The print edition of my latest short story, “Greyhound,” is available for online purchase from Serpent Club Press here.

In 1679, a Dutch journalist named Jasper Danckaerts visited New York City, looked around, and started writing.

“It is not possible,” Danckaerts recorded, “to describe how this bay swarms with fish, both large and small, whales, tunnies and porpoises, whole schools of innumerable other fish.”

I think of Danckaerts, whose account is conveyed in Eric Sanderson’s essential New York natural history Manahatta, every day during my walks along the East River, a body of water whose status over the course of modern history has been relegated to the butt of a Seinfeld joke. In fact, the current state of New York’s unapproachable waterways is a historical aberration, a blip in the long natural history of the region. And I, more than anything, want to jump in.

I’ve been thinking about all of this as the weather warms up here in New York City and I’m reminded yet again of the force of nature, its indomitable presence both on the street and in my heart, especially after witnessing the spectacular beauty of the California coastline on a visit last month. It’s a fallacy to presume that nature doesn’t exist here—the island of Manahatta would have been the most ecologically biodiverse of any of America’s national parks had its environment been preserved—but there’s a certain day-to-day integration of the natural world in urban life on the west coast which is sorely lacking here. I’d like to remind readers that such cohesion, as surprising as it may seem, is indeed achievable here in New York, too.

This premise undergirds my latest essay, “Will We Ever Swim in the East River?” published yesterday in Vital City. Do New Yorkers have it in us to reimagine the city as one embedded in, and not separated from, the natural world? Will we ever dare to jump?

I want to thank the team at Vital City for supporting the piece. You can check it out here, and, as always, spread the word if you like what you read.

Happy summer, everyone. Back with more soon.

Nicky

This piece was originally published in August 2023. Five years after the defining events of 2020, I’m republishing it for a new audience who missed it the first time.

One day in September in the year 2020, I woke up in the dark amidst a scorching night in Berkeley. I was thirsty, really insatiably thirsty. I trudged to the kitchen, eyes half open, economizing every step, knowing the activation of more than a certain threshold of muscles would jolt me out of the precious peace which, under the right conditions, follows the recently awoken.

Everything was quiet and still, and everyone, it seemed, was asleep. It was the middle of the night in the middle of the week in the middle of a year. My grandmother was still alive.

I emptied an entire water flask down my throat, then began filling a second, shooting a cursory glance at the stove clock in the meantime. Abruptly, I shut off the faucet. The clock read: 10:32. AM. Moving just my eyes, I looked outside, and then looked back at the clock. What I saw suddenly warranted risking a wider range of motion; I dipped my head to the height of the nearest window for a more meaningful gaze.

Something still seemed wrong with the clock, but as I observed the outside world I became aware of odd details which had gone unnoticed in my peripheral vision amidst the walk from my bedroom to the kitchen. The world wasn’t exactly brighter than I had originally perceived, but the street below had taken on the distinct quality of charcoal, a dark gray glow which distinguished the light ever so subtly from that of night. The air resembled the fuzziness of a dark piece of paper widely contaminated with lead, as if a young child had decided to, in an act of rage, mash a Ticonderoga pencil into her desk, press her finger into the mess, and smear the atmosphere with the resulting contents. All was still.

I looked back at the clock on the stove. It hadn’t changed. I stood in the kitchen, frozen. A trickle of water continued drip drip dripping out of the sink.

I creeped carefully back to my room seeking something like confirmation. The alarm clock next to my bed: 10:33. I rapped my thumb against my laptop’s spacebar to wake it up. 10:32.

Barefoot and in pajama pants, I tiptoed around the house—I lived with eight other people that year—to see, well, I’m not exactly sure what. It felt like a moment that should be shared. Every door in the house was shut, though. All my friends, I guess, were still asleep.

I thought going outside might change something. Shirtless and barefoot, I descended our carpeted stairs towards the front door wearing just my pajama pants. Halfway down, that little instinctive alarm which activates when you’ve forgetting something, like a watch, started pinging around in my head. I remembered what I’d forgotten. It wasn’t a watch. Straining to shift my hips around, I turned and climbed back up the stairs I had already conquered, fetched the thing from my room, and closed the door behind me. As I walked through the living room, I slipped on a mask.

The first thing I experienced when I stepped outside onto the sidewalk was relief, for though the smoke had completely blotted out the sun’s light, it somehow no longer smelled like smoke, as it had through the first few days after the fires. It was, instead, hanging precipitously above all the houses on the street, draped over the world like a stack of floating carpets. I never understood why that happened. I strained my neck, trying to remember where it was the sun would usually be at this point in the day. The sky offered no clues. Briefly, I considered whether the condition of this new environment marked an improvement over that of the day before. The sun wouldn’t come out, but it seemed as if our lungs could be in better shape. This was the first thought I had in words on that day in September.

So I climbed back up the stairs into my house, still walking on my toes, not thinking about anything conveyable. I went back into my room, making sure again to close the door behind me. I sat on the edge of my bed for a few moments, looking around. I started up, then stopped, then started again to open the blinds. No additional light greeted me; nothing, in fact, about the ambiance of the room changed with the completion of the usually transformative morning act. I returned to the edge of my bed, sat up straight, and stared out the window. It was clearly too late to go back to bed, but it was equally clear that it was too something to just start the day like it was any other. I sat like that on my bed, back perfectly upright, for a very long time. I’m sure I didn’t realize it, but I was still wearing my mask.

I know that I will always remember waking up in the dark that day, at 10:30 in the morning, and thinking that it was night. It’s a difficult vision to lose; black, billowing ash thick enough to suffocate the sun. I never worried about forgetting it, though. In the midst of lives stuffed with mundanity and routine, it is those most distinct and unusual of moments which are bound to leave the greatest impression on the mind.

I do fear, though, that I have already forgotten the feeling—primal, unshakeable, stomach-pitting—that most occupied each cell in my body during those impossibly gray days in the Bay. Of looking outside late in the morning, seeing nothing but darkness, and thinking, really genuinely thinking: will it ever be light during the day again?

Of not being able to count on the sun.

How will we remember 2020? It will be fascinating, as the decades inevitably churn forward, to see how we attempt to answer that question.

Some of us, sensing the moment, tried to do it right away. Before the calendar turned over, an excerpt of Lawrence Wright’s “The Plague Year” ran in the year’s final issue of The New Yorker. Wright’s brilliant document immediately sent me into the thralls of 2020’s merciless drama—the false hope and denial of February, chaos of March, pain and liberation of June. It details, in reported morsels equally juicy and excruciating, the numbing incompetence—Trump administration officials tossing out, months before the declaration of a global pandemic, a 69 page national infectious disease playbook inherited from the previous administration—transposed against the pure brilliance—the formulation of a vaccine began mere days after the virus’ composition had been identified—of humanity during a generation’s most harrowing time. And it recalls, with heart-wrenching empathy, the devastation of those early months—how hospital workers and octogenarians trapped in senior home death traps and anti-mask thirtysomethings posting defiantly on Facebook all fell victim, at a terrifying rate, to those early, erratic days of the virus. One forgets how quickly an entirely new shared vernacular—“superspreader”, “social bubble”, “hygiene theater”—cropped up, almost overnight, in the midst of COVID; how we attempted to create logic amidst the most nonsensical societal shift of our lives.

It is equally remarkable how quickly those terms seem destined to fade away. 

Reading “The Plague Year” now is a lesson as much in the fickleness of interpreting the present as it is a demonstration of the dueling heroism and incompetence displayed during a people’s most trying days. The events which began transpiring mere days after the book’s publication necessarily transformed the text, almost instantly, from a secondary into a primary source. This is a development Wright clearly anticipated. Still, even with the acceptance of the necessary disclaimers—times are turbulent, history is mercurial—it is jarring to consider just how many more twists and turns the situation Wright describes had yet to take before arriving in the present, nearly three years after its publication.

Wright’s dominant closing narrative—a detailed description of the race to produce a COVID vaccine, which results in the the miracle of the Moderna shot—today reads like an impressive but woefully overambitious premonition. It is one which was widely held, by CDC as well as armchair experts, from the earliest days of the pandemic: that the development of a vaccine would end it all, stop the spread, get us back to normal.

To say nothing of the vaccine deniers who we could then only see dimly on the horizon, this is, clearly, not how things went down. Vaccines curtailed, drastically, hospitalizations and deaths, but the prevailing 2020 expectation that the vaccine would stop the virus entirely prevented this positive development—a real miracle in itself—from being perceived as such. By late 2021, with mysterious variants rampant, catching the disease for the first or second or third time seemed almost certain, inoculated or not. As of Wright’s writing, the highest the American daily average case count had been was just over 200,000 new cases a day. A year later, with three approved vaccines widely available throughout the U.S. for over half a year, that number reached over 800,000.

But if Wright used the vaccine as a narrative crutch, the rest of us did, too. Early in 2021, when three of my fully vaccinated friends caught COVID within days of each other, a part of myself broke—the part still left in 2020, the one which knew this would all be fixed by science, that we were just a shot away from going back. When people started catching it twice, the logical leaps induced were frightening; if the shot has holes, and catching the thing itself won’t give you immunity…

How would this ever end?

I was wrong to think it would be so easy because in 2020, when we needed to be righter than ever, everyone was wrong. That year, we experienced so many different forms of supposed reality—the truth changed so fast—that it was easier to pick one, cover our ears, and stick with it, future evidence be damned, than it was to submit to the whiplash of modern uncertainty. And the wronger we were, the surer we felt about things, the more we backed into our corners, rejecting everyone else who was wrong in even a slightly different way, building walls around our tribes impermeable to more than just the virus. Who wants to admit that they’re mistaken?

And we were so mistaken. We were wrong about vaccines and we were wrong to hoard toilet paper and we were wrong to stop people from taking runs outdoors. We were wrong to think that no one would vote and we were wrong to let electoral politics break up families—break up families—and we were wrong to assume a new government would be able to stop the virus much more than the old one. We were wrong to ignore intolerance for so long and then we were wrong to not ensure something tangible emerged out of our collective anger and then we were wrong to forget about said intolerance all over again by the end of the year. We were wrong to think that we’d change our habits when this was all over—that we’d make more room for the birds and plants and animals who seemed so unbothered by our whole escapade. That we would work together, finally, to build a starkly better world than the one we had lived in before.

But, in the moment, we were so sure, at one point or another, that we were right about all of this. We became irreversibly immersed in our untrue truths, and the whole thing became impossible to escape because so many of us discounted the possibility which was then too terrifying to confront: that all of it could be false. That none of us knew—knows—anything.

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Any attempt—there have been so many, and will be so many more—to assign logic to 2020 must contend with the reality that the year, more than any I can think of, ruthlessly rejected our countless contemporaneous efforts to do so. This essential fact about 2020 must be considered by retrospective accounts. Its shiftiness makes the designation of the year as A Year—2020 is destined to end up as one of those Years, isn’t it, right up there with the last Year, 1968—extraordinarily difficult.

‘68 is ‘68 because a few important things happened, but those things, overwhelmingly, were reflections of the decade that had preceded it. Woodstock and Beggar’s Banquet and Electric Ladyland and The White Album represented the apotheosis of the sonic movements which had been building over the decade. The political violence of that year—MLK was assassinated in April, RFK in June, American cities burned all summer—was the wrenching, predictable endpoint of a decade crammed with domestic atrocity, from the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing to the gunning down of Malcolm X to Bull Connor’s police dogs, incidents which all fueled the passing of real federal legislation, including the Civil and Voting Rights Acts under the bolder auspices of LBJ’s Great Society. 1968 was the 1960s.

Did 2020 summarize anything? Despite what we were told was the greatest mobilization of protestors in the country’s history, the vast uprisings of 2020 resulted in the passing of no federal legislation—nothing. In fact, for most, 2020’s most resounding political takeaway seems to be how flawed the conceits of our demands for justice were in the first place; how we were undisciplined, sloppy, overemotional, unfocused, idealistic. How we just did it for Instagram.

And what of the pandemic, that killer of over a million—over a million!—Americans and disruptor of so many more lives. Do we even want to remember? For three years, we’ve longed openly for a return to, I guess, the golden days of 2019. What does it mean to spend three years wishing that it was four years ago? We’re back, now—in May it became official, I guess—will any of it have meant anything? The bottom dropped out, and it took us three years to sort of scrape ourselves out of some awful collective hole, and now it seems we don’t have any interest in peering back down to see what the hell happened. Many of our brothers and sisters got buried down there, doomed to never make it out. Why worry about them when we have TikTok?

Perhaps this whole business of remembering (or not) is all more ‘68ish than meets the eye. It’s easy to forget, amidst the mythmaking which has carved such a prominent place for the year in our collective history, how unfulfilled many of that era’s promises ultimately proved. How the students calling themselves Marxists who shut down Paris abandoned the streets by the end of the spring to retreat to their parents’ second homes—it was time for summer vacation, after all. How Murakami fell out with the young revolutionaries in Tokyo after they graduated university and became corporate lawyers for Toyota and the hippies fled Haight-Ashbury late every Sunday afternoon—they had to lose the tie-dye to hustle back across the Bay for class. How Marlboros and Cokes and Budweisers kept flying off the shelves, revolution be damned. In 1968, the apotheosis of the counterculture, Richard Nixon stormed through the door. Ronald Reagan was creeping in his shadow. What did they want us to remember?

Moreover, for the majority of people in both 2020 and 1968, did the number of the year mean anything at all? I think often of Jay Caspian Kang’s piece, from early 2021, about the dichotomy in the Bay Area, where I was then living, between the tech workers (and students) who could afford, for dozens of reasons, to work remotely starting in March, and the migrant service workers tucked into green shacks on the side of a dilapidated race track on the outskirts of Berkeley—a community of just under four hundred mostly Latino workers who accounted for over twenty percent of Berkeley’s 2020 COVID cases despite representing a tiny fraction of the city’s total population—who could not. For communities like this, which were, overwhelmingly, the most widespread victims of the disease, what the fuck did the difference in the year make? 

It was 2020, but just like 2019 and 1968 and every other year the rest of the world wasn’t mourning, or even pretending to pay any special attention. Postmates was delivering in record time, and its service was “frictionless.” That was a 2020 truth we could all believe in.

At the end of February, in 2020, my college group chat was discussing the virus, something that, at that point, still seemed to be spreading in a different world. In my world, the real one, Elizabeth Warren had just owned Michael Bloomberg in a Democratic debate, even though it seemed like too little, too late, and the Lakers were really good, and I was in Madrid, studying Spanish and learning about French girls, and it was impossible that anything would come of any of this. Didn’t people understand that all they had to do was wash their hands? Hand washing had always made everything ok.

“Eh really not that bad.” I wrote to the group on March 3. “Like what r u gonna do. Wash ur hands and live your life.” One of my friends reacted with a heart emoji.

Then, when hand washing wasn’t enough, I quickly said goodbye to the new friends I had met abroad and waited in a long line in an empty airport to board an airplane. On the flight home I sat next to a woman who told me that if I could hold a deep breath for ten seconds without coughing it meant that I didn’t have COVID. This reassured me. Maybe the other kids wearing masks around me couldn’t hold a deep breath for ten seconds without coughing?

I returned home to my family, except I didn’t really see them much on account of the fact that I stayed in my room for the first week or so that I was home and used the little washroom next to the garage any time I needed to do anything in the bathroom. Then, when it was determined after about ten days that I was in the clear—ten days was still a long time then—I had to help bring in the groceries. But the thing about bringing in the groceries in 2020 was that we had to wash them all before they made it into the house. So, my dad would go to the grocery store and come back with too much food and he would dump it all on the porch and then I would sit on the porch—this was mostly my job, I’m not sure why—and wash, individually, each fruit and vegetable and bag and cereal box which was to enter our home. Mostly I did this with soap and water, but once April came and I started to resent the task I transitioned to performative, grand Klorox wipes of the bags, and assumed everything would be fine. At that point, I don’t think anyone else was really paying attention. 

And then at the end of May I watched the George Floyd video next to my mom, and I cried a lot, and though I cried a lot as a child I never cried about anything anymore, and thinking about this made me cry even more, and I sat at the kitchen table and cried and cried. My mom and I could go to protest, it was agreed, but only if we showered before leaving the house (to protect others from our COVID) and immediately upon returning to the house (to kill the COVID the others had given us). We protested all week. Tanks rolling through the Third Street Promenade. Rubber soles crunching over broken glass. Tear gas streaming off Ocean Boulevard. I saw lots of old friends from high school on the streets that week, but I didn’t acknowledge any of them. I wonder if they saw me, too?

We marched through Brentwood and Westwood and then we started marching towards Beverly Hills, but we never made it. Outside a golf course, we were sandwiched by police from the front and back, with riot shields and helmets and tanks, a sea of tanks, right next to what might have been the 14th hole, and then some of the protestors started shouting for all the white people to get to the front of the group. I started sort of sheepishly scooting forward but was interrupted by a policeman who announced on a speaker from behind us that it was after the 1pm curfew, and that this was our last chance to get out before being arrested. All fifty of us, I bet, would have been happy to go home then. 

Except that five seconds later the voice announced that we were under arrest, then and there, and then we sat down in the middle of the asphalt, my mom and I and a few dozen young people, and we waited to be called up to be handcuffed, one by one, and the young people were shouting out emergency phone numbers and scrawling ink onto their forearms and suddenly the whole thing felt very, very serious.

I got called up about twenty spots before my mom. I looked back as I did; there wasn’t much to do about anything at that point. My hands were ziptied behind my back and I was led to stand on the side of the road and I couldn’t see my mom and then, a few minutes later, a policeman ziptied me at the bicep to a senior studying film at UCLA. Eventually, I caught a glance of my mom, also cuffed and tied at the bicep to another young person, and we stood on the side of that road for many hours. When the police had taken all our names and Social Security numbers (though I blanked on mine when the officer asked), they cut our ties, one by one, and funneled us out onto Wilshire Boulevard.

My dad picked us up and drove us home from there, my mom and I, and he yelled at me for putting my mom at risk and I yelled at him for not understanding what was at stake, but, mostly, I moped in the back seat of the car, and when I went home I went into my room and turned off my phone. I laid in my bed for a long time. This time, I didn’t cry.

I remember all of these things happening, clearly, but I cannot place them in the correct sequential order the way I remember easily being able to do with events which transpired before 2020. Some days I remember sending the hand washing text to my friends sometime after we started rinsing our produce with soap, but before the protests. On others the protests come first, followed by the vegetable washing, and I don’t think about reprimanding my alarmist friends at all. Things never quite end up in the right order, though. I have a temporal shuffler in my head, and each card is one of a wild assortment of vivid memories, full of incomparable sound and light and color, that has crystallized amidst the madness of that year. At some point, you’d think these moments, if only by random chance, would line up in the correct order. They never do.

This, for me, is 2020’s most nagging symptom. Profound interruption and protracted lull, random spikes of viscous combustion, jutting nonsensically through a thick and eternal charcoal haze. It’s all right there, close enough to grasp, but none of it makes sense like it did before.

Will it ever leave my body?

In the meantime, I came across a few snippets I wrote a couple years ago, in El Salvador, which I’ve revived from the dead for your pleasure. Enjoy, and have a great week.

“Do you know what she was talking about? The acidity of the beans?”

I stop dead in my tracks. It’s twenty minutes after I last saw the man, and I had forgotten about him, in the way you forget about marginal characters like Johnny, the ones who abruptly disappear for hours at a time and then inexplicably return with four small styrofoam containers after long, wordless, gesticulating conversations with local maids over cans of pinto beans.

“No, man. Sorry about that.”

He inspects me, up and down, then grins. “No worries, bro.”

It’s three o’clock in El Tunco, and I am still stuffed from breakfast.

* * * * *

I’m watching Johnny swaying in the kitchen and trying not to let Esteban get away with another bogus Sorry turn—he’s “counting in his head,” he tells me, which is, apparently, meant to explain why he’s skipped the first two spots every time he moves his piece—when I suddenly wonder about Johnny and me. About the paths each of us took which ended with us in the same room, me playing Sorry with a six year old and him in the kitchen chopping jalapeños for himself and the girl he had moaning in his room half an hour earlier. What would Esteban and Johnny talk about if they played Sorry together? I don’t know anything about Esteban or Johnny, except, I guess, for the former’s Sorry prowess, but I sense innately that it would be impossible for either of the two to initiate a conversation with the other. They have shared a tight physical space for over an hour, and Johnny has stayed here for many days, yet I cannot imagine them interacting.

