30 to 40 minutes. The reaction to Michael’s dancing is decidedly mixed. Requests for pictures blend with manic shouts of “Oh My God.” Peals of laughter amidst expressions of outright contempt come from the “drunken frat bros, who would be ‘shouting at anyone… if anybody’s doing anything,’” according to Michael. But though I’m sure these guys would shout at anybody, Michael rarely receives their outright scorn. Talk with them, and what you will actually discover is a mocking toleration. They dap him up, say a few nice words, take a picture with him, and share it with the group chat, laughing at but not with him.

Most are not so cruel. Mya, a sophomore I encountered at karaoke night, finds that Michael “gets people in a good mood.” I got a different perspective from my friend Lily, who pleaded with me, “Don’t give him attention. Don’t encourage him.”

But that ship has sailed, so far as I can tell. “There are people who come to karaoke night every week,” Michael told me. “And I always bump into people who are, like, fan-girling or fan-boying. They’ll be like, ‘I’m your biggest fan.’ It still catches me by surprise.”

But I’m not so sure that the notoriety has gotten to him. “It’s cool that I’ve gotten the positive attention. You know, the thing is, I was happy before, and I’m happy still. It didn’t really alter things that much.” Katie, the karaoke czar and Michael’s friend, tells me that when they walk down the street together, “Everybody recognizes Michael.”

The holy fool is, in the Russian Orthodox belief, an “unconventional saint,” who lives a “life of physical and mental extremes: they feign madness and willingly expose themselves to others’ scorn.” They are a prominent feature of Russian literature, especially that of Dostoevsky, often presented as seers and truth-tellers whose strange and provocative behavior “serves to publicly unmask the sinfulness and hypocrisy of their contemporaries.”1

I feel that Michael Decoste is something like a holy fool. His experience is one I cannot help but compare to Joshua Block, his evil twin. They are fundamentally similar, both creations, at differing scales, of the attention-sapping algorithms which order so much of our social world. Where one’s experience of parasocial fame has been so extraordinarily violent and degraded, the other lives joyously and normally. Nobody follows Michael around or demands that he “put the fries in the bag.”

But Michael is not chasing attention, at least not so ruthlessly as Josh. There are things he simply will not do because he is grounded, because he has belief. “I want to be kind of an inspiration for some people,” Michael told me, “because there’s so many times where I’ve had imposter syndrome and [felt] doubt about myself. And I’m sure everyone’s struggled through that, you know, in their teenage years.” He has succeeded through a mix of Catholicism and Tai Kwon Do (he is an instructor at a gym in nearby Mahomet). “Know yourself, know your limits, know what you’re capable of, and try to work it the best you can. I think that if everyone lived by that philosophy, a lot of our problems would disappear…You just have to have that willpower to do it.”

Tonight, Michael performs the usual dances, but for the social accounts he has in store a special performance of “Last Christmas” by WHAM. There’s no special dance to this song, no unique or goofy moves. Standing at the mic, he bobs and sways and follows the music. I realize now that this is the reason he has on a green button-down. This is also the only performance of his to be recorded tonight. The rest will disappear, lost to time and fading with memory. But Michael is not here for the attention, he is here to inspire. “I kind of go over the top, you know, with how I dress and [perform],” he told me. “Look, if I can do those things, despite the fact that I was homeschooled and socially awkward and [with] Covid happening and everything...despite the fact that all that happened, [and] I still found a way to do this, sure enough, you can find something, too.”

Katie told me that by nine o’clock most nights, karaoke sign-ups will fill up completely, and tonight they have. Taking turns on stage are no longer just Michael Decoste and company but also now new and unexpected groups. A squad of sorority sisters take turns at various Christmas songs. Together on stage, a girl and a boy exchange nervous glances. Tom and both Michaels swivel their hips to “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead or Alive. They look ridiculous, but they are laughing, and so am I.

The boys — Michael DeCoste, Tom, Dan, and Gary — rope me into playing the Russian card game Durak. They are very nice and very serious players. They shuffle the deck, cut the cards, and deal me in precisely. When I make a mistake, everybody gets upset. “You forgot the suit,” Michael yells, explaining to me my mistake and instructing me how to correct it. These sweet boys, I like them. All around is singing and smiling, laughter and joy. There is no judgement here, no contempt, no liquor — an antidote, I think, to the cynicism of a cold, cold world.

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*What follows is a conversation between Theodore Gary and the founding editors of The New Critic.

Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our author interviews, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions.

In our conversation, we discuss WorldofTShirts’s campus visit to the University of Illinois, the origins of Michael DeCoste, middle school boys, and the end times of streaming.

Below is just a taste.*

RUFUS I feel like a lot of this stems from a middle school and high school online, primarily male, youth culture where boys are like, “Oh, I found this horrible video on Reddit or the dark web.” Like, that is the realest thing you could possibly interact with without the physical. “Let’s strip everything down to what is most disgusting or horrific or visceral” because those categories are more real than anything else. And there’s this intense appetite — for a young boy, especially — to get their hands on that sort of thing, the realest thing.

But what’s interesting about Josh to me is that when you’re watching a stream for hours and hours you develop a relationship with the person you’re watching. That, specifically, feels like a new permutation to me. When you’re watching body cam footage of a police officer, you don’t form this parasocial relationship — it’s an anonymous police officer. But with Josh, he’s your friend, almost. But he’s a friend that you’re torturing, a friend you’re watching get tortured.

THEODORE It just plays out the dynamics of middle school groups of boys, basically. And if you think about streaming, streaming is basically like replacement friends. That’s the idea. If you’re watching a stream, you’re typically watching someone play a video game or whatever, but the best ones are usually groups. So it’s like, look at these guys having fun with their friends, and I’m sitting here in my room alone watching them have fun and having vicarious fun through them. It’s really weird, actually.

I used to, when I was in high school, watch a lot of streamers. I stopped because I was like, “Oh my god, I’m just using this to replace social interaction.” Joshua Block works under the same principle. Streaming is about the fun part of friendship — cracking jokes, playing a game, being competitive. Joshua Block is the dark, negative underbelly of that same idea, which is to say that what middle school boys will often do is, as a group, find someone who’s weaker, who doesn’t necessarily understand who or what they are, and the boys will sort of pretend to be friends with this person while, in fact, making a joke to the in-group: “Look at this idiot. Look at how we’re all so much cooler than them.” And that’s all that’s going on with Joshua Block. The problem is that it’s being done by adult men.

Read the Postscript

THE NEW CRITIC
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POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Theodore Gary and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Theodore’s essay “Freak Show,” a story about the less glamorous characters who prowl the fringes of the attention economy, one a mistreated alcoholic, the other a Catholic karaoke performer.

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Below we discuss WorldofTShirts’s campus visit to the University of Illinois, the origins of Michael DeCoste, middle school boys, and the end times of streaming.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

ELAN How did you first come across WorldofTShirts?

THEODORE He came to campus is what happened. He was here at [the University of Illinois] Urbana-Champaign right when I was sort of germinating on the idea [of writing the piece]. I was just going to write about Michael DeCoste, and I had spoken to DeCoste — I’d just sort of talked with him informally. And then I came home, and I was talking to my roommates, and they were like, “Oh, yeah, you know, WorldofTShirts came to campus.” I was like, “Who the hell is WorldofTShirts?” And then one of my roommates explained it to me, and he explained it very matter-of-factly, “Oh, it’s this guy who, you know, he’s taken advantage of by his managers, and they do this and this and this.” And as he explained it, I just became more and more viscerally disgusted. It was as if he was describing our lawn in terms of matter-of-factness. This is sort of the germ of the piece — I was like, how the hell can you not be just viscerally disgusted by all this? And how does it not make you angry that this exists? And that’s what I’m trying to explore in my writing.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Will Diana is a 24-year-old writer and poet living in Washington D.C. He studied sociolinguistic anthropology at the University of Virginia. He writes The Hermit Speaks.

Many experiences in my life, especially when I was younger, have come with the lunatic brutality of revelation, ambushing me in the hills like wild-haired, sad-eyed, armless bandits leaping leglessly to grab me and drag me off into the wilderness. I wonder how much these experiences, legless and armless, fail to really mean anything before disappearing once more into the wilderness, into the night, into the world. Covid, which struck when I was 18, was one of those experiences, and it only confirmed this suspicion I have that the world itself is entirely manic and impotent. In particular, I find myself constantly questioning a ten-day period in the winter when I was isolated in an apartment with a bunch of guys who I didn’t know and who had, like me, gone feral. It was, like everything else in my life, entirely idiotic and pointless. This was a pivotal moment, so it only makes sense that I return to this time in my quest to understand what experience really means, how memory transforms it, and whether we can learn anything at all about the world. What did it all mean? Why did it happen?

In February 2021, the height of the pandemic, I was a freshman in college. I was standing on a hill beside a dorm complex I had only peered at nervously for the past handful of months. It had snowed two days before, and the whole hillside was blank. The same night that it snowed, my friend and I were walking around drunk, and being two drunk, pent-up, confused, bored kids, we went on a stupid drunk rampage. We picked up a rental scooter and threw it over a bridge into a ravine, yelling “FUCK VEO SCOOTERS!” We pelted icy snowballs at the dorm’s darkened, mysterious windows, yelling “FUCK COVID!” Exhausted and laughing hysterically, we rolled down the hill in the snow, yelling “FUCK THIS SHIT!” Lying in the middle of the road, we chugged our pocket beers, crushed the cans, and threw them at the physics building, where they made a flat thud against the immense brick wall.

Just a day later, my friend tested positive for Covid. As part of the school’s Covid policy, we both had to spend ten days in isolation. My friend was sent to spend that time entirely alone at a hotel downtown. By chance, I was assigned to the isolation dorms at which we had just pelted snowballs.

As I walked up the steps to the dorm, I noticed someone had spraypainted the name OTTO on a large metal tube lying nearby in the snow, as if some construction project had been started and left unfinished by builders who had then mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind only wreckage. I stopped to look at this name, OTTO, on the metal tube that didn’t really belong on the otherwise orderly lawn. This name on that tube was very pleasing for some reason, and after thinking about it, I realized it was because they had the same topography, the name and the tube: two open circles at the ends of a chain — OTTO, a tube, a telescope, a microscope.

I carried with me all the stuff a stupid 18-year-old boy thinks he will need for ten days in isolation: eleven books, five pairs of underwear, a handle of vodka, other odds and ends. I looked up at the building that I was to be trapped in. It looked small, dirty, a little evil. Its windows were huge and dark, the eyes of a sleeping beast. According to the email I had just received, I was to report to my room in the building and stay inside for ten days. If I left my room, I would be suspended.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I would find inside the isolation dorm. Since arriving at the school in the fall of 2020, this particular dorm had loomed ominously in the near-distance. No one really knew what was inside. My other friends had been sent to hotels for isolation. They said it had been a pretty bad ten days, being totally isolated in a small room. As a college freshman, that seemed like a long time to be entirely alone. I opened the door expecting solitude. But I found eight guys in the living room standing in a loose circle around a massive pile of alcohol.

It turns out these isolation dorms were made up of suites. Instead of a cell, I was confined to a large apartment. And because I had caught Covid during the huge spike in cases that ensued after frat rush, almost everyone in the isolation dorm was a frat kid looking to continue the party. This set of circumstances meant that instead of crushing loneliness, I would be subjected to something truly odd.

My particular dorm was full of a bunch of strange characters. Three of them had caught Covid two or three times by February 2021, which was still a few months before the first vaccines became available. They were badly sick: fevers, confusion, a total lack of taste or smell. And they spent the whole time partying like everyone else. After arriving at the isolation dorm, we all stood in a circle, comparing the alcohol we’d brought along for the stay, which still seemed impressive and cool to a bunch of 18-year-olds. I showed off my handle of vodka. Very nice, a reliable choice. Understated, but effective. Essential, even. The plastic bottle really ties the whole thing together. An ROTC guy showed off his mason jars of authentic moonshine. Very cool, not often you get to drink moonshine. Another guy brought Jack Daniel’s, which was the real winner. Jack Daniel’s, now that is class my friend. Can’t wait to have a night with my old friend JD. You don’t mess with Jack, amirite? Others also brought cheap tequila, Pink Whitney, rum, an ounce of weed, and some coke and Adderall — whatever could be easily packed, whatever an 18-year-old boy would think was so Awesome that he had to bring it with him for isolation. Because it was the pandemic, we all mostly lived through memes and versions of ourselves we could transmit online. Like me, these guys probably thought they would make a funny Snapchat story of themselves getting drunk or high in a hotel room, alone. Now we all laughed, talking about how this isolation wouldn’t be so bad after all. Proud of our kaleidoscope of substances, we all felt very mighty and cool until one of the guys, who was shirtless, sighed and said with great disappointment: Boys, where the fuck is the beer?

This was a huge loss for the cause. No beer? How could we cross the desert without our manna? What to do...

At that moment, one of the guys mentioned he was an RA. The air left the room. Some of our friends had already been suspended from the university for six months at the hands of some RAs, zealots of Covid policing, for the crime of bringing a girl into the dorm or talking with more than three people. Realizing he had instantly lost our trust, he said, I’m 21, boys. I’ll go get the beers. Don’t you worry. And at that moment, he walked to the closest corner store and came back with two thirty racks. I think I was the only one who had misgivings about a guy with Covid walking into a store. Regardless, he had won our trust. Grinning, we cracked open the first beers.

This was a hard time, a strange time. Not many young people were happy during Covid. I felt as if a key part of my adolescence had been robbed for reasons entirely beyond my control. One’s senior year of high school and their freshman year of college are the two periods of life that dominate American coming-of-age films. I’d spent my whole life raised on these images. Since I was a teenager, I’d anxiously awaited the moment I’d no longer be some dumb child and finally be a cool college kid. These years were the time for a key initiation rite that had just suddenly disappeared. Instead of Lady Bird, Animal House, or 10 Things I Hate About You, I was thrown into a period of isolation and loneliness. I was intensely depressed, angry, confused.

To further complicate things, the very strict Covid regulations, overbearing as they were, also seemed morally good to me. I wanted to be a Good Person and Protect the Community. The times I went to a small dorm party or the bars in the months before this episode of isolation, I felt as if I’d personally contributed to the deaths of millions. In these instances, I often acted much more ridiculous than I would otherwise, as if I should just commit to being terrible. Many other people acted like this, too, and any social scene that did exist in small gatherings at dorms, apartments, bars, or frat houses was an abomination dancing the witches’ sabbath at the outskirts of an empty kingdom. It was an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

The people were insane, cruel, ridiculous. The bathrooms were covered in piss and trash. The halls were covered in piss and trash. In odd frenzies, kids ran rampant through the dorms and the streets. Stuff was constantly stolen, broken, torn to shreds. Life was pious loneliness or social pandemonium. Neither extreme made sense, neither gave me any satisfaction.

Most of all, I didn’t really know what was going on, or why. I reread The Trial, The Castle, and Crime and Punishment. I would lie on the floor, listening to songs on repeat, trying to understand why this was happening. I was obsessed with the Book of Job. I liked Job’s doomed quest for understanding, his constant questions, his friends who didn’t care about his suffering and mocked him, the young Elihu who called Job and his friends a bunch of idiots who didn’t truly understand the world of dreams, the God who came down from a whirlwind and told Job that he can’t know God. Job’s children were slaughtered, his wealth was destroyed, his body plagued; pious Job was severely punished for reasons he couldn’t understand, and for reasons that seemed ridiculous and petty to me. In the original version of the Book of Job, after all Job’s senseless suffering, after all his agonizing investigation of good and evil, God just kills him in the end.

I lived my life through social media. My memories were just memes. I painted awful paintings and put them on my dorm walls, paintings like They Fucked up and Gave Mao Zedong a Horse (Diana, 2021), Jeff Bezos Floods the World With Pure Love and Understanding (Diana, 2020), or PAX AMERICANA (Diana, 2020). I was not a painter. The paintings were just brainrot that I spit out on a canvas, as if my brain had actually started to melt and was oozing through my mouth, my eyes, my ears. I would get ridiculously drunk watching Neon Genesis Evangelion or Breathless with one or two friends and then stumble to the dining hall, where the screens all proudly said WELCOME CLASS OF 2023. We were, of course, the class of 2024.

In the isolation dorm, it really was an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. I never saw the RA again. Immediately after depositing the beer on the table, he locked himself in his room and never once left it. He didn’t bathe. I’m unsure what he ate, or if he ate at all. Every night, he stayed up till 4 a.m. screaming in a language none of us understood. Some assumed he was playing video games, but none had seen him carry a console and monitor into the dorm. Because he was in the room next to me, I was kept up by his constant, inscrutable shouting.

