There’s a brief classroom scene in Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret (filmed in 2005, unreleased until 2011) that perfectly crystallizes a wounded adolescent masculine intelligence of a kind that has become increasingly prominent even among adult men in contemporary American cultural and political life, discontented by liberal arts pedagogy, and—by way of an emotive, illogical leap—with liberalism itself. A bunch of Upper West Side prep-school kids are asked by their well-meaning if rather uninspiring English teacher to gloss the Earl of Gloucester’s lines from King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” At first we’re treated to a range of fairly realistic, almost banal responses: there’s a girl who prefers not to say anything at all when called upon. The audience knows it’s because the lines resonate too deeply with her, and, like Cordelia, nothing is the most truthful thing she can say. Then there’s the good boy who suddenly discovers character and subjectivity: “It’s not Shakespeare saying it, it’s Gloucester. Maybe another character would have a different point of view.”1

The teacher is all set to reward this insight, allowing him to reinforce the lessons of the easygoing pluralism that we recognize to be the implicit pedagogical aim of too many high school English class discussions. (Poor literature, almost never taught for itself, always as a means to something else.) But Lonergan then takes the scene to another level by writing in that one galaxy-brained teenager who had probably just dropped acid for the first time the preceding week. He seizes on his classmate’s idea of different subjective realities and overworks it: not only do “the gods” treat humans the way boys treat flies, he suggests, but from the standpoint of consciousness, a god’s consciousness to a human is like a boy’s consciousness to a fly, and therefore we can’t know why the gods do anything. This is essentially the end of the Book of Job rendered in the self-satisfied idioms of someone a couple years away from discovering effective altruism, a future master-of-the-universe type. In Lonergan’s screenplay, this is made explicit. The kid continues, “He’s saying there’s a higher purpose we cannot see. He’s just saying that what seems like them killing us for sport could just be because our consciousness isn’t developed enough to see what the higher wisdom of their killing us is.” The filmed version adds a note of hostile grievance: “If you say they kill us for their sport … then how can we be so arrogant as to think they would even bother to kill us for their sport?”

Here is the theater of an intelligence suddenly in love with itself—“in apprehension how like a god.” In this situation a good teacher could ask the boy to connect his observation to the play as a whole, opening up a potential conversation about the social purpose of tragedy or beginning to inculcate an awareness of irony, i.e. what happens when characters in a play become aware that they are essentially characters in a play. Alternatively, the teacher could move in the direction of philosophy, reminding the student that that this teenage attempt to inhabit the standpoint of the divine is nonetheless a statement made by just another flawed human being.

Instead, in the film, the teacher gets flustered. The kid’s idea is not assimilable to the humanistic “takeaways” the guy has been hired to impart to these young minds. So he tries to sow doubt, insisting, “I don’t think that’s what Shakespeare meant,” and invoking “scholarly opinion” without citing any specific scholarship. The kid is too smart, too high on his own supply, and his mood too combative to be satisfied with this mere ghost of expertise. He shoots back: “What are you saying? A thousand Frenchmen can’t be wrong?”

Eventually, the exasperated teacher chooses to utter the fateful words that turn the premise of this entire exercise in nonhierarchical, pluralistic liberal arts education to dust. “No, David, you’re wrong. That’s not what Shakespeare meant!” he raises his voice. “I would really like to move on.” The camera shows us disdain, bafflement, turning to hurt, curdling to anger, on the kid’s face. What did he do wrong? We can well imagine how this kid might nurture a grudge for life against the dumb liberal arts teacher and the guy’s fake experts who shut him down. He would now be old enough to be among the more senior operatives at DOGE, or leading the charge for viewpoint diversity on college campuses, or representing the Marxist-accelerationist wing of the DSA.

Teachers—like cops, border guards and that day’s consulting psychiatrist at the ER—perform crucial jobs at the tense frontier where illiberal impulses and wishes are in daily confrontation with liberalism’s “rules-based order” for maximizing individual expression and liberty within the ever-shifting limits of other individuals’ expressions and liberties. A society turns out to be really only as good as its most liminal gatekeepers, and the teacher who fails the test of the principles he’s supposed to uphold as well as transmit reveals the fragile foundation of the whole open-society endeavor.

The machine was always full of illiberal ghosts, the irritable gestures of a weak authority tired of allowing itself to be questioned. And this was true of America’s most prestigious and rigorously “liberal” institutions, like the composite prep school of Lonergan’s film, which retained many non- or anti-liberal aspects throughout the comparatively brief epoch of American liberalism’s social, cultural and political ascendancy (a period that, most charitably, spans from the publication of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination in 1950 until Al Qaeda took down the Twin Towers). Handling testosterone-fueled, would-be-nonconformist boys at the end of history was only one of the many challenges for an already fraying post-9/11 liberalism, but it turned out to be a particularly salient one for the ability of liberal institutions to continue providing the promised end of one type of good life.

The failure point had been reached well before the spot of time depicted in Lonergan’s film. Liberal values, at least in education, were already more of a vague idea than something actively practiced. The audience implicitly understands that the teacher had only a fifty-minute period to get through that day’s allotted reading of King Lear. The clock was ticking, and—in addition to the soft pluralism—he was also responsible for maximizing student SAT scores, thereby boosting admission rates to fancy colleges, a cog in the wanton flywheel of class reproduction. Time to move on.

Or not just yet. The contradictions on display in Lonergan’s short dialogue are not all on the teacher’s side. The kid isn’t just trying to make a valid—if digressive—point about hierarchies of consciousness. He wants two different things at once: the same validation the teacher bestowed on his classmate—be it smile, gold star, whatever cookie of affirmation or stamp of approval from authority; and yet he also wants to triumph over that authority. He’s not just seeking to be recognized as part of a community of meaning-makers and fellow minds, his comment is meant to end conversation. The recognition he seeks is a recognition of his superiority.

The scene offers a succinct version of what I like to think of as the “whiny Nietzsche” paradox that afflicts many young men (and not only men) of high intelligence at some point in their emotional and intellectual development. It’s not enough for them to be smart, they must be smarter. And it’s not only enough to be smarter, they need an authority to ratify their superiority. This need for external approval gives the lie to their claim for superiority. The boy does not seek recognition from the fly. In an ideal world, this yearning for recognized superiority would only be a type of chrysalis stage that gives way to mutual acknowledgment between peers, without the need for the single overarching authority figure to bestow rewards, or punishments. Because we don’t live in that world, what we’ve got instead is a number of adult whiny Nietzsches strutting and fretting upon the American stage: Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert), whose claims to intellectual superiority or godlike insight into immutable truths about human nature ought to have been actively contested and refuted at a moment when it might have made a difference to their own thinking and to an impoverished culture that now lives only to take sides with or against them.

●

Although the relationship might not be immediately apparent, I thought about this scene in connection with The Point’s forum about the left and the good life for a number of reasons. If we believe, along with Aristotle and Hannah Arendt, that the good life is one that contains or indeed chiefly is defined by contemplation, conversation, the free cultivation of the intellect for no ulterior purpose apart from the pleasure or happiness we derive from such thoughtfulness as an end in itself, we also have to attend to the creation and care of spaces that permit the full and free exercise of what Arendt glorified as “the life of the mind.” The whole point of this intellectual idea of the good life is that it is precisely apolitical, or pre-political. Not only is it beyond good and bad, it is beyond left and right, or rather it is before left and right. So, at first glance, what the left has to do with this kind of good life is precisely nothing. Only a space free from politics allows us then to enter politics, ideally on our own terms. But, as Arendt acknowledges, freedom of thought itself requires conditions of political freedom. Curiously and counterintuitively, she goes on to remark in her discussion of the life of the mind that “it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”

What this has to do with “the left,” more than “the right,” is connected to our assumption that the left, at least such as it once existed in the United States of America, retains commitments to enlarging the space of freedom or providing for the greatest liberty of the greatest number, whereas the right narrows the liberty of others to protect the freedoms of the few. In this way, although the good life is both pre- and post-political, the guardianship of the nonpolitical space that offers the positive freedom to think has historically most often been entrusted to those on the left of the U.S. political spectrum. The foundations not just of the modern university but of the cultural practices of discussion, conversation and open-minded debate in this sense do indeed have an inherent liberal bias, and that’s a good thing.

The problem comes when that inherent liberal bias turns into something more than that, which is a constant temptation, since the things we think in our pre-political phase will inevitably, at least if we are serious about thinking them, as opposed to merely playing games with ideas, lead us in a political direction. Eventually we may find ourselves in a position where we are required to sideline the political convictions we have arrived at through thinking for the sake of keeping open the nonpolitical space for thought—and, depending on the times in which we live, or any number of ulterior considerations, we may not feel that this is a good trade, either for us personally or for the “movement” that our political convictions have brought us into alignment with. It is here that the posture of Lonergan’s put-upon English teacher, which has so often been taken up by the American left in the past fifteen years, even in its more moderate institutional guise, can become so hard to resist.

I experienced the difficulty of maintaining an open-ended space for “the life of the mind” firsthand, from inside the workings of n+1, the “little magazine” I helped bring into being in 2004. One part of the founding impetus, and the part with which I most strongly identified, was to enlarge or create a space of intellectual and artistic freedom within that mysterious trinity of “literature, culture and politics.” At times we placed this desire under the anarchic banner of “saying the unsayable,” aiming to function as a type of voice of the unconscious of American intellectual life—both as id and sometimes as superego. When we started out there seemed to be too much responsible and self-interested ego all around us: that could take the form of Peter Beinart’s carefully calibrated arguments for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or the expensively tousled stylings of twee literary culture operating out of West Coast magazines like McSweeney’s and in the workshops of the MFA pipeline. We looked upon these as cultural and intellectual interventions that were written for the sake of approval from “acceptable” institutional voices and authorities, and which would never dare risk their incomprehension.

While suspicious of broad conformity and approval-seeking at the expense of grappling with complicated truths in the work of others, we nonetheless tried to be sensitive to this tendency in ourselves. Built into our attitude of permanent dissatisfaction was a project of autocritique, or at least an openness not only to disagreement and discussion but an active attempt to promote and host unfolding and uncomfortable conversations, whether through long letters to the editor, dissents to our own critiques published in our pages—as happened when James Wood approached us to respond in essay form to our criticisms—forums and public events with people who thought or believed differently from us, and so on.

At the same time, there were enough unresolved tensions in the founding editors’ sensibilities and commitments that we couldn’t avoid our own mid-2000s version of the whiny-Nietzsche problem, especially as the magazine gained subscribers and cultural influence. Did we in fact want the recognition and approval of the authorities we were challenging, did we want to supplant them, or did we want to evolve our own model of a working, growing cultural institution that operated differently and so avoided the pitfalls of groupthink and closed-mindedness we’d sensed in our precursors? Cynics would and did suggest that the first of these was always the primary motivation and that the evolution of the magazine over the twenty years since its founding bears that out. But it wasn’t so straightforward or predetermined at the time.

As editors but also as writers, we often found ourselves in the tricky position of occupying both sides of Lonergan’s unfortunate student-teacher encounter. Contrarians ourselves, we still struggled to handle any would-be whiny Nietzsches who came into contact with us. Most of all, the contradictions they inhabited—between wanting our approval and wanting to prove to us how dumb or backward or insensitive we were ourselves—made working with them difficult and time-consuming. And publishing pieces that we might not wholly endorse on grounds of widening the conversation or sparking dialogue tended to cost us subscribers who didn’t appreciate the challenge. And not only subscribers: one of my great shocks in talking with many of our most enthusiastic interns and writers was that they’d been attracted first to the magazine not because of its openness but because of the correctness of our opinions. “You were right about the Iraq War!” is something I heard from almost every young up-and-comer.

Something else happened in the course of my time at the magazine: beginning with Occupy Wall Street, in 2011, an actual American left protest movement broke out, of a kind that had not existed when we started the magazine. This put our commitment to remain open to uncomfortable confrontations under even more pressure. Throughout the left-liberal intellectual sphere, it was recommended that in the name of action—or at least of activism—conversations on a whole range of issues needed to be shut down, or wrapped up. The magazine’s editors and staff wholeheartedly joined encampments and demonstrations; we saw our friends beaten and arrested or were beaten and arrested ourselves. In our hearts, minds and bodies we felt ourselves to be less free. And under such conditions, as Arendt had warned, we chose to emphasize action and therefore “right action” over “thought” or the kind of “conversation” that suspended judgment of right and wrong.

Our foundational triad of politics, literature and culture turned out to be a hierarchy with political identity at the top. It didn’t necessarily have to turn out that way. A few years later, the novelist and essayist Amit Chaudhuri proposed a project that he named “Literary Activism,” i.e. activism on behalf of literature and literary approaches to life. The irony built into the phrase highlights the difficulty but also a life-affirming joy in the task. Alternatively, we might have mounted a more robust defense of freedom of thought, independent of party or politics or the sensitivities of donors and subscribers. Instead we became irritable, impatient and ultimately hostile toward those who continued to question our commitments and beliefs. They had not spent a night in the Tombs, nor had they labored with little sleep and no immediate reward to produce gazettes and pamphlets to give a platform to activists and advocates and everyday people who made up the movement. And so something that began as a contrarian operation inside the left-liberal literary and cultural spheres that formed our intellectual life lost the necessary patience to engage with and host potential skeptics within the frame of our own pages. This happened in the way people go broke, at first gradually then suddenly.

●

Lonergan’s scene highlights the difficulty of maintaining open-ended intellectual spaces even under what ought to be close-to-ideal conditions. With one misstep, one slip off balance, the invitation to think becomes instead a theater of gesture, a drama of recognition and vengeance playing out in a space that appears to be free but reveals itself to be cryptically or tacitly authoritarian. This tacit authoritarianism does not have to arise from any obvious “ideology”—no assumptions about race, class and gender are at play in the confrontation—but rather from psychology. Or we could say that both teacher and student in the scene are caught between psycho-ideological scripts, the boy not knowing if he wants approval from authority or wants to supplant it, the teacher not knowing how to command respect without slipping into dogmatism. The teenage boy is not yet a troll, not yet an intellectual terrorist or right-wing influencer. It is only in the drama of failed recognition that he may become one. How much harder is it to deal with this type of intelligence, this type of challenging person, the gadfly who thinks he can see like a god, when we become convinced that conditions are intolerable and we inhabit a permanent state of emergency?

I’m not writing about my old magazine here to settle scores, or only to catalogue a disappointment. I understand n+1’s fate to be representative of a host of leftward cultural and intellectual institutions that unintentionally yet also willingly surrendered guardianship of the life of the mind. That this surrender happened at the same time that we also tried to open ourselves up to newer voices and newer perspectives is a tragic irony worthy of King Lear. But one result is that American society has drifted farther than ever from a truly independent good life in which our thoughts may be unsanctioned and also unsanctified, while remaining always contestable and always in conversation with other all-too-human humans.

Further reading on education and intellectual life from issue 36…

• Annie Abrams on Dewey, Plato, and what’s good for students.

• on the left case for great books.

• Ege Yumusak on where politics takes place.

Last February, a group of young conservatives in Washington hosted an open-invitation Valentine’s Day debate party. There, a month after the inauguration, dozens of young men in or around Trump’s new administration gathered to discuss not the great man in the White House, not political revolution, but love.

This is an era of good feelings for these young men, and the theme would seem to reflect the mood. It is also promisingly uncontroversial, and thus more welcoming: more women have come to this event than most conservative mixers, raising their average attendance from the single digits to tentative double digits. For a generation of young men increasingly politically divorced from women their age, who make up the most anti-GOP and anti-Trump demographic, the idea that love could overcome any obstacle is a hopeful premise.

But in the debate that ensues, nearly every speech is against romance. The arguments detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a “simp” or a “sucker.” Some wonder aloud whether one should ask out women at all, who, in the age of dating apps, receive far too much male attention, and as a result have become too picky, exacting and fickle. Eventually, a quip about women’s suffrage comes from the audience, prompting a jocular back-and-forth. I ask a friend why they are suddenly discussing whether women should vote. He looks at me and sighs. “Women’s suffrage always comes up.” By night’s end, almost nobody has asked out any of the women present in the room; the only man who ventures to do so is summarily rejected.

Afterwards, at a nearby bar, I find again a lot of single young men talking about women, rather than to women. One tells me that his friend, who is not here tonight, recently found a girlfriend: “I’m really happy for him. But now he texts our group chat advice, acting like he’s got the key to life, like he’s got it all figured out. And sometimes I’m not sure what to talk about with him anymore. We used to bond over not having a girl.” I think of my own “girlfriends,” who’ve told me to break up with previous boyfriends over their greater or lesser faults, imploring me to think of “how fun it would be to be single together.”

In another corner of the bar, I encounter a group of three twentysomething young men. The young, right-leaning women who had shown up hopeful have gone home. These men are now here alone on a Saturday night, in hour one of a five-hour debate about the nature of love. They are lonely experts, armed with elaborate theories of the female mind. The discussants go around in circles for hours, discussing what men truly want, what women truly want. Theses abound: “Men want respect; women want to be desired”; “Men are easily satisfied, but women are always afraid of making the wrong choice and not maximizing their options”; “Men are the only true romantics.” And questions remain: How many past sexual partners is too many? How many is too few? Does she need to share your interests, or is femininity more important than intellectual compatibility? Is it a red flag if she’s unmarried after 25? Is it a red flag if she’s single? What if we just assigned girlfriends and boyfriends randomly, wouldn’t they be happier than if we let them choose?

