We Good?

I can’t say I ever truly understood podcasts. Firstly, I don’t take in information well through auditory means, which is the main reason why lectures leave me impatient and I loathe phone calls. I get that you want something to listen to while you handle the mundane shit of day-to-day life, and that’s fair, and some few podcasts manage to scratch that itch, but now that the market is saturated, and now that random men tell me to listen to someone’s podcast on the regular, I can’t muster the enthusiasm. It just seems like more detritus.

However, that wasn’t always the case. Before all three turned into the worst kind of culture-war slop, and before I stopped listening entirely, This American Life and Radiolab and 99% Invisible were regular favorites. The first balanced beautiful human nuance with hilariously bitchy snark – Sedaris for the win – and the latter two were the best kind of popularization, taking complex and thorny ideas in science and design and presenting them in an informative but still rigorous way. But the early podcast bros never did it for me. Adam Carolla was far funnier when he was bottomfeeding on Comedy Central’s Man Show and lowering the discourse on MTV’s Loveline than he ever was on his own podcast (Dr. Drew telling listeners how important communication was, followed by Carolla asking if they’d done anal yet). And long before his right-wing turn, I found Joe Rogan to just be kinda annoying, even when he was interviewing people I found interesting and admirable. 

Yet I’m not sure quite why I stuck with Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast ends this week.

Before every comedian had an interview podcast, Maron had one. 

I remember so distinctly when I first listened to him, sometime in 2011 or 2012, while working on a technical writing gig in late summer in suburban Seattle. And while I don’t exactly remember how I found him, I do remember the angry, weird, self-loathing comic style that drew me in. This in particular stands out.

And the podcast had the same spirit. You got to see how he dealt with all the people he’d wronged in the past, making amends with all the people he had been an absolute shit to in the cocaine-and-bourbon haze of the ‘90s NYC alt-comedy world. My team at the time consisted of a cadre of overeducated, boozy quasi-fuckups with humanities degrees, heavily stamped passports, and strong opinions on David Foster Wallace. Listening to Marc Maron as I took screenshots and instructed users on how to get the most out of their Tapout-branded Android devices seemed a natural response to the circumstances in which I’d found myself. We’re all in this shit together. Let’s hash it out. 

And while his personality carried the tone of the interviews – the deeply wounded man trying to get good with the world – the guest list largely consisted of other loveable disasters, figuring their shit out with someone else figuring his shit out, as they all admitted they hadn’t behaved like upstanding citizens after snorting absolute alligator tails of primo Colombian. And they still weren’t completely alright. Sure, they had writing credits on well-regarded shows, they had husbands and wives who managed to deal with their foibles, but they were at the end of the day the sort of broken people who have no choice but to put themselves on stage and try to connect. These were their war stories. In a world of slick packaged bullshit, WTF seemed a beacon of honesty.

For years, I listened religiously. 

That being said, I did fall off some time ago. As Maron’s fame grew, his guest list consisted of fewer and fewer second-tier comics who never quite made it, and more and more genuine A-listers on the award-season campaign interview circuit. Maybe the famed Obama interview, an ugly sort of softball utterly lacking in substance, was the moment where he jumped the shark, but it seemed to me more of a slow decline. Rather than actually connecting to something deep and human, too many Maron interviews seemed to have the form of sincerity but not the substance, and consequently were little more than kitsch. His penultimate episode, a 40-minute monologue, ended with a compilation of some of his most legendary moments, set to the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” And it just felt manipulative.

He himself also got progressively more annoying. There was less and less cynical smirking counterpointed with genuine tears, and more whinging about the minor humiliations of Hollywood life and getting fat from craft services, as well as a fair bit of ignorant culture-war slop. And while I expected a certain misanthropy from him, it used to be barded with empathy. By now, his opening monologues have devolved into the groanings of a stereotypical wealthy California liberal who seems to genuinely despise and fear ordinary people, someone who seemingly hates them for their stupidity and just desires to wishcast them out of existence, while at the same time mewling about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices and listening to people’s trauma, assuming of course that they serve to assuage his sense of personal virtue. I came awfully close to smashing my phone when he harped about how people elected a fascist because they cared about the price of eggs. God forbid people, even if quite misguidedly, take their material conditions into consideration rather than their moral uprightness. Not all of us get infinite swag bags of vegan snacks, Marc. 

Furthermore, as other comics imitated the style of WTF, it seemed less like a unique representative of a certain world and more part of the background chorus. How unique is it when Bill Burr has a comedy podcast, and Conan O’Brien, and Shane Gillis, and Hannibal Buress, and Iliza Shlesinger, and Anthony Jeselnik… and… and I didn’t even know most of those people had comedy podcasts, but all I had to do was go to the Wikipedia pages of some comics I liked, and lo and behold. It’s almost a requirement now.

But even with all of that said, he never fully devolved into shit. He never got the neon podcast sign, he never sliced his interviews up into TikToks with starburst subtitles. For every utterly pointless interview with a focus-grouped favorite, there were interviews with the sorts of weirdos I like hearing from, and at its best it was still a clarion call to those of us, who try, quixotically, to still pursue creative endeavors in this benighted era. Consider this beauty, with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (and go watch Old Joy and Meek’s Cutoff while you’re at it).

Yet just as I’m writing this, final episode dropped. It’s Obama, he’s back. Will I even listen? It’s frankly doubtful – I don’t need to spend another second of my life with that empty suit. Just fuck you. But maybe that’s a representative choice of our first-as-tragedy-second-as-farce era, trying to drink the Amanita muscaria urine until the heat death of the universe. 

Which is a sign that it really is time for the curtain to fall. I’m not sad to go because of Marc Maron himself, as he is now, who is someone I feel less identification with, or because of his podcast, as it is now, as something that I feel has lost much of its original value, but because of what he and it were to me at one time in my life. Our lives disappear piece by piece, and for every graceful dismount, there are a half-dozen stumbles.

The Summer Vibes Never Die

 On Sunday, 15 June 2025, I do what we all do. I wake up and check in on the world.

Then I see this beauty, shot at a Beirut rooftop club:

 

“Missiles in the sky, but the summer vibes never die.” Sun emoji.

Click the link for the funky beats and Baker Street-level sax solo: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK5Z41RMRkz/ 

Netanyahu, of course, is hiding out in Greece right now. The Israeli Air Force One is apparently called “Wing of Zion.” Maybe he wanted summer vibes too.

The water is for the coffee is taking too long to boil. 

