Permeable: The Monetization of Human Fragility

Posted on by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

“Amongst Men” by Haroon Gunn-Salie

There is a particular moment of weakness that most of us recognize without needing to name it. You are lying in your bed, it is late at night. The light from the phone is brighter than the background in the room. The day has thinned your patience as well as your judgment. You click on posts and stories what you would otherwise have ignored. You may even be tempted to buy what you do not need. In other words, your guard is down. You read for a few seconds and then doom scroll to the next story and then the next.  You feel like going to sleep but then you lie to yourself, one more scroll.” Welcome to the world of attention economy. It is basically a system in which human focus is treated as a scarce resource to be captured, measured, and monetized by digital platforms. The attention economy began with a relatively simple goal i.e., capture and hold the gaze. Over time, that ambition evolved into not just focusing on what you like but also focusing on when you are least able to resist. Timing, not just taste, has become the new frontier that these algorithms focus on. While it is true that these platforms were informed by decades of research on human psychology, they do not need to understand us in any deep, human sense. What they do need to do is to predict when you are tired, lonely, bored, anxious, or depleted. It is precisely in these states of vulnerability that it is easier to influence people and steal their attention.

Behavioral science has long recognized that cognition is not constrained by what else is going on in one’s life. Decision fatigue is real. Cognitive depletion makes us more suggestible. Our skepticism varies with sleep, stress, and emotional load. What has changed is that our devices now emit a steady exhaust of behavioral signals that correlate with these states. The phone does not know that you are lonely. It does not need to. It only needs to register that your scrolling pattern has slowed, that you are lingering on certain kinds of content, that the hour is late, that your interactions look different from your baseline. Correlation at scale does not need understanding. The use of human vulnerability is not a rhetorical device, it is anchored in behavioral research. Read more »

Monday, March 2, 2026

The Map and the Territory in Frontier AI Risk Management

Posted on by Malcolm Murray

by Malcolm Murray

Over the past year, there has been significant movement in AI risk management, with leading providers publishing safety frameworks over the past year that function as AI risk management. However, the problem is that these are not actually proper risk management when you compare them to established practice in other high-risk industries.

In other industries, risk management typically has 5 components. These are all interconnected and important. They are: Risk Identification, Risk Assessment, Risk Evaluation, Risk Treatment and Risk Governance. These go by different names depending on the framework, and are sometimes also grouped differently. For example, in the International AI Safety Report, we call them Identification, Analysis/Evaluation, Mitigation and Governance. In a recently published paper that I worked on, Open Problems in Frontier AI Risk Management, they are instead Risk Planning, Risk Identification, Risk Analysis, Risk Evaluation and Risk Mitigation.

The exact wording and grouping does not matter, what matters is the activity. I have found that a good way to explain what the key activities are can be done using the concept of the map and the territory. Basically, first, we want to understand which territory we are in – this is risk identification. Then we create a map of that territory – that is risk assessment. Third, we determine alternative paths to proceed through the territory. This can be compared to risk evaluation. We then need to choose a path and pursue it. This is risk treatment. And finally, the risk governance equivalent aspect can be expressed as stopping once in a while to get a second pair of eyes on the compass, to determine that we’re still going in the right direction.

However, in what has become the norm in current AI risk management, only a limited subset of these are actually being done. What typically happens is an assessment of capabilities, and then, if the capabilities reach a specific threshold, a corresponding implementation of predetermined safeguards.

This means there are several missing areas where risk management is not happening. Read more »

Bakhtin’s Freedom

Posted on by Laurie Sheck

by Laurie Sheck

Mikhail Bakhtin, literary theorist, 1895-1975

1.

Always when I think of him, I picture him alone in a room, bedridden for months at a time. How from late childhood on, he suffered from osteomyelitis, an incurable infection of the bone that set flame to raw nerve fibers, induced recurring fevers, skin lesions, intense, crippling pain. And how in that enforced solitude he wrote about the ways the self is not isolate but comes into being through contact with others. How this is its beauty and its freedom. “I become myself only when revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another.”

