On May 11th, I’ll celebrate the launch of my new novel, Colossus. I’ll be in conversation with the great Shadi Hamid at P&T Knitwear in Manhattan. Tickets are going very fast—we’re getting closer to capacity—and if you want to come party with us, please secure your seat now. We’ll have a great time. Colossus has been called a “challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man.” Come out May 11th and see what all the fuss is about.

Recently, it occurred to me that, by the close of this year, I will have published a book with almost every single kind of publisher. This is either a reflection of the modern condition or my own mad career. There’s been the major conglomerate (Random House), the very large non-prestige publisher (Amazon’s Lake Union), the midsized indie (Verso), the much smaller indie (OR Books), the small imprint that belongs to a much larger company (Arcade), and the tiniest of indies (Tough Poets Press). I’ve dealt with major corporations and de facto one-man bands. I don’t know if that qualifies me for doling out any sort of advice, but I thought I might reflect, a few weeks out from the publication of my next novel, on how I got here.

From the time I was eighteen, I wanted to publish novels. I continue to exalt the novel, though I obviously publish plenty of nonfiction for both money and pleasure. Nonfiction, in every way, pays the bills. If I could find a way to have my novels pay my rent, I would. For now—and maybe always—they will be the labor of love. They are art objects, offerings of the soul.

In my early twenties, like a lot of ambitious young writers, I wanted to be a star. I dreamed of being anointed. I dreamed of landing on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, when that still mattered a great deal. I wanted to be profiled in major newspapers and magazines. This was not, ultimately, why I wrote—I wrote because I loved it, because I was obsessed—but I thought it should be the proper reward for the work I put in and the talent I possessed. Why not me? To be a major novelist seemed like the very best kind of life. As hungry and preening as I might have been, I did, at least, keep working at my craft, even when validation didn’t materialize. I was able to publish a few short stories—I remember how thrilled I was to see my first, at age nineteen, in an online journal that’s long vanished from the internet—but a vast majority of my submissions were rejected. In college, I wrote my first novel, and it never left my hard drive. I started another—not to be finished—that also never left my hard drive. It only survives as a short story published in my college newspaper. In 2013 and 2014, I finished a novel called Devlin DuNair about a baseball prodigy who is elected mayor of New York City and later assassinated. The assassin is female, which I thought outré because the shooting of the famous tends to be, historically, a deranged man’s job. I haven’t read the novel in a decade, so I can’t tell you if it’s any good, though I imagine there’s stretches of strong writing, the spark of something better. After many queries to many agents that went unanswered, one replied; he was a man in his thirties that I’ll call C., and he worked for a boutique agency in Manhattan. He told me he very much liked the novel and wanted to represent me.

It was a rainy spring day in 2014. I was twenty-four, wearing a tie, standing in a wood-paneled office somewhere in the West Village. C. worked with a senior agent, and we all got to meet. This was, at that point, one of the more exciting moments of my life. Here it was—a dream about to come true. The novel would be sold, I’d be reviewed across America, and the critics might even compare me to much more famous and successful writers, writers I could, with enough luck, even surpass. C. told me the novel, as good as it was, needed edits. That was fine with me. We emailed back and forth for months. He decided to bring on an outside editor for another read. More time went by, and he seemed less satisfied, not more. In October 2014, C. told me my “writing is so sophisticated that your first draft made me believe that you were capable of adding a driving force to the narrative.” But, it turned out, I apparently “became lost in the minute changes and not focused enough on the macro changes. I think you need to do a lot of reading, figure out what the plot of Devlin Dunair is, and do a chapter outline based on that plot.”

I tried. C. never thought the manuscript was quite good enough to go on submission. He dropped me sometime after that, and I was left without an agent. By then, I was writing another novel—I’m restless that way, and if I’m not writing, I feel a tad lost—and treating it as my new meal ticket. City of Simcha was about a religious cult, somewhat similar to the Hasidic Jews, that takes over New York City. In the spring of 2015, another agent, on the recommendation of a writer friend, expressed interest. Let’s call him W. I was invited to W.’s offices in Midtown. The agency was much bigger than C.’s and it remains, to this day, one of the heavier hitters. Again, I wore a tie. W. was young, just a few years older than me, but his position in the industry was more assured. He wanted to represent me. Second time, I thought, must be the charm. I remember W. asked me if I was ready for the controversy this book could bring. Would I be comfortable, he asked, defending it during an angry Q&A at the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble? I answered, quietly, yes. Internally, my answer was fuck yes. Publicity, attention, a firestorm—what a life! Hadn’t Roth shot to fame this way? I hadn’t written City of Simcha with that in mind, but if I spurred some outrage, so be it. It would mean, simply, people cared.

My experience with W. turned out to be even worse than my time with C. W., like C., wanted extensive edits. I was eager to take direction, to make my novel saleable. I revised the novel over the summer. We had a phone call in September, where I was told City of Simcha wasn’t ready yet. One sticking point, I remember, was making the cult less of a takeoff on Hasidic Jewry. I had no issue with that. We exchanged further emails, my edits seemingly getting us nowhere closer. On October 27th, he told me he’s get back to me soon after I sent in the latest version of my manuscript. On November 20th, he told me he still owed me a response. He said nothing to me in December. In February 2016, he wrote me back, at last, to tell me there was nowhere left for us to go. “I feel cloudy and angry at myself for sitting on your manuscript for so long,” he said. “I wish I could say it had something to do with something manageable and irritating like laziness, but in truth, the manuscript has been bouncing around my head for ages and I have not been able to pin it to the wall long enough to kill it and label it as an agent should.”

“There’s a real real raw anger in this manuscript, in the main character, but also in his protagonist, that I cannot subsume into the story in a way that talks itself into a saleable tag, or an intelligible selling point,” he continued. “Or even as a story point. It’s a really vicious manuscript. I know we are supposed to be in a post-sympathetic-character world, and we are in many respects, but I don’t know if your protagonist is post-sympathetic as much as he is extremely loud and incredibly close.” He added he felt “defeated” by my manuscript.

So it went. He offered to read other work I might have. None stuck, and he responded less and less. I was without an agent once again. By late 2015 and early 2016, I began work on a novel called Demolition Night, which would end up as the first actual book I ever published. A time-traveling satire, set in the 1970s and the dystopian near-future, Demolition Night owed its writerly DNA to Thomas Pynchon’s V., a novel I devoured in the summer of 2015. In the fall of 2016, I wrote an essay for the Village Voice about an overlooked novelist, poet, and playwright named Marvin Cohen who was having his work reissued by Tough Poets Press, a small independent publisher based in Massachusetts. After speaking with the man who ran Tough Poets, I asked, once my essay was finished, if he was accepting any new fiction. He said yes. I sent him City of Simcha and he rejected it. I decided, then, to try Demolition Night. He liked this novel much more, and we set a publication date for the summer of 2018. By then, though, I was running for office, and there was the question of how I’d promote a book while politicking every single night, a certain future mayor telling me to knock on ever more doors. There were also the novel’s contents—it was quite louche and lurid—and how this might “play” during a campaign. We pushed publication back to the fall, not long before my birthday, and I was safely defeated in the Democratic primary by the time I held my first and only reading for Demolition Night at the BookMark Shoppe, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn’s local bookstore.

