THE NEW CRITIC
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POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Clare Ashcraft and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is supplement to Clare’s essay “Collegiate Value.”

Read Clare's essay

Being the “voice of your generation” is a rather difficult role, especially if you earned the moniker from a piece you now consider a re-packaging of Jonathan Haidt.

Last August, Clare Ashcraft wrote an essay for the titled “Gen Z Is Worse Than You Think” (not Clare’s words). The post has more than 5k likes on Substack — the platform’s equivalent of a platinum single.

“Gen Z is, in most ways, no different than the generations who came before us. Cigarette lighters in our cars were replaced with phone chargers, but we still follow the incentives given to us and do what is required of us to survive. The problem is, to survive requires almost nothing.”

The uproarious reception of Clare’s jeremiad provoked our skepticism — why were adults so eager to wag their fingers at the young? — especially knowing Clare, whose temperament always seems to attract the most measured takes. (Clare works, after all, at the media bias think tank AllSides.) When faced with a question that trends toward destabilization, Clare locates the comfortable, balanced landing ground.

Clare is also a remarkably honest thinker. Her most recent piece for The New Critic, “Collegiate Value,” is a story of despair and aspiration, in which Clare reflects upon her atomized and ultimately disappointing undergraduate years at Capital University:

“I don’t regret going to an affordable school as much as I regret the feeling of stuckness that came with it. There was a richness to the warm wood, vaulted ceilings, and tall windows at Kenyon. It allowed breathing room that was absent under Capital’s buzzing fluorescent lights and dusty linoleum floors. Simply put, Capital was a harder place to dream in.”

Our conversation — on finding meaningful friendships, online or IRL, and accepting or rejecting your romanticized delusions — has been edited for length and clarity.*

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RUFUS Reading your takedown of gen z or your reflections on the friendships you did or didn’t make in college, I could imagine someone our age thinking, “What the hell is this girl talking about? She just needs to get out of her room.” What is your response to that criticism?

CLARE I think that’s fair enough. I don’t know everything, nor do I pretend to. I think people sometimes give me a little too much authority with that RoL piece. Yeah, I’m a 22-year-old sitting in my room. I don’t know any more than anyone else, fundamentally. But the one pushback I will say is that I feel like a lot of the people saying, “Oh, this girl’s just sitting in her room, she doesn’t know anything,” are the type of people who are going out and going to a party and are like, “Our generation’s fine because look, there are other gen zers here.” And there probably are, but there are also a lot of gen zers sitting in their rooms like me that you don’t see — because they’re sitting in their rooms. And it’s very hard to quantify how many people are just sitting online all day when, by your very nature, you don’t see them, if you’re the healthy one who’s out in the world.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Clare Ashcraft is a proud, 22-year-old Ohioan. She writes The Mestiza, where she makes observations about identity, psychology, and culture.

I dreamt about college growing up the same way some people dream about their wedding. It was the place I’d finally become myself.

What I didn’t imagine was that instead of touring campuses and imagining my future self in the bodies of students chatting about philosophy on the lawn, I’d be scrolling their overproduced websites in the background of a Zoom lecture. I kept adding colleges to my ever-growing applications list, then paring it down, then expanding it again because it was the pandemic and I didn’t have much else to do beyond daydreaming.

I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I deserved to go to the Ivy League, but I always imagined myself somewhere close, at some B-tier college with name recognition. The place I ended up falling in love with was Kenyon College, a writer’s school known for its famous fiction-writing alumni John Green and Ransom Riggs, the musicians Yoke Lore and Walk the Moon, and cartoonist Bill Waterson. It was hidden in the rural Ohio hills, a place I could disappear into for a while, like any good novel.

Most campus websites and brochures feature the best angle of the only pretty building on campus and are actually somewhat dull and ugly, but Kenyon was surrounded by a quad of beautiful gothic buildings every bit as stunning as the pictures. I wasn’t allowed to take a tour when I arrived to visit campus because apparently there was a waitlist due to Covid, so I walked around trying to keep in mind the less than 30% acceptance rate before I got too attached.

I visited the few buildings open to everyone — admissions, the art gallery, the dining hall, the recreation center, the chapel, and the single general store. The dining hall’s vaulted ceilings and chandeliers reminded me of Hogwarts. The lines of the building were accented with dark wood and romantic stained glass windows. This little town they created had one street in and out. It was an academic community set apart from the world, just beside ordinary life. It mirrored the way I saw myself: warm, inspired, but in some ways unreachable.

I was often beside the world, but not in it, which isn’t a wholly unpleasant position to be in. In high school, I got along with everyone just fine. I was well-liked. I’d watch my friends get in a snowball fight and smile at their uproarious laughter without feeling it deeply myself. Call it something clinical like dissociation or depression, or call it the condition of a writer, to be a witness. But when I saw the high ceilings and tall windows at Kenyon, I saw a place from which I could observe the world, study it, and be among others with similar habits.

I was accepted to Kenyon, Kent State University, the University of Toledo, Capital University, and Sewanee: The University of the South; waitlisted for Columbia University and Temple University; and rejected from Northwestern, Harvard, and Cornell. My Kenyon acceptance letter came with a handwritten note and a copy of David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” given at the college in 2005. They knew how to charm a future English major. What wasn’t charming was the $76,000 tuition bill.

The first time I visited Capital University, I had to be dragged out of the car. My parents and I were on our way back from a four-hour road trip, and I just wanted to go home. My parents said Capital was on the way and I may as well take a look. The campus was comprised of a few brick rectangles and was so small you could walk from end to end in five minutes. I can see the whole thing from my car window without getting out, I whined, can’t we just keep driving? We stopped in the center of campus, I looked at a map, walked a few paces forward and back, and we left. Even if I had wanted to see it, I was convinced I wouldn’t end up somewhere so bland. It looked more like a maze of parking lots than somewhere that made me excited to dive into Mill, Locke, and Aristotle, though I was reluctant to admit then how much the ugly aesthetics of the place mattered to me.

The second time I visited Capital was for a “Capital Cruise-in” event because they gave out a $1,000 per semester scholarship to anyone who came, and although I didn’t want to go, my mother insisted, just in case. The first person I met there was my future philosophy professor. I’d just finished reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer and was persuaded of veganism, and the professor and I got into an argument about whether Singer’s claims were ableist (I did not know at the time that disability studies were his expertise). I also met the manager of the black box theater below our student union — he would later become my boss for the year and a half I spent building sets (he’d toured with Huey Lewis and the News and often regaled me with stories of his rock and roll days while we painted floors or constructed walls together). Everyone I met that day was friendly. Importantly, Capital was also $30,000 cheaper than Kenyon.

Nevertheless, in the ensuing weeks I used my acceptance letters and attached tuition bills to bargain with Kenyon to knock down the cost, which they did, subtracting $10,000 from the sticker price. But even with scholarships and aid, Kenyon would still cost $51,000 a year, and they wouldn’t let me transfer all of the credits I’d accrued in high school because they wanted all students to have the full, four-year “Kenyon College experience.”

Going to a $50,000-a-year college because it’s pretty and prestigious is unreasonable. I, with my middle-class Midwestern sensibilities, knew it wasn’t the “correct” choice. I could have gone to Kenyon — no one would have stopped me. But I knew I would come to regret the nearly $200,000 in student loans I’d have to take out because I wanted to go somewhere beautiful.

So I convinced myself I didn’t really want to go to Kenyon anyway. It was too pretentious to ask for so much money in tuition and then not accept all of the transfer credits I rightfully earned. Not to mention the fact that knocking off $10,000 just because I asked nicely proved they were massively overcharging students.

At the time, it seemed more sane to stomach the emotional consequences of not going than the financial consequences of going, but in hindsight it’s not so obvious to me. I wish someone had told me it’s okay to be unreasonable, as long as I take responsibility for the consequences of it. It’s easier to pretend the answers are obvious and universal than to own the sacrifice you’re making in denying yourself.

To add insult to injury, several of my friends ended up at top schools — Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis. I had friends all over the map. Other friends of mine went to local state schools, community colleges, and several didn’t go to college at all. I believe those are acceptable paths, maybe even better ones in the current economy, but they weren’t acceptable for me, because I considered my main asset to be my academic intelligence. I don’t have particularly strong social skills; in fact, that was one of the main reasons for me to go to college: to have community. And I wasn’t athletic or coordinated enough to work with my hands like friends who grew plants or built PCs. I’d always been destined for some white-collar job with a high mental workload, but it seemed many of my friends that had interests of a similar caliber pursued their dream school without a second thought.

Part of the reason I ended up at Capital instead of somewhere like Kent State was Capital’s small class size. I didn’t have many close friends in high school, but since my graduating class was only 80 students and we often collaborated on projects together, it was a tight-knit group; I was friendly with all of them. I imagined my college major might be the same. When it wasn’t — because we were all adults with more freedom than high school kids — I was convinced I would simply have to try harder. I founded student organizations and took up leadership roles to dig my heels into the campus culture, but I never truly made friends. I can count the number of times I hung out with someone outside of class or a club event during those three years on one hand.

My freshman year, I brought a famous philosopher to campus who has several hundred thousand social media followers to speak at an event hosted by BridgeUSA, a political dialogue club I ran, even though I had essentially no fellow club members to help me execute the event. I emailed the university president to let him know about it, proud that I could bring our small campus some publicity, and got a generic response from him about it being a campus policy not to endorse any student events. I just wanted someone to be proud of what I was doing. I wanted anyone to recognize it.

I got several internship offers that summer from places I found and applied to myself. That internship turned into a part-time editorial job at AllSides I was excited about, but my professors barely paid any interest. They gave advice about graduate school and literary magazine submissions but did not understand the new media world I was becoming a part of, one focused on media bias and meta-criticism. They were in a world that still held The New York Times as the paper of record and Poetry Magazine as the best place to be published, while I was in a world where it became cool to dunk on The Times and common to lament about the fall of magazines like Poetry.

When I returned to campus for my second year, it was to an empty room. I’d asked around at the end of the previous spring, but everyone had their roommates picked by then. I spent most of that year wedged between the isolating concrete walls of a dorm room eating canned soup (the single dining hall had nil vegan options). The posters I bought never stuck to the stark white concrete bricks. One side of the room had cheap wall-to-wall closet built-ins, and the fire alarms in the building were constantly going off from people smoking weed in the middle of the afternoon. There was little space for character, history, or joy of learning.

Older generations had sold me an idea of college — that it would be a place where I stayed up past midnight discussing religion and the meaning of life, that I might meet my spouse there, like my parents did. None of that came true, and it’s hard to know if it was because of Covid, or me, or the college, or all of the above. I kept telling myself I’d be fine at any college I went to, that I’d find my people. When I didn’t, it became hard not to wonder what my life could have looked like elsewhere.

One of my professors that first year at Capital also taught part-time at Kenyon. I felt vindicated because it meant I was essentially getting the same quality of education for $30k cheaper. Recently, I learned one of my coworkers, who’s of a similar age to me, had also graduated from Kenyon. See, we all end up in the same place, a part of me said. But that led me to the conclusion that the school I went to was not something I could blame my unhappiness on, that, had I gone elsewhere, my life may not have been as tangibly different as I wanted to believe.

I stayed only three years at Capital, mostly because I was sad and lonely, but it was easy enough to frame it as ambition. I had a post-graduation job lined up, so there was no need to stay longer, anyway. If I couldn’t boast that I’d gone anywhere worth knowing, I could at least say I graduated at 20. It’s embarrassing to be complaining about the college experience I didn’t get to have at the college I didn’t get to go to when I’m 22 and happily employed now. But all those ambivalent feelings came flooding back when I was invited back to campus recently by my creative nonfiction professor to talk about my job and my writing on Substack.

I was working the same job and writing on Substack six months before I graduated, but no one seemed to care then. I am the same person two years post-graduation as I was, only now I’m seen as more successful. This professor, for whom I’m grateful, told the class that I’d “found success on an alternative path” and hadn’t taken the usual mainstream publication route. I had always done that — built a new path for myself because I didn’t understand the old one. I didn’t understand how to make friends, or build community, or publish in literary magazines. I didn’t perceive how, at some point, not knowing those things became cause for admiration rather than pity.

After I presented to the class, a journalist for the student newspaper interviewed me. “Why did you choose Capital, and why did you stay? What was the most valuable part of your experience at Capital? Did career development help you find your job?” I had to take a beat, so that I didn’t say, “I stayed because I’m arrogant and stubborn and transferring was too much work. Career development didn’t help me, nor did the administration, nor did my professors, though the professors were kind.” Instead I gave some palatable, mostly true answer about trying to build the community I wanted to see and the importance of learning from failure.

I naturally find myself getting along with people who went to UPenn and Dartmouth because I spend my weekends reading philosophy for fun, but I talk to my Ivy League friends with a chip on my shoulder. Other times I feel entirely out of my depth because I didn’t vacation in Europe, and I’m still brushing up on obscure literary references I was never taught. I won’t say, “it should have been me at one of those schools,” because it’s futile to argue against the past. But I do Google philosophy graduate degrees at Oxford and daydream about an Iowa Writers Workshop MFA, as if going to graduate school would be a corrective experience — as if things would turn out differently if I could just outwork my jealousy, jealousy mostly of the person I expect myself to be, jealousy of my potential on my best days.

“Potential” doesn’t grant you anything, though, hence why I work. And when it goes unnoticed, I double down, and when people ask how I got here, my only answer is how could I not have? How could I have ended up anywhere but here, denying unreasonable dreams, sandwiched between working-class bitterness and persistent, egotistical naiveté? I haven’t managed to give up that desire for institutional approval quite yet, but at least I paid off my student loans.

People are quick to give you mountains of advice when you’re lost and 17: “College will be your happiest years,” but “pick a practical major and don’t go into debt.” “Don’t make any choices you’ll regret,” but also “now’s the time to make choices you’ll regret.” When students are understandably overwhelmed by all this, advice-givers pivot to, “This choice doesn’t matter as much as it seems to. You’ll be fine anywhere.” I would argue it matters a great deal, but the good news is you can make more choices at any time.

Rationally, it doesn’t make sense to talk about my experience in terms of right or wrong choices. There are only the choices that I made, and I can’t know if anything would have been substantively different otherwise. Rather than sacrificing young people to the advice-industrial complex that is the internet (or fancy Ivy League tutors), we must empower their agency so they understand they cannot undo their choices, but they can always make more as they better comprehend the consequences of their initial decisions.

While Ivy League students are sometimes decried as brats who have never been told no in their lives, I wonder about the kids who were told to be reasonable so many times they never even risked asking for more, the ones who dreamed in secret, knowing they’d one day have to settle for a boring middle-class life in the suburbs but weren’t quite ready to believe it. As long as you’re in high school, it’s easy to convince yourself of all the people you might one day become, but choosing to attend a “reasonable” college marks the first betrayal of the romantic in you. It is the first time it hits you that you will be nothing more than average because you don’t have the stomach to make unreasonable decisions. To be great, you have to give up the urge to protect and maintain the good, cushy, safe, middle-class life that your parents worked hard for — that you feel you should be satisfied with but cannot deny that you aren’t — and take a risk that could have financial ramifications for the rest of your life.

I don’t regret going to an affordable school as much as I regret the feeling of stuckness that came with it. There was a richness to the warm wood, vaulted ceilings, and tall windows at Kenyon. It allowed breathing room that was absent under Capital’s buzzing fluorescent lights and dusty linoleum floors. Simply put, Capital was a harder place to dream in. Even now, the pragmatist in me cringes at that characterization, because the abstract concept of dreaming has such a concrete cost in the form of student loan debt. But unquantifiable experiences are often the most valuable to cultivate. The romanticist in me has been so often denied by the educational system and its fixation on GPAs, test scores, and career paths. And yet it remains unbroken, I still crave the pursuit of the sublime.

Romance is a fickle, ambitious, insistent thing. As much as I tried to root it out — as much as the education system tried to root it out of me — I remain tumultuously wedded to it. I can no longer sheepishly tuck away my tendency toward desiring grand ideas and places, doing so only makes me resent myself. I must sustain a healthy diet, balanced with foolish hope and delusion, to honor the annoying part of me that’s eternally reaching for a grittier, self-transcendent panacea.

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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.

The summer before our senior year, my roommate and I came up with a way to rescue our humiliations: we would term them part of our Girls reel. Setting our hair on fire taking selfies too close to the candles? Spraining my ankle walking up the stairs when I was stoned? Vomiting blackout drunk into the Delaware river as my childhood friend kissed my roommate, my puke still pooling in her hands? The embarrassment and pain would fade if we passed off these moments as half-hilarious, half-glamorous; they signified the beginning of our fumbling 20s — very Girls. It was like that Nora Ephron quote, “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.”

Later that year, the two of us ate together at a nice Italian restaurant I was too hungover to enjoy. She told me she wanted to be a lawyer.

I thought this was a little sudden for someone who played the drums and permanently wore eyeliner, but I didn’t say so.

She said if she had a clear artistic passion she would have followed it. She just wanted to have a plan. Didn’t I understand?

“Sure totally,” I said as I picked at my inedible sausage ragu.

That night, when we returned home, we decided to watch Girls.

While it’s unclear when exactly the Girls renaissance took off, it was in full swing by March of 2023 when The New York Times asked, “Why Are So Many People Rewatching Girls?” Viewing figures had doubled between November and January of that year. Millennials were revisiting their youth with kinder eyes and gen z was watching the show for the first time. Why then, why now? Maybe it was another recession indicator.

