Who Killed Creative Writing?

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

“I think writers have always realized their own value; there just weren't a lot of options in the post-2008 recession for how to make good on it,” says Anne Helen Peterson, who writes the newsletter Culture Study. “But all of this feels very cyclical to me. The economy tanks, writers get laid off from their publications, writers go freelance, write... See more

Like the Depp-Heard coverage, the forces that Sacasas describes can be deeply cynical and destructive. They’re also almost always exhausting for those of us consuming them.

Times are changing for writers. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. To give some insight into what’s happening, the following is a postmortem of my decade-long career writing nonfiction for well-known media outlets like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast. 

One of the mirages that resides in many books today, of course, for him and for many of us, is the idea of its author being a “middle class writer.” That appellation seems somewhat fantastical, something borne of secret inheritances and side hustles. Becoming one has become the literary version of the illusory American Dream. It rhymes with the “do

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Are you reading the words of your favorite writer, their intern, or their intern’s ghostwriter?

At scale, I suppose performative thought isn’t a bug—it’s a feature.

As Emily Sundberg deftly noted: “Substack is making everyone into writers the way Instagram made everyone into photographers, but there’s one big difference ... the point of Substack is ... See more