I still had no agent. My submission to Tough Poets had been direct, and the payment was a straightforward royalty split. No advance. For my next novel, I wanted to at least secure an advance and try my luck with a bigger house. Through a literary connection I made, I came into contact with a Power Agent. This Power Agent had represented several famous literary authors that you have definitely heard of. I hoped to entice the Power Agent. To her credit, she answered my emails and seemed drawn to my media background. Since, in 2016, I had quit the Jared Kushner-owned New York Observer over their decision to make an endorsement of Donald Trump they had told me wasn’t going to happen, the Power Agent thought I might write a nonfiction book. That could make us both more money than a novel. She suggested a biography of Kushner. I didn’t really want to do it, but I did want to be published again, and I thought if I found a large house for a Kushner book, this could aid my fiction career. The Power Agent liked the proposal I wrote—when you shop nonfiction books, you shop proposals, whereas completed novels are sent on submission—and we sent it out to the leading editors in the country. None were interested.

I suppose, though, my credo was to keep writing. I was like one of those sharks who can’t fall asleep or they’ll smash against the ocean floor. During a few hot summer months in 2019, I wrote a new novel. I called it House of Earth or Blood Earth, the former referring to the name of the cult in the book, the latter, in my mind, more appealing. House of Earth, later to be renamed The Night Burns Bright, was about a fictional cult in upstate New York in the first years after 9/11. I wrote it from the perspective of a child who is trapped there, who watches as his world slowly crumbles all around him; he is manipulated by his mother and the charismatic cult leader, and in my original draft, there wasn’t much uplift. I sent the novel, in early 2020, to the Power Agent. She really liked it. This was, naturally, very exciting. Unlike my first two agents, the Power Agent had a track record that was undeniable. She spoke, offhandedly, about how the advances of one of her famous authors helped pay for her country house. I was barely thirty, and I might be rich! The pandemic hit, but from the perspective of publishing the novel, this didn’t seem to matter too much. With the Power Agent, the editing process was more seamless. She had a young assistant I worked with, and the Power Agent would swoop in occasionally, offering bits of advice. By June 2020, we were ready to go on submission. I had never had an agent submit one of my novels to any publishers before.

With C. and W., we had tried to build airplanes that never left the hangar. Now, I’d be soaring into the clouds.

Every publisher the Power Agent submitted to—they were, in many cases, the brand names, the dream-makers—said no.

They had, I learned, different ways of saying no. Some were terse. Some were apologetic. Some were effusive. Some were blunt. “When it came to discovering all the bodies, especially those of kids, I was rattled,” one editor wrote. “I think kids being killed that way would make it a tough read for many people. It was for me. It wasn’t the cult stuff that I found difficult (though it’s certainly creepy, but also fascinating). It was the mass murders of children and parents, especially the children.”

A second round of submissions went nowhere, too. As frustrated as I was, I had yet another novel to absorb me, one I had begun in the fall of 2019. I eased into it, and then, with the arrival of the pandemic, I found I could dedicate far more time to its completion. The pages poured out of me. In August 2020, I had a draft—160,000-odd words of a sprawling social novel that I was calling, at first, An American Affair. I had written, I thought, a very good novel about 9/11, when there weren’t many out there. Don DeLillo was one of my favorite writers, but Falling Man, to me, was inadequate. Perhaps An American Affair could be published by September 2021, more than a year away, to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. I emailed the Power Agent, sending the novel to her and her assistant. And then I waited.

In early 2021, a publisher told us they’d accept House of Earth. I had forgotten the Power Agent had even queried them: Lake Union Press, a division of Amazon. Amazon had its own publishing houses, with legitimate editors and marketing teams. They had tried, with limited success, to compete with traditional publishers like Penguin Random House and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I knew little of Lake Union. One problem I suspected House of Earth had run into with most publishers was how the Power Agent had pitched it—as a thriller and horror novel with literary elements. To me, it was a literary novel that carried some thriller and horror elements. Keeping the reader in suspense wasn’t really the point. I didn’t care all that much if a reader guessed the plot twist. Most vital to me were the interiority of the child narrator, the way the world was rendered, and the psychology of the cult. Lake Union, I suspected, wanted to position the novel as a thriller of some sort. Philosophically, I was opposed to Amazon as a company—I still am, and rarely buy from them—and struggled with whether I should publish with Lake Union. Ultimately, after consulting with my partner at the time as well as her family, I decided to say yes. It would be silly to turn down an opportunity to publish, to not let my book exist. Lake Union offered $25,000, which was more than reasonable, and I signed with them. The editorial team was friendly and the publication date of February 2022 was only a year away, a short timeline by industry standards.

My editor liked the novel quite a bit and changed relatively little. What she did want was a different ending—less gloom, some nod to a better tomorrow—and I agreed, if I preferred the novel’s original coda. The title also wasn’t going to be House of Earth. Lake Union would decide, ultimately, what the book was called. My other suggestion was Every Side of Darkness. It sounded like Lie Down in Darkness, an alluring William Styron title, and captured, I believed, the essence of the novel. The Lake Union team rejected the title, disliking any use of the word “dark” or “darkness.” This was the first time I had ever encountered a “sensitivity reader” and, in 2021, “darkness” was viewed as problematic in some fashion. Other titles were suggested to me and I didn’t like any of them. The least bad option, I decided, was The Night Burns Bright. My experience with Lake Union was pleasant, overall, but the title never sat very well with me. I quietly vowed, if I ever had the chance again, I’d decide exactly what my books would be called, even if the publisher opposed me.

Meanwhile, OR Books, a small leftist publisher, had approached me at the end of 2020 about writing a short book about Andrew Cuomo. At this time, the New York governor was a national hero because of his response to Covid. I was deeply skeptical of Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic, having written critical dispatches for The Nation and starting this very Substack—originally named the Cuomo Files—to hold the governor to account. OR offered me a few thousand dollars, I accepted, and a publication date was set for July 2021. I wrote the book in about six weeks, building off of reporting I had already done, and found real-world events rapidly overtaking the manuscript. In the early months of 2021, Cuomo faced down around a dozen sexual harassment allegations. As the book went to press, his standing was deteriorating, and he would resign after publication day. Luckily, the title of the book—the one I had selected—worked just fine. The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York was met with a strong critical reception and modest sales. The summer book party, at an outdoor venue in Brooklyn—it was still the pandemic—attracted a few anti-Cuomo politicians, including my old friend, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

All of this was gratifying. But I very much wanted my new novel, An American Affair—I was also calling it Mona—to see the light of day. In August 2020, I had handed it off to the Power Agent. In early 2021, her assistant told me she enjoyed the novel and recommended it to her boss. Still, the Power Agent said nothing. Finally, in November 2021, more than a year after I sent the novel to her, I received a dispiriting response. “Right now there is a real drive for very high concept fiction set in an entirely different world without the confines of our current daunting reality or work from previously marginalized voices,” she wrote. “In addition, there were many elements of your novel that overlap with others I represent- [names redacted]. And while very different I just couldn’t summon the full-throated support your work deserves.” She offered praise for me, said she’d consider other novels I wrote, but wouldn’t be shopping my new book.

The novel that would become Glass Century—in fact, the manuscript I had sent to the Power Agent differed very little than the book that would eventually be published in 2025—was not going to be sent to any editors anytime soon. Since this was the novel I wanted to submit and I had no other work I cared enough about—this book mattered more to me than any other—I would be, once more, without an agent. I could cheer, in 2022, the publication of The Night Burns Bright, but without any feasible path for Glass Century, my celebration couldn’t be full-throated. Since The Night Burns Bright was an Amazon title and I didn’t, truthfully, know how to promote it, it wasn’t reviewed much at all beyond a few trade publications. Thanks to Amazon, a lot of readers did receive free digital copies, and I was invited to speak to a Zoom book club. I was glad to be a published author again. Still, I wasn’t sure what steps I should take to get my next novel to an actual publisher.

