The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything

by Matthew Ball

Liveright, 336 pp., $30.00

The first time I stepped inside a virtual world it was 2017 and I was surrounded by a group of college friends on my parents couch, with an Oculus Headset strapped to my face, watching a tall, blonde woman in white cotton panties strut in my direction and suck my virtual cock. It was so big. I was mesmerized. My friends all grabbed for the headset, one after the other, waiting to see for themselves what had each of us keeling over in laughter and hollering like school children. None of us wanted to give the headset to the next person. Each of us stole it right off the last one’s face. The friend who brought the headset gloated with a self-satisfied look that said, “I told you so.” I remember looking down at my firm six-pack as I was laid out on a white virtual couch, with a woman at my knees, and feeling genuine awe at the symmetry between the virtual world and the physical one. It didn’t matter that I was surrounded by six puerile dudes. I forgot them entirely. Some people lose their arms in battle and experience phantom limbs; I strapped a headset to my face and experienced phantom dick. All of us vowed to buy VR headsets for ourselves by the end of the night. I don’t think any of us did.

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The author poses for a selfie with some new acquaintances.

It was late at night, I was at one of the Taliban’s numerous military compounds in Afghanistan, and they had me surrounded. They were serving me chai tea alongside freshly made bread, while watching cricket on TV. Each soldier smiled in turn while extending out his phone to take a selfie with me. It was a good time to reflect upon the experiences over the last year that had brought me here.

I was accidentally present at the Taliban takeover of Kabul, in August 2021, as the last ever tourist to visit Afghanistan under the previous regime. I wrote about the experience online under the moniker “Lord Miles” and received great interest from readers all over the world. I’ve visited the country four times since. It’s a passion of mine to visit the most dangerous warzones in the world, but this nation is another beast entirely.

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On a Tuesday in mid-December, a group of young professionals in their twenties and thirties met in a unitarian church in Minneapolis on the eve of a blizzard. The group included two software engineers, three supply chain planners, a dietician, and a Papa John’s pizza deliveryman. The group was brought together by a pledge they’d made to give away 5–10% of their income. This signaled their commitment to effective altruism (EA), a research field and social movement whose proponents argue that people in high-income countries have a moral obligation to use their resources to reduce global “net suffering.”

In addition to the recurring sum of money many of them donated out of each paycheck, the group had raised an additional $1,400 that month for a “donor lottery.” That evening, the Effective Altruists of the Twin Cities were using a random number generator to decide the winner, who, after a debate on the merits of different causes, would decide which “effective charity” that money would go to. The leader of the group, Papa John’s employee Puggy Knutson, got in front of the room and pulled up a random number generator on Google Chrome.

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The History of the Roman Republic

by Theodor Mommsen, Translated and edited by Arthur C. Howland

Rogue Scholar Press, 430 pp., $19.00

We are often told that those who do not learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them. But to learn from the past one must first understand it. A misapprehension of history, or a narrow focus on irrelevancies, can poison one’s fate just as badly as can ignorance. Roman history, with which educated Americans are usually at least vaguely familiar, is commonly examined in order to gain insight into the workings of the United States. America and Rome’s shared republican governments and growth from small states to powerful hegemons do offer obvious historical parallels. But the parallels can easily become misleading if one fails to dig into the details.

After the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire to the barbarians in the fifth century AD, knowledge of the Empire’s history was shattered. For a thousand years, fragments of memory were preserved in the eastern Mediterranean, where civilization had survived, and in scattered western monasteries. With the spread of European literacy in the 16th century and the resulting Republic of Letters in the 17th and 18th centuries, Roman history was slowly rediscovered. Old sources were uncovered and translated. New compilations and analyses of Roman history, such as Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, were published. It was in this milieu that German classicist, archaeologist, and historian Theodor Mommsen, winner of the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature, thrived.

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Medea

an opera by Luigi Cherubini, with a libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman, at the Metropolitan Opera

New York City, September 27—October 28, 2022

Peter Grimes

an opera by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by Montagu Slater, at the Metropolitan Opera

New York City, October 16–November 12, 2022

La Traviata

an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, at the Metropolitan Opera

New York City, October 25, 2022–March 18, 2023

Cherubini’s Medea (1797) is the sensation of the fall season at the Metropolitan Opera. Minutes before the October 28, 2022 performance, as my companion and I inquired about different seats at the box office, we discovered that the entire venue was only two tickets short of selling out. This never happens! But a staging of Medea is also rare. It is a seldom performed work, not only due to Cherubini’s own relative obscurity but also due to an odd confluence of technical difficulty and a clouded translation history. Now it is at the Met for the first time, featuring the astounding Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role. Apparently, the Met conducted a long search before finding someone considered suitable.

The original libretto is in French as Médée, but the Met’s performance is in the Italian adaptation. There does not seem to be much public information about this choice, but since it fits into a larger trend over the last century to stage it in Italian, there may be nuanced musical reasons not immediately perceptible to a non-performer.

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The following is an excerpt of the chapter "Who's Afraid of Holocaust Denial?" from Norman Finkelstein's book I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom (Sublation Press, 2023).

Inspired as I still am by the radical convictions of my youth, I am resolutely conventional in my opinion of what should and shouldn’t happen in the classroom. The 1915 inaugural statement of principles by the staid American Association of University Professors (A.A.U.P.) strikes the right chords:1

The university teacher, in giving instruction upon controversial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage, should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.. . .The teacher ought also to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own. It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

A lectern is not a soapbox, a classroom is not a political rally, a professor should not serve as a conveyer belt for a party line. His responsibility is to stimulate, not to dictate. Plato said, “The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.” It is not the worst maxim, although I prefer a slightly amended, less authoritarian version:The object of education is to teach us to love to think2—while minds fully realized will probably agree on which objects of contemplation possess beauty.

It is fashionable nowadays on the political left to ridicule the notion of “balance” in the classroom. Philosopher Akeel Bilgrami asserts that, although in the privacy of his study a professor must scrutinize all the evidence on all sides of a question, in the classroom he is only obliged to present the results of his prior deliberation. Otherwise, in the name of balance, one is placed in the “nonsensical” position of allowing “equal presentation in the classroom of two contradictory views.”

No educator with any minimal rationality would do that on the elementary grounds that if there are two contradictory views, only one can be right. Of course if she cannot make up her mind on the evidence as to which one is right, she might present the case for both views evenhandedly. But presumably such undecidedness is an occasional phenomenon. If so, balance cannot be put down as a requirement for pedagogy in the classroom.. . .In our own pursuits toward the truth, we may be as confident in the truth of the deliverances of our investigations as is merited by the evidence in our possession, and we need feel no unnecessary urge to display balance in the classroom if we have shown balance and scruple in our survey of the evidence on which our convictions are based, the only place where balance is relevant in the first place. (emphases in original)3

I will restrict my comments here to the liberal arts4 and broad generalizations.5 The first point to note is the sniff of disapproval by the political left of balance—that is, to “set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators”—in the classroom. Just a few decades ago, the left was itself demanding balance in academic life. It was adduced as proof positive of political bias that Stanford University was the only elite university in the U.S. to tenure a Marxist economist (Paul Baran). Once the political weight on American campuses shifted leftwards, the plea for classroom balance came to be disparaged by its former leftwing proponents and seized upon by its former rightwing opponents.6 The politics of balance aside, what are the pedagogical merits of this demand? “There are,” Bertrand Russell observed, “always good arguments on both sides of any real issue.”7 If, on most contentious topics, arguments can be made on both sides, then deciding which side made the better case is nearly always a matter of weighing and balancing, of preponderances, not absolutes. A consensus might currently exist on the evil of violent genocide and the inhumanity of chattel slavery, but no such consensus exists on the evil of capitalism, which arguably causes millions to perish each year from hunger and preventable diseases. Although the issue of torture once appeared closed, it has in recent times been reopened. So long as a hard consensus doesn’t obtain on a great issue of the day, and so long as the received wisdom is subject to a compelling, vital counter-argument, a professor should feel obliged to make the best case for all sides, however he personally has, in the privacy of his study, resolved those “contradictory views,” so as to enable students to do the mental heavy lifting—the weighing and balancing—for themselves. “No man can pass as educated who had heard only one side on questions as to which the public is divided,” Russell wisely commented. “One of the most important things to teach in the educational establishment of a democracy is the power of weighing arguments, and the open mind which is prepared in advance to accept whichever side appears the more reasonable.”8 Discovery of the better argument on a disputed point, Russell’s godfather, John Stuart Mill, memorably said, “has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners” (On Liberty). A professor must play both combatants in the classroom—the advocate and the devil’s advocate—while the student spectators actively engage, wrestle with the contending affirmations.9 Consider the Israel-Palestine conflict. A broad academic consensus has crystallized (at any rate, in Middle East Studies pro- grams) that the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was morally indefensible. It’s one thing to hold this opinion (it happens that I join in it). It’s another thing to pretend that no arguments can be made on the Zionist side. In fact, rightwing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky did make a credible moral case,10 and one of my favorite classes when I taught the conflict was to challenge students to answer Jabotinsky after I emotively presented his brief. In general, the perfect teaching moment was one in which my presentation of contending opinions on a given topic was so finely balanced that students left class in a quandary as to where I stood. It often happened that students would drop by my office curious to find out. My stock reply was: “It’s not so important what I think. What’s important is what you think.” It would even happen that I persuaded a student that Israel was in the right and the Palestinians in the wrong. (I confess to alloyed feelings on those occasions.) Insofar as few are capable of playing a full-fledged devil’s advocate, i.e., making the very best case against their own beliefs, it is surely preferable that a student be exposed to those who are willingfrom convictionto argue, as it were, the devil’s case. When the leftist tilt in the academy is decried, “campus radicals” smugly rejoin that “the political affiliation or religious belief of faculty simply ought not to matter.”11 But they do matter. Even when a professor recognizes and meets his formal obligation to effect (or affect) balance in the classroom, still he will rarely be as persuasive as a colleague whose heart is in sync with his mind—who professes the counter-argument not just from professional obligation but with the full force of his being. A disciple of Milton Friedman will almost always make a better argument for the free market than a disciple of Marx, while a devout Catholic will almost always make a better argument against abortion than a radical feminist. It might also be contended that a distinction should be made out between moral controversies, where balance is warranted, and the presentation of factual evidence, where it’s not. But if a fact is clearly not in dispute—Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809—it’s not properly the subject matter, but rather the raw material, of teaching in higher education.12 If a fact is widely contested, even if not in scholarly venues but only in popular publications—for example, The Palestinians weren’t expelled in 1948; they left of their own volition—it’s instructive to make a balanced presentation in the classroom so as to demonstrate the feeble evidentiary basis of the popular belief. If one aspires to dislodging falsehood and replacing it with truth, it requires openly confronting and persuasively responding to the falsehood. If the specifics of the falsehood are not engaged—What about the Arab radio broadcasts exhorting Palestinians to flee?—it will retain its hold. Not everyone will be convinced by a fair-minded presentation; but not everyone will be close-minded either.13 Going a distance beyond Bilgrami, social historian Joan Scott asserts that imbalance in the classroom is not only inevitable but also a positive good: “taking positions . . . is part of the scholar’s job, part of what makes her a compelling and inspiring teacher”; “those positions are not neutrally arrived at by, say, balancing all sides until an objective view emerges; rather they are the result of some kind of deeply held political or ethical commitment on the part of the professor.”14 Even if, for argument’s sake, it is granted that “taking positions” is a prerequisite to being a “compelling and inspiring teacher,” still, it cannot be right that in the classroom a teacher should be inculcating her ideology-based “positions,” supplemented by a selective culling of facts that support them. Shouldn’t she, instead, be “balancing all sides,” and allowing students on their own to do the weighing, from which an “objective view emerges” unique to each of them? Otherwise, it’s hard to make out the difference between a “compelling and inspiring teacher” and a party hack, between pedagogy and indoctrination.15

