Brian Thomas Clark

What I do know is that we are in an era marked by a crisis of masculinity that is neither warranted nor deserved. That young men feel very alienated. That they are very online. That there is a paradigm shift away from what has been true for the past 60 years: boy leaves home; boy reacts against his parents’ puritanical values; boy becomes some sort... See more

The idea is that literary representation is an act of transubstantiation. Literature pulls the real up out of the realm of temporality and insignificance and remakes it into a form that will never decay and never die. There is nothing doctrinally religious about this conception of the literary act. It is at the heart of modernism.

I can’t stop thinking about how objects hold me. How they alter the way I carry myself in a new room. Or hug me when surrounded by strangers. Clothes keep teaching me valuable lessons of tenderness and repair–of repetition, and the importance of returning to things that are worthy of love. This is not to encourage anxiety or hyper-attachment to our... See more

As much as I share his concerns, this book repeatedly made we want to yell back at him for willfully underplaying obvious exceptions and counterarguments.

Chief among these is to what degree Chayka’s “flattening” is anything new. When he writes, “If anything, mass culture lately appears more aesthetically homogenous than ever,” he seems to forget... See more

This all isn’t to say that there was nothing novel about TikTok. It obviously did give Americans genuinely new ways to communicate and create culture, but the culture we created with it was always there. Thanks to TikTok, America finally saw itself and it scared us. It turns out Americans don’t talk the way we think they should, don’t dress the way... See more

This, I think, is another reason why Updike has so many detractors. Ever since F.R. Leavis wrote The Great Tradition , there has been a school of literary criticism that has demanded that great novelists also be great moralists: that the job of the writer is not just to reflect the world but to tell it the difference between right and wrong.

That is... See more

While it’s probably one of the corniest things I’ll ever write in this column, I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not... See more

Meaningful friendships develop when things are intense, and involve peril, beauty, jeopardy, drama and self-development

In order to make room for this weird, this liminal zone of possibility, we need to get off the grid-like map of quantized utility and grow a culture instead. We do this together by forming clusters of human weirdness; groups of people with varying forms of space, voltage, and potential between them. We need a cohort, a rabble...what Jews call a... See more