I didn’t consider self-publishing because, at the time, I felt it carried stigma—I do not think this is true anymore—and I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to design or format a book. The process was mysterious to me. I needed someone else to take the reins. After querying a bunch of agents and hearing nothing, I decided to try another Power Agent represented by a writer I knew. This Power Agent was quite busy and had a couple of his young assistants read Glass Century. (I was still calling it Mona then.) They liked the novel, and the young male assistant—let’s call him M.—who was, at the time, a junior agent said he could represent me. This was good enough; I had tired of Power Agents anyway. This was the first time I had an agent who was younger than me. I did, for a while, like M. He was responsive enough. He thought it might be better to pair my novel with a nonfiction work and sell it all together. Why not? I had ripped through Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties and thought I could write something of a follow-up, a cultural study of the 2000s. I wrote a proposal for my agent, he thought it was strong, and we sent it out to editors at large, well-known publishing houses. It was roundly rejected, if a few offered compliments. The introduction written for that proposal would emerge as a series of essays on this Substack in 2023.

Meanwhile, M. was strategizing on the novel. The plan was to submit it to publishers at the start of 2023. But January arrived and M. wasn’t ready to submit. He was slower responding to emails and needed more time to tinker with the novel. This became a theme: M. would offer a deadline, blow it by months, and barely respond to texts or emails. I came to resent him and I confess this resentment remains. In part, this was because I strongly implied to him time was of the essence; there was a family matter I alluded to that made me more restless than usual. My elderly father was in and out of hospitals. I very much wanted to tell him about Glass Century, a novel he partially inspired, and even have him read it. But it mattered to me, greatly, that I secure a path to publication—that I have a deal of some kind with a publisher that I could then tell my father about. Perhaps that was all quite silly—tell him, anyway!—but I decided that was important, vitally important. January, February, March, April, May—M. had excuses for why Glass Century couldn’t quite go out yet. None of them, quite frankly, made much sense. He seemed spacey and inattentive. Finally, at the end of June, the novel was submitted. My father died at the end of August, as my novel was on submission.

No deal was forthcoming anyway. Every single publisher, two dozen or so, had rejected Glass Century or not responded at all. Ghosting was most common. Most editors didn’t answer M. I despaired, of course, if I had numbed myself slightly after watching so many publishers turn down The Night Burns Bright. In the fall of 2023, however, I did have one lead: a top editor at a prestigious small publisher read my Substack. He had inquired about nonfiction and I told him about the novel. I sent it to him. In November, we met for coffee. He liked Glass Century, was absorbed, even. He wanted to publish it. My journey was done; I’d have a publisher, and a very good one. Writers knew this publisher. I wouldn’t be at the front of The Strand, but so what? Or, well, maybe I would. This publisher was good. “I just have to take it to my team,” the editor told me. He explained they decided on novels as a group and if there was too much opposition, they wouldn’t go ahead. But he was the top editor, and he had a lot of pull. The way he spoke about the process, it sounded like a formality.

I heard nothing from the editor in December. It was January 2024, after the holidays, and I decided to inquire about the status of the novel. The editor was apologetic; he meant well, truly. He explained to me he thought highly of the book, but the team didn’t. They hadn’t found consensus. They would have to reject it. He had already told my agent. But my agent hadn’t told me. My fury built. I texted M. M. said he was going to tell me. He was in the process of writing an email, or a text, or composing a thought to convert into language that would reach me sometime before next Christmas. I wanted to fire M. then, but who the hell was I, really? How was I going to find another agent? It had taken me a year just to get to M.

I did, at least, have a revelation—the problem wasn’t me. It was the system. The system wasn’t working all that well. I knew my novel was good enough to be published. I knew, if it ever reached the public, it would do just fine. And at that point, I couldn’t let the whole decade leak away. It had been nearly four years since I finished the draft of Glass Century. A whole presidential term. For the first time in several years, I contacted Tough Poets Press. I told the editor, Rick Schober, about Glass Century. He was enthusiastic. I was back to where I started, and that would do. Rick would release the book in May 2025, so we’d have a year to prepare—more than enough runway. He let me name the book and I had a strong hand in the cover design. Our deal was a royalty split. M. oversaw the contract, which I regretted because I had done all the work of securing the Tough Poets deal myself. If there were ever film or TV rights, M. would take a cut. I asked M. if he could try to sell foreign rights. M. was noncommittal, as he was about most things, and he could go weeks without returning a text message. I wanted to be done with him.

To lay the groundwork for Glass Century, I promoted it incessantly, in a way I had never done for any other book. I was like a helicopter parent desperate to see my child succeed. I had barely written anything on Substack about The Night Burns Bright. Self-promotion, then, felt gauche. Now I was a carnival barker for myself. I even, out of my own pocket, paid for a publicist. (I honestly wouldn’t recommend this unless you’re willing to spend a significant amount of money.) Most of the publicity, though, I’d secure on my own, through many emails, many galleys in the mail, and a dogged insistence on having the novel get some kind of reception. In the meantime, from May 2023 to March 2024, I had written another novel, far shorter than Glass Century. It was called Colossus. I gave it to M. to submit; most of the publishers ignored the submission. In 2025, after having met the team at Arcade at a party in New York—I was getting The Metropolitan Review off the ground—I sent them Colossus. They responded quickly, accepted the novel for publication, and set a date of April 28th, 2026. I was allowed to name the book and had a tremendous amount of input on the cover design. I am very thankful to Arcade.

The publication of Glass Century was, by far, the best time I’ve had as a novelist. The Wall Street Journal gave the book a strong review, the New Statesman in the U.K. praised it, I got to appear on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast, and many Substack writers read it generously. It was all I could have asked for. We drew a huge crowd, maybe a hundred people, to the launch in Manhattan, and I got to hold readings in Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon. My alma mater, Stony Brook University, invited me back for a talk. Now I hope for some of the same with Colossus. What’s the lesson of all this? On a practical level, if you’ve got an agent and want to part ways, part ways. I did that in 2025 and now have a great one. To get anywhere in the writing world, you need luck, certainly, and that won’t be manufactured. Connections help. You need a dash of talent, too. I do think, as trite as it may sound, persistence is underrated. If you stop trying, you won’t get anywhere. If you do try, you may also get nowhere, but you’ve got more of a chance. Novels can have longer tails. A launch matters, but so does someone, a year later, telling you they’ve just finished your book and enjoyed it. Books can linger in the bloodstream. After Colossus, Random House will publish my book on Zohran Mamdani in the fall. I’ll have more to say on that soon. And, I hope, I’ll have news to convey about a new novel, the one about the drone assassin. Let’s hope a publisher bites.

Colossus, my new novel, is almost here! If you missed out on The Metropolitan Review’s already legendary print launch party earlier this month, get tickets to the Colossus book launch on May 11. Preorder the novel or buy it at P&T Knitwear in Manhattan, where I’ll be in conversation with the great Shadi Hamid. Come say hi and party afterwards. We’ve already sold north of 30 tickets—they’re going fast, capacity is tight—so get them now.

Last week, the books and culture magazine I run, The Metropolitan Review, held the launch party for its first print issue. It was a raucous time, with plenty of drinking and, thankfully, not all that much speechifying. Two hundred people packed Hurley’s, an old saloon in Midtown, and we had more enough leading lights in the crowd: reporters from the New York Times, Zohran Mamdani’s speechwriter, the Booker nominee Brandon Taylor, and Jay McInerney, the author of the legendary Bright Lights, Big City, among many others. This was night, certainly, to feel important, and I know I and the rest of the TMR team did.