Meanwhile, back in my country, one Minnesota Democratic lawmaker has been killed, another injured. The presumed killer was the head of a security company called “Praetorian Guard,” but was apparently debased to living with a roommate, an old buddy. His CV said he’d worked for “the world’s largest convenience store chain” as a flex, meaning he had managed a 7-Eleven. Said roommate seemed to be a Papa John’s employee, and now the image everyone is going to remember of that poor bastard is him crying and reading text messages to the news cameras as he sweats through the Papa John’s polo stretched over his gut.

The suspect was experiencing “mental health challenges” per the local sheriff’s office. “Challenges.” 

I got baked last night and made post-midnight eggs au gratin with hella hot sauce. Probably a bad idea.

There’s probably still shit going on in Los Angeles, but Trump had a birthday rally in DC so all eyes were there, with troops failing to march in time to generic rawk and roll music that sounds suspiciously AI-generated. Sponsored by Coinbase, Palantir, UFC (natch), and Scott’s Miracle Gro. 

Miracle Gro.

Who’s been sending me messages? Seoul, Paris, Kyoto, and New York all send their regards, or at least their memes. I send back a picture of the pool outside (there are summer vibes, we must remember, even if it’s the bleak and rainy monsoon season here) and I have to ask myself whether to use the sunglasses emoji, or to playfully allude to the fact that I want to use the sunglasses emoji. 

The signs at the other rallies read “No Kings!” and I genuinely can’t figure out what this means. General dissensus, I suppose. I don’t see much in the way of concrete policy goals, mostly just one big frowny-face emoji.

Meanwhile, marines are detaining US citizens in Los Angeles after storming elementary schools, cops firing, point blank and with intent, at an Australian journalist reporting on the scene, Latino cops roughing up Latino protesters, LAPD and LASD shooting rubber bullets at each other, and Brian Wilson is dead.

 

But I repeat, “summer vibes never die.” Brian Wilson, at least you were given the dignity of being called profoundly mentally ill, not challenged. 

I really shouldn’t have had those late-night eggs.

The coffee is almost ready, though. 

What they tell you, five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. Zero things you can vibe on, summer or otherwise.

I don’t know that that necessarily works. 

But I hadn’t even noticed my foot was bleeding.

The Fable of Jonah Peretti

It's an inevitable product of aging that one starts to wonder what the representative cultural products of the present era will be, what will be remembered, what will be reflected upon. And when thinking about the 2010s, I'm sure I'll be suspected to some nostalgia film in 10 years in which the bride and groom dance to Happy or Blurred Lines or Get Lucky at a wedding.

And few organizations captured the ethos of this time more accurately than Buzzfeed, to the point where it became almost a shorthand for the preciousness and stupidity of the decade. And a brief glance at it, as of a recent date, revealed itself to be the same sort of bullshit they've always done, to the point where it's almost a portal to 10 years ago. "This Couple Had a Sensory Friendly Wedding and I Could Almost Cry at How Beautiful It Is." "33 Products That Work So Well You'll Be Taking (sic) About Them All Year." You know. Clickbait bullshit for people who want to have weddings at Disneyland. Barf. Pass. You'd have thought we'd have moved past this sort of thing in an era where the problems of the world have become that much sharper.

But what is fascinating to me is the story of its origins and of its founder, Jonah Peretti, who, aside from being the dude with the most white-California of all possible names, had a decidedly strange arc, one that reflects the shifting priorities of a century.

Like so many Gen-X'ers, he came of age in the heady days of critical theory, in which American theorists willfully misinterpreted their French masters to make correlations between particle physics and Lacanian psychoanalysis (which another Gen-X'er theorist, Joe Rogan, would later extend to a connection to his DMT trip in the desert), and he even published a piece heavily informed by the theories of Deleuze and Guattari in one of the at the time very au-courant, pre-Sokal Affair journals that adopted a purely "cultural" anticapitalism at the end of history, Negations.

To wit:

"My central contention is that late capitalism not only accelerates the flow of capital, but also accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities. Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities." 

A sensory friendly wedding. Almost crying at how beautiful it is.

Several years later on his bildung, Herr Peretti entered a room with a former follower of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh named Arianna Huffington and a plucky young Brentwood posh lad with a passion for uppers and thinly veiled fascism named Andrew Breitbart to start a certain news aggregator site that would come to be known for its quippy responses to the foibles of the Bush Regime.

And from that particular smug vomitorium came the worst of the American political culture that has dominated discourse within my own country, and owing to cultural imperialism, the world at large ever since. It's been a while since I'd even thought about HuffPo, but it laid the template for Breitbart and Buzzfeed, and Internet discourse more broadly.

The thesis was set forth in the "Breitbart Doctrine," that politics lies downstream from culture. Despite the right-wing origins, this is a sensibility that has come to dominate both liberal and conservative approaches to ideology. And it reflects the fact that both Perretti and Breitbart -- as representatives of a certain generation and a certain upper middle-class caste -- drank from the same streams, those of cultural studies, in which the legitimate insights of Western Marxism and the mid-20th Century "cultural turn" were placed in the service of late-stage capitalism.

A brief overview: the dissident Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci came to realize that a major part of what kept people in a state of false consciousness was "cultural hegemony," whereby the institution and powers that be insinuated a deep-seated ideology of which the subject is not even aware, which is normalized as common sense. But Gramsci and the Frankfurt School philosophers further north sought to articulate a truly emancipatory path for human development beyond the failures of capitalism and orthodox Marxism-Leninism. But when this program is applied without a strong critique of capitalism, the end result is disastrous.

Peretti and Buzzfeed largely mirrored the tone of the Obama years. The voice the editorial board championed was cheery, triumphant, inclusive, effusive. For a reference point, think about Parks and Recreation. Sure, all is far from well in Pawnee, Indiana, but Leslie Knope and Co. want to do their best to put people on the right path. Things were going to get better. And the vibe of Buzzfeed matched this, hoping that by giving people the right culture, they would give them the right politics. Never mind the economic recovery that wasn't.

Well, let's see how that turned out.

Meanwhile, Breitbart and friends, funded by an increasingly cantankerous right, managed to capitalize, conversely, on a visceral disgust, which is of course a much more powerful emotion. The 2016 election demonstrated that the culture that the liberals had tried to foster had failed to produce a downstream politics of any meaning, given that the political message was essentially "cheer up and be grateful, we've got it covered." To which the right responded by producing rage responses, which helped, in its way, to pave the way to a rage-response presidency.

