Books & Lit

Mainstream offerings are dominated by sensationalist non-fiction, formulaic and #BookTok-approved YA, and an endless parade of self-help. The few compelling books still being published for mainstream audiences occupy niche spaces, without the broad public engagement they once enjoyed. If intellectuals have always complained about the fragmentation ... See more

Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck

Once a dominant art form, theater ceded its cultural primacy a long ago. People still produce and even write excellent plays and musicals, even today, but it’s no longer the primary vehicle for cultural expression and innovation. It’s a niche. Similarly, film, fashion, literature, or even music as we once knew them are no longer the primary mediums... See more

Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

Barbara Kingsolver • The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel

I’m asking her about the gaps where language fails us. I want to know because those stories are the making of me.

Caleb Azumah Nelson • Small Worlds

The Internet was supposed to democratize everything, do away with gatekeepers and in some cases, craft. We were prepared for that: the masses overtaking the institutions.

But that’s not what happened. The gatekeepers and the craft both changed. And with it, so did ideas around authorship. It wasn’t a simple fight between independent creators and es... See more

Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck

I’ve wasted part of my life in confusedly interpreting nothing at all, and the rest of it in writing these verses in prose for my incommunicable sensations, which is how I make the unknown universe mine.

Fernando Pessoa • The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)

“And sometimes I have kept
my feelings to myself because
I could find no language to describe them in.”

-Jane Austen