Anything but the loudest, brightest, most blunt-force sensory experience is not going to work.
My point here isn’t that “selling out” is OK, but that the binary itself proved unsustainable.
Gen X Weighs In
After Zahedi called himself the reincarnation of Kafka, an audience member yelled, “This is bullshit!”
You’re Wasting My Time, I Love You
If you saw him in the windows, or if there was a nondescript sedan in the driveway, the Buffett Game Dollar was yours.
Buffettspotting
The saints! Spending their money on books!
Literary Mercenaries, Ha Ha Ha
Where is this young man going to dinner?!
Check, Please
It’s not exactly how the present sounds, but it’s close enough.
Electric Cars and Excessive Fiction
Feelings Were Stirred
Hyperbolic comparisons, grinding misogyny to dust
At the catered events and private parties, I wore various uniforms and carried around silver trays of beautifully shaped hors d’oeuvres that sat on topiaries to make them look even more cunningly alluring — which wasn’t necessary but was a thing in that time. I served and was invisible to precisely the characters you describe in your novel. They were younger, more beautiful, and more ambitious than I had ever been, more sure of their success than I had ever dreamed it was possible to be and at the same time trembling with anxiety that the vaunted appointments to fame and accolades and cash advances they believed were their inheritance would not in fact come to them because the world was already turning against them and they might be the last generation to die.
Craven!
Bros on Instagram, elitism in book publishing
Only when we name our enemy can we confront it. Only when workers regard ourselves as a class can we access the great power that is available to us. The failures of an elitist, capitalist system have been amply demonstrated in these opening years of the 21st century. The time is now to organize ourselves toward something else.
June 12, 2020

What Richard Said
So many well-meaning people in my own family confront me, they instruct me, they denounce me, Richard said, they tell me You only have one mother. They say it like it’s a bad thing. One is enough. These flagrant children, boil them like corn, boil them in a sack. It is other people who tell us who we are, other people who tell you what you can be and whether or not you have become it yet, all these other people. Other people are reality, Richard said, other people who want to drink your blood, this is well-known.
How long until we become indentured servants living low-emission lives for the world-traveling ruling class?
Design’s Daddy Issues
Letters
Letters from Issue 33