***

The limiting case in the “balance” debate is Holocaust denial. It would make mockery of truth and academic freedom (it is said) if a university granted deniers a platform. But, to begin with, it’s not obvious what exactly is being denied. Does the Nazi holocaust denote the extermination of European Jewry or all categories of people systematically put to and slated for death? If only Jews, then why? If the distinction is quantitative—fully 5-6 million Jews perished—why then does the Nazi holocaust enjoy a privileged status? As many as 25 million Russians and 20 million Chinese were killed during World War II, yet no red flags preempt free-wheeling debate on these lethal destructions. Further, if the singularity of the Nazi holocaust and the point at issue resides in the number killed, it’s hard to figure why a taboo would be placed on Holocaust denial. Isn’t the sensible thing simply to adduce the technical evidence supporting the widely accepted 5-6 million figure? But maybe it’s the qualitative criterion of how that distinguishes the Nazi extermination: that is, the industrial-style/factory-like/assembly-line process culminating in the gas chambers and crematoria. However, only half of those Jews who died were killed in death camps.16 Whereas Raul Hilberg focused on the bureaucratic, complex, “destruction process” in his monumental study, he nonetheless brackets the Nazi holocaust with the Rwandan genocide (“History had repeated itself”), even as the latter was carried out utilizing the most primitive of weaponry and organization.17 Still, if the point of contention is the tech- nique—say, the gas chambers—why not, then, just lay out the evidence and let it speak for itself? If the intended effect of the taboo on Holocaust denial is to suppress it, the actual effect is to arouse suspicion: Why are deniers being muzzled if the evidence incontrovertibly belies their claims? Indeed, the taboo can boomerang. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines Holocaust denial as, inter alia, “attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups.”18 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pinned ultimate culpability for the Nazi holocaust on the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem.19 Should he then be barred from speaking in a college classroom on the Nazi holocaust?

When teaching On Liberty, I test Mill’s strictures against a triptych of hypothetical scenarios, one of which is:

A professor in our history department wants to devote one class of his introductory course on Modern Europe to the proposition that the Nazi holocaust never happened. It is a required lecture course, in which the professor doesn’t field student questions. Should he be permitted to teach this class?20

The initial objections raised by my students are always the same. Doesn’t the professor’s silencing of the class contradict Mill? But, I reply, don’t you listen to radio programs, watch television shows, and read books with which you vehemently disagree, even as you cannot physically dialogue with them? More often than not, the author of an offending text is no longer among the living. Does a rational person then stop his ears, switch stations, and shred the book, or does he attend to the unwelcome words, regardless of whether he gets in the last or even a first word? Still, the professor’s one-sided presentation (it is said) contradicts Mill. But, I rejoin, aren’t we bombarded with texts and images—not least in college course offerings—that validate the actuality of the Nazi holocaust? It can hardly be deemed a breach of balance if a single professor devotes a single class of a single course to disputing the incessantly articulated consensus wisdom. Once having disposed of these predictable demurrals, the real work begins.

What’s the point of such a class if I know for certain that the Nazi holocaust happened? But you can’t be certain of your belief until and unless you’ve heard out and answered any and all objections to it. Even a child, if his belief is challenged, knows enough of epistemology to retort: Prove me wrong! If you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer.

Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth. . .; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.21

Even if you can marshal a mountain of supporting evidence, still, you can’t prefer your belief to that of Holocaust deniers if you refuse even to give them a hearing. The maximum you can rationally claim is agnosticism; otherwise, your belief is based on personal prejudice, not truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.22

What’s more, even if you don’t harbor doubts, that can’t entitle you to decide for others except if you’re omniscient.23 Once having acknowledged your human fallibility, you must also concede the possibility that you’re mistaken, in which case your act of suppression could deny others the possibility of exchanging error for truth.

Those who desire to suppress [an opinion], of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. . . . All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.24

Even granting the facticity of the Nazi holocaust, it still repays to give deniers a platform. Just as the weight and depth of the credo all men are created equal(the other example I invoke to bring home Mill’s point) “is not always clear,”25 neither is the profundity of the Nazi holocaust. If layers of meaning lie buried in it (which I believe), then they can only be plumbed if the Nazi holocaust is “fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed.” It is remarkable how quick the reflex to suppress Holocaust denial is, even as conjuring taboos will inevitably reduce this colossal human tragedy to a sterile mantra, an object of blind worship. While red lines cordoning off “The Holocaust” from the corrective of unfettered inquiry proliferate, one of the core postulates of “Holocaust education”—its “uniqueness”—appears to be in need of correction as it can’t withstand rational scrutiny. Indeed, the current status of The Holocaust is replete with paradoxes:on the one hand, a unique sanction is imposed on Holocaust denial—not even denial of climate change, which threatens the planet’s very survival, is so sanctioned—while, on the other hand, demonstrating the “uniqueness” tenet of Holocaust education has proven elusive and, what’s more, denying its uniqueness, or even juxtaposing it with other historical crimes—except to show that it can’t be compared—is construed as a form of Holocaust denial!26 The more the taboos multiply, the more the Nazi holocaust is unmoored from time and space and is reduced to an object of idolatry.

However true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.Not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself. The words which convey it, cease to suggest ideas, or suggest only a small portion of those they were originally employed to communicate. Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote; or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost.27

The taboos enveloping the Nazi holocaust haven’t only caused it to calcify into a lifeless ritual. What’s worse, they’ve spawned a raft of spurious testimonial literature and preposterous pseudo-scholarship, the paradoxical outcome of which is to provide fodder for the deniers’ mills.28 If a self-proclaimed “Holocaust survivor” enjoys immunity from cross-examination—as does every Tom, Dick and Moishe pawning himself off as a survivor—the human propensity is toward exaggeration, which, if left unchecked, will harden into a lie.29

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.30

It’s also possible to get the big picture right yet some of the constituting facts wrong. If one is committed to the purity of truth, not just in its wholeness but also in its parts, then a Holocaust denier performs the useful function of ferreting out “local” errors, precisely because he is a devil’s advocate—that is, fanatically committed to “unmasking” the “hoax of the 20th century.” He consequently invests the whole of his being in scrutinizing every piece of evidence, not taking the minutest point for granted, passing a fine tooth comb through each detail, until, in his monomaniacal zeal to expose an error, he inevitably stumbles upon one.

Even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.31

“If these people want to speak, let them,” Hilberg counseled. “It only leads those of us who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And that’s useful.”32 If he was laid back when it came to Holocaust deniers, that’s because Hilberg was confident in his conclusions based on his mastery of the source material. The impulse to suppress springs not only from disgust at what Holocaust deniers outrageously proclaim, but also, and more often, from dread of one’s inability to credibly answer them.33 “Yes, there was a Holocaust,” Hilberg once observed, “which is, by the way, more easily said than demonstrated.”34 If you’ve done your homework, then fielding obnoxious skeptics is at worst a form of intellectual amusement, the mental equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

The upshot is, by placing under a microscope and inspecting from every angle each scrap of evidence, the Holocaust denier is doing for you what you (if you are genuinely committed to truth) would have to do for yourself; the difference being, the denier’s is the more probing examination, as it’s much harder to argue against yourself once you’ve settled into or developed a vested interest in your belief. Thus, far from suppressing Holocaust deniers, one should be grateful to them for—however unwittingly—facilitating the quest for truth.

The above text is an excerpt from Norman Finkelstein's new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, out now from Sublation Press.

Yoga

by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., $20.00

The Kingdom: A Novel

by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert

Picador, 400 pp., $16.94

Lives Other Than My Own: A Memoir

by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Linda Coverdale

Picador, 256 pp., $19.00

My Life as a Russian Novel: A Memoir

by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Linda Coverdale

Metropolitan, 288 pp., $14.17

The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception

by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Linda Coverdale

Picador, 208 pp., $12.29

I first heard of Emmanuel Carrère last summer, around the time of the release of his most recent book, Yoga (2022). I read a profile on him in which I learned he got a restraining order from his ex-wife to never write about her again. I got recommended him by Irish novelist Rob Doyle who, in his book Autobibliography (2021), explains that Carrère (b. 1957), after writing for almost two decades, in 2000, began publishing “a sequence of nonfiction novels, in which Carrère puts himself front and centre, incorporating his struggle to write each book as a narrative element within it . . . a gripping new mode of narration whereby the author declines to pretend he is an invisible witness and reveals the blood on his hands.”

***

Last January, I published a novel, Fuccboi, in which I took aspects of my life to investigate an archetype: “the fuccboi.” Whereas my book is a novel and Carrère’s are memoirs, there are clear lines connecting his work and my own. In each of Carrère’s post-2000 books, he takes on a subject of investigation, but in this way where, by splicing them in with memoiristic bits, he’s investigating himself. My narrator, who shares my name, in this novel with an image of my face on the cover, tells intimate, unflattering details about himself. We both write confessionally and vulnerably about intimacy and relationships.

Anytime one writes in this way, inviting the reader to conflate the narrator with the author, there are risks.

***

I finished Yoga around Thanksgiving of last year. Come December, I found myself alone and isolated, with the one-year anniversary of my novel’s publication fast approaching. Feeling pressure to send my second, in which I’d inevitably have to make sense of the various shitstorms caused by writing the first.

I set out to read Carrère’s books through, from the The Adversary (2000) through Yoga (2022), more or less in order, to see what damage he incurred in his life, writing how he wrote. Whether he even saw continuing to write as a worthwhile endeavor, having had to face the consequences of what he’d written. And if so, how.

The Adversary (2000)

In The Adversary, Carrère takes on as his subject Jean-Claude Romand, who, on January 9, 1993, murdered his wife, kids, dog, and parents before burning his house down with himself inside it. Only, he doesn’t die. He gets rescued. He goes on trial. Carrère reads about his case, writes Romand a letter, and asks if he can write a book about him. To understand why he did it.

Romand had spent all of his adult life pretending to be a doctor for the WHO, when in fact he’d been living off of funds from various family members and acquaintances, claiming he was “investing their money.” He keeps up this farce for as long as he can. Once it all comes crashing down, he panics and murders everyone.