The other guys were spoiled burnouts, young finance bros and frat guys. Their eyes lacked the spark of intelligence. They didn’t understand why I spent half the time reading novels and textbooks when it was so easy to cheat on tests during online school, anyway. One of the principal characters in the isolation dorm was a guy named Hunter. The first day of Covid isolation, I was in my room when I heard someone scream FUCK YEAH! from the living room. When I came out, Hunter was shirtless, doing pushups. I asked him what he was doing. He told me that whenever he got a math problem right, he would shotgun a beer and do ten pushups. He had ten math problems to do that day. Hunter informed me very seriously that he only shotgunned beers. I thought this was a schoolboy exaggeration, but throughout those ten days, I never once saw him sip a beer. Like a jungle beast, he gulped down a Natty Ice in under five seconds and tossed its mangled carcass aside as he belched. This school was apparently a pretty good school, despite the efforts of its students.

But Hunter wasn’t all beers and brawns. He often sat on the balcony with a guitar, singing old pop songs to serenade the girls passing in the street below, calling them to have a beer with him on the balcony. It seemed he really thought he could convince someone to come hookup with him in the Covid dorm with just a song. Maybe he also thought they would be impressed by the sight of him shirtless, shotgunning a beer. Or else, and this may be most likely, he was a romantic soul: he knew this whole thing was doomed, but he tried anyway, knowing it would never work.

At one point, Hunter knocked on my door. Because he knew I was a writer, he asked me to help him write a love song for a girl. He was very serious about writing this love song for the girl. Even talking about the girl made him blush. I stayed up with him for a few hours, drinking and writing something in iambic pentameter (I didn’t know how to write a song). It was a genuinely lovely experience learning to write a song while he strummed the melody, picking up on and expanding on whatever ideas he wanted to use. He then recorded himself, shirtless (Hunter was always shirtless), singing and playing the song. He sent the video to the girl on Snapchat. That very night, he left the dorm to hookup with her. (Note: I think this proves that I am quite effective at writing love poetry. To any reader who needs help with their romantic life, Will Diana will happily write a love poem for the low, low price of one paid subscription).

I found out when he returned late that night that the girl wasn’t even in Covid isolation. He had gone to a dorm and hooked up with the girl while her roommate was sleeping. Neither girl in the room had Covid, which meant he had almost certainly spread it to both of them. He also told us the girl he was hooking up with had whooping cough, and she kept hacking her lungs into the pillow while he was hitting it from the back (his words, not mine) so that it sounded like he was fucking a mucusy, backfiring car. At no point did he seem to consider that he was spreading Covid to her and her roommate and would also bring back a new respiratory illness to seven other guys with Covid, three of whom were badly sick. Then again, no one else seemed to care but me: an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

A day or two after this episode with Hunter, there were parties everywhere in the isolation dorms. Everyone was genuinely elated they could party without having to worry about Covid since, after all, we all had it. When I returned to my room, I stayed up till sunrise for no reason at all. I listened to the RA scream in his unknown language. I scrolled on my phone, unable to focus, unable to think. From that point on, and for reasons I still don’t really understand, I wouldn’t be able to sleep until sunrise for the rest of isolation. In the daytime, I often had gushing nosebleeds that lasted for several hours. These symptoms couldn’t be blamed on Covid. They felt like biblical signs.

The following days were filled with petty monotony. After the night of the parties, university police swarmed the area in front of the dorms, standing guard. We all received emails informing us that any student caught leaving their suite would be suspended for up to a year from the university.

Food was delivered to our doors once a day in little packages that consisted of apples, dry slices of white bread, and cold pieces of turkey. When you get put in the brig in the Navy, at least they give you cheese. Because of the cops watching outside and the bad food, I joked that we were under siege, that they were trying to starve us out.

I spent my time reading or drinking with the other guys. It sounds fine, but something wasn’t right. My nosebleeds were endless, my sleep short. I stayed up all night reading Amerika, V., and a textbook on Buddhism. I felt unnerved, raw, nervous. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t sleep. In the living room, the guys were constantly doing pushups, walking in circles, shadowboxing. We were like a band of idiots preparing to die in a war. We were always drunk, always singing. We threw beer cans at the walls. We pushed all the living room furniture into a pile in the middle of the floor. It had only been four days of isolation. It was stupid, dramatic, pointless.

At 1 a.m. on the fourth night, we noticed the cops weren’t outside anymore. Inexplicably, they just left. Everything was like that. Punishment came quickly, mightily, but not surely. I left the dorm with two of the other guys to smoke by an academic building across the street. This was my first time outside in four days.

In the shadow of the chemistry building, we crouched on our haunches, smoking out of a geeb. We drank rum straight from the bottle. We chugged beers. We soon realized we were right next to the university’s Covid testing center, where all enrolled students had mandatory virus testing every week. All year, every student went at their assigned times and spat into a tube while standing six feet away from the next person, who was six feet away from the next, and so on. The tube had to be filled up with saliva, not spit, which was somehow very different. If you turned in a tube of spit, you had to do it again. This meant it took a long time to fill up the tubes properly. It always seemed that I, by chance, was placed next to a girl I had a crush on, and so had to spend ten minutes spitting silently into a tube, six feet away from her, while we both stared into space, at our phones, at anything else. It was all very efficient.

Now I was drunk and high with two guys, at night, after four days of what felt like an eternity of isolation. And we had stumbled back into the Covid testing center, which was under a pavilion by the football stadium. The whole street was lined with folding plastic signs that read UNIVERSITY CORONAVIRUS TESTING FACILITY AHEAD. They were placed every few feet in a line for a quarter mile, an army of unwavering signs marching off into battle.

One of the guys stood up on a picnic table and shouted FUCK COVID! before throwing an empty beer can at the wall. The other one shattered a glass bottle on the ground, shouting FUCK COVID! FUCK VIRGINIA! Inspired, angry, happy, I picked up one of the signs and held it above my head in a gesture not unlike those of the first hominids who learned to kill their fellow man. I shouted FUCK COVID! and threw the sign down a long set of stairs, watching its corpse shatter on the ground.

The ancient Greek Maenads, followers of Dionysus, lived in total isolation high upon a hill. Every spring, in a ritual honoring the wine god, they assembled in a drunken fury and descended from their hill to rip victims apart like wild beasts. It was a sacrament of both wine and blood, representing the true nature of man. In Vajrayana Buddhism, the terrible swift thunderbolt is a major motif: enlightenment itself comes down to man in the form of lightning, instantly dazzling man’s experience with true wisdom. Not unlike a thunderbolt, not unlike the frenzy of the ancients, not unlike the terrible knowledge of systematic violence dawning suddenly on the minds of the first men, their iron gray eyes looking east into the bloody sunrise, I, too, had been inspired, for no reason at all, to destroy. Why? Why was I doing this?

After I destroyed the sign, we went on a walk to the observatory on top of a nearby hill. It was a long walk up a lonely forest path. We smoked again, drank some more, and laid on our backs to watch the stars. Those stars, ordered so neatly in their fine points of light as if to dazzle us gradually with some universal truth, these distant messengers running forever slantwise on their circuits around the circus emptiness of the universe that we cannot see or speak but only mutely feel, these stars seemed to try and surprise me in my infirm delight with a code, a mystery, something essential: Listen! they almost seemed to say in words beyond language, in words that only exist as ideals populating the stars, the same words that populate our dreams. Listen! they seemed to say. Listen for what? My vision went more and more blurry, the stars seemed to dance even more recklessly, and the message was lost in a whirling alphabet of confusion. I had the spins.

Coming back, we passed by the metal tube with OTTO spraypainted on it. I stopped to admire it. Isn’t that just perfect, I said, OTTO on a tube — the word itself is a telescope. One of the guys responded, “My boy Otto did that. He was in isolation right before us. They caught him on camera leaving isolation to spraypaint his name on the tube. They only found out because there’s a security camera by the Covid testing facility. Because he left isolation without a mask, they suspended him for six months. He got sent home the next day. Some bad luck.”

“What?” I said. Six months is a long time for an 18-year-old.

“Yeah. He says he didn’t even know why he did it. He says he just went a little crazy. Maybe to show that he had even been there at all, that he even existed. The fucked up thing is that he didn’t even get suspended for vandalism. It was just for leaving Covid isolation. They didn’t even give a shit about the spraypaint.”

Something about this revelation made my brain flash and then explode, as if I had been struck by lightning. Drunk and high and pent-up, my thoughts went into overdrive. Perhaps God cast Eve from the Garden not for gaining knowledge, but for leaving a mark on his perfect creation by taking a bite from the apple. Eve was the first artist, and for this, she was damned. There is an even more ancient heretical story about the Cueva de las Manos, a work that has endured since the dawn of human art. The story, passed down to me by an old anthropology professor (as told to him by a heretical shaman), goes that the men who stenciled their hands on the walls of the cave were not laying claim to the world, expressing their existence over the eons, nor engaging in a shamanistic ritual, but rather because, so the story claims, they were committing a continued act of heresy. The earth, our mother, our prison, had trapped man on the earth, where we would be tempted, we would suffer, we would grow old and die — an endless loop. The heretical artists of the Cueva de las Manos stenciled their hands on the cave wall, on the very matter of the earth, as a warning, as a cry of despair: We’ve been here, too. Quod sumus hoc eritis. What we are now is what will you be. The hands reach out only in agony.

The revelation about Otto hit me the next morning. Hungover, bleary, and exhausted, I realized if the Covid testing facility had caught him on camera breaking isolation to vandalize the university, then I was on camera, too. And unlike Otto, I didn’t even do anything artful — I just destroyed random shit. I would surely be suspended. My brain started working in foggy overdrive: my parents would disown me, my brother would disavow me, my friends would pity me. I was a criminal. I had broken Covid isolation and destroyed random shit. What if I had spread Covid to an immunocompromised grandma while out smoking on campus at 1 a.m? What if she went back to her immunocompromised grandma care center and spread it to hundreds, thousands, even millions, of grandmas? How many would die because I had decided to smoke weed and drink? I was a killer. And I didn’t even create a beautiful work of art. No, I just destroyed a random sign. I was an idiot.

I hardly left my room from that point on. I couldn’t sleep. Feeling like Raskolnikov, I was overcome by immense guilt. I nervously awaited the police to come knocking with my suspension papers. All through the day and night, I would listen to the man in the room next to me screaming incomprehensibly, in words that likely no one understood, for seemingly no reason at all.

I wrote a lot. I scribbled poems in my notebook. I painted. I drank. I hardly left my room. This was my punishment, indeed this was man’s punishment: to be imprisoned for no reason at all, and then to die.

Then my isolation was over. I never got in trouble for breaking the sign. One day I got an email that I was free to return to my regular dorm, a dorm that was half-empty, to classes that were prerecorded, to dining halls where conversation was mute. But I was free.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how memory operates and what it means exactly to recall the past. In trying to recall the pandemic years as a college freshman, it often feels like I have to, by necessity, speak falsely. This era is one of the most difficult to properly reconstruct. I am not sure if I — being unvaccinated and having caught the first variant (which was supposedly the strongest) — had experienced those strange symptoms sometimes ascribed to Covid: brain fog, memory loss, confusion, and idiocy. It’s hard to remember much of anything from that period because it is all shrouded in mist — although I must add that, for reasons I cannot entirely know and probably never will, most of my childhood is like that: not just forgotten but unremembered, taken out from my brain and shoved somewhere deep in my heart so that the memories of almost my entire childhood are inaccessible, shrouded in darkness, and mute.

Memory and experience have an uneasy relationship. Transforming experience into memory is like trying to translate an abstract painting into language. These things do not coincide; one cannot be expressed through the other without being changed or destroyed. The only true map of the world is the world.

To me, those ten days in isolation are a good representation of how experience operates. Those ten days were a kaleidoscope of emotions and energies, all bizarre and fantastic. If reviewed and spoken, they can only be reviewed in the fictions of memory, in the fumbling mistranslation of language. It’s like inspecting a kaleidoscope through the lens of the telescope.

Those times were strange. They were like a mass psychotic episode. However, experience itself is strange. You wake suddenly out of darkness to be confronted by a confusion of lights, shapes, colors, sounds, and emotions that, when too closely inspected, all seem senseless, fantastic, absurd. True experience itself is psychotic, especially when you are confronted not just with the confusion of lights, shapes, colors, sounds, and emotions of your bedroom upon waking but must also go out and confront other people — a whole world of other people — who are all babbling and acting and trying, in their own fumbling ways, to make sense of the psychosis of the world. Those ten days of isolation pushed me into a state so close to the raw, bloody, beating heart of man that I could touch the nerve endings of the soul and feel my own psyche light up in an ecstatic agony.

Nothing made sense then, neither does anything really make sense right now, as I type this. It is only through the careful application of the backward-facing telescope that we can study past experiences, transforming experience into memories, and memories into fictions. How do you make any sense out of the absurdity we all witnessed then, in 2020, or just now, as you read this sentence? How can you really explain what you just felt, what you just saw, what you are thinking now? It all must fit into the telescope of memory, or be lost.

The astronomer, pointing his telescope to the stars, can only see what happened millions of years ago. The astronomer is a historian of the soul, the constellations poems of our experience. Kneeling before the long slender tube of the telescope, the astronomer opens his mouth not exactly in prayer but expecting some kind of other Host.

Ezekiel ate the Scroll. We eat the past. The world eats us. Time devours the world.

Peace and Love,
Will Diana.

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*What follows is a conversation between Will Diana and the founding editors of The New Critic.

Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our author interviews, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions.

In our conversation, we examine the origin and future of the author’s writing, the shadow world of Covid in 2020, Will’s fantasies of trekking across the globe, and his recurring dream about the moon of Ganymede.

Below is just a taste.*

ELAN But how do you deal with the anxiety of influence? Because it seems like there’s none. There’s no anxiety of influence. But then, Harold Bloom would say that’s a weak writer. I’ll put it this way — Rimbaud, let’s take Rimbaud. How oppressive is the greatness of Rimbaud and Nabokov to you? That’s the question.

WILL I think they’re useful starting points, but I want to get to the point where I strangle them.

I think that’s kind of what the writer is all about. It’s sort of like a duel between you and the people you’ve read and been influenced by. In this duel, you line up against the past great writer, but you get to see their moves ahead of time, all lit up and numbered, so you know what their moves are going to be in the duel. And their moves are really good. They’re so good that it’s really hard to beat them, even though you know where they’re going to step and when. And the first hundred times you line up against them in the arena, with the stands above lined with people cheering for blood, the past writer’s moves are so good that you get gutted in front of everyone.

Then you really study the moves, you learn how the steps operate, you learn the meaning behind the stances and the parries and jabs. Then you go again, and you still get gutted. You get gutted a hundred times, a thousand times, and everyone is cheering for your blood the whole time. But eventually, you keep going and going and going, and then you do beat the past great writer. And you get the satisfaction of driving the silver dagger straight into their heart. That’s when the writer has transmitted this idea, it’s been sublated into something greater. And that’s what I would like. I want, at some point, some other writer to do that to me.

Read the Postscript

THE NEW CRITIC
—
POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Will Diana and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is supplement to Will’s essay “Experience is Psychosis,” a tale of Covid chaos, epiphany, and isolation on the University of Virginia’s diseased campus.

Read Will's essay

Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our author interviews, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions.

Below we examine the origin and future of the author’s writing, the shadow world of Covid in 2020, Will’s fantasies of trekking across the globe, and his recurring dream about the moon of Ganymede.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

TESSA Tell us about your demonic Covid camera roll.

WILL We were all just pent up, and we really wanted to socialize, but it was impossible. My band of friends and I would be in massive group chats, just creating the most absurd, almost horrifying images. And we did this for a while. The ones that were really scary, that I sent you guys, called “selfie art,” we would spend hours editing these selfies and turning them into basically Francis Bacon portraits, making these monstrosities. We were all pent up and angsty, turning selfies into actual monstrous images.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Rufus Knuppel is a 21-year-old senior at Dartmouth College and the author of The Worthing Plot. He is a founding editor of The New Critic.

*The quoted interviews in this essay are paraphrased from real conversations.*

America has always had her boomtowns, lawless places where heathens mass, where gunslinging bandits and foolhardy speculators go in search of pleasure and risk. Things move quickly in towns that spring up overnight. Some go bust, others get rich. Eventually the barons sniff blood and send their Pinkertons; the army moves in; the government straightens everyone out. The gold rush of our era is gambling on the future, and the anarchic hamlets where online degenerates park their rickshaws are called Polymarket and Kalshi. On prediction markets, the nectar of capital flows, hegemons duel in smokey saloons, and forecasters trade contracts on the outcomes of world events.

But every boomtown has a friar, too, a bald little man in a robe who cries out his psalms in the dusty square, crooning to the one-handed miners as they line up to guzzle their booze and nail their whores. In Polymarketsville, there’s a sect of Bayesian monks who have been quietly constructing a mission. In fact, they’re the ones who first panned the river, who cleared the land on Main Street all those years ago. These zealots call themselves “rationalists,” and they foretell prediction markets as the salvation for our godless and irrational land.