This thought doesn’t make me feel superior or selfless or like a good samaritan, pretending to be into a board game on a waveless afternoon to appease the child whose mom owns the youth hostel. It makes me jealous. Of their total autonomy; Johnny is chopping peppers and humming Marley like he’s on Pluto, and Esteban is immersed in his counting, and that’s what they’re doing, and though they’re a few feet apart they don’t care about, or even feel the need to acknowledge, the presence of the other.

I’m in the middle of convincing Esteban to adjust the way we’ve been using the Sorry card for the last half hour—he plays that whenever you pull a Sorry card, you just move the opponent’s piece back to their home base, and I’ve realized that playing this way makes it mathematically impossible for the game to end—when I see Johnny turn around from kitchen, where he’s consolidated all his ingredients into a pot, and squint in my direction. He looks back down at his food, gives it a stir, then moves his hand up to his mouth to lick off its contents before stopping, giving his fingers a sniff, and wiping his hand onto the side of his striped swim trunks instead. He tiptoes towards me, rerouting himself a foot or two further than he needs to to evade Esteban’s chair, and makes an announcement.

Through bleary eyes, he tells me he’s leaving his food on the stove. Just to keep it warm. And that he’ll be right back. But if I need to cook anything, for any reason, while he’s gone, to clear his stuff and go for it. He doesn’t wait for me to respond before strutting off, gingerly opening the front gate, and forgetting—perhaps too generous a term—to close it behind him.

* * * * *

I have no intention of cooking. At ten that morning, I had ordered a three dollar breakfast from a shack down the street, with eggs and toast and rice and beans, and, assuming based on the price that it wouldn’t be enough food, ordered three pupusas—one cheese, one spinach, and one garlic—to come with it. The cook, ten minutes after the waitress took my order, waddled over to my folding table, dipped her chin and raised her eyebrows in a way which, I registered a few crucial moments later, expressed great concern.

“Las pupusas para llevar?” she asked, her pitch soaring on the last syllable past that unmistakable point where curiosity ends and judgement begins.

No, no, I told her confidently, the pressure cooker of the interaction suddenly cranked all the way up, forcing me to respond before I’d had time to consider the significance of the unusual tone in her voice. No. I wanted to eat the pupusas with my food, not take them to go.

“Hm,” she muttered, rolling her eyes up in their sockets a notch, as if considering how to proceed. She walked back to the kitchen.

It wasn’t until she had taken a step or two away from me that I processed all of this, and realized that the body language the cook had displayed towards me is never the sort of body language you want to see from somebody in charge of making your pupusas. But it was too late to do anything, so I spent the next ten minutes replaying the conversation in my head, finding ways to subtly improve my Spanish responses to her questions with each playback, muttering to myself, sitting alone at a folding table in El Tunco, terrified of the possibilities soon to emerge from the kitchen.

Finally, the kitchen door swung open, my eggs on the way, but I was more interested in what I glimpsed in the background: the pupusa station, where, very briefly but very clearly, I could see three rows of three pupusas bubbling on the grill.

At the precise moment the waitress slid my eggs and rice and beans down on the blue checkered tablecloth in front of me, the significance of this image, combined with the cook’s tone, thundered down on me. Nothing was confirmed—the dough was still on the grill—but I was positive nonetheless: the pupusas came in orders of three. I had ordered nine pupusas, and I’d already rejected the option to take them to go.

Last August, I published my first short story in KGB Literary Magazine, a mag based out of KGB Bar in the East Village. The occasion was accompanied by a reading, which a number of trusty TRIAGE subscribers were kind enough to attend. We had a great time!

I’ve been to a lot of readings in the last few months, and (beware) a frustrated diatribe may be incoming; these events really aren’t the best way to interact with writing and reading themselves, which are, above all, highly solitary acts. But I can’t lie: getting up there and publicly getting into the weeds with this story, which I’d toiled on and wrestled with internally for the better part of a year, felt pretty damn good. I’m still pretty new on the scene, so I haven’t become old and jaded yet; I really appreciate everyone who came out, and everyone who’s given me really genuine (I think) feedback from reading the story in print.

And there’s exciting news! “No Reply” is now available to read online via the KGB website. It’s around 8,000 words long, so you’ll want to set aside between twenty and thirty minutes to read it, depending on how fast you go. And I really think you should; seven months later, I still feel really good about the piece, and think it’ll challenge and surprise you in ways you don’t anticipate. At its heart, it’s a mystery, and I suspect once you get into it you’ll find it hard to put down. I set out to write something unlike anything I was reading elsewhere that simultaneously wouldn’t be too esoteric to digest. And, well:

Seriously, if you like what I’ve been doing here, you should read (and share!) this story; I love the flexibility I have to do nonfiction stuff, but ultimately fiction is the direction I want to go in, which is a tougher slog industry-wise. You never know whose hands a story will fall into if you share it a few times.

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Finally, I want to thank the team at KGB, and in particular its editor Carrigan Miller, who was the first person outside my immediate family to embrace this story so vociferously (subscribe to Carrigan’s Substack, both because he’s brilliant and it’s quite good and because it will force him to write for it more).

Stay tuned to this space, where I’ll have another exciting announcement for New Yorkers in the next week or two. I’ve been a little quiet here over the last month as I work on balancing out my fiction-nonfiction output and integrate some fancy-schmancy professional stuff into my life, but I’ll be back more consistently soon. In the meantime, here’s a preview of “No Reply” (click here to jump straight to the full version):

Nathan Cole <nathanco97@gmail.com> Fri, Oct 13 at 10:23 PM

To: Svetlana <svetllama214@yahoo.com>

Dear Svetlana,

I’ve tried everything. Figured this’d be worth a shot. Don’t ask me how I found it.

After a week of unanswered messages, I figured I wouldn’t see you again. This, on its face, I could understand. I do understand. It’s a premature ending, but as you and I discussed, this had to end sometime. Now or later, it’s not so different in the long run, the sort of long run we knew. Somewhere inside I know I will, someday, accept it, that you and it will fade, become one great learning lesson, everything dissolving into the great puddle of shit I’ll force a smile and call a learning lesson for the rest of my life.

But there’s acceptance and there’s that other thing, the doubt, blasting me over and over, replaying our last conversation dozens, hundreds of times in my head. I’ve thought of every alternative, every path I could have wound our last conversation down by replacing a noun here, a word there, adjusting my tone at a critical moment, switching to the passive tense at a crucial juncture.

That the outcome holds in each imagined scenario hasn’t stopped my ongoing search for a different destination. I hold onto the hope I’ll get there. I imagine the most crushing blow will come only later, when the fact of my finally having discovered the right formula will run into the truth that I found it too late, and, worse, that it was only in my own head, not out there where it counts. Where you’d have any chance of realizing I’d even tried to get it all back.

It must have been that talk. Right?

You make a decision and you take whatever you want with you when you walk away. I haven’t spoken with many people about you, but the few I have talk about debt. She owes you an explanation. She doesn’t owe you anything. Owing, not owing. Would our debt have ever been settled? Was our language insufficient? Did we not transcend?

Nate

Svetlana <svetllama214@yahoo.com> Sun, Oct 15 at 8:21 PM

To: Nathan Cole <nathanco97@gmail.com>

Dear Nate,

Last night, a mountain lion chased me through the streets of the city. I never actually saw it until the very end, but I knew it was there, and I knew I had to get away. I sensed it, in the beginning, near the train station. I don’t remember how. I only began to run.

I sprinted in every which direction, surprising myself with the turns I took, the routes I followed. I tried outwitting the mountain lion, and I felt the best way to do it was to outsmart myself. Complicating the whole effort was that while I sprinted for basically as long as I wanted (I impressed myself with my stamina) my feet never quite made as much traction with the ground as I would have liked. I would say it was like trying to run on ice, but that wasn’t quite it. It was as if every street, park, and lot I ran through was covered in loose, invisible gravel. Of course, there was no gravel anywhere. Each surface was perfectly normal, but my soles kept slipping, surprised air kicking up behind me with each dubious tread. Anyways, even if I’d had a good grip, I knew, the whole time, that no matter what I did the mountain lion would find me. I continued to run.

S…

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It was 2016, and the National Football League was in trouble.

That fall, Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem for the first time, sparking a wave of (premonitory) conservative backlash against the solidly red-meat institution. Less than a year earlier, NFL games had been interspersed by trailers for “Concussion,” a film about a doctor’s quest to uncover the proliferation of brain damage amongst professional football players, embedded reminders of incidents like former linebacker Junior Seau’s 2012 suicide (Seau shot himself in the chest in order to preserve his brain for testing; subsequent imaging revealed Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy [CTE] present on his brain). The year before that, the league’s opening week was spoiled by the release of a video showing star Ravens running back Ray Rice punching, knocking out, and dragging his then-fiancé out of an Atlantic City elevator, the most high-profile incident in a recent string of domestic abuse cases involving NFL players.

Over that mid-2010s period, criticism of the league reached a fever pitch. It seemed obvious, at the time, that the NFL was in decline, a point only accentuated by a previously unimaginable trend: the league’s television ratings were down. This was taken as incontrovertible proof of impending demise. And what a righteous capitulation it would be; the league, after all, deserved what it so clearly had coming. Darth Vader commissioner Roger Goodell had botched the Rice situation about as badly as he could have, and his NFL was being sued by nearly five thousand retired players for its failure to properly protect them on the field. Above all, though, the product Goodell had to work with was violent. And this, simply, wasn’t going to fly. The on-field violence, it seemed, begot the off-field violence, and America was finally rejecting the NFL.

This was the unmistakable tenor of mainstream sports media’s coverage at the time, and the anti-NFL fever caught up with even the most fervently independent of analysts: me. In 2016, I was a freshman in college, writing a weekly sports column for my then-school’s newspaper, and I thought it was pretty clear why the NFL was in decline: all that brutality was catching up to it. In a piece titled “Violent Ends,” I wrote:

Understanding the decline in ratings requires an understanding of the fundamental principle that the game of tackle football is based upon: violence. Brutality has been the common denominator of the game’s evolution from an all-running sport to the eventual introduction of the forward pass through to the modern era.

Dismissing the decline in ratings as a product of short-term, ephemeral issues glosses over the more probable and likely more devastating explanation for the sudden decrease in popularity.”

Time and time again, the NFL has ignored and enabled serious, life-altering damage to both its own players and their families and spouses. And now, the NFL’s chickens are coming home to roost. The league’s seemingly sudden drop in popularity isn’t so sudden at all to those who have been paying attention. It’s simply retribution for years of intolerable incompetence, and fans are finally starting to catch on.

…and in the nine years since, the NFL has continued its precipitous fall into oblivion, talent drained out into safer sports, like basketball, whose meteoric cultural rise contrasts with the league felled so firmly to its knees that it would be unfathomable, unthinkable, unconscionable, that the most famous celebrity in the world would associate herself with a tight end stained by the dark mark of the league, and—sorry, wait. You’re telling me the NFL is…more…popular…than ever?

Yeah. I’d feel worse about my erroneous premonition if I hadn’t merely been riding the coattails of nearly every serious contemporary commentator, all of whom seemed positive that something then was indeed fundamentally rotten with the state of the league. Those pundits, all of them, were wrong. Following a brief dip in ratings, viewership shot back up to normal levels—despite the rise of cord-cutting and the decline of sports ratings generally after the pandemic—where it continues to dominate every most-watched television list in existence. It’s 2025, the Super Bowl is on Sunday, and the NFL is as popular as ever. Why?

It’s multifaceted. The league, by chance, has been blessed with a handful of truly transcendent, mesmerizing quarterbacks capable of performing with levels of athleticism and panache totally novel to the sport. It’s aided those stars with more generous rules both favoring the passing game and erring towards protecting the quarterback, so that games are more aesthetic and, generally, a bit safer. The Kansas City Chiefs, who play the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, have emerged as a compelling, household-name dynasty, spawning an all-time great in Patrick Mahomes and a cultural star in Travis Kelce (you may have heard of his girlfriend). Somehow, the NFL, despite having essentially the same racial makeup as the NBA, has avoided many of the cultural pitfalls of the latter; while the NBA took endless shit from conservatives for placing “Black Lives Matter” on its courts at the end of the 2020 season, the NFL has somehow managed to evade similar criticism for its “Inspire Change” campaign, which features (admittedly more anodyne) social justice messaging on helmets and in end zones.

Still, the underlying fundamentals of professional football remain largely unchanged compared to 2016, when it was supposedly in crisis. The NFL can claim whatever safety improvements it wants; it may be true that tackling techniques have improved over the last decade, and that the sorts of all-out, bone crushing hits you might find in a fuzzy, early-2000s YouTube compilation have largely been legislated out of the game. It’s probably safer to be a quarterback today than it was in 1990. But professional football remains an inordinately dangerous game played by some of the fastest men in the world who careen towards each other, helmets down, at ground speeds 99% of humans must enlist wheels to achieve, to take out ankles and knees and shoulders and, often, heads. We have no reason to believe that recent facile changes in gameplay will correlate in any significant way to post-NFL outcomes on player brain damage.

Meanwhile, despite releasing a report last year claiming player arrests had been cut in half since the Rice incident, the league continues to be plagued by an incessant flow of domestic abuse cases, ranging from the bizarre Deshaun Watson allegations a few years ago to the release of a video showing current Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt shoving and kicking a woman outside his home in 2018 (Watson received a contract with the most guaranteed money in NFL history from the Cleveland Browns as his scandal unfolded; the Chiefs cut Hunt upon the video’s release, then re-signed him this season—he’ll be on the field Sunday). And yet. Across nearly every demographic, on TV, on TikTok, on Spotify, the NFL dominates. The violence continues, and the ratings remain as high as ever.

It's tempting to attribute the league’s recent resilience to broader cultural changes, a sporting vibe shift perpetrated by the more masculine-aggressive attitudes which have come to be associated with the young men most likely to impact NFL discourse. It’s true that we’ve witnessed something of a mainstream resurgence of hyper-violent sport in the last year, the product, mostly, of a shift in what’s considered mainstream. In November, Donald Trump received his grandest post-election coronation at Dana White’s UFC 309, at Madison Square Garden, where the President-elect watched Jon “Bones” Jones Jr. (himself the perpetrator of an alleged assault against a woman last year) hit “the YMCA” octagon-side after a roundhouse kick to the ribs crippled his opponent. Clips from Power Slap, the White-owned “American slap fighting promotion company,” (competitors deliver unshielded slaps to opponents’ faces within a 60-second window) regularly pick up hundreds of millions of views. Cruelty is in vogue, and violence is the vibe.

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But, other than that mid-2010s dip (which itself never discernibly altered Super Bowl ratings), the NFL has stayed pretty reliably relevant through an untold number of internal scandals and alleged national “vibe shifts” which might have threatened a less secure institution’s place atop the American cultural food chain. Its mainstream popularity is not a product of some recent political trend. The NFL has always been, basically, the UFC hiding behind a slicker veneer, high-stakes, vicious combat fluffed up with the primped-and-primed, boxy jawline of CBS’s ex-quarterback commentator du jour and strategia which Thucydides might find arcane. Its secret sauce has been its ability to somehow funnel what is very clearly a widely shared, quasi-primitive thirst for brutality into a product of respectability; of fancy scoreboard graphics and elaborate halftime shows and A-list glamour.

Here is the crucial point I missed, almost a decade ago, in my haste to bury the league: the relationship between football and violence is symbiotic, not parasitic. For all the 2016 talk about an aversion to brutality, today it appears quite obvious that the resurgence and continued success of the NFL is in fact inextricable from the profound danger inherent in strapping on a helmet. There’s the halftime show and the tradition and Taylor Swift and the pageantry and the theme songs and the giant American Flag and Taylor Swift again and the big, green field which reminds you of how the grass smelled that summer when you finally got your hand under first-crush Sally’s shirt. Football delivers. But so too does, say, baseball, which features basically all the same sentimental hits minus the labyrinthine rulebook and unsavory aftertaste of CTE-induced prison cell hangings. And yet: something like 15 million people, on average, watched the World Series last year. It’s an inexact comparison, but at least 100 million Americans will watch the Super Bowl on Sunday.

We will do so almost entirely devoid of the moral hand-wringing and virtuous brow-furrowing which so dominated the sport’s discourse not so long ago. As much as I’d like to believe that I’m tuning in Sunday to watch Patrick Mahomes fling and Saquon Barkley juke in a vacuum, their performances separated from the 300-pound missiles buzzing, literally, right by their ears, I’m forced to confront the fact that I had absolutely no interest in last weekend’s flag football-style Pro Bowl, despite the big names and star talent participating in it. Plenty of leagues have star power, but none other takes up 72 out of 100 spots on a list of 2024’s most watched television shows. We watch not merely for celebrity but to see man at his limit, going all-out (you do not survive on an NFL field if you’re not going all-out) and risking everything, shielded only by a plastic helmet which doubles as a battering ram. To step onto the gridiron, in 2025, is to willingly accept the unfathomably grim risks accompanied by participation in professional football. It is to be one false step, always, from twitching extremities, a fifth concussion, cardiac arrest. It is to perform on a high wire in front of the world, the reward glory, riches, and a podcast, the risk, quite literally, an early and horrific death.

It is, in other words, unbelievably compelling. That’s an unpalatable admission given the real-life stakes, but I see no stronger explanation for the resiliency, in an otherwise crumbling media landscape, of professional football. In its perfunctory, PR-savvy way, the NFL has halfheartedly addressed the most fervent violence-based critiques which so dogged the league a decade ago. Its shrewdest calculation in the meantime, though, seems to have been its recognition that we, its viewers, don’t really want it to. ■

I took a bike ride last year and had this thought about ducks and geese. Three birds stood beside the path. They would have been either very small geese or very large ducks. In about 0.02 seconds the following thought shot through my head:

Maybe these are geese? They’re too small to be geese. But too large to be ducks. The odds that there’d be three equally massive ducks hanging out together on the side of the bike path seem suspiciously unlikely, but for some reason three abnormally small geese seem much more realistic. Therefore, they are geese.

Millions of neurons firing, billions of years of evolution, and this is the mind’s capstone project. Are there people who don’t have these minute, tiny thoughts constantly? My day-to-day is dominated by them, almost as much as it was as a child, when I actually dubbed a running inner monologue with its own name (“Through the Eyes of Nicky” was a sort of running reality show I kept up; I’d be boogie boarding or scootering and I’d conjure announcers, commentating my every ride, shot through lenses in my eyes). As a kid everything is greater—everything means everything. I felt that way until embarrassingly recently—that everything means everything. Sometimes I still get it. We patronize children for their lack of experience, but really their dearth of perspective is the most magical thing. Context fucks everything up. Big, grand, dominant feelings filled up my childhood. Memories from back then are accompanied by distinct, deep feelings in my stomach—some general, generic ones (embarrassment, wonder) but some so oddly specific that they feel like evolutionary malfunctions.

I have a memory of my elementary school Jog-a-Thon, for example, which even today manifests as a completely novel, undefined, specific feeling which cannot be conveyed in words. I take myself to be a rational person guided by some lodestar of logical agnosticism, whereby I maintain respect for the unknowable but ultimately defer to science; evolution, Darwin, mutation. Yet I can think of no biological impetus for the enormous associated pit which burrows in my stomach upon the consideration of my third through fifth grade Jog–a-Thons. It’s inexplicable to me. I assure you: there was nothing remarkable about these fundraising races. I’m positive I’d be hysterical at the sight of the event’s actual scale if I visited today. But it holds me. Why?

According to Freud (or is it Russell?) we die many times within our lifetimes. We’re reincarnated, transformed into a completely new self, every time we change. Our relationship with memory has always represented the strongest argument for that worldview, one which, if extrapolated out to its logical endpoint, leads to some shocking conclusions. Is there not, for example, an argument to be had that we die several times a day; nay, several times a second? That enough regularly changes within my environment, body, and mind to be able to claim that my former self perished at some undefined point not too long ago. We retain identity, of course, and memories—but I am not the same person. I died.