It can only have helped that Lena Dunham, the show’s controversial star and creator, had withdrawn from the public eye, allowing new viewers to connect with the show without being forced to solve the problem of Lena Dunham. I was vaguely aware of Dunham’s many scandals — as far as I knew at the time, there had been something in the news about her claiming a basketball player didn’t talk to her at the Met Gala because she wasn’t his type, that time she said she wished she had an abortion — scandals which epitomized white feminism, a thing most of us didn’t talk about anymore but I knew we were supposed to be against. Still, I didn’t think too much about Dunham while I watched Girls; like most 20-somethings, I was consumed with myself.

Girls is but one entry in the canon of young women figuring things out on TV. Many of these shows take place in New York City, and almost all follow the model of Sex and the City. Dunham pitched Girls as an explicit follow-up to Sex and the City:

“Sex and the City was about being a woman in New York, already established and looking for love. But what about the phase before, when you don’t even know enough to even know what you’re looking for? The New York I know isn’t glamorous — we graduated during a recession. We’re the first generation that can’t reasonably expect more than our parents had. We all grew up on Ritalin and AOL Instant Messenger. We’re having sex fueled by the availability of porn, and we’re feminists who don’t know how to live our politics. I want to see my friends on TV.”

Swap out AOL for Instagram and Ritalin for vapes and it’s disconcerting how contemporary the pitch remains.

My roommate and I were constantly trying to square our politics with our dogged heterosexuality. How could we, that generation of women raised to believe they could break glass ceilings, pine and wait by the phone? We read Mary Gaitskill, debated the merits of Emily Ratajkowski’s feminism, and fumed over the hypocrisy of those Lefty boys who performed feminism while treating us so poorly. It seemed an insult to our education that we couldn’t think our way out of our heartbreaks. But at least we had each other. Ours was one of those friendships that creates new language, a bevy of nicknames and codenames that could sometimes make it seem like we talked in tongues. For two years, we ran a radio show we described as an “indie, feminist version of Call Her Daddy,” in which we talked at a clip and rarely planned our playlists.

Our senior year, we lived in two singles connected by a small room with only a sink and a mirror, the layout a quirk of our college’s ancient dormitories. My roommate had a keen sense for how to aspire to aesthetics, and before every semester she asked me what was on my semester mood board, a question to which I never had a good answer. She loved stories about young women in New York figuring out the world through sex. A picture of the four leads from Sex and the City had pride of place on her dorm room wall. That year, she taped up a picture of the bad boy bartender from the Starz adaptation of Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter and told me she wanted a man like him. “He looks like he eats cigarettes,” she said dreamily.

It was my roommate who introduced me to Sex and the City. I watched the show the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college, a year before I watched Girls. This is a fitting viewing order. While the shows appeal to similar demographics, they largely satisfy different itches. Sex and the City applies an aspirational gloss to the emotional realities underlying modern dating, whereas Girls strips away the gloss and lets the camera linger on the ugly parts of growing up.

It’s difficult to think of a better advert for New York than Sex and the City. Each episode details the highs and lows of the New York dating scene against the backdrop of the city’s panoply of delights. A product of the post-feminism ’90s, Sex and the City eschews any obligations to feminism even as the women owe their sexual liberty to the gains of the second wave feminist movement. With the exception of Miranda, the show’s strident token feminist, the women use their newfound freedoms to shop, gossip, party, and talk about men. It’s revealed in season three that Carrie doesn’t even vote. In Sex and the City, hyperfeminized consumption culture is rendered feminist by the fact that it is women doing the buying. For all the lifestyle porn, though, the show is also popular for conveying the agony of heterosexuality. Though the women are at the top of their professional fields, their mental energies are devoted to parsing the motives of largely indifferent men. Despite their financial power, they are subjected to waiting and wondering, and in doing so, playing out a tired dance: woman waits while man decides.

Time and time again, Sex and the City implicitly (and sometimes, via Carrie’s column, explicitly) asks if women can have sex like men. The answer is mostly no. While the women experiment with divorcing sex from feeling, it is only Samantha, a magnificent paean to feminine id, who succeeds. I have yet to meet a true Samantha. When my roommate had casual sex, she would describe herself as being in a “Samantha moment,” only to confess how much she wanted a boyfriend several months or even weeks later — as if I had been fooled by her blasé act. I didn’t try to play it cool; I knew I was a Carrie through and through, pathetic in my devotions. I didn’t fall in love often, but when I did, it was without restraint. My friends liked to say I lacked a self-protective instinct. Much of the series’ tension revolves around Carrie’s on-again, off-again relationship with a financier the viewer only knows as Mr. Big, or Big (in the finale, we learn his first name is John). Alternating between grand romantic gestures and astonishing coldness, Big keeps Carrie on the hook long after she should quit him. Many of the quartet’s brunches are spent hyperfixating on Big with questions like, “What if he never calls and three weeks from now, I pick up The New York Times, and I read he’s married some perfect little woman who never passes gas under his $500 sheets?” In season two, Carrie shows up at Big’s apartment with McDonald’s and a jaunty beret to try to convince him she can keep things casual — but she ends up asking, “Why is it so hard for you to factor me into your life in any real way?” The image of Carrie at Big’s door endures in meme-form as an example of the self-effacing pursuit of an indifferent partner. The masochistic element of their dynamic frustrated many viewers, but it was one of the show’s most adept moves; we hated Carrie because her insecurity, her ugly need, was true.

Around the time I first watched Sex and the City, I was seeing a guy I referred to as “my Big.” It didn’t matter that he was a nervous, gangly boy who wore a lot of stripes — by using the archetype, I could articulate a strength of feeling my friends would not otherwise understand. My roommate had a Big too, and then she had several. Whereas I liked nerdy, hyper-articulate guys (a strange number of whom have considered working for the CIA), she liked brooding guys who always seemed to be on the verge of flunking out. It comforted me that we liked different types of boys; without boys to tear us apart, I reasoned we’d always stay friends.

I’m tempted sometimes to write our friendship off as shallow, as if that would be a proper explanation for why it ended. For all my frustration with the insufficient intellectualism of my college’s student body, it embarrasses me to admit that boys occupied such a large space in our mental universe. But they did. In my defense, we attended a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere where there wasn’t much else to do but drink, write, and talk about how badly we wanted to fall in love.

The only clip from Sex and the City that lives on a loop in my brain comes near the end of season two, when Carrie learns Big has started a serious relationship with a beautiful, 20-something girlfriend. Naturally, they’re in the Hamptons, so a heartbroken Carrie heads for the sea. Miranda approaches and asks if she’s okay. In answer, Carrie throws up in the sand. This is the image that came to mind when I learned my Big came back from Chinese language school with a blue-eyed girlfriend who had perfect boobs. That it was 4 p.m. in the arts center parking lot was the only thing that prevented me from throwing up on the asphalt. My roommate and I had just come back from a run to the liquor store, and she ushered me into her room as I blubbered and sobbed. Later that night, my women friends gathered in my room with the solemnity of a wake as I drank and readied myself for a party that my heartbreak had decided was a necessary proof of strength. In the episode Carrie gets her heart broken by the sea — “Twenty-Something Girls vs. Thirty-Something Women” — she wears one of her best outfits: a snakeskin bandeau with a red midi skirt and a red cowboy hat. I thought a lot about my outfit for the party, eventually settling on low-rise mini shorts I can no longer fit into, a green bandana top, and my pièce de résistance, red cowboy boots. I looked about as beautiful as I ever have and was just as miserable. Predictably, I ended up sobbing in the bathroom, another night spent reveling in the best years of my life.

My injury was compounded when this boy, through some combination of guilt and awkwardness, decided to ignore me. On such a small campus, this move was as difficult as it was obvious. But through every tortured glance, every sob, every terrible party, my roommate stood by my side. When I think of that semester now, I remember us talking on treadmills positioned next to each other, propping up her JBL speaker in the communal showers so we could listen to the same music while we shampooed, getting ready to go out by rubbing the coconut oil she read porn stars used on our chests, and talking, always talking.

In Sex and the City, the foursome’s friendship is inviolable. Throughout all the noncommittal boyfriends, impotent husbands, and surprise pregnancies, Sex and the City tells us the one thing we can count on are our girlfriends. The show upholds this ideal of female friendship even as it makes it clear the most important relationship is the romantic partner (as proven by the series finale, which rounds off the series with a montage of the quartet in happy heterosexual relationships).

Girls, on the other hand, boldly destroys the central quartet. Across six seasons of television, the four main characters only appear together 12 times. So it makes narrative sense when Shoshanna, the most Sex-and-the-City-worshipping of the girls, ends the series by saying, “I have come to realize how exhausting and narcissistic and ultimately boring this whole dynamic is…Notice all of those really pretty girls out there who have, like, jobs and purses and nice personalities? Those are now my friends — not you guys. I think we should all just agree to call it.” In other words, Shoshanna has tired of dysfunction and prefers the girls who gossip over brunch over those who accidentally smoke crack at a Bushwick rave. She’s traded up.

In preparation for this piece, I decided to rewatch Girls from start to finish. Despite the fact that I have a massive Girls poster hanging over the foot of my bed, I had only ever seen the show in bits and pieces. Then I remembered why my first watch of Girls had precipitated so much nausea, watching the biting comedy of season one shift into a relentless carousel of everything that can go wrong in your 20s: mental breakdowns, rehab, bad sex, sex that borders on rape, disastrous girls’ trips, quitting grad school, attempted assisted suicide, flashing your boss, breakups, coked-out fights, divorce, and singing Kanye West at your ex-boyfriend’s work function. Yet for a show designed to disturb, it’s the absolute paucity of the friendships I find hardest to watch.

The friendships depicted on Girls are often defined by a baseline of unrelenting narcissism — genuine kindness is the deviation from the norm. The girls routinely skip each other’s calls, fuck each other’s boyfriends, fight about fucking each other’s boyfriends, demonstrate little interest in each other’s lives, ruin countless birthdays, and sacrifice greater self-fulfillment in favor of centering their lives around men. When the show’s lead Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham, decides to leave the city for good, her roommate and gay best friend Elijah protests, “But Hannah you’ve made so many wonderful friendships here.” Then they both crack up with laughter. I don’t think it’s an accident that Hannah’s most stalwart friendship is with Elijah; on Girls, the deepest relationships often occur between women and men. For this reason, watching Girls can often feel like an exercise in (very witty) masochism. Why do so many of my generous, insightful women friends enjoy watching other women enact breaches of friendships they wouldn’t accept in real life? Is it cathartic to see women be mercilessly mean, to observe ventriloquists express words and feelings we don’t dare voice? Is it simple schadenfreude?

The very ugliness of female friendship is central to Girls’s appeal. In a confrontation at the end of season one, roommates Marnie and Hannah air their long-simmering grievances by yelling, “You are the wound” back and forth. And when Marnie accuses Hannah of being a bad friend, Hannah says the ugly thing out loud: “Maybe that’s not what’s important to me right now. I don’t really give a shit about being a good friend. I have bigger concerns.” It’s such a fantastic line because it violates the inviolable tenet of female friendship: that we must always care about being a good friend.

In season three’s “Beach House,” the rare episode where the foursome is actually together, a trip to the North Shore culminates in a blistering fight that leaves the girls wondering if they are really friends. Hannah leaves the confrontation saying, “I really miss my boyfriend, who asks me for nothing, so I give him everything.” While this isn’t strictly true, it drives home the thesis of Girls — that female friendships are often thornier than heterosexual relationships because women demand more of each other than they demand of men. As a self-involved 20-something, this doesn’t strike me as totally off-base. Historically, my friendships have been peppered with painful, earnest — sometimes painfully earnest — conversations about the health of the relationship itself. To date, the cruelest conversation I’ve ever had was an hour-and-a-half verbal assessment of my flaws by a former friend who told me — in the middle of the pandemic — that I should spend more time alone to work on my self-development.

For all my feminism, it is women whom I hold the longest grudges against. With time, I forgive all my exes, rationalizing their flaws with the sanguine confidence that the relationship just wasn’t meant to be — not so with ex-girlfriends. When the name of a girl who wronged me in my freshman fall comes up, I’ll say, “That girl’s a snake,” with all the bitterness of fresh injury. I’m opposed on principle to using feminine slurs against other women, and this is about the worst insult I can manage (that creature slithering through the garden…).

I can’t pinpoint exactly when my roommate and I grew apart, but I remember the first time I realized we no longer looked at the world the same way. It was the fall of our senior year, and I had drafted an article for our college newspaper about my shame at not having a college boyfriend, a feeling we often commiserated over. When I asked her what she thought of the piece, she said publishing something so intimate would have been her nightmare. Usually so effusive, she started moderating herself on our radio show in case her crushes were listening and holed up in her room to work on law school applications.

I didn’t blame her for wanting a plan. I wanted one, too. Against the advice of my advisor, I applied to the 10 most competitive MFA programs in the country. My advisor believed young writers would ruin their voices by matriculating to MFA programs too young, and though I recognized the truth in what he said, I wanted a Hail Mary to rescue me from the messiness of adult life. School had always come easily to me, and I wanted things to stay easy — I was rejected from every single program.

My roommate began hearing back from law schools around the same time she started seeing the guy who would become her boyfriend. I counted my MFA rejections in silence. It was my first big failure, and I walked around stunned. But instead of demoralizing me, the rejections fortified my conviction. I spent more and more time alone in the library, working on my novel and not applying to jobs. At that point, my roommate was most conspicuous in her absence. Whereas it had once been strange to go a day without seeing her, running into her was now a surprise. I still don’t know if she recognized what was, to me, a brutal drift apart. There was no blow-up moment, no viral monologue; I couldn’t even tell if she noticed. The sharpest words we ever exchanged were in February, after our Winter Carnival. I told her I had been sad. “Well,” she said with unmistakable reproach, “that seems to happen to you a lot.” She continued applying her makeup while I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice.

It was true, my senior year, that I had taken up the mantle of sad drunk girl with unusual verve, but I would have expected this kind of critique from my less emotional friends — not from a girl whose tears I had dried more times than I could count. Worse than that, she was annoyed by my pain. I held all these accusations on my tongue, ready to charge her with that cardinal girlhood sin of girlhood, of being a bad friend. The only thing that kept me from firing was my fear she would voice the unforgivable thing: “I don’t really give a shit about being a good friend.”

That spring, I resumed my former antics — talkative and giggly when drunk and prone to kissing my friends on their foreheads — only my roommate didn’t get to see them; she spent most nights in the glow of her stoner boyfriend’s fish tank. When, on graduation day, she said I would always have a place to stay in Boston, I knew she meant it as much as she could and that I would never take her up on the offer. “Thanks,” I told her. When I texted her and asked if she would talk to me for this piece, she told me she wasn’t in a “digital footprint sharing mode,” though she thanked me for thinking of her.

A part of me longed for a confrontation equal to the scope of my grievances with her. That there had been no definitive break in our friendship frustrated me. I realized that is why so many of my supportive female friends love watching the awful friendships on Girls: because it’s cathartic to watch female friendships explored to their true operatic potential.

It surprises me how unanimously my friends see themselves in Girls. They told me that while Sex and the City was fun to watch, the women on Girls reminded them of their friends. “It’s a little bit voyeuristic almost,” my current roommate told me, “Lena Dunham gave us an excellent show that I could watch while I was being messy and while I was pining over boys and while I was like, ‘Ugh all I wanna do is be a writer and live in New York.’”

I belong to that rarefied demographic that Girls speaks for and skewers in equal measure: graduates of elite colleges who feel vaguely guilty about their privilege, who are listless in their liberalism. But unlike the women of Girls, my friends largely work the entry-level, white-collar jobs our education promised us. It is I who have failed to fulfill the promise of my education, I who work the kind of ad hoc job that sometimes results in being paid in cash, I who wonder before I fall asleep if I will ever be able to sell my novel. Yet even my friends with enviably stable careers feel represented by Dunham’s portrait of post-recession dysfunction. Instead of staying out at night, they meal prep, study for the LSATs, and save for retirement. Instead of getting picked up in a bar, my friends scroll through anemic Hinge profiles. “It was okay,” a friend recently said of sex. “It’s Hinge,” she explained, like she was talking about grocery store sushi — there’s only so much accounting for quality.

I moved to Williamsburg in the winter of 2025, and a few months later, I began working as a hostess at an expensive steakhouse. Naturally, there was a brooding server, a 32-year-old nightmare with sharp cheekbones who doused himself in cologne to cover up the smell of his cigarettes. If I was in Girls, he would have fucked me in the handicapped stall where the servers did coke, and I would have learned a lesson about male callousness. If I was in Sex and the City, I would have gotten any of the countless media jobs I’d applied for and wouldn’t have needed to scrape the wax some 12-year-old had decided to drizzle on the menu. Instead, I mulled from May to July over whether I wanted to fuck the server until I decided if I had to think that hard about it, I probably didn’t want to fuck him. I spent my shifts trying to come up with metaphors to describe how he used his fading beauty to manipulate the other servers into doing his work for him. Currency is to what? When the opportunity came to quit working at the sexy, low-lit restaurant and do the restaurant’s administrative work instead, I took it because the sleep schedule was better for my writing.

On Girls and Sex and the City, every heartbreak and humiliation is elevated to a crucial step in female becoming. For the characters who are writers, these indignities are not only formative but generative; they make for good material. Toward the end of season five, a character tells Hannah, “You’ve had all these, like, boyfriends and jobs and moments. And you’ve lived all this truth…And you have so much to say.” Girls ultimately decides that Hannah’s mistakes (some of which are truly egregious) are to the benefit of her person and career; it is because she has had so many experiences that she is able to write something worth reading. It is comforting to believe all of our pain serves a higher principle, but is it true? What if it’s only pain? I think of those college parties in which I chased misery. Wouldn’t I have been better off without my cowboy boots, consoling myself with a good book?