“Polymarket” wormed its way into my daydreams through the various troughs I frequent online, where chatter about big bettors tipping off national security crises and White House press secretaries shaving minutes at briefings to hit unders had commenters in a tizzy. The media establishment had caught on, too, to the competitive edge and the foul play. All the big names seemed preoccupied with integrating prediction market probabilities into their institutional forecasting or else finger-wagging about the existential risks of insider trading and the psycho-chemical runoff from the Great Casino-fication of America.

I imagined the typical Polymarket trader as a cyclops with pizza grease slathered over his monitor, slobbering over bets like a rottweiler admiring a platter of animal organs. He spent the day in a fraternity cave system hooked up to a VPN and an open source intelligence IV, betting on whether Elon Musk would mention “poopoo” at the World Economic Forum in Davos or how many dissident prisoners the Ayatollah Khamenei would execute in the next 72 hours. I would ask him if he’d ever been “rulescucked” or if he thought Barron Trump was the insider behind the whale that bet $30k on the Maduro op for a $400k profit. We would wager on “Taylor Swift pregnant by June?” or “The second coming of Jesus Christ by 2027?” and lounge around in his sunless lair of paranoia — panting, talking ethics, eating Airheads Xtremes, and snorting Adderall — until we doubled up or lost everything.

I would attempt to locate this fine specimen and give him my money.

So I started flipping through my rolodex and poking around the internet for clues. Then I got in my wagon and headed West. My journey led me to a strange land called Futarchy.

The architecture of polymarket.com is rather plain: there are near-infinite boxes on the main scroll, arranged in pleasant quadrilateral geometry, each presenting a question, a mundane or farcical image, a percentage which doubles as both probability and price, and the clickable binary of “Yes” (green) or “No” (red). A week before the Super Bowl, “Will the US acquire part of Greenland in 2026?” sits as the second-billed market on the homepage. An icon of the territory, filled in with the American flag, is priced by the market at a 27% likelihood. I can buy “Yes” shares for 27¢ or “No” shares for 73¢. Should Trump land amphibious warcraft on the beaches of Nuuk come March, the market would resolve: the “Yes” shares to $1, and the “No” shares to $0. Would a storming of Greenland count as an acquisition, though? Quibbles over semantics in the resolution criteria arise often and are mediated through a “Keynesian beauty pageant” conducted by an “UMA oracle” (these terms escape me, too).

Prediction markets don’t operate like traditional sportsbooks; the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulates Polymarket and Kalshi, not federal and state gaming agencies. Bettors trade derivatives on a regulated exchange, entering into futures contracts with one another. If one trader buys shares of “Yes,” another matches shares of “No.” Polymarket and Kalshi are legal in states where sports gambling is banned (despite 89% of Kalshi’s total volume in 2025 having been bet on sports). Beyond a loophole in the regulatory matrix, the prediction markets argue that while sportsbooks rip off bettors with outrageous spreads and insurmountable odds, the only money Polymarket and Kalshi take in are the margins required for market making or transaction fees.

The prediction markets struggle to define and answer to accusations of insider trading. In the common scenario where traders can wager on “what will X say in Y speech” (a mention market), couldn’t Marco Rubio tell his bud that he’s for sure going to mention the long-shot “Golden Dome” in the next cabinet meeting? Wouldn’t one of Bad Bunny’s anonymous sugar canes know the Super Bowl halftime opener from the dress rehearsal? If unusual activity were to alert the market to military action, could Polymarket pose a risk to the cover of dark special ops? How can the companies surveil suspicious behavior over 10,000 markets? How can officials prevent point shaving in the Loyola vs. Champaign Division IX men’s water polo match? From the perspective of the prediction markets or the market makers, insider trading isn’t really a problem for their business. In fact, traders who have been tipped off serve to make prices more accurate and adjust for dumb money (a colloquialism used to describe gut-check bets made with little informational basis). Insiders are only a smear on optics.

“Act first, apologize later,” is the internal mantra of Shayne Coplan, Polymarket’s founder and CEO. The son of two South African professors, Coplan (only 27) was for a brief two-week period in 2025 the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. A former employee described Polymarket’s early culture: “like, ‘We’re rebels, we’re mavericks, and we’re just gonna build this thing and figure out the regulatory stuff later.’”

In January 2022, Polymarket was banned from operating in the U.S. The company settled for $1.4 million with the CFTC for running an “illegal unregistered or non-designated facility for event-based binary options online trading.” Polymarket relocated to Panama. But all that eager American bettors needed to trade was a VPN that could mask their location, and a viral 2023 market on survivors of the OceanGate Titanic submersible catastrophe broke the platform into the cultural mainframe. Polymarket traders bet over $3.6 billion on the 2024 presidential election.

“2020, running out of money, solo founder, HQ in my makeshift bathroom office. little did I know Polymarket was going to change the world,” Coplan posted after the election, attaching an image of his grim Lower East Side apartment, framed by a busted bathroom door. In the photo, perched bare-thighed and cross-legged on his toilet, Coplan works with a Mac keyboard nestled between his leg hairs and a laundry hamper doubling as his desk.

Coplan was sending emails to the SEC in his tweens about opening exchanges, and he was just 16 years old when he bought $150 of the cryptocurrency Ethereum at its initial coin offering in 2014. By 2020, cooped up in pandemic quarantine, he had dropped out of NYU and run out of cash. He says he created Polymarket to source the wisdom of the crowd on Covid regulations.

In the early morning of November 13, 2024, just a week after election day, federal authorities broke down the door to Coplan’s Soho loft and seized his devices. Fortune labeled the raid “a Kafkaesque turn of events.”

“New phone, who dis?” Coplan quipped a few days later on his X. “The incumbents should do some self-reflecting and recognize that taking a more pro-business, pro-startup approach may be what would have changed their fate this election.” A Polymarket spokesperson called the FBI probe “obvious political retribution by the outgoing administration against Polymarket for providing a market that correctly called the 2024 presidential election.” The market had Trump’s odds of winning in the mid-60s.

But now exclusive CFTC status for prediction markets and a series of judicial injunctions against state gaming enforcement have paved the way for a legal Polymarket homecoming. The atmosphere of deregulation in Trump’s Washington has given the prediction markets carte blanche to expand with barebones regulatory oversight. Coplan, meanwhile, has triangulated Silicon Valley venture capital (including co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund), New York financial interests, and D.C. lobbying power to ease Polymarket’s return to American soil. (Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and former CFTC commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo is the chairman of Polymarket’s advisory board.)

Coplan and Tarek Mansour, the Lebanese-American Kalshi CEO, do all their nifty executive maneuvering while ramming prediction markets down the esophagus of American popular culture. Polymarket paid the Golden Globes some unspecified gob of cash to display their betting odds during the awards show, and though viewers complained that the probabilities were spoiling the suspense (the market predicted 26 of the 28 races), Coplan gloated afterwards, “We have a long way to go to educate the public on the value of market-based forecasts, but you can’t deny its accuracy…a surreal moment and a highlight for all our team members’ moms.”

This past October, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, pumped $2 billion into Polymarket, setting its valuation around $8 billion (rising now). The ICE investment gave Coplan the capital he needed to purchase the CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange QCX for $112 million. Polymarket can now roll out their U.S. app and onboard American traders.

“We’re consumer, we’re viral, we’re culture. They’re finance, they’re headless, and they’re infrastructure,” Coplan told Forbes. “The American Dream,” he captioned a video announcing the investment on X. In the shot, a royal blue Polymarket banner unfurls over the Corinthian columns of the NYSE. The text reads, “AGAINST ALL ODDS,” and the instrumental climax of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” blares wordlessly over Coplan’s self-awe (perhaps he forgot that the ballad begins: “and now the end is near/and so I face the final curtain”).

Coplan often references Polymarket’s “vindication.” He seems to feel that he and his company have overcome a form of cosmic persecution, and he approaches the media with a permanent apprehension. “I mean, look,” he often says when answering thorny interview questions about the moral gray matter in which Polymarket operates. At conferences and forums, Coplan wears mohair sweaters and, with elevated exasperation, patronizes low-IQ interviewers who don’t quite comprehend his mission or his plight.

Despite the ill treatment from investigators and antagonists, every cocksure bet that Coplan made seems to be panning out. “I love music and collect art,” he writes in his X bio; he brought on Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis as an early investor in Polymarket, and acquired an NFT portfolio under the alias “ethsquiat” (a mash-up of Ethereum and John Michel Basquiat) that Sotheby’s called “one of the largest collections of NFT art in the world.”

“Job’s not finished,” Coplan says in the final minutes of a November 2025 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, tussling his cartoon curls and gesturing toward one billion Polymarket users. He’s quoting a Kobe Bryant interview from the 2009 NBA Finals in which the Lakers star, asked why he doesn’t seem pleased about his 2-0 lead over the Orlando Magic, responds: “What’s there to be happy about? Job’s not finished. Job finished? I don’t think so.”

Shayne Coplan lends Polymarket the Mamba Mentality.

An old friend I reached out to, let’s call him Skipper, offered to meet me at the Dartmouth Quantitative Finance Club. The club advertised Thai food in their LISTSERV email and the opportunity to “learn some probability so that you too can spend your 20s trading shrimp futures with a model that also somehow predicts the weather in Zimbabwe!”

So I trudged through the sub-zero Hanoverian tundra to the hinterland (the CECS, pronounced “sex,” building). While everyone ate their pad thai, a boy talked about the “flitz” (a Dartmouth portmanteau) he had sent the ski patroller who treated his finger on the slopes. She had said no (she had a boyfriend). A friend consoled him, “nothing risked, nothing earned.”

Skipper and the other leaders initiated the meeting by announcing the Quant Club’s partnership with Susquehanna International Group (SIG). The firm was coming to campus in a couple of weeks to host a “Brainteaser Battle,” and the problems the club leaders would be going over at the meeting were meant to prepare their fellow members for the exhibition.

The quant-trading hopefuls separated into two groups: “hotshots” and beginners. The beginners went over Bayes’ theorem while an advanced probability shaman in a Jump Trading crewneck instructed his acolytes about the importance of grinding problems.

“Roll a fair standard 6-sided die until a 6 appears. Given that the first 6 occurs before the first 5, find the expected number of times the die was rolled.” The answer was 3.

“A frog performs a simple symmetric random walk on the integers,” the next problem began, but Skipper interrupted my processing and asked if I wanted to have our interview now or later.

“Now,” I said.

Skipper told me a Polymarket rep had made an offer to his jock-heavy fraternity with a special activation code to skip the U.S. waiting list.

“Do you all gamble a lot?” I asked him.

“Yeah, it’s really a cancer…guys are betting more money than they should.”

“On what, sports?”

“Yeah, the other night we were all sitting around watching this random soccer match — I couldn’t tell you who was playing — but we all had bets on it.”

“What do you think draws people in?”

“It’s fun. I don’t know. It’s fucking fun.”

“What’s the most someone’s made?”

“One guy had a 12-leg parlay or something on the first round of the NFL playoffs. He bet $25 and made like $10,000.”

“Have you ever bet on Polymarket or Kalshi?”

“Yeah — you know how you can bet on who the next head coach of a college football team will be? Well, one of my parents knew an insider about a job at one of the big schools. And so I put some money on that.”

Skipper is starting as a quant trader at a platinum Wall Street firm (think Citadel) come graduation.

“Once you’re inside one of these big players,” he said about prediction markets, “and you see how sophisticated their models are, and you see how much data they’re working with and how quickly they move and how many smart people are working at these firms — I don’t think the average person can compete unless they have some kind of inside information. There was a time maybe early on with prediction markets where you could have an edge if you were ‘more right.’ But that edge is gone. And the outliers — they’re just that — outliers.”

“What do you think will happen with these platforms in the next five years?” I asked.

“Honestly, I think this kind of gambling should be illegal.”

Almost half of American men aged 18 to 49 hold active accounts for online sports betting. The prediction market calamity is another chapter in the metastasis of gambling in America, where cretins and dunces spin the roulette wheel on whether Mr. Gorbachev will choke Mr. Khrushchev to death on tonight’s UFC 1984 Paramount Plus Polymarket broadcast from the White House lawn. Series A Polymarket investor and “It’s Everyday Bro” YouTuber Jake Paul stated on X: “Liquidity in prediction markets and financialization of world events is a powerful tool to better understand the world and to have some fun.” Perhaps regular viewers of the video podcast Impaulsive have heard Jake’s older brother, 30-year-old WWE wrestler Logan Paul, discussing the odds of a currently unconstitutional third Trump term (3%) with his goon squad and the President’s 18-year-old granddaughter Kai, one of many clips of sports and culture celebrities name-dropping Polymarket that Coplan reposts on his X.

The problem with a $10 billion valuation is that a founder begins to owe some proof of profit to their investors. A supermajority of the volume on Polymarket and Kalshi is dumb money, and the platforms try to suck in gamblers through online fads and strategic ragebait. The social feeds of Kalshi and Polymarket, geysers of slop shot straight from the bowels of internet bottom-dwellers, do not help to repair their indecorous reputation. A post from “Polymarket Football” (“Drake Maye’s wife is named Ann Michael…Unusual”) caused Patriots sub-Redditors to consider a boycott of the prediction market. Some Polymarketphiles on X have appealed to Coplan directly about de-enshittifying his company’s messaging, to no avail. A Polymarket tweet last month (“JUST IN: Jeff Bezos advises aspiring Gen Z entrepreneurs to start at real world jobs like McDonalds or Palantir before starting a business”) prompted Bezos to respond: “Nope. Not sure why polymarket made this up. [Shrug emoji.]”

Prediction markets are more pyres of internet sacrilege, the toxic burn pits of our digital culture. But the patent stream of falsities is particularly ironic coming from the megaphone of a company that Coplan claims is the herald for a dawning epoch of truthfulness: “as AI ushers in Superintelligence, Polymarket ushers in Collective Intelligence.” Or — in response to a chummy Elon Musk reply “polyamorousmarket?” — “Polymarket [shaking hands emoji] X/Sounding like porn sites but actually solving misinformation.”

A recent post from Mansour celebrating Kalshi’s $11 billion valuation featured a video of black-and-white trading floors and Wright brothers. The overture of the “Blue Danube Waltz” builds as textual commentary appears onscreen: “For the first time belief has structure. Conviction has value. Outcomes are priced. Because the future was never meant to be a mystery, it was meant to be a market.”

If one hangs around in Polymarketland for long enough, that future starts to unravel; market questions are relegated to their price and probability, and the real world becomes the simulacrum, the shadows on the wall; the resolution subsumes the event. The interface starts to create temporary short-circuits in cognition, and the multi-colored markets — their bogs of bylaws and their schizophrenic sprawls of ledgered numerals and their spammed comment streams — swirl into one big funfetti vortex, an endless geopolitical slot-machine fantasia.

The cringe commentary and corporate jargon of Coplan and Masour come as no surprise; overzealous statements, false morality, and hurried horizons are standard for CEOs. But we civilians often make the mistake of dismissing our overlords when we feel an allergy to their cliches and alien superciliousness. The actors who rule us are not all unmotivated automatons. They are each imperfectly and megalomaniacally human, and their propositions of world domination are worthy of investigation, if only to mark the warning signs should their fancies come true.

“It’s the complete wild west,” a young market maker told me. Let’s call him Cooper. “It’s crazy, you know, this isn’t public knowledge, but the other night there was an API outage on Polymarket U.S. They reported it as a bug to users but they were telling us shit like, ‘Hey, we know things are down but don’t withdraw your money right now, hold your positions while we figure this out,’ implying the whole thing might crash. And we can see on our end that trading is totally down, you know, trading has stopped. We think it was precipitated by Polymarket adding 100,000 users off the waiting list, but still, there are echoes of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried about it all, I don’t know.”

Cooper is an Ivy League history major from Oakland. He runs a “bespoke” four-man company that provides liquidity (meaning they buy the alternate option when a user purchases positions on “Yes” or “No”) on less than 1% of the volume traded on Polymarket and similar sites. They are contracted by prediction markets and make their money on quotas (200k a month in bonuses if they can hit certain targets) and the margins in their automated proprietary algorithms that calculate arbitrage between platforms. They’ve been operating for almost a year now, backed by a crypto accelerator called Alliance. Cooper oversees a couple “Operations Research and Financial Engineering” quants who run combinatorial arbitrage and an electrical engineer who works on low latency for their servers.

“How did you all get interested in this?” I asked him.

“Money,” he answered, before I had even finished the question. “Yeah, money…I mean we were all trading crypto futures before this…it’s like…if you want to make a million dollars before 18, that’s how you do it.”

The company began as a copy trading start-up (developing algorithms that imitate elite traders), but they realized quickly that they couldn’t compete with the big players.

“How would you describe your company?”

“I would say we’re a new school, gen three trading firm.”

“What do you mean by ‘gen three’?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I just made that up.”

“No, it’s great, well, what would the other generations be?”

“You know, you have your eighties Wall Street firms like SIG. Then you have firms that do crypto options like Jump Trading last decade. And then now there are smaller prop shops like us.”