I can’t decide how morbid this thought is. In Charlie Kaufman’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a wacky memory loss surgery is necessary to reset a relationship. Yet are the main characters the same people when they meet again, memories wiped? Or are their blind spots to their past selves so massive that they must be considered reborn? It’s fairly obvious to me that each of them died—that the characters lose so much of themselves in their respective amnesiac operations that they cease to exist as they did before the surgeries. But where do we draw the line? “Eternal Sunshine” presents a pretty obvious example. What about the 99.9% of experience we lose automatically, without a passing thought? The leaves piled up in the gutter you passed on your walk to work, the dust gathered under the floor mat in your grandfather’s Subaru, the crack in the sidewalk which rushed by half an hour ago from beyond the grimy bus window? Are these not memories we’re forgetting, incessantly, and ignoring, merely because they don’t fit into the narratives we prefer to tell ourselves about our lives? Are we not forgetting everything?

Not forgetting like you do your mom’s phone number, or your childhood address, or your girlfriend’s friend’s name (which eluded you as soon as it was uttered). I mean everything; every thought, phrase, conversation, place, person you’ve ever considered. The mundane hum of life that really makes us who we are; do we not forget all that shit? Almost immediately? Take the “Eternal Sunshine” operations and multiply them by every thought you’ve ever had. We’re dying not just every time we go to bed and wake up, but every millisecond. Our existence is a continuous chain of death and rebirth, and we’re powerless to defend against it.

How we react to this finding is, of course, a constant source of anxiety, sadness, indifference, and amusement. There are extremes across the spectrum. Some write everything down to compensate—a compulsive effort to stoke memories down the line—to put off or soften the blow of impermanence. Others—the ones who have tuned out by now—find the revelation obvious, uninteresting, pedantic. They accept this fate as the essence of existence, are fine, even happy, retaining their core identities through these vicissitudes and leaving the rest behind. Many more never think of it at all.

I, myself, am deeply troubled by the thought.

It has to do with sleep. I’ve gone through stretches—months, weeks, random days—where, just as I’m about to drift off, my body seizes up: wait, it screams. What is about to happen? Where am I about to go? Will I be the same when I return? I jolt out of bed, take a lap, try to breathe, and either convince myself that I will or get so tired that the question becomes irrelevant. Usually it’s isolated there, in my bedroom. But sometimes it’s not.

I once went months—this was the summer of 2012 (I was 14) when death was inescapable to me, a feeling compounded by my inability to fathom why everyone else didn’t feel the same as I did. I watched the Olympics that summer and gawked at the packed stadiums full of duped people, people too distracted to come to terms with their fates. I spent that summer haunted by this thought, paralyzed by its implications. I found it unbearable, inescapable, to consider not just that infinity of darkness, non-existence, waiting for us, just around the corner, but that we were too distracted to know it was coming. This memory, too, of that summer, triggers one of those distinct stomach-feelings. My chest tightens, I seize up. I’m 14 again. Until I talk, or move, or sleep, or forget.

I’d be grateful, most of the time, to avoid this hassle altogether. I’ve been successful in stretches; nights filled with deep, blissful, uninterrupted sleep, enjoyment, not fear, of spectacle, sport. Infinity, before and after me, transforms in one apparently random moment into something entirely different from a doomed life sentence. The true acknowledgement of terminable being, an unshielded stare into the pure blackness of a steeply descending sea cave, reveals an untapped liberty profound enough to render all other universal details extraneous. The previously toe-curling knowledge of the free falling elevator’s impending demise, when viewed from just a slightly different perspective, transforms into a superpower. Futility eliminates consequence.

But then something happens and I wonder how, in some twisted way, I’ve come to forget the truth. And I’m not sure which side is better, or if I’m capable of walking the line. I sense the great challenge of my adult life will be interacting with a world undergirded by the supposition of permanence—hundreds of thousands packing Olympic stadiums in the name of Earthly allegiance—while simultaneously gripping its ephemerality.

No easy feat. To perpetually hang on to one end of the dueling yet identical high wires of nonexistence—to dangle always on one side of the dialectic of infinity—means sacrificing a series of values held by most of the rest of the world which center around balance. To deny consequence is to reject balance, to rebel against the grand underlying theory of cause and effect, to challenge the logic which drives nearly every choice made in all those mundane day-to-day moments which call for them. It is to oppose both religion and the opposition of religion itself.

It’s just very important, you see—very important—that I’m able to distinguish a goose from a duck.

In the spring of 1524, an Italian explorer named Giovanni de Verrazzano slipped his ship between a gap in the rocky, mid-Atlantic coastline and sailed into what he mistakenly took for a giant lake. This “lake,” really, was a harbor, and it linked to an elaborate system of tributaries, estuaries, and a single, wide river which snaked north along the western edge of a tall, skinny island. Not entirely satisfied with the view, apparently (like most explorers of the day, the captain was searching for a body of water linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, an imagined “Northwest Passage” whose reputation loomed so large in the New World imagination that Thomas Jefferson remained convinced of its existence into the nineteenth century) Verrazzano sailed around the harbor, briefly docked along an uncertain shoreline, and proceeded hastily back out to sea.

Do we care about this story? It’s an interesting counterfactual, I suppose, to consider how differently the history of New York City might have played out had Verrazzano decided to stick around (for one, the island’s first colonists would have spoken French; just as Henry Hudson was a British mercenary representing the Netherlands, Verrazzano sailed on behalf of France). But given the lack of notoriety pertaining to the origin stories of New York City which actually played out, I suspect the lore of Verrazzano’s lap around the future New York Harbor is destined to remain relegated to its present status: a historical footnote and the namesake of the city’s longest bridge.1

If you can name one at all, what’s your preferred New York origin story? Is it Hudson, sailing the Half Moon, pulling up to the southern tip of the island and establishing a trading post for the Dutch in 1609? How about the moment in 1626 Walloon trader Peter Minuit, in the first slimy New York real estate deal, agreed to “purchase” the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for the oft-cited price of $24? Or, for patriotism’s sake, was it the dramatic crescendo of November 1783, when a triumphant George Washington sailed into New York Harbor, waving American flag proudly greeting his troops from the mainland for the first time?

For a variety of reasons, none of these stories has quite stuck in the city’s popular imagination. Hudson’s journey isn’t quite satisfying enough; he, like Verrazzano, mostly happened upon the island in his search for a route to the Pacific, and got out of dodge himself as soon as he was able. Minuit’s purchase is rife with issues; aside from its illumination of the real reason it’s so hard to find an appropriate New York origin story (by 1600, living on Manhattan was far from “original” for at least 100 generations of Lenape locals), the 1626 “deal” between the indigenous residents of the island and the Dutch is fraught with historical inaccuracies, the least of which being that the natives were unlikely to have had any conception of land ownership.2 I love walking through the graveyard at Trinity Church, surrounded by the ghosts of the founding fathers, as much as anyone, but 1783 is simply too late in New York’s development to qualify as an appropriate moment of birth.

What, then, is New York City’s moment? Where’s our Romulus and Remus, our storming of the Bastille, our crossing of the Delaware? Is it possible, in the city so rich in iconography that entire sections of book stores in other cities are dedicated to tomes about New York, that there is no such moment?

The author Lucy Sante both makes exactly this point and takes it to its logical endpoint in “Low Life,” her 1991 classic: the defining story of the city overflowing with folklore is that it contains no defining story:

The myth of Manhattan, therefore, is cast in the future tense. It does not hark back to a heroic past, lacks it Romulus and Remus (except in the image of that transaction between Peter Minuit and the Canarsies, which is simply the first clever deal, the primordial ground-floor entry). New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.

In “Low Life,” Sante does her best to bring the forgotten dead—the sailors, prostitutes, and street merchants of 19th and early 20th century New York—back to life. The author revives a city teeming with hustlers, vice, and a plain weirdness unrecognizable to basically every Manhattanite today. “It was said in the 1880s that you could stand on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street and fire a shotgun in any direction without hitting an honest man,” Sante writes. “A story of the nineties had it that at Broadway and Forty-second someone yelled, ‘There’s the man who stole my watch!” whereupon twelve men ran off.’” Burlesque and striptease performers with names like Carmencita (famous for wearing corsets outside her dresses) and Little Egypt (the “exotic belly dancing prodigy” who “became the metonymic representative of the forbidden throughout the nineties”) generated citywide cycles of hysteria as the “mainstream” Broadway crowd catastrophized the supposed declining morality of the Downtown scene (if they weren’t spotted at the seedier dives themselves, the folks uptown weren’t up to much better). As city elites turned up their noses, newly-arriving immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, China, and Eastern Europe profoundly reshaped the city’s landscape, growing the population at an unprecedented scale and transforming, in an unplanned, ad-hoc fashion, the culture, values, and language of New York City.

Sante’s central thesis: that, far from homogenous and sterile, New York’s story is necessarily kaleidoscopic, cacophonous, irreconcilable (more “Big Onion” than “Big Apple”) arrives as disorientating news for many a modern New Yorker. The city has always been a place of projection, of localism-as-tourism, of torpid mimeticism; one could always stick to its postcard version, and, alternatively, you can still, if you know where to look, find plenty of weirdness in Manhattan. But it’s also true that the island has never been so anodyne, so expensive, so played out. The Knicks are a Kith concept brand; tourists and polo-rocking Big Ten grads alike scrub TikTok to move on the city’s best chopped cheese; some 1940s starlet’s great-granddaughter launches a flavored lip plumper and you can’t walk down the sidewalk in SoHo.

“The city was like this a century ago, and it remains so in the present,” Sante writes of Manhattan’s down-and-dirtiness. “There are, in fact, only two really significant differences between that world and ours: now there is a lot more technology, and everything is much more expensive, even proportionately.”

Having grown up amidst tales of two generations of elders’ upbringing on the Lower East Side, from the fifties through the eighties, I am not one to pine for a return to the city of old. Still, arguing, in a capitalist society, that somewhere is the same…except for that part about how now everything’s much more expensive…is a bit like…well, I don’t know. I’ve struggled for weeks to come up with a proper analogy there, probably because it’s pretty much everything (In a 2003 afterword to “Low Life,” Sante herself hints at her earlier underestimation of the city’s shift as she admits that she is no longer able to afford, despite her relative success, to live in the very burned-out tenements she stalked in her twenties). Anyone operating under the premise that Manhattan is the cultural driver of the city’s underground today, as it was during the nineteenth century period examined by Sante, is delusional, the butt of Nolita Dirtbag’s 2020s update to the famous joke undergirding Saul Steinberg’s iconic New Yorker cover depicting Manhattan as the center of the world:

Steinberg’s cover played on the myopic worldview New Yorkers take as they burrow into the city. But it could as easily be said that the average Manhattanite’s cityview is just as warped; that it’d be an equally appropriate joke to take Steinberg’s perspective, flip it to face eastward, and shrink down the outer boroughs into clumps just as amorphous as the artist’s depictions of China, Japan, and Russia are in the far distance.

Close to eight and a half million people live in New York City. Something like one and a half million of them live in Manhattan. Add together the rest of the neighborhoods which the New York journalist Ross Barkan recently called the outer boroughs of the “professional class” (Williamsburg, DUMBO, Astoria, etc.) and you end up with somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the New York City population living in the true outer boroughs, places, Barkan observes, known derogatorily as “deep” New York:

Among the professional class who live in the coveted outer borough neighborhoods—those that have properly gentrified—there is a term used to discuss and dismiss the rest, one I’ve come to resent: deep. Are you in deep Brooklyn or deep Queens? Depth is a measure of how far you are from Manhattan as well as the cultural exports of the neighborhoods considered to lie in proper commuting distance. It is time measured on the subway, as well as a greater psychological chasm that will not be crossed. Life isn’t quite happening, they imply, in deep Brooklyn or deep Queens. Not like in Bushwick or Astoria.

Whether the “shallow” professional class chooses to acknowledge it or not, it should be self-evident by now that more profound history, using the classical Sante definition, is being made today in the “deep” boroughs than anywhere else in the city by a decent margin. It’s where the political winds of the city are shifting more dynamically; Donald Trump increased his voter share by a larger gap in every outer borough than he did in Manhattan between 2020 and 2024 (as Barkan notes, Trump himself is from the “deep” Jamaica Estates neighborhood). I noticed more MAGA hats on a single stroll through Kingsbridge Heights, in the Bronx, last fall than I’d ever seen on the Lower East Side (I stayed away from Sovereign House, itself the topic of no less than four election thinkpieces, on election night).

It’s also where the population is changing, perhaps permanently, transforming the city just as the much-mythicized waves of immigration from Ellis Island reshaped it around the turn of the 20th century. I suspect I won’t read a better piece of reporting this year than Jordan Salama’s “New Yorker” deep dive into the indigenous Ecuadorian migrant experience in New York City from earlier this month. Where longtime New Yorkers might search in vain for a good origin story, many newly-arriving residents from Latin America today are receiving their preconceived images of the city months or years in advance through Instagram and, especially, TikTok, where friends, family, and acquaintances post about their experience, filtered through a distinct lens:

The most popular videos have hundreds of thousands of views. It is clear that users are emulating one another, particularly given that certain errors are repeated so often that they become trendy. The emoji of the red-white-and-blue Liberian flag is regularly used instead of the American one, and places in the New York area are spelled as they would be pronounced by Spanish-speaking migrants. (Junction Boulevard in Queens is called “La Jonson”; Roosevelt Avenue is “La Rusbel.”)

These migrants have a presence in Manhattan, but it’s in the shadows; working kitchens, on delivery bikes, in the subway. Their relationship with the place is wholly unique, unbeholden to any pre-existing notions of New York “tradition” propped up by curmudgeonly city veterans (many migrants, Salama notes, identify Times Square as merely “that place with the screens”). In this way, is their experience not quintessentially of their new home? I thought relentlessly of “Low Life” as I flipped through Salama’s piece; the slight localized distortions (“Rusbel” for Roosevelt) and community building (thousands of Ecuadorian migrants gather every Sunday at Flushing Meadows to play in soccer leagues whose teams are often organized by their native towns) evident in the Ecuadorian migrant experience here mirror, for example, the early 20th century diaspora of the Italian immigrant community on the Lower East Side organizing itself into blocks based on native region and dialect, or the distinct sayings which sprung out of the various Bowery Boy troupes of the mid-1800s.

New York is so large, so complex, so overwhelming, that it’s not so simple to say that malice alone has led to the widespread dismissal of the outer boroughs by the professional class. But just as the elites of the 19th century largely dismissed the parlor houses, new languages, and funhouses of the Bowery as belonging to a different city, so too the majority of Manhattanite-adjacent New Yorkers overlook the quintessential history playing out right beneath our noses, a neighborhood or two away, in the very city we are supposedly so enamored with elucidating. Understanding New York, in the messy, bottom-up way it must be understood, requires understanding such places, even and especially when such stories fall outside the purview of what’s considered “mainstream” New York. The history unfolding in the outer boroughs today is not transpiring adjacent to some “proper” history of the city. It is New York.

Last month, I hopped on a ferry at Stuyvesant Cove headed uptown on the East River, towards the eastern edge of the Bronx. It was late in the afternoon, and the long, pre-solstice December light struck the underbelly of the arching Hell Gate Bridge, the abandoned, sandy shore of South Brother Island, the cockpit windows sparkling off LaGuardia Airport. At one point, in an effort to orient myself, I peered back into the sun towards Manhattan. Its midtown skyscrapers jutted upward, framed in the foreground by the towering, barbed wire fences surrounding what I realized was Rikers Island. How peculiarly those very tall buildings in the background loomed.

For most of my life, a shocking number of the crucial choices I’ve made about who I spend my time with have been guided by a very particular inner dialogue, a conversation with myself which always culminates in the same, singular question:

Do they get it?

A mutual infatuation with the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History sparks a new friendship? He gets it. A blind date goes south when she starts complaining about the immigrants ruining Spain? She doesn’t get it.

I haven’t been alone. My late teenage years coincided with what, in retrospect, appears to have been the apotheosis of the Millennial Internet’s cultural relevance, a period when the implicit question, “Do they get it?” centered every relationship, critique, and news story of the day. Local high school football coaches put rivalry aside to raise money for a Turkey Trot? They get it. State Senator lounges on beach while teachers strike for equitable pay? He—obviously—doesn’t get it. I was startled, just a few weeks ago, to read a pundit of a recent Los Angeles Lakers trade cap off his analysis with a sigh of relief: “Finally, the Lakers get it.”

What exactly is it, you ask? Excellent question.

It is both completely obvious and entirely unknowable. You know it when you see it, but—more importantly—you especially know it when you don't see it. It is a vague elixir of self-awareness, charity, and kindness. But also, crucially, a lack of seriousness. The kind of person who gets it—not to mention the kind of person who considers the world in terms of whether other people get it—maintains a certain attitude of nonchalance about the state of things. Their heart’s in the right place, but they carry with them at all times an implicit understanding that somehow, by virtue of some elusive guiding force, the jig is up. They care about others, but somewhere not so far from the surface those who get it understand that, while there may be a series of specific, consequential subjects in the world, the vast majority of life simply isn’t that serious. Except, of course, for those obvious subjects within the singular worldview that are.

All around me, esteemed compatriots of the Internet—mods, avatars and eggs—have filtered their judgments through the same lens, by deploying the same question, without ever being quite sure of its actual meaning. With one exception, of course: anyone self-aware enough to frame the world through the lens of getting it must, themselves, get it.

Get it?

Does Don Quixote get it?

For those afflicted by the compulsion to filter the unknowable span of human existence into this singular question, the quandary is perhaps the most seminal in all of modern literature.

To a certain sort of observer, the answer is an emphatic, unequivocal, thundering no. Any casual reader of Miguel de Cervantes’ two-part opus (an admittedly rare distinction in 2024), written over two distinct stretches in the early 17th century, would almost certainly concur.1 The book’s titular protagonist—the character who has almost rotely come to be known as the trailblazer of modern literature, shaped every Spanish-language book which succeeded it, and attracted so much fame as to warrant a neologism in English which might supersede the notoriety of the original work itself—is, after all, the epitome of a man who does not get it.

His exploits may be familiar to you. Alonso Quijano, a lowly, middle-aged hidalgo in the dry, empty heart of Spain, becomes so enamored by the chivalric romances he spends his days reading that he decides to change his name, hire a squire, and hit the road in search of adventures himself.

Delusion quickly reveals itself. Don Quixote mistakes windmills for giants. Don Quixote slaughters a roaming herd of sheep on the mistaken pretense that the animals are in fact a threatening army. Don Quixote, stripped to his underpants in the middle of the night, slashes an inn owner’s stash of wineskins, feverishly taking them for enemies in a half-asleep daze. Don Quixote is crazy.

As I traveled throughout Spain in the fall, I received a torrent of theories diagnosing Don Quixote’s behavior (all from people, by the way, who have never read the book; apparently I’d have a better chance of locating the protagonist’s elusive love interest, the enchanted Dulcinea del Toboso, in Toboso, in 2025, than I do of finding a Spanish person who’s actually read “Don Quixote” cover to cover). Don Quixote is bipolar. He’s a madman. He’s on mushrooms (duh).

I found it difficult to argue with these assertions as I dutifully flipped my way through Cervantes’ work, meandering through España Vacía, peering out dusty windows, imagining the knight and his squire scaring off shepherds, bickering over dwindling rations, looking to the stars. Then I arrived at the halfway point of book number two. There, a single quote—one line of dialogue—took my breath away.

Don Quixote, fresh off sitting through his squire Sancho Panza’s eloquent recounting of a recent experience soaring through the atmosphere on the back of a wooden horse named Clavileño (part of an elaborate setup executed by a good-humored Duke and Dutchess the pair meet on the road), pulls his loyal assistant aside and implores him to agree to a truly strange arrangement. The knight errant had himself just endured a similarly unbelievable ordeal: a trip through the time-warped, castle-filled, enchanted Cave of Montesinos, where Don Quixote claims to have been regaled by a sorcerer named Merlin over three days and nights. Sancho Panza, who, from outside the cave, clocks his master’s time gone at just over an hour, is skeptical of the knight’s story from the beginning. So, after Sancho wraps up his own whimsical tale, Don Quixote turns and whispers into his squire’s ear:

“‘Sancho, since you want people to believe what you saw in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. I say no more’” (765).