As part of a recent Q&A column on her Substack, Dunham wrote that “long term friendships — ones that stand the test of time and continue to bring both delight and deep, steady support — have one thing and one thing only in common, and that thing is: a willingness to let the other person grow.” This was in response to a young woman who had written in to describe a rift with her college best friend. Could they stay friends? she asked Dunham. Was she the bad friend for making her friend feel insecure?

My expectations for friendship are different than they were in college. It is normal for me to go weeks without seeing some of my closest friends in the city because they need to work, or go to the gym, or see their boyfriends. I don’t take this personally because I am a person who routinely forgets about text messages and now refuses plans in order to write. I understand now that sometimes there are more important directives than being a good friend.

It would be easy to tell a story in which my roommate and I grew apart because she became a lawyer and I became a writer, but in the grand scheme of the human condition, these are negligible differences. A full accounting of our grievances would obscure how we needed to sever our togetherness so as to allow for the development of two independent selves. If we had been less close, or if our closeness had not been forged in the mutual agony of being heartbroken girls in college, then we might have borne this natural self-differentiation with more grace. It strikes me now that the intensity of our friendship was only possible because neither of us were in love.

And if I sometimes miss the fevered closeness of that friendship, I know I am no longer capable of sustaining such an intimacy. For one, I am no longer in agony. In this city of endless delights and cruelties, I have chosen to embrace an approach to my mid-20s that is not built on the worship of experience or ritualistic pain. It would make for pretty boring TV.

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THE NEW CRITIC
—
POSTSCRIPT

*What follows is a conversation between Owen Yingling and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Owen’s essay “The Great Zombification.”

Read Owen's essay

Owen is likely the heavyweight champion of our young generation’s polemicists — his previous essays have taken on the decline of literary fiction, the confessional-essay-industrial complex, and the absence of the Great Millenial Novel.

Now Owen — an assistant editor of The New Critic and a junior at UChicago studying Philosophy — has taken on the one great specter to rule them all: AI.

Below we discuss why we should punish students more for cheating, dusty intellectualism, UChicago mythos, stern hands, 1920s Paris, Wikipedia, scenesters, Scott Alexander, internet criticism, modernism, LessWrong, how not to produce great art, the Bridgewater interview process, Saint-John Perse, removing oneself from literary endeavors, and the impossibility of grad school.

In short, we cover everything of any significance.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

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RUFUS How has UChicago distorted your sense of the American youth culture at large?

OWEN It’s done terrible things to me. Not everyone is going to Jimmy’s and talking about Derrida. But still, nobody there would ever think about our own college sports. But, Elan, no offense, you did stereotype us a little bit.

I live in my fraternity house. I’m in touch with whatever part of UChicago is closest to actual youth culture. But even in the frat, I was coming up the stairs when I heard there was a debate going on about the Spanish Inquisition, and I pitched in with some stuff about Netanyahu’s father’s revisionist book about the Inquisition, and we argued about that for a while. That was a bunch of frat brothers messing around. It does make you think that there’s this vast group of American youth who do read a lot of books.

RUFUS So where does your anger come from?

OWEN The anger comes from the fact that if Chicago is very, very intellectual, then that’s still not a good baseline. And it’s going downhill. It’s largely because of the way AI is used with the Core [Curriculum at Chicago]. A frat brother telling me that he “Chatted” every single essay he wrote for the Core? That’s a direct attack. The school has also introduced easier Core classes, like a social studies class where you just read research papers. The foundation is eroding, and even without AI, it would be eroding. The Core got smaller in 2001-2002, and it’s going to keep shrinking. AI is this rot that is accelerating this process. There is an image of old Chicago versus new Chicago — that it was once this quirky, weird humanities place that existed until 2020, and since then, it’s been classes full of investment banking, finance people.

RUFUS Then they started over-indexing prepsters…

OWEN I am sort of in favor of this. If old UChicago is an academic sandcastle, then letting in these people is like pouring a river on it that sweeps up some of the sediment with the water. The sandcastle is going away, but it means exposing more of the world to the Chicago ethos. Before, it was sequestered. This is not a bad trade-off. The problem is that, with AI, the river becomes a more existential threat.

Here’s a crazy AI thing. Someone I know used ChatGPT on purpose to produce UChicago admission essay prompts and submitted them to the admissions office. One of his AI-generated prompts won their contest, and it was going to be featured as one of the actual application questions until the admin found out because he posted about it on LinkedIn, which is ridiculous and maybe emblematic of something.

RUFUS But I feel like you’re contradicting yourself, because with your sandcastle metaphor, you’re praising this change in Chicago’s ethos, but it’s the Business-Economics people that use AI — a supermajority don’t care about the learning, and the ones who do will be on their Kindles reading Tacitus anyway.

OWEN You’re right. It is a weak point. But I think it’s good to force people to engage with the Western tradition, even if they don’t take it up. I suspect part of the flowering of English literature was due to most intelligent Anglosphere men in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries being forced to learn Greek and Latin in grammar school, even if they had no interest. Selection is not enough. People will select out of the humanities too early.

RUFUS But it seems that the student culture — not administrative action — motivates reading. The classes where I have felt intellectually stimulated are those in which there was a collective sense that, “I should have done the reading,” because everyone is interested in the subject at hand. The weak points are the Chads who say, “Who the fuck care about Hobbes and Locke? I want pussy, and I want to get drunk.”

OWEN I agree. The key nuance is that UChicago choked itself out on dusty intellectualism. I think many of the students who come from prep schools — like myself — would be willing to do their reading if a stern hand is applied. Without a stern hand, they will default to using AI. This can be fixed, to some extent, with administrative action.

RUFUS I took a Latin class in high school in which we translated Caesar and the Aeneid. At the end of the term, I remember hearing that some guys in my class had been cheating with each other to figure out which lines would be on the test, or something like that. And I had been in my room for hours studying these Latin lines, which I will never use again. That moment ruptured the incentive structures of school for me. I thought, “This is inane. Why am I in my room studying these lines?” It burst whatever film had been pulled over my eyes. And I just thought, “How meaningless.” And it’s really that sense of meaninglessness that pushes someone to use AI.

OWEN I think the best solution is to punish students, to scare them — but not too much — it can’t be to the extent where teachers and TAs don’t want to punish them. The most annoying example of AI use I’ve seen was in the fall. It was my Heidegger class with Robert Pippin, who is the top Heidegger and Hegel scholar in the country. For our first essay, he said, “Oh, there have been so many reports of AI use on this essay that I’m just not going to count it for a grade.”

No! Pippin, I want you to punish every student who used AI on this essay right now, because they deserve it. Instead, my first essay doesn’t count. My first essay was good. I got an A- and I would have maybe gotten an A in the class had that essay counted. This pissed me off. But the reason he didn’t do it is because if he was to refer these cases to the University, the punishment each student would get would be a three- or four-quarter suspension. Pippin is a nice old man. He doesn’t want to do that and put up with the administrative work or deal with individual AI cases or, like, giving kids a year-long suspension on a “more likely than not” criteria. It’s like “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” There are 25 kids a year who take the brunt of disciplinary punishment that should really be meted out to 2,500 of them.

ELAN I have a question about this. I proctored a Blue Book exam today. I was not told to take peoples’ phones. It was a two-hour exam. During the exam, people got up to go to the bathroom more often than I think one normally has to go. So at least one person cheated, although I think they all did. I saw one student take an extra-close look at the exam sheet before going to the bathroom. I could have sent it to the professor, but —

RUFUS — but who cares?

ELAN Exactly.

RUFUS That’s my point about the Latin translation. It was meaningless.

ELAN Miniature transgressions, when so widely accepted, build up to a generalized apathy and rot.

RUFUS I think these transgressions are so endemic at Dartmouth that cynicism, apathy, materialism, they permeate everything: the humanist liberal arts fall apart when there’s a crack in the edifice.

ELAN Owen, tell the story of your decline of literary fiction piece. How did that come about?

OWEN I’m 95% sure I’m allowed to talk about it — it just may give people an unfair advantage in the Bridgewater interview process.

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THE NEW CRITIC

On thousands of elm-dappled quads this spring, hordes of proud parents and gowned graduates will gather under party tents. Programs will rustle, beads of sweat will drip from scented armpits to damp belly-buttons, and commencement ceremonies will debut a new crop of students to the real world. Come June (God willing), we three founding editors will be seated among such a throng, awaiting our diplomas on the green at Dartmouth College. Considering the occasion, our college president, an honorary speaker, the valedictorian, and others shall be called upon to make remarks.

The commencement address, as a genre, demands grand statements and moral mandates: What should the world expect of a young adult? What should a young adult expect of the world? What were the tuition and toil really worth? But most often in these speeches, the soporific reigns. (What sort of person is valedictorian, anyway?) The most interesting part of any graduation ends up on the periphery — the badly-behaved child destroying fresh turf, the gossipers loitering in the mid-morning sun, the feverish couple fucking in the library stacks.

Yes, rarely do graduation speakers do as they should — scandalize the settled, agitate the ossified, and invigorate that rollicking mass of youth destined for embourgeoisement. Therefore, The New Critic seeks a commencement address of its own. An address that would make siblings scream, grandmothers gape, and fathers faint. An address worthy of equal quantities boos, frowns, and applause. An address that would make the evening news. An address that would prompt the audio technician to cut the mic.

In the interrogative spirit of our friends at , the essay should answer to the following question: “What Was College For?” We offer a $1,000 prize to the winning address. Excerpts from other submissions will be collected into a symposium.

For consideration, one must be:

• A member of generation z

• An annual paid subscriber of The New Critic

All submissions are due to editors@thenewcritic.com no later than Wednesday, May 27th.

Write and be merry!

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THE NEW CRITIC

Owen Yingling is a 21-year-old writer and assistant editor of The New Critic from Arlington, Virginia. He studies Philosophy at The University of Chicago.

Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.

Take the infamous photograph of a UCLA student showing off a ChatGPT window at graduation. What exactly does it mean? There are a million silly articles and think-pieces that unwittingly engage with it at the most charitable level: the student is showing off how he used ChatGPT to cheat on his essays, complete his final project, whatever, in order to graduate. Cheating on examinations is not particularly interesting or new. “Perhaps,” these pieces seem to chide in a stern parental voice, “the schools need to really crack down on AI because it makes cheating so much easier.” This is a cozy and noble sentiment that conflates a difference in kind with a difference in degrees. I do not think anyone over the age of 23, even if you are a teacher, graduate student, or professor, understands the extent to which AI usage affects every appendage of the university system.

The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at “elite” universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training.

I did not really notice the sing-songy cadence in the voice of one of my professors until my friend pointed it out: “Do you think he’s writing his lectures with Chat?” I am a tired and lazy student. The senior slump has started a quarter too early for me. “Who cares,” I thought.

Clinically, I wonder if this marks the transition to the metastatic phase. When I arrived at UChicago, LLMs seemed like nothing more than a benign tumor. I remember that a fraternity’s ill-concoted plot to use AI on an asynchronous midterm ended with most of them getting 70s. And I remember my logic professor laughing at the poorly reasoned answers to homework questions that ChatGPT would give. I don’t think she was laughing two years later when I was TAing the class and we observed a fairly distinct gap of about 40 percentage points between the take-home test and the one administered in-person.

The transition to Stage I, an aggregation of harmful tumorous cells, was not particularly alarming at UChicago because it was localized in an area already treated as a bit of an academic joke: the business economics specialization, a recently created moneymaker bemoaned by the traditional UChicago student as a portal for frat types and generic ‘elite human capital’ types, viewed even by most participants (mostly double-majors; myself included) as a bit of a beach vacation, a cool relaxing respite from the rigor of the rest of UChicago.

In the typical “bizcon” class, a student must complete six or seven lazily graded problem sets and take a midterm and final exam. Professors always release one or more sample exams before the test date. There is almost no math above the simplest algebra, no thinking beyond the rote repetition of problems and concepts covered on the lecture slides. Some of the required classes must be taken at the business school, where the professors always marvel at our blank stares and how few questions we have compared to the MBA students. To get an acceptable grade, there is rarely any need to do anything besides reviewing the sample exams and problem sets come test time, and there is certainly no pressing requirement to attend class or actually complete these problem sets yourself. In short, bizcon classes are the perfect primary site for cancerous growth.

The growth soon spread to the standard economics department. Last year, a friend of mine took Statistics 244, a popular econ elective, and reported the following scene inside the exam room:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“But people literally Chatted the whole exam
Teacher sat in the front of the class and didn’t gaf”

During the exam, students were pulling out phones and taking photographs of the test to submit to LLMs before copying down machine-written responses into their blue books.

I was disturbed but not surprised when I began to see intrusions into the humanities. Typically, each fraternity deals with one or two plagiarism cases a year in the mandatory humanities courses, but after sophomore year and the release of GPT 5, the cases (allegedly) went down and the grades went up.

Parallel growth marked the next stage. I was asleep in my Cairo hotel bed, studying abroad, when Sidechat, UChicago’s anonymous social media platform, made a tremendous discovery: The Maroon, our school newspaper, had published two articles completely written by AI. This had gone unnoticed for a few months before the only UChicago student with free time on his hands decided to see what sort of groundbreaking coverage of Chicago-area sports The Maroon might have and was certainly dejected to realize that instead of being furnished insider scoops on the Bulls’ roster moves, he was stuck reading sentences like: “Chicago’s perfect start isn’t a fluke; it’s the product of cohesion,” and “And through it all, there’s Giddey — the calm in the chaos, dictating the tempo and keeping the team grounded in the momentum.”

It should have been clear then that AI use was not simply a matter of academic misconduct. It could not be dealt with solely through reforming the baffling university disciplinary system, which is consistently content to grab twenty or so kids a year and suspend them for a year or two for cheating on an assignment or exam.

In the months since The Maroon case first aroused my suspicions, I’ve noticed a raft of student publications publishing partially or fully AI-generated pieces. There is a rather infamous new campus “journal” advertised with bombastic posters on every cork board that, if you bothered to scan their QR codes or navigate to their Instagram, you’d realize is a sort of unintentional Moltbook. Every piece is written with what appears to be no human effort whatsoever and is met with a corresponding lack of engagement from actual people.

And so perfect parallel constructions fill the lecture halls, the take-home tests, the school newspapers, and perhaps even the idiom of student chatter. Given all of the decay I’d seen over the past couple of years, my realization that even professors had begun to succumb to the digital disease was tinged with the relief of a terminal patient that the fight was finally over.

But I am starting to fear that this cancer has more grandiose ambitions than the death of its host.

In April, The University of Chicago announced that “Rika Mansueto, AB’91, and Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80,” had made a $50 million gift “to advance UChicago research and support faculty in AI.” According to the university, aside from funding AI research projects, the money will “[support] a dozen projects that promote a wide range of pedagogical innovation, seeking to expand and leverage machine learning and AI in the classroom” — the final clause of the sentence is remarkably out of tune with the rest “— or to deliberately limit the use of AI.” This addition is too jarring to be ignored but too offhanded to be treated seriously: Here is a suspicious island in this placid sea of buzzwords and well-worn phrases.

“AI in the classroom!” screech the other top universities:

• “At Harvard we are exploring how GAI tools can open up new ways of teaching and learning.”

• “Over the next five years, Yale will commit more than $150 million to support faculty, students, and staff as they engage with AI.”

• And Columbia’s “Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI site features ways to leverage AI for teaching, course design, and learning activities.”

Everyone knows about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis — the “zombie ant-fungus” made infamous in those Natural Geographic videos we watched in middle school. I believe I am watching the spontaneous generation of something similar. Recently, I sat next to someone in class for 10 weeks and watched, baffled, as they slowly began to turn all facets of their life over to an LLM. First, it was their homework. They used Chat to generate answers to dry problem sets while ignoring whatever was being taught up on the board. Then it was their emails. Extension asks à la Claude became coffee chat requests became “write me a nice thank you note to send my professor,” before spilling over onto fragmentary text messages, gym routines, summaries of books read for pleasure, and perhaps even a long message to send a girl. I was astonished then, but it is not hard to understand how this sort of thing happens.

I recently reread a prophetic Scott Alexander fantasy story from 2012 known as “The Whispering Earring.” This earring is a very curious and familiar artifact:

“...when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form ‘Better for you if you…’ The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own…

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring’s commands momentous on the level of ‘Become a soldier.’ No more are they even simple on the level of ‘Have bread for breakfast.’ Now they are more like ‘Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way’ or ‘Articulate the letter p.’ The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.”

In an increasingly large number of spheres, there are tremendous object-level “benefits” to using artificial intelligence, not least in the cutthroat world of elite universities where students are asked to balance a 4.0, a not-insubstantial number of extracurriculars, a rich social life capable of absorbing the stress of the prior asks, and a number of biological constraints involving sleep and nutrition, as well as caffeine, nicotine, and adderall intake.

In this world, the more you offload the areas you cannot cultivate sufficient care for, the better you will perform. So the best universities are not teaching students to be wise, to be a banker or consultant, to be an “indoctrinated” leftist academic, or to be a rich elitist prick. The best universities preach the efficiency, convenience, and countless other benefits of chaining one’s intellect to a very charming machine.

Maybe I’m describing college in overly resplendent words, for the modern university is a schizophrenic institution. It is as often as filthy, pointless, and degradable as it is alluring and edifying. Purists and idealistic crusaders (UChicago’s very own mad president Robert Hutchins, for example) are often driven insane by it, while industrialists and sell-outs are generally thwarted or slowed by its atavistic structures. Whatever your conception of the modern university, whether grand or grim, understanding the current landscape of campus-wide AI use, much less its intensification, should destroy it.

