Brian Thomas Clark

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

Another reason for all the division: the self itself is fragmented. As Yancey Strickler says, we are in the era of the post-individual. Strickler’s essay is deep and illuminating, but it is best summarized by a Sean Monahan quote he includes in the article: “Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality.... See more

In the artist of all kinds, I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. This might account for the fact that we cannot conceive of an artist’s coming to the end of the task that occupies his whole nature.

When Elliot protests that he can’t just do nothing, he is seeing and judging himself from the perspective of a culture that looks with disdain at anything that smacks of inactivity. Under constant self-scrutiny as to whether he is being sufficiently productive, he feels ashamed when he judges himself to have come up short in this regard. But this

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What my students seek is what I sought: not just a place to publish, of which there remain plenty, but a place to aspire to, the kind of established, vital ecosystem within which a writer can learn, play, feud, create meaning, spark conversation, make sense of herself and her world. Rare by definition, such things grow more elusive by the day.

AI images remove viewers from the complex conditions of life in favor of commercially or politically expedient fantasy, all while packaging this fantasy in a realist mode that makes it less ideologically suspicious, easier to take at face value.

to write about the internet in a post-COVID world, specifically, means that you will have to write about everything because everything is now finally online. It’s not uncommon that I start questioning what the internet even is anymore. Is it the memes we share? Is it the platforms we share them on? Is it the infrastructure that underpins those... See more

Our oldest and closest friends – those we might call meaningful – have seen us at close quarters. They know our flaws, our faults, our failures; all the things that might make us less than admirable. They don’t like us in spite of these, but because of them. In the end, friendship is an acknowledgement of our imperfect humanity; built not through... See more

We rush because we’re late. We also rush because we want to move quickly away from discomfort. We rush to come up with solutions to problems that would benefit from more sustained consideration. We rush into obligations or decisions or relationships because we want things settled.