The line made me stop in my tracks, squint, re-read the quote once, twice, three times. Was I really reading what I thought I was reading? Don Quixote, né Alonso Quijano, allowing the shadow of a doubt over his own identity to creep into his yet-unperturbed mind? Until this point—three quarters of the way through my thousand-page copy of the book—Don Quixote had stayed true to his identity, not belying for an instant his belief in the magical world he claims to inhabit. Suddenly he seeks the reassurance of his bumbling squire (of all people!) to validate his life’s mission? It’s the first sign of the protagonist’s slow slip out of delusion, away from insanity, towards far more treacherous territory: logic. It’s the first clue that Don Quixote may, in fact, get it.

The multitude of such discoveries, the depth and richness of the lessons to be learned, still, 415 years later, from Cervantes’ novel, are a mere component of the truly delectable experience that is reading “Don Quixote” for the first time in 2024. The revelatory joy of experiencing such a work is such that it’s nearly impossible to entirely parse out its sheer effervescence, its continual defiance of expectation even in the long face of its canonical status. From prose to character, stylistic experimentation to uncanny plot twists, this is perhaps the richest text ever written.

Ultimately, though, it’s the timeless themes of “Don Quixote” which buoy Cervantes’ reputation even today. More tightly written, surprising, funnier, and inclusive works have been published since. But perhaps no book better encapsulates, through each of its components, the singular potential of the novel, the form’s unique ability to directly confront the predicament of its own existence.

This, above all, is why “Don Quixote’s” anointment as the world’s “first modern novel” is so well deserved. The book’s narrator is all-knowing, ironic, self-reflexive; he’s happy to laugh at himself, wink at the reader, and burn the entire history of a particularly rote genre to the ground…in the very style of the genre he is so intent on excoriating. While that reading certainly underplays the relatively revolutionary aspects of “Don Quixote”—the protagonist’s age, the cementing of the “bumbling sidekick” character (poor, poor Sancho Panza), the explicit portrayal of poverty, the countless, winking meta-layers stacked throughout the tome—the thing which essentially keeps the reader engaged with “Don Quixote” is the fundamental delight in the adventures of this very peculiar knight errant. The meta elements are delicious garnishes, but fundamentally the hook which engages the reader—exceptional storytelling—is the same in “Don Quixote” as it is in the chivalries it’s lambasting. It’s a madness, a total absurdity, that as a reader I was on the edge of my seat for Cervantes’ entire 40-page digression into “A Tale of Inappropriate Curiosity,” a total break from the main action of the novel which follows a doomed and wholly tangential fictitious love triangle. But a good story is a good story, and no possible distraction could have steered my attention away from Cervantes’ digression at the moment I read it, despite how utterly nonsensical, in any traditional sense, the story is in relation to the rest of the book’s plot.

Enlightenment—a movement whose history is incomplete without Cervantes’ inclusion—was excellent at stripping away the veneers previously shielding the many teetering levels of scaffolding precariously holding society together. It was less adept at telling us what to do about all the new, scary information it unveiled, at providing a guide to threading the needle between its intractable contradictions: science and the unknowable, probability and God. This paradox plagued the prime movers themselves (think Galileo begrudgingly recanting heliocentrism in the face of the Pope), and, for his part, Cervantes’ own biography appears at first glance a contradiction. One of the central tensions of “Don Quixote” is how socially conservative its core values appear (a group I met up with in the north of Spain ran out of English books on a recent trip, so I had the hot idea of having a friend read “A Tale of Inappropriate Curiosity” aloud as a bedtime story one night, and, well, let’s just say being the guy who recommends the author who favorably compares the precious chastity of a young woman with an ermine fleeing a group of trappers to preserve its virginal white fur, as a casual bedtime story, without context, in a room full of women, might be inadvisable for anyone desperately clinging onto girly pop solidarity) amidst such bold stylistic experimentation.

This disparity has led many to falsely presume Cervantes was some sort of covert agent, surreptitiously subverting the church, because of the implausibility, faced with the audacity of his writing, of his near-certain true identity: a God-fearing, institution-crutching, patriarchy-upholding war veteran trying to scrape by as a writer amidst an early 17th century context unimaginable to most every contemporary western artist. For many, this discovery reveals a disappointing reality—how much more scintillating might the book’s backstory have been had the author of such a structurally subversive work been engaged in literary tradecraft, each dash of the quill an act of sabotage against the sleepy, repressive establishment?

In truth, though, the “contradiction” of Cervantes’ traditional role is so fitting as to itself deserve an extraneous, overdone aside in his own masterpiece. For what better exemplifies life amidst present western modernity than living with a full awareness of the snares—psychological, scientific, sociological, epistemological—inextricably trapping us within contemporary existence, yet, for an elixir of countless inscrutable, dancing impulses, falling victim to them anyway; acknowledging the frivolity of sport while painting your face Dodger blue, hating all men while relentlessly trying to hook up with one, self-consciously chasing the eggs no matter how much you understand, in your prefrontal cortex, how chimerical they actually are. Giving up religion but still believing in something. The act of burying oneself inside “Don Quixote” is as much a submersion into an electric field of sparkling, skull-busting prose as it is an admission of that irreconcilable tenet of cognitive science: awareness of bias does not spare one from falling victim to it.

When Don Quixote ultimately capitulates to reality in the book’s finale, all those who’d at first worked tirelessly to free the protagonist from his delusion—his priest, his cousins, the reader—find ourselves suddenly begging him to remain in la la land, to carry on in the universe of giants and washbins-as-helmets and magical caves; to fight on another day.

“Now that we’ve had news, Don Quixote sir, that the lady Dulcinea has been disenchanted, you come out with all that?” says Sansón Carrasco, a local student who’d months earlier dressed up as a knight errant and battled Don Quixote himself in a doomed effort rid the protagonist of his delusion, to the dying, and now apparently sane, hidalgo. “Now that we’re on the point of becoming shepherds, to spend all our time singing and living like lords, you want to turn yourself into a hermit? Stop it for goodness sake, and come to your senses, and forget all that idle nonsense” (977).

The motley crew around Quixote’s deathbed begs the main character: be a knight errant, be a shepherd, be whatever you want to be, so long as you keep the magic alive. Recent devotees to the religion of getting it find ourselves on our knees, inexplicably praying for the protraction of an obscure Spanish farmer’s fever dream. The very definition of sanity is flipped on its head as we realize that delusion in this world is no longer a symptom of queer divergence; it’s a means of survival. We strain to elongate Don Quixote’s dream, but really we’re fighting to extend ours.

Reading Don Quixote’s sly admission to Sancho Panza about the Cave of Montesinos, his breathless acknowledgement of his own fallibility, was perhaps the most shocking moment I’ve ever encountered in literature. Might the steadfast protagonist actually be living a lie, aware of precisely how ridiculous his exploits appear to the outside world? How can one live with such delusion?

Then you take a step back, look up from page 765 of a book that’s consumed a month of your life, the second part, one in which a man pretending to be a knight because he’s read so much about them is having a conversation with an admirer who himself is aware of the knight’s exploits only because he, somehow, read about all of it in the first book, and suddenly an opus dedicated to thrashing the genre of chivalry has spawned a generation of kids running around in suits of armor, both within the fictitious universe of the book and in real life, and you think, “Oh, shit.” Four hundred years later, I’m not really sure what the joke is—or who, exactly, is telling it—but I’m positive that, their universe being the same as ours, it’s being played on me.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds show us how close to the edge we are.

Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” 1969

It’s a sick perversity of the human condition, another modern delusion masquerading as a vestige of evolutionary biology (or perhaps it’s the other way around?): we do not understand time. It’s what supposedly separates us from the pack, a certain existential self-awareness, placement outside of self and into the fabric of the universe. Context is what separates us from the squirrel. An understanding of death justifies our supersession of the California Redwood.

In the realm of narrative analysis—territory entirely separate from the business of engulfed picnic tables, bulldozed Bentleys, and scorched teddy bears—the temptation to organize chaos into something resembling order is irresistible. So it is that one can look upon the scene in Southern California today and think of a thing as trite as irony. That one can observe the lunar remnants smoldering over the sparkling Pacific and think, rather coldly, about that resounding paradox of our age: our grandest delusion—that we have mastered time—is the heaviest chain linking us to our evolutionary history. Our stubborn insistence that we understand time, in the face of the overwhelming evidence that we do not, is in itself the strongest bond tying us to our now-anachronistic shared evolution, the most unequivocal rejoinder that we are, in fact, the pack. Thousand-degree heat does that: blurs the lines between us and them, plant and animal, rich and poor. You, me, them; we’re all caught in the fire raging very much in the present.

The action in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 speculative novel “The Ministry For the Future” begins in January 2025 with a heat wave in northern India. In Uttar Pradesh, temperatures near 110 degrees Fahrenheit at 60 percent humidity, triggering a mass “wet bulb” effect—a condition whereby high heat and humidity combine to prevent the evaporation of sweat on the human body, foiling homo sapiens’ primary mechanism of cooling down. The scene in India, one of the many Robinson portrays in his speculative preview of the world’s relationship with climate change from 2025 to 2050 (cli-fi, short for “climate fiction,” is the genre), gets ugly in a hurry. Looters hold a humanitarian worker at gunpoint as they rip an air conditioner off the wall; hundreds of millions are cut off from electricity; vultures circle as bodies rot on the roofs of dusty buildings. In the end, something like 20 million people are dead, killed by the heat. Many of them are found rotting in the water of a town lake “as hot as bath water, clearly hotter than body temperature; hotter than the last time he had tested it. It only made sense. He had read that if all the sun’s energy that hit Earth were captured by it rather than some bouncing away, temperatures would rise until the seas boiled. He could well imagine what that would be like. The lake felt only a few degrees from boiling” (Robinson 11).

This is what I mean about time: I know, somewhere, that there’s no practical difference, really, between 2023, 2024, 2025, or any of the years which are to shortly succeed them. Twenty-five is just a round number, the arbitrary date at which Robinson chose, almost certainly for simplicity’s sake, to begin his speculative narrative. But after I read “Ministry for the Future,” at the beginning of 2022, the first thing my brain did was say, “Well, at least we’re still three years away…” as if I hadn’t already lived through Katrina and Sandy and Camp, as if three years was the difference between me being a strong young and weak old man, enough time for my children to be born, grow up, and die. But that’s where I went, based on the most senseless logic imaginable: those are their problems.

Now, it’s 2025 and they’re ours. It’d be rich if this were the event that did it. If, after the hurricanes in the Caribbean, blazes in Lahaina, twisters in Iowa, it was the great fire of the Pacific Palisades which sparked America, easily the world’s leading all-time emitter of carbon, to action on climate. Perhaps the most sadistic aspect of this crisis, one which will wrench you into truly debauched knots the more you uncover about it, is that those living between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, the poorest parts of the world, are set to bear the brunt of the weather effects they are both the least responsible for perpetuating and the least capable of defending against. The same can’t be said about the owners of the Rolls Royces and screening rooms torched over the last few days in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Yet, for all the perverted optics, it’d be even richer if this leads to nothing at all, a preservation of the status quo, on the twisted logic that these wealthy Angelenos “had it coming.”

No. This is a wickedly complicated crisis which we’re far from understanding in its totality. Part of the problem of addressing it is that it’s practically impossible to diagnose with certainty; there have always been fires in LA, and maybe this one would have broken out, too, regardless of the vulnerable conditions—drought, wind, heat—undoubtedly exacerbated by climate change. It’s essential not to oversimplify this, to assume there’s some easy out, or to cower out of fear that the big, bad thing will suddenly strike all at once. Positive, simple, collective messaging will almost certainly be the key to stoking societal principles more aligned with what’s known as the Leopoldian land ethic: “What’s good is what’s good for the land.”

“In our current situation, the phrase can be usefully reworded as ‘what’s good is what’s good for the biosphere,’” Robinson writes in “Ministry for the Future.” “In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive, and many inefficiencies can now be understood as unintentionally salvational.”

But—at the risk of oversimplifying, overemotionalizing, catastrophizing—this is coming. It will likely arrive in piecemeal, peculiar, perhaps even unsatisfying forms, through means which might defy our contemporary efforts to categorize them. But it will be impossible to avoid. I don’t care where you live, what you do, or how little you care. It could be an ice storm in Chicago tomorrow, a tsunami in Seattle in the spring, a hurricane in New York in the fall. Yes, LA is particularly prone to fires. But it’d have challenged even the most satanic of minds to envision the scene residents of the Palisades woke up to yesterday on a walk through the neighborhood a week ago. A new fire just broke out off Sunset Boulevard. It’s begun spreading into the flats. You are not immune. My parents live in the West LA basin, sandwiched about dead in the middle between the Hollywood Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. Based on their location, an evacuation order would signal a truly apocalyptic situation in Los Angeles. The howling Santa Anas are rattling the windows as we speak. Their bags are packed.

My relationship with Los Angeles today can roughly be summarized by the title of my favorite Didion book: “Where I Was From.” In her work, Didion eviscerates the California Dream by meticulously pulling back the veneers upholding the state’s Wild West mythology; it was all engineered, she argues, the product of shady backroom handshakes between unfathomably powerful men, the whims of the global economy, employment patterns of the world’s largest corporations. Her case is unassailable; the folklore is a ruse. When I introduce myself today, I de-emphasize my LA upbringing (my poor, Valley Boy father), pivoting instead as quickly as I can to my maternal side’s deep New York City roots.

Still, it’s impossible for me to dispose of the thing, no matter how much I understand its folly, its fragility; the California promise is too great (I suspect Didion, who died in New York City, never quite let go, either). Strangely, it requires looking upon a topographic map to see it—to understand Los Angeles’ potential and limits in the face of nature. Once you do, you’ll notice what Didion might call the “mechanistic” accumulation of people in the region’s flat basins, a developmental concession urban planners in gridlocked New York, Philadelphia, or Washington, D.C. refused to make. In California, the nature was too big, the populations too small, to do anything but concede defeat to the land. So the people pooled in the “flats.”

Which left the hills. In many global cities, the poor gather at altitude; the slums of Bogotà, favelas of Rio, Manshiyat Nasser (the “Trash City”) of Cairo, all overlook the city from above. Not so in Los Angeles. While the masses pooled into the valleys, the rich carved their way into the hills. They sought the great promise of California: to live in concert with rather than opposition to the environment, to find an equilibrium between the built and natural worlds. From the start, striking such a balance was a tenuous proposition. Fires in 1933, 1966, 1968, 2018, the Northridge earthquake in 1994, served as constant reminders of “how close to the edge we are.” Still, the Platonic ripples remain tantalizing, and, if caught at the right time (see, outside rush hour), they represent the LA experience at its best: snaking down the sloping contours of Mulhoulland and Sunset Drives in the dead of night; Graham Nash crooning alongside Joni Mitchell over a piano in Laurel Canyon; slipping off for a sunset surf under the vertiginous cliffs at Point Dume.

The “Apocalypse LA” genre is far from original—“Contemplating Hell, that it/Must be even more like Los Angeles,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in 1941—and California is notorious for its vulnerability to natural disaster, but on my last few visits I’d noticed that its signature balance had tipped further and further out of whack. Coyotes have always been a fact of life in the city’s outskirts, but they increasingly were appearing (and devouring pets) in the flats, where nature had supposedly been tamed. A pair of towering skyscrapers downtown was left abandoned mid-construction after its mysterious Chinese developer ran out of money 30 stories into completion, the carcasses near-supertall sitting ducks for daring graffiti artists and BASE jumpers provided clear-shot views to Skid Row a few blocks east from the precarious perches. In the aftermath of 2020, a startling number of my parents’ friends purchased (and began defense training with) guns. A discerning family member started storing a baseball bat in the trunk.

LA will not die in the coming weeks. It’s too stubborn, its allure still, amidst the haze and ash, too great. In “Ministry for the Future,” Robinson foresees a superflood drowning the city sometime near the middle of the century. Kayakers paddle through Los Feliz on frenzied rescue missions, sailboats race down the Sepulveda Pass for kicks. Robinson may have gotten the disaster wrong, but who can fault the literary author, really, for reaching for the only Biblical parallel capable of destroying such a peculiar, emblematic place? He foretold the wrong calamity in the right city. A great flood may yet wash through the Los Angeles Basin. For now, it burns. ■

In the fall of 2021, perhaps the hardest course to get into at the University of California, Berkeley—a school featuring a row of campus parking spots reserved for Nobel Laureates (nine of whom are active professors)—was a class focused on spending less time on one’s phone taught not by a Nobel Prize winner, nor, even, by a tenured professor, but by a 22-year-old undergraduate named Dino Ambrosi. The 30ish-capacity course—"INFO 98: Becoming Tech Intentional"—fielded hundreds of applicants, enough that Ambrosi was forced to shut down the class application before the end of registration. At the alma mater of Apple founder Steve Wozniak, a gaggle of Berkeley students, apparently, were just about ready to sling their iPhones into Strawberry Creek.

Ambrosi had found his calling. Upon graduating, he forwent an entry-level job and founded Project Reboot, a program (modeled after his Berkeley course) designed to reset the tech habits of a population caught in an “epidemic of social distraction.” Over the last three years, he’s launched curriculum-based courses in dozens of schools, delivered over a hundred presentations (including, in 2023, a TED Talk with over two million views), and is preparing to scale Project Reboot up to increase its presence in communities across the globe.

“I want every kid in the country to go through this program and to have clear space on their phone,” Ambrosi told me this week. “We have a right to technology that protects our attention and we need to get it out to everyone regardless of their socioeconomic status.”

Ambrosi and I studied in the same year at Berkeley, and since graduating I’ve tracked Project Reboot from afar as it increasingly aligned with my own interests. After I wrote a piece last month examining our guilt-laden, and increasingly responsibility-free, relationships with our devices, I reached out to Ambrosi to set up a meeting. The result was a really fruitful, nuanced, and compelling discussion about our societal screen time debacle, replete with a number of really useful tips and practical suggestions for entering a more mindful relationship with your device. Our conversation is below.

This conversation was lightly edited for length and clarity.

NS: I want to get into how you kicked off Project Reboot. Was there a specific moment or escalation that made you realize, oh my God, this is something I not only need to tackle personally for myself, but this is something I want to help others with? What sort of sparked that for you?

DA: There were a few key pivotal moments. There were a couple of points during college where I had major wakeup calls about my own use of technology. Both of those were prompted by viewing my screen time report and just being like, ‘Holy shit.’ I'm literally scrolling more than I'm studying, and I just had this burst of motivation to get my screen time down. It was something that I struggled with personally for the first two and a half years of college in a massive way. And then I got this opportunity to go to New York and that was like my reset button. I saw a lot of personal benefits from fully getting off everything for about a month and also building more structure into my life and starting to tap into the positive aspects of technology.

It struck me upon reflection just how profoundly changing my screen time had impacted my life. I went from scraping by in school to starting this internship with no role and getting promoted to the company's first product manager. I'd gotten in much better shape. I was running marathons and mentally just felt so much better. I could actually read books again. So I was just like, wow, my cognitive capacity, mental health, physical health, all of this has skyrocketed and it's all centered around how I changed my relationship with technology. Nobody helped me do that. I had to figure it out. I had a lot of shame—if somebody saw my screen time report, I would have been mortified because I thought it was just me. And so that was the moment, reflecting on that that I realized I could help other people with this and I bet there are other people struggling with it too.

So I decided to create a class at Berkeley, and I was really unsure if it was going to work at all. I didn’t know if we'd get people to sign up. We had to get 17 seats filled to run the class and I remember I made the application and I thought I'd be surprised if we got ten people to apply to this class. It's about using your phone less. How many college students are going to apply? Over the three semesters that I taught [the class], we got over 400 applications to the course from Berkeley students. And we had to shut the application early every time because we had more than hit capacity. So that was another thing where it was like, wow, this is bigger than I thought it was. I mean, the average student that came into my class was spending almost seven hours a day, non-productively, on their screen, as a Berkeley student. I saw students with screen time reports as high as 16 hours a day. So it really was teaching that class and having conversations with college students and seeing that nobody's getting help around us. And it just became crystal clear to me that I needed to be the one to build that.