These single men talk amongst themselves about how many kids they want, out of an earnest aspiration but also, at times, as if in competition to prove their traditional virility. It is easier to talk about wanting ten kids while unattached and 24 than to raise ten kids with one’s wife, but tonight the effect is the same: here, you are based. One asks me how many I want. “I don’t know yet; I have to find someone first. Three, four?” He gives me a look. “Those are liberal numbers.”

A few weeks later I attend another party in similar circles. It is almost midnight, ten minutes until my 27th birthday. I want to go home. As I walk out I encounter two young men, staffers in Trump’s administration, talking on the sidewalk in their suits and loosened ties, smoking cigarettes. Hesitantly, I say hello. I am exhausted by the theories I’ve heard over the last few weeks about women’s virtues and faults and nearly wince, expecting more to come. Behind me, I recognize two college-aged guys from recent media exposés; they work for DOGE and are evaluating some absent girl’s Instagram page.

I exchange a few pleasantries and introductions with the two men in front of me instead. Midway through the conversation, I mention that I ought to go home soon, but a friend walks past and wishes me a happy birthday. One of my new acquaintances walks abruptly toward a flowering dogwood tree, picks a flower from a branch, and comes back to present it to me without a word. I hold it in my hand, shy and elated. The DOGE boys call him a simp.

One thing I and other young women in D.C. have observed since the election is a shift in how young men speak to and appraise us. Passing through conservative mixers, parties and young-professional networks in Trump’s Washington, we’ve increasingly felt like we’re working against an assumption that women are tainted and guilty until proven otherwise. “Among all the young men I’ve met on the right, especially on the far right, I would guess that 10 to 20 percent of them hate all women,” my acquaintance Oliver, someone familiar with these circles, tells me somewhat sarcastically. I share Oliver’s estimate with a twentysomething right-wing influencer. He widens his eyes and laughs, but concedes there’s truth to it. “Look, lots of these guys, they just consider you less reliable if you talk to women. You’re compromised, in a real way.”

I later tell Jake,^* the Trump staffer who picked me the flower, about the statistic. He is a former fraternity president and hardly uses X. He looks bewildered. “Where do you find these guys?” He shakes his head. “Whoever they are, they don’t talk to me.” Jake seems to be as-yet uncontaminated by the culture on the right that views women as saboteurs of right-wing ideological purity and hen-pecking nuisances to be avoided. He suggests to me that, as a 27-year-old, he’s already older than the demographic that received their intellectual and social formation online. His romantic imagination was shaped more by fraternity mixers and reading physical books. Jake quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and Goethe’s Faust, revealing a talent I suspect will bode better for his own fertility than that of the young men studying tweets about female fertility.

The three of us meet again for drinks, and the other young staffer I met on my birthday, James,^* offers his own explanation for his peers: “My working thesis is that all of these stupid, these ridiculous rules—they come from a sense of anxiety. People feel very anxious that the normal rules have broken down.” He references not just the disappearance of in-person dating scripts, or our confusion about gender roles, but the widespread anxiety around expressing desire toward women, even verbally approaching women without clear permission, in the wake of #MeToo. “They [young men] think, ‘I have to make my own new rules.’ But people’s new rules are worse. Much worse. Real life has been so eroded” by social media, COVID lockdowns and dating apps “that people are forced to retreat into this kind of categorical thinking. Because opportunities to casually meet people as they actually come, as entire people and not checklists, are no longer available to most people. It’s all first principles. Yeah, right. Like, what’s the ‘first principles’ wife? ‘Doesn’t have too many tattoos.’ ‘I just want a woman who dresses modestly.’ Where are we, fucking Qatar?”

“For most young men, their lives are consumed by thinking about these categories,” he continues, “because real life is degraded for most people, and they can’t exit out of these imagined categories and just meet human beings. Real life is not degraded for me, because I’m relatively good-looking and charming and rich.” He pauses and gives me a smile. “But I can understand it. We’ve outsourced opportunities for normal connection. You go to bars today and it’s literally groups of guys in three and groups of women in three, and none of them talk to each other. That was not how it was fifty years ago. If you’re just a well-meaning young person who is not extraordinary in any way, what are you supposed to do?”

I think of his peers, the young right-wing men at parties around the city, surrounded by young women who share their values. Amid a post-election renaissance of right-wing social life in D.C., they’ve had all summer to pursue opportunities in real life, but the forms of gender-specific discourse that had given them consolation were more gratifying, or familiar, than the opportunity to encounter real and receptive women. Instead, they talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.

Around the same time this past summer, I stepped outside the New Right’s anxious romantic subculture and went to a birthday party for a liberal acquaintance. The invitation contained a self-deprecating joke about turning 29 (“it’s so over!”), which turned out to indicate an ambient anxiety about aging, a sense that we’re getting too old to still not know who we are and what we want.

At the party, I run into an old acquaintance and his girlfriend of four years, who works in Democratic politics. They are a pleasant and up-to-date couple who are appropriately embarrassed by how high-income their D.C. neighborhood is. At some point, as we discuss our late twenties, I mention wanting to have kids one day. His girlfriend’s eyes light up. “You do?!” she asks as she turns to me. “How many? Boys or girls?” Then her boyfriend chimes in. “You want kids?” He’s genuinely surprised; he expected better from me. He reminds me how bad the world, the country, is. I think back to when he and his girlfriend first started dating, in the Biden era, and the year-long situationship that preceded their lukewarm relationship, and wonder what he’s so afraid of.

While nearly all my conservative friends are single, even though they claim to want to get married young, many of my left-leaning or liberal friends are in long-term relationships, but say that they don’t want to get married or have kids any time soon. The young liberal women I know, based on the desires they express and their sometimes-contrary actions, seem to want an open but committed relationship; they want someone enthusiastically sex-positive but not a playboy; a man who reads but only the right things, and who isn’t disagreeable or prone to overexplaining what interests him; they want casual, liberated sex with regulated communication, rules and a sense of mutual obligation. They often prioritize men who have learned the right political and romantic lines and have an emotional register that mirrors their female friendships, but lack the seriousness or sense of purpose they are looking for in their relationships.

I notice another old acquaintance at the party. Years ago he survived a life-threatening accident; his girlfriend stood by him, through the complications and disability. I’d visit him between surgeries, and he told me once, still at that time facing death, that he had decided he was going to marry her. She had taken him to the hospital, been there for the appointments, held his hands and his head, stood by him on death’s doorstep. She had proved she was the one. As he told me this, I thought that I caught a glimpse of something women long to see: real, fixed love in a man’s eyes. It reminded me of the “state of enchantment” W. H. Auden called “certainty.” His near-death encounter had made freedom seem meaningless in the face of one real thing.

I wonder now if I imagined it: if my own romantic indecisiveness made me vicariously relieved by his bravery. Once he recovered, I asked him excitedly when he planned to propose. He became quiet. I felt like I was suddenly talking to a different person. His wounds were still healing; the scars were hard to look at. But more frightening was the look on his face when I asked him about that previous moment of clarity. I hoped he might be the first among my friends, all in their mid-to-late twenties, to make a lasting commitment. It seemed to me that he had made up his mind about her weeks before, somewhere between life and death. But in the light of life, with fifty years still ahead, he faltered.

As with the right-wing men, online dating discourse bleeds into my single female friends’ accounts of their experiences: they tell me, in insights learned from short-form videos on TikTok, that men are so dangerous that it’s safer to encounter a wild grizzly in the forest rather than a man, but also that it’s both laudable and empowering to have a one-night stand with a near stranger (who is also, of course, a man). Asked once by a friend about the bear-versus-man dilemma, I answered, not knowing the political context of the question, “I think I’d rather encounter a man. You can reason with a human being, right?” My answer was the wrong one.

After the party, I speak to Alexis,^* another friend, about a new guy she’s seeing. She’s a leftist and lives in a suburb. She’s in her mid-twenties, and has been dating for a few years since college. After several dead-end romantic experiences, she’s become uneasy with casual sex. On a date recently, she tried to explain to a left-wing young man why she wanted to wait a few weeks before having sex, but struggled for a moral vocabulary that didn’t seem retrograde, prudish or weird. She recounts the end of the date to me: “So I told him, ‘I don’t want to jump right into sex anymore, honestly. It’s so weird. It’s like, Hey, I just met you; now choke me out and fuck me.’”

She pauses as she tells me this, and laughs. “Like, that’s insane if you think about it! So that’s what I told him. And then he said, ‘No, no, I completely understand.’

“But I don’t think he did. I just told him, ‘I’m far beyond this idea of fucking just because you can, just because you’re attracted to this person and they’re alone with you in your house.’” Alexis grows more emphatic, as if proving the point to me as she recounts this conversation. “That doesn’t mean you have to, right?!” She pauses; she seems to be looking for some broader justification that might license, or contextualize, her desire for more emotional intimacy, familiarity and safety before having sex. “I told him, ‘Look, we’re bringing back yearning.’”

Something about the phrase sounds familiar. I look it up later, and it’s popular among young women who watch shows like Bridgerton, plots that have all the courtesy and flattery of traditional courtship with little of the stifling authority or shame. It seems that women who have observed, and accepted, that sex must precede emotional attachment in dating use the concept of “yearning” to barter for any sign of emotional life from their lovers at all.

She goes on. “I later sent him this famous essay I had read, by Silvia Federici, about how sex and sexuality are a form of labor for women. He asked me to explain what it meant to me. I told him, exasperated, ‘Look, it’s structural, not personal!’”

I think of the notion of boysobriety—celibacy, in other words, rebranded with an infantilizing TikTok neologism. The desire to sober up from love and sex is pervasive among the first generation (mine) to fully combine the mores of free love with the more, more, more impulse of dating-app culture. Drowning in opportunities but dying for dignity, people my age and younger don’t want a relationship they can DoorDash. The turn to “trad” dating norms, Marxist-feminist theories and TikTok lifestyle advice reflects the desperation for a social or moral framework that gives them the permission and the confidence to say, without feeling too conspicuous or weird, “I’ve had enough.”

Read the rest of “Doomers in Love,” and subscribe to read issue 36 in full.

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Letter from the Editors

On the Liberal Imagination
[]

Perhaps the vision offered up in the opening of Abundance—a temperature-controlled apartment, well-stocked fridge and drone technology for package delivery (something already current in select American cities)—is utopian enough for Klein and Thompson’s most likely readership: well-educated progressives who already inhabit some version of this life but would like to be liberated from the guilt they feel at the injustice and scarcity on which they know it is built. Surely, though, there must be something more to the “good life” than this.

Essays

Right and Left
A bad year in Washington
[Noelle Bodick]

Another fed worker tells me he spends his days pacing the marble corridors of his office like an absolute madman. The Lana del Rey lyric “I don’t wanna do this anymore” plays on loops in his head in Lana’s exact fey, languid voice. “Everyone is depressed under Trump. Everyone has ED,” a government lifer—male, late forties—reports, matter of fact. A probationary worker who studied history in school laughs manically when I ask if 2025 has felt “historic.” “It has not felt historic. It has felt chaotic.”

The Art of Nostalgia
Wes Anderson’s history films
[Andrew Eckholm]

Yes, your fantasies aren’t real, but you’re not stupid to have had them.

Doomers in Love
On dating and dignity
[]

“For most young men, their lives are consumed by thinking about these categories,” he continues, “because real life is degraded for most people, and they can’t exit out of these imagined categories and just meet human beings. Real life is not degraded for me, because I’m relatively good-looking and charming and rich.” He pauses and gives me a smile. “But I can understand it. We’ve outsourced opportunities for normal connection. You go to bars today and it’s literally groups of guys in three and groups of women in three, and none of them talk to each other. That was not how it was fifty years ago. If you’re just a well-meaning young person who is not extraordinary in any way, what are you supposed to do?”

Forum: The left and the good life

Beyond Equality
[]

What I’m about to say is going to seem like a bad joke: the trouble with the left is its egalitarianism.

Perfecting Democracy
[Paul Taylor]

Perfection, however unattainable, is the heavenly mark that galvanizes the self—the fallible, humble, but aspiring self that can, despite itself, come to regard goodness and right as cold and lifeless abstractions.

Live in Society!
[]

Discovering class consciousness is itself a social practice, where people form communities through a constant feedback loop of desire, self-inquiry and action. The Greeks had a word for this. They used to call it politics.

Radical Eudaimonism
[Jensen Suther]

Degrowth communism risks becoming eco-authoritarianism in a Marxist guise. Yet Hegel helps us see that work like Saito’s is premised on a false dichotomy—the choice is not between growth or degrowth but capital growth or rational growth.

Serpents in the Garden
[]

Lonergan’s scene highlights the difficulty of maintaining open-ended intellectual spaces even under what ought to be close-to-ideal conditions. With one misstep, one slip off balance, the invitation to think becomes instead a theater of gesture, a drama of recognition and vengeance playing out in a space that appears to be free but reveals itself to be cryptically or tacitly authoritarian.

The Left Case for Great Books
[]

When we sit down in a seminar to explore a text and the questions it poses, we are not doing it for an employer or in the service of some idea of social utility, but for ourselves and for one another. Indeed, it is only by divesting ourselves of the trappings of expertise and social hierarchy that a seminar becomes possible at all: we must meet and speak as equals. This includes both the people in the room and the author of the text: all may be criticized, but all must be understood.

Freedom of Intelligence
[Annie Abrams]

In the name of progress, public education is now pressed into the service of agendas that align with corporate profit, workforce readiness, ideological reproduction and demand for quantifiable results. These aims ignore what progressive education at its best can do, and the students who school ostensibly serves.

Clocked Out
[]

Writing off the average American worker as either a naïve dupe or an embattled burnout is reductive, an easy intellectual out. It skirts the messier question: Even if the contemporary economy is inherently exploitative, does the left have anything constructive to say about finding meaningful work within it anyway?

Make Nothing That Isn’t Beautiful
[John Michael Colón]

Morris dreamed of large-scale works of art that, like the cathedral, would combine the talents of all the greatest artists in all the recognized art forms of our time and stand as testaments to posterity of who we were and what we aspired to achieve. And they would also be microcosms of the society that produced them, whose virtue was to discover and direct the talents of the common people (a good slice of them, anyway) and not waste them in drudgery. For us who follow in the wake of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, Morris’s challenge remains our challenge, his dream our dream.

Dialogue

A Space Apart
A conversation with Paul North
[Paul North and ]

“The intellectuals who want to ‘do what Marx did’ are the ones who decide to spend some years reading Marx. We have this great guide—they don’t need to write it again. We’re still in the same epic saga where the analysis takes us.”

Correspondence

Tragic Heritage
The uncertain fate of Soviet art in Ukraine under siege
[]

All sorts of things that before were considered benign or even part of a shared culture—Russian literature, Russian arts, the Russian language—were now being scrutinized as ideological cover for Putin’s war of aggression. “My legli spat 23 Fevryala,” one acquaintance in Kyiv told me, “i my prokynulysya 24 Lyutoho.” “We went to sleep on February 23rd,” she said in Russian, “and woke up on February 24th,” she finished in Ukrainian.

Reviews

Listless Liberalism
[]

What the post-liberals get right—and the reason they are winning—is that the end of history has been sallow, ugly and deflating. Theirs is decidedly not an intellectual objection. It is not even an ethical objection, though it is often trussed up in the trappings of moral outrage. At its core, it is an aesthetic aversion.

The Great Replacement
[Vikrant Dadawala]

None of us—Camus, the peddlers of multicultural ephemera, the internet Nazis or me—is immune to the self-forgetting that follows the transformation of genuine cultural memory into kitsch.

Quitting
[]

Every smoker keeps in the front of their mind a worse-off, more seriously addicted, probably sooner-dying smoker who they use to legitimate their own habit. For everyone I knew, I was that smoker.

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If 2025 were a movie, it would begin at sunrise on New Year’s Day, in the porte cochère of Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. A gleaming Tesla Cybertruck glides up to the entrance. Seconds later, it explodes.

The movie could end there. Or not, whatever.

When I watched the CCTV footage of U.S. Army Special Forces soldier Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a married 37-year-old and father of a newborn, obliterate himself in a fireball, I had a wildly inappropriate thought: damn, that’s a nice shot. Early morning light. Long desert shadows. The explosion, a Bruckheimer-esque bloom of fire and debris, arcing in balletic symmetry. I felt like a shitbag for admiring this. Then I realized—the shot was the point. Livelsberger must have been picturing it. The shot was everything.

“Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” he confirmed in his manifesto. And for a few hours, he had their attention. But what was he trying to say? Like so much modern terror, his act had the quality of slop—painfully unsubtle, yet maddeningly unclear.

No one except Livelsberger was killed or even seriously hurt, thankfully. If others had been harmed, he may have earned himself a few extra news cycles, or even a limited series on Hulu. These days, we like our tragedies serialized, and preferably featuring victims and killers who resemble bankable young actors.

In the not-so-distant past, cultural watchdogs spoke out against the unchecked glorification of violence. But those fingers have stopped wagging. Jerry Falwell is dead. Tipper Gore is napping in some Montecito cul-de-sac, and the gummy residue of her parental-advisory sticker is being wiped clean by the algorithm. The parents have left the chat.