What you see are two attempts at placing culture downstream from politics. In the first, a kindly, liberal culture fails to produce a kindly, liberal politics. In the second, a negation of culture feeds into a political worldview based entirely around antipathy. To put it in less academic terms, it's the Wario version. Wantonio Gramsci.

Something tells me that this color-inverted Gramsci will be less likely to be a friendly and rather goofy opponent in tennis- and kart racing-themed games.

Perhaps it should be no surprise, as well, that Buzzfeed laid off 43 journalists in a mass purge of actual news in 2019, followed by another 47 without warning -- most of them unionized -- in 2021, via a virtual meeting using the insanely on-brand password "spr!ngish3r3."

What I am reminded of, more than anything else, are the haunting lines at the beginning of one of the masterworks of cultural theory, Theodor Adorno's 1951 text Minima Moralia. Subtitled "notes on a damaged life," Adorno, in these strange little micro-essays, traces the ways in which all hope had been extinguished, made impossible in the shadows of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, made all the more personal to Adorno through his own exile, through the ways in which his closest of friends were subject to expulsion at best, gas chambers at worst.

"The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that since time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy, and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own."

And I see the sighs of this long-dead German reflected in this engine of meaningless content. In the horror of the screen glowing in the dark.

Dark Academia and Meme Versus Reality

It's an inevitable feature of getting older that you come late to the party when it comes to trends -- sure, the Internet makes it so that you have the ability to search more, but you still have to know where to search, and how, and whether that search is worthwhile, and whether or not you should actually spend some time making sure that you've used the right cover letter for the TPS report. 

And that goes double for the "aesthetics" shared by a (mostly) Gen Z public on the infinitude of social media platforms I try to avoid taking part in, except for anthropological purposes. Various -cores have come back with a vengeance, and so forth, a rhetorical device which is older than me, and which I've always hated -- when I was 19, I refused to vocalize the word "mumblecore," and I refuse to still.

And thus it was that over the past year or so, I became aware of the concept of "dark academia," an aesethetic adoration and -- like all things deemed aesthetic now, somehow erotically charged but utterly desexualized -- of all things dusty and forgotten. Leatherbound books with dusty spines, tweed jackets, ivied and crenellated Gothic libraries, Byronic poetry, tasteful earth tones, decanters full of cognac, horn-rimmed glasses, brass candelabra, and the lingering scent of old pipe smoke.

 

I get it -- I, too, once wrapped myself in a scarf and wore tasseled loafers and showed up at parties with a well-thumbed Dover Thrift Edition of Death in Venice tucked into my back pocket, pontificated on the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes to anyone foolish enough to be in earshot, prowled used bookstores for copies of long-forgotten novels, tried to speak shitty French at parties, had six cups of coffee for dinner.

In other words, I was a cunt. I would say Timothee Chalamet would have played me, but I was never near as handsome.

And if you are a teenager raised in some hellish exurb, it seems to me natural that you would want to find some alternative reality that you could fantasize about. Someplace where ideas seemed to actually matter, someplace where humanistic education was more than being asked to find the symbols in The Great Gatsby to practice for the AP test, someplace dark and strange and interesting.

But that wasn't my reality. I was raised in an academic community, and so a lot of this is second nature to me. I was the product of an illicit student-professor affair, in a house with a bookshelf-lined livingroom and Faulkner first editions and antique furniture and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue playing as my dad, the Royal Tenenbaum who had lost his crown before I was born, would pour the first of many Scotches in front of the fire on frigid November nights.

To a certain degree I imbibed it. The world around me, it seemed, was a generally cruel and stupid place, and I spent most of my youth thinking that I, too, would retreat into the ivory tower eventually.

The thing is though is that reality sets in. Lacking the necessary capital and not going into a field which would have placed me on a professional track, I would have had to sink myself 100,000 dollars into student debt in the hope of getting an adjunct teaching position at an anonymous university for wages that a factory worker would (rightly) sneer at. And so, like all overeducated but decidedly non-blueblooded youth in the years after the financial crash of 2008, I worked a series of low-end jobs, the more horrifying the more novel, and became known as the "smart guy" (with the subtext being "lacking any actual monetizable skills") the guy who could happily talk about surrealism on his lunch break at the car dealership or the psychiatric facility, while he was earning 10 dollars an hour, people saying "y'know, you should really write a book or something."

Which leads to the divide between the aesthetic and the real.

It's easy to fantasize about a world of intrigue and scholarly madness and long Orson Welles shadows, but a lot harder to actually live a life dedicated to art and knowledge and letters. To actually devote oneself in this way -- something I've done on and off for my entire adult life -- is really goddamn lonely and painful and alienating at times, because, above all else, it's a form of escapism. A lot of people might refer to Of Human Bondage, the story of a seeker who realized all gods, spiritual or otherwise, were failures (which is great), but I think it was best phased by Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point in 1928: 

"I perceive now that the real charm of the intellectual life — the life devoted to erudition, to scientific research, to philosophy, to aesthetics, to criticism — is its easiness. It's the substitution of simple intellectual schemata for the complexities of reality; of still and formal death for the bewildering movements of life. It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology, than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one’s fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one’s friends and lovers, one’s wife and children. Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics. The intellectual life is child’s play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children — and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don't die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That's why (among other reasons) there's such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public-house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life."

And the older you get, the harder it gets. When you're 15, perhaps you can fancy yourself one of the lads in Dead Poets Society (a movie I've not rewatched as an adult, and do not plan to -- I'm sure I'll despise it). But one transitions shockingly quick from charmingly adorkable Oscar Wilde cosplayer to Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, bloviating about Baudelaire before getting rapey with the handsome young men in his company.

Perhaps it's this that unsettles me more than anything else as I look at the nascent wrinkles in my forehead, having graduated from thrift-store shoes to vintage desert boots from a nice consignment shop on Ekkamai Road, as one's life involves a lot less stoned arguing about shit over delivery Indian food, but no less introspection in the long taxi ride home.

The Ugliest of Decades

In the wake of the US departure from Afghanistan and the near-simultaneous 20th anniversary of 9/11, a lot of hay has been made about the attempted rehabilitation of George W. Bush's political reputation. This is especially odd considering how far the star of his comrade-in-arms, Rudy Giuliani, has fallen, from "America's mayor" to finally being widely recognized as the doddering, corrupt old fraud he always was (and who ripped a fantastically loud one in the middle of the Michigan recount hearings). Fortunately, the consensus still seems to be that both are fucking twats, and should be remembered as such.