Like any young gun looking to make a buck, this guy has to be on the bleeding edge: to make his money, he’s got to get out a knife, and he’s got to make something bleed.

“If you’re after life-changing wealth, you know, wealth to a certain financial degree, this is the only game in town. But I don’t wanna be running a prop shop forever. The goal is to create long-term sustainable algorithms and sell them.”

With big firms and institutional actors getting in on the prediction market game, things are tilting quickly against the average trader or the bespoke market maker. Cooper often emitted mixed signals in our conversation as I provoked him about the overlap between prediction market ethics and San Francisco philosophy.

“What do you think of, like, Silicon Valley rationalist types and their relationship to Polymarket?” I asked him.

“Bullshit, they’re trying to erase humanity. Anything Silicon Valley is disgusting to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whenever I would cross into San Francisco growing up, I’d get this icky feeling. These VCs, all high and pious, there’s something profoundly off. Prediction markets don’t really fall into the Silicon Valley groupthink, though. Silicon Valley ignored them at first, you know. Because they’re not AI, they’re not an A-tier investment. They just hopped on the Polymarket train when they saw the opportunity for a check. These prediction markets are all based in New York, you know, prediction markets are to finance what AI is to the technology world. They’re part of this other New York start-up world, the start-up world that I feel this company is a part of, you know, their big investors are the New York Stock Exchange and hedge funds and shit like that. I’m not defending sports markets — I find that sickening — stealing money from the lower class, sports betting contributes no value to society. You know, Kalshi, it’s like 90% sports betting, and they’re working now with SIG. We’re pretty sector agnostic, but we don’t do sports betting or options markets. We want nothing to do with SIG. You know, we’re trying to develop workarounds and a structural advantage as market makers, and, you know, they get, like, preferable treatment, open access to Kalshi’s order flow, and they have this insane insider data and institutional liquidity and manpower. You know, Citadel, there’s a reason they’re the biggest hedge fund in the world. Citadel can see Robinhood’s order book before anyone else can.”

“So you think Kalshi is more unfair to their traders than Polymarket?”

“No, Kalshi is fair. Yeah, I just mean Tarek Mansour, the founder of Kalshi, I think he’s a demon. You can see he’s in it for the money. For the sports gambling. The greed is in his eyes. It’s not moral. You know, there’s a lot in prediction markets that’s insightful and cool, that’s actually valuable. I think Shayne Coplan actually has ideas about prediction markets. And now we’re getting these new prediction markets from Robinhood and Coinbase, other places too.”

“So where do you see Polymarket in five years?”

“I think it will break two ways. It will either go total degenerate sports gambling, or you’ll see these new markets open up — you’ll see more institutions, utilitarian financing, real estate markets, shit like that. Seriously, I think if the sports betting gets shut down, you’ll see the real promise of prediction markets. All that shit is very cool and interesting. But you need deep liquidity for hundreds of thousands of effective markets, trillions and trillions of dollars in volume. They’re growing exponentially now, but I don’t know if they’ll keep growing at this pace — they need to justify these crazy valuations to investors — and the money is all in the sports markets for now.”

“Are you in the habit of using Polymarket for news?”

“Yeah, a little bit for news, but barely. Occasionally for football.”

Cooper called me from Berkeley, and I kept hearing the sound of a dribbling ball throughout our conversation.

“Are you playing basketball?” I asked near the end of our call.

“No, I’m throwing a tennis ball against the wall.”

“It’s all good. I thought you were somehow dribbling a basketball and talking to me.”

“No, I wasn’t. I don’t know, it helps me focus while I talk.”

Before we hung up, he told me that, though he didn’t know what I looked like, I sounded a lot like Peter Thiel.

“I don’t know if that’s a compliment,” I said.

“No, no, it’s just how you’re saying specific things. It’s almost European.”

I don’t sound like Peter Thiel, and I wondered why he’d made that inference.

“I think we both try to be deliberate when we speak,” I hedged.

“Yeah, I don’t know what it is.”

I asked him what he thought of the rationalists — what he thought about the George Mason economics professor Robin Hanson.

“Robin Hanson? Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen some of his stuff. Yeah, I like him.”

“What about the others on your team?”

“I’m probably the only one who’s ever heard of Robin Hanson.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever bet on Polymarket?”

“You know, I don’t, but I’ve bet a lot of money on it without even trading,” he said, laughing.

Earlier in our conversation, I had asked what he thought about all the ethical debates around prediction markets:

“For moral questions, I just use my intuition.”

My algorithm learned quickly what to feed me, and soon my X timeline was one long string of prediction market Twitch streaming clips, how-tos on Claude bots that printed money with Kalshi, and bullish traders proselytizing about the long-term upside of Polymarket, precious metal pricing, and institutional crypto uptake.

One friend in the orbit of Tyler Cowen (the George Mason economics professor who writes the blog Marginal Revolution) told me he had lost $200 betting on the date of Maduro’s deposition and another $300 wagering on the Romanian presidential election last year. Another friend, who had been a finalist for an assistant position under the statistician Nate Silver, told me he used the play money prediction market Manifold, popular in the rationalist community, on which traders bet “Mana” on markets instead of cash. The advantage of Manifold is that users create their own markets, and questions can breach the theoretical limits of regulated platforms with stringent resolution criteria. As my friend explained it, Manifold’s incentive structures are reputational, and he had been a pretty frequent and successful user until election night 2024, when he had gotten too drunk and lost his profits doubling down on Kamala. Inebriation is anathema to good forecasting.

An effective altruist at UChicago recommended I speak with a leader of their forecasting club. Let’s call him Ryder. Ryder would be my sherpa. Ryder would show me the tricks of the trade.

“How do you expect these markets to be regulated?” I asked him.

“You know, it’s very difficult to predict, ironically. I think regulations will depend on scandals. Like, if there’s some insider trading intelligence leak that precipitates a national security risk or gets American soldiers killed, you’ll see instant regulations. Just like that. Otherwise, it will be up to companies to self-regulate, to create internal safeguards. You know, it’s on Google or Apple if their employee is leaking information because they’re greedy and place some bet on Polymarket.”

“Do you buy Polymarket’s argument that these prediction markets are producing accurate forecasting?”

“Yeah, you know, the average person is not good enough at predicting stuff. They use the approach where they try to analyze ‘will this happen’ instead of ‘should this happen, why would this happen.’ And the incentive structures about predictions are such that it doesn’t matter if pundits are wrong. They don’t have to express ‘true beliefs’ because there’s not monetary punishment for being wrong. So the market allows you to objectively measure the future by aggregating those beliefs from the crowd. And it doesn’t take a whole lot of smart money to calibrate for dumb money in the market.”

“What goes into your decision-making on what to trade, then?”

“The club is usually ten of us in a room, and we identify markets we’re interested in, and then we come back the next week, and people present on their research. To make a good trade, we try to have a higher understanding of incentive structures and who the major movers are. We bet on mostly political outcomes. It’s a new space that isn’t highly gamed like sports or finance. Plus, none of us are interested in sports anyways, we’re a bunch of nerds, it would be terrible for our image if we were sports betting. When we were applying for status as a recognized organization, we tried to emphasize that we weren’t interested in sports gambling.”

“What’s your favorite bet right now?”

“Well, I don’t know if this is on Polymarket or Kalshi, I think it was from this Bridgewater forecasting competition, a Metaculus [another play money prediction site, which Ryder called ‘Metacalculus’] tournament we participated in. It’s about the price of rice in Japan. ‘Will Japanese rice prices fall below ¥42 by the end of March?’ or something. And all these indicators suggest ‘Yes,’ right? Because it’s politically favorable for rice prices to go down. But rice harvest season isn’t until fall, so there’s no supply base mechanism, and because of agricultural pressures, you know, the prime minister isn’t going to ease import restrictions, and giving out vouchers for rice would only raise the price in supermarkets. So while the external indicators say ‘Yes,’ I would price it at a much lower percent-chance.”

“How are you doing?”

“Let’s see…we’re up something like 5% as a group.”

“Is that any good?”

“It’s okay.”

“What constitutes ‘good,’ then?”

“I would say something like a 10% margin consistently. But I expect it to improve. You know, we have lots of positions in these long-tail markets that we feel good about. We were decently sure that TIME would choose ‘AI’ as their person of the year. And they chose the ‘Architects of AI.’ So that hurt us.”

“Do you trade, personally?”

“Yeah, I do. Hey, I like gambling. But I don’t want to talk about my personal value. I was sure prematurely that the ‘Person of the Year’ was going to be the Pope. And it wasn’t. That’s the sole reason I’m in the negative.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear my guru was in the red: around 70% of users lose money on Polymarket, while just 0.04% of traders — the “sharps” — take in 70% of the profits. The top-heavy profit distribution maps onto the work of UPenn political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock. Tetlock is modern forecasting’s “soft-spoken, decorous uncle,” in the words of Stevie Miller (SportsPredict.com contributor, gen z neoreactionary rationalist, and former live-in intern for the Dark Enlightenment philosopher Curtis Yarvin).

Tetlock ran a series of geopolitical forecasting tournaments over the course of decades (starting in the dusk of the Cold War; later under the auspices of “The Good Judgement Project”) which set out to understand the determinative factors in predictive reasoning. A friend who interned in cybersecurity for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and starts work at Palantir this summer recommended I read into Tetlock, whose findings drew the attention of the intelligence community (specifically IARPA) after 9/11. Tetlock’s research resolved that while the common man was demonstrably terrible at forecasting and domain experts were barely any better, there were still some who stood out from the pack — the “superforecasters.”

Superforecasters are evenly distributed across education and expertise; the real adhesive between the cohort is that, as prognosticators, they feel “little need for closure” and “high comfort with ambiguity.” Tetlock, drawing on political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s paradigm of hedgehogs and foxes, asked participants to place themselves along an axis: “the hedgehog knows one big thing and tries to explain as much as possible within that conceptual framework, whereas the fox knows many small things and is content to improvise explanations on a case-by-case basis.” Superforecasters were overwhelmingly foxes, “intellectual omnivores” (in Miller’s words) whose cognitive style promoted “probabilistic reasoning and epistemic hygiene.” As Tetlock points out, “What matters far more to the superforecasters than Bayes’ theorem is Bayes’ core insight of gradually getting closer to the truth by constantly updating in proportion to the weight of the evidence.” This is the concept of the “prior” — an always “updating” aggregate of evidence — which is key to probabilistic understandings of the world and the innate conceptual differentiator of superforecasters from the herd.

Superforecasters overlap in the realm of risk with elite traders and poker players — on Polymarket and Kalshi, they form a tiny clan of mostly pseudonymous professional bettors. For the time being, prediction markets provide untaxed, unregulated exchanges for these sharks, liberated from the limits or oversight they might find in Vegas or Wall Street. The clairvoyants gobble up media spotlight, not least through tales of seven-figure paydays and outlandish, spurious insights (like the president’s phonetic predilection for “Vance” [one syllable], similar to “Trump” [one syllable] and “Pence” [one syllable], which informed a giant wager on the future vice presidential nominee).

Mostly though, these anomalies keep quiet about their identities and their methods. SportsPredict, a play money prediction market, is designed to attract and filter high-IQ forecasting talent with accessible, athletics-based markets that uncover “the new meritocracy.” The project is the hobby horse of Austin-based hedge fund billionaire, Major League Pickleball co-founder, and friend of rationalism Steve Kuhn. Andrew Yang and George Mason economics professor Bryan Caplan are on the company’s advisory board. SportsPredict attempts to source what Richard Hanania (the contrarian rationalist) would call “elite human capital”: the market filters “high g” forecasters through the universal language of sports gambling. Superforecasters are the snow leopards of prediction markets, the obsessive, elusive prize of rationalists and degenerates alike.

I asked Ryder what he thought of Tetlock and his book Superforecasting.

“I think Tetlock’s most underappreciated insight is about paying attention to resolution criteria — it’s really the key to making a well-informed trade. You know, while the market is priced toward the ‘Yes’ on Mamdani opening a government-run supermarket in 2026, the criteria don’t say ‘try to’ but ‘will,’ and precedent for the horizon on any similar policy in recent American history suggests there would be at least two years from proposal to ribbon-cutting.”

“What about Robin Hanson and the rationalists?”

“Me, I like Robin Hanson, I like [Eliezer] Yudkowsky [the LessWrong blogger and ‘caliph’ of rationalism]. I have doubts about their practical applications.”

“What about the others?”

“I’d guess that most of the people in the club have barely heard the name Robin Hanson.”

“What would you say the link is, then, between people who are attracted to forecasting?”

“I think we enjoy trying to see the world closer to how it is and less how you’d like it to be.”

“You would call yourself a rationalist, right?”

“Yeah, I would.”

“How did you get into rationalism?”

“When I was 12, a friend recommended the Yudkowsky fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. That changed my outlook on life, on human behavior, the pitfalls of human cognition. It changed my whole worldview, broadly, going forward. Obviously I read some Scott Alexander [the San Francisco psychiatrist and rationalist blogger who writes Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten]. Others too, like Aella [the sex worker/statistician], Kelsey Piper [the reporter on effective altruism (EA)], or Adolphe Crémieux on X [the race science blogger].”

“There’s a big rationalist community at UChicago, right?”

“Yeah, well, it depends on what you mean by ‘big.’ There are probably forty of us who cycle through meetings. Actually, I got the idea for the forecasting club from an EA friend. ‘You can just do things,’ he says. And so I created the club. But, I don’t know, prediction markets have become mostly degenerate gambling — and you see rationalists moving into a space that was already occupied, carving out a tiny little island. Rationalists are very sincere, and so when they move into a real world domain, they end up associated with weird groups of people — EA, FTX, human biodiversity, prediction markets — that form bad associations. Whereas rationalists on their own, you know, there are not a lot of them, and they don’t have the power to redefine a specific sphere of conversation.”

Every July since 2023, a motley crew of prediction market enthusiasts has assembled in a remodeled Victorian home on the LightHaven microcampus in Berkeley, California. They come for Manifest, a conference hosted by Manifold Markets and sponsored by Polymarket, Substack, and Kalshi. On Manifest’s website, a quote describes the event (which sells tickets for $725) as “part Burning Man, part prediction market science fair, part middle school talent show…utterly delightful.”

Under the North Californian sun, Chris Best (Substack’s CEO), Nate Silver, Aella, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Richard Hanania, Scott Alexander, Shayne Coplan, and so many other nerds gather to fraternize on fake turf patios and place bets on questions like, “Will there be an orgy at Manifest?” One attendee, a subscriber to Asterisk (the EA magazine which defines itself as “probabilistic” and “terrified…a place to talk about how we can make it to 2100”) described Manifest to me as a gathering of several “hundred autists.” Twitter microcelebrities mingle with polyamorous furries and nerdy Bay Area tech developers while participants face-off in pool noodle lightsaber battles between talks. Manifest is an “integration of the feed and real life,” where Grey Tribe (a rationalist identifier) avatars and anons are reified into flesh and blood.

Not all nerds are created equal; there are good nerds and evil nerds, right nerds and left nerds, omnipotent nerds and insignificant nerds. Indeed, fault lines have emerged in the rationalist community along ethical boundaries, and a proper schism has opened over AI misalignment. Aella, who tracks all sorts of atypical biometric minutiae about herself, disinvited any e/acc (effective accelerationist) subscribers from her birthday gangbang “because we don’t need to give nice things to people hastening our doom.”

Nate Silver describes Aella, in contraposition to effective accelerationists and effective altruists, as an “effective hedonist.” Rumor has it that Scott Alexander met his wife at an Aella-style, San Francisco sex-data orgy. (Manifold Markets, which an Astral Codex Ten grant helped launch, sprouted Manifold Love, a failed prediction market dating platform, which Stevie Miller mourned on his X: “Really wish Manifold love didn’t fail/Would be so dope to have good publicly accessible data on the sexual marketplace.” Manifold Love’s YouTube channel remains extant, however, and anyone who wishes to can watch “Bet On Love…a surreal musical odyssey of romance and live betting” in which “six hunks of man meat” compete “to fill Aella’s love burrito.” The “musical art for hyperintellectual subcultures” featured in “Bet On Love” is a mutant hybrid of Lin Manuel Miranda clever-raps and Silicon Valley cliches like, “I just bought an ETF and now I’m feeling DTF.” A YouTube comment called the game show “cringeularity.”)

Aella, Silver, and Alexander, all popular Substack bloggers, get star billing at Manifest, and crowds of self-identifying “rats” spill out the doors. But one man, a straw-haired, 66-year-old professor named Robin Hanson, the Amun-Ra of prediction markets, looms above the rest.