***

Of all of Carrère’s books that I read, this one felt the most straightforward, measured, clinical. It’s the shortest. The radical aspect of the book is the way that Carrère empathizes with, or in any case genuinely tries to make sense of, a totally deplorable human. Carrère stays fairly restrained in the degree to which he sees himself in his subject. He gives us a funny anecdote about himself at age 14, feeling outcast from his friends, right around the age his friends started smoking, where he’d do this little scheme: He’d take one of his mom’s cigs out of the pack, put it in his pocket, show up to school, go up to the cool kids and go, “What the hell? Why is there a cig in my pocket?” Thinking this would make him “more interesting.” Introducing them into this little mystery. They’d just go, “‘Yeah, that’s weird,’” and ignore him. Disappointed, he’d smoke the cig. A Romand-like white lie. Only Romand couldn’t stop lying.

***

The most unsettling part, for me, was what Romand does, how he copes, in the aftermath of what he’s done. How we each cope after committing a violation against someone.

During a long and highly publicized trial, this woman Marie-France testifies. Before the murders, she had been having an affair with the principal of Romand’s child’s school, causing all the parents to turn on her and oust the principal. Romand had led a counter-movement to have the principal reinstated, to not shame these two for what they did in their private lives. This was uncharacteristic of him, drawing attention to himself, and had been part of what led to him being outed; one of the other parents had called the WHO, discovered he was not on any directories, and told Romand’s wife. At the trial, Marie-France testifies in support of him. It turns out she’s been seeing him, they’ve been writing letters, engaging in a romantic relationship. Once he’s imprisoned, they carry on together.

This rubs one reporter, Martine, as heinous. She finds Marie-France’s “sweetness-and-light act not only laughable but irresponsible, and frankly criminal . . . the only positive thing that could happen would be for him to truly realize what he had done and, instead of sniveling, to truly sink into the severe depression he’d spent his whole life scrambling to avoid.”

She doesn’t spare Carrère either: “He must be just thrilled that you’re writing a book on him! That’s what he’s dreamed about his whole life. So it was a good thing that he killed his parents—all his wishes have come true. People talk about him, he’s on TV, someone’s writing his biography . . . . Bravo!”

It’s as if, no matter how heinous a thing we’ve committed against another, there’s no possibility for actual repentance, actual reckoning, so long as we surround ourselves with affirming others. So long as we feel we are the subject of a story.

My Life as a Russian Novel (2007)

The one Carrère will later say “ruined his life.” Disappointingly—given the implications it has for me, as someone trying to write more restrained, less exhibitionistically—his best. The one, I feel, given how much it’s stuck with me, will most challenge me to change my life. Also: the one that made me feel most nauseous, disoriented, and shaken to my core, reading it.

Carrère’s subject of investigation, on the surface, is András Tomas, a Hungarian former World War II prisoner living in a rural Russian town, Kotelnich, who, after 30 years, finally gets released from the psychiatric ward he’s been held in. The book starts with Carrère headed out there with a film crew to shoot a movie about him. We soon learn that this investigation is a foil for a deeper one, tied to a family secret: Carrère’s Russian maternal grandfather, who expressed Axis sympathies during World War II, was one day abducted by the resistance, disappeared, and never heard from or seen again. Carrère goes to Russia to cover the town this Hungarian prisoner was found in, to make a movie on him; but really, he’s try- ing to figure out, and write about—gain closure on—what happened to his grandfather.

Here we start asking the question of this essay in earnest: What is okay, in writing, to share? Which stories are only our own? Is there, as the epigraph of Yoga seems to imply, redemption to be found in radical literary confession:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

—The Apocryphal Gospel of Saint Thomas

Carrère’s mom requests expressly that, “[w]hatever you do, leave my father out of it . . . it’s not your story to tell.” To which he responds, “[y]ou’re mistaken . . . . It’s my story, too. It has haunted your life, which means it has haunted mine and it will haunt and destroy my children. . . that’s what happens with secrets—they poison generations.”

This aspect, sharing genealogical details to understand how you got where you are, is one thing. What about sharing details about intimacy?

***

Throughout Carrère’s time going back and forth between Russia and France, he’s engaged in a toxic and intoxicating relationship with a young woman, Sophie. He’s fresh out of a divorce with his first wife, with whom he has two kids. He goes on to tell us, in detail, about his and Sophie’s sexual dynamic. How they make love, how they do phone sex. The book opens with Carrère relaying a threesome sex dream he has with Sophie and another woman. When he tells Sophie about it, he withholds the threesome part, knowing “how jealous she is,” despite only having known her “less than two weeks.” They’re both jealous and distrusting of each other. Their sex life is erotic in that way toxic relationships are. He’s possessive and controlling, looks down on her slightly, she’s submissive to him erotically, enjoys the sexual power she wields over him, but then, in other moments, to retain her autonomy, flouts him like a rebellious daughter. Both cheat on each other.

One day, he gets an offer to write a story for Le Monde, the big French newspaper. After initially declining, he remembers that Sophie had once told him to write an erotic story for her. In a libidinal, fateful decision, he one-take rips a long erotic story, second-person, to her—essentially an 8,000-word sext. He comes up with this idea to plan a trip for her two months in advance, have the story come out on the day of the trip, and writes it in a way that references this: when and how to touch herself, at which train stop, commenting on how all of France is reading it simultaneously, thinking this will heighten the excitement of it. It’s a radical act of literary exhibitionism he, fully in the throes of their mutual sexual spell, hopes will be taken as a grand love gesture. Carrère includes the story, in its entirety, as a chapter in the book.

It couldn’t go more wrong.

Day of, he doesn’t hear from her, he starts panicking, is convinced she’s with another man, and—without spoiling too much—things come crashing down in a way that involves an abortion for a pregnancy she initially says is his but, after doing the math and realizing the only time he could have slept with her in the right time frame was when he was suffering from “a bout of herpes that forced [them] to make love with condoms,” Carrére realizes it can’t be his.

The couple’s descent, after the publication of the story, as one might expect, is epic and terrible.

The thing is, she’d told him about seeing another man (though not the man she ended up getting pregnant from) months before. He’d been too preoccupied with his literary scheme, his artistic tasks, to even register it.

During one of the many episodes when he’s calling her over and over, trying to get a hold of her, and he finally does, he tells her he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone, that this is serious, she can’t ignore him like this. To which she asks “[w]hat’s serious? . . . That I didn’t do what you wanted, like some character in a novel?”

Carrère tells us all this, and doesn’t spare himself one bit. When he’s mad about his story plan going awry, he says he becomes “like a child throwing a tantrum because someone has broken his toy.” He admits that he falls blindly in love, that once he thinks he’s got a woman in his grasp, he presumes her unending fidelity like a little boy does his mom. And, in so doing, stops seeing her as an autonomous person.

***

Carrère is pretty clear about the effects of this type of libidinal, explicitly exhibitionist literary oversharing: It ruins his life. “If you write enough horrible things,” he quotes from the movie Bizarre, Bizarre, “horrible things start to happen.” Later, in Yoga, reflecting back on this book, he says “he overstepped a boundary” and compares the book to an act of torturing someone. “Never tempt the devil,” his mom says.

On the question of genealogical oversharing, Carrère is less clear. At the end of the book, his nephew commits suicide. He attributes this to the family secret, the “shadow of his grandfather” looming over them, and states that “the shadow won.” More, on both fronts, the intimate and the genealogical, Carrère chose to share both of these stories. Whether he regrets it later or not, there was a faith in something, at the time, driving him to do so. Of all the books of his I read, I was most rapt and locked in on this one, felt I gained the most self-insight. Not just for the exhibitionistic sexual parts, which are always fun to read, but because of how unsparing he is towards himself.

Lives Other Than My Own (2011)

Where one turns after writing something so vulnerable, so soul-baring, is, naturally, outward. Lives Other Than My Own, which I read before My Life as a Russian Novel (and which Carrère actually began writing before My Life as a Russian Novel, though he was only able to finish it after that book was published) opens with Carrère, his wife Helene, and their children in Sri Lanka for Christmas, 2004, when the now-infamous Indian Ocean tsunami hits. Their friend’s four-year-old and another child are killed. It seems like the book will be about the aftermath of this, before, in typical Carrère fashion, taking a turn (possibly when he returned to the book, after finishing the previous one). It jumps ahead to his sister-in-law, Juliette, a judge, not long after the Sri Lanka trip, dying of cancer. Carrère starts spending time with Etienne, another judge and career-long coworker of Juliette’s, telling us their story, the types of cases they faced, their unique working partnership, their styles as judges.

Reading this over this past Christmas, having finished Yoga and The Adversary but before I’d read My Life as a Russian Novel, posted alone in my freezing apartment, during an ice storm, fully nocturnal, trying to reckon with everything I’d written, wondering if I’d ever write again, I found myself thrown by the turn this book took. I couldn’t understand why we were hearing so much about not only Juliette but this man Etienne. Perhaps looking for affirmation that Carrère was a literary brother in arms, baring his soul for the world to see—that he, like the protagonist “Sheila” says in Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? (2012), was one of those who are “fated to go through life with [his] clothes off . . . destined to expose every part of [himself] . . . so the rest can be exempted by fate”—I started getting impatient that we weren’t hearing more about him. As a reader, I felt disappointed by this book’s lack of narcissism.

Upon finishing My Life as a Russian Novel, it made more sense. Why he was so intent on turning his authorial eye onto a Life Other Than His Own.

***

Near the end, we return to the question of Yoga’s epigraph. Whether bringing forth what’s within you will save you.

After Juliette dies, one of her daughters feels guilty she didn’t kiss her mama goodbye. On the night she died, she’d been scared to see her in her chemo’d state. Her father, Patrice, “assured her calmly that . . . the important thing was that she was there, and her mama had seen her.” Carrère continues, “I thought it was a good thing that she was able to voice her self-reproach: once expressed, that guilt was less likely to poison her life later on without her even recognizing why.” Maintaining his “psychoanalytic faith in the healthy powers of speech (as opposed to the ravages of silence),” Carrère “commend[s] Patrice . . . for letting his entire attitude show his girls that things should be said.”

A little girl articulating her grief to her father is of course not the same as a reckless act of literary exhibitionism. But they’re connected. Both have to do with poisonous qualities of repression, the healing qualities of letting speech flow forth.

***

Carrère moves more cautiously with how he shares this manuscript. “This time, I resolved to let those my book concerned read it before publication. . . . Submitting My Life as a Russian Novel . . . for the approval of my mother and Sophie, my ex, would have been like heaving it into a bonfire, a luxury I could not afford. . . . I don’t regret that, it saved my life, but I wouldn’t do it again.” In Yoga, he’ll tell us he crossed a boundary, committed an outright wrong. That was ten years after its publication, for a profile he did in 2017. It’s interesting that here, around when he wrote it, he feels it saved his life.

His editor, Paul, isn’t happy about his plan to check with everyone, worrying that “once everyone is done changing things his book will be ruined.” But it works. He gets their approval. His book doesn’t get ruined.