NS: I was struck reading your bio that if you took the phone out of the equation, you would appear to be someone working through a substance abuse issue or a gambling addiction. You're specifically using the word ‘addict.’

At least in the sort of college-educated, computer job milieu, I think there’s a recognition that we’re on our phones too much and that there is something negative going on with our relationship with our phones, right? My frustration recently has been that the discourse has remained discourse. I sort of tiptoed around making this explicit point in my piece, but the acknowledgement that the phones are a problem is almost being used as an excuse, right? “I'm going to blame the algorithm. I'm going to blame Mark Zuckerberg. I'm going to blame Elon.” How do you think about balancing a perfectly legitimate case that, yes, Mark Zuckerberg could snap his fingers and reshape Instagram, for example, make the experience less addictive. On the one hand, yes, that is true. On the other hand, there is a level of personal responsibility, and you use words like insecure, guilt, shame. This hits at a super personal place. Do you think about how you're balancing the very personal impulses that this draws from versus these larger, more structural factors?

DA: There's a lot there to unpack. I know I say phone addiction, social media addiction. I say that because it quickly gets people to understand what it is that I'm really getting at, which is chronic, unintentional use of digital technology. I don't think we're actually addicted to our phone or to Instagram or to YouTube. I think we get addicted to escaping discomfort by seeking distraction and it's just the shortest path of distraction that we've ever had. Right? Even if you got rid of it. Like I got rid of YouTube and Instagram off my phone, and I still found ways to chronically distract myself through content consumption.

NS: My thing is ESPN.com, for whatever reason. And if it wasn’t that, it’d be something else.

DA: Exactly. I think there’s a balance to be had. It's important to recognize the fact that, yes, the algorithms and the incentives that social media are running on make the problem worse and they make it more addictive. And what they've really done is they've pushed social media from being social media to being entertainment. That's what it is now. I think it's important to see that as the problem it is, and to recognize that there is some culpability that the social media platforms have.

Because it alleviates some of the shame—it's helpful to see it's not just you being weak. It's you being manipulated, that is a component of it and it takes some of the blame and shame away, which I think is an important thing. To me, the epitome of doomscrolling is burying yourself in a rabbit hole, doing a deep dive, consuming content through whatever platform as a means of escaping the very uncomfortable confrontation with the fact that you've lost control over your behavior. So what I see is that when people realize they've become addicted to social media, the addiction actually usually gets worse before it gets better. Because that psychological discomfort of the recognition that you've lost your agency is so profoundly uncomfortable and the reason you got addicted to it in the first place is because it’s your means of escaping discomfort. So I think there's value in recognizing and kind of “boogeyman-ing” Zuckerberg and social media, because it alleviates some of the shame and guilt that people are running away from by turning to the platforms.

But from a first principle's perspective, as long as anyone on the planet can create content and upload it to the Internet and anyone else can consume that content, this will always be a problem. I loved your distinction between the algorithm and the apparatus. I completely agree with that. The algorithm is a compounding factor, but it's not the core problem. At the end of the day, it all comes down to changing the way that you respond to discomfort.

NS: And that's a lot—I mean, this is a job that you traditionally think about belonging to a therapist or a family member. We're in the realm of insecurity, guilt and shame. If people could figure out their discomfort with the world and these very, very deep things—death and illness, whatever we're shielding ourselves from—how do you approach that? Because you're taking this big, scary, nebulous mixture of these super primal fears and insecurities and shames, and you're funneling it through the lens of the phone. When you're sitting down with a group, is there a way to ease people into this, or do you go right for the big existential stuff?

DA: I don't call out the “you're not actually addicted to your phone, you’re avoiding discomfort by seeking distraction” thing until the end of the meditation. I call it turning to the digital pacifier. One of the first things I talk about in my presentation is how I fell into this doomed spiral of escapism through my phone. And the way that I first help people think about what to do and how to change their relationship to it is by focusing on the way in which they view the phone. I really don't think that there is a “right” relationship to have with social media or the Internet in general. I honestly think you can use social media for four hours a day and have a better relationship with it than someone spending 30 minutes on it.

It's not black and white. I think screen time is a decent proxy for the real objective, which is to be intentional. My goal when I work with students or talk to parents is adherence to informed intentions. That's the only thing that I'm really trying to do. I'm not a therapist, I'm not fully trying to change how you respond to stress and anxiousness. This isn't a drug and alcohol class. Fundamentally, the objective of what we're trying to do is get you to build a relationship with your phone where you know how you want to use it and you're following through on that. And what I've tried to do is just boil down this very big nebulous question to two really simple core ideas from which people can create their own intentions.

The first is that you just have to recognize that social media is not actually free. You're just paying for it with your time. So the only reason it's not charging you money is because you're not the customer, you're the product, and it's profiting off the time that you're spending. So recognize that your time is super valuable. That's why I have that visualization of how many months an 18-year-old has left.

NS: It’s in your TED Talk. You begin with this incredible demonstration. You're speaking to a group of high school kids, and you show them a big set of bubbles which represent every month they have left in their life if they live to 90. And then you fill in the bubbles with how they're going to be spending their time: sleep, chores, work, all these different things. You leave them with the third or so free open bubbles left after all those tasks. Then you ask this very fundamental, existential question: how are you going to spend this time? You show that if they continue their screen time use, something like eighty or ninety percent of that of that free time is used up. You can hear an audible gasp in the room, as these kids are realizing, “Holy shit.”

This is why I asked the last question, because if you're 18 years old and you're thinking about what your life is going to be like at 90, you inherently are getting into some pretty heady, existential territory right off the bat. It’s the first thing you do in that video.

DA: It’s the first thing I do in all my talks.

NS: So you are leaning on this existential thing. And then you bring it down to a more molecular level. Particularly with the high school kids, are you sensing that this balance is something that's working? Is this something they're receptive to?

DA: I've done this talk over a hundred times at high schools now. So I've been able to go through a lot of iterations and you can see when things are clicking or when they're not. And there's a lot of initial hesitancies and resistances that I've learned I need to overcome. I’ve noticed that when I do that graph, there's two reactions. Some of them are terrified by it, and you can see the shock in their eyes. Those are the kids that know they have a bad relationship with it. And they see themselves in that and it scares the shit out of them.

The other kids look at it and think, okay, that's wild, but it doesn't apply to me because I'm not spending eight hours and 30 minutes a day on my phone. They're frustrated about their parents putting restrictions on their phones, and they feel like it's a very condescending, accusatory, belittling conversation.

When it comes to giving them advice, it's being non-prescriptive and non-judgmental. Your time is valuable. That's what that first graph represents. You're paying for social media with your time. Just make sure you're getting a good deal. Figure out what value it’s adding to your life. And I think it's really important to acknowledge there's still a lot of value there. I still use Instagram and YouTube every day and I genuinely believe that they are net positives to my life. So I'm not saying that we need to get rid of them or that the optimal screen time is zero. Again, figure out what value it adds to your life and how much of your time that's worth.

NS: I’ve noticed that you don’t demonize the phone. You specifically mentioned you use Instagram, YouTube, you're talking up the benefits of information on the internet. Is that both effective messaging and how you personally feel about the devices?

DA: Yes. I don't want that to soften the strong critique I have of the way that phones have changed society. I think for most people, it has been a net negative. I just think it has the potential to be a net positive.

NS: So you still think that within this digital context, there's a world in which society as a whole can have a positive relationship with our devices?

DA: 100%. I've seen it. I had kids in my class at Berkeley go from seven and a half hours of nonproductive screen time per day down to an hour and a half, and sustain that for long periods of time. Yeah, you can change it. I mean, I've done it for myself. I'm not perfect about it. I still fall into negative behavior with it. But 100% percent yes, it's possible to develop agency and autonomy and how you use the Internet, even with the platforms having the negative incentives that they do. You can't will your way to it. You can't just set the intention and expect it to happen. You actually have to make internal changes and external changes.

NS: Right, so let’s get into what some of these changes are, so we can move away from this more theoretical conversation into a more practical one. Let’s actually get into the prescriptive stuff here.

DA: Okay. So, there's four keys to having a healthy relationship with technology. There's your intentions—which we just talked about—your environment, your habits, and your mindset.

With your environment, there's three types of changes you can make. There are physical environment changes, digital environment changes and social environment changes. Physical environment changes, super easy one: move the phone charger. If you could stay off of your phone for the last hour and the first hour of the day, the other 22 hours get a hell of a lot easier. I cannot wait until more studies officially validate this, but anecdotally from giving people recommendations and seeing how they respond, no phone, no addictive technology for the first 30 minutes to an hour of the day is one of the most effective things you can do. And then, obviously in the evening, if you can stay off your phone, you'll fall asleep faster, you'll get more sleep, you'll get a higher quality of sleep and you'll wake up actually feeling refreshed. So it has this huge, cyclical reinforcement effect. If you can get those two things right, everything else is so much easier.

Then there's digital environment changes. These are the easiest ones of all. There's a lot of helpful tools that are coming out—we're finally getting technology that leverages the same understanding about how our brains work that social media has been using to predict us, but in the opposite direction. And that is super powerful—everybody needs to be using them. Are you familiar with Clearspace?

NS: Explain it to me.

[Ambrosi at this point spends two minutes attempting to find his phone, which he’d left upstairs during our call, before returning to demonstrate]

DA: It does a couple things. First off, it makes you pause before going on a distracting app. I have to go through a delay where I’ll actually see how much screen time my friends had the prior day. And then I can give them little kudos and whatnot. It then asks me how long I want to go on the app for. So I can say, okay, I’m going to use Instagram for a maximum of ten minutes, and after those ten minutes are up it kicks me off the app. I have to go through another delay to start another session, and I’ve given myself a budget of three Instagram sessions per day. If I go past that, I lose my streak in the Clearspace app and my friend gets a text message from Clearspace saying that I broke my streak. That’s often the missing thing, the peer to peer social accountability. There’s other stuff. Notifications. Chrome extensions. They don't solve the underlying problem, but they'll certainly make it a lot easier for you to approach it.

Then there's social environment changes. This is a big part of why I talk to schools. The cultural norms that drive students' behavior are super powerful, right? So if it's cool to chronically doom scroll, you're gonna chronically doom scroll. If it's expected that you respond to Snapchats within five minutes, otherwise it means that you don't like the person or if you break your 500 day streak, that signifies the ending of your relationship, you're chronically going to be on Snapchat, right? So we actually have to have a cultural shift around how we use it. And I think we're starting to see that happen, this shift towards in-person genuine social connection is becoming more sought-after. There's run clubs starting. The students at Berkeley now teaching my class are organizing phone-free social events. It's starting to become in-vogue to unplug. So I think we can see those norms start to shift.

Then there's habit changes. Generally it boils down to prioritizing satisfaction over pleasure. “I've been studying for a while. It's been a long day. I need to use my phone to take a break because it'll make me feel better.” But it doesn't make you feel better. It's actually draining. It makes you feel better for a couple of moments just like eating a bunch of candy and then you come out on the other side and it's like you've taken an anti-nap. Now that you're feeling lower, you're going to re-engage in the same behavior to try to get back up because you have even less motivation now. So that's how you get caught in that loop. The other option is to do something that doesn't feel bad in the moment, but it's an active form of leisure. Reading a book or going for a walk or Facetiming a friend or playing an instrument or cooking or organizing your room. If that can become your default response to boredom, stress, anxiousness, loneliness, social awkwardness, whatever it is, it's actually an effective coping mechanism. So starting to retrain that is really at the core of it.

Then lastly there's some mindset stuff. There’s underlying beliefs we have that really influence our behavior. Prioritizing consistency over intensity in your behavior change and preparing yourself for setbacks, because there will be setbacks. I still go through setbacks. The difference is now I know how to rebound from them. And that's something that everybody can learn. It just takes time.

NS: You mentioned this earlier, where there is almost a sense of embarrassment here, even as someone who has identified this as a huge problem for myself, there’s an element of shame about how pedantic all of these things are. There's this weird mix of how this little thing in my pocket is combined with this deep, existential insecurity I feel while using it, and it can feel like the solutions should be these grand, lusty dreams of a mass revolution against the phones. And it's striking and somewhat disappointing for me, and I think probably for a lot of people, to realize that in the face of what feels like such a huge transformation in both our personal lives and society that the solution here is literally moving my phone charger to the next room, or downloading an app that's going to send a text to my friend, or give me 10 second delays. It totally makes sense that these solutions work, but it feels embarrassing that I should have to resort to these little tiny things, and it ties into the shame I feel when I look at my screen time. Is this something you're thinking about?

DA: Yeah, I think there's a middle ground there between those two. This stupid little trivial, “Move the phone charger, that’s the solution?” No, that's not the solution. It's an element of the solution. The solution is to change your brain. And that can happen. Your brain is always changing. When you first got a phone, it wasn't immediately a huge problem. It became a problem because that phone changed your brain over time and it's designed to do that. And the fact that it changed your brain means that your brain can change in the opposite direction. So the solution is to become more intentional, mindful, disciplined, and resilient. And that is a much grander objective than moving the phone charger.

There's this dissonance that people have—we identify as the narrating voice in our head, right? We identify as the version of ourselves that looks at that graph of our remaining months and sees 90% of our remaining free time taken up by this stupid little screen that's not adding value to our lives and we’re mortified by that idea, right? We often intuitively view that aspect of ourselves as all that there is, that inner narrator, that prefrontal cortex part of our brain. But we are more than that. Right? That conscious voice in our head rests upon this archaic, Paleolithic jumble of neural pathways that's not designed for the modern world, and we're not aware of it. But it drives our behavior more than the conscious part of our mind does, right? So literally recognizing that you, as in Nicky Shapiro, who’s reasoning about his own screen time—that’s not all you are. You're up against your own biology. And your biology is not designed to live with the smartphone in your pocket. So recognizing that it's a deeper issue and you have to have a more nuanced understanding of how your brain works and how you make decisions and what drives your actions. And it will benefit you not only in terms of your screen time, but in terms of your entire life.

Even I, a creature who prides myself on my unflappability in the face of such blasphemous propagandist efforts, have to reluctantly admit: that ad caught my eye. Two gorgeous celebrities, lounging around in paradise, looking to meet up, inexplicably diving into dark, salty seas. Sue me—I immediately wanted to know more. What could this audiovisual bacchanal possibly be selling?

It was said by Don Draper, America’s preeminent scholar of advertising wisdom, that the greatest marketing opportunity “since the invention of cereal” was that moment in the sixties when the six big American cigarette companies were staring down the blank marketing slate brought on by the surgeon general’s unfortunate recent revelation that smoking a pack a day was not in fact beneficial for one’s health.

“We have six identical companies making six identical products,” Draper says to a skeptical Lucky Strike executive suite in the pilot of “Mad Men.” “We can say anything we want.”

Draper was right about the power of saying “anything we want,” but he was talking about the wrong industry. The greatest advertising opportunity, ad infinitum, will forever and always be not in marketing cigarettes but in selling smells.

Fragrances. Perfumes. Deodorants. Think the shadowy image of a long, lean cigarette emitting a dark, mysterious plume of spiraling smoke is an ad agency’s dream? Try an even more illusory starting point: nothing. Because what, exactly, is there to identify with a scent amidst an exclusively audiovisual advertising landscape? Everyone knows what a woman smoking a cigarette looks like, feels like, is. Everyone has seen, been inside, a Volkswagen, a Chevy, a Toyota. You know what Gatorade tastes like.

There is, apparently, something called “FragTok,” an internet community of “fragheads” who really know their scents. This subgroup, perhaps, can conjure concrete olfactory delights at the mere mention of a specific perfume. The vast majority of us, though, represent a pickle for fragrance companies looking to tap into new markets. How to possibly convey the sensory experience of, say, Chanel No. 5, in a television commercial? The short answer is that you can’t. And so these ads have gone in the opposite direction: they don’t even try to explain what the scent is. Which is, from an advertising perspective, really, really smart (I’d argue the half-second cut to Robbie actually applying the advertised fragrance is the least effective part of that Chanel ad). Why waste time explaining what your chimerical product is? Instead, show what it can be by paying the two most “it” actors of the moment (at this time a year ago, anyway) an outrageous amount of money to star in a Luca Guadagnino-directed spot in which they drive unthinkably expensive vehicles and lewdly jump into crystal clear water in the foreground of the most renowned electronic music of the 21st century. Because if you’re selling a scent, you’re selling nothing. You have options.

The most effective fragrance ads understand this; others miss the boat. As a kid, our family got Sports Illustrated delivered to the house, back when Sports Illustrated still mattered, and cologne ads near the front of the issue regularly featured fold-out leaflets which, when opened, would unleash a microdose of whatever scent Polo Ralph Lauren et al were pushing at the time. Even as a ten-year-old, I recognized that these ads missed the point. I was no different from the average Sports Illustrated reader at that time in having zero idea how to even begin to imagine the scent of a Hugo Boss fragrance. Whatever idea I had, though, was surely more appealing (aided by whatever touched-up amalgamation of horses, polo sticks, and slicked hair was displayed on the page) than the one which actualized as I unfolded the tab and leaned in to discover the scent. As I inhaled, the luxuriant scene depicted on the page snapped into reality, and, suddenly, I became myself: a prepubescent child, hunched over on the toilet, snorting at some approximate, overwhelming, pasted-in fragrance I could rip out and throw in the garbage whenever I pleased (a fate met by practically all of those hideous ads). These tactile pages overlooked the power of the illusory, squandering the untapped, open-ended magic of the nose.

The most memorable campaigns of my youth recognized that the smell was besides the point. No example better proves that truism than AXE deodorant’s 2009 body spray campaign. It was universally acknowledged, back then, at my middle school (I was in sixth grade) that the AXE product line, down the board, was rancid. The stuff was ubiquitous anyway. Why?

Double Pits to Chesty.

Very few men born in the United States during the nineties don’t need additional context in support of that paragraph. To everyone else (you miserable philistines, deprived troglodytes), I offer the following video, perhaps the most influential thirty-second clip of my childhood, in an effort to provide a mere facsimile of the experience of a truly profound early-millennium, pre-teen American brainwashing:

Attempting to contemporaneously convey the effects of this advertisement on an 11-year-old boy in 2009 requires stepping into what today feels like an alternate universe, one whose fate was decided by a series of visceral, inscrutable forces which were, above all, highly sensory: the strict slamming of metal lockers, heavy palm slaps to bare backs (“five-stars,” these smacks were dubbed), elusive bobbing of curly, delicate hair. Within such a context, the imagery associated with the depicted motorbikes, sex, and ostentatious deodorant spray in this AXE commercial were a natural fit. From an advertising standpoint, we were sitting ducks.

The spot had it all. Think getting Robbie and Elordi to collaborate, in 2024, made a big splash? Try 2009 Adam Jones, a freestyle motocross biker who (for some reason) meant enough to the then-10 to 13-year-old demographic that enough AXE body spray flew off the shelves that year to justify a Double Pits to Chesty sequel featuring actually-quite-famous skateboarder Ryan Sheckler (who claims to have been paid a million dollars to appear) later that year.

When I tell you that the Palms Middle School P.E. department’s signature Friday “Lap Days” were thrown into serious jeopardy in 2009 because the schoolboys were too busy a) spraying AXE deodorant into each other’s faces and b) mimicking the “Double Pits to Chesty” move as we rounded the three-quarter turn around the cafeteria…I really mean it. The stuff was outrageously popular, even though (or perhaps, in retrospect, because of the fact that) the deodorant itself was universally acknowledged to be toxically odious. Marketing! If we’d sniffed the stuff out of a magazine, we might have keeled over. Instead, we associated it with this:

…and this:

…at a time when loud, fast motorbikes1 and getting within a two-foot radius of a girl were as close to our lodestars as anything.