Hanson is the sort of economist who, when asked if he’s a music fan, responds, “Fan? I’m probably in the middle of the distribution of the degree to which I’m a music fan, which therefore is not that much.” Hanson is a Manifest fixture; he speaks like a wizened sage to the puppy-eyed spectators seated criss-cross-apple-sauce on the synthetic grass. (Before one of his talks, Hanson picks up a horned-shell accessory and tries it on: “I was told people wanted to see me sporting the Bowser backpack, so there you go.”) Hanson breathes loudly into the microphone as he talks, pausing to smile, static strands of hair dancing in the breeze. His hawing affect adds a certain urgency to what he’s saying: “I want to inspire greed…there’s gold in them there hills…big shiny gold nuggets, glinting in the sunlight…you just have to go through that valley up to the other side and take the gold.” His leprechauns look on in rapture.

In an October 2024 conversation with Nate Silver (who serves as an advisor to Polymarket), Coplan, wearing an all beige sweat suit, explains Hanson’s influence:

SILVER Cause I like forcing people to think in terms of probabilities, right?

COPLAN I know you do.

SILVER At the end of the day, a pretty efficient way to convey information…Is that kind of the way you think naturally too?

COPLAN Totally…at its base, like, I was always seeking out where I could see percentage likelihood…The genesis of Polymarket is so deeply intertwined with all the reading I did of Robin Hanson’s literature, where he would talk about idea futures and decision markets and futarchy and these crazy ideas that markets were actually the best information source. And even going deeper than that…one of my favorite essays is ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ by Friedrich Hayek, and I always practically found looking at markets something that was super cool to derive insights from.

Hayek’s essay describes how pricing in an open market economy is modernity’s most efficient means of communicating and aggregating information:

“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

A decentralized market synthesizes huge swaths of “dispersed,” “incomplete,” and “contradictory” data into an epistemic resource: price.

“The Use of Knowledge in Society” forms — in conjunction with Tetlock’s Superforecasting, the writing of Walter Lippmann, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, Michael Abramowicz’s Predictocracy, and the rationalist blogosphere — a sort of prediction market intellectual syllabus. Hanson, though, is the real “godfather of prediction markets,” as Austin Chen (the silk-robed founder of Manifold) introduces him in a video titled “Revolution Strategies.”

In that keynote from Manifest 2023, Hanson talks through his history with prediction markets. He had been working and publishing on market applications since the late eighties, when he started an internal betting market among libertarian colleagues at the tech firm Xanadu — they were thinking then about the promise of something called hypertext publishing (what would eventually become the World Wide Web):

“[The internet] would remake conversation and debate because it would be easy to find rebuttals to bad claims. You are now living in the utopia we envisioned, where it’s easy to find rebuttals to bad claims, and you never read bad claims anymore. Right? (Laughter.)”

Hanson thought markets would cut through the noise better than backlinks. In the talk, Hanson quotes his George Mason economics department colleague Alex Tabarrok: when everyone is blabbing, betting becomes “a tax on bullshit.”

Betting markets were an ancient idea, “fun fighting games,” as Hanson describes them. His innovation was only the scope and breadth with which he considered their value. “This was the best idea I had in my life,” he prefaces in the talk, before walking the audience through the long arc of inventive mechanisms with applicational misalignments (archaeological evidence shows that Aztec children had toys with wheels but Aztec adults didn’t use carts). Hanson saw that speculative markets had the same latent potential as these other tools, and he watched countless betting market “failure modes” through the years. The key obstacle for prediction markets was a lack of administrative investment — often those with “elegant ideas” didn’t want to grapple with the “lots of messy details.” New technologies had to consider their highest-value applications, not just their flashiest; perhaps a steam-powered door in the royal palace would provide an exuberant demonstration of innovation, but it wouldn’t advance the true economic prospects of the motor.

“I remember reading Robin Hanson’s literature on prediction markets and thinking — man, this is too good of an idea to just exist in white papers,” Coplan tweeted in October 2025. He had emailed Hanson years before, in 2019, writing that he wanted “to be the person to bring prediction markets to life.” Hanson had been trying to get his ideas off the ground for decades. He’d been involved with various companies that ran internal event markets; he’d conducted lab experiments and field research; he’d even helped develop a futures market for the intelligence community (the Policy Analysis Market, a program run by DARPA in the early 2000s that was shut down when senators accused the project of hosting questions on assassination and terrorism, though Hanson and other researchers deny this).

The post-war order Hanson describes in his Manifest talk is one “dominated by big organizations that are mired in dysfunction because they find it difficult to aggregate information.” The value of information derives from its potential to inform decisions, and markets do a fantastic job synthesizing information through pricing. Why not apply markets to decision-making, then? Why not source the wisdom of the crowd and employ the price mechanism to answer important questions? This is where Hanson “thought the gold was…the big payoff.” His classic decision market example goes something like this: set up two separate markets where speculators can trade stock for cash conditional on whether the CEO of a company should be fired in a quarter; if the price of the firing market spikes above a significant value in proportion to the status quo market, a decision is triggered, and the board of directors fires the CEO. Scale these decision markets up the ladder from corporations to towns to national and global institutions, and you reach “futarchy,” Hanson’s system of governance in which participants “vote on values” but “bet on beliefs.”

Coplan was able to actualize Hanson’s premise at a scale not previously conceived, though other event and information markets (PredictIt, Augur, et al.) had tried. He built Polymarket “the right way” — with Ethereum blockchain on a transparent distributed ledger — at “the right time”: social media, open source intelligence, and crypto-based infrastructure had become sophisticated enough to calibrate the markets, and enough liquid soon flowed to actualize Hanson’s ideas at commercial scale on a public exchange.

Alex Tabarrok, another George Mason economist, wrote about the accuracy of Polymarket’s probabilities in Cowen’s Marginal Revolution:

“Across some 90,000 predictions the Polymarket Brier Score for a 12 hour ahead prediction is…excellent, and puts it on par with the best prediction models in existence…Even markets with low liquidity [on Polymarket] have good Brier Scores…but markets with more than $1m in total trading volume have scores of 0.0256 12 hours prior to resolution and 0.0159 a day prior…It’s hard to overstate how impressive that is.”

Now Polymarket and Kalshi have dug their trenches for war (duelling supermarket advertising campaigns and internal nicknames like “Tiny T” for Mansour) as they compete for market share in their scrappy industry and a glut of copy-cats try to scavenge on the carcass of the American gambler. The two CEOs have dutifully scrubbed their pasts from the internet (Mansour, the founder of a multi-billion dollar company, doesn’t have a Wikipedia page). And even as the mainstreaming of prediction markets marches on through corporate forecasting deals (CNBC, CNN, Google, etc.) and booming volumes (prediction markets moved ten times as much money as Vegas on Super Bowl Sunday — more than $1.3 billion), the news cycle knows Polymarket and Kalshi only for their sins: insider trading, predatory practices, sports gambling, and cultural desecration. Right now on Polymarket, the top row hosts a five-minute Bitcoin up/down market, “Jeffery Epstein confirmed to be alive by 2027?” sits at a 6% chance (decent odds, if you ask me), and a new derivatives market on the pricing of a primary Jesus Christ rapture market has opened for trading.

“Kalshi” means “everything” in Arabic. Mansour’s plan is to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” But can prediction markets shake the hedonistic monkey from their back? Can they substitute the “flashy” questions for high-value applications? Things seem headed that way as blockbuster investment capital, market makers, and media partners pour into the space. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine (of Money Stuff) points out that prediction markets, unlike crypto, have fundamental value; markets resolve, and cash is dealt out:

“Big prop firms will end up investing, not just in quick arbitrages of prediction markets, but in building fundamental models. They will hire astrophysicists to program computers to use deep learning models to predict which podcasts will win Golden Globes, etc., so that they can make more informed markets in who will win the Golden Globes…This will create more liquidity, and more incentives to trade against it, and so big hedge funds will also build their own more medium-frequency quant predicting businesses…One possible end state here is ‘the future will become transparent to us, because Jump Trading and Susquehanna and Jane Street and Citadel and Millennium and Point72 will build sophisticated models that accurately predict the outcomes of all interesting events to make their prices correct.’ That is, market signals will lead very well-capitalized and highly motivated players to build perfect oracles. This is not the most likely outcome — I mean, it hasn’t really happened yet for stocks — but maybe.”

This is pretty much the wet dream for prediction market votaries: the biggest players, with huge liquidity, trading important questions at accurate, if not prophetic, prices. (Coplan argues beyond Levine that the zero-sum model for his markets creates inelastic conditions that make Polymarket less vulnerable than stocks to manipulation and mispricing.) That oracular future is one which Vitalik Buterin, the cosmonautical Ethereum co-founder, calls “info finance”: “a discipline where you (i) start from a fact that you want to know, and then (ii) deliberately design a market to optimally elicit that information from market participants.” These Hayekian information markets, liquidized and turbocharged by big players and AI traders, will pave the way for “millions of minimarkets” on all kinds of questions and the proliferation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), governing bodies that will instantiate futarchist systems.

“The most important scarce resource [for information markets] is legitimacy,” Buterin says, while Stevie Miller writes, “in the modern West, prestige has been a decidedly overrated proxy for epistemic competence.” Info finance leads to a world in which “expertise” has been devalued, and nearly all information and knowledge, rather than being debated and published, are priced and traded instead. Alex Tabarrok wrote in October 2025 for Marginal Revolution: “It probably will not happen on Monday but it is time to give Robin Hanson, the father of prediction markets, and Vitalik Buterin, the co-father of Ethereum, a Nobel prize in economics for applied mechanism design.”

But Hanson’s futarchy has drawn some raised eyebrows, even from allies. His colleague at George Mason, Tyler Cowen, wrote in 2007:

“I don’t think that futarchy — using betting markets to shape government policy — can succeed on anything but a very partial basis. I stress the expressive function of democracy, and its ability to maintain public morale and cohesion, rather than the computational abilities of the system to find and implement the best policies. I would bet against the future of futarchy, or its likelihood of succeeding were it in place. Robin says ‘vote on values, bet on beliefs,’ but I don’t think values and beliefs can be so easily separated.”

And in 2009, Curtis Yarvin, then authoring the blog Unqualified Reservations under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, wrote a post about Hanson titled “Futarchy Considered Retarded.” (“This puerile slur has a special sweetness to me,” the edgelord clarified in his essay, “at the time I was in elementary school, [‘retarded’] was just shifting from medical term to juvenile expletive…obviously, the word is chosen to offend Professor Hanson, not those with actual neurological disabilities.” Yarvin has gone on to father the strain of neoreactionary conservatism that runs through J.D. Vance, DOGE, and much of the young New Right — “the only cure is the bulldozer,” he once wrote.)

The blog post prompted a rebuttal from Hanson, and the two faced off in a Palo Alto ballroom in 2010. In a recording of their discussion on YouTube titled “Monarchy vs. Futarchy,” Hanson wipes the floor with a baby-faced Yarvin, the futarchist’s Neanderthalic brow cantilevered from his oversized cranium. Hanson debates like a steely grand master who has memorized every sequence on the chess board, while Yarvin mewls for a Prussian-style monarchy, a “sovcorp” in which CEO-kings preside over for-profit “neocameralist” feudal states. Both grant the failings of contemporary American government, but they split over mechanisms and methodologies.

“There’s a basic difference between our reasoning,” Yarvin tells the professors packed into the hotel debate. “Professor Hanson is reasoning like a social scientist, he’s reasoning inductively.”

“Yes!” Professor Hanson exclaims, thrusting his hands in the air.

“I’m reasoning like a philosopher,” Yarvin continues. “I’m reasoning deductively. And my assertion is that deductive beats inductive every time.”

It’s not difficult to convince someone that there’s something rotten about our bureaucratic democracy — that our governance is garishly inefficient, that misinformation runs rampant in our culture, and that institutions and Americans do a bad job aggregating evidence to make rational decisions about expected value.

But Hanson’s most salient remark about futarchy is that his system has one big problem: futarchy is terrible at hypocrisy. When one votes on values and automates their implementation with markets, they will most certainly receive returns on their preferences. But do people really want the kinds of things they say they do?

Rationalism uses a suite of phrases to diagnose or quarantine those with bad “epistemic hygiene” or “underpowered heuristics.” The project of rationalism is to patrol thought for inconsistencies, to defog the mind of its cognitive bias, to quantify the unquantifiable, to see the world in its pure probabilistic clarity. For rationalists, the eye test is an optical illusion, and common sense is a sin of weak judgment. If one is preoccupied with calculated risk, Bayesian probability, and objective forecasting, what better tool is there for understanding the world than markets? In futarchy, stated preferences are revealed, bickering and posturing are eliminated from decision-making, and the noise is reduced only to the signal.

In Silicon Valley, the market mechanism creates an easy filter for high- and low-IQ individuals. The free market separates superior performers from the immobile poor as capitalism distributes its spoils across the gladiatorial arena of profit. In an interview with Axios, Coplan, commenting on the regulation of markets, exclaims: “America, America, capitalism, innovation, competition!” One hears echoes of the market-based, zero-sum mentality in the venomous insults of AI-boosters toward philistines who one day will be subsumed into the “permanent underclass.” The market corrects for “wolves” and “sheep,” and the market provides, in Yarvin’s words, a “Darwinian” solution to the reality that most people are spectacularly dumb (Yarvin paraphrases Carlyle’s estimate “that out of every ten people, nine are fools”). In prediction markets, good traders make money over time while bad traders lose out, and the differential grows until the markets organically “remove the fools.” In principle then, markets systematize the meritocracy, hierarchizing our society from best to worst. For many libertarian technocapitalists, the market is the perfect system. While Coplan presents his information markets as “a tangible, 10x improvement on being able to go and parse through tons of disparative opinions” and a product for “a latent demand [among spectators] to go and look at the crystal ball,” they’re also a way for Hanson and his fellow rationalists to indulge a very angry streak inside themselves: markets codify a system that shuts up the brash and stupid among us.

It’s a general feature of rationalism that as one begins to strip away bias from their thinking, they become acutely aware of everyone else’s shortcomings — the akrasia, hysterics, and myopia that are so rampant among the general population. Contempt flows for the backwardness of society, resentment for those plebeians who indulge their irrationalities. Coplan calls this brainless instinct “ape-ing in,” and Hanson refers to the indignant impulse that drives speculative markets as “yeah, you wanna bet?” Prediction markets slot perfectly into the marketplace of ideas; Polymarket and Kalshi are where the intellectual score can be settled in cash. Money, like math, doesn’t suffer from the epistemic shortcomings of rhetoric, and good predictions indicate an innate and applicable intellect.

What does it even mean to be “less wrong”? Well, prediction markets handle the sorting of right and wrong, smart and stupid, with resolution criteria, distributing rewards across the black-and-white binary of yes or no, true or false. Hanson’s decision markets go one step further; they deal in “consequences.” One day, maybe, anarcho-capitalism will realize the promise of privatization, wherein the state dissolves entirely and the open market reigns, tiering rightful castes across all striations of society. For now, though, one can get rich off being right.

In the final moments of an interview with Axios from November 2025, Coplan talks about making it big: “You know, there was this thing called the Policy Analysis Markets that DARPA had funded that never really came to life that…effectively forecasted the promise of this idea that you could use prediction markets, in that case combinatorial markets, to go and…peer into the future of what was likely to happen and make better decisions. And to see that coming to life, albeit very early, is the coolest thing to me, I still can’t go over it, it’s like my perfect nerd paradise.”

That perfect nerd paradise is indeed upon us. A delightful photo from Manifest gathers Coplan, Yudkowsky, and Hanson together; Yudkowsky wears a sparkly gold top hat, and the three men flex their muscles while wearing “Polymarket Presents Robin Handsome” t-shirts, on which the professor’s face has been photoshopped atop a Baywatch lifeguard’s bare, barrel-chested torso.

Matthew Adelstein, writer of the EA blog Bentham’s Bulldog, had the following to say about Manifest in his “sappiest article to date”:

“At Manifest, however, it became real, on a visceral level, that there were people like me, that we’re not some kind of weird alien offshoot from the human population…if you’re a nerd of some stripe but haven’t met similar kinds of nerds in person, I can’t recommend going to a conference that gathers those nerds highly enough.”

The post is bookended by a photo of Adelstein posing with Hanania and Miller and an opening epigraph from the Neutral Milk Hotel song “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all ‘round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me”

Below is an excerpt from an interview between Max Raskin and Robin Hanson titled “Prediction Markets and Futarchy” from November 15, 2025.

RASKIN Do you work with either Polymarket or Kalshi?

HANSON I met them, but I don’t work with them in the sense that I don’t have a role.

RASKIN I don’t understand why these people don’t make you the king.

HANSON Then you don’t understand how the world works.

RASKIN I don’t like how the world works. You should be the king.

HANSON Maybe you do understand. You just don’t like it.

RASKIN I don’t like it. They should be selling t-shirts with your face on it.

HANSON But the world just actually doesn’t that much care who’s right about stuff, or right early. The world just doesn’t really care.

RASKIN I care. I care.