In their absence, our appetites for violent media have changed, and the language of cinema has rewritten the way we process real-world violence. How we got here—how filmed violence slid from something with deep moral weight to something unquestioned and banal—is a strange story: one that doesn’t begin at sunrise in Las Vegas, but at the dawn of cinema itself.

In 1903, Thomas Edison produced Electrocuting an Elephant, a film just over a minute long that documents the execution of Topsy, a Coney Island circus elephant that trampled a jeering spectator. This grim spectacle was confined to Edison’s coin-operated kinetoscopes—arcade cabinets that predated movie theaters and allowed a single viewer, peering through a peephole, to catch a flickering glimpse of life and death.

Film historian Tom Gunning would later call these kinetoscopes the “cinema of attractions,” a form that prized sensation over story, pure kinetic display over cause-and-effect narrative. The kinetoscope offered its voyeurs an ephemeral jolt of something real, raw and primal: beefy strongmen flexing in loincloths, leggy dancers twirling their skirts and, of course, violence. Prizefighting reels such as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897) were among the biggest draws. “These early films,” Gunning writes, “explicitly acknowledge their spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront … as opposed to the cinema of the unacknowledged voyeur that later narrative cinema ushers in.”

Across the Atlantic, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) marked the beginning of cinema as a communal experience. Unlike the clunky, stationary kinetoscope cabinets, the Lumière brothers’ projectors were light, scalable and breathtakingly profitable. Equally important was their fluency with the classic Aristotelian narratives of literature and theater, stories presented in three acts, taking place in legible ethical universes where the forces of good mostly prevailed.

For the next sixty years, narrative cinema dominated, not just as entertainment but as a vessel for a spiritually and ethically coherent teleology. Like religion—or, increasingly, advertising—films used storytelling to shape behavior, teach lessons and model morality for the masses. A hero is tested, makes sacrifices and returns transformed. A fallen world is righted through his struggle. The narrative logic ladled a comforting secular moral order over the chaos of life, inviting paying viewers to empathize with, and even embody, the characters on screen.

To the extent that Edison’s pervy little picture box, with its morally and dramaturgically untethered spectacles, persisted, it was in a subdued form: restricted first by local censors, then by the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines enforced by the film industry that forbade profanity, sex and nudity. Violence, however, was permitted, provided it was cleaned up and moralized. From the eighteenth-century frontier myths of Daniel Boone to the American Revolution and the Civil War, violence had always been central to America’s founding narrative and it remained the key ingredient of mid-century America’s most popular cinematic confection: the Western. Movies such as High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953) lionized lone gunslingers who cleaned up corruption and “tamed” native populations through purifying carnage.

In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America rating system replaced the Code, and with its adoption, restrictions on explicit, morally ambiguous spectacles eased. Consequently, Edison’s cinema of attractions flickered back to life in films such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). This cinema of “blood and holes” (as critic Pauline Kael named it) transcended the closed moral frameworks of the Code era to present audiences with ambiguous studies of human nature at its most savage—or perhaps its most honest.

Arriving at a time when American society was grappling with spiking crime rates and anti-war protests, these films prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to assemble the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence to determine whether on-screen brutality bled into real life, particularly among children. Various studies produced competing results, none of which stopped filmmakers from venturing further outside the newly porous moral boundaries of narrative into the savage wilds of sensation. Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) followed a documentary crew whose reckless pursuit of shock value led them to a grisly fate. Among the first so-called “found footage” films, Cannibal Holocaust was banned in more than fifty countries for its real animal killings (a callback to Edison’s elephant) and its gut-churning, hyperrealistic depictions of human sacrifice. When rumors spread that the murders were real, Deodato was arrested in Italy. Actors were forced to appear in court to prove they were still alive.

By the Eighties, violent media—newly available on home video and cable TV—were drawing fire from all political corners. On the right, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority crusaded against filth, while on the left, Ralph Nader’s watchdogs accused Hollywood of reckless sensationalism. Networks scrambled to appease both camps, dulling down anything that might provoke outrage.

But it was too late. The dam had cracked, and an endless barrage of carnage now splattered onto our screens—“nightmares of depravity,” as Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole called them, singling out Time Warner for “putting profit ahead of common decency.” He was echoed from the left—in the 1995 State of the Union address, no less. President Clinton urged Hollywood to “understand the damage that comes from the incessant, repetitive, mindless violence … that permeates our media all the time.”

Then, just as the outcry reached its shrillest note, something unexpected happened: from 1990 to 1997, U.S. violent crime dropped by 15.4 percent, even as the consumption of violent media exploded. Suddenly, it seemed that after all the hand-wringing, any supposed link between violent entertainment and real-world behavior was, at best, wildly overblown.

The cinema of blood and holes could now flourish unencumbered—it was all good harmless fun. But as on-screen violence became more stylized and abstracted, it began to lose its ethical charge. Films like The Matrix (1999) rendered mass shootings as sleek, slow-motion bullet ballets; The Boondock Saints (1999) offered up vigilante killings with frat-boy bravado. The line between depicting brutality and endorsing it had blurred—not because these films told us violence was good but because they stopped telling us anything meaningful about it at all. A deeper cultural shift was tremoring underfoot—one that would intensify our aesthetic fixations and dull our moral instincts, slipping the bounds of cinema and television in favor of computer screens.

On March 25, 1998, tucked deep in the police blotter of the Columbine Community Courier, below a report about a stolen leprechaun lawn ornament valued at $25, a brief item appeared: a high school student had made death threats on his website. The student, identified only by his screen name, “Reb,” had reportedly singled out a classmate. Investigators promised to look into it. They didn’t.

Eric Harris named his shotgun “Arlene” after a character in his favorite video game, Doom. He tells us this in the so-called Basement Tapes—a series of ranty late-night confessionals he filmed with his gleeful, toothpick-chewing co-host, Dylan Klebold, in the weeks before they killed fourteen people and themselves at Columbine High School.

Elsewhere on the tapes, the two teenage murderers-to-be talk movies; specifically, the movie that will inevitably be made about them. Harris offers some preemptive script notes, suggesting the film should have “a lot of foreshadowing and dramatic irony.” Klebold agrees: “Directors will be fighting over this story.” Will it be Spielberg? Tarantino?

There had been school shootings before Columbine, but none so expansively documented. The nightmare unfolded live: sweeping aerial shots of students escaping, then grainy security footage of the killers stalking the cafeteria. Cinematized on arrival, it served as a grim precursor to another spectacle of unnerving realness, The Blair Witch Project, released in theaters just months later.

In the frothy aftermath, pundits scolded the usual culprits—violent movies (Natural Born Killers), music (KMFDM) and video games (Doom). Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore tacked the discourse toward gun control, while Jerry Falwell jibed back to the removal of prayer from public schools. But almost no one mentioned Harris’s online presence. The internet was still an unfamiliar alien landscape, one that law enforcement and the commentariat had yet to recognize as a threat. Harris, however, sensed its potential. While video games offered escape, the internet offered immortality—a place to curate his own violent legend. In addition to making death threats, Harris used his website to post bomb-making instructions and murderous rants. “I can’t wait till I can kill you people,” he teased. Elsewhere, he reportedly uploaded a custom Doom level mirroring the floor plan of Columbine High, presumably so online admirers could “play along” after he was gone.

The Basement Tapes were withheld from the public for fear of inspiring copycats. Only a handful of victims’ families and journalists were allowed to view them before they were destroyed. As Harris and Klebold predicted, movies were made, not by Spielberg or Tarantino, but by arthouse directors like Gus Van Sant (Elephant, 2003) and Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, 2011). Mainstream audiences barely took notice. As it turned out, most people didn’t need a movie about Columbine because they had already seen it. The massacre was the movie, with Harris and Klebold playing themselves. And there would be sequels.

In October 2011, a user named “Smiggles” posted a recipe for oatmeal berry chipnut cookies on Shocked Beyond Belief, an online forum focused on school shootings. Between threads devoted to his favorite Columbine-inspired movies, he fixated on the fabled Basement Tapes, marveling at “the potential it allows for speculation.” Smiggles—real name Adam Lanza—would go on to post on the forum 296 times before killing his mother and then 26 others, most of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

In the thirteen years since Columbine, the internet had grown from the pixelated nerd dungeon Reb once roamed into a glossy, all-devouring cathedral of content. Video production and distribution, once the tightly controlled domain of studios and networks, had slipped into the sweaty palms of practically everyone on earth. And everyone, in turn, could broadcast any video to anyone anonymously—even children.

Tumblr, a microblogging platform known for fan art, soft grunge and tweeny self-obsession, became an unlikely breeding ground for murder fandoms around 2012, just as the true-crime craze hit its cultural peak. On “True Crime Tumblr,” populated mostly by teen girls, mass-murderer fan fiction, video montages and chibi-style anime abounded. Some reimagined Harris and Klebold as bullied outcasts (they weren’t), while others “shipped” serial killers in imagined gay pairings, warping real-life carnage of the past into the bubbly vaporwave fantasies of now.

“Let’s get this party started,” Brenton Tarrant said, grinning at the camera before strapping it to his helmet and stepping into Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the 28-year-old gym trainer murdered 51 worshippers while livestreaming on Facebook. For Tarrant, a gamer radicalized on far-right message boards, mass murder wasn’t the endgame. The video was. The massacre, captured like a Doom-style first-person shooter, was crafted for a global audience.

Alarmed parents and watchdogs rallied—but this time, they found themselves outgunned and outnumbered: nearly half of America’s teens were now armed with smartphones, and they reported being online “almost constantly,” swiping through a blur of video clips. Thomas Edison’s “cinema of attractions” had returned—only now, the kinetoscope was pocket-sized yet infinite, and capable not only of displaying video but capturing it. Fans of violent spectacle could now take part in producing it. And as with all forms of entertainment, those who pushed the boundaries the furthest were the ones who garnered the most attention. Concerns about fictional violence in movies, shows and video games suddenly seemed quaint in the face of real-life beheadings bleeding into timelines between dog bloopers and makeup tutorials.

We still watched violent movies. But whatever power violent cinema held to inspire imitators paled in comparison to the internet, and whatever sharp edges or meanings once attached to cinematic violence had been memed away—made self-aware, ironically detached and frequently deployed to blunt or otherwise mediate the impact of real-world violence. For those of us who’d grown up watching Fight Club (1999) and American Psycho (2000) for their scarring intensity and cheeky originality, it was alarming to watch them become banalized and co-opted as right-wing memes—memes that were then sprinkled through the 180-page manifesto of Buffalo supermarket shooter Payton Gendron, itself plagiarized largely from the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. A copy of a copy. The internet, with its instant gratifications, its bottomless pit of “authentic” horror and its open call for user-generated interpretation, made even the most extreme fiction feel fake and toothless. The movie now belonged to the audience.

A few years back, my sister moved to Durham, North Carolina. Just three minutes from her front door sat the former home of Michael Peterson, convicted wife-killer and reluctant star of the acclaimed docuseries The Staircase (2004). My wife and I had binged it and now here I was, standing next to the very pool where Peterson claimed to have last seen his wife before discovering her bloody and crumpled at the foot of the stairs. My cousin, who also lived nearby, had even been inside the house. She went to the estate sale that appears in HBO’s 2022 dramatization of The Staircase, the one with Colin Firth and Toni Collette, which—of course—we also gleefully binged.

Morbidly, I confess: the proximity gave me a little thrill. A pulse. Then, as with Livelsberger’s exploding Cybertruck, came the pang of self-loathing. Why was I so delighted to be close to this ghoulish tragedy? What was wrong with me? With us?

There’s nothing entirely new about this impulse. Aristotle defended public interest in depictions of tragedy as cathartic and emotionally purifying. Plato famously disagreed. In the Republic, Leontius walks past the executioner’s wall, unable to stop staring at the dead bodies, torn between disgust and desire. What’s changed isn’t the impulse but the scale, saturation and speed. You no longer have to seek out the corpses: the algorithm delivers them to you.

The golden age of narrative cinema, for all its fussiness and flaws, gave violence a moral context, a weight. Its depiction provoked outrage because it was doing something, either reinforcing or challenging the narratives by which we understood ourselves. At its best, that framework made space for empathy and transformation. The climactic shoot-out in Taxi Driver is disturbing not because it glamorizes violence, but because we’ve already been drawn deep into Travis Bickle’s lonely spiral, and feel implicated by intimate association. John Wick, on the other hand, has killed a total of 439 people across four films—and I couldn’t tell you the first thing about any one of them. (Or, frankly, about John Wick.)

In Empty Moments, the film scholar Leo Charney argues that “drift”—the inability to hold onto a stable present—is the defining feature of modernity. Violent spectacle jolts us into momentary contact with something that feels real, however horrifying it might be. Social media, like Edison’s cinema of attractions, doles out violence as a stimulant. By discarding context and moral frameworks, the violence is aestheticized and reduced to slop—slickly produced yet strangely hollow, gesturing at importance without actually achieving it. What matters most isn’t what the violence means or why it was perpetrated, only that it draws attention. Its shallowness invites viewers to project their own interpretations—or just enjoy the show.

The rise of AI will only blur reality further. When images can no longer be trusted, everything can be viewed with detached amusement. It’s not only that screen violence has become normalized, it’s that it has become meaningless. Like a Cybertruck exploding in Vegas, it signifies nothing.

In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), two young men hold a family hostage and torment them with escalating cruelty, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to confront the audience. At one point, when one of the intruders is killed, the other grabs a remote control and rewinds the film, erasing the event. In the final moments of the movie, as the killers dump their last victim into a lake, they casually discuss seeing a film, then set about enacting a “sequel” at a neighbor’s house. In the last frame, one of them smiles at us, and it is strangely reassuring. Who do we really identify with, Haneke seems to ask—the families being terrorized or their winking, unreflective attackers?

Viewed today, Funny Games strikes me as prophetic. Like the killers, we can now rewind, remix and even create our own screen violence. If violent cinema once interrogated our darkest impulses, and violent spectacle indulged them, the violent slop that engulfs us now is too hollow to do either. It doesn’t disturb or thrill. It simply loops.

To read the rest of issue 35 (“What is violence for?”), click here.

This time around, sadly, we had to cut the Sources page for space, but the internet isn’t subject to the tyranny of page-count constraints and signatures, so we’ve reproduced it here for your pleasure.

American Idols

• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

• Jodie Foster, “Why Me?,” Esquire

• Jack and Jo Ann Hinckley, Breaking Points

• William James, The Principles of Psychology

• Taxi Driver (1976)

Militants for Peace

• Acta Maximiliani

• S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire

• Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society

• George Orwell, “Pacifism and the War”

My Father’s War

• crazydademails.tumblr.com

• Dave Grossman, On Killing

• Seneca, On Anger

Demonic Force

• S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon

• Halloween (2007)

• Kate Millett, The Basement

The War Habit

• America’s Army (2002)

• Mohandas Gandhi, “War or Peace?”

• William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War”

• Herman Melville, “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight”

Fear and Trembling in the Garrison

• Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart

• Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

• Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Propaganda of the Deed

• Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

• Law and Order, “Folk Hero” (2024)

• Richard Pipes, “The Trial of Vera Z.,” Russian History

Kinds of Killing

• Stew Albert, “Life and Death,” Good Times

• Esquire, November 1970

• Interviews with My Lai Veterans (1970)

• Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory

Popular Justice

• Euripedes, The Bacchae

• Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge

• René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

What We Become

• Rana Dajani et al., “Epigenetic Signatures of Intergenerational Exposure to Violence in Three Generations of Syrian Refugees,” Nature

• Maggie Michael, “Syrian forces massacred 1,500 Alawites. The chain of command led to Damascus,” Reuters

• Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination

Is Death the Muse

• Susan Howe, The Birth-mark

• John Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats

• Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

Porn

• Aella, “The Other Sexual Orientation”

• Polly Barton, Porn

• Pornhub

Jiu-Jitsu

• James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual

• Elsa Dorlin, Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence

• The Joe Rogan Experience #2234: Marc Andreessen

Violence and the Left

• Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism

• Andreas Malm, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

• Nelson Mandela, “Second Court Statement at the Rivonia Trial” (1964)

• No Other Land (2024)

• Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic

Explicit Content

• The Basement Tapes

• Bob Dole, “Remarks in Los Angeles: Hollywood Speech”

• Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde”

• Michael Haneke, Funny Games (1997)

• Pauline Kael, “Bonnie and Clyde”

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Letter from the Editors

Note on Issue 35
[The Editors]

It can seem perverse, so long as violence is ongoing, to ask for philosophical reflection on violence. In some sense, it surely is. It is a perversity that is coequal with intellectual life itself, which will always seem decadent or ineffectual in view of some more urgent concern or other, and yet remains our only avenue for understanding why something feels urgent to us in the first place, or why it seems less so to others.

Etymology

Terrorism

“The Terrorist … is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimities of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero.”

Essays

American Idols
Death in the magnetic age
[]

That phrase is repeated in all the stories about him, those exact words: impress Jodie Foster. He was stalking her, he was in love with her; somehow he thought that assassinating Reagan would help. But that’s not what really happened. What happened in 1981 is that John Hinckley discovered the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.

Militants for Peace
Christian pacifism and human nature
[Peter Mommsen]

Christian pacifism irritates because it demands what the biblical scholar Richard Hays calls “the conversion of the imagination”—the overturning of certain assumptions that modernity lives by. One of these is that humans are wired for violence. Another is that a world without bloodshed is an impossible ideal that dreamers may yearn for but can never realize in history. The story I am about to tell is partly a story about how I came to agree with Christian pacifism that both of these assumptions are wrong.

