In some ways, book reviewers, critics, book club hosts, readers, and even the writers themselves, are engaged in a long war against the idea of fiction itself, involving the reverse-engineering and geolocation of various hurts and harms in the psychology of the writer. We are, at least in America, a nation trained in the arts of literary analysis,... See more

For the sake of post-nutshell clarity, assertions like literature is inherently more serious than games boil down to two anxieties, one material and one aesthetic:

1) The underfunding of the humanities. As college deans and corporate executives shred venues dedicated to reading, writing, and the instruction of reading and writing, many of... See more

This has fractured the essay into competing mediums. “Articles” use factoids to make mechanical arguments, while “opinion pieces” weave feelings in an organic stream. In articles, the author has no presence. In personal essays, the author’s presence is all there is. One optimizes for objective truth, the other for subjective honesty, and both camps... See more