But what I’ve come to enjoy most about this venture is how we’ve been able to, so far at least, avoid building any sort of ivory tower. A vast majority of the people who come to our parties and get published in TMR have no ties to any kind of literary establishment. There is nothing wrong, of course, with forging these ties, and I’ve done that myself in the last few years, but it was always important for me to curate a space where anyone who has a burning desire to read or write can feel welcome. This doesn’t mean we publish nearly everything we’re pitched—we’ve got limited slots, and there are plenty of rejections handed down—but it does mean that when I or any of the editors consider pitches, CV’s simply do not matter. As the writer Naomi Kanakia has noted, the New Yorker stopped publishing short fiction from the slush pile decades ago. There is no way into the New Yorker, as a fiction writer, without a well-connected agent. Other journals like the Paris Review are increasingly difficult to penetrate for an unknown writer. I am bothered by this state of affairs because this is how literary culture corrodes, and it flies in the face of the spirit of how these magazines operated in the last century. Once, the New Yorker cared deeply about launching new voices. The editors took pride in building careers from the ground up. And the Paris Review, at its founding, was a place for the Young Turks of literature, a home to the burgeoning counterculture. The same cannot be said today.

I do not believe in a democracy of taste, per se. One has a right to dismiss certain books or pieces of writing; all novels are not created equal. Philistinism is a scourge and a degree of literary snobbery should make a comeback. Yet I do believe anyone has a right to participate in high culture. High culture should not be limited to the Ivy League, select MFA programs, or the overly educated. Many of the New York Intellectuals, the writers and critics who defined twentieth century literary culture, were the children of immigrants who attended public schools. They matriculated at City College, the Harvard of the proletariat, with a few reaching Harvard or Columbia after humble beginnings. They were not self-taught in the classic sense, since they all had college professors, but they were hungry for literature beyond the classroom—hungry, really, to treat literature as something that is lived and breathed. They could, like Alfred Kazin—a child of the Jewish slums of Brownsville, Brooklyn—publish whole surveys of American literature before they turned thirty. They were a brilliant, ambitious, and plenty combative lot.

Having attempted, since the 2010s, something of a literary career and only found it in the last few years, I can say that I’ve enjoyed the 2020s. That might be my own bias, my own projection of personal circumstances onto a scene. It does feel, though, much more open today. I do not know if The Metropolitan Review could have found as much success a decade ago. Some of that has to do with the rise of Substack and its ability, despite its flaws, to draw many like-minded, writerly people together. We’ve got contributors from all across America and the world, and that’s what online networks can do for you. One theory I have for the little flowering happening right now—this neo-romantic culture—is that it correlates with the general decline of literary prestige and the ossification, at the very top, of the publishing world. Conglomeration has made literature seem more tired and predictable. Publicity machines do not work as well as they once did, and laurels like the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize do not halo writers today like they might have a decade or two ago. Prestige exists, but it is more diffuse, and if it’s conferred at all, it might only find a few select writers at a given time—and even then, it’s not as if Ben Lerner is rocketing to the top of any best-seller lists. This does not mean the major publishers can’t release great literature—or don’t—or that indies have a magical ability, in the 2020s, to produce great books. What it does mean is that a person who wants to be a writer today, with very little publication credits to their name, is not as far from the mountaintop as they once were. In part, this is because the mountain is a lot smaller. But also, thanks to platforms like Substack, getting your audience—your little band of supporters—has grown much easier. You don’t need to wait a year for the Iowa Review or Kenyon Review to accept your short story submission. Writers like the aforementioned Kanakia as well as standouts like Alexander Sorondo and Henry Begler can attract more readers to their pieces than many of these journals can. That fact, even four years ago, would have seemed farfetched.

TMR can thrive because there are many talented writers in the world who’ve found the literary establishment less receptive to them than it might have been in the twentieth century, when editors at publishing houses were more empowered to cultivate new talent—to take risks—and there were fewer layers of resistance on the path to publication. There was a time when writers like Cormac McCarthy could subsist for decades without literary agents at all. There was a time when editors did read the slush, found a manuscript they liked, told their bosses, and rushed it to publication. The analog literary world, for all its problems—let’s not handwave away racism or sexism—was far nimbler than the one found today. In the fall of 1919, a 23-year-old from Minnesota could have his manuscript accepted for publication at one of the larger American houses and see it in bookstores by the spring of 1920, and he could become a sensation; this only happened because one editor, a young man named Maxwell Perkins, was permitted to gamble on a new kind of book, the campus novel—and so the world got to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Metropolitan Review has no publishing house—one day!—but I’ve tried, as best I can, to at least escape the glacial pace of the contemporary world of letters. No promises, of course, since we’ve got a limited number of slots and are already booked out for many months ahead of time and small outfits have their share of stumbles. We do the best we can.

Do the parties matter? Sure. They aren’t everything, but every young magazine, I believe, should throw a lot of them. The old ones should, too. Nothing can replace the energy of a bunch of human beings in a room, sober or drunk, high or low, ideas flashing between them. There’s the fun, of course, of putting a name to a face. And there’s the bid at scene-creation, which most literary movements have made at some point. Performative, sure, but it’s not as if literature can’t be performative, or isn’t. One needn’t wait for the neo-Harold Blooms to dispense with decrees of canonization, either. One makes history by making it. Waiting around for any kind of approval, if such approval can even be said to exist anymore, makes little sense. I at least learned that over the last decade. It’s true that gatekeepers haven’t disappeared; it’s true, also, that one needn’t keep ramming up against gates again and again when there’s opportunities to build different kinds of houses, different sorts of compounds. Naturally, I am sure, The Metropolitan Review will be accused of gatekeeping; that course of events might be impossible to head off. What I do hope to do, however, is retain the publication’s openness to new talent. It’s a sad day when any magazine or publishing house willingly gives up the vanguard.

We are very New York, in one sense, but many of our top writers come from elsewhere, as do most of our editors. The name of the publication is meant to invoke a certain kind of Big City glamour, since there’s so much that’s aspirational about a city. We are not simply for the city, if we like to party there. TMR ranges all over the place, as it should. There’s a city aspect in the sense that it can be a glorious cacophony, so many different voices and ideas and arguments, forever resisting standardization. The writer needs a place where they can breathe, where they can be themselves. I’ve always bristled at house styles and it’s why TMR refuses to impose one. This used to be confusing to people, though I don’t think it is anymore. That’s the democratic spirit of magazine—we’re for taste and for talent, and we’re not going to throttle it. If we really do, I hope you’ll let us know.

And don’t forget to make yourself known on May 11. I’ll see you there.

I am very excited to announced Quadrant Magazine, one of the large literary magazines in Australia, has published a review of my new novel, Colossus. Hugh Blanton writes that “Colossus earns its grand title. . . Family secrets are nothing new to family saga novels, but I don’t think I’ve ever read one with such diabolical ingenuity.”

High praise! Preorder my novel now—you’ll like it, I promise—and come celebrate with me on May 11. I’ll be in Manhattan with Shadi Hamid, and you really don’t want to miss this launch.

Three full months have passed since Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor. It’s been a more successful run than his detractors would ever admit—state cash secured for a childcare expansion, clean streets after a miserable winter, the expediting of street safety improvements—with plenty of challenges ahead, including a budget gap that must be closed and the threatened reduction of the city’s credit rating. Mamdani remains popular, and city government, following four shambolic years of Eric Adams, seems to work. I do not know what the future holds and governing New York is an inordinate challenge for anyone, let alone a 34-year-old newcomer who once managed my State Senate campaign. Once the city and state budget seasons pass, we’ll have a stronger idea of what the immediate fiscal future of the city looks like.