My Father’s War
Anger and inheritance
[]

Ira furor brevis est, as Seneca quoted—anger is a brief madness—and my father’s rages were nothing if not mad: the wild eyes, the grimace, the guttural roar, the groaning and bellowing. But brief though the outbursts might have been, the fury smoldered until his bitter end. “It’s you or me,” he would sneer at us whenever we mustered the courage to fight back, “and I damn sure hope you want it to be you, because I sure as hell want it to be me.”

Symposium: What is violence for?

Demonic Force
[]

I’m not sure anyone understands sadistic violence sans motive, especially when acted out on helpless victims or in the context of social normalcy. Or maybe we do understand, in the way I understand the dreams that horrify and bewilder me: on a primitive feeling level that translates into images but not words; maybe we just don’t want to admit that we understand.

The War Habit
[David Bromwich]

As a site of impressive action, in which one person can see the difference he makes, the only rival of war might be the construction of a new city. But that is a long-term ameliorative project that requires imagination and the passage of time. Destruction is faster.

Fear and Trembling in the Garrison
[]

Late nights digging foxholes in the rain mere miles away from one’s own bed only make sense if there’s reason to think such habits will soon save a life. Long, infuriating hours fixing aged tanks only make sense if one expects to lurch toward battle in them. Lonely shifts guarding ammunition only make sense if one anticipates returning fire. It is easier to send a company to the field for training if its soldiers believe their lives will soon depend on what they learn. Without a war on, such work appears to many an exercise in pointlessness.

Propaganda of the Deed
[Sophie Pinkham]

She had been worried, before Solovyev’s attempt two years earlier, that a failed shot at the tsar might “bring about still more serious reaction.” She and her fellow assassins seem never to have considered that success could have the same effect.

Kinds of Killing
[Claudia Verhoeven]

The cases intersected in 1969, went to trial simultaneously in 1970, then concluded in early 1971, with the death sentences and guilty verdicts of both appearing side by side on the front pages of American newspapers. It was this convergence that made it so obvious, and so culturally confrontational, that Manson and My Lai shared gruesome content and form.

Popular Justice
[]

Girard did not deny Foucault’s insight that our modern institutions bear traces of their archaic predecessors. But this did not lead him to conclude that the effects of replacing blood sacrifice with a judicial system were merely superficial.

What We Become
[Alia Malek]

Violence had not just wrought metaphorical transformations in Syrians, turning them at points into bystanders, accomplices, exiles, perpetrators, victims and (for now) a free people. It had also turned their bodies and even their unborn children into repositories of what had happened.

Dialogue

Is Death the Muse
A conversation with Shane McCrae
[Shane McCrae, John Palattella and Julia Aizuss]

“To some extent—to a large extent—maintaining one’s innocence is self-delusion. It’s maybe an extended exercise of Keatsian—although is there any other kind?—negative capability, where you pretend you don’t know what you do know, because otherwise you will adulterate the thing that you make.”

Survey

Capturing Violence
A survey of photojournalists

Is there any instance or aspect of violence that you would not photograph?

“I don’t want to photograph the funerals of my fellow journalists who were martyred in the field in Gaza, or any of their families, or even their homes that were destroyed by the Israeli occupation. I don’t want to photograph any of my relatives or friends who were injured or harmed by the army. I feel that my duty here is to offer my condolences to them, not to photograph them. I feel that my family could be in their place one day. I don’t want to photograph them. There are many scenes that make you lose the desire to photograph, especially if you are filming in your country and you have to convey the image to the world.”

Literature

Permanent Impermanence
[Jenny Erpenbeck]
Translated by Kurt Beals

At Milastrasse 18, where the last fighters of the ghetto uprising took their own lives, geraniums grow on the balcony, the curtains are bleached bright white, and birds chirp from a quince tree. On the spot where the historian Emanuel Ringelblum climbed out of the sewers to hide on the Aryan side, there’s a beautiful park with large chestnut trees.

A Letter to Vania
[Yousri Alghoul]
Translated by Graham Liddell

I’ll tell her that during the war, I turned myself into water as a way to protect myself from collapsing walls and falling furniture. I peeled off my body parts one by one, and they melted away from me until I was no longer trapped in the rubble like my wife and children, who are yet to learn the art of transformation.

Reviews

Porn
[]

Because I’m so interested in what’s popular, this essay has to be about what normal porn actually is, rather than about the goings-on of some esoteric and richly suggestive kink community about which we would love some novel and detailed news. For better or worse, we’re going to stay on the front page.

Jiu-Jitsu
[]

For the left, Penny was not only a racist vigilante who had executed Jordan Neely—yet another unarmed black man—but also, because of his former military service, an extension of the state. For the right, Penny was a hero, someone who was stepping up to help protect innocent bystanders from the chaos of contemporary urban life. My husband, who is a jiu-jitsu blue belt, saw something else: a bad rear naked choke.

Violence and the Left
[Jacob Abolafia]

The left’s fascination with violence, its Mangione memes and Sinwar graffiti, appears to have few real-life consequences outside the hurt feelings of some undergraduates and the ruffled feathers of those business and cultural figures who seem glad of the excuse to be able to finally defect to the rampant right. And yet I am going to try to convince you that the left’s violence problem is serious and real.

Explicit Content
[]

When I watched the CCTV footage of U.S. Army Special Forces soldier Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a married 37-year-old and father of a newborn, obliterate himself in a fireball, I had a wildly inappropriate thought: damn, that’s a nice shot.

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2018, Germany. A bungalow, with anthracite walls and a flat roof. Jerome Daimler’s parents purchased it. They’re divorced now. He lives there alone. The light outside is always muted, gray with little pockets of soft blue. He is constantly renting Teslas, and driving them down the A66. He plays Discover Weekly Spotify playlists via Bluetooth technology. He was born in 1982 and designs websites, which he considers an art form. He lives outside of Frankfurt, in Maintal, where he grew up. He is proud to have never lived in Berlin. His life is a long list of perfectly curated banalities. He likes the music of Bladee. He doesn’t do molly anymore, but he does do ketamine. He is politically left-wing, often thinking to himself, “More people should do various things.” And when we read this, we laugh. Or we’re supposed to. Jerome is one of the two protagonists in Leif Randt’s Allegro Pastel, first published in German in 2020, translated this year into English by Peter Kuras. It is a book that marvels at frictionlessness. A love story and a satire that seems to simulate what it is like to fall in love when you have never experienced resistance, when your consciousness is fully formatted by the internet. Does this make your life seamless, perfect?

The apple of Jerome’s eye is Tanja Arnheim. Tanja was born in 1988. She’s a novelist, author of the ridiculously named PanoptikumNeu. Tanja is meant to be a kind of generational visionary, and her book is “about a virtual reality experience shared by four male friends in an abandoned rural boarding school.” The four male friends are all gay. Due to the fact that Tanja is a young woman (29) and has written a book about something topical (VR), she becomes a favorite on the festival circuit. She is flown around the world as a Delphic oracle of youth culture. She is described as simultaneously ruthless, arrogant and somehow self-deprecating. Tanja is from Kiel. Her mother is a therapist. Her father is a neurologist. She has a younger sister, Sarah, who is a depressive and is in and out of the hospital, but is able to maintain friendships and (mostly) stay medicated. Tanja meets Jerome because Jerome attends the premiere of the “web series adaptation” of PanoptikumNeu “filmed using Samsung Galaxy S7s.” They have a one-night stand and realize there is something more there. Jerome realizes this because “it felt normal to send [Tanja] multiple short messages, one after the other,” and have it still be exciting.

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In the first half of the novel, Tanja and Jerome go back and forth between Maintal and Berlin. When they’re together, they argue about whether or not Call Me by Your Name is a good movie and have “slightly melodramatic sex on the couch,” none of which we see in any detail. They get Chinese takeout and cuddle. When they’re not together, they text each other emojis and photos. Jerome sends Tanja a photo of him jogging and follows it with the caption “300% Joy.” Tanja does molly at a day rave and texts Jerome “Miss U 😍. Miss U 😍 Miss U 👻…” Then she says that Jerome should have a drink “in solidarity with your high girlfriend.” Then Jerome texts back, “You only ever use the word solidarity when you’re on xtc. And then you use it all the time 😂.” This is supposed to be funny. In a meta way. When we read these text messages, and hear about what this couple does together, we’re supposed to think, Technology, man, doesn’t it make people so boring?

And it does. It does make people boring. Here are a few sweeping statements. Social media has made everyone dumb as shit. Millennials were the first cohort it really ruined. People born in the mid-Eighties are the original iPad babies but in a different, secret way. This has put them in crisis: a sex crisis, a crisis of creativity, a crisis of self. Is this the reason contemporary art is so bad? Is the internet the reason why millennials are so downwardly mobile? Is it why the so-called creative class is peopled by “brand consultants” and “content creators”?

Allegro Pastel is in conversation with all of these ideas, and what Randt does with them is not new. His is a millennial novel about sex and the internet, pro forma. It checks all the boxes. Here is the brilliant young woman and her hipster web-designer boyfriend. Here she is debasing herself and her intelligence by saying that she “missed the Snapchat of 2015,” because back then the “story function was so new and exciting.” Here they are wasting their lives, scrolling on their phones, snorting ketamine and renting Teslas and self-optimizing via psychotherapy and scrolling on their phones and talking about Airbnb and vacation and new shoes and fucking but not going into any detail about the fucking and shrinking attention spans and scrolling on their phones and scrolling on their phones and scrolling on their phones.

Randt is not the first millennial to write a novel about the effect of the internet on the psyche, but he is hopefully the last to subject us to page after page of emails like this one from Tanja’s estranged best friend, Amelie:

i think it would be good if we saw each other again. i read an article about menopause yesterday. that’s coming for us too, in like twenty years 😱😱😱 i thought if anyone had something to say about that, it would be you. the future is on 🔥🔥🔥

you’ll find me in the same old places: threema, telegram, and now i’m back on snapchat. 🤦🤦🤦 . . . i also have a posteo email address now ✅, but gmail is better.

What Randt is doing might have felt slightly more fresh when Allegro Pastel was first published five years ago, even fresher in his native German, some of which has surely been lost in translation. But this genre, the internet novel, has already existed in some form for almost the entire 21st century. Cf: Tao Lin’s gchat history. Also: Tao Lin’s Taipei, Megan Boyle’s sinister and sometimes brilliant Liveblog, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. When I was first introduced to Allegro Pastel, it was described to me as Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, but written by a German man. Or perhaps the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, another millennial Internetroman set in Berlin and translated into English this year, and bafflingly nominated for the International Booker Prize. In all of these works, we are in on the joke the entire time. We are meant to read all of this and feel like we are hovering over them. Like a computer is a two-way mirror.

Allow me, for a moment, to talk about David Foster Wallace. In 1993, Wallace wrote an essay, “E Unibus Pluram,” about the effects of television’s presence in contemporary literature. He argues that television, when written about in a postmodern context, often feels hackneyed. This fiction, he writes, “is not just a use or mention of televisual culture but a response to it, an effort to impose some sort of accountability on a state of affairs in which more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers.” But in trying to satirize television, he argues, these literary works just end up feeling like a pale imitation of the thing itself. Bland, forgettable, dated. The satire has no teeth.

Replace the word “television” with “internet” in “E Unibus Pluram,” and you will find that Wallace’s essay more or less holds up, 32 years later. That everything kind of falls apart, when you satirize the thing you’re also trying to imitate. That perhaps instead of writing a novel that, say, defamiliarizes the sensation of being on X, you could go on X and have it all defamiliarized for you. We are now in the very first wave of Zoomer literature, and these writers, like their predecessors, are still trying to shape the internet into prose. Perhaps they shouldn’t. Honor Levy’s My First Book is dazzling and frightening at times, but it also falls into a Look At Me trap. Which is to say it is just what it says it is, and, despite the irony, nothing more: a story collection by a very young person who lives on the internet.

The formal conceit of these novels is to represent the feeling of being online. But a novel that truly said something new about being online probably wouldn’t mention the internet at all. This hypothetical True Internet Novel would not use the words Instagram or meme, or even based. It wouldn’t be self-conscious. You would just be able to tell by the nature of the sentences that the writer of said novel had only ever known life on the internet, and nothing else. It would try to make us feel something being online could never make us feel. It would be alive, feral, scary, ruthlessly in dialogue with its digital circumstances and compulsively trying to break free of them at the very same time. I’m not sure that book exists yet. (When talking to a friend about this he said: What about Gaddis’s JR? Not a bad thought.)

So here we are. Allegro Pastel is an internet novel that is a response to the internet. It tells us how to feel. It tells us how to laugh. The internet remains a novelty. The novel is constantly directing our attention to the Internet as a proper noun; it is, for the most part, simply a long list of reasons why the internet makes us stupid and boring. We nod our heads and think about the times that we have also “missed the Snapchat of 2015,” and how that was pretty darn embarrassing. As we read, we engage with a carefully instructed thesis about how “life online” really comes for us all. Even really smart female novelists.

All that said—there is something like a pulse beating beneath all of this in Allegro Pastel. And that is that Randt writes about Tanja and Jerome with love. Like how Sally Rooney looks at her characters: compulsively, brutally, lovingly, all cast in the soft blue glow of someone’s phone screen. The way in which Jerome and Tanja love each other is also compulsive, brutal. In the second half of the book, they split up. They get back together. Tanja asks for space from Jerome, essentially because she finds him boring and needy. During this time, Tanja sleeps with Janis, her friend Amelie’s crush, leading to their estrangement. Jerome, meanwhile, stays mostly celibate, pining for Tanja, his ruthless, arrogant and somehow self-deprecating girlfriend. But then he reconnects with Marlene, an old classmate, and the book, up until this point tedious and formulaic, starts to destabilize. Tanja, a character who for the first two hundred pages acted like someone in complete control of her life and world, starts to weaken, becomes pathetic. All of the banalities about the internet wash away. In its second half, Allegro Pastel becomes a novel about a power struggle.

At its best, Allegro Pastel’s realism is frighteningly real. And this is because it is so banal—because it is, forgive me, relatable. (Nabokov once said of this phenomenon, “this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book,” but I digress.) What is interesting about it has nothing to do with the internet, with life online. Instead, it’s something very old. It is the novel’s ability to make us feel something. To tell a story that has existed as long as the novel has existed. To tell a story about love and how it often does not work out. Like what happens in Madame Bovary, when Emma goes to the ball and then spends the rest of her sad, pathetic life wishing she was back at the ball. Like what happens when Jerome starts to fall for Marlene in Allegro Pastel.

What Jerome likes about Marlene is that she is easy to be with. She represents the kind of frictionless life Jerome already has. Time spent with her is as comfortable as looking at your phone. They go on vacation to Lake Como and stay in a “relatively cheap Airbnb.” Jerome wears a summer leisure suit. They have sex together six times. “Jerome found the flow of their sex easy and natural,” Randt writes, “She looked good, she knew what she wanted, and on the shores of Lake Como she laughed with real character.” Eventually, Jerome gets Marlene pregnant. Jerome makes a PowerPoint they go through together about whether or not to keep the baby, and some of the slides address the topic of “social responsibility,” given that their child will “certainly produce CO₂.” They decide to have the baby anyway, and we can feel Jerome getting smothered by the choice because it is so easy to make. It is the path of least resistance. Tanja is crushed.

Reading it, I felt crushed, too. It is crushing to read a novel that forces you to watch two people, young and in love, succumb to the banalities of everyday life: The comfort of making a safe decision when it comes to a partner. The comfort of spending all day on your phone. Of thinking that making art and building a website that looks like a lava lamp are the same thing. Of making money and getting comfortable making money. Allegro Pastel isn’t at all ambitious about the way it reckons with these ideas. It favors prose that is flat and chilly, self-consciously cool while also wanting you to feel like the point is that it is self-consciously cool!!! It wants you to laugh at the characters but doesn’t quite give you enough distance to do it.

In the final moments of the novel, Tanja breaks down. She sends Jerome a long and manic email about how she fucked up, how she shouldn’t have let him go, how they should be together. It felt gut-wrenching to read, to watch Tanja unspool so easily, after watching her execute such control over her life in every way. For a brief moment, when I finished the novel, I felt queasy for Tanja. I felt it in my neck and in my wrists. I thought to myself: I have been this woman before. I, too, have let the sand slip so violently through my fingers due to my own bad behavior. Then I got up and put the book down. And then I felt nothing at all.

Image credit: Thu Le (Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

From the archive

“Alt Lit” by
Everything that’s published now is shaped by the forms and concerns of online, whether it’s explicitly about the internet or not. Our bestselling poets write what are essentially Instagram captions. Publishers live or die at the mercy of BookTok. The recent glut of normie novels about trying to be a good person, or minor racial contretemps between professional-class narcissists, or hot girlies who don’t really do anything in particular—all of these are attuned to the sensibilities of an implicitly online public, whose sense of what might be an interesting topic for literature is downloaded directly from Twitter. The most mainstream Obama-endorsed fiction is now more like a feed than anything else: a series of sharp little lines, minute observations, quips, for you to quote on social media. The whole culture industry is just the internet’s auto-coprophagy, feeding its own waste back into the system. You are not radical or cutting-edge because you remember Neopets.

