Damon Linker at Persuasion:
In striving to make sense of the mind-warping incoherence, corruption, and self-destructiveness of the second Trump administration, my mind often wanders back to my time in college and graduate school during the 1990s. Back then, perhaps the most pressing intellectual question we pondered about the present was whether we were on the cusp of entering a “postmodern era.”
That famously slippery phrase had many meanings and implications, but this was its core: The time of grand, unifying, “hegemonic” narratives was over. A so-called “hermeneutics of suspicion” and impulse toward “deconstructing” received theories had revealed all attempts to reach a universal, permanent truth as power-grabs attempting to conceal fundamentally political motives. Broad swathes of the left latched onto the work of French theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard as a contribution to the liberation of individuals and groups from the white, male, heterosexual writers of the West—and from the grand narratives that justified their domination.
At the time, the most cogent critics of these prophets of postmodernism could be found on the center right. The philosopher Allan Bloom’s surprise 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, for example, suggested that what he called the “Nietzscheanization of the left” was bound to end badly.
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ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME is a series of seven novels by the Danish writer Solvej Balle that imagines a world in which one November day repeats indefinitely. Six volumes have so far been published in Denmark; in the United States, Volume IV is the newest to be available, in a translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. The books are structured as the occasional journal of Tara Setler, a rare-books dealer. Volume I covered the first three hundred and sixty-six repetitions of the day; by the end of Volume IV, ten years have passed, and Tara is not any closer to understanding what is happening, or why. But asking “why” progressive time has broken would be asking the wrong question. Balle is not interested in the physics of space-time, but in a structure of feeling. The novels drift, skirting the existential terror inherent in their premise. In lieu of conflict, they offer the reader an anesthetized lyricism, an elegy for a world that, because it holds still, can at last be seen and heard and described—like an exhibition in a museum, or a body preserved in formaldehyde.
AI company OpenAI and biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks announced in February 2026 that OpenAI’s flagship model GPT-5 had 
These letters are emblematic of the paradox that is Jack Spicer: the acerbic, deliberately un-PC misanthrope and the imaginative romantic. What they don’t reveal is Spicer the poet, who on his deathbed at the age of forty famously said to fellow poet Robin Blaser: ‘My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will go on.’ Stan Persky wrote of being confused by a Janus-faced Spicer whom he saw as shifting between what he called ‘Dirty Jack and Radiant Jack’. The former could be a manipulative and often cruel alcoholic while the latter championed community and encouraged others toward better writing. With Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, we gain some memorable insights into Spicer’s poetics, literary networks, and contradictions.
A few months ago, I was on a hike with my friend Tom, who is in his 70s and has lived in the same small town in the Santa Cruz Mountains for 50 years. Tom and I walked single-file down a narrow set of switchbacks through a canyon carved by the creek that was also our destination. Our view was hemmed in by the steep, forested walls around us. It was one of those times when you’re much more in the mountains than on a mountain, and also one of those times where someone like me could very easily lose their orientation. But Tom knew at all times where we were.
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The year 1776, whose quarter-millennium we mark this year, was a good vintage for documents that would last. Almost four months before the publication on July 4th of The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (sic), the publishers William Strahan and Thomas Cadell in the Strand published, on March 9th, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. A few weeks before that (sources disagree about the exact date), the same publishers launched the first volume of a projected six-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It’s surprising that subsequent historiography has drawn few explicit comparisons between the second and third of these documents, almost as if the chronological coincidence were an embarrassment for serious scholars, like a form of astrology. The disciplinary separation between history and political economy is doubtless part of the story. One of the rare books to treat both works together, Harold James’s The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton) is by a scholar unusually at home in both traditions.
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In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen released a document called “
The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”
The joke among young men these days is that everybody’s got a little money riding on something: football games, foreign elections, the odds of a U.S. military strike. Except it’s not really a joke. I recently made $3.79 guessing when the United States would attack Tehran. I pocketed $0.85 when To Lam was re-elected general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. I took home $83.64 after the rock climber Alex Honnold successfully climbed the skyscraper Taipei 101 without a rope.