June 1, 2026
On television, Texas, and Chuck Klosterman's Football
Klosterman may often be subversive, kind of lazily seditious, but he is, clearly, self-aware about his counterrevolutionary inclinations, accepting and even celebrating football as a stabilizing—some might say paralyzing—force on the American imagination.
May 29, 2026
At the Museum of Errantry
Cárdenas engages the arid landscape, the dead tree, the dried-out wood, and sculpts into existence a beginning—a way into the future eked out of a barren present.
May 28, 2026
Please look stylish. Or at least slutty. Don’t give us nothing.
May 6, 2026
How can we train ourselves not to translate?
How can we train ourselves not to translate but to imbibe words that we don’t understand? How do we push past obscurity and opacity, without the requisite training in, or knowledge of, other languages?
On Frederick Wiseman
As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see. There are always “characters,” but their significance lies in the way they intersect with and illuminate social structure. They never motivate action — what they do instead is perform (and sometimes declaim) the logics under which they operate.
Gass’s sentences were the least datable, are the least dated.
April 7, 2026
Everything he says is a sort of poem.
By channeling the Delphic spirits of his mentors, Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits: finding the sense and nonsense in natural speech; intersplicing shards of citation and quotation; and contesting the very concept of a stable narratorial voice.
February 26, 2026
On Pip Adam
Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the principle that no one should be in a cage.
January 15, 2026
A half century later, who will control control?
Rarely considered together, the intertwined legacy of this odd couple, Skinner and Lilly, has given us the world we live in now: the world of surveillance capitalism and generative AI, of high-tech woo-woo and algorithmic self-optimization, a world that is a weird and improbable synthesis between the visions of these two era-defining midcentury mind scientists.
January 15, 2026
Dunn’s protagonists are almost always isolated and isolating, bristling at connection and rebuking tenderness.
“We” will never go to Mars. Well, I won’t.
Buildings were on their way to extinction — and so were sentiments and sensibilities.
