what will happen to the “the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, “who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life?” Will they retreat further away from anything resembling criticism? And then who will pin this moment to the spider’s web? Who will marshal the context and... See more

as criticism has declined, debate has risen to take its place—debate being the verbal form of the hot take: reductive, shouty, uncaring of context or meaning or truth. Where conversation has ceded to talking points and yelling. I’m not writing about how the decline of magazines and the rise of “news” shows like Crossfire and Real Time and Hannity... See more

but where once it might have launched a cascade of critical essays—each linking to each other, referencing each other, building, as it were, a cultural conversation reckoning with the phenomenon that is Elizabeth Gilbert—the conversation just kind of...collapsed. Sure, there were a lot of takes on Notes and Threads and Bluesky and whatever else has... See more

Criticism isn’t antithetical to creation: Edgar Allan Poe was a critic; so were T.S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. On the contrary, criticism is necessary to it; good, engaged, deeply felt criticism takes that piece of art and fixes it to the firmament. A critic pins a song or a film or a book onto the still wet spiderweb of culture, and tells us not... See more

The critic, the movie asserts, is necessarily at odds with the process of creation. Whereas I saw the critic’s job as an extension of the creative act.