But this moment has put me in mind more and more of the 2000s, a "decade without a name" as Timothy Garton Ash called it, the decade when I came of age, and therefore the era that is supposed to be ensconced in my memory as hallowed.

Yet if you ask me to think back on the 2000s (or the "oughties," or whatever you want to call them), my memories are of nothing but disgust, particularly with the "short 2000s" lasting from 9/11 to the Obama election (to crib a technique from Eric Hobsbawm). Sure, there was political disgust. The general opinion of those who identified as in any way "progressive" tended not to see Bush as a malefactor, but as a puppet of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. But the blame went deeper. The general opinion among my peers was that these bastards were elected in in '04 by a fundamentally fucked country, with a stupid, piggish, populace of cross-clutching nationalists, fearful of gays marrying and brown people at TSA, that was to blame.

If there's any piece of media that sums up this particular stance, it's MTV2's Wonder Showzen, a pisstake of children's shows that ran in '05 and '06, featuring puppets harassing civilians on the streets of New York, kids dressed as reporters in trenchcoats doing vox-pop interviews (going to the racetrack and asking a retiree "why not cut out the middleman and give your social security check directly to the mob?"), or just dressed as Hitler and screaming "what are you afraid of?" at passersby in Lower Manhattan. In other words, taking pure anarchic glee in the freaking out of the squares.

 

For me at 19 or 20, this seemed the only sane reaction to a reactionary decade. One in which not only was the military apparatus and surveillance state radically expanded, never to contract again, but in which the culture just seemed so damn dumb. So it might be illustrative to look at how the culture expressed itself.

In cinema, it was the year when everything I hate -- leaning into franchise products, comic book movies as surefire seat-fillers, CGI excess -- all became the standard (which isn't to say that cinema was necessarily better in earlier decades, it's just when this particular iteration of shittiness became the norm). "Quality" films weren't safe eitehr. I remember watching The Aviator on DVD in someone's apartment, and wondering what had happened to Scorsese, why he couldn't stop moving the camera, why everything had to be so damn big.

In television, while it is (rightly) remembered as the era of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, let it be remembered that it was also the era when reality television reached its highest form, an arc stretching from Survivor through Laguna Beach to Jersey Shore before that impulse in entertainment was taken over by Internet culture writ large, when the famous-for-being-famous were given the key by network execs rather than simply posting cringe on TikTok.

In music, it was the decade of album after over-long album of grandiose Southern rappers all of whom had album titles like "Tha Thug Life, Volume 1: The Feature Film" or some such shit, replete with Gothic fonts and weirdly Tyler Perry-ish music videos (he goes on the list too) with minute-long cinematic intros. On the country side, we were told that putting a boot in one's ass was the American way. In rock, the charts were topped by... that Canadian band, you know which one... along with a host of other shitty groups, many of whom had numbers in their names (in numerical order, you had Three Doors Down, Maroon 5, 30 Seconds to Mars, Sum 41...). It was when the shitty emo out of Vegas and Orange County that is being revived for some dumb fucking reason right now was being played in dorm rooms by boys in puka shells and Livestrong bracelets, alternating with Dave Matthews Band and Ben Harper. Across the hall, their English-major counterparts were listening to any number of bland indie bands with giggly names (and to be fair, I listened to some crappy stuff, but I was at least above Mumford and Sons). Or Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, or other "dance-punk" bands hyped by NME.

And in design... I'll just list some representative objects off. The McMansion suburbs built in the prelude to the 2008 crash. Von Dutch hats. Ed Hardy t-shirts. The Hummer H3. Uggs. Thongs peeking out over low-rise jeans. Chinese-character tattoos on white people. Ads for "x-treme" snack foods. The creepy Burger King ads.

It's easy (and fun!) to blame conservatives, especially during a decade largely dominated by conservative politics, but if I look at liberals from the time period, they didn't fare much better. Their objects in the rising culture war were the obnoxiously smug Daily Show at its Jon Stewart peak, and the sheer idiocy of the near-parody of politics in The West Wing. They felt good about themselves after watching Crash.

Looking back, with the wisdom of my added years, sure the culture sucked, but my finger-wagging at those I felt to be beneath me was mere adolescent misanthropy. People may have had wretched political opinions and lousy taste, but it was far easier to blame the hog-people than to actually interrogate why they believed what they believed, or why the mass culture of the time looked the way it did. It's a lot easier to point and mock than to ask why people might want some spectacle in their lives and max out their credit at a time when the media kept us in a state of perpetual fear.

But what's most interesting out of all after all these years is the fact that this is really the last time in American history when there was anything you could call a common culture (Marvel movies being really the only thing nowadays that pretty much everyone watches). It was still a time when Saturday Night Live could parody an episode of a reality show that had aired the previous week, with the expectation that the audience could be counted upon to laugh at the joke.

We don't have that anymore. Our lives are so individuated, so self-contained, our choice of media so curated, that trends are increasingly difficult to observe, and increasingly fleeting.

As I age, my ability to parse a fundamentally youth-driven culture becomes poorer and poorer. But I will say this, I will never become one of those annoying nostalgists who can't shut up about Woodstock, or grunge-era Seattle, or whatever. When looking back at the ethos of the time in which the light of youth shone strongest on me, I can only sigh and roll my eyes.

On Rewatching Mad Men

And you thought you were binge-watching before.

I've been, too, but I've been focused on re-watching Mad Men, a show I've held pretty close to my heart since I was introduced to it by a remarkably shitty ex-roommate. I watched it, episode-by-episode, week-by-week, as we always used to, and finally got around to watching the whole thing again, the first time I've re-watched a drama in full (which like binging in general, is something the general populace as a whole does that I've never been very good at).

So I was treated to a dual experience, both the standard experience of revisiting a work from a previous stage of one's life, as well as the experience of viewing something in a completely new way, in this case in a condensed version, where the themes that Matthew Weiner and Co. chose to underline were starker, more obvious.

Spoiler alert, and all that.

Some things, of course, remained wonderful – the richness and depth of the characters and the very specific ways in which they change and evolve, the gorgeous cinematography informed by 1950s and 1960s American cinema, the dreamy montages presenting the characters' mundane lives in counterpoint, the occasional streaks of dark humor, and perhaps best of all, the slips into the surreal – dead characters reappearing, a suddenly empty elevator shaft.