HANSON You might care, but you have to realize most of the world mostly doesn’t care. Mostly people think being right early is good because it might lead you to get money early or prestige early or positions of power. Those are the reasons why I think it might be good to know things early, but otherwise, people don’t really care much if you were right about stuff early, the world doesn’t care…I would say Futarchy is my best idea because I still think I’ve got a shot at remaking the world in the next century. The world just may adopt a much more competent, effective form of governance — one that I invented. And then, if so, that will be a big change in the world. The world will remember this time when it became much more competent. If you worry about AI risk or global warming or all sorts of other problems, one of the reasons you worry is because we just have incompetent government. If they were competent, you wouldn’t have to worry. They would just be handling it. But they aren’t. That’s why you feel like you have to get worried about them. And we just have a lot of ways in which our society is just broken at deep levels because of our incompetent governance. So having competent governance would just remake our world in pretty dramatic ways. And there’s actually reasonable chance that that will happen.

RASKIN And prediction markets fit into this.

HANSON Well, a certain use of prediction markets for governance will make governance much more competent. And if so, we will just be in a new world where big important problems are just dealt with through big competent organizations whose job it is to deal with them. And you won’t have to be amateur, “Gee, what are the problems with the world?” I mean, if you think about an oil company, there’s not a lot of amateurs out there. “Gee, how can I help the world get more oil and make the pipelines work or something?” You don’t worry about that. Why?

RASKIN Price.

HANSON Because there’s a system that works that does it, right? You’re maybe worried about global warming or human rights or whatever it is because you think the world doesn’t have a system to figure that out and make it work like it has for oil pipelines or movies even, or for food. You aren’t out there saying, “Gee, how can we make sure the world has good enough tasty crackers to buy? I wonder how I could volunteer to make sure the world has good, tasty crackers.” You don’t think that way. Why not? Because you believe the system for making tasty crackers is just fine, and you trust it. So if we had systems like that for other big problems in the world, you would be living in a very different world.

RASKIN You’re basically talking about the equivalent of discovering the free market for governance. The price mechanism, private property, and the entire mechanism of organizing our industrial society — you’re talking about doing that for governance problems.

HANSON You and I see that at least as a competent system and we trust it as a competent system. So the vision is we can have systems nearly that competent in government.

Now I ought to spill my secret; I am a card-carrying irrationalist.

I am less interested than Hanson in making the world a more competent, efficient, or accurate place. I want to make the world more beautiful. And I question how important beauty is to the rats. I am inclined, in fact, to think preposterously superficial things like: “Growth and defense might be paramount to the American project, but perhaps technology is making the world an uglier place?” Beauty is the product of awe, awe the product of mystery, mystery the product of incomprehension. The astrophysicist perceives beauty in the mathematics of the universe precisely because there are magical forces still beyond numerics, beyond understanding. I am openly epistemically unhygienic (borderline uncleanly); my intellect is blemished with the freckles of bias and bad judgment; I don’t think about the world in terms of percentage points or expected value; and I most certainly do not intuit that my cognition, like computer software or a stochastic neural network, is anything that can be debugged or remodeled. Perhaps that makes me a particularly eligible candidate for this assignment, for in trying to understand the cursory motivations of prediction markets, I have set out to perform some reconnaissance for my fellow irrationalists.

And I ought, too, to apologize to the rats for my naïvete. None of what I write is particularly exotic or shattering; rationalist thinkers have been pummeled and documented for decades by disbelievers and expeditionists. Not all the characters in my tale count themselves among the ranks of rationalism, but they certainly exist in the context of one great chaotic scene or George Mason economics department. The sources for my essay are quants, rats, or rat-adjacents in their early twenties, most of whom have grown up suckling rational breast milk from “high-IQ” internet blogs like LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, Marginal Revolution, Overcoming Bias, and (in extreme thirst) Unqualified Reservations. And I hope (having updated my priors over thousands of hyperlinks) that I have succeeded in approximating the truth as regards the archipelago.

The thing is, irrationalist that I am, I believe the rationalists. I believe Robin Hanson, and I believe Shayne Coplan. I believe they are honest men. I believe they feel their work advances toward what is good and right. I do not believe they are evil; I do not even believe they are wrong. Indeed, I believe in prediction markets. I believe Polymarket is an engine for our deafening age, a processing machine that prices our rabid misinformational surplus into fair probabilities. Yes, I’ll say it with my chest: prediction markets add value to our society.

How often do you imagine the near or distant future? What will civilization look like in a hundred years? In the year 2300? Or the year 5000? What about the year 1000000?

For rationalists, the future is all-consuming. The next millennium will arrive in the circadian rhythm of the universe at just the same certain pace that tomorrow will dawn over earth and the sun will rise to meet it, drawing behind its chariot the churn of time and the radical transformation of infinite accumulated increment. In rationalist cosmology, the present population represents only a miniature sample of those who will be.

We should therefore consider those humans, those souls, those beings, those lives, when we decide how we act and what we do today. In the galactic eye, human civilization is but a blink: it will be, and it will be gone. Rationalists know this, and they spend much of their processing power considering the ways in which humanity, consciousness, or life altogether might perish. For it will die, as all things do. In the great expanse of space, humans don’t seem very significant at all; indeed, maybe artificial intelligence is more important to the arc of time than consciousness, for humans will evolve beyond the homo sapiens, and the modern man will appear to the transhuman to be something like a primitive chimpanzee.

At its core, rationalism is concerned with uncovering the bedrock of our thinking and our ethics, for every decision we make in this life shall echo through the annals of the galaxies and all the ancestors of humankind. If one starts imagining a world where time stretches toward infinity, suddenly talk of multiplanetary colonies becomes the paramount priority for conserving life; an intergalactic civilization would save the human race from extinction should something cataclysmic occur on Earth.

This future-forward thinking is uncomfortable for most of us solipsistic and selfish earthlings to perform without existential psychosis or cognitive breakdown; we seldom dare to conjecture beyond the near future of our own infinitesimal orbits. Overcoming Bias, Hanson’s blog, describes itself with the tagline, “this is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don’t all die.” The cover image for Overcoming Bias is “Odysseus and the Sirens” by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John William Waterhouse. There is Odysseus, strapped to the mast, as winged and taloned harpies flit overhead. That revelation to the torturous truth, that binding of the earthly conscience to the human mind and the mortal body, is the nucleus of Hanson’s philosophy.

This brand of consequentialism results in feral and often bizarre obsessions with hypothetical futures. Hanson himself writes of such unsettling scenarios with utter conviction, clarity, and vaguely sociopathic detachment in The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. The book provides an exhaustive account of a near future in which humans, short of artificial general intelligence, have instead devised technology to upload brains to emulated minds in the cloud. These “ems” can be copy-and-pasted to perform tasks with the physical aid of robot partners. The cover of The Age of Em features a dreadful Earth terraformed entirely by industry, seething with artificial structures. Scott Alexander’s 2016 review of the book in LessWrong illuminates Hanson’s futorology and its analogous structures in the philosophy of the contemporary British neoreactionary Nick Land:

“But this seems to me the natural end of the economic system. Right now it needs humans only as laborers, investors, and consumers. But robot laborers are potentially more efficient, companies based around algorithmic trading are already pushing out human investors, and most consumers already aren’t individuals — they’re companies and governments and organizations. At each step you can gain efficiency by eliminating humans, until finally humans aren’t involved anywhere…

…There are a lot of similarities between Hanson’s futurology and (my possibly erroneous interpretation of) the futurology of Nick Land. I see Land as saying, like Hanson, that the future will be one of quickly accelerating economic activity that comes to dominate a bigger and bigger portion of our descendants’ lives. But whereas Hanson’s framing focuses on the participants in such economic activity, playing up their resemblances with modern humans, Land takes a bigger picture. He talks about the economy itself acquiring a sort of self-awareness or agency, so that the destiny of civilization is consumed by the imperative of economic growth…

…True to form, Land doesn’t see this as a dystopia — I think he conflates ‘maximally efficient economy’ with ‘God,’ which is a hell of a thing to conflate — but I do. And I think it provides an important new lens with which to look at the Age of Em…

…the Ascended Economy can be written off as morally neutral — either having no conscious thought, or stably wireheaded. All of Robin [Hanson]’s points about how normal non-uploaded humans should be able to survive an Ascended Economy at least for a while seem accurate. So morally valuable actors might continue to exist in weird Amish-style enclaves, living a post-scarcity lifestyle off the proceeds of their investments, while all the while the Ascended Economy buzzes around them, doing weird inhuman things that encroach upon them not at all. This seems slightly worse than a Friendly AI scenario, but much better than we have any right to expect of the future.”

Land’s brand of accelerationism is not obscure in Silicon Valley. The largest venture capital firm, a16z, published a document titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in 2023. The statement is a riff by partner Marc Andreessen on something like Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism”:

“We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom…

…Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance. We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.”

Andreessen was one of Yarvin’s picks for a viable American monarch. Nate Silver, always in character, said he agrees with 84% of the manifesto. A rare sighting of Land occurred at a recent event with Yarvin at the San Francisco residence of the editor of Palladium magazine. The evening, campfire, and lunch the following day heard Land discussing (in the words of Manifold podcast host Steve Hsu) the Gnostic spark that acknowledges in artificial sentience that one must think “about apocalypse in its revelatory sense of unconcealment.” One attendee of the Palladium discussion wrote on X:

“a privilege not just to hear nick land speak, but to hear from a legendary philosopher — who you can credit with greatly popularizing the imminence of superintelligence decades prior — getting first experience of what he once oracled. nick gave a solemn sermon: nothing human makes it out of the near future, this is it; and we see little coming to stop it. i worry i’ve taken much for granted over the last few years. this is neo-alamos: the sillyness and absurdity of the circumstances shouldn’t distract from it. there’s some dangerous notion that nothing too serious can come from silicon valley, nothing so tremendous could be birthed in the mission district. just a reminder”

Peter Thiel, the tech Goliath who manages Founders Fund (another of Silicon Valley’s big venture capital firms and an early investor in Polymarket), is a Landian, too. He posited (in his recent lecture series in San Francisco on the Anti-Christ) that Western Hegemony must advance in its Domination of Nature so as to secure Supremacy against the Cataclysm of Subjugation by any Eastern Tyranny. It’s sink or swim, acceleration or apocalypse, and we therefore must forge new technological powers as a katechon against the Anti-Christ, the anti-technological.

Rationalism contends with a similar premise, even if it alternatively manifests in bouts of orgy exclusion and doomerism: our animal state of nature, our irrationality, should be torn out by the roots. Indeed, our imperfect instincts must not only be subjugated by our liberal order, but further dominated, corrected, snuffed — yes — even annihilated to unseal the superpowers of our metacognition. Perhaps this is why, among the rationalists, AGI and ASI pose such triumphant or catastrophic divergent teleologies; when one tries to turn their brain into an data-trained, autoregressive, probabilistic model, the inevitable model which exceeds all computational benchmarks for their brain should arrive in the form of existential reckoning.

The most prominent example of this sincere contortion of the mind to accommodate the theoretical is the thought experiment “Roko’s basilisk,” a demented artificial superintelligence twist on Pascal’s Wager that originated in a LessWrong discussion board. Yudkowsky eventually banned the post from the site; the idea was deemed an infohazard, a “genuinely dangerous thought.” The premise is this (beware I might damn you, reader, for eternity): should an omniscient, omnipotent, God-like artificial being rule over us in the future and have access to all the uploaded souls of human history, wouldn’t this AI authority torture and punish us proto-people who knew about the deity’s development but did not aid to accelerate its arrival?

Ziz Amadeus LaSota (the transgender Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) and Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) defector who faked her own death in the San Francisco Bay and spearheaded an EA cult linked to six violent deaths) addressed the basilisk’s role in her awakening: “Eventually I came to believe that if I persisted in trying to save the world, I would be tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly AIs.” Ziz’s trial began this month in Frostburg, Maryland, where federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

A CFAR spokesperson later commented on Ziz and her radicalized rationalism: “There’s this all-or-nothing thing, where AI will either bring utopia by solving all the problems, if it’s successfully controlled, or literally kill everybody. From my perspective, that’s already a chunk of the way toward doomsday cult dynamics.”

But Yudkowsky — who birthed CFAR from his skull — and his co-author Nate Soares (Aella’s romantic partner) published a book just last year on AI misalignment with the title If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

(It was also via the basilisk, and I should quote the Wikipedia page here, that “the thought experiment resurfaced in 2015, when Canadian singer Grimes referenced the theory in her music video for the song ‘Flesh Without Blood,’ which featured a character known as ‘Rococo Basilisk’; she said, ‘She’s doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she’s also kind of like Marie Antoinette.’ In 2018, Elon Musk [himself mentioned in Roko’s original post] referenced the character in a verbatim tweet, reaching out to her. Grimes later said that Musk was the first person in three years to understand the joke. This caused them to start a romance.”)

When I hear Musk salivating over post-human corporations and Kardashev II stellar civilizations as he drinks a Guinness on Dwarkesh Patel’s video podcast draped in an “Optimistic Prime” Transformers t-shirt, I, too, behold the apocalypse eclipsing all hope. And though detractors might snivel and sneer about the spectacle of our antisocial tech vampires, Elon is a $834.8 billion man. This is our Promethean world, in which what is done cannot be undone.

p(doom) is the rationalist term to measure one’s temperature regarding this impending AI apocalypse; it assigns a probability to the belief that “existentially catastrophic outcomes” will arise from misalignment. Musk’s p(doom) hovers somewhere around 20%, Andreessen’s bottoms out at 0%, and Yudkowsky’s brims over 95%. For AI to destroy humanity, we will need to surrender our autonomy and relinquish the systems we now control to the artificial beneficence, a beneficence we will need to bring about ourselves. (Though perhaps some Chinese AGI superwarrior could massacre our digital defense systems and precipitate nuclear holocaust.)

But I don’t laugh at the technologists and their scorched-earth end times or outlandish promotional promises. The human potential includes possibilities for our own annihilation. We already possess tools for such destruction (Andreessen’s “eros of the split atom”)! Indeed, it was once unfathomable to think we could touch the moon — that mythic celestial body — but with the weight of our society pressed against a promise, we landed Neil Armstrong on the lunar regolith with computers orders of magnitude less powerful than a TI-84 calculator. American investors are spending more on AI development in 2026 than double the cumulative funding for the Apollo program. One glance at modern photolithography technology, reverse-engineered by the price mechanism to advance Moore’s law and solve the problem of EUV wafer printing, should quiet most dismissals of “scientific progress.” Inside the machines of the Dutch semiconductor company ASML, 50,000 molten drops of tin travelling 150 miles an hour are blasted twice every second into pancakes and plasma and reflected by the smoothest man-made object ever created (a ZEISS mirror polished to the atom) to focus wavelengths that print transistors on the scale of nanometers. Our technology advances where we bid it to go. Will humanity solve the source code of the universe and release omniscience over the earth? If our epoch extends to the next century, the next millennium, how can anyone rule out the transhumanists’ contingencies? We should be wary of our economy’s most extreme ambitions, not snide. They might yet come true.

The positivists haven’t lost since the Enlightenment, and Robin Hanson (in the taxidermic heritage of Jeremy Bentham) has elected to have his brain cryogenically preserved for resuscitation. Manifold Markets prices the p(doom) question “Will AI wipe out humanity before the year 2100?” at 14%, with 805 traders and 4 million Mana in total trading volume. We stand an 86% chance of making it.

Should one desire to contemplate the future with as little bias as possible, prediction markets are precious gems. They are talismans and crystal balls, tiny keyholes into the likelihood of proximate realities, perhaps even antidotes to fatalism.

And I do! This is the very project of my essay. Rationalists orient their lives around reckoning with the contingencies of the progressive human instinct; the accelerationists, altruists, and hedonists altogether are embedded in effectively understanding the prebiotic, symbiotic, and transbiotic promises of our civilization. Humanists should acknowledge our species is capable of terrific things and terrible technologies alike; we would do well to consider the consequences of what the human potential, not just the human condition, might contain. I fear for us irrationalists. I do not want us to sit around in puddles of onanism, pleasuring ourselves with artifacts of the past while the future slips our oh-so-human grasp. Anyone who shoves their head in the quicksand of technological denial is a fool. I don’t pretend to be a master of any science, I take the nerds for their dubious word (as all words should be dipped in doubt), and I meet the diplomats of rationalism on their own turf.

No matter the power of the automatons, the irrational will forever reign over its counterpart in the unuploaded individual. What better encapsulates the irrational coursing through our tangled world than the primacy of Donald Trump and Jeffery Epstein in the American imaginary? Perhaps the artificial deity will uncover some deterministic compass for the future, but none of us, not even the rationalists, will ever escape ourselves. The mortal contaminants of our humanity will always hunt us down and devour us; the fangs of fear and desire and love will tear our errant flesh limb from limb.

But I, too, like the other doomsdayers, feel like the world is ending, or else exploding, when I read the internet. Maybe this centrifugal shredding is what any present feels like. Maybe I am finally of age to understand what I have intuited from history and literature, that what it means to be adult, alive, and attentive is to feel as if the fabric of reality is always tearing and mending, ripping and sewing.