In the meantime, there’s politics. Of late, I’ve been thinking more and more about Mamdani’s most intriguing endorsement, one that is either going to cement him as the major power broker in New York or deal him a significant blow. Mamdani is backing Claire Valdez, a 36-year-old state assemblyman, in an open Democratic primary to fill the congressional seat being vacated by Nydia Velázquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress. The June primary for the 7th Congressional District will be the first purely political test for Mamdani since he won his smashing victory over Andrew Cuomo last year. Velázquez, who is retiring after more than 30 years in Congress, is decidedly not supporting Valdez. She has offered her full backing—what Donald Trump would call her “complete and total endorsement”—to Antonio Reynoso, the 42-year-old Brooklyn borough president. She’s been openly fuming that Mamdani went against her, not only refusing to endorse Reynoso but pushing Valdez, a DSA member who was only elected to the Assembly in 2024 and didn’t move to New York until she was an adult, into the race.

In addition to Velázquez, Reynoso has won many major endorsements: Attorney General Letitia James, the Working Families Party, and several significant labor unions, including the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, 32BJ, and DC 37. The district’s progressive city council members are in his corner, too. On paper, Reynoso should win, and win big. Mamdani-haters have every right to salivate.

So what is Mamdani thinking? Is he actually going to get embarrassed this June?

Read more

Our Culture named my new novel, Colossus, as one of the most anticipated releases of the spring. You should anticipate it, and buy what Library Journal has called a “challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man.” Preorder it now.

A writer is forever at risk of hubris. A writer plays god, after all; he or she is a shaper of reality, a giddy or miserable tyrant, the sole purveyor of whatever currents pass through the brain and onto the page. And the writer-critic is no better—conventional fiction is audacious enough, but to render judgment upon judgement? To decree what is high, what is low, or to attempt to render reality with that critic’s scalpel, that ranging mind’s eye? Oh, no. What an invitation for trouble.

Yet the critic, and criticism largely, persists. The financial structures that once made criticism a full-time, middle-class profession have crumbled, and this is to be lamented. We need book, film, and music critics. We need a far healthier media ecosystem. A staff writer might take a risk, knowing their employer will back them up, whereas the precarious freelancer will fear offending a future editor who could turn off the commission spigot. This dynamic can’t be ignored. At the same juncture, there’s a kind of dullness, even rot, that can be found in some criticism, the writer with a sinecure being plenty susceptible. Publications, if not helmed by ambitious people, can limit range and experimentation; they can make the writer smaller than she needs to be. That is the liberatory aspect of Substack. A writer is confronted with a blank slate and doesn’t need to endure meditation. All tools for communication are there.

What I can declare, in these early months of 2026, is that we’ve begun to encounter a new form of nonfiction writing. Like the New Journalism of the 1960s, it attempts to—and often succeeds at—expanding the horizons of a much older form. I am calling it New Cultural Criticism. Today, the New Journalists are best remembered for importing the techniques of novel-writing and fiction into reportage. Their number includes Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin, and Hunter S. Thompson. These writers didn’t necessarily identify themselves as New Journalists and the term itself could be applied rather loosely. No one was absolutely sure where it came from. It’s important to emphasize how much form and economics impacted the rise of New Journalism; it was the height of the famed and well-funded magazines, Esquire and New York in particular, and editors like Harold Hayes and Clay Felker who were willing to recruit talented writers and let them rumble onward for many thousands of words, seeking truth as they saw fit. It was a strange, rebellious time, a confluence of good fortune—the magazine business, funded with print advertising, was never stronger—and a fizzing counterculture that rewarded intellectual adventure. The era was never repeated.

The New Cultural Critics working in the 2020s do not enjoy the same fruits. They are not rich and they are not famous. Many of them have day jobs. In a sense, their pursuit of the writing craft is purer, because there is little reward beyond the act itself and the audience that might follow. The magazine I co-founded, The Metropolitan Review, has been an incubator of the New Cultural Criticism, but I can’t claim full credit for making this sort of writing possible. It was happening, already, on Substack, and the talent was out there in front of me. I am a writer myself, of course, and in my role as editor-in-chief, I conceive of myself as something like an old-school baseball manager, crafting lineups and tinkering with the rotation and maybe swinging a trade but ultimately finding success only because it’s the rest of the talent getting up to bat and smacking long doubles in the gap. A manager is only as great as his players; Joe Torre was viewed, mostly, as a managerial failure before receiving the blessing of the dynastic New York Yankees. I feel, in my editorial role, I am blessed with so much talent around me, especially since mainstream, macrocultural institutions are weakened and don’t take as much interest in cultivating new voices.

Just as the New Journalists did not necessarily huddle together and hang a shingle that declared themselves “new,” the New Cultural Critics aren’t identifying themselves in this manner; they don’t live in the same cities or even belong to the same generation. The New Cultural Critics I am identifying here—and this accounting is far from exhaustive—range in age from thirty to fifty. Some are younger Millennials, some are in the heart Gen X. What they share, ultimately, is a sensibility. Here are a few examples to digest: Mo Digg’s “Stop the Stream”; Daniel Falatko’s “God Is in the Algorithm”; Naomi Kanakia’s “The New Yorker Offered Him a Deal”; Alexander Sorondo’s “The Last Contract”; Henry Begler’s “Runaround Sue”; Chris Jesu Lee’s “Asian American Psycho”; and Sam Jennings’ “Towards an Alternative Canon of Pop”. These writers are not the only New Cultural Critics working and these are not the only proper NCC pieces that have been produced over the last year, but these are some of the very best. (Retroactively, I might include my 2022 essay on the Beach Boys in the above rundown; I see a New Cultural thrust in the work now.)

Now, what is it? What binds these writers, many of whom, unlike the New Journalists, do not live in New York City? The New Cultural Critics approach art—whether it be literature, music, film, or television—in a way that is not so different than the New Journalists, importing the techniques of fiction into cultural criticism. This is not unheard of, but it’s quite uncommon. There is a sense, in many of these essays, of narrative and even character. There is evidence, in some of them, of rising and falling actions, of threads converging in such a way that defy conventional critical analysis. The New Cultural Critic summons the obsessiveness of the novelist—the devotion to character—and is comfortable with moral ambiguity. If there can be a worshipful aspect to New Cultural Criticism—so many words spilled on a 26-year-old rapper or a famed twentieth century critic or the curious history of the New Yorker—it is only fan service in the sense that the critic, first, must care. But if the New Cultural Criticism doesn’t exist to tear apart or excoriate a person or text or trend, it does not hide from the warts, blemishes, and darkness of the subject at hand. Like the New Journalists of yore, the New Cultural Critics don’t shy away from the first person or injecting themselves, fully, into the essay. The author’s ego, sturdy or fragile, is never far away.

Allow me to be straightforward: it is very difficult to imagine any New Cultural Criticism that is less than 5,000 words. Length and breadth are the New Cultural Critic’s calling cards. Excess, if it’s even to be called that, is virtually essential to performing the task. It is not so much a devotion to verbal pyrotechnics as it is the overwhelming desire to track down every last tangent and lead, to unlock the trapdoors of history and dive straight through and see, exactly, where the essay might go. New Cultural Critics write to match the vertiginous immensity of their subjects. The criticism might only work if there’s a subject worth this sort of effort. There are, of course, exceptions to all rules, and I am not here handing down commandments from on high. But consider a few of the essays cited. Kanakia’s widely read survey of the New Yorker exceeds 17,000 words. Falatko’s exploration of the legend of NBA YoungBoy breaks 11,000, as does Alexander Sorondo’s excavation of William Vollman’s career and his last quest to publish an epic CIA novel. The other examples all exist in the 5,000 to 10,000-word range, which allows for a certain depth that is not possible in prototypical criticism. Here is how Begler begins his essay on Sontag: “She was the Girl from the Golden West, born on Long Island but coming to awareness first among the red rocks and tumbleweeds of Tucson, then in Sherman Oaks, where she played World’s Smartest Valley Girl at North Hollywood High. There was always something different about Susan Sontag, some mysterious inner drive that was nowhere to be found in her glamorous, alcoholic mother, in her long-dead father (a fur trader in China), or anywhere else in the family tree.” She enters the reader’s consciousness as if she were a work of fiction herself.