“No One Is Talking About This” by Michelle Taylor
As a novel about the internet, No One is obligated to show us some things we already know—the way that the internet has changed our thinking, our perception, our way of being in the off- and online world. Yes, the novel admits, the portal has shattered our attention to pieces; yes, its style is infectious and homogenizing; and yes, it tends to render our politics shallow and fragile. The novel transcribes these truths, universally acknowledged, with great perspicacity; it organizes them into poetry: “Each day to turn to a single eye that scanned a single piece of writing. The hot reading did not just pour from her but flowed all around her; her concreteness almost impeded it, as if she were a mote in the communal sight.” The prose itself imitates “the communal mind,” merging, splintering and reassembling disparate images in its tenuous web. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen modern life, depicted through a fragmented consciousness, represented with a nearly liturgical level of lyricism. At one point, the novel even nods at its modernist lineage when Lockwood’s heroine, beholding a bust of James Joyce, calls the portal “the new book, the communal stream-of-consciousness.”

“Who Needs Fiction After the Internet?” by
“When I think about the internet (which is impossible),” Natasha Stagg writes, “I feel similar to when I have a crush. I feel crushed.” The line comes from an essay, first published in her 2019 collection Sleeveless, titled “To Be Fucked,” and here in miniature are the thematic and stylistic signatures of Stagg’s writing. The title suggests at once a discourse on sex and an anatomy of despair, a punk aggression and a passive subject. If the internet is impossible to think about, what are we doing when we write and read about it—and on it? You try to think but are left with only a feeling: a mixture of desire and hopelessness, a sense of excitement and power that is also an emptiness and inertia. Something you thought that you were doing, that was under your control (your crush, your browsing) becomes something that is being done to you (you’re crushed). Everything is at once manifest and obscure, right there on the surface for the world to see and somehow enigmatic, unresolved and unresolvable: a link, only, to something else. This internet affect is, despite its novelty, now probably as universal a feeling as that of romantic desire, but like the latter, it is also private and hard to pin down. To catch this mood one can’t try too hard.

“Girls Online” by Noelle Bodick
Cyborgians, cyberfeminists, latter-day “glitch feminists”—none of them had it quite right. Thwarting the optimists, the internet did not open users up to a bouquet of identities that elude gender. Rather, it reduced it to one. A girl online, Walsh cheekily writes, “is an avatar for everyone.”

A proposition: though “trash art” remains with us, the trash artist is a dying species. Trash art is focus-grouped these days, high-gloss. Trash art is a direct-to-streaming show full of people who are slightly too attractive that’s meant to be played in the background while you play Candy Crush on your phone. Even our truly lowbrow cultural productions, like The Bachelor, are not the product of particular people; they’re crafted through a system. Without romanticizing the old days of pulp magazines and Brill Building song writers, we can—ah hell! Let’s romanticize them. Why not? They certainly put out lots of garbage, but it was honest human garbage. Look at an old issue of Weird Tales—in terms of nostalgic reverence, the Partisan Review of pulp fiction—with its now charmingly dated pinup girls on the cover, and its promise of many stupid adventures within, and try not to romanticize it.

In terms of its social standing, all trash is genre, but not all genre is trash. Science fiction and horror have both long had seats held open for them at the adults’ table, and fantasy gets past the bouncer sometimes. (Romance is still standing out in the cold.) Its status as trash is probably why genre fiction survives and even, sometimes, thrives in a moment when we’re repeatedly assured people do not read. It has to look out for itself, because no patron is coming to pluck it out of the bin. In truth, as anybody who’s spent a summer without air conditioning knows, there’s trash and there’s trash. There is the kind of trash that, in rotting, provides fertile soil for new things to grow—and then there’s plastic, which sticks around forever without giving life to anything and can only be remixed into endless, slightly worse versions of itself. One stinks up your apartment, but only because it’s alive.

I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake. If somebody asked me whether I preferred literary fiction to genre fiction (or vice versa) I would say, I hope, that I prefer good fiction to bad fiction. I think that this is a good response to a silly question, but there’s another one we could ask that’s a little more interesting: Is what makes a genre story good the same thing that makes realistic fiction good? Part of what makes genre genre is its place in a certain tradition with certain conventions and stock elements. If we are reading a detective story, we have certain figures and moments we come to expect: the amateur detective, the hapless sidekick, the suspicious woman, a second crime, a red herring, a solution. Part of what makes a detective story good or bad is its use of these expectations—a use that can (and often does) include subverting them. When it comes to speculative fiction, another dimension is that the boundaries between a fan, a professional and an amateur are never very clear. The landscape is more horizontal. You could, if you wanted, start a fanzine and get important writers to contribute; you could publish your first story ever in a magazine and get a letter from one of your most famous peers. Within genre, work can be wildly experimental, but this experiment takes place in a context of shared touchstones and trust in the audience. Writers of speculative fiction want to be read, and they have a good idea of who is out there reading their work.

So if we already know what we lose when we depart from realism (verisimilitude), what is it that we gain? To investigate this question, The Point has given me the opportunity to write about four works of what I’ll broadly call “speculative fiction.” The four stories I’m going to discuss have a few things in common. First, and most importantly, I like them. Second, they all use their genre well—they need to be the sorts of stories they are. And, finally, I’ve placed on myself the following restriction: no crossover writers. No Philip K. Dick, no Samuel Delany, no Ursula K. Le Guin, no Octavia Butler, no Harlan Ellison, no Joanna Russ, no James Tiptree. Those writers are all amazing, but you know that (even if you don’t know it personally). My interest in these columns is not in writers who can be said to transcend their genre, either by being adopted by broader readerships or through their own hybrid practice, but rather writers who realize their genre.

Instead, we are going to read, in chronological order, these four stories: C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau” (1933), a “weird tale” set on Mars; Fritz Leiber’s “A Deskful of Girls” (1958), a science fiction-horror hybrid; Craig Strete’s “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” (1975), a monologue from the perspective of a lab animal; and Vonda N. McIntyre’s “Aztecs” (1977), a science fiction novella about a woman who undergoes a procedures that makes her either slightly more or slightly less than human. The first two of these stories both appeared in big genre magazines; the second two made their initial appearances in anthologies.

I will discuss what we get from these stories being written the way they are, and along the way, I hope to illuminate some of what we lose when “trash” culture is no longer the product of individual (if, perhaps, deranged) minds. Of course, it should probably be said that these writers didn’t think of themselves as writing trash—nor did they—but they did often consider themselves to be writing in trashy places, as, in fact, they were. But those trashy places were essential to producing what they did produce.

So let’s go back to that old issue of Weird Tales—it’s from November 1933—and to the first entry in the table of contents: “Shambleau,” “an utterly strange story” (the table of contents says) “about an alluring female creature that was neither beast nor human, neither ghost nor vampire.”

Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, “pulp” now carries the connotation of sleaze and hyper-violence, but to be a “pulp” magazine really meant one thing: be printed on cheap paper. (That’s the pulp.) And for the writer in the 1930s whose imagination ran to the bizarre, the fantastic or the interplanetary, the preeminent pulp magazine was Weird Tales, which published writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. If we judge by the November 1933 issue, its readers and contributors are what you might expect—bookish types, mostly but not exclusively men, with certain firm prejudices (no more naked women on the cover, please, and anatomical accuracy in your tales of maniac surgeons, if you don’t mind) and a susceptibility to scams (one finds ads for: get-rich-quick gold mining, the Rosicrucian Brotherhood and, most intriguingly, quack medicine for the female libido).

“Shambleau” was C.L. Moore’s first professionally published story, and its presence in Weird Tales is another indication that women did really read it—the “C.L.” stands for “Catherine Lucille.” Her use of initials was not to conceal her gender (she’s not even the only woman in the November 1933 issue) but rather to make sure her day job didn’t figure out she was moonlighting as a writer. Presumably, Moore knew what kind of place she wanted to send her own “weird” story to because she was already a fan of this sort of writing.

Moore’s story introduces us to Northwest Smith, a space adventurer whose reputation has clearly spread far and wide. He’s hanging out in a little town in Mars when he realizes a group of people are about to murder a woman; appalled (and not a little flattered by her appeal for help), he intervenes. The woman, who is something called a “Shambleau,” follows him back to the inn where he’s staying. She is not human and is regarded by all the people in the town with fear and disgust, though Smith cannot figure out why. The physically distinctive thing about the Shambleau is her total lack of hair—she wears a turban but Smith assumes it covers only “baldness.” She refuses to eat his food, saying that her food is “better.”

This better food turns out to be Northwest Smith himself, whom she feeds on psychically (though not physically), a process that creates both great internal disgust and exquisite pleasure. Under her turban turn out to be thousands of snakes, which she uses to feed, and the sleeping Smith can feel them without understanding at first what they are:

It lay loose and light about his neck…and it was moving gently, very gently, with a soft, caressive pressure that sent little thrills of delight through every nerve and fiber of him, a perilous delight—beyond physical pleasure, deeper than joy of the mind. That warm softness was caressing the very roots of his soul with a terrible intimacy. The ecstasy of it left him weak, and yet he knew—in a flash of knowledge born of this impossible dream—that the soul should not be handled…

Smith is eventually rescued by a Venusian friend, who remembers the legend of Medusa and shoots the Shambleau while using a mirror to guide his aim. But though he is rescued, he understands that some aspect of himself has been changed forever; he will always miss the simultaneously ecstatic and degrading experience she offered him. When his friend demands that Smith promise to kill the next Shambleau he sees on sight, Smith loses himself in memory for a moment, then says, unevenly: “I’ll—try.”

That’s the plot. It feels familiar—not derivative, just familiar. As Moore herself characterized it, her story is a Western, just played in the key of space. Like a wandering cowboy, Northwest Smith is ambiguously good and ambiguously noble—he is no gentleman, but he might be something better. And it’s a story that seems easy to understand symbolically. The Shambleau is booze, or a bad love affair, or drugs. Yet to pursue this sort of reading is to court frustration. We can understand the strange and disturbing being at this story’s heart through analogy, but what makes it memorable is our sense that we can only flatten it out if we try to go further. What Moore aims to do—and succeeds in doing—is presenting us with something that is outside of the realm of possible experience. “Shambleau” draws its sense of reality from the ways it resembles ordinary situations, but it is not reducible to them.

Part of the power of Moore’s story comes from its sense of happening in both the far future and the distant past. “Man has conquered Space before. You may be sure of that,” she declares, imperiously, in her opening lines:

Somewhere beyond the Egyptians, in that dimness out of which come echoes of half-mythical names—Atlantis, Mu—somewhere back of history’s first beginnings there must have been an age when mankind, like us today, built cities of steel to house its star-roving ships and knew the names of the planets in their own native tongues—heard Venus’ people call their wet world “Sha-ardol” in that soft, sweet, slurring speech and mimicked Mars’ guttural “Lakkdiz” from the harsh tongues of Mars’ dryland dwellers. You may be sure of it. Man has conquered Space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a world that has forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as mighty as our own.

This precise feeling of temporal ambiguity would be exploited forty-something years later by Star Wars, which situates itself long ago and far away (while also feeling fully like the future). In 1933, man was not even slightly close to “conquering space”—the first contact with the moon wouldn’t come along until 1959—nor, not to put too fine a point on it, is man even all that close now (my Mars timeshare’s value depreciates daily). By positioning her tale and her hero in a cycle of progress and loss, Moore not only gives him a mythic quality but bestows on our time a little of the same quality: this story is where we’re going, but also where we’ve come from. Given that whether or not he ever encounters another Shambleau is out of his control, it also represents this for Northwest Smith himself—this is certainly where he’s coming from, and it might be where he’s going, too.

Ambiguity of time, slipperiness of subject—these are the basic tools of this “weird” story. The situation is a Western—almost. It’s a metaphor for addiction—almost. It is the firm future—almost. The damsel in distress—well, she is in distress, that part is real, but Smith’s intervention turns out to be heroically stupid. The Shambleau calls Smith her beloved, which is perhaps the most disturbing thing she does, as it implies that she may not regard Smith merely as prey but that she thinks she is granting him something, a gift of extraordinary experience, even though it will kill him. Smith’s Venusian friend speculates that Shambleaus are not in fact very intelligent, just psychic predators, but there is no way to know, because no human being can be around them for very long without losing their mind.

Thus Moore uses the “weird” to reveal and to disguise, to make her subject familiar and strange. She achieves her effects through a careful manipulation of what we expect and think we know (and therefore what we think we know to expect). And in this use of expectation, genre is crucial, because you only can expect an outcome if you think you know what sort of a story you’re already in. But her particular genre is also important because its essential quality involves introducing something that cannot, will not and in some ways should not exist, but which we nevertheless desire. That “something” is not life on Mars, but the Shambleau. Moore’s repetition of the phrase “the soul should not be handled” is effectively ominous, but her singular achievement is giving you a sense of what that might mean and why it might be alluring enough to need a prohibition. Indeed we might think the true height of intimacy would be to find someone who could perceive and handle our soul. And maybe it is, but, should we ever be offered the chance to have this experience, we will not survive.

About a year and half after the publication of “Shambleau,” Moore received a letter from an admirer—Lovecraft himself (who had also written to Weird Tales when the story was published to commend “Shambleau” as “great stuff”). Though Lovecraft is notorious now for his extreme racism (and rightly so), to those he included in his circle, he was also a generous and lively correspondent. (Reading his letters to Moore is to be charmed by his friendly erudition, surprised by what seems to have been an intense conversion to socialism and then, sometimes, on turning the page, to experience resigned disgust at some depressingly human and non-eldritch horrors.)

You might have an idea that the people who wrote for the pulps had an attitude of screw the critics, I write for the people, and no doubt many of them did feel that way. But Lovecraft’s early letters to Moore are, by and large, exhortations not to commercialize her work. (In his letter to Weird Tales, he dings her for setting her story on Mars.) It’s clear, in fact, that he regards weird fiction as the forefront of the narrative arts. He tells her that he’s seen too many talents squandered either because they end up writing to please their pulp audience or because they switch up their style to write more palatable, Saturday Evening Post-like stories. In fact, his anxiety that she will succumb to the “underworld” of “low-grade popular psychology & mechanically following the pitifully few & childishly unreal & oversimplified formulae which suit that psychology in such matters as plot, incidents, atmosphere, assumed values, & characters” is part of why he’s reached out to her in the first place. The weird writer, he tells her, has to think differently:

For the object of weird fiction is purely & simply emotional release—a highly specialised form of emotional release for the very small group of people whose active & restless imaginations revolt against the relentless tyranny of time, space, & natural law. … All real art must somehow be connected with truth, & in the case of weird art the emphasis must fall upon the one factor representing truth—certainly not the events (!!!) but the mood of intense & fruitless human aspiration typified by the pretended overturning of cosmic laws & the pretended transcending of possible human experience.

Moore objects (reasonably enough) that she really does need the money. (Her deliberate attempts to write trashy romance tales for money, however, which she occasionally mentions in their subsequent correspondence, don’t seem to go anywhere.) Lovecraft, who values atmosphere above all other qualities in a “weird tale,” also makes an interesting claim here that the weird tale is fulfilling a very deep wish for there to be something about the world that we cannot understand, something that could overturn all our assumptions, even if it was something horrible. Something so out of our realm of experience would almost have to be something horrible, in fact; we wouldn’t have another way to understand it.

To behold impossible geometries, even if they make you stab out your eyes—that was the dream weird fiction represented, as far as Lovecraft was concerned. It is “escapist” fiction where the escape is costly. Yet that isn’t what we get in “Shambleau.” It is a more approachable story than your average Lovecraft horror show, and not just because it’s on Mars. A scene where Northwest Smith, trying to puzzle his strange guest out, sits at his table watching her while biting into an apple—this is the sort of mundanely realized life that does not exist in a Lovecraft story. Even his own particular mixture of gallantry and vanity, or the lust and disgust the Shambleau awakens in him, don’t have Lovecraftian equivalents. The Shambleau is horrible, but not cosmically so. Moore is in search of something more individual than an atmosphere—to know what it would be like to be a specific person in an imagined world. Lovecraft was interested in the human experience only insofar as it was a cage, protesting in one essay against “the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law.” His landscapes and his ancient cities were uninhabitable by anything we could understand.

Moore’s approach was different. If we got to Mars, she seemed to reason, there would be some kind of life there for us. We would figure out how to inhabit it. We would come into contact with things we couldn’t understand, but we could survive. In one of her letters, she speculates about life on the moon, writing, “imagine how magnificent the eclipse must have looked from there. Wouldn’t it have been a vision of a black Earth ringed with rainbowy haloes of atmosphere? I hope so.” Her intense curiosity, to know not what could be but what it would be like, is what makes her story stand apart. When a mutual friend sends her some suggested books to read, she tells Lovecraft that she is interested in the work of Montague Summers but is “extremely suggestible”:

I had some wisdom teeth pulled a month or so ago and went about for a couple of weeks, all together, with the taste of blood so constantly in my mouth that I almost—well, every time I looked in a mirror I didn’t expect to see anything there at all. And whenever a bat went by I wondered if it was me.