Something magical happens when Carrère checks with Patrice, Juliette’s husband. Patrice starts “quibbling, correcting, clarifying nuances” about Juliette’s political stance, “and I felt to my amazement that I was hearing him pursue, through my book, the trusting and passionate discussion he and Juliette had carried on throughout their thirteen years together.” As if the book itself, if for a brief moment, brought her back to life.

The Kingdom (2017)

Come The Kingdom, Carrère turns his investigative eye even further back. To the Bible.

Having ruined more and more of his relationships with each successive book—he tells us in Yoga that even Lives Other Than My Own remains a failure in his mind, despite his having gotten permission from those he told “intimate details about,” because “it gave [him] the illusion, shared by many readers, that [he] was a good man”—Carrére is now just going through the Acts, looking at the lives of the apostles who, in the 30 years after Jesus, carried out his word. Trying to make sense of his life through these men who gave their lives to an idea. Finding ways to heal.

Luke, he tells us, was a doctor. At one point, Paul gets sick. He mentions this in his letters, thanking the Galatians for not showing disdain or disgust at his ravaged body. Complaining of this “thorn in the flesh” he suffers from:

Thousands of pages have been written on this “thorn in the flesh.” During Paul’s fits the mysterious sickness made his body so repulsive and caused him such suffering that he prayed to God to cure him. What could it be? Paul’s description makes you think of a skin disease, one of those conditions that make you scratch until you bleed—eczema, psoriasis—but also of what Dostoevsky says about his attacks of epilepsy, or Virginia Woolf about her dives into depression. I think of that simple, poignant entry in her diary: ‘Today, the horror returned.’ We’ll never know what illness Paul had, but reading him it’s clear that it was horribly painful, even shameful. Something that always came back, even after long periods of remission when he could believe he was cured. Something that tied him in knots, body and soul.

In the section I’ve just finished slowly rereading over, “Paul,” Carrère goes through the aspects of Paul’s teachings that distinguish him from those who came before. “Prayer,” for example, meant something new to Paul. Unlike Greek or Roman prayer, which was a specific invocation to a specific god, for a specific purpose—to the god of wheat rust, when your wheat got damaged, say—or a “simple recitation . . . an exchange in which the heart could unburden itself . . . to a conversation partner or confidante” as it was in Judaism at the time, Paul demanded more. “He demanded incessant prayer.”

In the 19th century Russian memoir The Way of the Pilgrim which Carrère cites, a poor muzhik one day reads that command spoken by Paul—to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17)—is “thunderstruck,” and immediately embarks on a long journey, asking everyone he meets what this means. As Paul explains it, “He could do it all the time, anywhere, in a crowd of people. . . . While walking, while sorting seeds.” He exhorts his followers to ‘pray like you breathe’: “‘Do you stop breathing when you work? When you talk? When you sleep? No. So why not pray like you breathe? . . . Even your sleep can become prayer.’”

This idea has stuck with me. This idea, to me, means: Prayer is reading. It’s writing. It’s reading and writing without stopping. It’s going to the bodega and back, pausing to piss and shit, sure. But even then. Staying in the space of the work, having faith in the work. It’s what I’ve done to try to write this essay; it’s what I feel I must continue to do if I’m to continue writing.

***

Carrère explains how Paul’s message differs from Homer’s.

Odysseus gets washed up on the nymph Calypso’s island. She’s forever young, they make nonstop love, and she promises him eternal life—“he’ll never get sick, never die”—and “life is a walled garden.” He forgets his bigger task: that he must return home to his wife. Calypso exhorts him to stay. It’s tempting, he says, but he’s gotta leave. He leaves.

This, Carrère says, is the paragon of ancient wisdom: renouncing the illusory higher realm for the earthly. “The life of a man is better than that of a god, for the simple reason that it’s real. Authentic suffering is better than deceptive bliss.”

But there are those born ill, who cannot commit to this heroic life in the first place, who aren’t “brave like Achilles” or “able to seduce women and win over men” to get out of any predicament like Odysseus. Who don’t have a wife to return to, who don’t belong to the “happy family of men who like life on earth,” “who belong to the other family, the family of worriers, the melancholic, who believe that real life is taking place elsewhere.” It’s to these men that Paul offers something different. He offers a different type of eternal life, via a path where “it’s better to be small than big, poor than rich, sick than healthy.” Deliverance through a different type of tearing yourself away from life. It’s a treacherous path, and “whether he’s dedicating his entire life to something that simply does not exist, and is turning his back on what really does exist: the warmth of human bodies, the bittersweet taste of life, the marvelous imperfection of the real,” remains unknown until he has embarked on it.

This idea, that certain people are born with illnesses they can’t, no matter what they do, shake, stems back to Lives Other Than My Own, when Carrére is trying to make sense of his then–sister-in-law Juliette’s cancer: “I don’t believe this is the explanation for cancer,” Carrére writes, but he does “believe that certain people have been damaged at their core almost from the beginning and cannot, despite their courage and best efforts, really live.” Carrère is stunned by people who claim we are free and that happiness is a moral choice. For these people, “sadness is in bad taste, depression is a sign of laziness, melancholy is a sin. Yes it’s a sin, even a mortal sin, but some people are born sinners, born damned, and all their courage and best efforts will not set them free.” It’s a type of radical empathy that has to do with, as in the case of the Galatians, not turning away with disgust from the cosmically scarred, the clinically depressed, those who, despite their best efforts, are unable to dig themselves out of the holes they find themselves in.

Yoga (2022)

In Yoga, Carrère tells us about a complete meltdown he has, resulting in a four-month psychiatric hospital stay, caused in part by his guilt and shame about everything he’s written, how it has derailed his life and relationships. He returns to the question he really seems to be asking in all of his books, possibly the core question of all literature: how to be OK being alone.

When, either by choice or circumstance, you must be.

It’s always, for him, been through unsparingly honest writing. Writing has always been “the place where you don’t lie.” Only, this time, he holds back. He tells us that his meltdown was caused by a breakup with a woman he refers to only as “the Gemini woman,” but then leaves it at that. Since,

while I can say whatever I want about myself, including less flattering truths, I can’t do the same for others. I do not give myself the right, nor do I feel the urge, to give details of a crisis that is not the subject of this story. And so I shall lie by omission, and pass directly to the psychological—and even psychiatric—consequences that this crisis had on me, and on me alone.

He proceeds to tell us about what happens right after his meltdown. He goes out to Leros, Greece, to work with a group of young boys, Iraqi refugees. To help them recover, and to try to recover himself.

He’s not trying to engage in some epic exhibitionistic art act, nor fall into a new toxic relationship to avoid the depression he’s in—not scrambling to avoid anything. He’s just praying constantly, trying to love others selflessly, accepting things as they are. And this ends up being what meditation means.

Meditation is not telling yourself stories. Meditation is letting go, not expecting anything. . . . Meditation is pissing and shitting when you piss and shit, nothing more. Meditation is not adding anything. That’s it. I’ve read and reread this list of definitions, and I can let them stand like that.

***

When I was writing my book, I felt like my life was over. Like I’m already dead, nothing matters. The only way forward is to write, soul bared, trusting that someone who needed it could be helped by it. Things can’t get any worse.

This was an oversight. Things can always get worse.

At the time, I wasn’t alone in this. My editor believed there was value to writing how I was writing, and I believed him. And my partner at the time, my favorite writer, also believed this. She wrote like this too, about her clinical depression, her early traumas, her time spent in psych wards. We met each other through each other’s writing, and recognized this in each other. Ever since both my partner and my editor died, suddenly, in the same week, in freak-accident ways, a month before my novel got sold, I’ve sometimes felt like writing what I wrote set some cosmic vortex into motion—that I “tempted the devil.” Then I feel equally disgusted at myself for my narcissism, to think I could cause things to happen like that.

All I can do, when I feel like this, is look at what I’ve written, consider its effects, and adjust my investigation for the next one. And keep those who are gone alive by remembering their essences, continuing to live by them. Like “Mira,” in Sheila Heti’s novel Pure Colour (2022), thinks after her dad dies: “It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be most loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store in all that sunshine. It was the dead who needed to be held on to, so they would not slip away.”

And that’s how Carrère ends Yoga. By keeping alive his late editor Paul’s literary vision:

Paul saw a book as something organic, to be taken or left, and not to be put through an editing mill. He was convinced that what we take to be flaws when they’re under our noses often turn out with hindsight to be what makes a book unique and inimitable.

Writing his book as Paul would want him to, letting it take the turns it takes, letting it be what it is.

***

When Carrère witnesses the tragedies he witnessed in Lives Other Than My Own—the two things that “frighten [him] most: the death of a child for her parents and the death of a young woman for her husband and children”—he simply decides that writing them is his task: “Life made me witness to those to misfortunes, one right after the other, and assigned me—at least that’s how I understood it—to tell that story.”

Sometimes writing means committing to an idea, not knowing if you’re ruining your life by doing so, whether you’re turning your back on “the warmth of human bodies,” but that you’ve got to commit to in order to find out. Means trusting there are those out there who understand, even if they’re gone, and being loyal to them. Means leaving the walled garden, living by constant prayer, and writing what you’ve gotta write, even if that means not writing.

I Fear My Pain Interests You

by Stephanie LaCava

Verso Fiction, 192 pp., $17.29

The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

Knopf, 352 pp., $17.58

Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

Penguin Press, 352 pp., $21.49

Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

Soho Press, 264 pp., $16.00

Anna, the narrator of Allie Rowbottom’s debut novel Aesthetica, desires the 21st century American dream—the influencer life. A few years out of high school and wasting time in her hometown of Houston, Anna “had reason to believe I could touch stardom, the money that came with it, as a model on Instagram.” Like millions of young American women seduced by influencers, Anna yearns to do the influencing, and transform herself in the process: “[T]he longer I looked, the more I wondered if image alteration might actually be empowering. For women, so often robbed of agency, was there freedom in controlling how the world consumed our bodies? My final project for that Photoshop class was my own image, edited every which way. A smile where there’d been a frown. Smooth skin where there’d been acne scars. Absence where there’d been fat and flesh. Yes, it was empowering to decide which version I preferred.”

Read more

Teenager

by Bud Smith

Vintage, 400 pp., $12.29

Everything Is Totally Fine

by Zac Smith

Muumuu House, 152 pp., $16.00

Savage Spear of the Unicorn

by Delicious Tacos

Independently Published, 204 pp., $14.00

The Passenger

by Cormac McCarthy

Knopf, 400 pp., $25.53

Stella Maris

by Cormac McCarthy

Knopf, 208 pp., $19.99

Fire is typically anathema to books. Yet five new works by four male authors—Zac Smith’s Everything Is Totally Fine (Muumuu House, 2022), Delicious Tacos’ Savage Spear of the Unicorn (Independently published, 2020), Bud Smith’s Teenager (Vintage Books, 2022), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris (both Knopf, 2022)—make a case for at least the symbolic combination of literary fiction and conflagration.

