The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom
To go goblin mode is to take a stand against standards; a trend which has taken over not only social media, but current social justice efforts. In the name of progress, all cultural claims to perfection are increasingly coming under attack. Take the body positivity movement on Instagram (and now virtually every advertising campaign); what began as ... See more
the critic • The death of Ideals
In context, these artists (like the psychedelic hippies of yore) were being literally countercultural—using culture against itself to violate the hegemonic push toward, in Allin’s and Rice’s case, neoliberal “responsibilization.”
documentjournal.com • The Internet Didn’t Kill Counterculture—you Just Won’t Find It on Instagram
the gatekeepers are failing, so why not get rid of them altogether? — but setting that matter aside for a moment, how did it come to this? When did American fiction become a specialty pursuit, or more importantly (and here I am forced to wave away a bunch of arguments, also very popular on this platform, about MFAs, about how no one wants to publis... See more
Substack and the American Novel
Teens are this grisly combination of suppressed rage, sexual confusion, vanity, and unrelenting incompetence, but there may be a redeeming sweetness there, somewhere, buried very deep. Just imagine Donald Trump but more agile. Or a turkey vulture. There is a constant war between needing affirmation and shunning affirmation.
H. Jon Benjamin • Failure Is an Option: An Attempted Memoir
Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it ... See more