Similarly, if Moore did already know what something was like, she had little interest in it. She tells Lovecraft that she, for instance, does not enjoy reading Poe because, having spent most her childhood seriously ill, she’s too familiar with the experiences he conjured up already. “I know what it’s like to experience that horrible, dank, miasmic atmosphere for hours together,” she writes, “and don’t like to be reminded of it.” Of course part of her objection here is clearly that these memories are unpleasant. But Moore was reading and writing unpleasant stories already—that couldn’t have been her entire objection. It was that it was unpleasant and had nothing new to show her.

If you want to see what happens when somebody attempts a similar kind of grounded story but completely fails, instead stapling a vague “human interest” story to a vague “science fiction” concept and calling it a day, you have only to read the next story in Weird Tales. “The War of the Sexes” by Edmond Hamilton tells of a brain that is sent forward into the future, awakening into a new body in a world of artificial reproduction and sex segregation. The newly awakened man manages to seduce the leader of the women by kissing her. Then it turns out to have all just been a dream—except the cute girl who helped wake our hero up looks the same as the leader of the women. Ho ho ho. Nothing in this story is interested in what such a future would be like; forget social commentary, it’s not even a thought experiment, or a story.

Two years after contacting Moore, Lovecraft died. She would go on to marry another Lovecraft correspondent, Henry Kuttner, and largely cease writing as herself. Instead, she and Kuttner would co-write stories, often under the name “Lewis Padgett.” As Padgett, they would go on to write for the magazines that supplanted the pulps—such as the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which would publish one of their last stories in 1956, and which, in 1958, would publish the next story we’ll discuss: Fritz Leiber’s “A Deskful of Girls.”

No sooner had Donald Trump secured the presidency for a second time than the commentators began commentating and the prophets began prophesying. Trump would criminalize microplastics; he would build the long-awaited wall; he would Make America Great Again, again, maybe this time for good. Meanwhile, an elite coterie insisted that he would do something that he had never mentioned, even in his most meandering speeches: he would revitalize Culture.

How was he going to do this? It wasn’t clear, but the moment that a crestfallen CNN anchor called Wisconsin, at approximately 5:30 a.m. on the morning of November 6th, a new era of unfettered creativity and ambitious artmaking dawned, or so enthusiasts proclaimed. Jonathan Keeperman, founder of the new-right imprint Passage Publishing, wrote on his Substack that Trump, a “Great Man,” would be an antidote to the “spiritual emptiness that has hollowed modern life to its core.” The writer Walter Kirn tweeted—or Xed, as we are now obliged to say—“Who would you be under freedom, if you weren’t afraid of the scolds and thought police and the internal censor you installed, perhaps unconsciously? What would you say and do and make? Time to consider this deeply—and act accordingly. Epic opportunity, America.”

This outpouring of optimism was hard to credit, because art did not flourish during Trump’s first term, as even the most fervent MAGA-culture warriors would freely acknowledge. Indeed, the last time around, paranoia reached a fever pitch, and the scolding sensibility of so-called resistance liberalism colonized vast swaths of American cultural life. This is not to say that resistance liberals were entirely misguided, of course: for all of their failures of affect and imagination—their humorlessness, their incuriosity, their imperviousness to irony, their apparently bottomless appetite for articles about the patrons of diners in the Rust Belt—they were not wrong to worry. Trump’s first term was chaotic and to some extent ineffectual, but he still managed to install the judges who would eventually imperil reproductive autonomy by overturning Roe v. Wade, and his blood-and-soil rhetoric still emboldened bona fide white nationalists. It was reasonable to revile him; it was understandable, if inadvisable, to panic.

More dubious and less sympathetic, however, was the increasingly aggressive insistence that art was no more than an outpost of the all-important project of anti-MAGA propagandizing. In one characteristic salvo published in the New York Times, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen warned writers (white writers especially) against withdrawing from politics when Biden assumed power in 2021. The Trump presidency, he suggested, was politically catastrophic but aesthetically salutary, insofar as it “destroyed the ability of white writers to dwell in the apolitical.” Confronted with a pandemic and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, “everyone had to make a choice.” The owners of well-appointed houses clambered to let everyone know what choice they’d made by installing signs in their vast, manicured yards that announced “Love Is Love” and “We Believe the Science.” Would artists follow suit?

Unfortunately, they would. Despite Nguyen’s call for literature that would transcend an “empty form of politics,” the aesthetic fruits of the political awakening he celebrated were usually not much better than in-this-house homilies. There was Don’t Look Up, a heavy-handed commentary on right-wing climate denial that strained desperately to be cute; there was Amanda Gorman, whose cloyingly anodyne and moistly inspiring verses (“That even as we grieved, we grew, / That even as we hurt, we hoped”) were mercifully ignored by most critics; there was American Dirt, a feel-good novel about immigration in which “the heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous,” as the critic Parul Seghal observed in her review. And then there was that triumph of liberal self-congratulation, the musical Hamilton, which premiered a year before Trump took office but embodied the outlook that would thrive under his regime.

Everyone had to make a choice, but did they have to choose such cheap didacticism? The problem was not that Gorman’s poems or Don’t Look Up were, in some sense, political. All art is political in one way or another: it is produced under political conditions, and insofar as it is about anything resembling human life, it is about political situations. The problem, in part, was that resistance liberals evinced bad politics. Their smugness about their own righteousness was patronizing, at times even anti-democratic; their simplified worldview, in which Trump voters were evil and they were faultless, was Manichean; perhaps cruelest of all was their conviction that the symbolic currency of representation could take precedence over the bread-and-butter of material redistribution. But if they were wrong about what good politics looked like, their art was unsuccessful for a second reason: they were also wrong to suppose that political and aesthetic value were one and the same.

Some of the evangelists of the new cultural revolution appear to be gunning, during Trump 2.0, for resistance liberalism in reverse—for art that is doggedly doctrinal, just in the opposite direction. In this house we believe… that science is disenchanting the world; that modernity was wrongheaded; that liberal anomie is destroying wholesome communities; that love isn’t love unless it’s cozily marital and gruelingly traditionalist; and so on. Keeperman’s maudlin commendation of Trump as a Great Man is a sample of the sort of sentimental kitsch we’re in for from this crowd.

Other critics, nominally more serious, believe that resistance liberalism erred in permitting aesthetics to carouse with ethics in the first place. Last time, artistic value was reducible to political value; this time, then, we must prevent aesthetic and politics from enjoying any acquaintance whatsoever. The most vocal (or at least the most visible) proponent of this view is the critic and Dimes Square-adjacent man-about-town Dean Kissick, who proclaimed in a recent Harper’s cover story, “I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing.” The ostensible occasion for this outburst was a visit to an underwhelming exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, but Kissick’s target is evidently much broader. His essay contains not only an indictment of the art of the past decade but a theory of art as such. “Art is often best when it’s absolutely deranged,” he writes. “Art should do more than communicate.” What it should not do is mean anything, and by extension, make any sort of political point.

In effect, Kissick is calling for a revival of l’art pour l’art, a demand that has been characterized by both detractors and enthusiasts as neo-Romantic. What he “wants is Romanticism, or something like it,” remarked the art critic Jonathan T. D. Neil on Substack; Kissick yearns “for artists to return to romantic ideals,” wrote the curator Saul Ostrow in the “blogazine” Two Coats of Paint. Neither of these commentators used the term as an honorific, but some of the usual suspects have embraced the label nonetheless. Matthew Gasda, author of the play Dimes Square and avowed raw-milk guzzler, writes a Substack newsletter by the name of “Novalis,” the pseudonym of one of the most important participants in Frühromantik, the earliest phase of the German Romantic movement (lasting from the summer of 1797 through summer of 1801).

But Kissick, alas, is no Novalis. His repeated descriptions of artists as “researchers” hardly inspire fits of passion, and when he praises artists who display “the freedom of absolute purposelessness,” he sounds less like the poet and more like the stodgy figure that the Romantics hoped to supplant: that giant of the Enlightenment, a man who was born middle-aged, Immanuel Kant. It goes without saying that Kant’s system, developed in often punishing detail over the course of three notoriously difficult volumes, is more elaborate than Kissick’s, advanced in just one middling article. But Kant, too, believed that art made no ethical claims on us, and Kant, too, was intent on severing the aesthetic from the moral. The beautiful and the good had been passionate bedfellows since Plato detailed their intimacy in the Symposium some 2,200 years ago, but in Kant’s intricate and rather byzantine Critique of Judgment, they could make only indirect and analogical contact, like people pressing their palms against opposite sides of a window.

It is no exaggeration to say that the entirety of German Romanticism was an attempt to reunite them. Under Kantianism, Kissick’s preferred ideology prevailed: art could not mean a thing. Romanticism began when Novalis and his friend and interlocutor, Friedrich Schlegel, set out to show that, on the contrary, art meant everything.

At first (and perhaps even final) glance, the Romantics’ conception of beauty seems to be an artifact of its era. It grew out of Kant’s controversial claim that beauty is “the symbol of morality.” This declaration was already a costly admission for a philosopher bent on sundering the ethical from the aesthetic. Still, it represented the sort of gentle concession one makes to a willful child. Beauty could be a symbol of morality, but never the genuine article.

Far from celebrating the sudden estrangement of the moral and aesthetic, the Romantics were ardent dissenters. For Kant, beauty was at most the appearance (not the reality) of freedom; for the proto-Romantic Friedrich Schiller, it was “freedom of appearance,” as he wrote in a letter in 1793. Two years later, in his seminal On the Aesthetic Education of Man, he proposed that beauty is “living form.” It is no mere symbol but actual freedom, transmuted into something we can perceive.

Schiller’s Aesthetic Education is arguably the founding document of German Romanticism, and many of its assumptions are a touch eccentric. The book begins with a lament about the schism between reason and sensuality, which bifurcates “not merely individual persons but whole classes of human beings.” The masses, by Schiller’s lights, are too impulsive, too rough, too coarse—too subservient to the indulgent imprecision of the senses. The elites, on the other hand, are too cerebral, too effete, too bloodlessly civilized—too beholden to the cool severities of reason. In Schiller and the subsequent Romantics’ view, the fault lines that divided the people of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century posed both a spiritual and a political problem: until the continents’ citizenry was perfected, an ideal polity seemed out of the question.

This sorry state of affairs does not, however, license a return to our halcyon yet unsophisticated premodern condition. “Little as individuals could derive any profit from this dismemberment of their being, yet the race could have made progress in no other way,” Schiller assures us. “There was no other way of developing the manifold capacities of Man than by placing them in opposition to each other.” Fragmentation turns out to be a means to the end of a higher form of integration—one in which both reason and the senses are developed to their utmost yet harmonized with each another. (To describe the eventual harmonization of the sensuous and rational drives, Schiller uses the verb aufheben, in the sense of sublation, for perhaps the first time in the history of German letters.) And only at the highest stage of human development can the moral law so beloved by the elites be reconciled with vitality of the masses. Such a foundation can at last support the weight of a healthy governmental apparatus. “The conduct of the state depends upon the public ethos,” Novalis mused. “The ennoblement of this ethos is the only basis for the genuine reform of the state.”

But how to “ennoble” the public ethos? How to enact a “genuine reform of the state”? What is necessary, according to Schiller and his acolytes, is “a third character which, related to these other two, might pave the way for a transition from the realm of mere force to the rule of law.” This third character is the aesthetic. Because beauty is “living form,” it unites the sensuous (the living) and the rational (the formal), thereby inducing us to harmonize our warring faculties in its image. Beauty is “freedom in appearance” insofar as it models how we might balance and blend our conflicting drives, teaching us “to make this combination perfect, to accomplish it so purely and completely that both conditions entirely disappear in a third.”

Unsurprisingly, the Romantics are quite clear that politics are (or at least ought to be) aestheticized. Their utopia is a heady amalgamation of material innovation and high-minded ideals, which is to say, a work of art. Novalis mused in his notebooks that “the poetic state is the true perfect state,” and Schlegel went so far as to insist that the state is the ultimate aesthetic object: “The highest work of art for man is the state … politics is the height of aesthetics” (emphasis his). Though the Romantics took many cues from Plato, they vehemently rejected the political vision sketched in the Republic, in which the poets retreat into exile and the philosophers take charge. Instead of expelling artists, Novalis and Schlegel invited them to occupy the citadels of power. The exemplary politician in the Romantics’ ideal state was a figure Schiller called the “statesman-artist.”

If the political is aesthetic, is the aesthetic political? For Schiller, the answer is a tentative yes. Aesthetic success is a prerequisite for political success, because only people perfected by encounters with beauty are “ennobled” enough to embrace the dictates of an enlightened government. But even in this account, the content of a work of art is irrelevant to its political power. Its formal properties—its ability to model and inspire the harmonization of the faculties—are the sole source of its elevating effects. The beautiful is not properly political so much as preparatory: it shapes us into the sort of people who could one day take political action or draw moral conclusions, but it offers no concrete directives on its own authority. Schiller’s emendation, however, was mild compared to that of the first generation of the Romantics, who rejected even the pretense of Kantianism. They were devotees of Plato’s metaphysics if not his politics, and for them, the good and the beautiful were continuous with one another.

Still, the Romantic view diverges from the resistance liberals’ view, in which the aesthetic and the political collapse into a single undifferentiated slush. Plato regarded the good and the beautiful as coextensive and co-constitutive but not synonymous, and the Romantics followed his lead. Though the two categories are conceptually distinct in their eyes, the presence of one without the other is unthinkable. The schism between the beautiful and the good, so forcefully maintained by Kant, had been surpassed at last.

There is much in the Romantic picture that we jaded hyper-moderns would be wise to retire. Their mawkish fetishization of “the people” smacks of polite condescension; their caricature of the “elites” is unconvincing; and, in general, the idea that entire demographics share a unified character is naïve. Besides, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mania for carving the mind up into discrete faculties is by now obsolete.

But there is also much in the Romantic worldview that remains appealing. In particular, they understood the cost of amputating art from life. They knew that if literature was to be more than an effete nicety, then it would have to be part of the world, which meant it would have to wade without embarrassment into the muck of politics. Much of the best art of the centuries that followed did exactly that. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is about the founding of the Second Empire and the political about-faces that fashionable Parisians made as they weathered the onslaught of de rigueur ideologies; Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise is about the displacement of small stores by chains and the making of the modern city; Celan’s stammering poetry is about the way that the Holocaust shattered the German language. Who could possibly want to excise political meaning from these texts? If Kissick likes art that doesn’t mean a thing, then he doesn’t like most of modernity’s best art.

In an age of grand systems and multivolume treatises, the Romantics were defiantly anti-foundationalist—hence their predilection for the fragment, a form that is conspicuously unfinished. They sought no final formulas, and they would not have minded (and would probably have relished) the chaos that is loosed when art and politics are unleashed on one another. Those who would flatten aesthetics into politics and those who would prize the two apart are united in having hit upon a universal diagnosis. No matter the question, the answer is always the same: either the art is good because the politics are, or the two categories run entirely parallel to one another. But those of us who recognize that every combination of aesthetics and politics is possible can make few general claims.

Sometimes—I suspect quite often—art fails aesthetically because it fails politically: James Baldwin argued that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “a very bad novel” because of its “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality,” and much the same can be said of the literature of resistance liberalism. But sometimes art is good precisely because its politics are bad: Portnoy would be a flatter character, after all, if he were a feminist. Sometimes art is good despite its bad politics, not because of them (Anna Karenina can withstand even the saccharine sections about the moral simplicity of peasants), and sometimes art is good despite its good politics (it’s only possible to enjoy the depravity of Dangerous Liaisons when you disregard its dutifully moralizing preface). If art and politics do not have a fixed rapport with one another, there is not much we can know about their relations in advance. Our only option is a careful consideration of each work in the wild.

Unlike many MAGA boosters, I am not in the prediction business: I have no idea what cultural horrors the second Trump term will bring, though if I had to guess, I’d imagine that it will become harder for the socialites of Dimes Square to pass their desperately edgy creations off as transgressions at a time when reactionary politics are the preserve of tech oligarchs and other emissaries of the establishment. But who knows? I’m no prophet; I’m in the criticism racket. It is my job to say exactly how aesthetics and ethics intersect in specific cases. There is no purity at this violent junction, which Lionel Trilling calls “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet,” but I’m glad that art can still matter enough to wound and maim. It is a great merit to be able to bleed.

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The first, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” is a report from the summer and fall of 2024 in Washington D.C., with a focus on the younger demographic of right-wing boys and men for whom Donald Trump has become the “great man” of American politics—and the center of their own aspirations for the future. It is part of the magazine’s ongoing interest in the dynamics driving the much-commented-on Gen Z drift to the right, but it is also more than that. Part oral history of a moment in political history, part personal reflection, part sociological study, Mana Afsari’s essay offers an unprecedented insight into the specifically intellectual sources of Trump’s support, and into the gap that post-liberal politics is filling for a generation who attended college in the midst of the #resistance to Trump 1.0. Below is an excerpt from the opening section:

A few months before the 2024 election, Gen Z young men who were leaning toward Trump were described in the New York Times as “apolitical” and adrift; when their demographic achieved new prominence via exit polls, it was implied they had been manipulated into Trumpism by “bro whispering” podcasts. Maybe this was true for some. It was not true of the young, mostly male and intellectually curious Trump voters who I encountered this past summer during a reporting assignment to cover two overlapping conferences in July: first, the fourth installment of the National Conservatism conference (NatCon), and then the “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference, organized by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. The young men I met at NatCon—and who I kept up with throughout the summer and fall—were far from apolitical, and they showed no signs of being easily manipulable. In describing how they had arrived at their political outlook, none of them cited podcasts.