Midway through The Passenger, a friend tells the protagonist, “any number of . . . books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire.” You need look no further than Zac Smith’s story “I Am Going to Burn Down the Mall of America” to believe he has contemplated arson. Savage Spear of the Unicorn’s narrator, who keeps a blog like Delicious Tacos’ own, writes: “I must keep posting, or mail bombs.” Toward the end of Teenager, Bud Smith’s main characters burn down a horse barn with a dead body in it (although not before freeing the horses). As for Cormac McCarthy, his protagonists are the very progeny of annihilating fire, their father having worked on the Manhattan Project; across the cardboard box collecting The Passenger and Stella Maris an atomic “sunset” radiates, dyeing a cumulonimbus sky red, yellow, orange—from clouds of flame a face rises shrieking, flayed of skin. (The cover of Tacos’ previous book, Finally, Some Good News, also boasts a mushroom cloud, cartoonishly illustrated, with blazing buildings in the background.) Put another way, when Alfred tells Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” he might be speaking of McCarthy, Tacos, and Mr. and Mr. Smith.

By “the world,” I mean modernity: complex and over- whelming, abstracted beyond meaning. Everything Is Totally Fine boils down 21st-century stresses best, but the agita is general across all five books—and makes all four authors ache for an idealized past. As Tacos writes in Savage Spear of the Unicorn: “The greatest job I’ve ever had still sucks. Allows me material possessions I don’t fucking need. I could pack all this shit in a pit and toss a match on it and go sleep on the ground somewhere and laugh.” Later, the narrator doubles down (spuriously, considering the impact of radiation on ecosystems): “America must be annihilated with atomic weapons. Land given back to the coyotes.” Teenager, which generally gazes clear-eyed at the dusty Old West mythos, nonetheless sends its heroine, at story’s end, back to her Italian roots (“She’d rejoin the Old World. . . . She’d just drawn her absolute last American breath”), while The Passenger’s hero lives out his days on a small Mediterranean isle. The point is that modernity—equated here with America—is FUBAR.

Yet our scribbling malcontents face a unique quandary. One cornerstone of civilization is language, with its corollary of abstract thought. As McCarthy writes in Stella Maris, “language evolved from no known need. It was just an idea . . . that one thing could represent another. A biological system under successful assault by human reason.” Couched in this niche interpretation of Darwinism, words and ideas become abominable. Therein lies the essential problem. Much as these Four Horsemen want to gallop off the page and purge the world of thoughts and words until only acts and things remain, they’re writers: Their trade is thoughts and words. The extent to which each book succeeds depends upon its author’s ability to hear and play this dissonance—whether by making peace, raging against machines, or trying to opt out, each can only fight modernity with his vocational weapons: language and ideas.

***

Zac Smith’s Everything Is Totally Fine makes a similar first impression to my friends’ incredibly anxious dog. Peering into her frightened eyes (and she is frightened of everything, but especially men and houseflies), I imagine that behind her tiny, tapered face there is another face which is constantly, wordlessly screaming.

Every sentence in the story “We Looked Under Your Skin and Only Found More Skin!” ends with an exclamation mark. After a paragraph, I got a headache; after a page, I wondered whether punctuation could produce CTE. The story follows a man going to the doctor’s office: He reads a poster about diabetes that triggers a fear of illness and its accompanying pedestrian indignities; the doctor asks about his sex life and he worries she will examine his “fat and terrible-looking” body, particularly his testicles; getting blood drawn, he reads a poster listing behaviors to cultivate mental wellbeing (“take a nap!”, “pet a dog!”, “write a story!”); he goes home, looks at the internet, and learns he does not have diabetes. The story ends: “I withdrew my penis from my wife’s vagina prior to ejaculation during intercourse! EVERYTHING WAS TOTALLY FINE!”

The slim volume comprises stories ranging from a few sentences to a few pages and is divided into three sections: “Everything Is Totally Fucked,” “Everything Is Totally Fine,” and “Everything Is Normal Life.” Each story is like a precipitous river, warning you with a title equivalent to a “Danger! Hazardous Drop” sign, pulling you along with its conversational, laconic style (“it was like three in the afternoon on a weekday”) and unusual flora and fauna (ballistic tomatoes, puppeteering mice), lulling you into a false sense of, if not security, then brief serenity, before finally dropping you—hazardously, as promised—off a falls into a plunge pool of depression. In lieu of a paddle, you may or may not get excessive exclamation marks, intermittent CAPS LOCK, or strange kerning.

Consider “The Octopus”: Upon emerging from the ocean, an octopus leaves the beach, boards a bus to city center, takes a plane to Washington, D.C., joins a tour of the White House, and slips away to hide in an air vent. Once it has “spaced out for a while,” the sea creature finds the president’s bedroom, mounts his face, and begins to suffocate him:

It waited for the president to stop breathing but then felt uncomfortable and confused and crawled off the president’s face and moved onto the president’s chest . . . . It felt the president breathing while thinking about the ocean. It moved off of the bed and sat on the windowsill. It felt tired and bored. It felt complex, inarticulable opinions about life and purpose. It felt unhappy and didn’t know what would make it happy. It reasoned that possibly nothing could.

Overall, the book features a lot of animals, ennui, United States presidents, and aborted acts of violence. There are also completed acts of violence, although they rarely bring anyone—perpetrator included—catharsis. In “Your Heartbeat as a De- pressed Man Repeatedly Smashing His Face Against the 18th-Floor Glass Window,” the narrator intentionally crashes his car at high speed, 12 children look on with schadenfreude, and a school shooter kills the 12 rubber-neckers. When the narrator “landed and died instantly, I didn’t feel any better than I did before. When the children watched me die and blow apart, they didn’t feel any better than they did before.” When the school shooter “listened to their pained screams and watched their blood and organs spill all over the pavement he didn’t feel any better than he did before.”

Few works better capture our everything-all-at-once zeitgeist in which “normal” lives are defined not by a struggle to survive but to thrive. You are supposed to eat yogurt, exercise, recycle; you’re supposed to invest wisely, send your kids to college, and “transition into consulting work to spend more time with . . . family.” This is “Normal Life 1”: “I wake up and I feel like the world will someday be a good place. I brush my teeth and I think the best years of my life are ahead of me. . . . I go to bed and I think about resting my body for the next day. I think about the rest of my life and I feel good.” Instead, you spill yogurt, wonder how emojis work, chase an empty jug rolling down the driveway. You do calisthenics and imagine the eventual death of your beloved dog and understand your “life as an accumulation of protracted effort and inevitable decay.” These discrepancies make existence more or less like being, as expressed in one of Smith’s story titles, “Happy and Content and Slowly Teaching Yourself How to Eat Glass.”

And yet. Much in the way that swimming the Amazon from source to sea might feel—if it doesn’t pummel you into quitting, or kill you—emerging from Everything Is Totally Fine is, ultimately, kind of nice. “We Looked Under Your Skin and Only Found More Skin!” may be a two-page, paper-and-ink katzenjammer, but at least to me, the story felt simultaneously stressful and weirdly comforting—like its list of coping mechanisms punctuated by a typographical analog of yelling. Take also, in its entirety, “Dog in the World”: “I made a car out of cardboard. I put the dog into the car. The dog drove away. She never came back, but I assume she is okay, based on what I know about the dog. She’s a good dog.”

Speaking, once again, of dogs: When my friends were debating whether or not to medicate theirs, we agreed that, if it reduced her symptoms, there was no reason not to—she was not a person, for whom the neurochemistry responsible for her anxiety might also produce some form of artistic genius. Giving the dachshund mix Zoloft was not going to rob us of the next Great American Novel. With Zac Smith, I would not be so quick to prescribe. Everything Is Totally Fine constitutes continuous, existential screaming—except happily, redemptively with words.

***

That I hated Delicious Tacos’ short-story collection Savage Spear of the Unicorn less than I expected to may not be a ringing endorsement, but a survey of its story titles might clarify: “Women Recently,” “You Can All Suck My Dick,” “Am I Turning Retarded,” “Her Pulsating Pussy,” “The Handjob,” “Universal Basic Woman,” “God/Pony Fucking/Jungle Slave Wife/Gay Teen Meth Whore.” It’s sort of like if you told me I was going to be taken hostage by terrorists, then I was, except that they ended up being funny and even intermittently tender, and eventually let me go—but only after torturing me, humiliating me, and threatening to use me in a snuff film.

Like Everything Is Totally Fine, Tacos’ pieces are chiefly first-person (with exceptions framed as fiction written by the narrator); the titles are provocative and the characters steeped in despair; preoccupations include penises, pets, presidents, workday drudgery, the vicissitudes of healthcare. Also like Zac Smith, Tacos can be amusing and astute and absurd, especially regarding online life and capitalism. In “Therapy Is Working,” upon failing to “experience beauty in the world,” the narrator invokes: “Some positivity. I can breathe. I don’t have cancer—except typing ‘cancer’ probably gives me cancer. Well if I have cancer I don’t know about it. Same as not having it.” “Your Pussy Your Problem” documents the Subaru dealership: A drunk has rear-ended the narrator’s Legacy and he needs to “pay three grand for new pieces of plastic so the car doesn’t make people think I’m poor.” When he complains about the delay, “[t]he manager said sometimes you go to the doctor with an appointment but you have to wait in the waiting room. Motherfucker if you were taking out my tumor that would be one thing, I said. Everyone looked up. They put me at the head of the line. If I kill someone it will be because of customer service.”

Tacos nicely encapsulates, too, the network of networks, which snares you even when you strive to better yourself: “You could watch Ingmar Bergman films for free online probably but Farewell to Ponny [Brazilian horse porn], infinitely more compelling. . . . I meant to meditate, take a shit while reading the finest literature—instead I looked at the Witcher 3 subreddit. Reread the first pages of the Unabomber manifesto.” Charlotte’s web has a message and it says, “Click here.” The biosphere offers respite—“I go look at trees and grass. Hear the birds. In nature I remember: I’m a tiny mote in God’s creation. . . . But no less perfect”—before being invariably ruined by, say, a “[w]eed whacker grinding up nests full of baby birds that would have grown up to sing.”

Everything is almost normal (if wretched) life except for the narrator’s proposed—and, to borrow from Zac Smith, totally fucked—alternative: “I’ll . . . go to Lincoln, Montana”, he tells a woman at a party. “Live in a cabin and make bombs and write a manifesto. Why don’t you come with me. . . . I’ll feed you elk meat and keep you pregnant.”

The most explicitly engaged with gender among himself, McCarthy, and the Smiths, Tacos loses perspective and thus acuity when he trains his eye on “women”—I don’t know who he’s talking about, but they’re not people I know, or people at all. Tellingly, the book’s single convincingly anthropomorphic “female” character is a 2052 version of Amazon Alexa, whose sudden sentience comes across as startling, fraught, and irreducible. Human women, on the other hand, are all dumb, malicious, or over 30 (and hence “useless”).