The glossy and ever-increasing university announcements about AI centers, donations, and initiatives feel like 1980s Pravda articles. It would not be right, in my view, to say that there is a disconnect between the story that schools are telling to alumni, donors, and themselves and the story on the ground. There is an impassable chasm.

At Princeton, for instance, where the administration “[encourages] faculty to experiment with generative AI (GAI) tools,” in the classroom and holds symposiums on “teaching AI literacy,” cheating cases nearly doubled from 63 reported cases during the 2023-2024 year to 119 in 2024-2025 — the yearly disciplinary report noting that “there was a significant increase in the use of generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) in the cases adjudicated this past year.” I’m certain this trend holds true — in practice, if not the collected data — at every single school that has trumpeted initiatives to use AI in the classroom.

Every anecdote I hear about AI use shows that there is no “integration” happening, there is simply substitution: for learning, teaching, and conversing. These are the bare activities required to enact whatever concept of the university you would like, whether it tends towards monastery or marketplace.

Now it’s true that I am being something of a sophist. You might shake your head.

“Owen, you can tell as many of these lurid stories as you like; you can conjure up this picture of AI use as a creeping cancer, or an octopus from a nineteenth-century political cartoon, but so what? You’ve jumped down from the world of concepts and ideas to fleshy anecdotes, but don’t think that we’ll let you get back up there so easily: right now, AI integration in colleges has been a grim farce, great, but that means what exactly? That doesn’t mean it can’t be successful; you haven’t shown us that there is any theoretical incompatibility between AI use and education. We agree — schools need to do better — now let us tell you about our Edutech start-up…”

I think the practical hurdles are so great and the benefits of integration — at least in ‘core’ or humanities classes at elite universities — are so low, that this is an unacceptable position.

We can only understand the administrative apathy on widespread AI use at these elite schools as part of the modern university’s inability to make anything beyond pragmatic demands on students. These schools can barely grade students with any sort of rigor, so it’s no wonder UChicago (and its ilk) can only muster up the nerve to officially punish a handful of students each year. The demands students put on themselves — for a 4.0 or a prestigious club membership — do not stem from the authority of the university but from the behavior of their peers, the pressure from their parents, and the nebulous intrusion of the job market the second they step foot on campus. Perhaps Deep Springs can shield students from these burdens and fully impose their own humanist ideals, but a T10 cannot, so it’s laughable to complain too fervently about how they won’t.

If these schools embraced “AI integration in the classroom,” there are piecemeal reforms these schools could make to stem the worst excesses of widespread AI use — paradoxically, lessening the severity of punishments given for cheating would do much to stem the most flagrant AI use — but these measures would do little to stave off what some would call a “transformation,” others a “zombification,” into a very different sort of institution. Punishing more students will not address why students voluntarily hand over their student newspaper articles, workout routine, or dating life to a computer, even if it safeguards the classroom for a little while longer.

And for what imagined benefit are we then risking the final remnants of this old, beautiful, and crumbling project? What could “the integration of AI in the classroom” concretely mean at what are supposedly the most elite and well-funded universities in the country?

The case I’ve heard for “AI in the classroom” runs as follows (and are sinisterly similar to those school district-wide initiatives involving iPads and Chromebooks which lobotomized or traumatized an entire generation): AI will “democratize” education by giving all students access to the same resources.

But this framework, when applied to such elite schools as are advocating its adoption, is a contradiction in terms. If the best use of AI is “cheapening” education (removing work from professors by generating essay feedback, examinations, course material, etc.) — in sum automating and standardizing “teaching” — why would it make any sense for the “best” schools, which claim to spare no expense on education, to turn to it? It’s a bit like if haute cuisine restaurants decided to replace their entrees with Soylent because it was “new and innovative.”

Goethe once noted, “A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.” Teaching is a relationship between humans — perhaps mediated across time and space by tools or instruments but a relationship nevertheless. And lest we be misled by the names of things, anyone who has ever spent any time “learning” understands that it is more akin to Platonic recollection or the exercise of an Aquinian intellect than fitting patterns to some vast set of unapprehended data.

The best teachers — those who can stimulate students like Goethe’s romantic educator or Socrates in Meno — are not always Robin Williams imitations, but they are eccentric, sometimes malicious, and occasionally downright insane. Already, the standardization of academia and teaching over the last 50 years has decimated this type. The best and worst professors at any given college are usually the aged fossils who arrived before grad-school and a tenure-track position became a narrow gate and student evaluations became gospel; no one can deny that the unthinking application of metrics and checkboxes funnels teaching standards toward mediocrity.1 Introducing AI into the classroom as a teacher or even the producer of teaching material will drive this unique but ideal type to extinction.

Now of course, it is possible to imagine AI bots like Claude being better teachers than the best humans in the same way it is perhaps possible to imagine them as better novelists or filmmakers than we are, but if this is really the fate we are consigned to, I suspect that the truly optimized and widespread use of AI to teach students a book-centered education — the tendrils of which are already deeply embedded within every part of whatever remains of academic life today — will likely choke out any leftover semblance of their sentimental education. In such a world, there might never be adults, nay, even human beings, again. There is something rather dystopian in such a sterilized conception of education.

And regardless of the hypothetical benefits, integrating AI tools and material into the classroom means homogenization and centralization. Already today, the top schools are more interchangeable (some students now decide where they will attend college by simply picking the highest-ranking school on the US News Best National Universities list they get into) and more intertwined with the federal government than at any point in the last century. Tying education to a capital-intensive and (likely soon to be) tightly regulated technology is one more step toward a different, frightening future. A world in which independent educational institutions are neutered and transformed by their reliance on a central authority into factories designed to train students according to the “needs of society” is not a new prospect — it has been the persistent dream of Fabians, technocrats, and engineers — but to me, at least, it is a terrifying one.

So what is to be done? Some would say, even considering the harms I’ve just outlined, nothing. “Let the schools integrate AI as much as they want…” There is an extreme idealist view of education that might see the threat of AI as good precisely because it could transform those kids — the former connoisseurs of SparkNotes and Mathway, the ones snickering in lectures and inking formulas onto their palms before exams before the rise of generative AI — into zombies lurching and stumbling their way into the “permanent underclass” (as the tech bros say), leaving the elect few free to enjoy the benefits of a humanist education without all the noise and din. Under this framework, there is little to do but wait: the university system will soon fall apart, and then something new can be built from its ashes. There is little good in the university today: it is a brand, a hollowed-out signifier that has long since lost its referent. Its demise, then, would do nothing more than deliver us from our confusion when we unconsciously substitute their immense worth a hundred years ago for their value today.

In this vision of the future, shared with the educational extremist by every stripe of anti-humanist, terms like “university” and “college” may persist as empty names like “Senator” or “Caesar” did when Rome fell. It is impossibly sad to imagine this world, bereft of these concepts except in a slowly degrading material culture. Unseen beauties will be lost: millions of volumes once rebound, carefully catalogued, shelved, and preserved with monastic care sold for pennies; a few collections preserved for curiosity’s sake or drifting into the hands of rich nostalgic collectors. The glory of those wonderful doctoral genealogies — graduate students who can trace their lineage back to Leibniz or Lessing — cut short forever. The buildings, of course, will remain, to be observed and treated respectfully — like old cathedrals, mainline Protestant churches, and most of the European continent.

I am not such an idealist. I would be happy to make concessions and cut deals to save the universities at the expense of the community of “true learners” currently stifled in rather unpropitious conditions. For one, I do not believe in an educational Eden. In 1936, Robert Hutchins lamented that:

“This is the position of the higher learning in America. The universities are dependent on the people. The people love money and think that education is a way of getting it. They think too that democracy means that every child should be permitted to acquire the educational insignia that will be helpful in making money. They do not believe in the cultivation of the intellect for its own sake.”

Much has happened since then to ensure that little has changed. The university system has held itself in a remarkable equipoise between professionalization and intellectualism. I am content with this — the struggle is a microcosm of what every person faces in life. To pretend like we can banish it from education is to expect heaven on Earth. An intensification of generative AI use on college campuses would destroy this equilibrium not by, as some might suppose, necessarily strengthening the preprofessional position, but by diminishing learning — whether that is being taught how to use zero-coupons to make synthetic loans or examining the presentation of chivalry in Chaucer.

If schools took a harder line on AI — limiting pedagogical integration and cracking down on cheating — it would not solve any of the problems that stem from the tension (between training a mind for the workforce and the good life) that every real university grapples with. But it would ensure that these problems do not suddenly become by fiat irrelevant as students’ minds crumble — and the schools with them.

It is true that one particular form of the university — the post-WWII research university — is dead, its death rattles readily apparent. It is too early to say, however, exactly what will wear its skin. Let us hope that it is not this preview of an undead university, cancer-ridden, crawling about without purpose, discipline, or originality. The Western intellectual tradition has survived several botched suicide attempts. I wonder if our descendants will look back at our current treatment of higher education as one more disfiguring try.

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

RUFUS So where does your anger come from?

OWEN The anger comes from the fact that if Chicago is very, very intellectual, then that’s still not a good baseline. And it’s going downhill. It’s largely because of the way AI is used with the Core [Curriculum at Chicago]. A frat brother telling me that he “Chatted” every single essay he wrote for the Core? That’s a direct attack. The school has also introduced easier Core classes, like a social studies class where you just read research papers. The foundation is eroding, and even without AI, it would be eroding. The Core got smaller in 2001-2002, and it’s going to keep shrinking. AI is this rot that is accelerating this process. There is an image of old Chicago versus new Chicago — that it was once this quirky, weird humanities place that existed until 2020, and since then, it’s been classes full of investment banking, finance people.

RUFUS Then they started over-indexing prepsters…

OWEN I am sort of in favor of this. If old UChicago is an academic sandcastle, then letting in these people is like pouring a river on it that sweeps up some of the sediment with the water. The sandcastle is going away, but it means exposing more of the world to the Chicago ethos. Before, it was sequestered. This is not a bad trade-off. The problem is that, with AI, the river becomes a more existential threat.

Here’s a crazy AI thing. Someone I know used ChatGPT on purpose to produce UChicago admission essay prompts and submitted them to the admissions office. One of his AI-generated prompts won their contest, and it was going to be featured as one of the actual application questions until the admin found out because he posted about it on LinkedIn, which is ridiculous and maybe emblematic of something.

*In our conversation, we discuss why we should punish students more for cheating, dusty intellectualism, UChicago mythos, stern hands, 1920s Paris, Wikipedia, scenesters, Scott Alexander, internet criticism, modernism, LessWrong, how not to produce great art, the Bridgewater interview process, Saint-John Perse, removing oneself from literary endeavors, and the impossibility of grad school.

In short, we cover everything of any significance.*

Read the Postscript

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THE NEW CRITIC
—
POSTSCRIPT

*Israeli Jews have the army. American Jews have summer camp.

Last Saturday, April 25, The New Critic published my essay “Notes on Camp.” In it, I wrote about my friends Milo and Aitan, comrades of mine for many years, who deemed my view of the socialist Zionist summer camp we attended too jaded. Milo and Aitan stuck around Tavor longer than I:

“I could have delayed leaving camp. Most of my friends now attend Tavor as counselors who create the kesem (magic) of camp for a new generation. My old camp pal Milo is dating someone he met at Tavor. Their life is like an endless summer camp; as I sat beside them and another Tavor friend in Chicago’s Millennium Park three weeks ago while listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it was as if no time had passed at all. But time had passed — after 12th grade, I stopped attending camp altogether, and while I maintained my friendships with Milo, Eli, and Aitan, I slipped away from the community I once had with everyone else…

And what is Aitan doing with his first year after college — his first real time unbounded from the expectations of suburban American Jewish life? He is doing protective presence in the West Bank, working as a human shield…

The promise of Camp Tavor was the promise of pure love for a community of peers and for Israel. This world is too impure for such a thing. To leave that idyll was to open a wound incapable of being healed.”

Read Elan's essay

Writing about Tavor was like sending a little piece of my soul out into the world, and so Sunday evening, seated on Dartmouth’s wide open space — aptly called “The Green” — I called my old camp pals to reminisce. We spoke about the state of socialist Zionism in America today, the questions of my essay, and, of course, camp romance.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

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MILO I just want to say, Elan, that in your piece, the transition you portray, from Tavor being a deeply Zionist camp to something else, is incorrect.

I remember reading your piece and thinking that your view on the shifting Israel-related stuff was very different from mine. It could be because I stuck around camp longer than you did, but I was also ready to see Jewish day school as one part of my life and camp as another — and that, together, they made a more complete picture of the conflict. I got a very Israeli, much more Zionist perspective at my day school, and then at camp I got a nuanced view of the occupation. I don’t think we laid the anti-Zionism on too thick. We are more anti-war.

AITAN Milo, I think you’re right. We didn’t lay on too much anti-Zionism. It was about sticking to anti-war ideas. But I don’t think we’ve come out of this moment with a clear idea of how to move forward, either. We’ve been able to hold our ground, but now that it’s been some time since October 7th, Tavor needs a real direction. And I’m not sure we have one — or a sustainable one, at least.

ELAN When you think about the most positive parts of camp, what comes to mind?

MILO My most positive memories are the moments where collective decision-making actually works, and we actually do something at least a little bit interesting. The best example I can give is the whole “This Land Is Your Land” situation.

ELAN Tell that story. I mention the removal of “This Land Is Your Land” in the essay but only briefly. I had already left camp by the time you tried to bring it back.

MILO “This Land Is Your Land” was a song we used to sing to bring in the Sabbath. It eventually got phased out due to concerns about disrespect toward indigenous peoples, this idea of claiming land as anyone’s — “this land is your land, this land is my land” — coming from white people, or at least non-indigenous people. I think that’s a huge misinterpretation of the song.

The song is really anti-private property. It’s actually a beautiful representation of communal beliefs. So, as counselors, Aitan and I brought the song to Asefa Klalit — a weekly decision-making gathering, where all the staff members come together, so that decisions reflect everyone’s opinions and are not just authoritarian — and said we had stopped singing it due to a misinterpretation but that it was worth bringing back. We talked for a long time about how it could be done and how to include others in the process. We decided that the campers should have a role in the decision. And in the end, the kids decided not to bring the song back.

ELAN Why?

AITAN The generational gap was really interesting. When the song was originally taken away, we were the campers who’d had enough time to be attached to the tradition, so we were genuinely upset when it was removed. But the kids who wanted to keep it gone were the ones who had been the youngest at camp when it had been taken away.

We also made a mistake in how we framed the decision. We gave the campers an article about the history of the song, and in that article, an indigenous person had refused to sing it. The kids skimmed the article, found that passage, and said, “This is why we shouldn’t sing it.” The rest of the article was actually fairly critical of that position and tried to analyze the real history of the song.

ELAN And Milo, that’s your example of a positive memory at camp?

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THE NEW CRITIC

Elan Kluger is a 22-year-old writer and founding editor of The New Critic from Michigan. He studied Intellectual History at Dartmouth College.

Two months ago, unsatisfied by the water pressure of my dorm floor’s shower, I visited a different one, two floors down. The showerhead emanated the strange, repulsive smell of rust. I knew of only one other place with that smell…the showers at Camp Tavor, the Jewish summer camp in Three Rivers, Michigan I attended for seven summers.

The smell permeates the bathroom closest to the living area for the madatz (those going into 12th grade), and it was the hangout spot for me and the closest friends I have ever made: Milo, Eli, and Aitan. In order to evade a widely hated member of our age group, we would linger in the shower for hours, talking and joking around. On Fridays, after a lengthy afternoon shower, we would dress in nice clothes and walk down to the kikar (our grassy meeting area) for restful activities — prayer, if one was so inclined, or music. Then we would gather around the toren (flagpole), singing “HaTikvah” and “This Land is Your Land,” before heading up Shabbat Hill for more singing, this time a Chaim Nachman Bialik poem.

We would embrace before holding hands, walking back down Shabbat Hill to eat a delicious dinner, normally brisket. (Eli and I savored the holy sandwich designed by the mythic counselor Elliot. It consisted of challah, brisket, and barbecue sauce.) Then we would sing what remains to me some of the most beautiful music ever written, David Broza’s “Mitachat LaShamayim” — “Banu l’chaan, mitachat lashamayim, shnayim, cmo, zoog enayim” (we’ve come here, under the heavens, two of us, like a pair of eyes).

Most importantly, we sang “Shir L’Shalom” (“Song for Peace”):

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“Let the sun rise, light up the morning,
The purest of prayers will not bring us back.
He whose candle was snuffed out and was buried in the dust,
Bitter crying won’t wake him up and won’t bring him back.
Nobody will bring us back from a dead and darkened pit —
Here, neither the victory cheer nor songs of praise will help.
So just sing a song for peace, don’t whisper a prayer,
Just sing a song for peace in a loud shout.” 

Yitzhak Rabin, former prime minister of Israel, was shot and killed shortly after singing “Shir L’Shalom” at a rally in 1995. His bloodstained lyrics are a metaphor for the death of Israel’s peace movement. With his assassination, the dream of a peaceful Israel was, at least to our American eyes at Tavor, delayed — delayed perhaps forever.

After singing “Shir L’Shalom,” we had Rikuddei Am (folk dancing), where even I, uncoordinated and lanky, would move and shake to Israeli music. Depending on the summer, I had my eye on a different girl, whom I would try to approach and talk to. Friday night, out of sight of the madrichim (counselors), was our chance to sneak about and finally earn that first kiss. For those not prowling in hopes of encountering the early fruits of youth, it was a time to bask in the collective effervescence of Tavor’s enchantment. The summer had the feeling of endlessness. When I think of joy, I think of those nights.

But I didn’t feel joy reminiscing about Tavor in my dorm shower. I felt mournful.