I attended these conferences not as a professional journalist, but as a young person interested in ideas. I had no bias against liberals, or toward post-liberals and national conservatives. Raised just outside of the District by immigrants in liberal counties, and coming of age at the end of Obama’s liberal renaissance, I spent my college years—and Trump’s first term—on a progressive campus in California. Since graduating in 2020, I had worked at large government agencies and mainstream think tanks. But like many young people all over the country, I have been searching for thinking and meaning beyond the technocratic liberal consensus. Because of this, I became part of a politically mixed social scene in D.C. and had discovered, with at least a little discomfort, that despite the twentieth-century liberal occupying the White House, the intellectual vitalism in my generation was increasingly to be found in post-liberal or conservative spaces—in other words, on the right.

Even still, I expected to find something of a political sideshow at NatCon; instead, I found a movement, perhaps the only one I’d encountered during my time in D.C.

The second essay we’re posting today is also a report on politics from the summer of 2024, though it could have been filed from an alternate universe. In “A Good Party,” Lauren Michele Jackson looks back on her experience at the DNC in Chicago in August. But this essay is much more than a convention report. For Jackson, the slickly produced speeches, the Obama-nostalgic paraphernalia, and the paranoia about having a “repeat” of ’68 all speak to the party’s attempt to separate itself from the “embarrassment” of its own history. The result is an event that lacks precisely the activist energy and spirit of ’68, not to mention of 2020, that could have made it feel like something more than a consultant-driven spectacle. Below is an excerpt from the middle of the essay where Jackson considers the convention’s stage-managed approach to identity, which, like so many other things, betrays a generic attempt to seem “good” without ever having to descend into any messy specifics:

I have dragged us this far without a single word on the speeches, perhaps, in a generous read, a testament to their vapor. I have notes, but what are the particulars compared with the formatting by which many spoke as one? The elasticity of the script fit all manner of personality inside. Shawn Fain sounded like Kathy Hochul sounded like Jim Clyburn sounded like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sounded like Hillary Clinton sounded like, yes, the Obamas, whose departure from the face of the party in favor of a second life in media production hasn’t dulled their political magnetism. Yet even Barack and Michelle, distinguished for their cadence, spoke the same seesaw of past and future, of worse and better, professionalism and crackpottery, a contrast whose revelations must be expressed in negative, in terms of what—and who—the candidate is not. Diversity testified to sameness. That this collection of people found their way to a coherent script, changing pronouns like that, in a matter of weeks is remarkable. If not for the hosannas collected by the old candidate, the man who was still president, you would think she had been running all along. “Let’s salute President Biden—he has been democracy’s champion at home and abroad,” Clinton said that first night. You could tell she believed it. The woman next to me, from Alaska, was wiping away tears. I think she believed it, too.

The rainbow has long been captured, but the room showed no knowledge of what this might augur. There is no missing that the average American, however one presumes that to mean, has had their fill of diversity in both name and presentations, for reasons both bratty and shrewd. Corporations took the notion of difference in hand, working the appearance of coalition toward profit . There was one joke I liked from that regrettable Chris Rock special from 2023, swinging at the convolutions—or rather, appropriations—of corporate speech in a moment of marketable inclusivity, already on its way out by the time he hit the stage. He parrots the Lululemon credo against “racism, sexism, discrimination or hate.” And yet, Rock adds, “They sell hundred-dollar yoga pants. Hundred-dollar yoga pants. They hate somebody.” The poor, he means. They hate the poor, yet have the nerve to hang their shingle for blacks, browns, queers. Identical hypocrisies litter the Obama years; an entire generation of intellectuals have vented their indignation at becoming declassed at the behest of race, seeing only one of these categories as needlessly punitive. More see through it now, but then, I also said “bratty.” As DEI is legislated away, liberals and conservatives alike have taken to suspecting any cry of oppression of being a cry wolf, sympathy gone with the bathwater of the girlboss and Antiracist Baby. They that call themselves moderates have awaited their moment, ready to blame the party’s depleted people power on the people. They have already tsked at identity politics gone too far, but there is ground yet left to cover in blaming minorities for having interests at all. They will spin scraps into a feast, spurn the sin of gluttony, and push for a middle that so happens to entail rightward movement. The party, as one corporate body, will confess they are correct and race them there.

But right then, it was about “Not going back!,” repeated at every opportunity. You could be forgiven for wondering just how far back they meant. The city had done everything it could to keep history at bay. Who didn’t have 1968 on their mind?

We hope you’ll enjoy these two articles, and, if you do, consider subscribing to be among the first to get the print issue delivered to your home. It is worth mentioning that while we give away a lot of our writing for free, we are a small magazine that depends on subscription revenue to stay alive—and also that a subscription to The Point is a good deal! (In Substack terms, less than $4 / month for three issues per year plus unlimited access to our web and archive.) In any case, stay tuned for more updates and sneak peeks from the new issue here.

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By Lillian Fishman

Q: My girlfriend and I have always had what I’ve considered a healthy (albeit “plain”) sexual dynamic—we fuck regularly, make each other come in various ways, and are generally comfortable talking about what we want and need from each other. Recently, she mentioned that she was feeling insecure that I didn’t initiate sex as often as I had earlier in our relationship. Her libido has always been higher than mine, and four years into dating I’ve gotten used to mostly having sex when she wants to. I felt guilty and embarrassed and ultimately reassured her that it had nothing to do with her or how I felt and that I’d be more mindful to restore the balance moving forward. I compared having sex to going on a hike—something I love to do (especially with someone I love) but not something I think about often (especially when I hike all the time).

At the time I thought this was a harmless comparison. We both knew she “liked to hike” more than I do. I understood how it might feel to always be the one suggesting hiking and agreed that I could do more to put her mind at ease. For her, however, my silly analogy was proof of a much deeper sexual incompatibility—it was not just our libidos that mismatched, but the way we viewed sex itself. As we dug deeper, I worried she was right. Sex for me really isn’t all that different from other activities I enjoy. I can imagine being partnered with someone who isn’t able or doesn’t want to have sex, exactly the way I can imagine being partnered with someone who can’t or won’t go hiking. For her though, sex is an essential part of what separates a romantic relationship from a platonic one. I get where she’s coming from, but I’m also hurt that my deeply felt desires (sexual, romantic, platonic) are somehow “not enough” for her. Are we doomed? Am I doomed? It wasn’t until I started discussing with other partnered friends that I learned how atypical my view of sex seems to be.

Q: I hate the use that people make of the word “fun” when it comes to sex and relationship models. I can love or like or tolerate the vast majority of arrangements; but even after a couple of years of casual and semi-casual dating, the idea that one is looking for “fun” through sex and encounters remains completely alien to me.

Why do I find the concept of “fun” so problematic? I think it’s because, for me, when it’s good, sex brings you deep inside yourself, and at the same time deep outside yourself, but in no case can I consider it a distraction. In my primary language, which is Italian, “fun” is called “divertimento,” the etymology coming from di-vertere, to change path from something, like a diversion. For me sex is the opposite of that, and it feels offensive to consider it something that distracts us from ourselves and from the other person.

In which way do you think the word “fun” is used in dating? Do you think mine is just an ick, and I should dismiss it as such? Or do I have an inability to experience a lighter version of sex that comes without some level of attachment?

A: At first, I tried writing about these two questions separately, but as I came to the end of the column, it seemed clear to me that in some way they invert and answer each other. To the second writer, the fun-hater, might not the question from the first, the hiking-lover, describe a version of the more casual perspective on sex that they find so alienating? And for the hiking-lover, might not the question from the fun-hater describe the opposite of their form of desire, fleshing out what they perceive as their girlfriends’ dismissal? Both questions, at their core, are about how we define sex, and the trouble we encounter when other people don’t share our definition. What is sex? And what are we doing when we have sex with someone for whom sex isn’t what it is for us?

Part of the way we discover what we like in sex is by encountering what doesn’t make sense to us. One of my childhood friends discovered that she was gay in the most archetypal way: the first time she slept with her boyfriend, the absolute clarity that this was not what she wanted from sex illuminated for her what she in fact did want but had never felt able to consider. It’s sometimes more tolerable to experience a moment of repulsion and differentiation than an unexpected and intense desire. Many of us learn to identify what we like by first articulating what we don’t like.

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My friend Piper, for example, sometimes attends sex parties with her husband. They have a happy, vanilla sex life together, but their kinks are incompatible, and they both enjoy entering an environment where they can entertain their kink interests with other people. When we talked about her experience at these parties, Piper told me though she often had fun, she sometimes encountered a lot of “sex nerds,” as she called them: people for whom sex was a personal hobby, who delighted in the various tools and scenarios they could acquire and invent, the particular qualities of their ropes, for example. For her, this was innately unerotic; it was as if what was being enjoyed was a kind of engineering, the testing of the materials. In this environment Piper realized that in order to enjoy her kinks, she wanted the necessary tools or situational mechanisms to quietly serve their purpose and become almost superfluous, much the same way that our general awareness of our environment often fades when we’re in the midst of sex. (Of course, what registered to Piper as an emphasis on engineering rather than eroticism resonates to others in the community as a form of exacting care.)

When Piper described to me the carefully planned experiments of the rope engineers, I said aloud, unthinkingly: “That isn’t sex.” A moment later I was ashamed. After all, it’s axiomatic for social progressives that sex encompasses many different activities and orientations, even those that seem incomprehensible to those who don’t partake in them. I don’t need to describe why it’s useless or even dangerous to go around pointing at other people’s sex lives and dismissing them as not-sex. Yet it does us no good to let that get in the way of acknowledging that in our own bedrooms we do immediately recognize what sex is for us—and what isn’t. These questions reminded me of a recent experience of my own, with a woman I was dating last year. After we’d been seeing each other for a few months, I mused to her that I’d noticed she usually only wanted sex spontaneously: desire came over her suddenly, at moments I couldn’t predict. “Of course it’s spontaneous,” she replied. “Sometimes I just suddenly feel like it, the same way I suddenly feel hungry or tired.” I was surprised; I had never conceived of the sex I was having in this way. Personally, I thought of sex as a form of consistent communication, a way I expected us to relate almost every time we saw each other. I knew in theory that arousal can be private and spontaneous, unprovoked by a direct desire or even a fantasy, but I suppose, because I seldom felt it that way, I forgot about this possibility. She was also surprised. For her, this spontaneous desire was not only normal but presumably universal, just the way that the hiking-lover had once presumed that other people enjoyed sex in the same way they enjoyed hiking or other shared pastimes. I felt so destabilized when she described this orientation toward sex that I had trouble making sense of my own reaction. Though I knew it was unfair, part of me protested her version of sex as impersonal; by instinct I worried that what she proposed wasn’t really sex for me.

To me, this is the essential conflict at the heart of your relationship, hiking-lover. You and your girlfriend have two very different conceptions of what sex means. You’re a hobbyist: sex is one of many forms through which you and your girlfriend can establish intimacy and enjoy each other’s company. Although you might not want to talk explicitly about sex, you feel that it’s a part of the same language of the rest of the relationship: you could happily go without it if some other shared activity took its place. Your girlfriend, by contrast, is a mystic. She feels that sex is a singular element, foundational to romance, which is degraded by the comparison to a more general activity. For people like her, sex is not a shared activity like any other but an exclusive language. She feels sex has a specific and sacred quality, innately, without reference to convention or religion.

We see this division about whether sex is singular or one form among many surface in myriad ways: it’s the source of your girlfriend’s despair when you suggest that sex isn’t so different from a hike; it’s the source of the frustration of the fun-hater, for whom sex is too serious to ever be called “fun”; it’s the source of Piper’s distaste for the rope engineers. Most of us, I think, don’t know exactly where we fall on the hobbyist-mystic spectrum. Mainstream cultural hypocrisy is at its finest with regard to sex, where we are encouraged constantly to consider sex as sacred when it comes to love, merely liberating outside of love, and something toward which we should have a petite and manageable appetite, despite being inundated with overtly sexual material and expected to find it constantly appealing. To discover and describe, without great shame and confusion, in what way sex is important to us seems nearly impossible. I don’t think you’re alone in having discovered it only in the midst of an argument with a person whose personal definition baffles you. When we’re faced with this conundrum we often find ourselves loyal, if we really investigate, toward either the idea that sex can be interacted with like other activities, that we can impose rules and languages onto it, or that sex is either immune to or polluted by the imposition of external tools, a zone of exception.

A second, closely related, sexual dichotomy is no less complicated: I might describe it as sex as centered on physical pleasure versus sex as centered on emotional connection. We are usually looking for both, or at least cognizant, as we pursue either pleasure or intimacy, that we are likely to encounter the other as well. Yet it still seems that we frequently come into conflict over which element seems more important, which element sex seems primarily about. In the relationship I was in last year, sex seemed, to my girlfriend, to be more about physical pleasure—or at the very least more governed by her physical impulses—while for me, sex was more about relating to each other—at the very least my desire was produced by wanting to connect rather than wanting to get off. It seems to me as if the fun-hater is dealing with this problem too. In their condemnation of the concept of sex as “fun,” they’re in some way refusing the version of sex which is primarily about pleasure rather than intimacy.

Of course, it’s impossible to cleanly divide pleasure and intimacy: our physiological desires are inextricable from the emotional dynamics at play. And though we often know what we mean when we say we want to fall in love or to have a serious relationship, we often don’t really know what we mean when we say we’re looking for “fun.” To the writer of the second letter, fun is mere “diversion,” but I think this is a bit ungenerous. Fun is important; we need a sense of freedom and adventure, we need lightness, we need dynamism. (Doesn’t that description remind you a little of a hike?) Certainly, we can sometimes get that from sex, especially sex with new partners. But in our sexual culture, in general, by saying we’re looking for “fun” in dating we don’t usually mean “fun” like going on a hike; we often use it to stand in for “intimacy with no long-term implications.” Using the word “fun” is a means by which we diffuse the heaviness of need and vulnerable desire—and by which we indicate to others that we don’t wish to receive that heaviness. I imagine from your letter, fun-hater, that you have no trouble expressing need, or desire, or responding to emotional demands. You needn’t allow more “fun” into your sex life; merely take note that when someone describes their motivation for sex as “fun,” it may indicate a neutral incompatibility with your own drive for a mutually deep and transformative experience.

You may be on to something, fun-hater, when you separate pastimes into which we find ourselves veering lightly, out of habit or encouragement, from the kinds of pursuits for which we ache. When the hiking-lover describes sex as “like a hike,” they clarify that this means “something I love to do (especially with someone I love) but not something I think about often.” To what extent is sex about desire? Is that part of its innate definition? However this writer might feel about sex as it takes place, the not-thinking-about-it-often implies a low level of desire. When sex comes around, they enjoy it, perhaps the experience itself even resonates as more than simply “fun”; but it isn’t something they anticipate, wish for, reach for. This is plenty common, especially in long-term relationships. We often call it responsive desire. Yet for their girlfriend, this view of sex makes little sense. For some of us—presumably for her—powerful desire is the foundation of sex. Perhaps in a long-term relationship, powerful desire is not the foundation of sex every time, but the overall foundation of the relationship is the sense of a mutually circulating desire that remains alive and surfaces in waves. We can have sex without all-consuming desire, but it may also lack the essential resonance that allows sex to thrill, to bring us, as the fun-hater puts it, both in- and outside ourselves. The satisfaction of real desire has a level of impact that few of us would describe as “fun”; this word is too small. Even when we sleep with people with whom we’re not in love, or in any kind of committed relationship, if the desire is mutual and powerful, the sex (as a thousand rom-coms can attest) feels climactic. Everyone feels desire for all sorts of things beyond sex—other varieties of closeness, or personal ambitions—and almost always, when that kind of desire is gratified, it’s accompanied by a sense of depth and transformation. Real desire fundamentally distinguishes what is “fun”—freeing, adventurous, passing—from what is deeper.

An advantage that the fun-hater has over most of us is an active awareness of the multitude of ways people conceive of and relate to sex—even if the prevailing mode offends them. Some of us are plagued with the terror that we are alone and doomed in our sexualities from the moment we uncover them, as I was, and some of us careen along comfortably until someone else’s testimony gives us cause to worry, as the hiking-lover did. Nothing is quite so alienating as imagining that we are outside the realm of what is normal, and, even worse, that the person we love doesn’t feel about sex the way we do. How can we tolerate realizing that what we had imagined was shared we had in fact been experiencing alone?

Personally, I have a polarizing theory about sexual compatibility, which not everyone wants to hear. This divide between the hobbyists and the mystics is also a divide, I think, between those for whom sexual compatibility is one among many hoped-for synergies in a relationship and those for whom it’s essential. We are meant to accept that we will never have total compatibility with the people we love, and to rely on respect, generosity and communication to bridge those spaces where we differ. That’s all well and good in most respects. But for those I’m calling mystics, sex can’t be an area of compromise, of bargaining, of hoping and attempting. It’s very unfashionable to admit it, but there do exist mysteries that are useless to discuss. If I were to give one prescriptive piece of advice—which I myself have often needed—I would encourage you to sleep with people for whom sex is as important as it is to you. You do, as they say, know it when you see it.

Note: Lillian is currently looking for questions about sex and love to answer in her final column: feel free to post any you might have in the comments section below or send them along to highergossip@thepointmag.com. We will make sure Lillian gets them!