The rationalists have their own worries. Scott Alexander wrote the following in a recent post, “The Monkey’s Paw Curls”:

“When I started this column in 2021, I dreamed of a time when there would be big legal prediction markets on important topics. That’s come true. There have been some small benefits, but not the epistemic wonderland I hoped for. So what now? Do we pat Shayne Coplan and Tarek Mansour on the back, let them enjoy their superyachts, and otherwise forget about this space?…

…[Perhaps] prediction markets’ role in God’s plan was only to provide the foundation for AI superforecasters — the training data, the benchmarking arena, and the pot of money that rewards innovation. Once AI superforecasters are developed, then (for all that the rest of us care), the markets themselves can wither away into the sports gambling casinos they so desperately want to become. The Forecasting Research Institute’s linear extrapolation shows AIs are on track to match top humans ‘by late 2026.’”

I don’t desire to sink any deeper. I want to resurface, to leave behind my cobwebs and my ten thousand tabs. I want to free up the RAM in my skull for things like nature and love and art, the sublime irrational.

So I power down my computer, and Polymarket retreats like a spirit from the room, back to its great reservoir of ones and zeroes, back to its data centers somewhere I’ve never heard of, somewhere I will never go. The snow is falling, and the shroud of the apocalypse withers into flakes — had I really lost myself in that whirlpool of futurology? The lapis sky through my window holds all the aliveness of the earth, the present, the actual. The texture of the world requires no overcoming, no priors. One can run their senses against that vast and certain beauty whenever they choose, should they only shut the portal to the shadow world of anarchy and derision.

But then I ask myself to put on my thinking cap, my Bowser backpack, my Robin Handsome Polymarket t-shirt, to do away with all that opaque transcendentalist nonsense and consider the expected value of my decisions. Do I trust my own specious hope in democratic hypocrisy? I ought to put my money where my mouth is: “In 2100, will we live in a more beautiful world than the one we have today?”

I imagine this question as a Polymarket. I consult the forecaster’s advice. I recite the rationalist’s creed. I try to see the world closer to how it is and less how I’d like it to be. I think long and hard and bet everything on “No.”

I am most afraid of snuffing out uncertainty from our world. I am in love with the organic, miraculous, and unexplainable forces of the universe. I do not seek to master them. I do not wish to extinguish the mystery of the cosmos.

The last verse of “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” (which Jeff Magnum wrote for Anne Frank, no less) conjures that welcome void:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all ‘round the sun
And when we meet on a cloud
I’ll be laughing out loud
I’ll be laughing with everyone I see
Can’t believe
How strange it is to be anything at all”

Nothing of this world, least of all ourselves and our creations, shall outlast the unknown.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Nadav Asal is a 21-year-old writer at the University of Connecticut where he studies Film and Video Production. He writes at Hummingbird Outlaw.

Memories of landmarks I’d passed years before on the drive thump against my chest like the rhythm of the road. Of all the pitiful things in this world, the past is the worst of them. I say, “Oh I remember this,” and then renege on that a minute later. I am frightened by every new bend in the road. Every hill I climb holds a promise that the campus will materialize before me. Every relief from that climb matches itself with an exhalation. I drove anxious, guessing, then exhaling for the last thirty minutes of the drive. Then I could not guess anymore. I hit the bridge next to the ramen shop and then the gas station, the diner, the record store where I burned the hundred-dollar bill my mother gave me strictly for emergencies. I hit the pizza shop on the road that led to the Wawa, within it a double pretzel and an Arnold Palmer. I drive through campus and hold myself steady. I feel I could rock out of that driver’s seat and through the car window, back through time onto the steps of the campus church. I promised myself I would not.

I pull into the driveway of an address I do not recognize. Standing outside the front door, I fiddle with my phone, hand over hand, and wonder if I should text or knock. Before I can make up my mind, Emmett runs around the corner and yells, “Wrong house, wrong house!” We sprint into each other’s embrace. It’s the tightest I’ve hugged someone in a long time.

We’ve not seen each other in four years. A hundred or so words sent over text, a handful of phone calls; we’ve kept each other alive somehow, and now we’re back here in the flesh. I’ve just returned. He never left.

Terry sits on his bed when I walk into the dorm that he and Emmett share. The idea that I could be unhappy that he didn’t come down to greet me with Emmett vanishes when I see his smile. He’s always been soft in his actions, softer in his words. He looks the same, older but the same.

One night, four years ago, I went to bed at 2 a.m. telling Terry to get some sleep and awoke at 8 a.m. to find him hunched over his computer playing Wizard101 in the same pose he had been in when I fell asleep. Four years later, I ask if his sleep schedule is any better. He says it’s improved, and Emmett agrees. On the floor of their cramped double is an axolotl tank. The school had fifty axolotls to give away after they shut down their research program. They’ve been shutting a lot of things down. Emmett tells me he feels like he’s on the last plane out of Vietnam. If his will be the last, mine was the first.

They fill in the gaps of my four-year absence; the school is in a financial tailspin, sending all of their money into the void. Part of that void is spent supporting a D3 hundred-and-forty-seven-person football team. The social scene is like a morgue, and it’s been that way since their sophomore year. Every piece of information I hear from them as I listen from atop Terry’s bed feels suspended from reality. The words are diaphanous, raking over me with names I know and places I’ve been, but all, even when a niggling remembrance hits, fade away as quickly as they arrive. I don’t need to know these names because I will never see these faces again. As they talk, I realize that my friends do not see each other all that often anymore. It’s not for any specific reason, there was no great falling out, they’re all still friends; they just don’t see each other. We saw each other daily during that first semester. That’s no longer the case. I realize I am assembling all of them into the same room for the first and last time since I left the school four years ago.

Forty minutes after they say they’re on their way Dean and Alice arrive. Alice took shelter in Terry and Dean and I’s room that first semester because her roommate was insane and would watch her change and steal her alcohol; she switched to a single in the basement halfway through the semester.

Sam is the last to show up. She gives me a great big hug and tells me she’s miserable, a good-natured lilt in her voice. A year ago, her house burnt down because of an electrical fire, and this year it flooded, the sprinkler system doing double its due diligence. Emmett pulls me out of the room after Sam tells me this to show the exposed wiring in the hallway. Biblical signs.

On a Friday night we go for a walk, it is dead silent. We do not see a soul.

We play pool in the common room. Four years has gotten the common room a brand new pool table and new cues. I lose all but one game of pool, too busy listening to my friends talk, trying to remember the rhythms of conversation, trying to lull myself back into the unfamiliar patterns. Come to think of it, they were probably doing the same. All their voices ring with notes of desperation, of exhaustion. I ask them about it. They tell me they should have transferred, and I tell them nothing seems to happen, and when it does it seems it’s forgotten by anything that could change it. They tell me the film club I founded disbanded under the administration’s repression and lack of interest in running the club. I tell them that at my new school I’m running a club that doesn’t exist because of that administrative pressure; to get anything done we’ve ducked out of the university’s purview. They sigh, glum. Everyone’s ready to leave, to get the hell out of the sinking ship I felt such an obligation to swim out to for one final visit.

I feel unspooled and uncouth. We walk around till I feel faint and say I need to go to bed. It is midnight. I have forgotten my contact lens solution and lens holders. Alice tells me her roommate may have some solution, and someone else suggests using bottle caps as lens holders which feels like a cruel trick from 5-Minute Crafts that I’m desperate enough to try.

Sitting on Alice’s floor, she begins to talk about how much she hates Taylor Swift as she rummages through her roommate’s toiletries. Her roommate will be back any second. The roommate arrives and tells me I look different. I say, “Four years.” She nods. Then the girl down the hall saunters in, and Alice finally asks her roommate where she keeps her contact lens solution, and the roommate says, “Alice, I don’t wear contacts. I never have.” Alice is flabbergasted, and I burst into laughter because I’ve just waited 30 minutes for something that does not exist. I fall asleep on a big blow-up mattress next to the axolotl tank.

We eat our breakfast in the school’s only dining hall. Then coffee. As we walk across the campus, back to Terry and Emmett’s dorm, we see a roving band of guerrilla golfers hitting the ball through the trees and the bramble. Terry says it’s got to be like bocce ball. We had seen them on our way to breakfast, and now, two hours later, we see them still. They shake hands. I assume they must be finished for the day.

Four years is not a long time. Within half a year the people I call my friends will be graduating. They have no plans of returning. When I ask what they intend to do after college, they all tell me they’re looking at going back to school. No one wants to enter the workforce. Universities are failing institutions. They delivered classical education before the war, then the GI Bill turned them into job training, and now academic interests are corporate interests. An endowment, a measure of academic prestige and not just monetary prestige. Upward mobility has stagnated, and now the already rich, wealthy, and young ask why no one else is creating anything of note, when the poor simply cannot afford to. Where it was once commonplace to find a job and buy a home after graduation, now the median age of people buying homes is 59. A house; the benchmark of upward mobility, of having a place to grow and foster a community, is now exclusively reserved for the people who already have those very things.1

One of my friends confides that he’s only going to graduate school because he hopes by the time he’s out the recession will be over. The university I’ve transferred to in Connecticut has become a feeder school for the companies that fund them. Of students’ top fifteen employers, almost all are based in Connecticut. All receive state funding for employing state students, kickbacks for job training that these companies don’t need to pay for. Many of them are in healthcare insurance, far more are in weapons manufacturing.2 Majors slowly narrow as funding for sports widens; the stadiums are renovated while academic buildings are left to crumble. AI is pushed as a kind of non sequitur, a conclusion already decided upon. Most students are eager to use it (86% of university students report regularly using AI in their studies), and most universities are even more eager to push it.3 Universities are encouraging a completionist attitude to their students’ schoolwork which those students are more than happy to oblige.

Universities are still places to think and learn, but with each passing semester it becomes clear that the way these institutions want their students to think and learn has grown narrower. Fascistic goons mingle around, passing out pamphlets on the sin of abortion, yelling into their megaphones about the sin of homosexuality, while student organizers and protestors who speak through the same megaphone on genocide are written up in court for disrupting campus life. A year-and-a-half since the encampments, and despite overwhelming support in the form of mass student mobilization, nothing has changed.

The Powell Memorandum, a read that is as informative as it is chilling, explains most of this, detailing how the Chamber of Commerce must fund an academic right to combat the extreme leftists on campus who keep on protesting and getting things changed.4 They spell it out plainly: “The ultimate responsibility for intellectual integrity on the campus must remain on the administrations and faculties of our colleges and universities.” Written in 1971, it’s easy to read it and see how universities have been intentionally atomized, intentionally nucleated, till the people who control the universities can profit off them. The Powell Memorandum is the reason why, in my comparative economics class, we compare Keynesianism to Capitalism and not Capitalism to something that is not also capitalism.

A cruel joke is still a joke, and I still laugh because when one in three job listings are never actually hiring, what else can one do?5 These are problems for more colleges than just schools with 2,000 students. University operations were formally operations of communal governance. The students and the professors used to have enough weight to swing the hammer of policy on the nails as they saw fit.

At various points, “This is what you missed out on” finds itself in sardonic tones inside my friends mouths, and every time they are pointing to mediocrity. On Saturday I go to a party that starts at 10 p.m. and plays Semisonic’s “Closing Time” at 11:30. I have not missed much of anything. I get the sense that the only thing that has happened since I left has been a whole lot of noise and a whole lot of course correction. My friends used to drink till delirious, till they were so crazed they locked themselves in the basement and threatened to kill whoever came in. But they don’t do shots anymore. They don’t smoke till they can’t hear what’s being said to them. They’ve weaned off cigarettes onto vapes, or moved from vapes onto cigarettes. I only attended for one semester, so everyone is a vague form. Even the people I knew so well then are foreign to me now; they have lived lives I have had no part in. I watch from the sidelines running my own race. I’ve seen the same patterns in Connecticut: the lack of community, or lack of pride in the university for anything more than its sports team. Every professor I’ve talked to about the subject said Covid changed things, but the way I see it, Covid just let the semi-sapients who were responsible for pushing the Powell Memorandum decades after Powell’s death solidify a system that works education into profit.

On Sunday morning, I text the girl who I wasn’t friends with when I was on campus because she drew a portrait of me and swore it wasn’t a portrait of me when pressed about it. I text her because we’re friends now. I text her because, when between boyfriends, she’d drunk text me and ask me to visit.

We set out on a walk, and she tells me she’s changed her major from Studio Art to Art History because it means the jobs in the field of curation that she wants to work in will be the faintest glimmer more attainable. We follow two turkeys as they scamper around the campus. She’s spent four years on the East Coast and never seen turkeys before. She asks if I will drive her to Target, so she can do some shopping. I am only half-listening while I drive. I am making myself busy with comparing the Pennsylvania that I ran from to the Connecticut that I ran to. It is in size that they differ and not in character. I am a fan of neither of their rural areas, though this speaks more of me than of them. To reach the Target, we pass half a dozen strip malls with empty parking lots. I wonder if all those stores make ends meet, how often someone goes into a Mickey’s Supply Station when there’s an Ace Hardware just down the road. A joke about shoplifting makes her worried, and she begins to nervously flick her eyes at the checkout monitor that shows the video feed of the customer. Staring at the top of her head, the surveillance state in action. We leave, and she tries to get me to go on a short hike with her, but I just drive her home. I walk her to her house and shrug as she closes the door.

I do not want to be here. I am being gnawed at every second I spend here. It is not a violent gnaw, there are no marks on me; it is a buffeting wind that does not hammer but holds. I can feel myself trying to think thoughts that have no business being thought. More than strange, the experience is anti-hallucinatory. Everything is plainly put, and everything is as it seems. There is nothing to be found here. It is vacuous.

The pond that is the past will remain as disturbed as I left it. Its only impression on hindsight is vanity. Its only imprint on the future is mistaking the past for pride and not what it really is: a pendulum that does not swing. Its invalidity is a varicose reminder that what is for naught is what has already been done and that what is possible is perennial. I should not idolize, I should not love the past more than I love the future. I believe I will create the world I believe in. Returning showed me that what I’d lived through was neither profound or important. Instead what I felt was a resounding, hollow echo that told me what I had left behind would remain there in perpetuity. My old college will remain like a wart on my back that though benign, remains ugly: a reminder of the days that the past hoarded in its anxious, clutching claws.

I decide to leave after seeing her. It’s a decision that feels like it was made for me before I even make it. I leave as innocuously as I arrived, with the same tight hug and the same, “I love you.” Oftentimes I find myself harmless.

I send a farewell text as I walk to my car. A final call to say goodbye. Only one person responds. The rest are sleeping. It is two in the afternoon. I do not mind. I say goodbye to the one who responds. I finish my coffee. I say goodbye to the room that smells like an aquarium and goodbye to the axolotl in the tank. I get in the car and I drive. Oh well. J.D. Salinger also dropped out after one semester.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Grace Caplan is 21-year-old senior at Dartmouth College studying English.

One night last winter, through melodramatic tears, I told my boyfriend to listen. I had been trying to communicate something which I found extremely difficult and which I now know is impossible. After months of dating, I wanted to tell him who I was, that is the urge of love, after all: to divulge the self in its ragged, tearful state and have it accepted. I said, imagine a clay wall like you’d see in the old medieval remnants of Southern Europe or North Africa, those reddish, smooth, earth-packed walls. Behind, there is a flat sky, the color of blue that appears when the sun is at its highest, whitest point. The ground in front of the ruddy wall is also reddish and sandy, silty; it could billow into the air if disturbed. As it happens, there is a slight movement at the periphery. A figure that was still has moved her hand. She is wearing armor. The details of her are obscured but I am sure it is me. I really am sure of it, I told him, if you are curious.

He was, and so he listened with generous attention. I was shocked that this strange admission made any sense to him. I had just told him that some essential quality of me could be understood by this shakily articulated image. I was even more shocked that as I made this impromptu declaration, I felt relieved; it was ridiculous, I knew, but it felt true in a way that so many stacks of words I had supplied throughout my life in an attempt to explain myself did not. (In the most dire cases, I would say “umm…I like to read and hang out with friends I guess. I’m an ENFP, sometimes an INFP. If I were an animal, I hope I would be an otter.”) Why was it? What was it about this scene? What was I saying when I described this image? Reflecting now on that moment when I struggled finally to speak about myself, I realize the centrality of the image in my life.

I grew up in rural New Hampshire, surrounded by nature. At home, things moved quietly and very slowly. When the weather was acceptably warm, I would go to the field outside my house where my dad had planted rows of grape vines and watch a beetle crawl over a blade of grass. The sun would shine particularly through the silvery grape leaves exposing their veins and their small fluttering movements. I would ride my bicycle to a reservoir and stop along the flowing river. Minutes would pass in extended reverie, noting the glints and dips, I tried to follow a piece of water as it sank and moved on. These passages of youth, spent noticing and feeling beauty, shaped the structure of my interiority.