I could have delayed leaving camp. Most of my friends now attend Tavor as counselors who create the kesem (magic) of camp for a new generation. My old camp pal Milo is dating someone he met at Tavor. Their life is like an endless summer camp; as I sat beside them and another Tavor friend in Chicago’s Millennium Park three weeks ago while listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it was as if no time had passed at all. But time had passed — after 12th grade, I stopped attending camp altogether, and while I maintained my friendships with Milo, Eli, and Aitan, I slipped away from the community I once had with everyone else.

The founders of Tavor and the larger movement of Habonim Dror (of which Tavor is a part) were Zionist. The movement’s goal was, and is, to gather the Jewish youth of the world and train them for socialist life on the kibbutz in the land of Israel. That goal structures everything about camp. We use Hebrew words for the farm (chava), kitchen (mitbach), and camper (chanich) — all because we will speak Hebrew in the land of Israel. We keep a farm with animals because we will keep a farm with animals in the land of Israel. We bond intensely with those in our age group (kvutzah) because we will live with our kvutzah in the land of Israel. We pool our money (kupah) because we are socialists and because we will share our money in the land of Israel. We sing the Israeli national anthem, “HaTikvah,” at the flagpole (toren) each evening because that is our national anthem. We hold special days for education about Israel (Yom Yisrael), have madrichim (counselors) from Israel (shlichim), and talk endlessly about hagshama (the realization of our values — i.e. moving to Israel).

We sing “Goodbye America, goodbye assimilation/We’re going to Israel to build the Jewish nation!” We are awoken once a session in the middle of the night for Aliyah Bet, in which we reenact the famous illegal entrance of thousands of Jews from calamitous Europe into Mandatory Palestine during and after World War II. An older camper leads us to sneak past counselors perched on roofs with strong flashlights, which, if shone on us, would send us back to Cyprus (or in our version, the flagpole).

But I attended Tavor at a time of change. Around the midpoint of my years there, the presence of anti-Zionism became palpable within the entire camp. A member of my oldest sister’s age group petitioned to remove Zionism as a “pillar” (a founding tenet) at one of Habonim’s national meetings. Aliyah Bet was eliminated. We stopped flying the Israeli flag, and we stopped singing the Israeli national anthem. For a couple of years, none of our counselors were Israeli. Enterprising counselors began to rewrite posters: “Politically we’re socialists/Culturally we’re Jews/We’re on our way to Zion with the youth movement for you” became “...We’re on our way to Tavor with the youth movement for you.” But we were already at Tavor!

While the staff at Tavor is small enough that any particularly charismatic counselor could sway the entire staff with an anti-Zionist opinion, I suspect the causes of these changes really had to do with shifts in the American Jewish left. Counselors are almost entirely college students, and in college — at NYU, Macalester, and Brown — they almost all join the furthest-left groups they can find. (Tavor is a socialist camp, after all.) At this time — the late post-Trump, pre-Covid era — being a Zionist was considered fundamentally illiberal.

Netanyahu, as we saw him at that time, was neither a supporter of the West Bank settlement movement nor a peacenik. His undecidedness and prevarications were the undecidedness and prevarications of an entire country. He perfectly represented Israel’s contradictions: unwilling to create peace, but not looking for war. Netanyahu — at least before October 7th — was the figurehead of a country that could not decide on a future. But while the world waited, settlers expanded their presence in the West Bank. The international left and the domestic American left — even the domestic American Jewish left — grew impatient with Netanyahu’s ambivalence and turned against Israel. My counselors took heed, which in turn shaped the mood at Tavor. However, their broader project — to make Tavor anti-Zionist — was made difficult because preparation for aliyah was the entire telos of the camp.

As a camper, I defended Israel. In middle school, I had become a budding right-winger by rejecting the stifling, conformist progressivism of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I grew up. I started listening to right-wing podcasts, subscribed to National Review, and started debating my middle school teachers and peers. Back at camp, I was defending Israel from whom I saw as ultimately self-righteous, and self-righteously wrong, counselors.

These counselors had imported one of the most insufferable tendencies of 2010s progressivism: the war against gendered language. In this case, they tried to rewrite Hebrew, a language which they already judged the language of oppression. (A few years later, some counselors tried to start a Yiddish revival.) Gone — banned — were the gendered nouns of chanich (male camper) and chanicha (female camper). Every camper had to be called chanichol, a made-up, gender-neutral construction. Counselors, madrichim, which used the masculine plural, had to be called madrichimot, which added two plural endings, masculine and feminine, to the same word.

Gadfly that I was, I mocked these social justice warriors by pointing out their inability to change the most important words. Habonim (the builders) — the name of our movement — was in the masculine plural, I noted. We would have to be Habonimot to be truly inclusive.

Along with no longer flying the Israeli flag, we stopped flying the American flag and singing the American national anthem — to love the country of our birth was imperialist. This I was actually happy about. We continually failed to use the correct American flag-folding etiquette, so better not to fly it at all, I thought.

Overall, I was unhappy with the changes. But despite making a big deal of never returning to Tavor each year, I kept coming to camp every summer. How could I not? The people I loved were there. (It is not by accident that my first kiss, and first love, was someone I met at Tavor. Our first serious conversation revealed joint antagonism toward the counselors’ attempted changes to the Hebrew language.) I was even hired as a counselor in the summer going into college, despite my camp-wide reputation as a conservative.

I had good relations with most of my counselors, except for one: a nonbinary person who went by the enigmatic initials GK, which were said to stand for nothing. They pilloried me for screening Avi Nesher’s Image of Victory (a film produced half in Arabic and half in Hebrew about a kibbutz in 1948) for fellow counselors and for not dogmatically assenting to the revolutionary changes at Tavor. GK hadn’t even attended Tavor as a camper — they were only on staff as the partner of someone else, but that someone had gone home under mysterious circumstances, and the unbounded GK had decided to terrorize. They were, thankfully, the exception to the otherwise delightful staff. I think (or so I was told) that I was beloved by my campers. I still have a photo of myself carrying a very small middle schooler in a rucksack.

I waged a defense of Israel at camp during staff-wide debates. (Although I learned, in a moment of real betrayal, that one of my closest friends had, in the middle of the night, painted over a mural featuring the Israeli flag with a Shrek flag.) I tried to keep the hyperactive counselors from removing “This Land is Your Land” from the camp songbook (they said it was offensive to Native Americans). I got in fights with other counselors about their attempts to avoid work and observed how systems without incentives benefitted the laziest and most pathetic of staff members.

Instead of attending “Workshop” — the Habonim gap year in Israel that my father and one of my sisters attended — I went right to college. I was sick of these socialists; I was tired of defending Israel. I went to Dartmouth, where there was no socialism, little anti-Zionism, and even fewer Jews. One economics professor there had learned the following lesson from working on a kibbutz in Israel:

“On a kibbutz, there is no material incentive for effort and not much incentive of any kind. There are two kinds of people who have no problem with this: deadbeats and saints. When a group joined a kibbutz, the deadbeats and saints tended to stay while the others eventually left. I left. In retrospect, I should have known right away, from my first day, that something was wrong with utopia. On my arrival, I was struck by the fact that the pantry of the communal kitchen was locked.”

I, too, knew that something was wrong with utopia, because every year I spent at Tavor, I had grown more alienated. So my first summer of college I did not go back to Tavor. I studied abroad in Morocco instead, where I met Rufus and Tessa, future New Critic cofounders, and felt bolstered in my decision-making.

Debating Israel had exiled me from the garden: my style of politics, when I was in Habo, was decidedly contrarian. I knew what I stood against — shared money, anti-Zionism, the woke rewriting of history, laziness. But what I stood for was hazier; I loved my friends, I loved Israel, I loved hard work. College — Dartmouth, especially — meant fewer insufferable wokesters to oppose, but it also meant I had to decide what I really believed in, because I did not have serious people to oppose. Instead of leftists, all I found was apathy. I joined the infamous Dartmouth Review my sophomore year in order to feel something, albeit in a rather reactionary manner. I wrote some essays in which I offended both the left and the right, essays in which I believed both everything and nothing. I quit the paper after an editorial changeover.

I then joined up as a columnist for The Dartmouth, the student daily, where my penchant for the ironical became even more pronounced. (I also benefitted from a wide editorial berth, thanks to the enterprising editor-in-chief.) In my junior year, I wrote an op-ed demanding the end of collegiate academic journals, which I viewed as time-sinks. The fall of my senior year, I wrote to bright-eyed freshmen that if they thought Dartmouth was a place of learning, they should transfer. (In doing so, I also managed to offend a host of University of Chicago students.) I also wrote a winking praise of Dartmouth’s horde of bankers and consultants: “Dartmouth’s community of aspiring financiers and consultants deserve criticism inasmuch as we all do,” I wrote.

“What our financiers and consultants represent is Dartmouth’s revealed preference. Each one is likely the more honest person than any of their peers who choose different paths, because while the orthopedic surgeon may claim a love of surgery; the professor a desire to rewrite the narrative of American history; the lawyer a desire to understand America’s tax code — the financiers and consultants put it plainly: I want to be rich; I want a good job.

May God grant me the strength to be as honest as them.”

This is the writing of a man enjoying himself. I had some great laughs while writing that essay. But I believed every word of that paragraph and also none of it. One student titled her response to my piece “Kluger’s Cynicism is Misguided,” to the endless amusement of my friends. That student, proceeding with dime-store sincerity, wrote that praising money acquisition is actually bad — as if that were shocking information!

I had, and have, no respect at all for bankers and consultants, but I wasn’t exactly filled with admiration for those who avoided those paths, either — those who chose to eat, pray, and love like God demanded from them. That her response was idiotic did not mean that I hadn’t become a cynic — I had. Cynics are funnier anyway, I told myself, and I have always loved jokes.

My sophomore year, I had written about The Zone of Interest for The Dartmouth Review and was invited to be a guest commentator at Dartmouth’s screening of the film. After a packed audience of students, professors, and Hanover townspeople had spent two hours with that wrenching movie about the Holocaust, I, with a smirk, presented my review. I began:

“When one does not eat for a long time (I once went five days), one remembers all the wonderful meals he has spent a lifetime eating. The Zone of Interest has the same effect. I sat in the theater thinking about all the wonderful activities I have done in my life. By the time the movie ended, I had barely scratched the surface of my memory; everything I have ever done is more interesting than The Zone of Interest. It makes even the driest of academic lectures seem titillating. I had an infinite amount of memories to recall.

The Zone of Interest seems new and important to those who are not familiar with the entertainment staple of the past 2,000 years: the book. We follow the commandant of Auschwitz and his family as they show love for each other that masks the brutality around them. The movie is a childish derivative of Hannah Arendt’s classic work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The text, which I read in seventh grade (and I am not precocious, which thus says something about the intelligence of the average A24 fan), argues that, while Eichmann deserved execution, his actions constituted ‘banality’ because he was not an essentially evil man and instead did not question his actions.

This movie asks us to question the nature of our reality and realize which concentration camps we are willfully ignoring. This has the potential to be fascinating, but it is not. This movie is boring. I cannot say it otherwise. It reminds me of Ivy League classroom discussions: everything has been said, but not everyone has said it. What this movie does to the viewer constitutes the banality of evil.”

The audience was rather too stunned to laugh. But after they got over their initial shock, they began to ask combative questions. Was I trying to make light of the Holocaust? Did I know Arendt had gotten Eichmann wrong? The Hillel representative at the event made a note to the audience that I was Jewish, thus saving me from almost certain mauling. To this day, I walk with a slight fear of running into someone who was in the audience that day. I realize, in retrospect, that the screening marked the end of my time at The Dartmouth Review. I felt real shame about my presentation.

October 7th occurred around that time. It feels not accidental, in the context of this essay, that I was with camp friends when it happened. Nor does it feel accidental that our response was to eat edibles and watch Stop Making Sense. Returning to college, my solution was to lambast the extremists of the left — and there was never a shortage — and then make half-hearted gestures at joining the IDF.

But what became clear over the duration of the war was that there was no real aim. (My access to the Hebrew-language news revealed that the ruling right-wing government turned down hostage deals constantly; if one only read Commentary or Moment, such truths would be absent.) It was a war that, if I were Israeli, I would likely dodge. Why die for Bibi to continue his lies? But as I am an American, that is not my choice. My choice is my stance toward Israel. So what do I think?

Today, many former campers and counselors from Tavor boycott Israel, join pro-Palestine protests, and write jaded essays that all Jewish summer camp is a manipulation of the youthful libido in service of Israeli nationalism. Two years ago, dismissing these people was much easier. Why fight for ideals when it seems like so few people actually believe in anything at all?

But I am not a real cynic. I think of my father, who at my age was making aliyah. What would his idealism look like if he were me, today? It certainly wouldn’t be garin aliyah — with what garin, what gang of idealists? I think he would act like my friend Aitan — the man I consider my best friend and the most morally serious person I know. Aitan does not chant “from the river to the sea” and imagine the dissolution of Jewish life in Israel. (He is Israeli, after all, and loves his Israeli family, if nothing else.) He called me one night from Cornell’s Palestinian encampment, bothered by the lack of Jewish knowledge on display in the SJP leadership. But he is an idealist, like my father; Aitan believes in working toward peace.

And what is Aitan doing with his first year after college — his first real time unbounded from the expectations of suburban American Jewish life? He is doing protective presence in the West Bank, working as a human shield. He wants to stop Israeli military encroachment; he believes Jewish lives are equal to Palestinian lives. He wants to use the energy and idealism of youth for something positive. He rejects the brutishness of Israel, not out of a faux-diasporism, but out of hope for Israel’s future. I respect and admire and hope to emulate him in some way. But what now, for me?

Perhaps writing and editing, moving people’s minds just a little further in the direction of honesty to oneself and to others, is enough for me. But in writing those words, I feel that they are unsatisfactory to the questions posed. I am not a cynic but nonetheless find comfort in the disinterested pose it provides. I distrust most activists. They rarely seem to want to face their own contradictions. How many supposed anti-nationalist humanists find energy in the surrogate nationalism of Palestine? If capitalism creates false consciousness, what makes their thoughts so lucid? But this is a pose I am incapable of holding for long.

The promise of Camp Tavor was the promise of pure love for a community of peers and for Israel. This world is too impure for such a thing. To leave that idyll was to open a wound incapable of being healed. But I will try my best to treat Tavor’s scar.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Ryan Merrifield is a 20-year-old undergraduate studying Econometrics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

*In the third installment of our series on UIUC nightlife, apparently a particular fascination of our young magazine, one of our Illini correspondents explores an alternative faction on the fringes of Urbana-Champaign.*

At the edge of campus and at the end of my known world, I found myself approaching a house located in the residential section of Urbana. My Urban Planning-major friend David, who had taken the liberty of bringing me here, told me we had reached “The Mirror.” I’ve learned that urban planners are apparently well-acquainted with the local counterculture — David is a native in these parts.

The Mirror, despite its mysterious, reflective name, is actually just an unremarkable home in a quiet neighborhood with a special twist: there is a large group of hippie-types who stand outside it. From across the street, the whole thing seems like some sort of Bohemian camp under a long, dark sky. Tonight, they have come to see ‘Terminus Victor’ perform. This is where these people have decided to spend their Saturday evening, and it’s where David and I have decided to spend our Saturday evening as well.

We showed up late. It’s just past eleven o’clock, and I can’t take my eyes off the entrance. There is a piece of furniture resembling a couch on the front porch occupied by a man smoking a cigarette. David and I speak to my vague acquaintance before heading around back to get inside. He tells me he is enjoying himself as he and David make wisecracks at each other.

Just inside sit two girls wearing smiles and manning a cashbox. They aren’t like bouncers at all. They are tender and lazy and give off the impression that there’s nowhere they would rather be. Instead of stoically scanning your ID card and waving you through, they make small talk and tell you, “Have fun.” You pay $8, with either the coin of the realm or with Venmo. I remember my first time coming to one of these as a naive freshman — I thought I was in a dream. The whole thing was so radically different from the school’s bar scene, which I was, and still am, afraid of and intrigued by.

My mother has told me many times that her four years at university were the best four years of her life and that they would likely be the best four years of mine. This is a nugget of wisdom she likes to repeat maybe once a year or so. My mother went to Illinois State, which is where she met my father. She pretended to enjoy country music, while he chewed tobacco and didn’t have to pretend to enjoy country music. My parents and their friends played darts, went to class, and lived off frozen pizza. At night, they drank beer out of plastic red solo cups and went to house parties they discovered through a flyer that was posted by the hosts earlier the same morning. It’s my understanding that these gatherings, largely impromptu and spontaneous, served to fill a simple need, one that still exists today: get drunk and stupid.

My father’s country idol, Johnny Cash, is now dead. He died in September of 2003, just four days before my sisters were born. Most of the other mythical country and rock ‘n’ roll heroes are on their way out, if they’re not dead already. When I play darts, I tend to leave small holes in the wall instead of the dartboard. And at many campus parties now, hard seltzer shows up where beer once did.

What hasn’t changed is that college kids drink — a lot. The University of Urbana-Champaign is no exception — there’s no shortage of what you could call street life — people flock every single day of the week to one of the big three campustown bars. It’s an obscene and thrilling experience to be inside one of these sweaty, packed locales at 11:00 p.m. CST on a Tuesday evening. These campus bars are dominated by a mysterious Greek-run hierarchy that I find hard not to associate with the mystique of Freemasonry; the whole operation is regarded as essentially Greek-run, but unaffiliated crowds show up unabated day after day regardless. I myself have waited in an hour-long line only to be told I must pay an absurd $30 cover or go home. Cover is their bread and butter, it’s their money printing machine that never gets turned off. Make no mistake: this is their Greek playground, everyone else is just visiting.