The next year brought an equally unique, even more influential player into the fragrant propaganda game: the Old Spice centaur. I’d like to view the introduction of the centaur as a more mature, refined evolution of the AXE ethos; increased elegance and sophistication, underpinned by (barely) coded, and actually quite perverse, phallic humor:

The deodorant ad reached its unquestionable apotheosis just a year after that (you’ll notice the similarities between this pattern of creative improvement and Stanley Kubrick’s midcentury run of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon) with Old Spice’s “Smell Like a Man, Man” spot, an advertisement which single-handedly turned around the decaying Old Spice brand and may or may not be responsible for me having worn “Fiji” scented deodorant for the entirety of the 14 years since:

Now, I’m no Francis Kurkdjian, king industry nose; I’m just a layman, relaying the wisdom of the masses as earnestly as I can to those wizards and gods, magicians and sorcerers, who by day bear the grave responsibility, the full burden of the blank slate, bestowed upon only those staunch enough to handle the charge of crafting the next generation of pre-teen fragrance commercials. Judging by the recent Chanel spot, we’re in okay, if a bit too mature, hands. But, if a review of the last two decades of literature reveals anything, it’s that there’s always room for improvement in the scented ad game. Thankfully, our forefathers have provided a model—untainted, I assure you, by the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia which I can already hear my detractors baselessly pointing out—to emulate as we press forward into the dark unknown of our fragrant future.

I’ve cut back my podcast consumption recently, but a guilty pleasure of mine is tuning into every episode Bill Simmons records with the writer Chuck Klosterman. The two catch up a few times a year, and their latest, appropriately titled, “A Holiday Check-in on Anything and Everything,” was typically broad, loose, and wide-ranging, filled with the sort of open-ended, “just asking questions”-driven discourse which makes the medium so popular. To the extent Simmons and Klosterman are “experts” about anything, it’s consuming and analyzing culture (Klosterman wrote a book about the Nineties which was apparently quite good), so sticking them together results in conversations almost Socratic in their dependence on open-ended questions which neither man has any idea how to answer. Which, I have to admit, can be pretty entertaining, and even, occasionally, really useful.1

I found their dialogue between 30:00 and 60:00 of the episode to be especially instructive, because I think it’s indicative of how lots of people are feeling right now: super fucking confused. Klosterman attempts to diagnose this feeling by citing a highly anecdotal example: after the election, he says, he texted a range of friends, asking them, on a scale of 1-10, how surprised they were by its result. He reports that his best-informed friends, the ones on top of not just the news but the niche discursive cycles within mainstream media, were overwhelmingly more surprised by the outcome of the election, giving answers from 7-10, than his friends who were relatively less dialed in to the media. Klosterman has an interesting takeaway from the exercise:

“I now sort of have the creeping suspicion that engagement with media distances us from reality. That the more information I take in, the less I understand the world. And I don’t know what to do about that, because that’s a real issue if that’s true. And that’s how it feels for me now. It feels that my perception of what the world is is being so shaped by these things that I’m not even close to what’s actually happening.”

Simmons, whose out-of-depthness here actually helps to frame the conversation, goes on to run through a few of the common post-election talking points thrown around in the wake of the Democrats’ defeat (it was the Rogan bros, Biden’s family, inflation, etc.). Then, amidst Simmons’ revisionism, Klosterman suddenly interjects:

“Anything in the past can prove anything. All these things people have been saying about Harris, if she had won, would still be part of the discourse. It would just be, ‘See, it was true.’ So because all of this discourse is, I hate to say it, it’s just made up…I just don’t fucking know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s happening in the world.”

Now, Klosterman’s opinion here is being shaped by an impromptu text he asked a few of his friends to respond to. I understand. This is methodological malfeasance, a statistically inadequate, crackpot way to assess the current state of the American population. But I also think that it matters. And it matters because this unofficial style of “polling,” the tiny, anecdotal experiences that everyday people have with their friends, neighbors, and colleagues, disproportionately swing how people feel about the larger world around them, providing takeaways which may be erroneous and understudied but which nonetheless make up a significant percentage of the human experience (for someone in Klosterman’s milieux, that plays out as the dissonance between seeing that New Yorker cover in August and living through the election itself in November). Over-dependence on lived experience is of course a bias to be aware of, particularly as a writer. But it’s precisely because it has such a disproportionate impact on people’s perception of the world that it should not be ignored.

And I think a lot of people right now, both inside and outside the indigo blob/Professional Managerial Class milieux, at all levels of society, feel like Klosterman: we don’t have any idea what’s going on. This sense is then reinforced by the anecdotal understanding that none of our friends and family seem to know what’s going on, either. We’ve been unsuccessful in our efforts to identify one grand narrative, a singular cohesive thesis, to explain the admittedly strange…mood?...that’s seemed to settle in over the world lately.

I can hear the cries of protest already; too much dependence on lived experience! Too many chimerical words like mood! Stick to some objectivism!

Which is all well and good. Stats, data, models; these are all obviously essential tools in the quest to understand the modern world. I read and trust lots of thinkers who depend on them. But what’s too often overlooked amidst the pushback to anecdotal experiences like Klosterman’s is that, more often than not, it’s the confusion itself, in the middle of disorienting epochs, which throws society off-kilter and begets further crisis. Rather than dismissing individual, disorienting experiences as extraneous and unhelpful, it would be wise to recognize that the contemporaneous confusion people feel about the world is often the entire point.

Turning to the past can help contextualize such a situation. In his seminal history, “The Weimar Republic,” Detlev Peukert, perhaps the all-time leading historian of interwar Germany, makes the following point after introducing a methodology for categorizing the different aspects of interwar German society between 1920 and 1923 into organized, neat segments:

It should, though, be borne in mind that a schematic approach of this sort runs the risk of distorting the historical picture in an opposite sense, since the broad shape of events during the years of post-war crisis was, after all, obscure to people living at the time; indeed, the very confusion felt by contemporaries and the interdependence of the problems in which they were caught up were perhaps the most decisive factors of the post-war era. (52)

To push Peukert’s message forward a century, Klosterman’s uncertainty is in itself indicative of a crisis, and the mass effects of large parts of the population feeling equally confused and disoriented really matter. In post-WWI Germany, a multitude of factors, most notably hyperinflation (by December of 1923 German inflation had ballooned to 1,261 thousand million times higher than it’d been in 1913; for comparison, U.S. inflation under Joe Biden peaked at 9.1% year over year), pushed the psyches of everyday Germans to the brink.2 On the 1920s German reaction to hyperinflation, Peukert writes:

We should remember that the effects on individuals were far more confused and confusing. Two individuals from the same broad social class might be affected very differently, depending on the precise period in question, the part of the country in which they lived and their exact role within the fabric of the economy. Indeed, it was precisely through the confusion experienced by individuals and their fears for their social status that the real psychological impact of the inflation made itself felt. (66)

Now, we are not living in Weimar Germany, as it’s become something of a cliché for armchair historians to suggest over the last decade. I don’t mean to insinuate that we’re sliding towards 1933 Germany (the Weimar Republic, it should be noted, survived the hyperinflation crisis and continued on for another decade). One of Peukert’s central theses, in fact, is that Weimar is worth studying in its own right, separate from the fact of what looks, from today’s standpoint, to be its inevitable demise. Even if it appears clear in retrospect that global conditions signaled a tragic outcome for Germany, German citizens living through the 1920s did not feel as if the ultimate rise of Hitler and the Nazis was inevitable. They were living in the moment, perplexed and disoriented, attempting to sort out what was going on in the world and survive.

How might we, in real-time, grapple with this confusion? There are methods of analyzing such a situation in real-time. The economist and historian Adam Tooze’s framework of the “polycrisis” attempts to reckon with exactly this real-time uncertainty (emphasis mine):

A polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts…what is striking is the deep uncertainty that surrounds several of the crises (e.g. new COVID variants, or nuclear escalation). These are tail risks which can no longer be ignored but to which it is hard to attach a real probability.

Tooze’s “risk matrix,” from 2022, looks like this:

Yeah. But however crude and arbitrary such a map may be, it at least attempts to recognize the profound and peculiar ripple effects which one crisis can layer atop another, creating a maze of intersecting lines and angles which are, above all, highly confounding. And it’s precisely their confounding nature—the sinking feeling you get looking at Tooze’s chart—which reinforces the confusion, in itself adding more chaos and further disorienting large swaths of the population.

By synthesizing Peukert’s and Tooze’s frameworks, we see how the seemingly separate issues of “confusion” and “interdependence” are actually deeply interrelated. Both academics are concerned with broad societal trends, yet each of them accepts as an underlying assumption that individual confusion itself can self-reciprocate, creating unpredictable and often bizarre feedback loops prone to generate novel and strange material historical outcomes. The confusion you feel, in other words, matters, not just in a therapy-speak, “you are Kenough” sense, but in real, material terms borne out by history.

It’s important to take lessons away from the election in an effort to diagnose exactly what’s going on in the country and the world; I myself feel strongly, for example, that Democrats should seriously reconsider their platform in the wake of November’s verdict. Alongside such revisionism, though, it’s equally relevant to continue exploring the exact vagueness Klosterman and so many others are feeling in the present moment. More often than not, it’s this confusion itself which portends a crisis.

To travel from New York City to the mountains of Minca, a small village in the jungle near Colombia’s northeast coast, one must fly six hours to Bogotá, catch a connecting flight to Santa Marta, hire a taxi into that town’s square, haggle with a crowd of drivers for a seat on a twisting, hourlong ride in a converted school bus to a small village set in a sweeping valley, and then, depending on the weather, hire a man on a motorcycle, for around two U.S. dollars, to carry you and your luggage up a steep dirt road into the clouds. 

The last leg of the journey, on the motorbike, depends on the elements because, on occasion, it rains so much in Minca (the town receives around 90 inches of precipitation a year) that its many rivers, streams, and creeks are prone to flood the single dirt road which ascends away from a quaint town center. When I visited Minca, just over two years ago, one such downpour had just begun, and the moto drivers, upon the arrival of myself and two freshly minted friends, were immersed in a debate about how feasible a trip up the mountain—to our accommodations—would be given the wet conditions. Some drivers were more confident than others. The three of us had packed relatively light, each with one large and one small backpack, but our luggage still added a not-insignificant weight to our pre-existing, and highly varying, loads.

“Eh, ¿por qué no?” the boldest of the drivers allowed after a few minutes of dithering. It was the ringing endorsement we’d been waiting for. Two of his buddies, with palpably less gumption, reluctantly joined the party. We had our rides up the mountain.

It was immediately evident why the drivers had been so hesitant. I’d have had serious reservations about driving up that road myself in a hefty four-wheeler on a dry day; with the rain dumping down on us that afternoon, it was barely traversable. The bike’s wheels—weighed down by the combined heft of myself, the driver I was pressed against, and the backpack I’d buckled on with every conceivable strap on the apparatus—sunk into the slick road, shiny like soft, light clay molded with dripping hands. I dug my wrists into the driver’s hips, completely at his mercy as we swerved around precipitous barriers and splashed through pockets of water determined to banish the word “puddle” into obsolescence. At the most harrowing points my driver would look back with a smirk (I’d been assigned the devious one). 

After an hour of herking and jerking (including the traversal of a raging river which had formed amidst the downpour, replete with dozens of hollering local spectators and an infinitesimal moment amidst the crossing when I felt the wheels of the bike lose contact with the ground), we arrived at our destination, which turned out to be a combination of a small lodge and a primary school (obviously). Class was in session as we straggled up, and the giggles and screams and sobs of a dozen or so small children coincided with the most remarkable thing: the sun came out. In a flash, the sky transformed, torrents gave way to a distinct crispness, and Minca revealed itself. The three of us, through commiserating with our cackling drivers, dropped off our things and took a soggy walk amidst the most outrageous natural beauty I’d ever experienced.

That night, sipping from a thick, ceramic mug of hot chocolate on a candlelit patio, soaked shoes and socks drying to my left beside a crusty welcome mat, surrounded by silence with a cat named Cosmo in my lap, I took out my journal and wrote the following:

Here, in the middle of the rainforest, surrounded by green, reading, with conservation and animals and life the center of my focus, I feel alive, true. I do not need anything here. I do not need to write. I do not need friends. I only need the jungle, the forest, the connection to the Earth, to the animals. I am returning to concrete but I do not know why. This is a power—a superpower—I do not have to be in the jungle to feel a part of the jungle. I am living with irony, sarcasm, too close to my heart. My heart is free of these. My heart is the trees, this feeling of purity. Accept more than I reject. Open my heart, stop filtering myself. Stop living in relation, or in opposition, or holding judgment, of others. I started doing that by writing today. Great writing holds no judgment, is open, free. I am open, free. I belong to the jungle. I am in the jungle even when I am not in the jungle. Remember the jungle.

Reading this now, a moto, bus, and two flights away, with honking horns and sirens and gossiping neighbors humming out my window, it’s really hard to know what to think about these words. My first reaction is to downplay the drama, cast it aside as a fresh-faced, wide-eyed young man’s overeager reaction to being exposed to the world for the first time. “Gringo sees mountain; becomes enlightened”; Some version of this meme gets played on a loop on the Latin American backpacking circuits I traversed. The journal has always been my place to let loose, but it’s pretty goddamn intense, what I wrote: “I do not need to write. I do not need friends.” Even granting myself the raw vigor of the moment, I completely disagree with both those sentiments. I sort of do need to write, to feel good, and I very much need friends to feel whole. Sitting in my room, considering my life today, it’s difficult to recognize the voice in that passage.

Yet, even now, having gained a wealth of context and experience in the two-plus years since I penned that entry, I can understand, pretty clearly, what I meant when I wrote, “I belong to the jungle” despite spending half a day in its midst. The passage is emblematic of an intensity of feeling which defines a long solo trip of the type I embarked on a few years ago—a situation within which huge, existential questions tend to emerge as suddenly and effortlessly as the sun poking its way through the puffy cover of a cloud forest.

This is a ferocity I rarely experience anymore. I did something pretty bold last week, the type of thing I’ve always wanted to do. I was really happy with myself, high on life and all that; in the aftermath my friend caught me skipping down Eighth Avenue. But the feeling I had, after doing the satisfying thing I’d done, came nowhere close to matching the elation, the total contentment, utter nirvana, which I routinely felt whilst traveling alone (my entry from that night was actually pretty circumspect, all things considered).

How do I come to terms with this? How can I possibly live on in this relatively mundane fashion, surrounded by concrete, a world away from Minca, when I know how relatively near I am to the sorts of tantalizing, revelatory highs awaiting me in parts unknown? I’m asking myself a version of these questions all the time as I try to navigate, well, what the fuck I should be doing with my life.

The answer is that the intrinsic intensity of traveling alone, in the fashion I did, cuts both ways. It’s very easy for me, sitting alone amidst the dank, shortened days of November, or recalling clean, open wave faces sparkling at sunset to drooling surfer friends climbing the corporate ladder, to wax poetic about the clarity of moments like the one I experienced in the jungle. But the truth is that for every Minca moment on the road, there was at least one—and, more realistically, many times more—low, desperate, flailing moments of hopeless and irrational frustration to match; moments when I felt not just lost but wasteful, selfish, valueless. 

The duality of these extremes is the nature of solo life on the road, and it’s yet another reason why I keep coming back to William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days,” which I first wrote about a few months ago. Finnegan’s memoir frequently veers into the existential dread which so often accompanies the long, in-between periods which make up the majority of time on the road. Here he is in Australia, for example, right after a frenzied, glorious dozen-page description of surfing Kirra, one of the world’s most spectacular waves, in the late seventies:

But I did wonder what I was doing with my life. We had been gone so long now that I felt unmoored from all possible explanations for this trip. It was certainly no longer a vacation. What was I vacationing from?...I panicked sometimes, convinced I was wasting my youth, aimlessly wandering on the dark side of the moon while old friends, classmates, my peers, were building lives, careers, becoming adults back in America. I had wanted to be useful, somehow, to work, to write, to teach, to accomplish great things—what had happened to that? Yes, I had felt compelled, almost required, to take a big surf trip. But did it really need to last this long? (229)

Turning to my own old travel journals, it took me half a second to flip randomly away from the Minca entry and discover the following smattering of optimism and cheer:

• “I had a two-hour ‘why the fuck did I give up the NYC apartment’ panic when I first got here.”

• “My left foot is covered in bug bites/scratches/god knows what. There have been ten total minutes where I've been free of all chafing/itchiness/stickiness/sweat. Will I get used to it?”

• “A man just checked into the hostel wearing an almost green, bright teal nineties t-shirt with ‘SHAMU’ and an orca printed on the front, with ‘Sea World’ underneath. For some reason this has made me viscerally upset.”

And, the kicker, from my first month:

It’s hot and humid in a way which makes New York Augusts feel like San Francisco Aprils, and I’m sticky all the time and the chafing on my chest, armpits, thighs, knees, and nipples from my surfboard kept me out of the water for two days, and I’m having terrible night sweats accompanied by fever dreams, and I’m homesick, and I realized today that I was codependent on Trader Joe’s to survive in America, and I’ve talked about the Alchemist four too many times already, and I’m also chafing on the insides of my feet from my new flip-flops, which I had to buy after the ones I bought were stolen on my third day here, all of which I experience with deep existential guilt because I chose all of this with my goddamned privilege and often all I want is to be somewhere else even though if I was there all I’d want would be to be here.

The deepest shames and insecurities I felt at home, before my trip, didn’t vanish upon crossing the border—they were exacerbated. There they are, right on the page: “guilt” over “privilege,” insecurity about reading habits, shame over national identity. This is the point I always try to hammer home to anyone considering a long, solo trip: do it (one hundred percent: do it), but be prepared. Because when you’re traveling alone, and the exact pain which had been plaguing you when you ditched whatever monotony you thought you’d left behind begins bubbling up again, in the exact same spot as before, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself for it. Really. No family turmoil to pin your woes on, if I just had better friends-themed excuses, anachronistic “if only it were the sixties” diatribes to lean against. You chose this, and now it’s just you, and the only way to get through it is to figure it out. Alone. It’s all self-imposed, of course, but it’s precisely that self-imposition which cranks up the temperature of the whole experience.

This can be a really lonely, dark place to find oneself. Taking the trip I did was the best possible thing I could have done for myself at the point in life I found myself in when I left. It was full of more Minca moments—more flashes of brilliance, jolts of understanding, thunderbolts of empathy—than I’ve experienced over the rest of my combined life. It was also packed with some of the lowest nadirs I’ve ever experienced, subterranean, spiraling caves within which a rash under my armpit, a failed conversation in Spanish, the tiniest of social rejections, was prone to corkscrew me into existential dread over the human condition. I’m really proud of myself for hanging in there and working my way through these problems on my own. It required a level of honesty—harsh, harsh honesty—which had theretofore been unknown to me. I’m eternally grateful I stuck it out. But it was hard, really fucking hard, to navigate the profound and incessant swings which seemed to linger in my shadow at every stop along the way.

In Minca, abandoned swimming pools, vestiges of some foolish developer’s aborted imposition into sylvan bliss, overlook dark green cloud forests so thick it takes real imagination to picture the orange daggerwing butterflies, giant toads, and spotted jaguars roaming in the valley below. I’m so far away now that it’s difficult to believe it’s all there, at this very moment, breathing. I fear there’s no combination of plane, bus, or motorbike capable of truly taking me back. Can you blame me, though, for refusing to give up the dream of a return?

I’m riding the F train uptown to Herald Square, and everyone’s on their phone. It’s the easiest scene to pick, if you’re in the market for “stock phone addiction lede” to whip out for your latest screen time thinkpiece (I’ve been there). The portrait is the perfect embodiment of the issue, after all: a group of strangers, stuck somewhere with time to kill, sacrificing their former camaraderie, the fleeting glances, knowing stares, and winking understandings of old on the altar of an endless doomscroll. What better encapsulation of a society plagued by its devices, done in by drab monotony?

In March, the sex and culture writer Magdalene J. Taylor wrote one such piece, entitled “It’s Obviously the Phones” (it was missing only the subway scene). After noting a troubling decline in the rates of young people hanging out since 2008 (the year following the iPhone’s debut), she writes:

Economic despair, political unrest, even climate fears were among the reasons I’d heard cited. But all of that, honestly, feels pointlessly abstract. It puts the problem entirely out of our hands, when in fact I believe it may quite literally be in them.

The problem is obviously our phones.