Now, read Falatko describing the unsettling undercurrents of NBA YoungBoy’s music:

Which brings us to The Devil. There’s a reason YoungBoy appeals to so many white kids, from the suburbs to the trailer parks, for just as a hellhound stalked Robert Johnson’s trail, there are many such hounds of hell chasing our YoungBoy. This music is as unsettling as it is melodic. All the classic subject matter of the primal side of rock n’ roll and heavy metal is fully present here, especially within the tracks where YoungBoy lets loose his non-singing, non-pain music alter ego and simply raps. This kid can absolutely rap his ass off, no doubt. This isn’t the “lyrical miracle” type of rapping so popular with the kinds of white folk who play Wordle and search for double entendres in Kendrick lyrics. This is machine gun bursts of hyper-specific violence. YoungBoy is not concerned with bars, filling up verses with words upon words upon words until they’re top heavy, unstoppable monoliths.

There’s an all-encompassing quality, an unstinting drive, that separates a piece like this from any that would be found in a magazine or culture website over the last decade. Beauty and ugliness can be held together; New Cultural Criticism defies, fully, the cancel culture paradigm of the last decade, which has sorted so much wearisome critique into the liberal or conservative lanes. The New Cultural Critics do not seek out to condemn or destroy; they eschew, entirely, Manichean thinking. New Cultural Criticism, like effective fiction, is comfortable with representing an artist or a work of art in all its startling, and occasionally disturbing, complexity. Length, here, is usually a requirement because the New Cultural Critic needs time to figure out where, exactly, the story might land. Typical cultural criticism defines its target right away. An artist is going to be celebrated or obliterated. The critic knows. The act of writing, then, is arranging facts and flourishes to reach a predetermined conclusion. How can I best make my case? It’s not that New Cultural Criticism is devoid of premeditation. Rather, it’s that this approach is not confined, solely, by what is imagined at the very start of the project. In this way, a New Cultural Critic is like a smart journalist. The best journalists allow their reporting to take them through a story and do not decide, well in advance, what ends up on the page. There’s an old exercise where a journalist crafts a lead paragraph before he begins reporting and then writes another lead paragraph once the reporting is done, comparing how similar or different they might be. If he did his job well, the two leads are not alike. The New Cultural Critic permits the writing journey—the acts of assessing, excavating, and feeling—to determine what shape the piece of criticism takes. In this way, there are no obvious heroes and villains. The political agenda, if there is one, is never very straightforward.

Form can govern content. The New Cultural Critics are creatures of the internet, since the strictures of print—the imposition of hard word counts—do not exist. They are also creatures of a very particular kind of internet, one a bit wild and wooly and set up in direct opposition to the streams, TikTok and Instagram and attention span-sapping social media. It can be argued they are drawing, to a degree, on the pre-social media internet, when blogs reigned and the writing styles tended to be more raffish and freewheeling. But that internet also rewarded brevity. Blog posts were bite-sized dispatches fired off multiple times per day. This helped grow readership but lent the writing and criticism an ephemerality that allowed it to lose the war to Facebook and Twitter. While plenty of great magazine pieces from the midcentury are still circulated, either studied in classrooms or at least preserved in books or on the internet, it is difficult to think of a single blog post or essay from a blog like Gawker’s original run that is worth pouring over, assuming the archive can even be accessed. Gawker was highly influential; this can’t be argued. The writing itself, however, rarely made its bid for history. The blog post, by its nature, was much more disposable.

The New Cultural Critics have a greater opportunity to reach into the future, to see their standalone critical essays, like important books, enjoyed or argued with in the next decade and beyond. Sorondo on Vollmann or Begler on Sontag or Falatko on NBA YoungBoy or Diggs on the “dream economy” are all too significant, already, to completely vanish into the ether. In part, this is because a new law of the internet, at least on Substack, is becoming apparent: readers make the effort for the writers who have plainly made the effort. Time is precious, and it must be spent well. A work of New Cultural Criticism is a mental exercise unto itself, and the reader is prepared to flex and strain. Both hard metrics and vibes demonstrate this. In the end, the writing of the New Cultural Critics battles back successfully against the ephemerality of our times, what Neil Postman once called the “peek-a-boo” world. The writing might even be the antidote. Let’s hope there’s much more of it to come.

A few years back, I used to publish capsule book reviews on this Substack. I miss doing it, but the reality is my schedule has made that harder to do and The Metropolitan Review now exists, so at least I have a publication that is reviewing books, something I used to plead for from the media. In addition to the capsule reviews, I also shared a list of Substacks I was reading. I thought it was a good way to use my own list to boost other people I believed were worth your time.

Today, I am going to share with you three Substacks, in particular, I think you should subscribe to. These are not the only three. In fact, by limiting myself to three, I can guarantee this will be a multi-part series, since there are many, many Substacks worthy of the spotlight. I want to get to as many of them as I can.

The internet can be a busy place. Let me be your guide. I promise, if you subscribe to these, you won’t go wrong.

Vanessa Ogle, Comedy Distant

Vanessa Ogle, TMR’s Senior Editor and Poetry Editor, wears many hats. She’s an accomplished essayist, poet, and educator, and she writes extremely well on class issues. Today, though, I want to point you to her latest venture, her humor and satire Substack Comedy Distant. Humor writing still isn’t prevalent enough on Substack. A lot of people, including yours truly, are far too self-serious. In her fist pieces, Vanessa skewers both improv and workplace culture (“I’m replacing your badge photo with your LinkedIn photo because you actually look normal there,” the boss says to his beleaguered employee) and it’s all darkly and wickedly funny. Vanessa’s a tremendous talent and has a lot more coming at Comedy Distant, so I suggest you get on the ground floor and subscribe now. Imagine the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, if only they were actually funny. I am very excited to see where Comedy Distant goes.

Alexander Sorondo, big reader bad grades.

Alexander Sorondo is a young novelist from Miami and the author of the excellent Cubafruit. His Substack is one of the most striking and original out there—part memoir, part literary reportage, written out in a numbered form that I’ve hardly seen anywhere else. A good portion of the Substack is dedicated to his reflections on life as a grocery store clerk, where he can bitingly funny and strikingly poignant at the same time. You may have caught him belting out his reported epics for TMR, and I just want to add that big reader bad grades is just as good, the enthralling compliment to the work he’s done for the magazine. When the new Sorondo drops, you won’t want to miss it. He’s a singular American writer.

Mo Diggs, Cross Current.

What can I say about Mo Diggs? I once called him the Brian Wilson of culture writing, the sort of guy who sees what others don’t see. If Mo is submitting to TMR—like Sorondo, he’s now a contributing writer—the mantra around HQ (a.k.a. the inside of my head) is let Mo cook. The man is ahead of the curve, and invents his own curves. My recent writing on “personality exhaustion” (a term Mo coined) and the anti-human ascendance could not have happened without Mo. A Mo essay on Substack is a cultural, political, and historical tour-de-force—few writers in America can bind together so many different threads—and it’s the kind of writing you have to sit with for many days, that marinates inside of you. Read him on the lack of modern cultural greatness or the rise of personal media, for a taste. Mo can pull you beyond the left vs. right binary while making sense of our disorienting politics. Go get on Mo’s frequency.