And catch up with the rest of the Higher Gossip columns here.

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By Mat Messerschmidt

Like many others, I first read Friedrich Nietzsche as a teenage boy. In the fall of 2001, at the age of fifteen, I learned that I was to have brain surgery, and I needed reading material for the recovery period. In preparation for a month or so spent largely in bed, I browsed the Barnes & Noble philosophy shelves and selected Plato’s Symposium and Republic and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These texts were my first foray into philosophy. Post-surgery, when I could do little but read, Plato and Nietzsche competed for my affection.

Nietzsche won. Plenty of authors had been presented to me as radical or revolutionary voices, but only with Nietzsche did the act of reading itself feel thrillingly subversive. I knew in a general way, of course, that other thinkers of the nineteenth century whom I had read, such as Marx and Dickinson and Thoreau, had in some sense rejected what we call “society.” But Nietzsche felt like a profound revolt in a way that they had not. It seemed to me that he succeeded, in a far deeper way than those other writers, at saying what was not supposed to be said, and saying it in a way in which it was not supposed to be said.

The voice of Nietzsche was unmistakably the voice of a man—a man who was asserting himself as a man. Maybe I was especially susceptible to the allure of such a voice at that specific moment in time, as I endured the deeply emasculating experience of undergoing a surgery that would leave me bedridden for a month, enfeebling my body, causing pretty dramatic weight loss and ruling out further participation in high school sports, which had been central to my identity and the basis of many of my male friendships. In that state, Nietzsche’s valorizations of pain were particularly appealing: the days-long headaches were given meaning by statements like “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” (a declaration that had not yet been appropriated by Kelly Clarkson). This idea of manly strength in suffering was embodied by a cast of male characters ranging from Greek tragic heroes to Roman Stoics and Germanic warriors. Nietzsche celebrated strength, assertiveness, stoicism, self-affirmation and, above all, power—an inward-looking power over the self and an ecstatic, outwardly questing power that projected itself onto the world. He fused together these virtues, unmistakably cast as masculine, in the invigorating term “self-overcoming.”

I had grown up, I was repeatedly told, in a culture dominated by men, by male voices, by male interests, by male points of view. Raised in a progressive family in the college town of East Lansing, Michigan, I accepted this description of the world. Yet, paradoxically, it was precisely the assertive maleness of the voice I encountered in the Nietzsche text that felt so profoundly radical. At home, my father would never have talked about being a man, and my mother seemed only ever to tell me about how men were in order to tell me how I should not be: men didn’t listen to women; men were stubborn and vain; men didn’t know how to load a dishwasher. At school, there were plenty of class discussions like the one led by our German teacher on how much better the world would be if women held all political power. But this sort of talk wasn’t simply transmitted by our elders. At our staff meetings for the high school newspaper’s opinion page, the hottest discussion topic was sex and gender, and an especially well-worn theme was generalized male entitlement and selfishness in sex—a stressful conversation topic as a virgin already obsessed with worries about basic performance. Of course, it isn’t as if any one of these reflections on men was emotionally devastating on its own, but they were coming from all sides. The world demanded masculine men, but smart people could not say that men needed to be masculine. Smart books certainly could not say that—or so it appeared to me, until I found Nietzsche.

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What was so powerful about Nietzsche was not that he was presenting some new, as-yet-unheard-of way of being a man. On the contrary, the masculine ethos articulated by Nietzsche felt as if it was what the world already demanded of boys. To do any of the things that really mattered to a fifteen-year-old boy, one needed the assertiveness and purposiveness he counseled—and one would have needed them whether or not one ever got around to reading Nietzsche. These traits seemed necessary to attract girls, to excel at sports, to earn the respect of other boys.

But the gap between the world as seen by Nietzsche and the world as seen by a progressive college town was that Nietzsche openly extolled the masculine characteristics demanded by the real social world, whereas the real social world condemned those characteristics while it demanded them. Despite all the very real social penalties for failing to live up to standards of masculinity, in any and every conversation I ever had in East Lansing about gender, those very standards were explicitly and roundly condemned as poisonous. In such discussions, the words “male,” “man” and “masculinity” were far more often invoked pejoratively than neutrally or positively. “Toxic masculinity” was not yet a catchphrase in the early aughts, but masculinity was already toxic in our town. His challenge to this enforced cultural contradiction was something both new and liberating.

I’m not sure I knew any boy in East Lansing who was not raised in a similarly progressive household, or who did not grow up to be at least left-of-center enough to vote for the Democratic Party. But even among that political demographic, there was, in hindsight, a clear thirst for masculinist literature more broadly. I shared and circulated my Nietzsche books, and from other teenage male readers, I found my way to Ernest Hemingway, Yukio Mishima and Cormac McCarthy. We all knew that patriarchy was real, that women made some eighty cents for every dollar made by men, that rape culture at the local Michigan State University was a very serious problem, that our mothers spent more time cleaning up the house than our fathers did. Still, there was a near universal appeal among boy readers to male writers who did what our progressive hometown could not do: assign meaning to the experience of being a man, and offer up a positive vision, however flawed, of masculinity. Prior to my encounters with such authors, I had not so much believed as simply assumed that masculinity could only ever be a problem, never a positive possibility—that bringing out the best in me would mean overcoming my manhood, not finding the right way to live my manhood. This was just the way everyone around me talked.

Twenty-two years after my first encounter with Nietzsche, I am a Nietzsche scholar. It was some time after I had written what could be termed a feminist interpretation of Nietzsche for an edited volume on Nietzsche and women that I reflected, for the first time in a long time, upon my initial encounter with the philosopher and on what his thought had meant to me as a young man. I found myself deeply conflicted, in ways that catalyzed a broader reflection on both gender and academia.

The mainline academic response to Nietzsche and gender over the last half century, influenced by thinkers in and adjacent to poststructuralist continental philosophy such as Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman and Judith Butler, finds in Nietzsche a largely unwitting ally to the cause of feminism. Despite being an over-the-top misogynist, Nietzsche teaches us that there is no innate human essence, let alone a timeless essence of man or woman. A “genealogy” (Nietzsche’s word, adopted, then, by Butler) of the human desires that structure our society today reveals that these desires are historically indexed and malleable, and that the social identities—such as gender identities—that are founded on them are therefore changeable. A human being becomes who they are in the performance of an identity that is realized in the very performance, rather than by expressing a “true” self, deep down inside, that precedes and determines the performance. This foreshadows Butler’s notion of gender performativity, which applies this logic to gender identity.

I don’t want to deny the validity of this way of reading Nietzsche, and in fact find it both correct and important. But when one interprets Nietzsche this way, the question becomes what to make of the Nietzsche that greets his teenage boy reader. That Nietzsche is also a real Nietzsche. Nietzsche routinely fetishizes the martial values of the Greeks; he appears to celebrate the masculine virtues prized by the Romans over those virtues emphasized by Christianity, which are unambiguously cast as effeminate. In art, tragedy, loved by Nietzsche, is harsh and manly, whereas Romantic poetry and opera, despised (selectively) by Nietzsche, is indulgent and feminine. Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the “overman,” though perhaps most accurately translated as “overhuman,” is clearly a male figure, an avatar of unprecedented creative production achieved via great destruction.

For half a century, academic engagements with Nietzsche have often treated these gendered accents that run throughout his corpus as entirely undercut by the latent feminist possibilities I described above. As a matter of interpretive correctness, this can come across as a kind of wishful thinking: while Nietzsche’s misogyny is hardly ever flatly denied by critics, the valorization of manliness and denigration of woman is generally assumed to be utterly defanged by scholarly analysis. Moreover, this way of reading also risks sterilizing Nietzsche’s writing. In my experience, explaining to undergraduates that Nietzsche is loved for his feminist possibilities is less likely to receive an immediate response of either indignation or invigorated sympathy for Nietzsche than it is to be met with glazed eyes: the text becomes much more boring when the case is made that the clear (masculinist or misogynist) message of the text we have been reading is not the real (gender-deconstructing or feminist) message—that intelligent, educated twenty-year-olds need someone with a Ph.D. to tell them the real message, which is a message that they would never have arrived at on their own. This renders Nietzsche not just arcane but boring.

This whitewashing approach to Nietzsche can obscure Nietzsche’s present cultural meaning in the world beyond academia. And its influence detached me, for a long time, from any consideration of the overwhelmingly male Nietzsche who had appealed to me as a boy. I was jolted back into reflection upon that Nietzsche last year when, in office hours, a male student sheepishly brought up Jordan Peterson in connection to the Will to Power notes we had read in class, relating the austere self-control that Nietzsche calls the mark of strong life to Peterson’s injunction to young men to “clean your room.” For many boys and men, Nietzsche is still a specifically male voice addressing young male readers. Just why is it that so many Nietzsche readers are very young men? What is Nietzsche offering them?

When my college course syllabus turns to Nietzsche, someone invariably volunteers that he read some Nietzsche in high school, and that someone is invariably a man. Men are visibly more passionate about Nietzsche than about other writers I teach. Even when students love Nietzsche, though, the most controversial questions that I raise in reference to his thought render them shy. Is human behavior really governed by the will to power? Could violence really be as health-inducing as Nietzsche suggests? Can we accept anything that Nietzsche says about men and women? These blunt questions sometimes slow down class discussion, generating diplomatic, tiptoeing answers, and are usually avoided entirely on papers. I have never taught a class with Nietzsche on the syllabus without at least one male student coming to office hours to reveal a passion for Nietzsche that either preceded our class or led him beyond the assigned reading—but even these excited discussions, which I am grateful for and enjoy, rarely result in a crystal-clear claim about how some controversial Nietzschean idea causes us to rethink the world.

Maybe, though, my demand that students take a firm stance on these sorts of questions is unfair. Maybe their silence is not entirely due to fear of controversy but rather—or also—due to the difficulty of answering such questions confidently. My margin notes on the Nietzsche books I read in high school transition back and forth from worship to visceral attack several times in the space of two pages. When I ask my students to yield confident answers to such questions, then, I am in effect asking them to take a stronger stance on Nietzsche than I was ever able to do as a young reader.

When I was a teenager, there was an enticing, fantasy-inducing path to masculine meaning implied in the Nietzsche that my friends and I were reading, but that path felt so captivatingly edgy precisely because we were products of our progressive upbringing, and we knew that we were. We did not secretly hope for a return to traditional gender norms. My friends in East Lansing who were reading Beyond Good and Evil and For Whom the Bell Tolls responded positively to idealized portraits of masculinity, but they also supported gay marriage, used the word “bro” disparagingly and called themselves feminists. Nietzsche, like those East Lansing boys, neither believed in nor wished for the possibility of a return to the past. The starting point of his thought is that God is dead, and old paths to meaning have irretrievably fled from the world as it exists today. We have “unchained the earth from its sun,” he has a madman say in the Gay Science that announces the death of God, and are “plunging perpetually … backwards, sideways, forwards, toward all sides.” In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche “whisper[s] to the conservatives” that, under these modern conditions, “a backtracking is in no shape or form possible.” To be sure, Nietzsche poetizes a version of masculinity that borrows from the past, but he does not yearn for a return to traditional, conservative gender roles, because for him the wish to return to traditional forms of meaning-making is generally delusional in modernity. For any man who wants to find meaning in such traditional roles, then, Nietzsche is not the sympathetic voice that he might at first appear.

Nietzsche believed, in proto-existentialist fashion, that the void of meaning that is modernity must urgently be filled, and that this task must be an individual endeavor, at least for the person who is strong enough for it. All of the masculine self-assertion, the will to power that he celebrates, is not in the service of some old patriarchal form of life but is rather to be harnessed and focused toward new, as yet unseen forms of life—toward new paths to meaning. In other words, Nietzsche’s anguished masculine energy builds on the abyss, to invoke one of his favorite terms. This, it seems to me, is a view of the world that resonates strongly with the worldview of boys who grow up believing that an old version of masculinity has indeed grown toxic, that old masculine ideals have expired without being replaced by new ones.

Manhood has become an abyss, in a place like East Lansing. The notion that changing gender dynamics are liberating for you, personally, and offer you new possibilities of meaning has, for good reasons, been pitched far more fervently to young women growing up in progressive environs than to young men. Society has told young women, for instance, that you can find meaning in your job instead of your family, if you want to do that. The opposite message—that you can be a whole and happy person by raising a family—has been pitched far more weakly and infrequently to young men. Young men see that an old vision of masculinity has grown problematic, but no new vision has taken its place. There is only a void of meaning. Nietzsche’s word for such a void is nihilism, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that modern masculinity has become nihilistic. Who is better equipped to serve as an interlocutor for the young man whose very gender identity is experienced as a state of being unmoored and rootless than the philosopher who says that our entire world has come unchained from any center of gravity or source of warmth?

Perhaps this is why boys continue to be drawn to Nietzsche. Of course, their reasons for reading Nietzsche should not necessarily be our reasons for prescribing Nietzsche to them. To tell young people to drive aggressively toward their own chosen meaning in life, in a world which has lost the ability to provide meaning for them, is a message that carries great risks. What if they drive so aggressively that their aggression forecloses other possible directions, or turns to violence? Why shouldn’t it turn to violence, if they are living in a modern world that has no meaning? Who would feel the responsibility to care for such a world? And what if their own chosen meaning turns out to be dark, even despicable?

During my nine years at the University of Chicago, I heard more than once from faculty or graduate students that Leopold and Loeb, the Chicago Law School students who in the 1920s sought to commit the perfect murder and become Nietzschean overmen, had a stupid, caricatured sense of Nietzsche’s message. Over drinks at Nietzsche conferences, I have heard similar complaints about the association of Nietzsche with Fight Club, the 1999 film about men escaping a cubicled modern American dystopia by finding distinctly male meaning in the act of mercilessly knocking the shit out of each other. These may be caricatures of Nietzschean thought, but they are not completely unrelated to what Nietzsche says and thinks. To pretend that they are runs a risk similar to that of the feminist take on Nietzsche I described above: it can disconnect an ivory tower view of the philosopher from his actual social meaning outside the university.

Nevertheless, I hope my male students keep finding their way to Nietzsche. Many of them are searching for alternatives to the message that they are toxic, and some of the spokesmen for masculinity they have found offer solutions that are worse than the problem to which they are reacting.

What solutions does Nietzsche offer? As with so many other topics in his body of work, to distill his “vision of masculinity” into any static, systematic and coherent dogma would be to falsify his thought. Yet that very fact may make Nietzsche the perfect thinker on manhood for a time like ours, when good men can find themselves pulled in multiple contradictory directions, ethically compelled to listen to the demands of feminism, but in search of a male identity that modern gender paradigms do not seem ready to supply. The path out of outdated ways of living masculinity cannot be simply to keep telling men that their maleness is bad, and Nietzsche’s call to self-affirmation may have something to offer them as a corrective to that message. In his best moments, Nietzsche’s ideal of manly purposiveness is expressed as confident, focused, goal-directed action that is conducive to the building of a better world: “The active, aggressive, ambitious man is still a hundred paces closer to justice than the reactive one,” he tells us in Beyond Good and Evil. This purposiveness has an individualistic strain that could speak to the lonely, atomized modern male, but without inviting him to wallow in a tragic heroism of loneliness like Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista killer and self-identified incel, did. Nietzsche has Zarathustra tell his listeners that he is going “my way,” because “the way—does not exist!”—and yet Zarathustra takes the time, over and over again over hundreds of pages, to speak to men searching for meaning. Nietzsche consistently champions focus: “The formula for my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.” Yet the indefinite article (“a goal”) leaves open the question of what this striving should be for, or what values should inform it. Indeed, a critical element of this vision of striving seems to be that the man himself supplies the goal.

This picture of focused, independently minded striving has the potential to be a healthy model for men, and that Nietzsche views it as a masculine picture cannot, on one level, be doubted. Yet, at the same time, the contours of that masculinity are not static. This vision is delivered by the philosopher who calls himself the “disciple of Dionysus,” a quasi-nonbinary god who is represented in Nietzsche’s early Birth of Tragedy as the female element in a heterosexual union with Apollo, supplying chthonic, earthly energy to Apollo’s form-giving potency. There are moments when Nietzsche seems to identify himself or his philosophical project with Ariadne, the female human lover of Dionysus. And for the creative, focused striving he valorizes, Nietzsche doesn't just draw on Apollonian manhood; he also uses the metaphor of motherhood. In short, Nietzsche seems to say, as stridently as possible, “Be a man!” but to ask in the same breath, “But what is a man?” Reactionary followers seem to want to hear only the imperative, and feminist scholars to hear only the question.

Perhaps now it sounds as if the writings of Nietzsche place men in a bind similar to the one I experienced as a teenage boy: the need to “be a man,” and simultaneously the need to question manhood itself. The critical difference, I think, is that Nietzsche removes the guilt from this state of internal division, proceeding as if one can assertively do both at the same time. It took me a long time to consider this as a possibility, in Nietzsche’s thinking or in general. Masculinity cannot be an untroubled concept today—if it were untroubled, that would indicate that feminism had failed entirely. But men remain and need ways to understand themselves positively as men. As a teenager, I only heard Nietzsche saying, “Be a man!”, and as a young scholar, I abandoned my earlier way of reading him, hearing only, “But what is a man?” Now, as a teacher to male students who are strongly impacted by the first message, I have learned how to hear both together.

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