Taylor’s post blew up, in Substack terms, the thousands of likes reflecting a symphony of agreement among readers. It’s easy to see why Taylor’s post did so well. It succinctly summarized the way lots of us feel intuitively about our devices: that, despite shifts in the economy and the decline in third spaces and the continued dysfunction of capitalism, the phones, really, are responsible for the profound social malaise Taylor describes. Her conclusion—that it’s obviously the phones—seems pretty unassailable at this point. Phones have been added to our lives, and our lives are worse.

In fact, it’s precisely the unassailability of this point which feeds into another, and I’d argue more significant, element of this conversation. Yes, the phones are the problem. That question, as far as I’m concerned, is settled. But clearing it out of the way reveals a far trickier problem, one which, frankly, I have a feeling most of those nodding vigorously along to pieces like Taylor’s are loathe to confront: what are we going to do about it? It’s an impossibly thorny question, but I think a good first step in answering it is considering what’s really at the core of our phone dependence. Because the phones are here, and they’re not leaving.

Within this discourse, 2007—the year of the iPhone’s introduction—is often treated as a definitive break in technological history (the social indicators in Taylor’s piece begin to plummet, remember, in 2008). While the introduction of the iPhone was clearly a seminal moment in recent history, I think it makes more sense to treat its introduction as a natural step in a long-unfolding evolution than as a material break in technological history. Because decontextualizing the invention of the smartphone overlooks a crucial component of the device’s origin: there was a demand for it! The iPhone didn’t just pop up out of the blue, in a vacuum; people wanted it. Nathan Heller made this point about technological innovation in the New Yorker in April, in a review of the essay collection “Scenes of Attention,” by D. Graham Burnett and Justin Smith-Ruiu (this one opened with the screen-filled subway scene):

True, tools and lives are faster, [the authors] write. But claiming innovation as the original cause is backward: “Human beings make the technologies—and they make them in the context of other human beings needing and wanting various things.” It wasn’t as though people, after millennia of head-scratching, suddenly “discovered” the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the telegraph, and modernity unspooled. Rather, people’s priorities underwent a sea change with the onset of the modern age, turning to efficiency, objective measurement, and other goals that made such inventions worthwhile. The acceleration of life isn’t an inevitability, in that sense, but an ideological outcome.

Now, I’d probably place more emphasis on the “material” and less on the “ideological” than Burnett and Smith-Ruiu do, and I’d also grant that adhering to “people’s priorities” was not necessarily Steve Jobs and Co.’s primary motivator in inventing the iPhone (profit was). But the smartphone’s introduction fits into a larger pattern, along with the genesis of the personal computer, iPod, etc., of consumers’ continued demand for small, individualized, multi-use devices. The smartphone does not just appear out of thin air; it’s the product of that technological evolution.

Similar, “boogeyman”-style arguments—which position individual people, technologies, and ideologies as singular prime movers—are rampant amidst the smorgasbord of well-intentioned efforts to explain technology’s most deleterious effects. Fix just this one thing, such arguments go, and you’ll solve everything.

This is the outlook embodied in a book like “Filterworld,” the author Kyle Chayka’s recent effort to describe what he sees as the profoundly conformist influence of the internet. According to Chayka, social media has had such assimilatory effects as producing identical coffee shop aesthetics and inspiring a boon in tourism in Iceland. In a February review of the book, the internet writer Max Read wrote:

Sometimes, uncharitably, I imagine that what’s at the bottom of the consumption of this kind of writing is a desire not to overcome one’s apparent helplessness in the face of “the algorithm” but to affirm it—a compulsion to wallow in one’s perceived estrangement from the motions of culture and commerce and politics in the 21st century, to have one’s learned helplessness excused. Articles and books in this vein (and I have written plenty of them!) tend to emphasize the power, scale, novelty, and opacity of the platform giants, and to de-emphasize user agency, statistical context, historical precedent, and even little things like “the economy” and “the world outside.”

“The Algorithm,” in particular, has emerged as a popular scapegoat in contemporary luddite-curious culture. If only the millennial tech titans pulling the strings behind our online existences would tell their programmers to just tone it down already—the violence, hate speech, misinformation, body shaming—and everything would be alright. Technology writer Kevin Munger dispelled this notion masterfully for Mother Jones in the spring:

“The algorithm” does not exist. And widespread use of the phrase implies a false hope that we can fully understand our dizzying information system. If it were only the algorithm on YouTube radicalizing us, or the algorithm on Facebook weaponizing misinformation, then we would know how to fix these things. We would just need regulators to pressure Mark Zuckerberg into fiddling with some code, and things would go back to normal.

The truth is more unsettling: We are living with technology moving at an inhuman speed, operating at scales simultaneously smaller than we can detect and larger than anyone can comprehend.

Munger goes on to argue that a more appropriate term for the present technology ecosystem would be “apparatus,” a word which more aptly emphasizes the interconnected nature of the relationship between the internet and its users.

To be clear, the inner workings of smartphones, algorithms, and tech boardrooms led by some of the richest and most powerful men in history are certainly worth examining closely. Again, I am in agreement with the initial claim being made here: phones are a massive problem for society. And their negative effects are exacerbated, pretty clearly, by the profit-seeking, often immoral behavior of the tech weirdos calling lots of these shots. As satisfying as such explanations are, though, they fall to capture the entire story.

Munger’s coinage of “apparatus” is so appropriate in this context because it properly identifies the crucial missing component in most phone dependence stories: ourselves. What singularly blaming iPhones, “the algorithm,” or some spooky amalgamation of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Cook does is to absolve ourselves from our own roles in our poor technology habits; from acknowledging that we haven’t been strapped down into dentists’ chairs, Clockwork Orange-style, and forced to go tune into every meme, shitpost, and one-turn-Wordle compilation video on the internet for the last decade. It allows us to willfully ignore the unattractive sides of ourselves which very clearly love this shit. In the self-destructive, borderline-addictive, and commercially-tainted sense, of course. But which nonetheless can’t get enough.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether our collective devotion to our devices qualifies as addiction, in the heroin/gambling/sex sense of the word. Are phones really affecting the chemistry of our brains in the same way an addictive substance might? This seems to me a really important question as we consider the best way to “wean” ourselves off our phones and enter a more socially mindful future. Is it possible to just stop?

As it turns out, the answer to this question is quite layered and complicated. Would a potential phone addiction, for example, most aptly be categorized as a substance or a behavioral addiction? It seems obvious that it’d fit best under the behavioral category, but, as authors Ido Hartogsohn and Amir Vudka point out in this phenomenal 2023 National Institute of Health paper (I HIGHLY recommend reading the whole thing), phone dependency actually shares lots of qualities with, say, cocaine addiction. Beyond their shared quality of triggering the release of dopamine upon use, both smartphones and cocaine rely on the artificial magnification of natural, non-addictive impulses to create dependency habits for the user:

While the smartphone services a natural human need for sociality, it also magnifies that need and creates new and intense manufactured needs. If we compare sociality to coca leaves—a natural stimulant safely integrated into the life texture of countless cultures—then smartphone sociality can be likened to cocaine—a more concentrated synthesized version with a remarkably higher potential for addiction.

Anyone searching for an easy screen time out will surely be left unsatisfied by this resolution’s inconclusiveness; there is no definitive answer, it seems, no silver bullet, for diagnosing, and therefore being granted the key to ridding oneself of, excessive phone usage.

Which leaves us…where, exactly? I wonder how many people nodding along in unabashed agreement with Taylor’s “It’s Obviously the Phones” article actually bothered reading her piece all the way through to its conclusion. Those who did were treated with a much more confused and muddled—not to say mundane—prescription for actually solving the issue than her headline suggests:

What I really want for myself and everyone else is to just use my phone less. That is something we are in control of. I want people to prioritize the real world…De-centering phones is another real thing we can do to better our social lives. The economy is out of our control, but our own personal tech consumption isn’t.

Hartogsohn and Vudka, authors of the NIH paper, come away with an equally sober recommendation for developing a healthier relationship with our devices:

A more conscious, mindful, and constructive relationship with technology can be cultivated on both the individual level and the collective level. Mindless habits of digital consumption can be challenged by developing a more mindful approach to technology: by changing one's mindset in the use of technology, and by recalibrating the parameters of our everyday digital existence (e.g., turning off one's notification updates, or placing one's phone outside the room). Though they might sound banal, user experiences and research data show such measures can be surprisingly effective.

It seems the alternatively apocalyptic and utopian aspirations of some great “un-phoning”—vengeful premonitions, visions mirroring fantasies long endemic to the tech genre—shall not come to pass. I, too, am disappointed. I want the phones gone as much as anyone, and these recommendations are, well, pretty fucking boring.

But the obvious truth is that the phones are here to stay. Rather than waiting passively for some purple-and-teal lightning bolt to transmogrify us back to the sepia-tinted, phone-free haven of 1993, perhaps it’s time to stop rolling our eyes at and take more seriously the “banal” suggestions of the most well-versed thinkers on the issue: to consider what annoying, tiny, and trite steps we might individually take to get a better handle on how we spend our time.

In that regard, our collective struggle against our devices may not be all that distinct from any other commonplace resistance to temptation or, yes, addiction, which we might experience in other areas of life. In the same way that blaming the existence of sugar won’t make you eat less candy, merely pointing to the ubiquity of the smartphone as a means of combatting social inadequacy is an entirely perfunctory exercise. Such condemnation is a cop-out designed to evade the deeper, more existential questions we’d much prefer to, well, swipe up and ignore. In order to change our relationships with our phones, I’m afraid we’ll have to change ourselves.

If you forced me to pick my favorite musician, I’d do the usual grumbling and groaning (the “what’s your favorite” question always portends a conversational dead end), and then, with a glint in my eye, I’d say: Lorde.

Here is how I came to enjoy the music of Lorde: 

At the beginning of high school, one of my best friends wouldn’t shut up about this teenaged singer from New Zealand. I didn’t think much of it until my senior year, when I started dating a girl who really liked Lorde. I resisted until her second album came out, in 2017, and by the end of that summer—the last summer, not coincidentally, I was really together with the girl—I’d gotten hooked on a few songs. Her and I split up, right after that (college), and so of course I spent my entire freshman fall devoting myself to Lorde’s nascent discography. I began associating the music not just with the relationship but with the beginning of college, so that by my first winter break its meaning had morphed into a truly potent nostalgic elixir. I’ve enjoyed Lorde’s music ever since; it’s been fun to follow an artist closely, connect with friends and strangers about it, and, of course, the music itself still brings me comfort, even as its associations shift continually over time.

As far as I can see, I’ve painted a pretty mundane portrait here: I came to like the music of Lorde by means of the same idiosyncratic mixture of social context, circumstance, and content through which, as far as I can tell, basically everyone comes to like a particular artist. There’s nothing special going on here.

Except: Lorde makes girl music, and I am not a girl. So—as I’m reminded nearly every time the topic arises—I have some explaining to do.

I’ve stopped explaining. Because most of the time I do, I find myself having to defend my taste on two fronts, depending on the conversation partner. Either:

1. I’m talking about Lorde to a straight guy, or guys, who judge me because they think my listening habits are emasculating (the kind of guys who’ve learned to say “pussy” with their eyebrows)

Or

2. I’m talking about Lorde to a group (often of girls, but not always) who don’t believe me; they think I’m being performative, or just mentioning her to gain social cachet

I can handle group one: the wannabe machos who think there’s “correct” male tastes to have. I’ve lived in the midst of such men for over a quarter century now. I can’t say I’m totally immune from their powers, but I know their ways. They will not be impacting Lorde’s standing in my Spotify Wrapped list this year.

I’m more perplexed by group number two, a coalition which seems to believe that men writ large have been swept away by some fever whose symptoms include surreptitiously raving to Mitski in Ridgewood while mass ordering Phoebe Bridgers skeleton onesies off Etsy to decorate our otherwise sparse studio apartments. This group seems to assume I’m reaping benefits, gaining social currency, getting laid, because my favorite artist is a highly acclaimed pop princess.

I am here to report, ladies and gentleman, that the alleged, um, benefits I’ve supposedly accrued with my Lorde fandom are…highly overstated. I’m not sure, in other words, what exactly my Lorde allegiance has won for me that devotion to any other artist or band wouldn’t have conferred upon me instead.

Because—and, trust me, this brings me no joy to report—my pop princess allyship has gotten me absolutely nowhere. I mean, really, nowhere. Liking a popular female artist has conferred the same benefits upon me (making friends, having community, going to concerts) as if I’d been obsessed with Radiohead or gotten super into the Kings of Leon.

I’m not a monk, of course, passively listening to Lorde, injecting myself only with lyrics, melody, and chords. I am keenly aware of how profoundly one’s social environment shapes our tastes, from what music we like to who we’re attracted to. I’ve certainly, particularly in college, had moments where I’ve leaned into the “guy obsessed with Lorde” persona a little too hard. As many have observed, performative poptimism is a thing, and it’s bad for music criticism and the industry as a whole.1 I’ve seen the late millennial picture portrayed by that New Yorker cover rolling through Park Slope once or twice. 

But if I’m honestly assessing, say, the romantic outcomes spurred off my music taste, I genuinely can’t think of a time when it’s come in handy, other than it sort of being seen as a quirky, mildly endearing quality when it’s discovered well after the point where it would have actually mattered in the first place. If anything, this discourse has gotten so out of hand that it’s endogenously conjured a duplicitous specter of a male character lurking in the black mayonnaise of the Gowanus Canal with righteous Lana del Rey takes, so that when I say I like Lorde, at least in New York, in the context of one of those shitty conversations about my favorite things, the girl is as likely to think I’m being disingenuous—just saying it to get laid—as she is to find it some charming, girly pop stamp of approval. Same goes if I interject in an Olivia Rodrigo versus Sabrina Carpenter conversation,2 or bring up Billie Eilish’s evolution, or, God forbid, criticize a bonus track off of the re-released 1989. These conversations, layered as they are within this meta discursive maze of intentionality and devotion and identity, are increasingly exhausting, entirely unmoored from anything resembling the music itself. Far from benefiting from whatever pop princess ally sticker I’ve slapped onto myself, the tedium of navigating such a tangled web discourages me, more than not, from mentioning it at all.

Mostly, though, it’s simply a non-factor. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places; I admit that I’m not running in the exact crowd where this kind of guy is most likely to proliferate. But I’m roaming the streets of New York City professionally, every day, operating in basically every nook and cranny where you might expect to find this sort of person, everywhere, and I have never, not once, seen the oft-maligned row of young, mustachioed dudes with baggy pants ostentatiously reading Ferrante and Rooney and hooks back to back to back at a cafe, or overheard a guy bumping Chappel Roan suspiciously loud through his AirPods while working the McCarren Park pull-up bar. Maybe this dude exists. Maybe I’m just so delighted to see any guy my age reading anything at all in public that I willfully gaze past whatever book’s actually in his hands. Maybe I can’t see him because it’s me.

But I suspect this character looms larger in our collective imagination than actually exists in real life because of the larger trend, gender be damned, of people relating to the world primarily through their favorite cultural objects. I realize now that the handful of times I leaned too hard on the “guy who likes Lorde” persona failed to produce meaningful relationships not because I presented as “guy who likes Lorde,” but because being someone who leans too hard on any persona is unattractive. Taste cannot compensate for character, and fandom is not equivalent to a value system. I really wish we’d stop conflating the two, and in general start giving less of a shit about policing the sorts of stuff people are into.

Look, none of this is any great burden; it certainly hasn’t stopped me from listening to Lorde, and the actual content (the music) is what I care about most. But it does frustrate me. I want to like what I like and be a part of a community that likes the same stuff; to get to know art and people better through work we mutually enjoy. This seems to me the most basic outcome we seek in turning to any kind of art. But both in my own head and out loud, I too often catch myself reflexively defending my choices before I even get around to analyzing them. The result is a less robust dialogue about art, on its own terms, and the same, tired meta-conversation about why we consume what we do in place of more profound conversations about the works themselves. Painted on the road, red and chrome, discourse disintegrating.

There’s so much to say about even the limpest of novels, so much terrain to cover. The novel is special in that way, its canvas so empty and boundless, so relatively limitless, that the form presents infinite opportunities for veering and swerving and lying and toying, run-ons and blanks, flourish and restraint. 

The novel is grand but it’s also intimate; the words, written by a stranger, bond to the reader, she latches on, and when she’s really connected, when the author has written the words really well, she becomes them, or something like it, she breathes them, feels them, becomes capable of navigating the ocean blind, undulating in rhythm beneath the crashing waves, diving just far enough under the surface to escape the lip, foam bubbling overhead, tingling her insides, before gliding smoothly to the surface. To attempt to know a book like this is as thrilling as the depths of the ocean. But it’s equally precarious. Because to know a book, to really fall into its rhythm, is to agree to an implicit deal with the words: don’t let me down. The intimacy of the novel is a double-edged sword; with an awareness of a work’s brilliance also comes an understanding that, at any given moment, the hand guiding them could let the pen slip, fall off the tightrope. A plot’s suspense is one thing, but the true tension of any great book is the increasing friction which develops between reader and writer as a work escalates: are you actually going to pull this thing off?

Needless to say, then, the task of reviewing a novel, in the face of the form’s great potential, is almost comically pedantic. How to assess, in relatively few words, all the intricacy, all those peaks and valleys, landmines triggered, traps narrowly averted, of even the most unambitious and rote of novels? Or, more difficult yet, of those novels which you finish listlessly in a week or so, shut, put down, and think, meh.

At the end of October, I read Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, “Crossroads,” which follows a family living in the fictional suburb of New Prospect, Illinois, over the course of a few months in the early seventies. Inhabiting five different perspectives over nearly six hundred pages (that of a preacher father, Russ, his disillusioned wife, Marion, and three of their children, Clem, Becky, and Perry), “Crossroads” weaves together the disparate narratives of parents and children to paint a portrait of a 1970s America searching for its moral compass. The family’s Christianity is the main vessel through which such morality is explored; with differing levels of self-awareness, each character, in his and her own way, centers their understanding of themselves around God, using Him as a lodestar to guide their often fraught choices.

While the ambition of Franzen’s effort is laudable—he’s clearly shooting for a masterpiece, commendable in itself—his big, morality-centered themes fall flat due to the subtle inability of his prose to match the correct tone of plot and characters. The author’s attempt to pair each perspective with a distinctive writing style is admirable, but the novel’s seams are too visible, its janky mechanics slightly too exposed, for him to fully nail the landing he seeks. 

Your enjoyment of “Crossroads” will likely be determined by whether you think paragraphs like: 

Among Larry’s insecure tics was rubbing the sebaceous nodes around his nose and sniffing his fingertips. Perry, too enjoyed the smell of his own sebum, but such sniffing was better done privately

are justified by the book’s logic of switching writing styles section-by-section to better capture character. In context, this passage fits in more snugly than it does shivering out here in the cold, but its iciness is indicative of Franzen’s tendency to over-write, a habit which detracts from multi-faceted, interesting characters and some moving (albeit overdone) themes.

Combined with a slightly unbalanced plot (eons, it seems, pass by with single characters, isolated from the family, as others inexplicably fade into the distance), the novel’s overwrought prose detracts from its obvious ambition, knocking “Crossroads” down from a thundering and definitive meditation on religion, aging, and community into a more typical, if still enjoyable, treatise on a complicated family and country at a crucial point in each of their histories.

That’s a pretty crude review, but given my limited space I tried to touch on what I think are the four most important aspects of any novel (plot, character, theme, prose) and pull at least one quote to give the reader a sense of what, specifically, I’m criticizing. I’m discussing a book, after all; I feel an obligation to give the reader at least a vague idea of how the work being reviewed was written.

This would appear to be an obvious goal for any reviewer. Yet here is Dwight Garner of the New York Times Book Review—America’s definitive source of book reviews—assessing Franzen’s novel, and leaving the reader almost entirely blind to how well, or even just how, “Crossroads” was written.