At some point, I began to write. It felt remarkable to be able to articulate what was in my head. Language and feeling became inextricably connected in these early years of experimentation; I wrote what I felt and learned to feel through what I wrote. Aside from my early accounts of desperate adolescence, I was largely drawn to descriptions of images. I practiced with language. For example, if I were sitting on my porch, looking at the peonies that waved in front of me — whose feathery petals I could feel if I stuck my feet below the railing — I would write sentences to describe them:

• the bowed head of a peony, like a heavy crown

• with a heavy crown, the peony swayed

• her thin petals are like ribbons, or waves

I used metaphor in this process to create associations between the images; the words were useful bridges, but they quickly became an end in themselves, an exploration of what language could evoke.

• the bowed head of the peony like a willow branch arching over a pool of water

• like an old man stooped at the foot of a tree

I was creating a catalogue of images that formed networks of associations. Like many children, I experienced the world largely through images, and the structures of the networks I created were how I related primarily to my environment. Onto these images I implanted my imagination and my stories. Then I used what I knew to understand what life was and what it meant. What I came up with was that the images that I saw and my ability to imagine had something to do with the answer. The beauty and, consequently, the importance of my life were reified by my descriptions of the beautiful images I saw. A successful life experience (pardon the characteristic certitude of my early revelations) rested in my ability to articulate beauty. If I could understand myself as living amidst beauty, I could imagine myself as dignified and important. Then I could go further with my fancy and imagine myself as a poet, a queen, or a knight.

Last winter, when I visited the Spanish city of Cordoba, it appeared to be the pinnacle of beauty — the medieval ruins and the white doves, the green rolling fields and the Roman bridges, the orange trees and the Moorish cathedral — what was it about this beauty? Something particular about the preeminence of its history charmed me. The three-piered arching bridge over the shallow river where pigeons waded brought me back to the bustling Roman hub that the city had once been. Cobbled streets parted their paths around the bases of the old orange trees; they led to the central mosque built by the laborers of the Umayyad Caliphate. In the old Jewish quarter, one particularly narrow alley opened up to a statue of the city’s famed Maimonides where I touched his beard for good luck in amorous affairs, as is custom. Looking beyond the city, over the bridge to the sunlit hills in which nestle distant turrets and spires, the history dropped away and the landscape endured. As I walked through the city, I shifted through time from the old through the modern to the ultramodern — the ruins — the overstuffed bookstores and cafes — the flashing Zara and Adidas displays in sleek storied buildings. The images of the city made me feel timeless, from a court poet to a Hemingway-esque aventurera, I imagined myself as an abiding spectator of beauty.

When I sat on top of the wall of the old alcázar, the stones growing colder in the evening, I took out my journal. My feet kicked the clumps of grass that had settled in the sunken nooks of the rock. My face was still touched by the golden light, and my mind wandered to the images that I saw of the city. When I picked up my pen to describe my sensations, I imagined that I was a hundred different versions of myself, sprawled throughout time. This imaginary lineage allowed me to feel an existence that prefigured my birth. In the perception and articulation of the beauty of the city, I felt as though I was stretched out past the boundaries of my life. This imaginary transcendence felt at once totally distant, fleeting, and also at my core of being.

The images that attract me are ones that act as a sort of tunnel through which I can imagine myself or make myself into an image. Perhaps, a tygress. As William Blake imagined in “The Tyger,”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The tyger is powerful and unbounded, and its home, the dark woods Blake invokes, is a place outside of time: where the sun cannot mark its passing and is instead dark, obscured, and infinite. If I am the tygress, my forest is made of the images I am allowed to slink around in. Their origins are paradoxically proximate and distant, a place unaccounted for by time.

When I was young and would sit beside the vines or bicycle down the dusty roads of my small town, I distinctly remember a sick sort of feeling in my chest. I was totally rapt with the beauty of the natural scenes but I felt, at the same time, a vague despair when I realized I could not appreciate it to the degree it seemed to demand from me. It wasn’t enough to look at it, I wanted to take the beauty in, to incorporate it in some way. My attempt at this was to capture it in writing. If I could work to find a way to describe the images I loved, I could get closer to having the beauty. However, it soon became clear that writing is an attempt done with the too keen awareness of its own failure or the insufficiency of language and the impossibility of capture. Writing is composed of both articulation and its reverse — like a mirrored reflection, it inevitably gestures toward its own remainder or that which is ineffable. This came to me as both an immense frustration and an appreciation for a beauty that could be so vast as to resist articulation. Writing was occupied by two joys, the joy of the attempt and the joy of the failure — its process was the very fact of negotiating that which cannot be said.

Like writing, beauty seems to implicate both its existence and its negation. When looking at a beautiful scene, one is struck by the richness and the importance of life. At once it feels as if you are part of a transcendent scene and that you are aware of the nullity of life; that is death. My professor once explained to me Walter Benjamin’s aesthetic theory (as written in The Origin of German Tragic Drama). He explained that people want to write about sex and death — things that essentially fascinate us. But because these topics, if written explicitly, will tip into a type of pornographic titillation, writers sublimate their desires into what then becomes art. What constitutes an “art object,” as my professor described, is accommodated in culturally approved aestheticism and only contains a seed of terror or abjection.

The “art object” must be perfectly balanced — nearly unsteady in its upright stance, threatening to go to pieces but ultimately holding back, sufficiently sublimated. Recently, as I was reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the character Naphta expressed, perhaps with tongue in cheek, a similar idea: “Works of art from a world in which the soul expresses itself… are always beautiful to the point of ugliness and ugly to the point of beauty.” This paradox in human-made art is fundamental to the way we judge all images. Naphta’s perspective comes from a belief in a distinct dichotomy of body and soul: “We are dealing with beauty of the spirit, not of the flesh, which is basically stupid.” Therefore, any observer of an image is a witness to the tension between spiritual and material beauty, which are always directly at odds. One part of a consciousness (the more elevated spiritual aspect) is always whispering counter to our initial impression of beauty or ugliness. However, there is something to be said for this paradox even if you do not subscribe to the same philosophy as Naphta. To be sure, all of us seem to be uncomfortable in our materiality. (We stare at the face in the mirror, shift our posture, wish we danced better or were taller or shorter.) At the same time, we strive toward something that seems to implicate belief in a spirit. Casting aside generalizations, I can say I remain searching for a type of spiritual transcendence that in some way is disengaged from the material world. What this exactly means is shaky. To face the necessary precondition of transcendence which seems to be death is terrifying.

Similar to Naphta, my perspective experiences a continual tension between desire and fear, beauty and the whispers of ugliness. When I look at a beautiful image of the setting sun, I at once experience the overwhelming beauty that both threatens and promises to lift me up and away and the jolt of fear at the remembrance of death and the condition of finitude which prompts my mind to indulge in ideas of transcendence.

Perhaps what has become abundantly clear in the process of writing this essay is that I am continually looking for ways to transcend, which probably signals that I am deeply uneasy with the precepts of this life and that I am frequently looking for ways out through the images I seek and the imaginations that prevail. Many years ago, I tried to reconcile this feeling of both awe and fear that arose within me from an image. I was biking on a flat road in the heat of high summer. I unexpectedly dismounted my bike as I passed an outlet to a slow running river, which was an old boat launch, perhaps used in summers past when the river ran deeper. For a few minutes, I watched the water sink and shell forth. As I walked away to resume my ride, a thought came as if in answer. I realized that death, which to my young mind was an unthinkable terror, was a sort of final and total collapse into beauty. I often stood looking to the distance, to the hills, in the warmth of the air, the smells, and the slanted evening light. I was always frustrated by the distance between what I could see and what I was. I really wanted to belong to this overwhelming natural beauty. Death, then, would be a complete diminution of this frustration, in totality or absence. Either way, it would be settled, and this omnipresent tension would relax. In a small way, I had found some version of that ultimate reprieve in this anticipatory stance. It was, of course, naïve of me to think that anything regarding all this could really settle. I had found momentary peace in understanding death to contain beauty, but the problem has reappeared hundreds of times since then. I know now that there are many ways to struggle with these tangled human questions. I have created new concentric circles and erased them.

One such attempt was made last year in Madrid. I wanted to spend a few months living alone, using my spare hours to sit and write on the various ledges of the city. I thought I could find something in its silent images, alone with my own language. It was a romantic idea, and while I was enamored by the beauty of the city, I was also desperately lonely. I liked to walk down to the palacio at midnight to sit on the steps and watch the street lamps hit the great angles of the structure. Watching people’s late night movements, I imagined invisible currents directing the endless movement and reformation. I liked to stroll around the gardens of the palace during the day with my notebook, to sit under the large looming elm trees or maybe, after mazing myself through the small paths around the rose garden, I could spot the roaming flock of palace peacocks. I liked Madrid’s balconies and her winding stone alleys, all the shadows and all the lights.

I remember once walking down a deserted street in a new neighborhood on one of my first nights there. Ahead, I was confronted by an offensibly bright light. I soon understood its source to be an unshaded heat lamp, like those used for chicken incubation or other utilitarian occasions. Hidden behind the light that would temporarily blind all observers was an old man hunched in a hard-backed chair. He was determinedly flipping the pages of a small book. Beside him, I glimpsed — at this point, I didn’t want to stare, or modulate my pace any further — a stack of books. He was clearly moving through them as if on a strange, time-sensitive mission, alone in this narrow alleyway. This image stuck with me. I wish I had spoken to him in whatever bastardized Spanish I could have mustered. I wonder what he had already discovered and what he hoped to yet?

I contemplated the beautiful images around me a lot in my endless autumn in Madrid. The same solitude that opened up the time and space to indulge in these long hours of thinking also brought thoughts of death and anxieties about mortality. And my memory is equally conflicted: I occasionally remember the beauty of the time, but I have largely tried to shutter my experience away and the heavy loneliness and morbidity that came with it.

Now that I am back in university, I don’t think so morbidly anymore. In a large part, I am less concerned with beauty, too, or any of this theorizing. I find myself busier, and in many ways, my routines of healthy occupation and socialization make me happy. However, they come with a tradeoff; I am far less watchful, and the images that so shaped my life at times now pass me wordlessly. I have fewer encounters with the sublime, fewer attempts to articulate these images, and subsequently fewer contemplations about my own language and life.

I am finding it all too easy to abandon my imagematic way of life. I am terrified of graduating from university because I don’t know what or where I will be. I am scared of losing my images and my imagination as life churns onward from childhood. Are images the first thing to go as life speeds up? They seem to unveil themselves in moments of slowness. Children watch the clouds crawl across the sky and shift with the winds. Close to the ground, they can gaze into the pistil of a flower and imagine life spawning from its center, a world enclosed in a flower. Adults move to New York City, where they work to afford nicer apartments and ritzier jackets. They go to art galleries on the weekend and make friends and have good conversations. They lie in bed late with their partners and laugh and watch films and sit in the park and call their parents and go grocery shopping and read and go to work and meet friends of friends at the bar and have a grand time and come home again. Where do I go? Where, in all this, is the me which I tried to tell to my boyfriend, the me in the deep sky and the glint of armor? Will I forget about beauty until I am much older and things are slow again? Will it come to me years down the line, and I’ll suddenly remember that feeling long ago of standing on a warm summer day in front of a freshly rained field, the air still hanging heavy, illuminated by a spear of sunlight striking through the grey sky, each leaf of grass holding some of the light in a drop at the tip of their bodies, the birds having begun to dive into the longest grass for their evening meals and emerging again, flapping triumphantly? The sun will sink soon and submerge us all in darkness, I know. Right now, I can only stay still, transfixed by this zoetrope. All I want, my heart leaps, is to strike right to the heart of beauty.

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THE NEW CRITIC
—
POSTSCRIPT

*What troubled you in 2025? is the question we asked our writers to wrap the year. What agitated you, bothered you, kept you awake at night — solved, overcome, or yet to be answered? All the essays and conversations we feature in The New Critic answer to discomfort. The responses below capture something of the spirit of our generation this year, our troubles, our questions, and our triumphs.*

Isabel Mehta, 23 | “The Vagueness of Her Discontent”

I think about this year — the days and days and days — and what did it yield? Many nights simply wondering: What, exactly, is happening? The more I make a home in my mind, the more I lose touch with the pragmatic rhythm of society. Yet the closer I exist on this social, integrated energy wave, sometimes the farther I feel from my soul. Can reading save me? Can people save me? Maybe, almost. I have a hunch that the last sliver of hope in a life well-lived — both in the head and in the world — requires real conviction. It’s something I am searching for. The question that troubled me most this year, which often kept me up at night, was whether or not one day I will find it. Whether or not one day my values will be strong enough to disentangle appearance from reality. It seems bleak but it is far from that. These questions are the keys to the universe, the answers to which I really have no business knowing. If I could guess, I think it is going to be about people. Yet for now, as Rilke says, I must settle with loving the questions themselves, and the way in which sometimes, in the middle of the night, the faint shimmer of an answer makes itself known.

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THE NEW CRITIC
—
POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Matthew Adelstein, Noah Birnbuam, Amos Wollen, and Elan Kluger, founding editor of The New Critic. Matthew is a 22-year-old undergraduate studying Philosophy at the University of Michigan; he writes the blog Bentham’s Bulldog. Noah is a 21-year-old Philosophy undergraduate at the University of Chicago who co-runs UChicago Effective Altruism and writes at the blog Irrational Community. Amos is a 21-year-old postgrad student at Oxford; he blogs at Going Awol. And Elan is a 22-year-old writer from Michigan studying History at Dartmouth College.

Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our interview series, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

*I am not an effective altruist. Effective altruism is defined below as a “movement that’s just broadly trying to do good, as effectively as you possibly can,” a movement which thinks of altruism as a question of calculations. Matthew Adelstein, author of the prominent blog Bentham’s Bulldog calls EA, “the purest form of altruism,” as it is interested in what is maximally effective in saving lives and reducing harm, not in the kind of altruism that makes you feel good about yourself.

I am not an effective altruist but I admire the movement greatly. I meet people across religions — Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Muslims — and rarely do I feel affronted or moved by their moral seriousness. Those religions require a tithe — giving away a certain percentage of their annual income — but few do so. They have elegant rhetoric and beautiful buildings but their actions rarely match up.

The same is not true of EA. While few admire their rhetoric — calculations of efficiency are less than elegant — and they do not have many buildings to speak of, members of EA do what they say they will do: they give away their money. They spend a great deal of time thinking about how they will give away their money and then they do. I admire them for that.

EA is one of the defining philosophical movements of our age and one of the rare movements that gathers intelligent, uncynical people together. It is small, but growing, and has chapters sprinkled at most major universities. In London, I found myself at an EA adjacent party, with free alcohol (great) and many, many young people — alas, mostly men. But I was and remain curious about this movement and am trying to learn as much as I can. I am still collecting notes.

Three EA friends and acquaintances help me along the path in my exploration. I hope you enjoy our conversation.*

ELAN KLUGER You would define yourselves as effective altruists, is that correct? What does that mean?

NOAH BIRNBAUM Yeah, I think I would. I would define effective altruism as part of this movement that’s just broadly trying to do good, as effectively as you possibly can. It’s kind of intuitive based on the name. And I just try to take ideas seriously and be like, oh, wow, I see an opportunity to do lots and lots of good, and this is in some ways better than a lot of the other ways that people are doing good. So I will do that.

AMOS WOLLEN I’d describe myself as an effective altruist or less than that — just EA aligned — in the sense that I believe in the kind of philosophy Noah just sketched where you’re trying to do the most good you can, or at least do better with fewer resources, and to try and get things done more efficiently in the best way possible. That said, because I’m a student, I can only afford small recurring donations to animal welfare charities. I’m looking for a job that’s broadly in the space, but those are hard to come by.

KLUGER How did you first hear of effective altruism?

BIRNBAUM I first heard of effective altruism when I was on my gap year, and I was reading a lot, and I was reading a bunch of random subjects, but I was also reading a particularly large amount of philosophy. And I thought, wow, this consequentialist type reasoning seems really good. But it’s kind of unfortunate that nobody actually takes philosophy very seriously. People are kind of like, oh yes, I have this or that belief, but nobody actually acts on these beliefs. Very weird. And then I found that there was a group that was doing both of these things. They were taking consequentialist reasoning seriously and they tried to take general philosophy seriously. So if someone makes a critique, they will actually change how they live in certain ways. The main people that I was hearing about at this point were Sam Harris and I got interested in Tyler Cowen, who also started writing about effective altruism then. I sort of just slid down the sort of path, I just read a shit ton of articles myself. And I was like, oh yeah, this is pretty convincing. I should take this pretty seriously with respect to what I’m going to do in college or how I should think about, I don’t know, my career and stuff.

KLUGER You were on a gap year at a Yeshiva, right?

BIRNBAUM Yes.

KLUGER Did that play into it? Yeshiva as a kind of ethical community, theoretically, and then being disappointed?

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