(That's right, I used a gif from a popular TV show in its own right instead of using it as a pointless throwaway gag)

And simultaneously, I cringe even more at the glibly self-congratulatory moments were we the audience are reminded how much better the present day is than the past – the arrogant tobacco execs, the scene where a young Sally Draper wears a plastic dry-cleaning bag to play astronauts, and her mother stops her, only to tell her the laundry better not be on the floor, the way the camera lingers over trash left behind by the Draper Family after a picnic.

I can't speak to the historical accuracy of the show. I obviously wasn't in a New York office space between 1959 and 1970, and increasingly few people were. And since art trades in vibes more than facts, I hesitate to apply any kind of data-based analysis to what the show is or isn't, what it does or doesn't portray. What interests me is not the era itself, but the lens the showrunners chose to examine that era through.

One can be forgiven for thinking of the show as possessing a fundamentally progressive worldview. The script champions women taking a more assertive role within the office, and all of the major characters seem to be more or less on board with the Civil Rights Movement. By the end, they've all become sickened by the Vietnam War, and the struggles of the show's few gay characters are treated with real empathy.

But yet upon second watching, it all seemed like window-dressing.

The version of feminism that is proffered is the Lean In variety, one in which, being a girl-boss is seen as the transcendental goal, and the status quo is in no way meaningfully questioned. The characters often find themselves shattered by the contradictions in their own life, but those are problems resulting not from any kind of structural failings in the society in which they live, but by their interior psychodramas. And when each major character resolves those contradictions in the end – Peggy Olson finally opening her heart up to love with the dopey artist down the hall, Joan Harris starting her own company, Roger Sterling finally settling down with a woman his own age instead of chasing 20 year-old secretaries, Pete Campbell accepting a gilded corporate gig and returning to his family – they do so with a full commitment to the machine.

In probably the most noxious version of all, our hero, Don Draper, a man whose entire life is built on lies, finds salvation at a commune presumably modeled on the Esalen Institute (look it up, it was a major force for the boomer generation but has largely been forgotten), it is by saluting the sun on a cliff over the Pacific. The final scene closes. He smiles as he chants an Om, and the scene cuts to the famous 1971 Coke ad with the teenagers singing on the hilltop in Italy, the presumed message being that he returned to work at McCann-Erickson and thought it up.

“I did hear rumblings of people talking about the ad being corny. It's a little bit disturbing to me, that cynicism. I'm not saying advertising's not corny, but I'm saying that the people who find that ad corny, they're probably experiencing a lot of life that way, and they're missing out on something.” – Matthew Weiner, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter

Nah, fuck that.

The end message is further evidence that only the worst parts of the '60s survived – the half-baked spirituality and Westernized version of Eastern religion, the mask of inclusivity covering up rapacious capitalism, a Whiggish faith in the inevitability of human progress, and the reduction of all human endeavor to individual choice and self-expression.

A sort of mediocre liberal centrism, the kind long since de rigueur in Oscar-noms, has become the standard perspective of American scripted television, at least in its “prestige” sector (reactionary programming now being confined to reality television and the sorts of fucking dumb “SALUTES TO OUR ARMED FORCES” that I skip over whenever I torrent an NFL game). Few are the shows – The Wire and Deadwood being two magnificent examples – that take an honest look behind the curtain.

With the first episode, featuring lots of idiotic old boys' club joking designed for the audience to be horrified by, I was afraid that Mad Men would become another thing, like so many others, that was ruined for me. I may have liked The Breakfast Club when I was 16, but it's fucking unwatchable now. I've been told not to re-watch Dead Poets' Society, and I have no intention of doing so.

But here's the thing – regardless of the many eye rolls, Mad Men is still a joy to watch. Each character is treated with real empathy, even at their worst, and I'm rooting for them, dammit! Certain sequences still took my breath away as much as they did when I first watch them. I take far more umbrage at the notion that art must contain a correct perspective (I'm listening to Wagner right now, for the-Christ-I-don't-believe-in's sake), than the various sins of the showrunners

 

The Haunted Landscapes of The Simpsons

I've been finding myself drawn, during odd periods of downtime at work, or on solitary late Saturday nights, to a point of nostalgia, probably my most salient point of nostalgia, and probably the thing that shaped my worldview more than anything else – classic episodes of The Simpsons. 

I say, “classic episodes,” because like most 30+ year olds (and like many younger), I stopped watching as the show got shittier. This is a woefully unoriginal observation, to the point where every time someone brings it up I cringe a little. And besides, many people more talented than myself have written whole essays on how and why this happened, as well as why this tends to happen with long-running series in general (jumping the shark and all that). But the fact remains that watching newer episodes feels a little like running into the coolest kid from your elementary school – the one whose parents shelled out for a pair of L.A. Lights and could sing all of the lyrics to Green Day's “Longview” – and seeing him 50 pounds heavier than his high-school prime at a Main Street bar, before he cashes out his tab and drunkenly swerves his car out of diagonal parking.

In a way, I never left those episodes behind – I still remember banks of dialogue, and it's how I received so much of my early cultural education.

Here is a story about how this works in a different time. In 1944, Patrick Leigh Fermor was sent to Crete to capture a notorious Nazi officer. Having found that the general hat already left the island, he went for a secondary target, a career soldier named General Heinrich Kleipe. For days, he had marched the general through the rain and over the desolate terrain, until in a cave, having a smoke together, they see the peak of Mount Ida emerge from the clouds.

“Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte…

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine – and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before.”

Being of this century, my points of resonance with strangers from across the ocean are nothing like the odes of Horace. Rather, my version of Fermor's encounter with Kleipe is bound to be something more like me running into an asshole Irish expat going off about something, and muttering across the table: 

Itchy runs afoul of an Irishman... 

And one of my tablemates responds: 

Look out Itchy, he's Irish! 

Fermor had Horace. I have season 7, episode 18 of The Simpsons.

Of course, I'm pretty sure that classic episodes of The Simpsons does have far more universal appeal than Horace, even Horace 100 years ago when your options were far fewer. But not everyone took the deep dive like I did, although quite a few did, and wherever I've lived, I've found those fellow souls who, as Fermor put it, drank at the same fountain.

So the dialogue was at the surface of my mind, that I knew. But there were still things to be discovered.