I can’t help but reflexively compare my parents’ stories to my own university experience, where a good 80% of my alcohol consumption comes from drinking before and during a visit to one of these campus bars. I’m aware of how much of a scam it is, but I show up anyway, and so do the rest of my peers. The remaining fifth of my boozing comes from a source that reminds me of what must be the spiritual cousin of the parties my parents describe: the House Show, of which The Mirror is a part. We don’t live in the ’90s anymore, but people will always need a place to drink. The song remains the same: where there is demand, there is supply.

UIUC’s House Show scene is a circuit of musical venues scattered in Urbana’s outskirts. Unlike the bars, which even open for morning drinking on Saturdays, DIY venues like The Mirror usually only hold events on Friday and Saturday nights. These venues aren’t unique in fulfilling the previously mentioned Demand-to-Get-Drunk that my parent’s generation so lauded, but it certainly cultivates a unique crowd. Much less sectarian and more decentralized than their bar counterparts, the House scene is more flexible with its unspoken codes. The people who live in the venue and manage the show can often be found blending in with the crowd. Drinks are sold inexpensively at $2 a can (I’ve never tried to establish the liquor license logistics of these operations). It’s easy to let myself feel justified pouring dollars into what I like telling myself is some sort of ill-defined and abstract ‘movement’ or ‘culture,’ contrasted with the cash-cow machine that the major UIUC watering hole establishments are proudly disguised as. I get a very similar kind of crowd-induced buzz from The Mirror as I do from the mainline Green Street bars, but the similarities end somewhere around being drunk and loud in a tight crowd.

A typical House Show consists of bands (or DJs) who play a set for maybe an hour or two before the next performer comes on and does their business. Tonight it’s ‘the florist.’ and next week it could be ‘OR D0ES IT EXPLODE’ or ‘Brain Sex.’ There is a wide variation in genre: bands range from thrashing power-chord Nirvanish angst to ethereal and hypnotic sounds reminiscent of something you would hear off one of the more experimental Velvet Underground albums.

Champaign-Urbana has local music history in spades. Most notably, the city was a central hub of the burgeoning indie pop/rock scene during the ’80s and ’90s. American Football, among the most prominent of the Midwest emo pioneers, formed in Urbana. The inconspicuous house used for their debut album cover is only a stone’s throw from campus; it is regarded as a sort of Mecca for the pilgrims that come to see it. Going back even further, the classic rock group REO Speedwagon was formed by a group of UIUC students in a dorm basement in the ’60s, where they started off playing covers of The Beatles and The Doors. Before they became a commercial success REO used to perform at the campus bars, back when the bars still had live music. The cycle continues at House Shows today — covers (hits hailing from Black Sabbath, The Police, Radiohead, and The Cranberries) and original tunes — oftentimes it’s a mix of both.

Tonight at The Mirror, it seems to be all originals, which certainly makes for a challenging sing-along. But I am undeterred and try anyway. No two groups performing are the same, and not all bands possess the same level of technical-artistic prowess, but it’s hard not to appreciate the talent and drive of live music whenever you’ve got the opportunity to hear it. Those who have already performed join the ranks of the audience, stage-sweat still drying. It never ceases to amaze me that these are regular people my age who are capable of creating and performing their craft at a high level. It’s easy to idolize a musician that you’re fond of, but it’s bizarre to actually talk to one in a casual setting and realize that they’re not as extraordinary or mythical as they seem on stage.

Many people at The Mirror have dyed hair, and even more have piercings in their tongues, eyebrows, and noses. The fashion is a melting pot from the past five decades; it’s the opposite of what is typically considered a going-out uniform. I notice the room has become tremendously hot, and we are sweating buckets. It is loud and crowded and I am filled with the urge to nod my head along with the groove of the bass guitar, if only because that’s what everyone else is doing — I like to imagine myself as being similar to the others in this crowd, for reasons real or imagined. The dregs of the late-night crowd is an enormous and unintelligible pit of sound and smell that overwhelm my nervous system. The people here seem to move like fiends, never resting, always standing, and rotating, and jumping, and twisting. In this respect, the venue isn’t so different from your typical bar. No one stays in one place for too long, and everyone is permanently sweaty.

In between sets, we spill outside and find ourselves under the Milky Way; the backyard proves to be a distinct but just as fearsome beast. Smoke fills the air; people sitting in circles pass around tobacco or marijuana. In warmer months, venues like this often have a fire burning out back, and it makes the crowd seem much smaller than it really is.

The outdoor air feels remarkable after being trapped inside for so long. Large groups of people congregate around the yard and at the back door, exchanging pleasantries, jokes, vapes. David and I apply the same rule as inside: find someone who looks interesting, and ask them about their LinkedIn. This is a bit that stopped being funny a long time ago, but I still deploy it compulsively — like a nervous tic that kicks in when I’m on autopilot. If the venue gets too popular and the hour is late, there’s a good chance there will be a line to get back into the house proper (this is called “capacity,” and we’ve all faced its slings and arrows at some point or another).

We run into a middle-aged man with enormous brown, gleaming eyes wearing a pinstripe suit. He is the only one of his kind here, and he does not bother with appearances. He is sitting on a folding chair. I interview the pinstripe man and several others in the interest of honest, boots-on-the-ground journalism, asking about life stories, the personal appeal of a House Show, and what it has that the bar scene lacks. The suited man begins emitting personal information at a great rate; he is a Chicagoland performer who has been in the game for a while. He is here merely because this is where opportunity/fate has brought him this evening. I ask about his musical influences: he lists off a slew of names I don’t recognize, and I vigorously nod my head in approval, a shallow attempt to disguise my bewilderment. Suddenly, I become paranoid that he has (not incorrectly) pegged me for a drunken buffoon, and I stop talking to him prematurely.

After we meander away, David is recognized by a young man and his lady friend (recall my earlier remark about urban planners always seeming to know someone). The couple tell me they are from my neighborhood back home, and they list off the names of middle school classmates and gym coaches. We discuss the local grocery store and exchange opinions on our various grade school teachers. I search my memory for their faces and recognize neither; it’s a slightly off-putting and surreal experience. I interview them in the same fashion as the pinstripe man, asking questions about the venue’s history and what brought them here. I will never listen to these pseudo-interview voice memos in my life. Even hearing a brief sample makes me wince. I am drunk and stupid and laugh in between everything I say. I like to think they get a kick out of me if nothing else, and I’m curious to find out if I’ll ever see these two again. This is a large part of the appeal: you’ve got the same chance of meeting an enormous eccentric man wearing a King Julien-esque palm frond crown at one of these events as you do some pretentious artsy type who thinks he’s got everybody figured out, and you’ll get kicks from both. Chance encounters are the spice of life.

We rotate back toward the entrance, where I get the chance to ‘interview’ Rito, a drummer for one of the bands whose set we missed. Rito also functions as a door guy, and he shows me his door guy playlist. Right now, “Crosstown Traffic” by Jimi Hendrix can be heard from a small speaker, mixing with the sounds of the shoegaze band and the chatter of the crowd inside. Unlike the musical inspirations of the pinstripe man, Hendrix is a name I admire, and I make sure Rito knows I have his likeness framed on my wall. We briefly discuss the great bygone bluesmen of the ’70s, and Rito gives me his two cents on the House Show scene, which will not be relayed here because I cannot remember what he said, and I refuse to listen to the voice memo. I have no doubt his insider information was insightful and cool. Rito is the type of person that makes these adventures worthwhile. He’s easygoing and makes me feel listened to; he smiles at whatever I say. He has what could be called “an engaging manner,” or a talent for putting you at ease. Someone you could feel good about voting for in an election.

Whatever you want to call it — a movement, a pseudo-movement, a bunch of bums/freaks, whatever — it must be discussed that the ‘house’ element of The Mirror house creates a bathroom situation that is much, much worse than that found in the bar scene. Lines often stretch in excess of a dozen waiting people and become microcommunities within themselves. While waiting for the bathroom, I become acquainted with the people in front of and behind me. Lines are everywhere in life — The Mirror is not immune. Given this, it’s not uncommon to just take care of business outside (a penis-wielding man considers himself blessed under these circumstances). As a working-class neighbor of The Mirror, this would trouble me, but as a student, I’m able to recognize and almost appreciate the strong correlation between drink and urine. If you’re letting the good times roll, you constantly need to pee — finding a secluded patch of ground to urinate on fits in nicely with the whole DIY aesthetic of the venue. This just simply isn’t the sort of behavior that would fly at a bar.

If you do end up making it inside The Mirror’s bathroom, it is not unlike any other crowded establishment: inscriptions and prophecies are carved into the bathroom walls. Sometimes it’s a stupid one-liner, and sometimes it’s a name, and sometimes it’s nothing. The Red Lion, one of the bars that REO Speedwagon used to perform at, has the esteemed and aptly named “Cocktagon,” seven urinals and an entrance that create a gleeful in-and-out operation — for gentlemen, at least. The ladies line is outside my realm of experience.

A different House basement I’ve been in actually had “PEE: $1” written using electrical tape on the wall in the corner of an abandoned side room with a run-down furnace and exposed HVAC. Whether or not this invitation was ironic or genuine is ambiguous to me, but the tape certainly felt mysteriously significant when I saw it. The reader may interpret this however they wish. But I’ll say no more about bathrooms, except that in both bar and House, they are sticky and pee-soaked and culturally significant in giving their occupant(s) a moment’s respite from the chaos unraveling just outside their walls.

David and I have decided that we’ve finally gotten our fill. David has a tendency for Irish goodbyes, and I have no intention of being left alone in a crowd of strangers. It doesn’t take long to feel sweaty and sluggish at a House Show, and I’m vaguely aware that the rest of our group has already disappeared. We wander out and negotiate through several dark, mysterious blocks back home. The residential part of Urbana is populated with large, beautiful houses, some with wacky, jungle-like lawns. When our paths diverge, I bid farewell to David and we go our separate ways. Upon reaching home, I mumble something about journalistic integrity to my housemates before I crawl into bed still donning my jeans and contact lenses.

Urbana is a much more sinister town in the morning. The thrill of the night is already a fading but cherished memory, slowly being replaced with the early symptoms of a radioactive hangover. My eyes feel sticky, my head feels heavy, my teeth feel slimy, and getting out of bed is a challenge. From my third-floor window overlooking Lincoln Avenue, early morning dog walkers and the more studious of my peers are already going about their daily business. There is the primordial soup of human life going on outside my window, and I’m lucky to have a quality view that lends itself to good people-watching. Through the veil of my lazy haze, they remind me of ghosts, and the thought occurs to me I will join them as a ghost myself when I inevitably reunite with society later this afternoon. The weekend is ending, and I must once again behave like a normal citizen instead of a rabid squirrel.

Has anything real, anything profound and meaningful, come from this? Have I gained a deeper knowledge of myself? Is there anything of value, tangible or otherwise, to be had from my account of all this? It is unlikely.

Am I heavily romanticizing my weekend as some sort of great feast of countercultural communal life, looking to give it the proper justification I know it doesn’t really deserve? This is unquestionably true, to an extent.

But that’s just the thing with personal experience: it’s impossible to fully articulate with words. I could try and tell you that I felt fully awake, with a clarity of mind that I can only, ironically, induce with the time-tested cocktail of Cheap Substance + Big Crowd, but whatever language I use cannot fully translate what the night meant to me while I was in the middle of it, and in the middle was where it was maddest. Perhaps this is largely self-serving, and trying to assign value to my evening as some sort of sophisticated, transcendental night is simply a well-crafted defense mechanism, enabling me to soak my weekends in escapades of debauchery and nonsense. Whether I’m self-aware or not, I don’t think that’s the whole truth. I take comfort in knowing I felt alive, and maybe that’s why nights like these matter.

Like many others, when I turned eighteen, I decided I needed to establish a radically new personality and sense of self. I fancied myself a cynical-nihilist-hippie-type, and all I have to show for it is a total uncertainty about what sort of person I really am and a Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon tattoo, which I don’t necessarily regret but also have to coexist with for the rest of my days. For a long time, it was hard to shake the impression that my whole life, I had been something of a fraud, constantly seeking the approval and admiration of others without ever considering what I really wanted to get out of life.

I now understand that realizing that everyone has these doubts and that we’re not really as unique as we believe is a universal rite of passage characterizing one’s waning years of teenagerdom. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We dump so much time and energy into cultivating how others perceive us, but the irony is that other people are usually far more concerned with their own image than with ours — insecurity makes it easy to forget that. With this in mind, I consider the House Show as having a special sense of community, stronger than any bar excursion I’ve had on campus, for no specific reason I can point to or explain to anyone. A strange and brief feeling of being maximally loved by the universe, of really living in the moment — or maybe just the absence of that subconscious alienation you feel at a bar — is what I would identify as the heart of the House circuit’s appeal, regardless of whether it’s some ephemeral mirage or truly part of a living, breathing, tucked-away musical organism populated by Ritos and sweet cashbox attendees.

As that wise sage of the ’60s Hunter S. Thompson once wrote:

“Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish — a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow — to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.”

In the end, I find myself left with a few certain, military-grade truths. Abstract questions of “true meaning” aside, the world, in my eyes, has become a slightly smaller place, and to me, this is a good thing. The Midwest is a big, flat, and at times, lonely place, and having the means of mitigating that peculiar loneliness can go a long way. If I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that house parties and House Shows will not go the way of the dodo, Johnny Cash, and hitchhiking. The constituent people and culture of the scene might change, but the warmth and essence isn’t something that can be stamped out.

Willie Nelson is 92 years old, and I can’t help but grimly wonder when he will die. I can’t help but wonder when I will die, but it’s comforting to know that between the bookends of my birth and death, there exists a brief, outrageous glimmer of youth, noise, heat, and piss. I like to imagine that Willie Nelson feels the same. Tomorrow, I will go back to class and continue to chip away at what I really hope are the best four years of my life. Nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides growing old. That much is not voodoo. If you ever find yourself in central Illinois, or anywhere there’s a good time to be had, stop by and see for yourself.

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THE NEW CRITIC
—
POSTSCRIPT

*In 2023, Stevie Miller, then 19, took a leave of absence from Carnegie Mellon University to work for the neo-reactionary, right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin and live in his Berkeley, California basement.

Stevie had been a fanatical reader of Yarvin’s blog Unqualified Reservations since middle school, and Yarvin had taken Stevie on as an amanuensis. But when Stevie worked for “Mencius Moldbug” (Yarvin’s internet pseudonym), Yarvin was not nearly so infamous as now. In the years since, Yarvin has been cited by Vice President J.D. Vance, and a Subreddit with over 12k followers, “YarvinConspiracy,” tracks his allegedly deleterious effect on the American right. The mainstream media has caught on too, sleuthing out links between conservative political factions and Yarvin’s extremist, exuberant internet writing. His densely-hyperlinked and referential prose, recondite intellectual heroes (Thomas Carlyle, James Froude, and John Adams, among others), and status as outsider-dissident-genius strike an alluring figure, an allure which he uses to recruit young people — especially young men — to the conservative movement. In June 2025, Ava Kofman wrote an excellent profile of Yarvin for The New Yorker (a portrait that Stevie told me forms a pretty accurate picture of Yarvin’s psychology):

“Near the open bar, I spoke to Stevie Miller, a sprightly sophomore at Carnegie Mellon who had been reading Yarvin since the seventh grade. (Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his ‘high-I.Q. style’ served as a ‘high-I.Q. magnet.’) Two years ago, Miller hung out with Yarvin at Vibecamp, a gathering for nerds and techies in rural Maryland. Yarvin, who left early, asked Miller to help him throw his own party in D.C., which came to be known as Vibekampf. Afterward, Miller became Yarvin’s first personal intern. ‘My parents, New York Jewish liberals who I love, were totally mystified,’ he said.”

So who is this precocious intern? When researching for this interview, I asked a D.C. friend, “Do you know Stevie Miller?”

“Everyone knows Stevie,” he replied.

Stevie Miller is the most gregarious, internet-addled, and social science-oriented gen z right-winger I know.

Now 21, Stevie, who hails from New York’s Upper East Side and the D.C. suburbs, is a fellow of Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures grant. Having returned to CMU after a brief stint at the University of Austin in 2025, he studies “Statistics & Machine Learning” in an honors program for “Quantitative Social Science Scholars.” He sometimes goes by the pseudonym Werner Zagrebbi, especially on Twitter, and he writes the Substack Right Rationalism.

Much of the social science-driven, right-wing world that Stevie belongs to was born from an interlinked sphere of blogs and forums (4chan, Slate Star Codex, MarginalRevolution, LessWrong, Unqualified Reservations, Overcoming Bias, and others) — following along through some of the hyperlinks in this interview should replicate the feeling of what it is like to be a young right-winger in the burgeoning internet blogosphere. For a broad overview of Yarvin, Stevie’s influences, and many others in the rationalist sphere, Rufus Knuppel’s p(doom) is a great starting place. (Stevie called it “one of the best things we’ve read on the intellectual and cultural history of the contemporary prediction markets boom.”) For the more minute references, I have provided footnotes and links.

Below, Stevie speaks about his time working for Yarvin, disappointment with various right-wing institutions like the University of Austin and the Hertog Foundation, failed attempts to land a job in the Trump administration, and much, much more.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

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ELAN The people I know who are most untethered from standard career expectations had a high drug intake in high school. You seem similarly untethered, but for you it seems to come via intellectual convictions. What is the origin of that in your personal history?