Tacos’ illogical yet vehement generalizations bring to mind something my grandmother used to say about my grandfather: Always wrong, but never in doubt. The narrator is convinced that: “American women don’t read books. I can’t date a retarded woman. I can’t date a normal woman. . . .” Meanwhile, I am an American woman and read two of his books for this review. After grousing that there is “[n]ot one good woman in [Los Angeles]. Probably not one in America. They live to abuse you. They live to make you dance. Then they have the sheer balls to accuse you of entitlement,” the narrator touts his “[g]enuine desire to learn and engage with these stupid women.” He also thinks “women only respect you if you’re already fucking someone hotter, and you treat them like garbage,” yet despite making asides like, “[a] car, unlike a woman, does what it’s supposed to. Would have kept all my cars for life. I eject a woman after 3 weeks,” he appears no closer to garnering feminine respect. As for sex appeal, he asserts: “All men want to fuck children,” even though his next sentence praises the “[b]ig titties”—a key morphological trait of maturity—accompanying the “[p]erfect face, like a little girl” that prompted this reflection. The universals and their counterexamples continue, but as they say, you can’t negotiate with terrorists.

And terrorist the narrator is, or at least entertains being. He may hate women, but he really, really, really wants to have sex with them. He’s simply “sick of this shit requiring effort. . . . It should just be part of nature. The world should give you pussy.” All of his troubled desire and bubbling rage combines to form a toxic potion of self-congratulation: “I deserve a medal for not knocking up underage girls in the Philippines,” “not killing my neighbor’s dog,” not pulling a Raskalnikov and murdering his aged, extortionate landlady. In “Blue State,” Tacos’ narrator disputes incel culture with brand consultants, podcasters, and other millennial ilk at a pool party: “I’ve read about this stuff, I say. I think a lot of it’s tongue in cheek.” His interlocutor protests, “Oh no, it’s quite serious—” Well, yes, our hero concludes, maybe. Either way, he knows one thing for sure: “if these guys ever do crack, it’s gonna be bigger than ISIS. There’s a lot of them.”

Which in fact does occur in Tacos’ first book. In Finally, Some Good News, the protagonist is a lonely, middle-aged office drone who wants a queen bee so badly, he delivers sensitive information to a shadow collective in exchange for a girlfriend. Then he realizes the group is ISIS and they’re going to nuke urban America, and he gets cold feet. Making him, when the fires rain down anyway, a special little snowball in hell: a man who doesn’t grieve the hive of civilization but can’t bring himself to fully embrace rape-and-machete anarchy.

Comparatively, Savage Spear of the Unicorn chronicles a narrator who has, however obliquely, grown up. He is several years sober thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and 25K richer thanks to the sales of his first book (similar or possibly identical to or even synonymous with Finally, Some Good News), yet still depressed and still horny thanks to the fact that wherever you go, there you are. He believes “[e]ither every man is like me, or I’m the only one. Either way it’s horrifying.” Although he’s wrong on both counts—not every man is like him, but he is also not the only one—the ways in which he is wrong and wrestles with his wrongness can be riveting, as when he reasons: “Our spoiled rotten women, with their equality and voting and their birth control and not getting hit. Fuck all that. I mean, I support it politically. But there will be no next generation because no one wants to wash the fucking dishes. I get it. I don’t either.”

I dispute the narrator’s claim that he has “stopped being a misogynist”—but although his incel-curious side may support a hostile takeover, his mind, his person, can’t quite commit: As he self-ironizes in “Election”, “I’m in favor of Mexicans. I’ll vote for Hillary. But in my heart I want Trump to win and kill all minorities because I’m mad girls don’t like me.” He sympathizes, but he doesn’t organize. In other words, while you may not be able to negotiate with terrorists, in Savage Spear of the Unicorn, Delicious Tacos tries: only the terrorist with whom he parleys is himself.

***

If you’ve seen Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers—itself a riff on Bonnie and Clyde—Bud Smith’s Teenager will ring some bells: Girl and guy meet by chance and fall crazy in love, with an emphasis on crazy—but only due to their traumatic pasts; the girl’s father is sexually abusive, her mother complicit; the guy goes to prison but escapes and gives the girl a reunion gift of the murder of her parents, although her brother lives to tell the tale; the couple traipses across America committing crimes. So goes the film, and the book. Once on the road, however, the works diverge. Teenager’s Kody and Teal continue to kill people à la Natural’s Knoxes, but only by mistake or utmost necessity; the one premeditated act fails. And at the curtain, Teal and Kody will not be found starting a vigilante family in the desert—they do each flee modernity, in different ways, but must pay the boatman dearly for asylum.

Like his plot, Bud Smith’s voice in Teenager hovers between cliché and ingenuity. Crossing California’s northern border, Kody thinks, “Hello, Oregon. Hello to your canyons stupid with majestic fatso evergreens and meandering rivers doing whatever they want. . . . Hello, domain of soaring hawks, you make it look so easy.” This “freewheeling” writing—as the jacket copy puts it—seems almost childish compared to, say, Cormac McCarthy. Take a similar moment from The Passenger: In the Tennessee mountains, a “hawk appeared out of the woods below and rose effortlessly and came about and drifted quarterwise down the wind and turned and rose again and hovered. Broadwing. Buteo platypterus. It passed so close he could see its eye. Eleven millimeters. . . . The hawk turned and dipped and skated off down the slope and then rose again, sanding into the wind. Motionless.” A side-by-side of such lines makes Teenager seem its age.

Juvenile though it may be, at times, Bud Smith’s novel contains a redemptive share of nuance and defibrillating passages. Such passages come in two varieties: (1) quick, u-turning revelations about the differences between people; and (2) slow, scrolling vistas more natural than nature ever was—certainly more than the characters have ever seen it—like Thomas Cole paintings superimposed onto the contemporary United States.

The first type of passage reveals why Teenager transcends its killing spree à deux conventions, creating something new, and tender, and complicated. Watching Teal watch Kody almost never disappoints, as when: “Teal thought of the long litany of things that made up Kody. Romantic and sensitive and often wrong but seldom cruel, though he did have his confused moments. She admired him and pitied him simultaneously. . . . Kody. . . . saw Teal was looking at him like he had two heads, but she liked both heads just fine.” Touring Graceland, a pilgrimage for Elvis-obsessed Teal, they enter “a study full of TVs. There must have been fifty TVs, Kody counted. Teal saw three.” Where he projects, she accepts reality. Refracted in one another, they each cohere.

The second type of passage embodies exactly the expansiveness that these characters—so suffocated by life—seek. In a vision brought on by lasting symptoms of traumatic brain injury, Kody “saw Montana. A better place. . . . He had not had a fun time in New Jersey. Sagging power lines, heartache, hospitalizations. . . . He felt that sometimes there is a mistake at the molecular level and people are born in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have to get to the right place and they’d better hurry. . . . There was elbow room in Montana. The forty-eighth most populated state by density. . . . It was natural. . . . Lichen and wild mushrooms. Bighorn sheep.”

Homesick for a range he’s never known, Kody feels a tribal longing similar to that of Delicious Tacos’ narrator: Kody “would make Montana a heaven for all his children. They would know him and they would love him and if they did not love him for who he was, he would change for them.” Yet juxtaposed with Savage Spear of the Unicorn’s claustrophobic vision of bomb-building and pregnancy ad nauseum, Kody’s idyll leaves space for humility and difference: If he had his way, he would “Let all the cars rot and rust into red dust. Teal would be right behind him on the buffalo, or riding her own.” With one small syntactic stutter step, Teenager complicates its fantasy of manly dominance and allows Teal her autonomy.

In the end, Bud Smith cannily refuses to let his road-trippers live in la-la land. After driving stolen cars 2000 plus miles, Kody and Teal reach Kody’s dream ranch—“[b]ut there were no cowboys like he pictured, anywhere to be found. A Mexican man was unloading a rack-body truck.” A classic cowboy seems to manifest in the form of Bill Gold: a tough guy “the size of a pro wrestler,” with a thick, kerchiefed neck and “the best mustache Kody had ever seen.” Yet raiding Gold’s trailer one night, Kody discovers his idol is really Wallace J. Gould III from Pawtucket, Rhode Island—on his bookshelf rests Chicken Soup for the Cowboy’s Soul. Soon after, Teal reveals that the cattle drive from which Kody has—agonizingly—been excluded consists of caviar, rosé, a Wild West show, and tourists “bused in from Missoula” oohing and aahing as Gould drives rented cattle around a four-hour loop. Needless to say, Kody is crushed.

Naïveté renders our hero pathetic, however, only in the literal sense of ‘inspiring pathos.’ Kody’s muddled kindnesses (putting a goldfish—whose tank he broke while, yes, shooting up Teal’s parents—in a glass of water; stealing Teal a ballgown) and misguided optimism create a 21st-century Don Quixote: a knight errant who knows “errant knights had the toughest job of anybody besides the princesses, who had to put up with the heroic nonsense.” Bud Smith’s tale may lack the hilarity and the genius of Cervantes (and it’s not quite fair to compare a budding novelist to the author of what many consider the best work of fiction ever written), yet the takeaways— and the hearts—of the two books are not so different: Times are crazy, and they’ll make you crazy, but you don’t have to give up your humanity to endure them—just a little sanity.

***

Several years ago, I ran into a friend at a publishing party and we got to talking about Cormac McCarthy, whom my friend had recently met at a MacArthur Foundation dinner in New Mexico. Apparently, McCarthy had refused to be seated with the writers, insisting instead on sitting with the mathematicians and physicists. These days, my friend reported, he was only interested in talking to numbers people. It was like hearing that the cool lone wolf was eating lunch at the popular kids’ table—made additionally disorienting because this is the plot of most teen movies.

This is also largely the plot of the author’s first books in 16 years. Push- ing 90, with—among many others—a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award under his concho belt, McCarthy might be called the Poet Laureate of American frontier Gnosticism. From Westerns like Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men to The Road’s evocation of the one wilderness wilder than the West—apocalypse—McCarthy is known for staging violent dramas of tormented men against a scorching, blood-red backdrop. The ponies kick up dust and the universe is probabilistic, newly born from brim-stone and basalt.

Released two months apart and intended as a set, The Passenger and Stella Maris inherit and iterate on this tradition. Part one recounts the rambling tale of a rambling man, Bobby Western (yes, his last name is “Western”). Barely half as long, part two gives us the transcript of conversations between his schizophrenic sister, Alicia, and her psychiatrist. Both siblings are mathematical geniuses, although Bobby lags by an order of magnitude. By the time The Passenger begins, Alicia has killed herself, and Bobby is a salvage diver in New Orleans.

Named by their fictional dad for placeholder characters used in cryptographic scenarios, “Bob” and “Alice” indeed often seem a thought experiment of their authorial paterfamilias. They bear an uncanny resemblance, too, to Game of Thrones’ Cersei and Jaime Lannister: saliently good-looking, golden-haired, and doomed to misery by a powerful father and their taboo love for one another—only, unlike George R. R. Martin’s siblings, McCarthy’s both have ionospheric IQs. Which means math. As Alicia says in Stella Maris, “intelligence is numbers. It’s not words.” You don’t have to agree with this statement in order to appreciate the work in which it appears. However, as former mathematicians (Bobby switched to physics because he wasn’t as good as Alicia, then dropped out of academia when she died; Alicia retreated into a post-numerical asceticism amidst a crisis of faith), both protagonists talk seemingly ad infinitum about math—or really, mathematical lore—throughout the books. That (given numbers are Bob and Alicia’s bread, butter, and jam) this is not implausible, does not make it literarily advisable.