In his great work on Dostoevsky, he wrote, “Every thought…senses itself to be from the very beginning a rejoinder in an unfinalized dialogue. Such thought is not impelled toward a well-rounded, finalized whole. It lives a tense life on the borders of someone else’s thought, someone else’s consciousness.”

Bedridden and alone in his room, far from the clamor of everyday life, he wrote of how language moves through one body to another, one mind to another, and in that movement changes and is changed.

2.

These are some of the rooms he lived in:

An apartment in Kustani, a town in northwestern Kazakhstan where he was sentenced to internal exile for “subversive activity.” Its climate was so harsh and its winds so strong there were cables to grab onto while walking. Here he reported once a week to the security police and was forbidden to teach school; the charges against him involved corrupting the thoughts of the young. He found work as a bookkeeper. His only known publication from this period was an article for the periodical, Soviet Trade, where he discussed economic indicators, including such minutiae as how many pairs of galoshes were ordered by the local collectives. This sentence lasted from 1930-1934. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Einstein & Etta James

I’m fourteen when Einstein
is in Princeton

He’s old & heading out of breath
as I am fresh and new at breathing
in some

But there the landscapes of the space
between our ears divides

Al used levers of his mind for lifting
mass in time, while mine
took to bass guitar of R & B
which thumped in head
and loins in adolescent
instants

Einstein’s gone, but his poster’s on our wall
—if you were stepping down our stairs you’d
glimpse him in overcoat and hat
strolling through our stairwell, wry smile,
moustache, life-sized poster, white and black,
shedding light on light (you couldn’t miss him)

Same thing, mid-fifties, bluesy
Etta James, to me, was winsome

Strong and sexy
beautiful and sure,

So I weighed the heft of
his and hers and took them both
to heart and mind, and in terms
of back-and-forth between the two,
there certainly has been some

I took to both, and
then some

by Jim Culleny
12/15/18

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Sunday, March 1, 2026

C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score (And My Quest For The Perfect “Baguette”)

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

Cover of The Score. The cover's background is a picture of a cloudy sky, with wispy cloud on bright blue. Three dashboard-like gauges are superimposed on the background.C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (Penguin, 2026; bookshop.org) arrived in my mailbox just in time. I was feeling that finally, after months of practice and oven-play, I was about done “perfecting” a bread. At the beginning of 2025, I had resolved to “perfect three bread recipes.” I wound up the year with just one so-called perfect bread, and the second was in the process of getting there. The second bread? The French baguette. But what I was pulling out of the oven in December 2025 and January 2026 was a distant cousin—a pleasingly plump version of the slim, stick-like baguette. I could hear the French baker cry, Monsieur, the bread you bake is not le baguette classique. N’est-ce pas? But the baker’s tears wouldn’t move me; my perfect “baguette” could not be a mere footnote to a rigid standard. (Some probably would call my version a bâtard, but that word of course means “bastard” and I shy from it, even though my perfect bread turned out to be a real bitch to discover.) I found that Nguyen’s book gave shape to the story I tell myself of the year-long experience with beguilingly simple, quite sticky, and enormously challenging (and fun) calculations I made for the best bread in the world.

About halfway through the book, Nguyen lays out a particularly tight relationship between rules—”algorithmic rules” in particular—and recipes. My baking experience had resonated through the preceding chapters, but in that section of the book Nguyen tightened the connection.

“My mother was an excellent cook,” he writes. “She learned to cook not from cookbooks and recipes, but from her family and friends in Vietnam.” But, unlike his mother, Nguyen learned from cookbooks: Julia Child’s for French cooking and Marcella Hazan’s for Italian, both of them sources for recipes in a format that we today almost intuitively understand: standardized measures, quite precise and ordered instructions, and assumptions of cooking skill that embrace even the novice cook or baker. Nguyen continues his story: “So on one visit home, I asked my mom to teach me my very favorite Vietnamese dish: hot and sour catfish soup…. What she gave me wasn’t anything I could follow; it was nothing like a recipe at all. It seemed to me, at the time, like this vast and disorganized ramble, a weird organic messy flowchart of possibilities and decision and judgment calls.” After a bout of confusion, Nguyen came to see that in fact his mother had given him a recipe (not, as he curtly said to her, some “Third World bullshit”). The contrast of her “organic messy” recipe and his rigid modern expectation revealed to him some of the effect that modern recipes had on the experience of cooking: “These precise, modern recipes had, in a weird way, disrupted my sense of what cooking was and could be,” he recalls. “I had come to assume that cooking—real cooking—had to proceed via an algorithm. I had refused to accept that real cooking might involve a messy and organic decision space, full of a thousand decision points and judgment calls.”

