Jon Repetti at the LARB:
IT’S 2025, and the turn to genre is old news. Since at least the 1980s, writers of “literary fiction” have been adopting the forms and techniques of popular “genre fiction”—a huge category that includes detective novels, sci-fi, spy thrillers, fantasy, horror, Westerns, and all varieties of romance. By 2012, China Miéville could tell the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference that it had already become “a cliché to point out that generic tropes are infecting the mainstream.” As ever, it seems that the academics are the last to know. Thirteen years after Miéville’s much-cited remark, Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction can still advertise itself as “the first monograph to address this phenomenon.” (We’ll take the author at his word, while noting that the institutional history of this turn has been told and retold, with the usual variations and hair-splitting, by a number of Rosen’s colleagues: Mark McGurl, Dan Sinykin, and Sarah Brouillette, among others.)
The basic story goes something like this. With the rise of mass culture in the late 19th century, certain prose writers sought to distinguish themselves as makers of “serious art,” cordoning off their work from the crowd of potboilers, bodice rippers, and other products of Grub Street. Building on the example of a few forebears (Gustave Flaubert and Henry James chief among them), the modernists systematized this great divide as a collective project of resistance to market logics in the realm of art.
more here.
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Penned in August 1925
Bilge’s description of Matthew Lillard’s facial journey in the 
Gatsby’s pink suit is, of course, a sign of his vulgarity, every bit as much as his lavish, show-off parties. And it is the vulgarian character of these parties that ties Fitzgerald’s hero to the character Trimalchio from Gaius Petronious Arbiter’s first-century literary burlesque, the Satyricon. Fitzgerald’s publisher had the good sense to reject Trimalchio in West Egg, the initial title of the novel. Fitzgerald’s commercial sense had certainly failed him when he proposed that title, though the allusion itself was sound. Both Jay Gatsby and Petronius’ Trimalchio are social upstarts—“Mr. Nobodies from Nowhere,” to steal Tom Buchanan’s phrase. Both use lavish parties in misguided attempts to pull themselves closer to the glamorous lives they desire.
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Neuroscientists have been studying more cognition-based questions — like how the brain recognizes patterns, remembers information, or learns rules to get a reward — for some time now. “Studying tasks that tapped into real cognition opened up whole sets of neural properties you simply don’t see in basic sensory tasks,” says Miller. But the experimental setup rarely changed, and the strengths of classical neuroscience — precision and control — limited the reach of these studies.
The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge isn’t just long, it’s complicated in a way 
Kate Winslet has made a career out of playing strong, confident, forthright women: Lee Miller, Mare Sheehan, Rose DeWitt Bukater, Clementine Kruczynski. Her resume is studded with awards recognition (an Academy Award for Best Actress for 2008’s The Reader, a pair of Emmys for playing the eponymous characters in HBO’s Mare of Easttown in 2021 and Mildred Pierce in 2011, an armful of BAFTAs across a 27-year span) and boasts cumulative box-office earnings in the billions (working with 
Elon Musk’s personal wealth now 
Legend has it that 18th-century Romantic painter Francisco Goya was once a porter here. Ernest Hemingway set the closing scene of The Sun Also Rises at a table in an upstairs dining room, and the signatures of Spanish kings throughout the centuries adorn one of the walls. There is also most definitely a ghost in the wine cellar.
I walk around the town in which I live and there aren’t drones in the sky or self-driving cars or sidewalk robots or anything like that. And when I spend time on the internet, aimlessly scrolling social media sites in the dead of night as I attempt to extract a burp from my newborn, I might occasionally see some synthetic images or video, but mostly I see what has always been on these feeds: pictures of people I do and don’t know, memes, and a mixture of news and jokes.
Back in the early 1930s Gilbert Seldes—a literary critic and early champion of popular culture—was asked to contribute an introduction to a volume of stories by Fitz-James O’Brien, now often regarded as the most original American writer of supernatural fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. At first Seldes declined, confessing that he’d never read anything by the man. But when the publisher jogged his memory, Seldes remembered that in some anthology or another he had in fact come across “The Diamond Lens,” O’Brien’s 1858 account of an obsessive microscopist who discovers an Eden-like world in a drop of water—and falls in love with the beautiful woman who lives in it.