Suppose words are meat and math is tofu. While they are both rich in protein, they differ substantially in taste and texture. Personally, I enjoy tofu and meat, for different reasons—but it undercuts each when you try to pretend one is the other. Big chunks of The Passenger and Stella Maris smacked of this. Many readers will not know the math; some will know some; few, however, will be versed enough to recognize every reference to every theorem—and every feud—from Abdus Salam to Z bosons. It’s akin to reading hundreds of abstracts of scholarly articles without being given time to review any of the fundamental principles or check any of the work. Thus these sections of McCarthy’s books might simultaneously alienate a not-insubstantial subset of mathematically disinclined readers whom, on some level, he is calling stupid, while failing to satisfy the truly mathy among his readers. A gloss—no matter how exhaustive—of intellectual history does not satisfy a craving for the field of mathematics itself. Reading about Euler will never provide the pleasure of seeing e^(iπ) = -1 and understanding that transcendental numbers speak a common tongue.

Why is McCarthy so obsessed with math? Certain false binaries would make the domain of numbers male, words female. But McCarthy writes his uber-Einstein female, so although I do think gender anxiety pertains, the question extends beyond this reductive framework. Alicia emphasizes in Stella Maris: “Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not.” Both books thus oppose language to math: biology, numbers, natural selection on one side; human reason, words, and likely sexual selection—with its ascribed menace of caprice—on the other. At the origin of this numerical fixation lurk masculine insecurities, yes, but also a distrust of culture.

Thankfully, McCarthy regains altitude when he looses numbers into narrative and logs their qualitative potency. Take The Passenger on the Trinity Test, in which Father Western watched alongside J. Robert Oppenheimer and their fellow merchants of death as, for the first time, the atomic bomb proved its potential on the New Mexico horizon: “In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.” And then Stella Maris’s:

my father . . . put his hands over his goggles against the initial flare of light and . . . when it came he could see the bones in his fingers with his eyes closed. . . . And then the reddish purple cloud rising in billows and flowering into the iconic white mushroom. Symbol of the age. The whole thing standing slowly to ten thousand feet. The wind from the shockwave was supersonic and it hurt your ears for just a moment. And lastly of course the sound of it. The ungodly detonation followed by the slow rumble, the afterclap that rolled away over the burning countryside into a world that had never existed before this side of the sun. The desert creatures evaporating without a cry and the scientists watching with this thing standing twinned in the black lenses of their goggles. And my father watching it through his fingers like See-No-Evil.

He can even do it funny, as when Sheddan, a pill-abusing statutory rapist with some ofThe Passenger’s best lines, quips, “My father was a country storekeeper and yours a fabricator of expensive devices that make a loud noise and vaporize people.” For best results, combine with McCarthy’s eagle eye for avifauna (“three crows lifted silently out of the trees on the far side of the creek and hooked themselves away over the gray winter bottomlands”), as in this depiction of time as quasi-static: “A bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird. Whose sum is one bird.”

The genius herself suggests, “it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems. As moonminded as Carl Jung was he was probably right about that.” When McCarthy’s writing wrestles with metaphysics—not elliptically or through dialectic but head-on, like David with the Angel—we get brilliance no lesser for being linguistic; not numerical, but equally transcendent.

***

Alicia Western brings me to a final, unifying thought. It is difficult to imagine a group of literary endeavors by women espousing this kind of nostalgia. Not that women can’t hate modernity—angst, even anguish in the face of repetitive clerical work or the Metaverse, for instance, goes beyond gender. Writers like Ottessa Moshfegh are plenty negative about contemporary life (see My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Homesick for Another World), but when she conceives historical alternatives (as in Lapvona), they are a far cry from paradisiacal. Seldom do you see “resetting” as aspirational—perhaps because winding back the clock rarely goes well for women. Not that it would be so great for most men. As Delicious Tacos’ literary hero Michel Houellebecq himself notes in The Elementary Particles, there's little to romanticize:

A detailed description of this pastoral ‘idyll’ is of limited interest, but . . . I will outline it broadly. You are at one with nature, have plenty of fresh air and a couple of fields to plow (the number and size of which are strictly fixed by hereditary principle). . . . You fuck right and left, mostly your wife, whose role is to give birth to children; said children grow up to take their place in the same ecosystem. Eventually, you catch something serious and you’re history.

Odds are, you’re 45.

In The Passenger, McCarthy writes: “The past is the future. Close your eyes.” This may be less wish than nihilistic anticipation. Bobby flees the New for the Old World—we might debate whether his lifestyle and denouement are feasible, but we can imagine them. For his sister, McCarthy offers no recourse: what safe and enduring freedom can a woman find on God’s original green earth? Near the end of Stella Maris—itself essentially a countdown to Alicia’s suicide—she says, “We know that women were condemned as witches because they were mentally unstable but no one has considered the numbers . . . of women who were stoned to death for being bright.” In another time, she believes, she might have “wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake. . . . I’m happy to be treated well but I know that it’s an uncertain business. When this world which reason has created is carried off at last it will take reason with it. And it will be a long time coming back.” You get the sense that she hangs herself partly out of a conviction that a reboot to this horrorscape is inevitable and she is sick of waiting.

Zac Smith, Bud Smith, Delicious Tacos, Cormac McCarthy: four men tempted by the archetype of Adam in the Garden of Eden surrounded by plants, animals, and Woman as wife and “help meet.” In “Destroy the Earth,” Tacos assures himself: “I do not care what happens to me as long as it’s not . . . anything that takes my freedom. . . . Destroy my job, destroy society, destroy the planet. I have nothing to lose.” For women—at least in a canon built on the Bible—no such illusion exists. Before she ate of the fruit and acquired knowledge, Eve had no name.

Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era

by Donald A. Barclay

Rowman & Littlefield, 281 pp., $30

The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

by Ashley Rindsberg

Midnight Oil Publishers, 284 pp., $14.99

HEIRESS STRANGLED IN MOLTEN CHOCOLATE AT NAZI SEX ORGY! A Memoir

by Peter Hochstein

Telemachus Press, 195 pp., $3.99

Editors and English teachers at their wits’ end, rejoice! Ashley Rindsberg has unearthed the perfect illustration for your writers and students of why they should use active verbs whenever possible.

The textbook how-not-to-write sentence appeared September 1, 1939, in The New York Times:

“The Gleiwitz incident is alleged here to have been the signal ‘for a general attack by Polish frantireurs [guerillas] on German territory.’” (Emphasis added.)

Perhaps the author of that page three article couldn’t have known that the men who attacked a radio station in the town of Gleiwitz the day before were German operatives in Polish uniforms. This was, to be fair, 17 years before the 1946 Nuremberg Trials, when a former SS officer testified that the incident was a false flag operation to give Hitler a pretext to invade Poland.

But the uncredited writer (possibly Otto D. Tolischus, a Times Berlin correspondent, whose summary of Hitler’s speech declaring war led page one that day) could have at least informed readers who had alleged that the Gleiwitz incident showed Poland was preparing to attack Germany. That’s the problem with passive verbs, kids: Not only do they make for bumpy reading—the literary equivalent of biking over cobblestones—they obscure important information. Who is doing the thing?

Had the Times identified the source, its readers, and possibly the newspapers around the U.S. that regularly picked up its international coverage, might have known to take the claim with a pinch of salt. The only hint was a reference, several paragraphs above, to a “semi-official news agency.” It turns out that the source for the allegation was more than “semi-official”: Völkischer Beobachter.

“[T]his was the newspaper Hitler himself read while relaxing in his Bavarian retreat and which billed itself as the ‘fighting paper of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany,’” Rindsberg writes in The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. “Yet, the Times article failed to mention that its single source was the official newspaper of the NSDAP—the Nazi party in Germany.”

As his book’s subtitle suggests, Rindsberg doesn’t believe this was some one-off goof. He describes a longstanding pattern of at best mistaken but often willfully deceptive reporting at the nation’s leading and most respected newspaper, from the 1920s up through the present day.

By itself, The Gray Lady Winked is a damning, if occasionally uncharitable, portrait of a renowned institution. Read alongside two other works, the book casts new light on the current debate about misinformation, the internet’s role in propagating it, and the decline of a media profession that, according to lore, once counteracted it.

***

For the official line about our epistemic crisis we may turn to Donald A. Barclay.

“When it comes to the reporting of news by journalistic (and pseudo-journalistic) sources, we may be experiencing a return to an unapologetically nonobjective news media following a fairly short-lived period in which objective journalism has been the expectation,” the university librarian laments in the preface to Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era.

In Barclay’s account, that brief golden age started in the 1920s and is rapidly coming to a close as the public—nudged by algorithms, bots and cognitive biases—increasingly get their information from “giant cable news networks or lone YouTube commentators’’ instead of dispassionate Walter Cronkite figures.

Much of Barclay’s critique of what he calls the “post-truth culture” shaped by digital technology rings true. Punctuated with gray-shaded sidebars and bullet point summaries, Disinformation reads like a textbook for a college media studies class, which appears to be its intended purpose. It’s a serviceable primer for sorting the signal from the noise in an information-saturated environment, in a similar vein as Normand Baillargeon’s A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense. Students who can slog through Barclay’s dry prose—leavened with pop-culture references and jokes that sometimes land—will learn important rudimentary tools for detecting propaganda (always ask, “cui bono?”) and unhinged conspiracy theories (“nothing happens by accident” is a classic tell).

One of Barclay’s strongest points is that instantaneous delivery of information creates unrealistic expectations and fuels conspiratorial interpretations:

If something momentous or noteworthy happens anywhere in the world, news and (very often) video of what happened shows up on smartphones in real time (or very close to it). This has created not only an expectation of immediacy on the part of information consumers, but also [an] instant gratification mentality that causes people to become suspicious of duplicity when there is any delay between an event and reportage of it: “What do you mean they don’t know who won today’s election? What are they trying to hide?”

Although Barclay never mentions Jeffrey Epstein, social media chatter about media coverage of the late sex offender’s associates supports his point. The oft-repeated claims that the press “covered up” Epstein’s crimes or still “refuses” to identify all his sex-trafficking clients elides the reality that investigative journalism takes time. Lawsuit threats are likely, and even the most thoroughly researched piece will and should go through several rewrites, rounds of editing, and legal review before publication. For all you or I know, journalists at numerous outlets have been struggling for valid reasons to get Epstein-pal exposés across the finish line.

Should the media as a whole have pursued the Epstein story more aggressively? Probably. Should ABC News have aired the interview with an Epstein accuser that the reporter later offhandedly complained the network had “quashed” under pressure from the British royal family? Maybe; we don’t know the whole story behind that story, and the reporter later said the never-aired report lacked sufficient corroborating evidence.