Before this epiphany, his understanding of “real cooking” had been “value captured”—defined by the rules and regimented modes of modern recipes. (It’s worth knowing that Nguyen was a food writer before he became a philosophy professor at the University of Utah.)

Having seen the effect of modern recipes, Nguyen renewed his understanding of “real cooking.” Read more »

On Usable Rage

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

How can we possibly approach the world today without being in a constant stage of rage? Philosopher and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s All the Rage suggests how to make this feeling more useful to us. He writes from a range of perspectives, everything from political uprisings to the patients in his office, and from how rage plays out in the world to how it manifests in our own minds, all with a thread of climate change activism throughout. Ideas are illustrated with examples from fictional characters, historical figures, and his own family. It hardly seems possible to do all that in just 195 pages, yet the book is a thought-provoking and entertaining read, comfortably shifting from micro to macro issues to explore four kinds of rage. 

SOME DEFINITIONS

In day-to-day conversations, we use “rage,” “anger,” and “aggression” almost interchangeably. We do the same for “emotion” and “feeling” and for “drive” and “instinct.” The book uses these terms more precisely, so a bit of a glossary might be useful. The order of events that occurs when we’re outraged becomes important. Cohen explains that aggression is often the way we respond directly to a stimulus, and anger is what happens after that first spark of action, when we choose to hold it back. He explains it succinctly in an interview with The Philosopher: 

“Aggression is a kind of stimulus response. It’s what we do with a provocation, which might be an injury; it might be a humiliation, an insult of some kind, something that arouses us to retaliation. Aggression is the way that we get rid of that load of stimulus in action. … Anger is a way of holding on. Feelings are ways of holding on to stuff. When we can’t bear to feel something we instead discharge it in action. …  Anger is something that you’re left with when action is unavailable to you or perhaps when you try to take the experience to a higher level, i.e. to maintain it in the consciousness as something to experience and process psychically rather than discharge in an action. That’s why psychoanalysis tends to think of anger as a human achievement.”

It’s not the case that we’re insulted, then feel anger, and then rationally decide to act or not act, even if it sometimes feels like that. Instead, the impetus to act is immediate following an enraging stimulus, and the restraint is what leads to the feeling of anger. I think that’s the idea. It’s counterintuitive to me, so it’s useful that it was repeated a few times in the book.   Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: National Service

Posted on by Eric Feigenbaum

by Eric Feigenbaum

On Christmas Eve 1965 – roughly five-and-a-half months after the nascent Singapore’s independence – “The Mexicans” arrived. Their job: to help build and train a Singaporean military. At the time, the British remained nominally committed to protecting Singapore as part of a planned military phase-out, but Singapore needed its own defensive capabilities.

Today it’s easy to look at Singapore and wonder what enemies it could possibly have. But in 1965, Singapore was surrounded by hostile powers – most specifically Indonesia and Malaysia, which for slightly different reasons were resentful, if not opposed to Singapore becoming its own country.

Malaysia was a scorned lover who at the last minute prior to independence from Britain tossed Singapore out of the Malaysian Federation largely for refusing to subscribe to the “Bumiputera First” movement – a set of legal principles that among Malaysia’s multi-ethnic population, gives additional rights and privileges to the indigenous Malays, or “Sons of The Soil”.

Indonesia’s founding leader and dictator, Sukarno – who styled himself with a mononym like Socrates, Charlemagne, Cher and Madonna – believed the Malaysian Federation (later Malaysia and Singapore) was a “neocolonialist” plot by the British to encircle and disempower Indonesia. He particularly resented formerly British Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo going to Malaysia.