STEVIE It’s probably some sort of character flaw. Having too high openness will fuck you. Give me another decade, and I will make decisions and live in a less flighty way. Looking back, it was probably a good idea to work for Curtis Yarvin, but there was no way I should have known that at the time. Because remember, in 2023-24, he wasn’t famous. And going to UATX, that probably was just a bad idea, and I haven’t even written about it yet.1

ELAN Well, I’ll be asking about it. Before I get into that, do you wish you did not read the internet at all? There’s a certain kind of person who has never heard of Substack and is not interested in the world of the internet.

STEVIE If you just took a data set of the Ivy League, of what percent has not heard of Substack, I would expect only a third or something has. That being said, I think it’s pretty clear at this point they’re going to catch on.

ELAN Sure. Do you wish you were the type of person who would be a latecomer to Substack?

STEVIE Yes. That’s a very good question. Seb Jensen responded to someone like this making the argument that online politics is worse than drugs, worse than video games, too. And to be honest, I don’t think that’s true. Just temperamentally, I don’t want to be applying to these fucking recruiting cycles. I see a lot of these people at Carnegie Mellon, and it sounds like this horrible, gray existence. I think I am doing something different and better. I think it’s more rewarding. And I think the best is yet to come of this.

I mean, who’s the president? I think if you’re going to write an intellectual history of Trump, you’re not going to look at tariffs and Sam Francis or something.2 You’ll look at Yarvin and Steve Sailer and these people. And AI is obviously going to become, like, more than half of the economy. Whether that’s in one decade or three, I don’t know, but it’s all a part of this intellectual history. These things are going to get more status.

ELAN You’re clearly very good at meeting people and getting things done. Why do you not attend, say, Yale?

STEVIE I think just finding closure for that has been a pretty big force in my life. Dare I say, I even have a notes document about it? I have a lot of those. I titled one “Closure?” when I got access to that Columbia admissions data and just ran the numbers on what I should have done.

It’s really hard to reach your final form at 19. How would you get into a great college now? There are a lot of things you can exploit to do that, but it’s a very different world for us now. I knew the GMU people, but they were a lot less famous then.3 It wasn’t really social-climbey in high school to be into internet writing. This has been the step-change in the status economics of this sphere. That’s the central fact of the past three years — these people have become a much bigger deal, and people process that in different ways.

ELAN What drives your need for closure?

STEVIE Everyone wants to explain, “Why are people so right-wing these days? Could part of it be that they feel they were locked out of opportunities because of race?” That’s a thesis. Where would you see it in the data?

I tried a little bit of something else. Is there any evidence? I analyzed this NYU data from Cremieux. Is there any evidence that kids who say they’re in the Young Republicans group do worse than the Young Democrats? No. There’s no evidence. I think everyone should read Steve Teles’s stupendous article — he’s at Johns Hopkins Political Science these days — called “Beyond Academic Sectarianism.”

ELAN The National Affairs piece.

ELAN So, UATX. What’s the story there? You were there for a year and then came back?

STEVIE So I was there for one trimester, is actually what it was, and I’m not even sure if I remember how serious I was about staying. I probably always put a 60% subjective probability of coming back to Carnegie Mellon.

It was interesting seeing education reform up close. I should really write 40 pages on this and just get it out of my system. I think UATX is pretty bad actually. It definitely underperformed my expectations. What they’re trying to do is just emulate St. John’s.4 That’s the intellectual vision, though Joe Lonsdale has a different vision which is cringe in its own way.5 Those are the two factions. You could see in the very good Politico article —

ELAN So you liked that piece? That was one of my questions.

STEVIE Yeah, that article totally understands the problems. McKenna Conlin got forced out for giving them the “tea.” I should text her to see how she’s doing these days. She had an undergrad degree. She was there at 26 and was the token lib. I liked her. I was a fan.

Anyway, yeah, Lonsdale wants it to be Y Combinator university.6 Of course, we have Stanford already, so he’s trying to do something more radically in that direction. Mostly it’s just these St. John’s people who believe that if everyone reads Plato, they’ll do a lot better in life. But what they need is hardcore right-wing social science, Bryan Caplanism.7

None of these people understand what is really going on with American education. I had lunch with the president. I had lunch with all these people. They just don’t get it. They’re not in touch with the empirics. Why can’t their university be good? It’s because they don’t have good students. That’s what you need to make a good university. It’s the students.

ELAN But then they have this whole thing about SAT score, where if you get a 1400 you have automatic admission. What do you think of the current cutoff?

STEVIE Yes, yes. That’s what attracted me to the school. I watched that SAT video they posted on Twitter, or this guy Isaac Simpson made it. I know who he is. I was like, oh, yeah, that’s pretty based, I’ll write them an application. And they flew me out to Austin and gave me and a couple of the other tippy-top admitted students dinner with Peter Thiel. How could I not go for a semester? And they were offering to pay me a moderate amount of money that I could live with.

To attract others, fly people to Austin. The SAT floor was 1400, and now it’s 1440. You got to jack that up. You know, Seb Jensen, another very fine fellow, ran this great article on converting SAT scores to IQ. Perfect SAT scores are, on average, 136 IQ or something. These IQ numbers never get that high because of regression to the mean.

Anyway, they were giving $25k a year — this is living money, not PhD money. When I visited, I had lunch with this kid who was too “based ritual” and drank too much of their Kool-Aid. He’s definitely — you know, by University of Austin standards — a very fine fellow. He was telling me, you know, Stevie, we’re getting a 100k here from Alpha School to work on projects where we massively pad our hours.

40% of the class — 40% of University of Austin — the year before I came, was getting paid through the nose to do nothing. Nothing has come of it. It was called the Alpha Fellowship. McKenna Conlin used it to make skateboarding events or something. It was just stupendously lucrative. If I was getting $100k plus the $25k, holy fuck, I would be going to the University of Austin instead of Carnegie Mellon or Yale in a heartbeat. That’s what they should do. They should publicize it. Obviously, no one has heard of this. No one understands the actual economics of the University of Austin. They have tremendous opportunities, but no one knows about them.

What people know about is the cringe Plato advertising, where they said, you know, at Harvard, kids only work 25 hours a week. We work 50 hours a week. How do you interpret this from a Caplanian perspective?8 You’re wasting everyone’s time on nothing. For me, it’s Rossi’s Iron Law, an underrated concept. Charles Fain Lehman introduced me to it.9 But Gwern has a good article on it. The law is that the expected impact of a social policy is zero. You know what the expected impact of forcing everyone to read Plato is? Can you imagine?

ELAN Giving a lot of money to Allan Bloom’s estate.10

STEVIE You know, it’s ridiculous. They had us reading Closing of the American Mind, and it was just this stupendously silly work. Maybe, if Bloom was writing it again in this era, you would have access to Claude Code to see if any of the claims even make sense.

ELAN There’s something I noticed in your description of UATX — you seem to have an identification with McKenna Conlin. By your description, she seems the kind of person you would find at Brown or Vassar, schools where you have a significant demographic of alienated left-wingers. At UATX, that isn’t exactly the spirit.

STEVIE Yeah, you know, who cares about me, but I think for understanding my character, or Yarvin, or Richard Hanania, it goes back to Bryan Caplan, who taught that voters are not rational. He demolished the rational voter model in a book that he may well deserve a Nobel Prize for but that he almost certainly will not get. Well, what is left is to explain political participation? There isn’t a canonical GMU book on it, but I think the Elephant in the Brain gets close. People adopt the politics they do to fit in with their peers, unless you really want attention, and you really want to stick out, and you think you’re much better than all your peers — then you do the opposite. You do the thing that’s most different from your peers. You seek the antipode. You have to be self-aware about that shit. For a lot of people reading this, that’s what we’re doing here. So temperamentally, yes, I do like McKenna Conlin. I knew going to Austin would make me much less right-wing because I always find fault in these institutions. The closer you look, the worse they look — always, except maybe for rationalism.

ELAN Did you read the Marco Roth piece in the recent issue of The Point?

STEVIE No.

ELAN Well there’s a concept in it that I am curious about. Roth discusses a scene from an Upper West Side movie called Margaret. There’s a classroom discussion scene about King Lear where one student makes a comment simultaneously trying to impress the teacher with his brilliance but also to be recognized as above the teacher — to be both legitimated by the institution and recognized as beyond it. Does that mean anything to you?

STEVIE I mean, you made a good pitch for the piece. I’ll definitely take a look. I definitely identify with that. I think a lot of people who make it do. In the internet writing scene, that’s Tyler Cowen and the Red Scare girls, who care about mainstream status but also want to transcend it.

ELAN You’re back at Carnegie Mellon. How would you describe your experience there? Have you found like-minded Stevies?

STEVIE Basically, no. There are internet writers, you know — Arctotherium, for instance, these great people — who just work normal jobs. That’s kind of how I look at CMU. I’m just there because of circumstances basically outside my control. To be honest, I think it outperformed my expectations. The quantitative social science program is stupendous. I kind of knew, going into undergrad, that I wanted to have the Cremeiux data analysis skills with more institutional affiliations. Carnegie Mellon is a great place to do work, but things don’t fit together intellectually. Maybe I’d be doing much better at Columbia. We’ll see. I wrote a transfer application.

ELAN How many years of CMU do you have left?

STEVIE Three or four semesters, depending on classes.

ELAN Why have you not dropped out and just started working?

STEVIE Yeah, that’s a good question. There are all these Palantir fellowships of different kinds. They sing like sirens, but I think temperamentally I actually like education.

ELAN How did you first come across Curtis Yarvin?

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THE NEW CRITIC

James Milstead is a 21-year-old undergraduate studying English and Linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington. He contributes to the Substack and podcast O Reader, Where Art Thou?

Seven car accidents in two years: arguably the defining characteristic of my first years of college. Every time I find myself talking about driving (in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, where spending hours in the car on commute is a religious act, driving comes up often) mentions of an accident slip into my conversations. Even conversations that don’t involve cars at all lead me right back to the accidents; if you ask me if I remember when so-and-so happened last spring semester, I’m compelled to locate the event in my memory in reference to whichever one of my crashes is chronologically nearest, reliving the howl of wheels and crunch of fiberglass, before being whipped back into the present moment to produce an answer, “Yeah, of course.”

I have difficulty understanding the winced looks I receive when I explain my driving history. I simply don’t know what’s an acceptable number of crashes anymore. I did look it up once to see how many accidents the average U.S. resident experiences per year; one law firm’s website stated decisively that most American drivers experience three to four car accidents in a lifetime. That leaves me with two lifetime supplies of crashes in two years. That number doesn’t bother me, in part due to the completely warped perception I have of appropriate car crash tallies. Still, grasping at rationalizations for such an unfortunate streak is a now-familiar movement, as I find myself casually mentioning my driving record and then feeling the need to defend myself from people’s inquiring eyes. “Do you know how dangerous the streets of the metroplex are? Do you know that I used to drive most of the way across the metroplex to get to the university every weekday? Even cutting it down to a three-day week didn’t save me from getting in wrecks. Just a one-way trip is 45 miles. All that time and all that distance on the road add up, so statistically it makes sense that I’d have a few mishaps. Plus, only three of the accidents were my fault, legally speaking…”

Though I never quite seek vindication, having lost the will to harbor strong feelings toward that number or other people’s perceptions of it after the first year of crashes, I understand the suspicious look they give in response to my tired speech as the indication of a thought they always seem reluctant to share: maybe you’re just a bad driver. I don’t blame them for the thought. I wouldn’t even deem them incorrect. Yet I feel a pang of offense. I want to say that I’m more than just a bad driver, I’m in the worst circumstances you could put a driver like me in. The bad driver label doesn’t consider my conflicted understanding of what my accident history is, what meaning any of it has. You don’t understand: this commute cursed by God is driving me crazy, and the sum total of the wrecks I’ve had is the least pertinent point to my mind.

My life as a commuter began as all good adventures do: in absolute mundanity. I’d just opened a Faustian contract with the highway that I thought would save me a lot of money and stress, exchanging a little time in the car each day for the privilege of free college and a free place to stay. At first, getting used to the act of driving to and from the university wasn’t the most difficult part. It was at most like a household chore; dropping a plate while loading the dishwasher and dealing with a manic driver on the highway dealt me an equivalent amount of frustration. No, the greatest struggle was deciding what else I could manage to do during the two hours I was locked away in the moving cage each day, a prisoner deciding how to pass his sentence. Too quickly, I grew accustomed to the rather uninteresting sights along the 45-mile stretch of road — the undulating, green plains occasionally interrupted by a gas station decorated in Christmas lights or a horribly ugly, brick-like Church of Christ. Soon after taking up the commute, I refused to settle for staring out the window (though staring out the window shouldn’t really have been an option anyway, as it is in those moments of distraction that the renegade motorists strike).

As the weeks went on, the seven o’clock grogginess clouded my brain and killed any desire to concentrate on listening to the individual parts of a song I’d never heard before, the interlocking guitars and drums and vocals; by the evening, I was just as tired as I’d been in the morning. So I went back to that which required less thought, the same three CDs stored in my glovebox. The commute was already repetitious, but this routine exacerbated the monotony. I’d get in the car, and my eyelids would already be slumped over my eyes. I wished I could shut my brain off for the entire drive and wake up at my destination.

The first accident was one of those fender benders that every parent wants their child’s first accident to be. As I was driving home after class on an October afternoon, there was a car at the stop sign in front of me that pulled out a little bit into the street before suddenly stopping again. I’d glanced down at my GPS to check which direction I needed to turn, and before I could look up again, I heard the fiberglass of my bumper cover crackle as it ground into the car in front of me. We pulled back so her car wouldn’t be halfway into the street and exchanged information while I sweated buckets in the sun (though I wasn’t sweating because of the sun). During the exchange, I couldn’t stop pacing, because if my body stopped moving, I’d certainly explode. The mild tap of my car against another’s had filled me with an exhilaration I’d only experienced while waiting in line for a rollercoaster. I had to shake the stutters out to the driver as I asked if she was alright, and what insurance she had, and all the things I’d been told I needed to say. In my mind, I sang along with Jake Ewald:

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I’m all thumbs today
I feel young in a bad way

Before I knew it, we’d said what we’d needed to say, and she drove away. Her bumper was barely scratched, but she still filed an insurance claim.

The thing about rollercoasters is that the ride itself eventually provides a chance to break the tension in an explosion of energy, replacing that suspense with an entertaining type of terror. In my case, there was no release. The wreck was the cause of the tension rather than the break. The disruption burst into existence for a brief moment and then subsided quickly, leaving only nervousness in its wake. After the crash, there was nothing but the hour-long trek back home in a slightly more battered car and the collapse into bed at the end of the afternoon. For the next few days, the storm cloud of bureaucracy hung over me as I began the drawn-out process of delivering my account of the accident to the insurance agency and receiving the politest notification of bad news they could give me. The static nervousness persisted for a while then gradually faded into the background, almost like the droning hum of the road. “I got lucky with this one,” I told myself at the end of the ordeal, “but I can’t afford anything more serious than that, so I’ll have to be careful from here on out.”

But trying to stay alert didn’t save me from a second accident. And it didn’t matter much that it wasn’t my fault. When you’re in a serious accident and there’s a child in the other car, you don’t stop feeling sick. You double, triple-check to make sure that, yes, that really is the front of your car hot and melted into the rear passenger-side door of the car in front of you, and yes, that is a child in a car seat on the other side of that door. You fumble with your seatbelt, and you leap out through the door and run toward the other car now fused to yours, calling to ask if they’re alright. And the mother comes out, too, and you hear her say, “Oh my God,” and that makes you feel sicker.

And when the off-duty police officer who was in traffic behind you steps out of his car and tells you that it’ll be alright, and it’s not your fault, you don’t stop feeling sick, but now it’s because you no longer have a functioning car, and you’ll have to figure out how to drive to the university for the next week or so while your car’s in the shop, and not only that, but you have to go through all that bureaucratic nonsense again and haggle the insurance agents until they relent and pay to get the car fixed. And your monthly insurance payment will go up again, and after thinking all that, you feel even sicker knowing that you feel more upset about the hassle of crashing your car than you do about coming so close to killing a child.

From that point on, it seemed that every move I made was a scramble to patch up holes in the least seaworthy ship on earth, if you’ll allow me the one nautical metaphor. Music became a method I used to keep myself alert as I drove. I no longer valued albums for their depth or novelty (which deeply injured that part of me which longed to be a snob) but for their ability to preoccupy my brain, keeping me singing or screaming along. I’d previously longed for numbness to last me the duration of the drive, but now it was the thing I did everything in my power to push away. With each successive wreck, the uncomfortable nervousness only grew more pervasive. Only the effort I made to drown out my paranoia, that reminder of crashes past and forecast of crashes future, made the journey bearable. It required a strict routine of putting into rotation those albums that could elicit a reaction from my brain without letting that rotation become itself part of the monotony — like squeezing a concentrated flow of music through a hose. But when you’re rear-ended by an absent-minded mother to the accompaniment of folksy guitar riffs, or you rear-end another car on the highway while screaming along to System of a Down, or the drunken owner of a high-suspension pickup truck smashes your car’s rear to bits and then speeds off into the night, leaving you alone with Jeff Buckley still crooning from the speakers, you finally realize that all that routine has little payoff. I was five accidents in, and music hadn’t done me one lick of good.

I remember driving home in silence on the night of the fourth accident (the incident with System of a Down, which was definitely my fault) after crushing my own front left fender and headlight against the other car’s rear bumper. I’d called my parents, who were at a party in a different town, to let them know that I was safe but my car needed repairs. I spent the drive home mentally killing myself over the fact that I had caused another accident, making life so much less convenient for the other driver, my parents (whose help I needed to find new parts for the car), and myself. The worst part was, I didn’t have a single strong emotion about it; if I felt guilt in my heart, it was only because I wasn’t feeling more guilty. Every few minutes, I slammed my hands into the rubber of the steering wheel to feel the sting against my palms. I let out the occasional yelp or scream, which was more performative than anything and gave me some way to release all that static emotion. Angry that I wasn’t crying about the mess I’d made, I screamed it out.