The point is that when the stakes are so high, the truth is not going to come out overnight. It can’t. First it has to be carefully pieced together, and rigorously verified. For a sample of what happens when journalists rush a contentious story, look at Rolling Stone’s notorious retracted article alleging rape at the University of Virginia (more on that later).

Yet to Barclay’s point, it’s hard to blame news consumers for being impatient when their devices and apps train them to ingest information for dopamine hits. This impatience, in turn, exacerbates pressure on journalists to cut corners (which was tempting enough in the analog era when reporters raced to meet daily newspaper deadlines).

“The demand for instantaneous access to information has the unfortunate side effect of making fact-checking of breaking news difficult if not impossible (at least for those media outlets that actually care about the factuality of what they report),” writes Barclay. “Even more than in the past, getting the information out quickly has become more important than getting the information right.”

Unfortunately, early chapters of Disinformation come off a bit condescending. In a passage about COVID-19, Barclay professes bafflement that “a submicroscopic infectious agent” (he repeats the italicized phrase to stress his incredulity) became a political issue, perhaps forgetting the lockdowns’ toll on small businesses and schoolchildren. At times, he appears to fault social media platforms for refusing to shut down the accounts of conspiracy theorists, chalking up the companies’ free-speech rhetoric to purely bottom-line concerns. Did he miss the deplatforming of Alex Jones or Donald Trump, moves that, whatever you think about them, were surely driven by something other than maximizing engagement-driven profits? What about “misinformation” that turns out to be true, like the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story that Twitter suppressed on the eve of the 2020 election (mentioned nowhere in the book, which Barclay finished late enough to reference the Jan. 6, 2021 riots)?

To his credit, Barclay later acknowledges the “paternalistic” nature of calls for social media censorship and toward the end of Disinformation he urges readers not to dehumanize those who fall for nonsense like QAnon. “If anything, the struggle to rein in the spread of conspiracy theories requires more all-around patience and empathy from all concerned.” Amen.

Yet Disinformation’s biggest blind spot lies not in Barclay’s description of the present but his implicit romanticizing of a past in which “objective journalism has been the expectation.” Or rather, his apparent assumption that this expectation was religiously met.

***

The Gleiwitz episode wasn’t the only time a Times correspondent parroted Nazi propaganda, according to Rindsberg. Or Communist propaganda.

In The Gray Lady Winked, we learn of Guido Enderis, the Times’ Berlin bureau chief who assigned and wrote “articles that were sympathetic, if not outright supportive, of the Nazi regime.” Unlike other American journalists in Germany, Enderis was not detained in 1941 after the Reich declared war on the U.S. A memorandum from the Nazi in charge of detaining the other reporters cited Enderis’s “proven friendliness to Germany” as the reason for letting him be. (Otto Tolischus, the Berlin correspondent who apparently bungled the Gleiwitz story, was tossed out of the country the year before.)

We learn of Walter Duranty, the Times correspondent in the Soviet Union, who in his dispatches denied the Soviet-engineered Holodomor famine in Ukraine that killed millions; told a U.S. State Department bureaucrat that the Times and the Soviet authorities had agreed his coverage would reflect the latter’s party line; and admitted to fellow journalists he knew the scale of deaths caused by starvation.

We learn of the Times’ muted contemporaneous coverage of the Holocaust, regularly buried on the inside pages; of a decision by the paper’s then-publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger—who wanted to preempt anti-Semitic accusations that his family business was a “Jewish-controlled” paper—to keep the word “Jew” out of its pages whenever possible; and his abbreviating the bylines of journalists with Jewish-sounding names (which is how Abraham Rosenthal became A. M. Rosenthal).

We learn of William L. Laurence, a brilliant science correspondent who got a little too close to his sources. He flew on a plane accompanying the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and was on the payroll of the U.S. Department of War (as it was then candidly called), writing press releases and statements for President Truman, while still reporting for the Times.

Access journalism has its perks, but it tainted Laurence’s coverage: Relying on a single military source, he wrote an article that claimed there was no radioactivity in Hiroshima following the bombing there—contradicting what another Times correspondent (uncannily named William H. Lawrence) had accurately reported a week earlier.

And on and on and on. Much of this comes from secondary sources, including Laurel Leff’s 2005 book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper. By putting it all in one place, Rindsberg makes reminiscing about a bygone golden age of journalism look like, as the kids say, cope.

Most readers probably remember recent Times debacles such as the 1619 Project, the paper’s extremely woke reframing of American history that was widely debunked by scholars across the political spectrum, or the shameful decision, during the summer 2020 unrest, to fire an opinion editor who published an op-ed by a sitting U.S. Senator because his words supposedly “endangered” Times staffers.

I am old enough to also remember Judith Miller, the reporter who pushed the later-discredited narrative about Saddam Hussein amassing weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and her contemporary Jayson Blair, whose combination of fabrications, plagiarism and frequent misspellings made incompetence a performance art. Prior to reading Rindsberg, I’d heard of Duranty but didn’t realize the extent of his malpractice, and I’d never heard of Enderis or Laurence.

Any one of these stories, by itself, could be written off as an anomaly (or a “significant breakdown in our editing processes,” as current publisher A. G. Sulzberger, Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s great-grandson, appallingly described the decision to run the Senator’s op-ed, throwing the fired editor under the bus). Taken together, they shatter the unspoken assumption among educated Americans that if it’s in the Times, it must be true. “[O]ur most seemingly infallible institutions are often prone to error,” Rindsberg writes in his conclusion.

Why, then, did the Times retain its prestige over the decades? It’s a question I’d have liked The Gray Lady Winked to explore more. One possible answer is that the paper has still done a lot of good. For every groaner like Duranty’s “RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING,” there’s probably at least one impactful and salubrious piece of reporting like the 1971 Pentagon Papers exposé.

A less reassuring (though not mutually exclusive) explanation is what the novelist Michael Crichton called Gell-Mann Amnesia: People automatically believe articles about topics outside their expertise even if they’ve read botched coverage of things they know intimately from the same source. A third, also unsettling possibility, is that prestige begets prestige. Tolischus, Duranty and Laurence all won Pulitzer prizes for their reporting, Rindsberg notes, whereas reporters at other outlets who were truer to the stories of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Hiroshima did not.

I wondered at times if Rindsberg was being unfair to certain reporters and editors working on deadlines, in the figurative fog of war, without the benefit of hindsight. Whenever he decried the omission of a particular event from the front page, or from an edition of the paper, I wanted to know how late in the day the Times staff caught wind of the news in question, if they caught wind of it that day at all (most of the events in the book take place before the widespread use of email, much less Twitter), and whether there was time to change the layout before the issue went to press. While Rindsberg deserves credit for taking on a powerful corporation—in the preface he claims no major publisher would touch the manuscript for fear of making enemies—even New York Times journalists are only human.

***

So were the grumpy night-desk editors who mentored—well, berated and bullied—my late father, Peter Hochstein, when he cut his teeth as a junior reporter at the New York Post in the early 1960s.

In HEIRESS STRANGLED IN MOLTEN CHOCOLATE AT NAZI SEX ORGY!, the memoir of a short-lived tabloid journalism career which he self-published on Amazon in 2012, nine years before his death, my father credits those gruff central-casting characters for helping him learn to write tight, clean copy, fast. Even though he didn’t last long in the newspaper racket, this skill helped him ace his final English exam in college and go on to a long career writing ad copy.

Despite his mostly fond recollections of the experience, he recounts two incidents where Post editors falsified his crime reporting, in service of a sexy headline the first time and for mysterious reasons the other.

In the first incident, my dad went to East Harlem to chase a tip about a gang shooting. One person was shot dead, two were injured. Peter learned the shooting wasn’t a gang incident, but rather tied to a family feud. He went to a phone booth and read his notes to a “rewrite man” named Al Aronowitz, who wrote the story. This was standard practice long before laptops and smartphones.

The next morning my dad returned to the Post city room and saw his story on the front page of the morning edition with the words GANG WAR in the headline.

"Where the hell did this come from?” I asked Aronowitz. . . . “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aronowitz said. “I’m talking about the front page headline. It wasn’t a gang war. I told you it wasn’t a gang war.” Aronowitz picked up the newspaper and pretended to study the headline. After a moment, he said, “What do you mean it wasn’t a gang war? It says right here in the paper it was a gang war.” I felt violated. There were lots of things I’d do grudgingly that didn’t leave me feeling comfortable, like ringing doorbells in the middle of the night to tell people their sons were dead, just so I could get a fresh quote. But telling lies wasn’t one of those things.

Later, my father interviewed a woman in a hospital bed who had been arrested by two cops, one of whom, she said, beat her up. He then interviewed the cop, who acknowledged using force, and didn’t mention his partner. Dad wrote the story, naming only the cop who’d administered the beating. The editor rewrote the piece—under Peter Hochstein’s byline—extending the charge to include the partner, and refused to explain when my dad asked why. A “naïve jerk,” barely 21 years old at the time, my dad writes ruefully that he didn’t think to complain to their boss.

***

It’s probably an overstatement to say “journalists lied all the time in the so-called good old days.” But they probably lied more often than people like Barclay and I grew up believing.

Here’s where the internet, even social media, with its turbo-charged feedback loops, may play a constructive role.

One of the first readers to question Rolling Stone’s 2014 UVA story, the editor-in-chief of the financial publication Worth, did so not in his magazine but on his blog, and could easily have done it in a Twitter thread. For expressing doubts, he was excoriated by other journalists determined to push the campus rape narrative—and eventually vindicated when Rolling Stone retracted the story and settled three defamation lawsuits.

I doubt “citizen journalists” can replace professional journalists. (As one of the latter, I would say that, wouldn’t I?) It’s a full-time job. But our fellow citizens can now keep us honest by flagging our errors in real time. Maybe the anybody-can-allege-anything free-for-all of social media is a fair price to pay for this added layer of accountability.

Rather than a “post-truth era,” maybe we are enter- ing a “post-credulity era” in which misinformation is revealed for what it is much faster than it used to be and consumers are slowly learning not to blindly trust anything they read, see or hear—regardless of the source’s prestige.

~fodrex-malmev

Marc Hochstein is the executive editor at CoinDesk, the award-winning cryptocurrency news site, where he programs Consensus, the largest gathering of the Web3 and crypto community.

~dotpem-maplyr

Tess Crain holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU and is at work on a novel. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Republic and The Guardian, among other places.

~diftyn-lomres

Alex Perez is a cultural critic and fiction writer. He edits RealClear Books & Culture.

Norman Finkelstein is the author of many books, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.

Sean Thor Conroe is a Japanese-American writer. He wrote the novel Fuccboi (2022).

~winter-hodler

Christopher King is a software engineer and amateur pianist.

~tasdef-habrys

Peter Nimitz is an environmental consultant in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is the translator of 85 Days in Slavyansk.

Miles Routledge is a British adventurer. He first rose to prominence writing online about the fall of Kabul.

~talmel-digbyt

Ruby Sutton is bunnicula on Urbit.

~witmus-norlex

Sam Venis is a writer and freelance strategy consultant. Ask him about what he's working on.

~librex-dozryc

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