As a result, roughly 1.9 million people, 75 percent of whom were Chinese ethnic living on a 500 square kilometer island, relying on water from their hostile northern neighbor, having insufficient agriculture to self-sufficiently feed themselves and being surrounded by enemies found themselves vulnerable. Read more »

Friday, February 27, 2026

A Palimpsest, Scraped Clean & Reinscribed

Posted on by Charles Siegel

by Charles Siegel

Last week, on Presidents’ Day, President Trump lost in court. This is hardly news. The administration has already lost hundreds of cases in just a little over a year. And this isn’t the first time it has lost on a day when courts aren’t even open.

The ruling came in a case officially entitled City of Philadelphia v. Burgum. Of the many, many cases the administration has lost, this is not remotely the most important. The day before I submitted this column, for example, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump in the tariffs case. (Trump, naturally, immediately called the justices who ruled against him — including three of the six conservatives on the court, two of whom he had appointed and all of whom had given him wide and unprecedented immunity —  “fools and lapdogs” and an “embarrassment to their families.”)  And just the day before that, a federal judge in West Virginia granted a habeas corpus petition filed by an ICE detainee. He began his opinion as follows:

Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.

In our constitutional republic, governmental force derives its authority from the Constitution. But that authority is not unlimited. The Government’s power is legitimate only because it is derived from the People and exercised through law by identifiable public officers answerable to the public and to the courts. The structure of the Constitution guarantees visibility. Both the officer and the force he employs are traceable to authority delegated by the People and subject to the limits imposed by law. When the Government uses force against the public, the citizen can recognize the officer as a lawful representative. The public can evaluate the act. The judiciary can later review it. Every stop, arrest, detention, and use of force can be tested against the Constitution’s protections. Not so here. Read more »

Proust’s Madeleine: Time and Narrative

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

A man sits unsettled on a wintry Paris afternoon, when his mother offers him some tea—along with a small little cake, shaped like a shell.

Perhaps it is the most famous cake in literary history, for the moment he tastes the madeleine, softened in the tea, he is, in that instant, transported across time and space, as the world of his childhood rises before him, whole and luminous.

What begins as a simple sensation becomes a revelation: the past, long buried, is not gone at all, but waiting in the body, ready to return.

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur might have said this was the perfect example of the way literature illuminates how human beings experience time. In his three-volume series, Time and Narrative, Ricœur suggests that time becomes human only when it is articulated through narrative, because this is when lived duration is gathered and configured into meaning.

A philosophy student undergraduate, I am now married to an astrophysicist so I guess it was no surprise that time was something I became completely obsessed with when I began studying the craft of fiction. Just think of how Proust’s madeleine moment captures the way we really do experience time. Like a palimpsest, where one sensation can trigger an entire buried world, and we feel ourselves transported through a temporal aperture, like a worm hole, through the story of our lives.

In a class on time and fiction I took several years ago, we looked at a story in The New Yorker by Weike Wang called Omakase. A kind of frame story, it begins when a couple goes out to dinner, and in almost every moment that happens in chronological time, a sip of tea or when the woman finds herself observing the man chat with the waitress, there is a shift of thought, an interior unfolding. It’s like the multi-dimensional unfolding of a Sophon in the Three-Body Problem, her inner world unfolds in multi-dimensions. Read more »

Ex-Patriot

Posted on by Rafaël Newman

by Rafaël Newman

Eva Bertha Strassner, Montreal, c. 1930

If she hadn’t died in July 1987, at the age of 81, my maternal grandmother would be celebrating her 120th birthday this week. One-hundred-and-twenty is a proverbial age among Ashkenazi Jews, who recite the Yiddish formula Biz hundert un tsvantsik, or “[You should live] to 120,” on the anniversary of a birth. That’s a full 20% markup over their Goyish compatriots in the Old Country, who grant honorees a mere Sto Lat!— “100 years”—in the traditional Polish song of birthday congratulations.