In his 1,100 word review, Garner gestures at the novel’s prose—how the words were written—three times. Here they are:

• “Crossroads” is “shot through with intimations of light” 

• It’s “a mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker…warmer than anything he’s yet written”

• “The action in ‘Crossroads’ flows and ebbs”

One and two reference the book’s prose, and three glances against it in a larger point about plot. Either way, it’s inexcusable, even given the limitations Garner, or any reviewer, is working against in any formidable review space (word count, house style, compulsory plot summarization) to write a thousand-plus word review of any novel and pay this cursory level of attention to such a foundational aspect of the form; to implicitly treat prose as if it’s less worthy than plot, character, and theme. The defining feature of the novel, the thing that separates it from film and television and children’s books and song, is the centrality of how it is written, how pleasing it is to read, how it tingles the senses, mirrors a story’s structure. How can one discuss the novel without discussing prose?

The New York Times Book Review is delivered to my apartment every Saturday, and for the last year I’ve dutifully pored over nearly every issue. This problem isn’t isolated to Garner’s “Crossroads” review—it’s endemic to the publication. America’s preeminent home for book reviews, its industry gatekeeper, barely seems to care about how books are written. What does it care about instead?

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary. Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.

And,

Like Franzen himself at times, in the public arena if not on the page, Russ is so intolerable and so uncool, such an ungainly apparition from an earlier era, that you sense him on the verge of redemption, of coming out the other side. Franzen’s cultural situation these past two decades sometimes reminds me of Orson Welles’s comment to Kenneth Tynan: “My trouble is that I exude affluence. I look successful. Whenever the critics see me, they say to themselves: It’s time he was knocked — he’s had it too good for too long. But I haven’t.”

In lieu of a brief but cogent discussion of the singular most distinctive aspect of the form, Garner twice drifts into rambling, extratextual asides which have nothing to do with the experience of reading “Crossroads.” In the most preeminent book review in America, here’s 160 words—nearly a fifth of the review—devoted to what essentially amounts to industry gossip.

The first passage at least helps the reader put “Crossroads” into context—I didn’t know it was the first of a trilogy until reading it—but I cannot possibly see how Franzen’s having declared his work a trilogy from the start could portend anything about the quality of the forthcoming series, other than allowing the reviewer to flex his knowledge of other epics of various shapes and sizes.

The second passage is less defensible. I’ve spent a lot of time reading that paragraph, trying to find something redemptive to pull out of it, but the more I review it, the more I scratch my head. What is Garner even attempting to convey here? How could an Orson Welles comment to Kenneth Tynan about the pitfalls of personal success possibly have anything to do with the contents of Franzen’s novel? This is straight-up insider posturing, and, if I’m being less generous, a sad demonstration of insecurity and jealousy, niche Franzen gossip in place of meaningful engagement with Franzen’s ideas. Even in the context of a review of his latest novel, who gives a shit about Franzen’s personal life? How is this information helping the reader to better understand Franzen’s work?

Here lies my central frustration: that reviews like these seem to care less about seriously discussing literature than they do making the reader who actually has an awareness of Franzen’s personal life (maybe that’s 99% of readership and I’m just a dunce who should cancel my subscription and stick to Highlights) feel special. If you have an intimate enough knowledge of Franzen to understand the personal gripes, this is all wonderfully gratifying, proof at last of literati supremacy. That’s the upside of this style.

The downside is the alienation of, well, everyone else. I’ve often wondered if the same people lamenting over and over again about how no one reads anymore don’t do so with a little glow emanating from their loins, because while they’d never admit it the fact that they’re the one saying “no one reads anymore” really serves to imply that they still read, and the implication of their not-so-subtle implication is that they’re special because they read. I’m certainly not immune. You think my chest didn’t puff up a little on that 10th grade trip when the girl sitting next to me told me what I was reading (“The Tipping Point,” I think) was a “smart person book”? When a guy stopped me in a hostel in Bogotá and told me he didn’t expect to find a guy here reading Nabakov? Pride, friends, pesky, pesky pride. It inflates and inflates but always, always, always, like the morale of a kid at a pool party discovering for himself the after-effects of inhaling a jumbo pack of Skittles in the fashion of a Cybertruck guzzling gigawatts, it crashes, pops, and fizzles, a limp balloon, abandoned and alone, realizing all at once that being seen as the guy unexpectedly clutching “Pale Fire” in a youth hostel is great and all, but wouldn’t, actually, the better thing be to be able to meaningfully discuss “Pale Fire” with someone else?

I’m not arguing here for a reversion to poptimist criticism, or a lowering of the standards expected of the readers of reviews. If anything, I’m doing the opposite: I’m asking for a reprioritization of how we analyze books. Don’t make reviews dumber; make them about books. Suffocate me with analysis, spin me with meaning, tangle me deep within roots stretching into literature’s history. Make me work to claw my way out. Force me to improve as a reader.

Dwight Garner and prestige reviewers like him have forgotten more about books than I’m likely to ever know. All the more frustrating, then, to read such intelligent thinkers resort to the glib, the washed Orson Welles aside, the “as everyone knows” attitude permeating Garner’s review. Show me what you know. This is the intricacy I crave, the insider knowledge I want spewed. Spare me your concerns over likability, marketing, ego. If you’re writing about a book, at least pretend you give a damn about how it’s written.

I’m curious if you can admit it, if only to yourself.

You love it.

You’ve never told anyone—that goes without saying—but you’ve loved it from the beginning. And the part of you which feels it is so isolated, so foreign, that you’ll never truly know it yourself. It’s too terrifying to consider.

There’s good reason for that. It’s not even really your fault; after all, you can try to be as honest with yourself as you want, but even if you’re willing to dig into places nearly everyone is too self-protective to excavate, it’d be almost impossible to get to the bottom of it. You’re in too deep. 

How deep?

You’ve been riding the wave for a decade now. It was inconceivable and then it happened and it’s been everything ever since. You devoted yourself to the cause—gouged your eyeballs out every night to the networks, hailed loyal commanders who’d lost wars to people with funny names, lost sleep over judges you didn’t know existed the week before. For four years you booed and jeered and threw tomatoes—you literally threw a tomato once—like it was six hundred years ago and you were at the circus.

Then it un-happened, which you told yourself was everything you ever wanted, but it was strange what became of you right after the un-happening: you were empty. Your life returned to the placidity you swore you’d craved, but it turns out your anger was inexhaustible, appetite for vengeance insatiable. It turns out the happening gave you purpose. You spent two years telling everyone you dreaded his return, and then he returned, your cup filled, subscriptions renewed, television blaring. You had something to talk about again.

Never again, you said, along with what felt like the rest of the world—it was the rest of the world, wasn’t it?—and you believed it, even when things weren’t looking so hot, in the depths of summer. He shit the bed and she rose from the dead, and all around you freedom rang.

But something was off. You were there in July, you heard her say it, gawking from behind the screen: “She will be the nominee. She will win.” She said it so confidently, like it was such a foregone conclusion, that you almost had no choice but to believe her. 

Somewhere inside, though, set askew like a cliff sliding imperceptibly off its tectonic plate, you knew it couldn’t have been right, the confidence with which she spoke. Because you remembered that night; was it eight years ago now? Had everyone just forgotten?

But by admitting something was off you’d be betraying not just orthodoxy but identity. That’s why it’s so hard. This is what it’s become for you, after all: you. Your resistance, as you saw it (a fight which transcended the party in power) became not just a movement to participate in, a battle to wage, but who you are. You burrowed so deep in the world of talking heads and unequivocal opinions and well-edited podcasts—the right side of history—that to reject any of it now, even a little, would be to repudiate not just a perspective but a value chain. Are you prepared to self-immolate?

Certainly not. Instead, here’s what you did:

You walked into the booth, and you froze.

It’ll stay between you and me, the feeling you had in there, right at the beginning, shrouded by those ridiculous privacy barriers on either side. The two blank bubbles, right at the top. You moan and pontificate and throw your chicken salad at the TV, but after everything there’s just that, you and a pen and an oversized sheet of paper and God. You ditched the confessional for this, exchanged booth for booth, large white floor tiles for mahogany pews, coffee-stained ceiling for stained glass windows, overheated whispers for hundred-pipe organs. Maybe He accompanied you there, maybe not. If He did, you’re keeping it to yourself, that’s the point of God; He keeps it between you and me. But what you’re definitely keeping to yourself is the feeling you had, just for an instant, when your pen hovered above those two bubbles, one next to the other, the same dry, hyper-legible font, set against an empty background, and you had the thought for a second. Just a single second. But it shot across your mind, you couldn’t help it:

What would happen if I did it?

How to explain the genesis of that question? Would it be too simple to say: 

Freedom?

Come on now. You’re talking crazy. You’re talking like them. You’re smart enough to know this isn’t real freedom. That, really, you get all the privacy you want. No one’s infringing on your anything, you’re your own man, unbeholden to anything, anyone, and real freedom is—

The privacy of the booth is really nice. It’s so silly, you know it is, but you can’t help but feel it. You like it here. How long’s the line behind you? Maybe you’ll hang out for a minute. Pretend to be taking in the propositions down ballot. You still need to fill out that first section, by the way…

What are you thinking? Really, what the fuck? I mean, you could justify thinking about it, maybe, if it was just you, you and your buddies, and your group chat was all the world meant to you. But that’s not how it works. You understand that. 

Consider the women. Yes. Right. Good. That is the real reason you’re here, why you’ve been so frenzied for so long now—so long now—because there are stakes, if not for me then for them. How many times has Sandra sat you down, cried into your arms, over another ignored pass at the office, another missed promotion, another patronizing sit-down with bossman. This won’t stop all that, you and she both know it, but it’ll send some kind of message, won’t it? And then Nicole; Nicole. How thrilling, how good, for her to see it with her own eyes, the thing you yourself have never seen, to experience it together, the three of you. To show her what she can be. You think of your daughter’s eyes and you know, unequivocally, what must be done.

Jesus. Where had your sick mind been? You move your pen down to the page. 

And stop.

Because there’s something else. Another thing you’ll never admit, even and especially to yourself. The thought has been there, nagging at your side, for a while, but in that booth, with the measly power it bestows upon your otherwise impotent ink pen, the one reserved during peacetime for enumerations of grocery lists, recitals, visits to the urologist, the feeling takes on a sudden urgency, nearly reaches coherency, the one that goes: 

For as long as you remember, you’ve dreamed of a dictator.

You dreamt of it not as one longs for success or love or liberation but as one actually dreams: in short, semi-intelligible bursts you woke up from, every time, wiping the sleep from your eyes and pretending to forget. Lodged in there somewhere, though, they remained. You never fought your war and thank God for it but you were curious. What would it be like? To abandon reason, stick it to rationality, drive a dagger through the heart of enlightenment, drag your fingers through the mud and wipe streaks under your eyes in an earthly allegiance to a flag whose meaning you’ve never considered. Again, this is a dream—you always woke up, so horrified you forgot it, at least told yourself you forgot it, slapped some water on your face and got on with your day, back to believing, nay, breathing the orthodoxy which unwittingly, without you even noticing, had become a synonym for monotony. 

But you stayed curious. Something about a longing for mud under your eyes made your pen hover above those bubbles for longer than it should have. Dreams fade but they tend to linger around your pelvis. You didn’t actually do it. But you stayed curious. 

What would it be like?

To forgo choice, deliberation, equivocation, to shut up and just have it done for you. You thought the rallies were dark and scary and doltish but at least they had vision, panache. They were interesting. They led somewhere.

Where, exactly? Well, that was sort of the appeal. That no one—least of all the speakers themselves—knew.

You watched them rant and rave—it was ranting and raving, no two ways about it—not live through the television but a few days later, when you searched for it online, on the sly (hadn’t your curiosity always been your strongest trait?) and you were disgusted, obviously, but for some reason you kept watching, didn’t skip a second, even the interludes, between the pomp, because it was fucking fascinating. It worked you up, but in a more ambigous way than before. Made your muscles swell. Jolted your loins. 

Who are you?

They conjured fire. Red and white banners hanging from the ceiling, thin flames lapping each sheet up from its dangling bottom. Smokeless. Black and white. History.

It’s not exactly that you liked all this, per se, not even close, as you watched. It’s more like you kind of sort of wanted to see what might come to pass if they followed through. Would it make you feel? As a kid you kept two beta fish in a single tank, separated them with a plastic divider. You loved those fish. But you couldn't help but wonder, as you gazed through the glass each morning, past beady specks of eyes, into shiny scales and squishy gills, what might happen if you, just once, lifted the separator and let them at each other. Is it so crazy to have not yet vanquished that urge?

This is what it means to be a Man.

You wake up from that dream, shaking in your booth, ink still hovering over a pair of inanimate bubbles (not that you ever actually had a doubt…), when out of nowhere another thought hits you, and you don’t know what it means, but it’s different from the dreaming because you don’t snap out of this one, you can’t repress it, it lingers with you all day, long after you step out of the booth, echoes across your skull, works its way into your ribcage:

A baby is being born right now. 

And the most difficult thing about pressing the pen to the page is your nagging sense that this thought, the one more than any other you can’t shake, is totally incompatible with the sterile duality staring back at you from the page. You close your eyes—maybe it’s merely a blink—and suddenly the fluorescent glare and the echoing clicks of sturdy heels (you didn’t realize how tightly you’d been wincing) rush away. It’s sunset, the exact hour during which nothing can go wrong, and light like a harp drifts diagonally through the atmosphere, gently warming the soles of your feet through the smooth stones crunching under you with every delicate step. In front of you the sea glimmers, the tide works the pebbles into a soft clatter, the smell of pine wafts down from the sloping hills rolling effortlessly into the horizon. Your inhalation of this world and all its warmth is heightened by a peculiar sound building in the distance. High pitched and off-rhythm, jolting you awake, you realize as it rises it’s the sound of laughter; the laughter of an infant. It’s halting and sonorous and raspy, like it’s at risk of getting caught in the giggler’s throat with every guffaw. It’s so full of pleasure you might die. You pivot in every direction, but you can’t sort out the source of the sound. Where is the baby? Meanwhile the volume is rising and rising and rising and—

You open your eyes. The names have become so blurry and distorted—what are those wet marks on the page?—that you no longer recognize them. The bubbles make you sick.

What would it be like?

I’m mostly reading fiction these days, but I try my best to keep William Finnegan’s surfing memoir, Barbarian Days, close to me wherever I go. I call it (to myself, anyway) a Sliced Turkey Book—so named because of an odd childhood belief of mine that eating cold, plain sliced turkey out of the bag whenever I felt down would perk me up. Placebo or not, this usually worked, and so too does cracking open Barbarian Days when I’m in a rut, creative or otherwise. My paperback copy’s been through the wringer; spine lopped out of place, pages frayed and splayed around the edges. Mysterious stains penetrate complete chapters.

The whole book is great, but the most memorable section is a stretch in the middle which describes the author and a buddy roughing it through Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and Australia for a couple years in Finnegan’s mid-twenties. For an ocean-obsessed 22-year-old college senior strapped into online classes in the middle of the pandemic (me), this was as inflammatory a document as you might imagine. Indeed, when I left for my own big trip a few years later, Finnegan came along for the ride.

I’ve taken to browsing random chapters lately before bed (I’m getting antsy!) and I’ve been struck on this last reading by the utter specificity of the author’s memory dating back to his youth. I think I’m pretty good at remembering stuff from childhood, but how can Finnegan possibly recount all this stuff, the color of the sand under his toes on a Hawaiian beach, the shape of a 1981 Fijian surfboard being hauled around by a stranger, from six to sixty?

A good friend of mine who I met on the road1 (he’d also been inspired by Barbarian Days, along with half the young people dotting far-from-home surfing lineups as we speak) recently put it to me well as we were discussing the book: in memoirs which contain so much vivid detail, down to the timing of the sounds people make or their decades-old facial expressions, how do authors manage to keep it all straight? “It seems unlikely,” he wrote to me judiciously, “that somebody would remember all those moments in such precise detail, especially when the memory is decades ago.” It’s a question I myself have been thinking about a lot over the last few weeks flipping through Finnegan’s memoir with a little more perspective.

While my friend is right to point out how preposterous it seems that one could remember, say, the exact face an elementary school teacher made in 1957 from the vantage point of the 21^st century, there are a few factors which make such recollections somewhat more plausible for the average memoir author than they would be for the average reader.

The first is that great writers—the kind whose memoirs schlubs like my friend and I are reading, anyway—are very probably lifelong writers, and therefore are more likely than even a well-versed reader to have kept extensive journals dating back to as far as early childhood. Now, you'd be right to question the veracity of these entries—which are undoubtedly marred by the same issues of memory and perspective humans all share—but they often work for painting a decent picture of circumstance or dialogue, which can in turn trigger a more vivid memory.2 

The second is adjacent to a point I made a few months ago amidst my analysis of Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker piece on CoComelon: the population pool of writers self-selects for people who are unusually perceptive and observant. These two traits are usually what make writers good at what they do. Because other writers are almost always the ones driving the discourse around literature—through analysis, discussions, reviews, etc.—the particularity of the writer class is so often taken for granted by critics who share the same tendencies creators do. But I can’t emphasize this enough: the vast majority of people don’t think like writers do! (Nor do they care about the many so-called pressing preoccupations of people who consider themselves writers). So I think it’s easy to take for granted how specific and peculiar the process of writing can actually be.

Attempting to step outside this vacuum, I’d argue that the same basic qualities which make, say, Haruki Murukami's fiction so riveting—his obsessive focus on tiny details, blowing some small observation he probably made about Colonel Sanders once into a whole subplot of a pseudo-fantasy novel about a cat murderer and fish falling from the sky—are, essentially, the same traits which make Barbarian Days so compelling. Great authors take things that most people, on some level, notice, and reframe them with their own idiosyncrasies and panache, infusing them with transformative, unforgettably creative flourishes (like how Finnegan describes getting barreled over and over at Honolua Bay as a teenager, a hair-raising experience for even the most extremely land-locked reader).

Now, there are obvious limitations to this. Even given all that writers have going for them in terms of recollection skills—journaling, good memory, etc.—it's impossible that everything Finnegan writes in Barbarian Days actually happened as he claims it did. I mean, come on. He's writing a nearly 400-page book and he's giving it his best shot, but he for sure knows that it can't all have actually went down exactly as he described, and he is absolutely, as my friend hinted at, embellishing lots of details. This fact is baked into the genre. 

The only question is how much the writer chooses to discuss this inconvenience out loud. Barbarian Days and a similarly popular memoir, Patti Smith’s Just Kids (the latter having inspired as many East Village apartment overpays as the former has impulsive surf pilgrimages), mostly don't touch the memory question directly; they rarely feature, in other words, warnings like “I remember this happening but..." or "in my mind it went like this..." to qualify individual stories. Others do (ironically, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, written in the style of a memoir, features qualifiers like "I remember it being like this”—but of course she’s(?) made it all up. Probably). I don't think one strategy is more effective than the other, though using qualifiers can get tricky because if you start going down that road then suddenly stop using disclaimers in telling a particular story, the reader is more likely to assume said story is true, which, well, who knows. You can see how this gets messy in a hurry.

Ultimately, the memoir question comes down to the reliability of memory, in every form—be it journal writing, oral history, or plain, old-fashioned internal recollection—and this issue (issue, not necessarily problem) will always be at the core of the memoir genre, just as, often, the inverse challenge arises in fiction (authors putting too much auto in autofiction). Personally, I think it'd be helpful to deconstruct these genre types a bit as readers, to care less about the purported category of a work and to just appreciate each one under the broader category of "art” while remaining mindful of each creation’s context. That's easy for me to say, though; I've never been on the wrong end of it, in the case of someone falsely and maliciously writing something “true” about me, which is also something that happens (not to mention the political weaponization of the genre—Barack Obama and J.D. Vance have both faced criticism over the veracity of their respective memoirs, each of which launched them to fame).

Political controversies aside, the crux of this question is essentially the foundation of all I'm interested in tackling as a writer; where does what we believe come from? How reliable are our memories, and is it useful to lean on them to shape who we strive to be in the future? I aim for all the writing I do to elicit questions like those, and I appreciate the way great memoirs summon them without explicitly referencing them by funneling memory, dream, and reality through a singular, somehow honest prism. I don't think anyone should read these works with the expectation that everything inside is 100 percent true, because, well, what would that even mean? A "true" recounting of a life, after all, is an oxymoron, even and especially when the recounter is yourself. The reader, as always, gets the final word on how he or she chooses to interpret any piece of writing, genre be damned.