The thing I notice more than anything else, that I never really understood before, was that part of the reason I was drawn to The Simpsons was that there was a loneliness at its core. Sure, a lot is made of the show's much-vaunted “heart,” which it had in spades in its golden years, but that sense of heart hinges on a deep-seated sadness. This is a family consisting of a father who worked a job he hated day in and day out, the housewife who once had dreams, the fundamentally good kid whose rebellion was inevitable, the isolated intellectual daughter, the youngest child who literally doesn't have a fucking voice.

And the aesthetics of Springfield bear this out. I know I'm late to the party in discovering it, but I keep finding myself drawn to the Scenic Simpsons Instagram page. Each image is by and large devoid of human presence, and consists of all of the background stuff that forms the show – an open telephone book, a flickering television screen, interior shots of familiar buildings, landscape.

Its creator uses the word “beautiful” to describe the imagery collected there, but that to me is missing the point. Rather, the first thing I am reminded of is the terrifyingly empty piazzas of Giorgio De Chirico.

 As a kid, I adored maps and photos of unknown places – my first childhood hero was Indiana Jones – and Springfield was just such another place, fictional and unknown and yet totally familiar to any American in the '90s. It was another thing I wasn't aware of then, but the background drawings of Springfield are hyperreal. It is a painfully anodyne suburban or small-town landscape, simplified and abstracted to almost childlike levels, and yet with the colors exaggerated and the occasional touch of the absurd, the laconic simplicity almost evoking something hidden, the scenery becomes resonant.

And this, too, reflects De Chirico's idea of the pittura metafisica. To De Chirico, the haunting effect comes through contrast, between light and dark, between monolith and emptiness, and, like Springfield, between the everyday scenery of the Italian city and the patently surreal.

 

It has embedded itself deeply in my consciousness. I need only look to the peace lily on my coffee table, my tweed sofa, the garden outside with its potted palms, and it takes only the slightest stretch of imagination to see it stylized, oversaturated, and transformed into flat fields of color, odd details haunting the corners.

Let's Talk About Why Netflix's "Street Food" Sucks

I always give TV shows I watch five episodes to prove themselves. There is so little time on this planet, and especially little time to do the things I love, and so life is too short for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I know that many members of my rough age cohort are less forgiving, but I figure five episodes should give the creators some time to prove themselves, and prove the worth of their characters or plots.

After finishing season 3 of Fargo (which slaps, by the way), I moved onto Netflix's latest venture into becoming the Xhamster of food porn, Street Food. I was interested, not just because I'm an enthusiast for street food the world over, but also because the first episode featured the current doyenne of my adopted city of Bangkok's street-food scene, Jay Fai, queen of the crab omelette.

I should have known what I was getting myself into. You know exactly how everything's gonna go down. Start with a dramatic drone shot of an exotic Asian landscape or a vaguely cyberpunk Asian cityscape, all fluorescent-lit slums and smog-spewing scooters, and then zoom into a market scene of chickens in bamboo cages, elderly women beaming over ropes of garlic. You'll have the local food expert (most likely speaking in English) championing the working-class vendor (most likely speaking in their native language), followed by the inevitable story of personal struggle -- child abuse, poverty, beloved fathers dying of cancer, addiction in the family -- with the vendor eventually tearing up, cameras gleefully rolling.

By and large, food TV is designed to be comfort food in every sense of the word. And to watch it is an act of passive consumption, also in every sense of the word. The high-class version is designed as a marveling at the exoticism and luxuriousness of the products, lurid shots of immaculate sea urchin, the riotous colors of a bowl of Singaporean laksa, a Provençal grandmother lovingly making an aioli in a mortar and pestle. Conversely, the low-class version is a fat fuck shoveling triple cheeseburgers topped with crispy pork belly, gorgonzola, and foie gras into his goateed mouth to guitar riffs (and you can probably guess which fat fuck I'm alluding to here), or some polite, chipper woman with a Colgate smile crafting chemically enhanced product-placement atrocities out of Cool Ranch Doritos and frozen gnocchi.

When there is anything that disrupts the comfort, it's either giddy reality-TV drama of the sort accompanied by dramatic judges' table sound effects (the last place where vocal synths are still used without irony) or maudlin descriptions of personal tragedy. You know, prepackaged feels -- just add water.

Of course, the producers could address how the personal setbacks and disasters reflect social realities and the often unspeakable poverty of urban-slum Southeast Asia. They come, at various points, annoying close to actually saying something -- they could actually open the discussion a bit, and talk even for a minute about the wealth gap in Thailand, religious tensions in India, or the fact that Suharto, who's mentioned as a big fan of the vendor in the Indonesia episode, oversaw the murder of one million fucking people -- but that would be a buzzkill, so any kind of larger issue is barely even mentioned in passing. Jiro Dreams of Sushi, perhaps the glossiest, most opulent food porn ever made, took a beat to discuss how Japan's rapacious appetite for fish was draining the ocean, and placed a critical emphasis on the pressures placed on sons in traditional Japanese society. But in Street Food, nope, instead you just have the tear-jerker story, the actual tears, followed shortly thereafter by the story of individual triumph, told with swelling strings and slow-motion, high-definition onions sizzling in a wok.

The great lie is that we live in the "golden age of television." Sure, The Sopranos ushered in a new era of high quality television liberated from network standards-and-practices doofuses, and likewise liberated from the time constraints of conventional cinema, and I love The Wire, Mad Men, and all the rest just as much as everyone else does. But as more and more shows compete for the "prestige" audience -- including the "prestige documentary" audience, the Wild Wild Country and The Jinx audience -- the result is more and more recycling of prestige tropes instead of actually good television. You get tired, recycled material -- shows like House of Cards and Making a Murderer – that are filmed beautifully, but which have no originality of purpose, no meaningful content, no soul, as sterile and as packaged and as focus-grouped as brands of detergent.

Street Food fits firmly into this rubric. It's like they took the more provocative, more imaginatively produced, more socially conscious food programming pioneered by Anthony Bourdain, David Chang, and Eddie Huang, and turned it into a garish, melodramatic parody. Regrettably, as occurs whenever I encounter any kind of low-caliber creative work, it makes me question whether the things it's imitating were any good to begin with.

This is where I would normally implore you, the reader, to go out and eat some good street food for yourself, and in Bangkok, this is a luxury that we take as a given. My one, sole, remaining hope is that decent food programming actually inspires viewers to go out and explore, but I know full well that the vast majority of viewers who are watching a sushi maestro place a single pristine piece of mitsuba on a glistening pile of salmon roe will be staring at their flat-screen between swigs of Pepsi Max, their television the sole source of light in their living room as the sun goes down, the pixels reflecting off of the half-eaten Chipotle burrito on the glass-top coffee table.