I never once said Biz hundert un tsvantsik to my grandmother, however, on any of her birthdays, although not for want of wishing her well. This was because, despite her birth in the canton of Aargau, the traditional Swiss “Pale of Settlement” for Jewish residents until the late 19th century, and her own eventual close family ties with Jews, my Grossmutti was not herself Jewish. But neither was she in fact a Swiss citizen, despite the place of her birth. She was German.

Registration of Johann Simon Emil Strassner in Zurich, 1909

Eva Bertha Strassner was born on February 23, 1906, in Baden, Switzerland, to Johann Simon Emil Strassner and Maria Elisabeth Sander, immigrants from Löbelstein, which was, at the time of their births and until 1918, in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and is today a part of Bavaria. Eva Bertha’s father had come with his burgeoning family in search of employment as a handyman, which he found with a variety of enterprises in the industrialized regions of Switzerland at the turn of the 20th century. Over the next decades the family moved, in keeping with Johann Strassner’s fortunes and economic exigencies, from Baden in the canton of Aargau to nearby Wettingen, then to Töss, at the time a village in the canton of Zurich, now a district of Winterthur, the canton’s second city, and from there, in the 1920s, to Schwerzenbach, on the edge of Zurich’s Oberland, within shouting distance of Zurich itself, the cantonal capital and today Switzerland’s largest city. Read more »

Thursday, February 26, 2026

Conservative Postmodernism and the Stuck Culture Hypothesis

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First CenturyNo one sells out anymore. The first pages of Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, W. David Marx’s overview of the past quarter-century of popular culture, give a striking example of this cultural shift. In 1992, the Seattle-based grunge band Pearl Jam elected to stop making music videos because they were worried about becoming too commercial. Marx writes, “Pearl Jam’s principled stand resonated with their fans: If rock bands were so desperate for money, they might as well be bankers.” This contrasts with the Lollapalooza festival in 2022, thirty years later, where David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, performed as “DJ D-Sol,” playing electronic dance music for party-goers at the Tito’s Handmade Vodka stage after arriving in Chicago on his corporate jet.

How did this shift occur? One thing that makes Marx’s analysis bracing is that the figures he picks as being most significant in our broader cultural history are not the usual musicians or writers. Much more time is spent on Pharrell Williams and Kim Kardashian than, say, Arvo Pärt or Elena Ferrante. This is not a failure of taste, but a decision to focus on figures who managed to understand, before the rest of us, how fundamentally the Internet had altered the logic of cultural change.

Blank Space further develops the model that Marx described in his 2022 book Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. Cultural change in earlier eras, from high culture to low, ran something like this. Small groups of innovators would try new things in relative obscurity. Popularizers would notice them, and would streamline and repackage their ideas to be fed to a mass audience. The public might never experience the original source of such ideas, but the kitsch they consumed might still be directional, moving culture forward, even if at a lag.

Subcultural scarcity was important to such changes. Knowing about trends before others did gave one social capital, and that capital rewarded risk. It made sense for Pearl Jam to stop making music videos, since overexposure was a form of contamination. The gesture worked because the market was suspect, underground knowledge was elevated, and selling out was a real category with real stakes.

Enter the Internet. Read more »

Bad Stupid

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

A thought has been nagging at me lately. Are most shitty people not very bright?

Some shitty people are very smart, of course, and those are the ones you really have to worry about: the pied pipers enchanting others to dance to their shitty tunes. But is it possible that most shitty people are not Darth Vader types, brilliant but troubled and drawn to the Dark Side’s Machiavellian potential? Could it be that most of them instead discover their shittiness through ignorance and low emotional intelligence, and are not seduced into it despite their brilliance?

There’s a lot to untangle. First and foremost, I am not contending that most not very bright people are shitty. Far from it.

Beyond that, however, we must ask ourselves both: What makes a person shitty, and, What makes a person smart?