My new novel, Colossus, arrives at the end of April. Dana Spiotta, National Book Award finalist, had this to say about it: “The slick, rich, right-wing pastor Teddy Starr is a charismatic confidence man in the American vein (part Elmer Gantry, part Jay Gatsby, part Donald Trump). As fast talking as he is, as amoral as he is, Barkan gives him a fascinating, complex inner life. This thrilling novel skewers the cynicism of our current moment, but it also strikingly renders the human drama of fathers and sons, the tension between legacy and possibility.” Sounds good? Order it now.

When did reality start to outstrip fiction for good? Philip Roth believed it was all happening around 1961. “The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality,” Roth wrote in Commentary, when he was not yet thirty years old. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” Gazing back more than sixty years, we can find some of this lament quaint. Roth cited Charles Van Doren, who cheated on the quiz show Twenty-One, as one of his imagination-shattering tribunes, along with Dwight Eisenhower, embodiment of the staid postwar consensus. (Roth was prescient, at least, about tossing Roy Cohn into the mix. Perhaps no single man is more responsible for the contemporary nightmare than Cohn, who was merely, in Roth’s era, the ravenous McCarthy bulldog.) But the sentiment holds. Each successive decade, it seems, has driven the practice of writing fiction further to the margins of American life. The novel is far from dead, and will probably not perish until human civilization goes with it, but each passing years offer a new assault. What might be most alienating, as a novelist working in the 2020s, is the apparent need to justify what it is you do. Some understand it—most, maybe—but there’s a segment of the populace, young and old alike, who will always comprehend nonfiction far more. Easy enough to declare you produce essays or journalism—you’re in the “reality” business—and harder, in conversation, to explain that you are a fabulist for the sake of art. Why? And if they might be, in theory, an appreciator of the novel, they come in for a Rothian lament. Isn’t life weird enough today? Why bother imagining? It’s not like any novelist could dream up Donald Trump. Even our wonderful twentieth century auteurs—in whatever medium they might have practiced—failed to anticipate a terrorist attack on the scale of September 11th, or at least such spectacular and strange violence. There are no fictional airplanes flying into the Twin Towers before 2001. Any portrayal of future New York City in film or fiction before that day inevitably preserves the towers. They were supposed to stand a thousand years.

Yet the writers persist. The novels keep appearing. Roth’s Commentary essay preceded almost his entire literary career. “As a literary creation, as some novelist’s image of a certain kind of human being, he might have seemed believable, but I myself found that on the TV screen, as a real public image, a political fact, my mind balked at taking him in,” Roth wrote of Richard Nixon, who wouldn’t become president for another seven years. How we balk at the real-life phantasmagoria before us today. It is enough to make any writer of fiction decide it isn’t worth it or, on the balance, it’s better to retreat—better to duck inward, paddle in the soup of autofictional neuroses, and gesture mildly at the madness out the window. What may offend me most about artificial intelligence is not that it can do a job I can—the chess grandmaster doesn’t fret that Deep Blue defeated Kasparov back in 1997—or may, someday, unemploy me, but that it’s so committed to robbing human agency. The promise is that AI can think for you, even dream for you. In a recent essay in Harper’s, Sam Kriss interviewed a pitiful young man named Roy Lee, a would-be AI mogul of some sort, and all he seemed to care about was taking the friction out of life. “I relish challenges where you have fast iteration cycles and you can see the rewards very quickly,” he told Kriss. The man read fiction until he was eight, and then found “classical books and I couldn’t understand, like, the bullshit Huckleberry, whatever fuck bullshit, and it made me bored.” He preferred, Kriss wrote, “online fan fiction about people having sex with Pokémon.” Not everyone can develop a taste for fiction, “classical” or no, but what vexed the young man most was that fiction vexed in the first place. It challenged him, forced him to think, and didn’t disgorge ready answers. AI is especially popular among college students because they’ve realized, to secure passing grades, they can offload reasoning and deduction to a machine. A machine can be a person for them. The work of personhood is, perhaps, too great a struggle—too much of an enigma—to engage with for a lengthy period of time.

In the age we’ve entered—this machine age, AI age, whatever it might be—the purpose of fiction is no less essential than it was a century ago. In fact, in these post-analog times, it might be what is required most. Not for a moral purpose—not to be a way to make “better” or more “empathetic” people—but for the need to reclaim, fully, personhood. The coming struggle might not be left vs. right or some other searing binary but human vs. anti-human. The anti-humanists are, for now, ascendant. They are interested, theoretically, in human augmentation, a cybernetic transcendence, but the greater purpose seems to be human replacement, with only a select few—a certain billionaire elect—presiding over the mass of machines. “It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Sam Altman, the OpenAI founder, said recently. “It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took, like, the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever, you know, you took.”

“The fair comparison,” he continued, is “if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question, versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.”

Capitalism will always prize efficiency; efficiency, in isolation, is far from evil. Neither is technology—we do not want to live bereft of electricity, penicillin, or even the computer. Digital entertainments have their purpose, too. What makes this decade different is the desire of this new billionaire class to deny human beings their intellectual and creative essence. It might not happen, but that is the dream. That is what they are yearning towards. Some are more earnest about it than others, or more honest. And the production of novels—the act itself of writing fiction—is alien to these pursuits. What separates a human being from a machine? Consciousness. And what is consciousness? What has the human being been able to do for thousands of years that other animals, largely, cannot? Imagine. The imagination is the greatest gift we have—what’s forged the cathedrals and pyramids, the paintings and poetry, and, yes, even the machines. The automobile and airplane were works of imagination. The novel, in particular, is an imagination art. It flummoxes the Roy Lees of the world, this new rising class, because it is both fundamentally human and asks so much of a human, a reader. The writer of fiction and the reader of fiction are entered, together, into a relationship of the imagination. This relationship can, quite literally, transcend space and time. The writer, long dead, can still commune with the reader through their words, and readers themselves can span the centuries. Both the printed page and the internet can offer their own forms of immortality.

The novel still comes without instructions. As a reader, you might be offered descriptions, but it’s up to you to interpret them—to properly world-build. Your Yoknapatawpha County appears differently in your mind than my Yoknapatawpha County. Cinema can impose far more on the audience. All visual media does this. All of it, to varying degrees, is more passive than fiction, which asks for the fully-fired imagination and the suspension of belief. Journalism is vital for a democracy but most of it is not art—not even close. New Journalism can reach those heights, if there is an inherent danger to that approach because journalism, at its core, demands facts, and facts can run into conflict with art. A fact does not have an aesthetic. The superior aesthetic might be, in fact, untrue. Journalism can be stenography or it can be more interpretive, analytic, and investigative. Still, in those formulations, it does not attempt the higher planes of fiction. Much of nonfiction doesn’t. Literature has the spark of the divine because it is so inherently unexplainable. One can read scores of writing on how to craft a novel or properly consume literature, but there are lacunae inherent to all these explanations; there is a mysticism to the art of fiction that can’t be explicated, what Martin Amis had called the “white magic.” The communing of mind, body, and currents, the flow of image to fingertips, the dream of these creatures in your skull becoming transmuted into a language, maybe English, maybe another, and then this language is the mechanism that produces fresh images for the reader, fresh dreams. And the language, of course, is an aesthetic. Language is never merely utilitarian; language is art, language paints and is the painting. All of it is a miracle.