As my eyes drifted to the side of the road, to the ditches filled with dark grass descending into invisible depths, I asked myself, “What if there were no more crashes?”

With one final crash, there’d be no more car to worry about, no more mind-numbing commute, no more sudden moments of destruction to complicate everyone’s lives. With a flick of the wrist, I could veer off the road and careen into the ditch, all while screaming along with Sean Bonnette at full blast on the stereo,

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No more bad times, no more bummers
No more SUVs and no more Hummers

As thrilling as the prospect sounded — and I did initially gravitate toward the idea for its seeming bombast — I realized just how little emotion the final crash generated in me. During Accident No. 3, I’d gotten rear-ended. In the milliseconds leading up to the collision, I stared into my rearview mirror and, upon seeing the impending car, I didn’t think, “God, help me!” or “What do I do?” Instead, I said aloud, “Not again.” It’s simply dropping a plate. In every subsequent crash, I’ve repeated the same mantra, occasionally accompanied by, “Oops, that one’s on me.”

So flying off the highway into the ditch provided no fiery glory and no release from the commute — it only offered more trouble for the people forced to clean it up afterward (I’d simply pass the burden of my commute onto someone else, like Atlas asking for a smoke break and then diving off a cliff). I balk at the idea that the sum of my accidents should matter to anyone, least of all myself, but the thought of preventing that number from ticking up further, of washing my hands of that number for good and rendering it completely meaningless, offered no appeasement. Even if I never had another accident and kept that number from ticking up while staying alive, I had no reason to believe the post-catastrophe nervousness would leave me; I might be stuck with the same lunacy as before.

After about a year and a half on the commute, I’d made it through five accidents — obviously playing music had proven to be of little help in both preventing crashes and distracting me from the nervousness — so to shift gears, I began to listen to audiobooks in the car. It began as an act of spite; upon seeing posts online of some people talking about how many classics they were getting to read in their spare time, I snidely said to myself, “Yeah, well, I bet you don’t have a two-hour commute.” I subsequently attempted to prove I could consume just as many classics as everybody else while on the road.

Eventually, I found my way to William Faulkner audiobooks. I was specifically captivated by As I Lay Dying, so much so that I immediately read the print copy after listening through so I could fully soak it in. I saw a symmetry between my commute and the Bundren family’s voyage. As the Bundrens set out across Yoknapatawpha County to lay their mother to rest, so, too, did I set out across the metroplex. I began to imagine myself driving around each day in a coffin very like Addie Bundren’s, excepting its velocity, size, and metallicity. Car and coffin became interchangeable in my lexicon. When referring to either object, I wouldn’t know which word I was about to use until I said it.

When I enter the coffin each morning, I consign myself to unbeing. Out there on the road, I’m in no place and am associated with no place — the people in the cars driving past know nothing of my home in a Dallas suburb or the university I attend in Arlington. The car crash is a concentrated form of this sensation: I am brought from catastrophe into nervousness on the side of the road. I step from side to side, restless because I need to be any place other than here, since then I’d actually be in a place and not the space in between places. To the people driving past, I’m just a person who got in a car accident, and to the person standing in front of me, I’m the person whose car they hit. I incur a loss of place and identity, the things that make me human.

When you’ve been in these circumstances, say, seven or so times, you start to pick up on a unique feeling of eeriness anytime you describe it to others. In my case, I begin with an awkward pantomime, and I end the story with utter frustration. I sense a gulf between myself and the people who don’t share my commute — they simply haven’t experienced the deathfulness of it. Even those who do, even those other students driving through the metroplex to get to another one of the hundred or so universities we have around here, might not have recognized for themselves the way the commute reduces them. It’s only those with an absolute hatred for the car that can truly understand, I think — those who, when the wheels roll to a stop, can’t stand to sit in their seat another second longer. Sometimes people just understand, and sometimes it takes surviving seven wrecks in two years to get it. And even then, if you put all of us who’ve been driven crazy by the road in a room together, we still wouldn’t quite know what we want to do about it. Experience tells me it won’t help much if we all set our Priuses aflame — that achieves the same end as driving them into a dark roadside ditch.

I guess I can only tell you what I’ve decided to do, which is to turn my back on the final crash entirely. Instead, my commute must be a sprint toward humanity. I must wake up every day thinking, “I won’t seal myself away.” Music and audiobooks are no longer mere stimuli to keep me alert or distract me from boredom but a method of desperately reaching out and asserting that I still belong to humanity, that I am still a part of the world despite my deathly state. I long to shrill with Evan Lescallette,

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Of course it’s personal
Personhood has made me feel this way

I can’t afford to belong to a place — I can’t afford to stop going to university — but I can mentally attach myself to these songs and stories in order to belong to them. And because these activities can occasionally lose their edge and their grip on my brain, I’ve expanded my methodology. I listen to language lessons (right now, I’m working on my Japanese), which require me to respond out loud and involve a greater semblance of reciprocity than the act of listening to music (the music itself is rather indifferent to my screaming along to it).

Probably the most radical practice I’ve developed (and thus the most deserving of scrutiny) is actually speaking to someone, usually my girlfriend, on the phone while I’m driving. It can be a little tricky to do this in a safe and legal fashion, but I don’t think there’s a better way to strive to be a person in such an impersonal environment than by talking to someone else. Of course, this isn’t practical for every commute, especially for the person who isn’t spending an hour with nothing else to do but drive. It started out innocently enough, with the thought, “I should call my girlfriend while I have this free time.” I’m wary, though, of letting it devolve into merely using her to stay awake on a long drive. Still, I jump at the opportunity to have a human interaction from within the car. My hands are firmer on the steering wheel, and my eyes have a quick steadiness to them. Is it that I’m driven by a desire not to traumatize the person on the other end of the line? Maybe, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Perhaps it’s that interacting with a human comes more naturally than interacting with artifice, so talking to someone puts me in the right frame of mind without making me work as hard for it. Regardless of the mechanism, it works for me, in moderation. I’ve come to realize that the dead truly are grateful when we pray to them because I, too, have been grateful when my loved one speaks to me during my stay in the coffin.

On a cold morning in November, I drive to the university in a light rain. It’s darker than it usually is at nine o’clock, and a few droplets, each a miniscule car crashing into a glass wall, beat against my windshield. I see a dewy world painted with wet melancholy surrounding me during my long drive. The rain clears a little as I near my destination, leaving only a light mist hovering around my windows.

It’s then that I see two sedans, one black and one white, circled around each other on the side of the road like yin and yang. The white car’s bumper cover is freshly ruined. The sedans have just had an accident. I wonder if this has pushed them one step closer to that craziness I’m so familiar with. Their driver-side windows are next to one another, and I can see for a brief moment before I pass that each driver stretches out their hand to touch the other’s in a handshake, or a high five, or some other gesture. Whatever it is, it’s a peace offering. Every time I’ve participated in this little ritual, it’s been while standing outside the car, stepping out into the world for a moment before slipping back into the coffin. But these two, beside me now, connect in a moment of reality and true personhood from within their cars. They don’t submit to the crash but stretch out toward the humanity in front of them. There’s beauty in that moment of doing everything they can to be connected; it’s a strong image of compassion and decency. How close can they get to that personal connection while remaining fully in the car? They have options: a longing hand pressed against the window, a silent mouthing of words through the glass, a voice pleading for a response through a cell phone, a recorded message playing over a car’s speaker. Each of these methods puts a bit more distance between the people involved, but aren’t they all the same — in spirit, at least? It requires the same effort out of a person’s soul, and to my mind, loses none of its meaning or beauty. The motion is identical: you feel the warmth of someone else’s hand holding yours tight to keep you from chasing after the final crash, and you can float in the unbelonging unalone.

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THE NEW CRITIC

Theodore Gary is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying English and History. He is an Assistant Editor of The New Critic.

I got an email from my landlord last Wednesday informing us that we were to remove any and all furniture from our lawns and porches or else be fined by the city. The subject line read, “It’s Couch Burning Season.” You see, I have a couch on my porch, and I’ve received an email like this before. They don’t have teeth. My couch remains, and nothing happened. But now the city, and my landlord, had to be seen doing something since the Illinois men’s basketball team was in the Sweet 16, and the potential for post-game mayhem was unusually high. Tell the kids to move their couches and their chairs. If things go wrong, they can’t blame us; our asses are covered.

I had never considered burning a couch before. Though the practice intrigued me — the emotion of fire, the specter of death — the moment in my life had not yet come when dousing a couch in lighter fluid and setting it on fire felt quite like the thing to do. Contrarian that I am, though, I began to picture it: How would I keep the fire burning? Would a leather couch burn quicker than a polyester one? How quickly could I get a couch out onto the street? I began to scheme. I wanted to see the couches burn. I wanted to see the fire catch, and I wanted to watch the couch turn to ash. I didn’t want to do this by myself, however. Burning a couch has to be a general sort of thing. Being the only one burning their couch is stupid. You want others to see, to be excited, to stand and gawk. When one guy does something dumb, it’s a crime. When everybody’s doing it, that’s just fun.

The game was slated to tip at 9:05 on Thursday, leaving plenty of time for drunken shenanigans, weather permitting, that afternoon. I had woken up in a sweat that morning — too many blankets. It was 80 degrees outside, one of those central Illinois days that begins like Florida and ends as the apocalypse. It had been 70 degrees out the day before, and 50 the day before that. A huge stormfront was set to roll through Champaign and had sent ahead of it an advance force of unseasonably warm days. Rather than exultation at the oncoming of summer, the arrival of a balmy spring day at UIUC brings with it a palpable sort of unease. Unseasonably warm weather means wild storms, and wild storms mean one thing: a tornado was coming.

The storm was due at 6, and we started drinking at 3. There were beers on the couch, beers on the porch, beers on the lawn. The frat house across the street started their pulsing EDM. By 5, the block swarmed with orange-clad sorority sisters, friends of friends, and frat boys. Clouds of solid black stood on the horizon — portents of evil. We kept at it as the wind picked up. The temperature dropped, the atmosphere changed, and the cold wind swept away that balmy afternoon. The sky went from blue to black in ten minutes, the birds and squirrels disappeared into their burrows and nests, but here we were, wind swirling and clouds onrushing, shotgunning beers barefoot in the grass.

It was a tense afternoon. Only once in the last 20 years had Illinois made the Sweet 16 of March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. That game was two years ago, when I was a sophomore. My memories of that night are hazy, aside from a single moment: up two with less than a minute to play, Terrence Shannon Jr., the star guard (now a Minnesota Timberwolf), stole the ball clean from his man on the left wing. The camera panned: there was no one ahead of him. Shannon tucked the ball into the hoop. The Illini went up four. The game was won. The bar was madness.

What I recall is the celebration, the ecstasy of the unified, screaming crowd. When the Illini win a game like this, students come screaming out of the bars and onto the street, running to a statue at the center of campus — the alma mater— around which a tremendous crowd rapidly gathers. Somewhere online, there is a picture of me, arms folded, cigar in mouth, standing atop it.

When I arrive at the bar this time around, packed chest-to-chest with about 300 other strangers, I’m thinking about the game, and I’m worried. The Houston team that Illinois will play in two hours is a powerhouse. They were a fairly unanimous championship pick in the preseason, and though they’ve failed to meet those expectations (being merely very good rather than generationally great), they play with an aggression and physicality that the Illini often seem to lack. Illinois’s strength is its offense, one of the best ever if you listen to the advanced stats. In the ways that Houston is a throwback operation built on hustle, defense, and under-recruited gems, the Illini are starkly modern: of the eight guys who play consistent minutes, only four are Americans; the rest are Balkans — 7-foot brothers Tomislav and Zvonimir Ivisic (Croatians), David Mirkovic (Montenegrin), and Andrej Stojakovic (Greek, son of Peja), lured halfway across the world by a mass TV audience and Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) dollars.

It’s full house tonight, standing room only, a line out the door. I’m glad we started early because ordering a drink means wading through a thick, angry crowd. As the TVs kick from the pregame show to the game, and the music in the bar stops, the March Madness theme begins, and a cheer rumbles out of the crowd. The game starts, and surprisingly it is Illinois whose defense takes control. Bothered by the Illini’s length and size, the Cougars force too many tough midrange jumpers. They look confused. It’s a grind to watch — a slow, methodical strangulation. By the midway point of the second half, the outcome is never in doubt. As Illinois stacks winning play atop winning play, as Houston over and over again fails to capture momentum of any kind, as victory goes from potentiality to certainty, a bellow rises up out of the steamy, sweaty crowd, gathering depth and energy until the buzzer sounds, and the music starts again, and the win becomes official. Kids begin knocking over tables or standing atop them. Liquid rains down from on high. Outside, cars honk. The street fills. The storm has broken: Illinois 65, Houston 55.

The following afternoon, I drove up to the University of Chicago for a party organized by campus lit mag The Harper Review, held in a building called “The Cloisters” where elevators open directly onto each apartment’s mudroom. The event was dressy, the furniture tastefully arranged. The bar was substantial and well-organized. On it, a case of Modelos had been removed from their box and arranged on a white tablecloth in a two-by-two formation. There was wine, vodka, mixers. I felt fancy. I felt put upon, a jet-lagged traveler adjusting to his foreign country. I could see on my phone that Duke was down to St. Johns, that UConn was about to tip against Michigan State. Where was the basketball? Where was the TV? It took me a moment to realize that there were none.

The windows in the apartment faced west. The last gasp of a purple-and-orange sunset filled the horizon, while on the soccer field down below, a throng of bundled-up parents and fans cheered on UChicago’s Division 3 women’s soccer team. Out of the elevator came trundling a host of young-people dressed in button-downs and blouses, matching suits and satin skirts, play-acting their futures of prosperous importance. Today, Harper Review, tomorrow, Harper’s Magazine. These people looked you in the eye when speaking and never stopped. One I spoke with dismissed the University of Michigan as if it were a community college. “More Nobel Prize winners have lived in this building than anywhere on earth,” another bragged. “I think you’re the first person to ever come from U of I to UChicago for a party,” someone else said. I think he was right.

As the party wound down, we moved to a new apartment. Here, a somber man gave a disorganized presentation on beauty that moved me, though I’m not quite sure why, since I don’t remember what he said, which artist he presented on, or what the paintings he spoke about looked like. But I recall the mood of that room, the sincere and devoted attention. To have spoken out of turn, or looked at your phone, or laughed as the speaker fumbled with his slides, seemed to fall somewhere near blasphemy. He was to be treated seriously, this man — a courtesy the others in attendance would doubtless expect in return.

In the morning, I made good conversation with dear friends over pancakes and bacon ordered from a crotchety man with a thick Chicago accent at a diner advertising itself as “Obama’s favorite.” We walked through the quad afterward and settled on a bench, taking in the crisp spring day. I found it easy, at that moment, to admire the place: an island of peace and calm, the university as it should be — serious, studious, and earnest.

Much the same way the children of basketball players are overrepresented in the NBA, the children of professors, writers, and bureaucrats are overrepresented at UChicago. The trouble is, they are all more or less deserving. Being around them is a fairly forceful reminder of why I never bothered to apply. Not only would these people never set a couch on fire, but it would not even occur to them to do so. If they are play-acting, then it is only in the sense that they are rehearsing for roles in which they have already been cast. The majority trait I encountered on that campus seemed not to be exceptional wisdom, grace, or even intelligence but rather a certain kind of serious-mindedness. What a waste of energy all this nonsense at the University of Illinois must appear if your goal is to understand Hegel or become a managing editor at The New York Times. In certain light, it appears that way to me, too: If only I could unwatch all those games, I think sometimes, retake all those tests, shake my 14-year-old self by the shoulders and force him to understand what he was missing, where he could have gone had he applied himself, had he considered the future seriously. I’m in the apartment, I’ve been invited to the party, but what a feeling it must be to live here, not only visit.

Three hours later, I was back in Champaign, in another bar, watching Illinois play Iowa for a spot in the Final Four, a place the Illini had not been in 20 years. Iowa took a lead early, but by half-time the Illini had pulled the game even. It remained close until mid-way through the second half, as Keaton Wagler, Illinois’s still-boyish 18-year-old freshman — a shoo-in top-10 NBA draft pick — contorted his lanky body around the manly strength of Iowa’s grizzled 24-year-olds. Deep in the second half, with the Illini down by one, Wagler drove right, spun left, and stepped back to the top of the arc in a motion so fluid his defender stumbled backward all the way to the baseline. Wagler buried the three, and Illinois never trailed again.

We stood pressed up against the wall at the end of the game, and we were banging on it now. Liquid dripped from the ceiling onto strangers embracing strangers as “Chelsea Dagger” played over the loudspeakers, and a wave of students crashed onto the street in a dead sprint toward the alma mater. The crowd they formed was gigantic, but the couches never burned, and the mayhem never really arrived.

In me, there is something that craves this sort of intensity, this ecstatic experience, and I was disappointed that it never came. But it did for one moment in the bar, during the celebration, when a stranger grabbed me and hugged me, which was not something I thought actually happened between strangers. I will tell you there is only one equivalent rush to that, one which I am sure even the most serious UChicago students can understand. That is the rush of writing a perfect sentence, one that needs no revision, something I celebrate in much the same way as I do a made basket, by standing up and pumping my fist.

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THE NEW CRITIC
—
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.

*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 delight or solace in our project, please consider a paid subscription to this flesh-and-blood gen z magazine.*

Subscribe now

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.

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.*

Subscribe now

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.*

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

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.

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
—
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.”

Read Sarah's essay

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…

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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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