Shittiness is the easier category to tackle, but by no means simple. Indeed, everyone is a shitty person sometimes. Everybody starts out as a baby, a toddler, a little kid, and every single one of them is a shitty little brat from time to time. Me! Me! Me!  No one else matters! That selfishness is at the core of both, general human shittiness, and much of childhood up to a certain point. But in most cases, families, teachers, and many others train children to leave a lot of that shittiness behind most of the time, and to become a functional member of various social groups: families, schools, houses of worship, friend groups, workplaces, and so forth.

How much of that Me! Me! Me! are people trained to leave behind? Aside from personal proclivities and experiences, it varies significantly across human cultures. For example, in many Indigenous American cultures, or in Japanese culture, historically there has been a strong emphasis on sublimating individual selfishness in favor of group function and cohesion. In U.S. culture? Yeah, not so much. But does that mean American society has a higher rate of shitty people than other countries? Who’s to say?

Well, this Brit for starters. But what even is shittiness?
Read more »

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

Of Wood Witch Born

Posted on by David Winner and Angela Starita

by David Winner

Witch not from the woods

Jessie Buckley, an incredible actress, breathes life into the role of Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, in Hamnet. Like others in the film, her face is always a little dirty (Chloé Zhao, the director, doesn’t fall for the trap of giving characters in dirty times perfectly clean skin), but I was frustrated by her character, which struck me as an odd fusion of romanticized gender essentialism and wild irrationality. Though I (a middle-aged cis male living in Brooklyn, New York, in the present day) could not be further from the Elizabethan woods where the essence of Agnes’s character originated, I still found myself resisting the film’s portrayal of her. Spoiler-alert, this writing reveals the ending.

Born (rumor has it) from a wood witch’s womb, Agnes mixes odd herbs together to create tinctures to heal wounds and reduce fevers. She (and this is a nice touch) greets young William’s desire to “handfast” with her by jumping past the wedding to the wedding night and having sex with him animalistically in nearly plain view. And she gives birth by herself in the woods, real wild-woman style. Her character seems ever wise and in touch with nature, her feelings and instincts spiritually sacrosanct and nearly unassailable—a vision of femininity pretty impossible, I would imagine, for any actual woman to live up to.

Her prophecies don’t always seem correct, however. She predicts a future for her son working on plays with William, though he ends up dying, still a child, when he takes the pestilence about to kill his sister onto himself—a brother bravely and spiritually sacrificing himself to save his sister.

Before her son’s death, Agnes encourages Shakespeare (who is sweet and kind of happy-go-lucky) to go to London to follow his passion. She declines his invitation to move there with the family, uncomfortable, I would imagine, in the large, alienating city. Each time William visits Stratford and leaves to return to London, there is tremendous sadness, which reflects—or so I imagine—not just their upcoming separation but the fragility of those times, when the smallest illness, in a time of plague, was likely to carry someone off. Read more »

Ghosts, Love, and the Search for Readers: A two-part conversation with writer Kipling Knox

Posted on by Philip Graham

by Philip Graham

I’m still amazed that Kipling Knox was my student during the mid-to late 1980s, the earliest days of my teaching at the University of Illinois. A more-than-promising creative writing undergraduate student, he then went on to live his professional life in the tech and editing worlds before embarking on a literary career that so far has produced two excellent books—a story collection and a novel—set in the Illinois landscape where he grew up. A landscape also filled with actual ghosts, a popular condition of so much imaginative writing set in the Midwest. My own latest novel has a dance card filled with ghosts, so it was inevitable that Kip and I would eventually sit down and compare notes. Another point of comparison has been our individual decisions to explore the possibilities of independent publishing and the unexpected avenues such a decision can lead authors in search of autonomy. It seems we had a lot of say, and so have divided our chat into two digestible parts.

Philip Graham: In the past three years you’ve published two beautifully-written works of fiction. In 2022, Under the Moon in Illinois, and at the end of 2025, How to Love in a World Like This. Both books are set—largely—in a Midwestern town that you’ve conjured up and call Middling, Illinois. And so they seem to be a part of a larger—and still growing?—world-building enterprise of fiction.

