The New Romantics

So this is what’s happened to the world: optimization trumps human preference. The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.

She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales... See more

But there is one big reason why a lot of men don’t think they should create—they think their turn to be creative has passed. It was taken by their ancestors, and they misused the privilege. Now they must, in the names of their fathers, be silent.

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.”

To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you have to stop mindlessly consuming the Internet and start mindfully curating it.

“Your homework is to stop canceling each other, find out about punk, and get laidwhile you’re at it,” I told them. “Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems. And it’s still happening right now, all over the world.” MAGA has adopted an authoritarian style of punk that disdains what... See more