This may sound like a cheap shot, but it's not intended to be one at You the Consumer (and certainly not a shot at the street vendors of the world, bless their souls) so much as Them the Producers. I can't blame people for wanting a bit of escapism, after all, we all do (however that may manifest itself), but I also know that anything this brutally symptomatic of late-stage capitalism is bound to depress the hell out of me. And now that I've watched my five episodes, I'm ready to move on.

The Story of a Failure

On Monday, January 21st, the news broke of yet another virginal man, Christopher Cleary, age 27, of Denver, planning to murder women en masse -- of course, this being my benighted republic, this barely counts as news, especially given the fact that no one was actually murdered. But the issue of the incel mass murderer has become one of the more trending topics of the past year or so, to the point where the "what an incel be" think piece has become utterly stale.

What fascinates me more about the sequence of events is everything but the fact that he was a 27 year old virgin.

When the photograph of Christopher Cleary came up in one of my daily traipses through the Internet, all I could see was an almost emblematically sad American. Someone whose life had been molded by the late-capitalist Sunbelt world -- making him one of many, of course, who had come out of a landscape of Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's, the persistent smells of fryer grease and Yankee Candle Company, the rows of townhouses hemmed in by dwarfish pine trees, vinyl banners reading "RENTING NOW! CALL xxx-xxx-xxxx!" limply flapping in the wind. One of many shaped by the ideologies that prop up this purely marketed world. The difference is that he was foolish enough to announce that he was going to mow down women.

This being our current iteration of networked existence, we, the general public now have the ability to probe his social-media personality, and you see the way in which he tried, himself, to mold his persona into a brand. Even his threat of murder was accompanied by sad-face and angry-face responses.

 His Facebook Intro was reported as saying "I'm Kris. from Denver, sports pa announcer, free spirit traveler and a lonely Starbucks lover."

It's a bit like the "short story" famously misattributed to Hemingway -- "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In that 15-word statement, a life, a picture springs forth. There's something terribly sad and desperate-seeming about the way he switched the "Ch" to a "K," about the way he self-describes as a sports announcer (despite seemingly not being one outside of his own mind), the way he describes as a free-spirit traveler despite the fact that he seems like he's so ensconced in the suburban world and just cribbed the term from a legion of Instagrammers, the fact that he unironically announces a love for Starbucks, a chain that tried 30 years ago to seem like the sort of place cosmopolites would congregate, and which now is just another fast-food joint by the side of the highway, but the way he pairs it with "lonely" seems to conjure up some self-image of a lonely café dweller, a trope that has been a cliché for at least 100 years, but this time buying into a marketing campaign.

Or look to his Youtube channel, with its Intro video showing him cheesing and posing in front of arenas (in such exotic destinations as Las Vegas and Salt Lake City) and simulated backdrops of palm trees, special-effect dollar bills falling over the screen. You see his videos of him eating fast food, CRAZY MCDONALDS BURGER MUKBANG!!!!, and so forth. And you see his painfully superficial analysis of coming sports games, his attempts to mimic the cadences and hand gestures of ESPN talking heads -- "I find it so difficult how the Patriots seem to be in Superbowl contention every year, I'm not saying they're a bad team, but man, like, can't they just give somebody else a chance."

It's the voice of someone who has been told the great lie of the Internet era, which is of course an extension of the great lie of American optimism -- that you too can be a star. All you have to do is implore enough people to hit like and subscribe.

I should hazard right now that it's best not to prematurely project a narrative onto news events. But at the same time, it's hard not to see certain connections.

In the same way that Travis Bickles in Taxi Driver came to represent a specific kind of post-Vietnam malaise and the quixotic male response to this malaise, the Christopher Cleary case seems to be so specifically of an era. This is 2019 in America writ large.

Alone and adrift in a world of ephemera, unable to find personal romantic or financial success, but inundated in images of the same, one particular man, in the grand tradition of failed men, threatened to translate that failure into violence towards women.

I am not trying to defend this would-be Elliott Rodger, and I'm not trying to sympathize with him, but I am trying to illustrate that there's something horrifyingly logical about how the whole series of events manifested itself.
 
I'm reading various articles in various outlets covering the issue. Regardless of format, every page is accompanied by "Sponsored Stories," in which everything is "legendary," "insane," "genius," "stunning," "tragic." Every stock visual, every aggregated piece of bullshit, every mindlessly assembled listicle, every thinly veiled scam masquerading as a news story that occurred just minutes from where you live, every EPIC WIN and TOTAL CRINGE all repeating themselves immediately below, the immense Ouroboros serpent of our image industry.

The Weinstein Effect

A few days ago, I first heard the phrase “Weinstein Effect.” Also, a more troubling term, “national dialogue on gender and power,” which masks the fact that (a) this isn't much of a dialogue, which implies two sides having a mutually beneficial discussion, and (b) “gender and power” acts as a cover term for the fact that this is a discussion about rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment perpetrated by men in power... but this is the American approach, isn't it? Put a good old positive, Norman Vincent Peale spin on the fact that rapes, sexual assaults, and sexual harassment were perpetrated by men in power.

The Weinstein case is fairly cut and dried it seems, as do a number of others – men who, without question, abused their positions to take advantage of multiple victims and ensure their silence. Perhaps I'm the odd man out, but I can't say I was shocked. I just assumed massive numbers of film and music producers, fashion photographers, and other gatekeepers of nubile talent exploited that power dynamic. Take Conde Nast's recent firing of Terry Richardson. Everybody has known for years that he is a sexual nightmare, to the point that this reputation, combined with his omnipresent creepy smile and rapey-uncle glasses, has become a critical part of his persona. And yet it's only now that a major publisher is actually choosing to do something about it, given that the zeitgeist has made their normal policy of sitting on their asses a strategic impossibility.

But the Louis C.K. case interests me. This is a guy who committed predatory acts, and in a way very much in keeping with his comic persona, they were creepy and rather pathetic acts.