Kipling Knox: Thanks, Philip. Yes, that’s true—both books share a world with common characters. But that wasn’t my original intent. Between publishing these two, I started two other novels, with different settings. I put them both aside because I found myself drawn back to Middling. The story “Downriver,” in particular, ended so ambiguously that I was curious to know what would happen to its characters, Morgan and Arthur, and how their mystery would play out. It’s a difficult trade-off—sticking with one fictional world versus exploring others. When you write a book, you are deliberately not writing others, and there can be a sense of loss in that. But it’s very gratifying to explore a world you’ve built more deeply. I think of how a drop of ocean water contains millions of microorganisms, each with their own story, in a sense. So the world of Middling County (and also, in my second book, Chicago) has infinite potential for stories!

As I consider my next project, I do feel very committed to the American Midwest. Midwestern people and culture fascinate me. I think this is partly because Midwesterners are so often unburdened by a sense of superiority. We’re always trying to prove ourselves, politely. This is a gross generalization, of course, but I think it’s grounded in truth. These qualities make Midwestern characters nuanced and earnest and, hopefully, a little comical. It also makes for rich social satire—I think of midwestern-born authors like Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Saunders. Read more »

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Together We Cannot Fail: FDR’s Ten Days

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Photograph by Vincenzo Laviosa, circa 1932.

March 3, 1933. Herbert Hoover spent his final hours in the White House in anger and despair. Angry that he’d been decisively rejected by an electorate wrongheaded enough to not realize the wisdom of his policies—even when the evidence of their efficacy had been there for all to see. Despairing that his successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a dilettante, an unworthy lightweight at a time when all serious men understood the necessity for prudence, for careful adherence to sound principles and practices.

He was also profoundly worried. “The Great Engineer” could see that the cracks in the foundation that he had so carefully begun to mend were giving way. Unemployment remained stubbornly high. Europe was deeply unstable and calling home from the U.S. its reserves of gold. Currency was increasingly scarce, and there was an acute loss of confidence in the domestic banking system—many banks could not meet the demand for cash. Without sufficient cash, the economy would completely seize up, and any scrip that might be issued in lieu of it would cause rampant inflation. 

Hoover thought he knew the reason: His leadership was coming to an end. The clear policy statements he had made over the course of the previous year—indeed his efforts ever since the Crash itself—had painfully, but certainly, eased the economy back from the brink. Now, he believed all that good was being undone by the public’s anxiety that FDR would abandon his proven approach.  

It’s not as if Hoover hadn’t warned the electorate: In his October 31, 1932 campaign speech in Madison Square Garden, he laid out the stakes: elect FDR and “[t]he grass will grow in streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of millions of farms if that protection be taken away. Their churches, their hospitals, and their schoolhouses will decay.”   Read more »

Three Times the USA Flirted with Utopia in the 20th Century (MAGA Is a “Restorative” Utopian Movement?)

Posted on by Daniel Gauss

by Daniel Gauss

An allegorical rendering of an impossible meeting: three presidents who once aimed beyond incremental reform, while a self-styled restorer of greatness looms in the background.

In the twentieth century, there were policy initiatives in the United States that went beyond incremental reform and which could justifiably be called “utopian.” Three of these initiatives stand out: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal of a “Second Bill of Rights,” Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” and Richard Nixon’s effort to establish a type of Universal Basic Income (UBI).

If we take a close look at these three initiatives, and what happened with each one, we can see why “progressive” utopian programs are no longer being proposed, and why there is now space for conservative “restorative” ideals.

Each of the three initiatives above was calculated to extend political, social and economic rights to previously excluded groups, and sought to shift the government toward greater responsibility for its citizens’ well‑being. Each initiative failed to reach its full potential because of a combination of political resistance, economic pressures, institutional limitations and changes in public attitude.

In the spirit of John Gray’s Black Mass (2007), I would also like to investigate whether MAGA might be considered a utopian movement, but in the opposite direction. FDR, LBJ and Nixon were interested in forward-looking utopian projects calculated to expand social rights and economic benefits. MAGA seems to represent a backward-looking utopian project: the belief that America can be “restored” to an idealized past through governmental action. Read more »