You have social commentators (as, for instance, in a recent GQ article) mining Louis C.K.'s humor revolving around his immense awkwardness and inappropriate behavior as a smokescreen for his guilt. That, by making jokes about jerking off too much and the “town child molester,” he was providing cover, making it easy to dismiss any future allegations. Or the recent Guardian article claiming that by laughing at Louis C.K.'s creepy-sex jokes, you are fully complicit with his abuses. Sure, the masturbation scenes in Louie are made all the more uncomfortable now, and the trailer for I Love You, Daddy makes my skin crawl – but this sort of ad hominem pseudo-criticism, vague sentiment masking itself as textual analysis, seems just as mindless and lazy as the kneejerk responses of the fanboys who couldn't believe that their heroes could do wrong.

There had of course been echoes, hints of creepiness from the past, short on specifics. And I categorized it in my head as “certainly plausible, ultimately unprovable,” which put Louis C.K. in the same class as Woody Allen or Michael Gira from Swans. Their work was filed under “great art made by potential awful people.”

But the admission of guilt pushes Louis C.K.'s work into another category, “great art made by confirmed awful people,” the Roman Polanski category. For Polanski, it has become the Thing You Know About Him (a characteristic that Bill Cosby is fast on his way to attaining as well), even if you couldn't name a single one of his films.

And yet our intuitive responses are short lived. Let's take Polanski, for example, who still had no trouble receiving an Oscar for best director for The Pianist in 2002. And there are countless others whose sexual crimes we continue to ignore. We forget about the infinite numbers of questionable encounters on the part of Jimmy Page, or countless other old rock stars. Their reputations are forever going to be protected by the nostalgia blanket, the romanticized dissolute rock & roll lifestyle of a time that was supposedly more innocent, even in its un-self-conscious decadence. We forget that Mike Tyson is a convicted rapist, and now he's the funny guy with the tattoo in the Hangover movies.

And sexual crimes actually seem to make more of an impact on the collective imagination than the more general ethical and ideological failures of public personae, the things that actually seem far more likely to have a direct impact on their work. We know Wagner as the anti-Semitic composer, Ezra Pound as the Nazi poet. The forgetting happens quickly. I would have told you a few years ago that Mel “fucking Jews!” Gibson's career was irredeemable, but now he's back in the limelight, his smile as dopey as ever.

Rather, we cast a harsh light for a few seconds, and are then distracted by something else. Consider how quickly it died down for a certain elected official noted for his yen for pussy-grabbing.

And even while that harsh light is present, there is minimal questioning of the power structures that make sexual crimes by men in the entertainment industry possible. Projects are dropped, contracts are thrown out, and that's it, all hands washed. Which to me reflects the way that media agencies perceive the spate of sexual assault allegation less as a series of actual, real crimes committed within a social system that facilitates them, than as a series of PR liabilities.

And the public response, likewise, is more a sense of satisfaction that the market is behaving appropriately, alternating with a sense of titillation at who will show up next in the scandal sheets. And make sure you're the first of your friends to share an article about it.

This is perhaps the real Weinstein Effect, a tendency towards public shaming in lieu of real action.

Which is a characteristic I've known myself to be guilty of as well, to have cast my own blind spots, to lack empathy.

And I know how actually writing about the process ultimately vilifies me in the eyes of many. To certain feminist critics, everything I say will come off as mansplaining about something about which I can say nothing meaningful. To others, what I say will seem like arrogant, bloodless over-analysis. And to others, whose opinions I will cheerfully write off, will deem any attempt at rectification to be a sign of a feminized society.

And as every reaction fades, only the trauma will remain.

Textbook Knowledge

Not long ago, I read Andrew Gordon's “A History of Modern Japan,” considered one of the definitive texts on how Japan, from the Meiji Revolution to the present day, has transformed from hermit kingdom to economic power. And I can safely recommend it for anyone who's looking for a solid source of meat-and-potatoes history about that particularly much-misunderstood nation.

But what I thought about the most in the days following was not so much what I had read, but how long it had been since I'd read a book that was even remotely similar – a book full of straightforward, narrative history. Here is how things happened, how event X paved the way for event Y, without any kind of explicit theoretical or ideological framework, without much of an argument, per se.

I suppose this is what you would call “textbook” or “encyclopedia” knowledge. Now, having read my Marx and my Gramsci, I know full well that this kind of knowledge is by no means “neutral.” There is an ideology in what is and is not told, how it is narrated, no matter how light Gordon attempted to make his fingerprint. Perhaps some more hard-core postmodernists or phenomenological thinkers would say that such a history says nothing about the events in question, and only says something about the author and his or her prejudices, contexts, and perceptive faculties, but I'm not quite that isolated.

Yet it is undoubtedly that kind of skepticism that prevents me from reading books full of just-the-facts. To me, it seems infinitely more honest when authors lay down their cards and cop to their stance, their context, whether or not I agree with their approach, before they get to the subjects of their argument (and yes, I know the hardline perspective would deny the “subjectness” of the supposed subjects, but let's all be William James about this and say that there is indeed a subject there, until a decent argument is made to the contrary).

This isn't to say that I avoid this kind of writing entirely, but I contain my experience of it to shorter form work, to scientific journals (when I'm feeling rigorous), Wikipedia articles (when I'm not, which is more than I care to admit), and those standard-issue publications that have best resisted the temptation to become clickbait.

Because a book seems to serve a different purpose for me – it is something more totemic, regardless of whether it is “fiction” or not, to the extent that distinction has merit (leave that topic for another day). To read a book is to dissolve myself.

And yet, up until my early teens, it was quite the opposite. On the contrary, I just wanted to sponge up knowledge, and it frustrated me when the text failed to act as a neutral medium, a sort of agar gel for ideas to grow in and express their true, absolute form. Which I suppose makes sense – children aren't exactly renowned for their sense of nuance, and that probably goes double for annoyingly precocious children.

There is a certain irony that I seek those sorts of fact-driven arguments in the world of the shorter form, considering the fractured media landscape which we inhabit. In which that framework has to such a great degree swallowed the facts themselves, whether the media outlets in question are mocking the very notion that a statistic in a major American newspaper could be true (a practice of both the sorts of entities that come charging in with their ideologies, banners waving, and those that conceal their ideologies under a veneer of “nonpartisanship”), or whether the media outlets in question are telling us how to feel about an article before we even read it (number 8 will make you CRINGE!!!).

However, these are stupidities that, in my reading life, I can safely and comfortably ignore, even if I feel the need to occasionally check the cesspool to perform a stool-sample analysis on the hive mind's feces. When I read something as simple as a research report on primate behavior, I'm a bit less frazzled. And when I shut off my computer, and look up at my bookshelf, and see the possibility for something more measured, I am again approaching contentedness.