Fiction, the great imagination art, cannot be defeated as long as humanity exists. Both literally, in the furtherance of modern civilization, and in the current long war against the anti-humanists. The anti-humanists, themselves, have imaginations—AI is its own dream, derived in part from science fiction—but they are repelled by both the indulgences of fiction and its relative unruliness, its inability to offer quantifiable dividends. Why dwell within an author’s world? Why dream if you aren’t making money? Why must a writer dedicate so many hours to a craft that may not be popular or remunerative? The literary novelist, like the ancient monk, toils alone—even in groups, in scenes, the act of writing is solitary—and the only promised reward is the fueling of a spirit, the feeling that, on the level of blood, an important task was performed. As a writer, I, of course, conceive of the reader—anticipate the reader, hope for the reader’s approval—and chase worldly rewards, whatever they may be, but that simply isn’t enough, especially now. You have to want to perform the imagination art. You have to believe in it. You have to love it, or at least like it enough. Even those who suffer through writing do it because of that belief. It must matter. The writer who allows AI to perform the writing for him has lost that belief. He is an apostate. He is claiming religion while having none at all. He is a liar, a liar of the mind and the soul.

The anti-humanists insist AI is conscious. It is conscious now or will be soon. This is like offering a child a toy dog and telling him, repeatedly, the dog is real. Doesn’t it look like a dog? Can’t it bark if you press the button? The simulacra, for the anti-humanists, is always enough because they have experienced a form of spirit-death. Or they are unconsciously hoping, in time, to arrive there, to that stage. It takes a special kind of human—an unusual segment of the species—to long for the obsolescence of their own, to be so against their own. To resent, fully, flesh and blood and brain matter, the stunning complexities of human consciousness and all, in the past millennia, that has been achieved. To make art, humans have never required more than the basics of the machine world: a paintbrush, a chisel, a word-processor. The hierarchy has always been well understood. The machine is the tool of the human being to enhance the experience of being human. Tools are subordinate. Now, AI asks the human to be subordinate to the machine. Or, more accurately, AI asks nothing because it cannot “ask” anything. It is not alive. The anti-humanists make the ask. They’ve grown rich this way, and they’re rotted from within, like Dorian Gray. Except, unlike Dorian, they aren’t even very beautiful on the outside. They cannot entrance or seduce. They are, as a class, froggish and malformed, their mannerisms glitchy. They can’t willingly march us anywhere. They’ll have to do it by force.

I don’t write fiction as an act of rebellion. I do it because I love it and it gives my life meaning, and I believe, through my novels, I can make art and achieve beauty. I can exist in my highest form, as a worshipper might when in prayer. But it is fine, too, to conceive of fiction as rebellion. The more surreal, or hyperreal, our world becomes, the more fiction will need to be the ballast. The more we will need to duck away from the slopstreams, the smartphones, the machines that, like soma pumped into our bloodstreams, steal our agency away. Can it be done? On this score, I tend towards optimism. It is not optimism grounded in the actions the anti-humanists might take. I do not believe in Sam Altman, Roy Lee, or anyone else like them. Their intentions are to make money, unthinkable amounts of it, and they have no second or third order concerns. Rather, my hope resides with everyone else. The human beings who have still, in this decade, not forfeited themselves, not offloaded the act of imagination. Not long ago, there was an AI-generated video of a battle between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt that looked realistic enough and drove a few commentators to declare that moviemaking as we knew it was over. What more could there be, now that perfect images of celebrities could be created almost instantly, with passable audio? What was left for the human being? It was an infantile conception of art, mistaking, again, the simulacra for the greater purpose, why we strive to paint or sing or write or direct films in the first place. We do not care about a film because a computer has created a representation of Tom Cruise in front of us. We care about Joel in Risky Business, Maverick in Top Gun, and Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible series. Brad Pitt is not AI IP; he’s Tyler Durden, Aldo Raine, and Cliff Booth. Both men look like they look, but that’s beside the point. AI enthusiasts wouldn’t understand this—not really—because they don’t grasp the vitality of the human narrative. An actor tells a story on a screen. A machine can write a story and a machine can generate actors in the same way a machine can play chess. A chess fan isn’t less appreciative of Magnus Carlsen because a machine can perform his role. Chess retains its human dimension. Art will, too.

Humans are a story-telling species. Animals have consciousness, animals can feel pain, and the smart animals can communicate in the proximate way people can, but animals do not tell stories. Animal do not conceive art. It is art, and the quest for narrative, that separates the human from all else; for many thousands of years, this was a cause for celebration. Now the anti-humanists hope to stamp it out—slowly, then quickly. The machine will draw, the machine will act, the machine will write. The machine will perform an imitation of imagination, a weak echo, and its creators will hope the human audience will not care either way. That is the darkest outcome: not a world where, Matrix-like, artificial intelligence rises up, enslaves us, and saps our bioenergy to power their own dystopia. The actual outcome, if Altman and his ilk have their way, will be far more banal. Instead of cyborgs, we will have slopborgs, diminished, slothful human beings who have offered themselves up to AI so completely they let machines think and dream for them. Their critical and cultural sensibilities wither away. There is no audience, anymore, for any sort of art. Instead of the Matrix pods, humans will merely stay home, rotting in the digital abyss.

We aren’t there yet. People still do read, make music, watch films, and visit art museums. There is a culture, high and middle and low, even if it’s under attack. There’s an awareness, too, of the cultural and spiritual sickness of anti-humans. The AI revolution is not very popular. None of its progenitors are celebrated in a way Steve Jobs might have been, when Americans still had great faith in their tech innovators. Writers endure and readers endure. Print book sales are not in decline. Neither is live music. The imagination has an audience and a market. The question will be whether, in the next half century, it can keep both. We have to believe it will. That belief will come with friction; the stakes will grow ever higher. Much is on the line for the AI oligarchs. If enough of us do not take to their creations and make them economically viable, they will be out many billions, maybe begging for federal bailouts. They’ll battle to avoid that outcome as much as they possibly can. This next decade will be pivotal, for both the anti-humanists asserting their market position and the humanists trying to lay claim to what is sacred—and what has driven the progress of human civilization for thousands of years. We will have to preserve our right to imagine.

To the detriment of my wallet, I don’t paywall all that much at this Substack, Political Currents. I will, from time to time, but my heart just isn’t in it. I like people reading what I write. I don’t enjoy taking anyone’s money. I’m not ending paywalls, by any means, but my goal is to keep a good deal of the writing I do for all 22,300 of you free.

I’ve got several ideas for big essays that I think you’ll like. Right now, I’m at work on a larger project that has taken time away from this Substack and I hope to finish that project in the spring. I’ll have more to say on that soon.

In the meantime, on April 28th, my new novel, Colossus, will be published. It’s about a pastor in the Midwest who harbors a dark secret, and I’m told it’s got shades of Roth, Updike, and Richard Ford. Library Journal calls it a “challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man” and the writer Matthew Specktor, one of the best out there, has said it is “a broad interrogation of the American psyche in its myriad conflicting parts. The result is masterful, as thrillingly devious—and as brilliantly controlled—as Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.”

If you enjoyed Glass Century, you’ll really like Colossus. It’s shorter, but no less ambitious. I view as part of a loosely planned trilogy interrogating the American condition. Colossus is set in the 2020s, and grapples with our current mood.

Ok, so here’s the deal. If you find yourself enjoying this newsletter, you should preorder my novel. Preorders are incredibly important for a writer. If I get more preorders, more bookstores take my book and more reviewers will start to care about it. The momentum starts here.

Get it from Bookshop, get it from Barnes & Noble, get it from the publisher’s website, order through your local bookstore or, if you gotta, head to Amazon.

If you’ve preordered already, ignore me. If not, please do it now.

If you’re a reader of fiction, you won’t be disappointed. If you’re not, I think you’ll be hooked anyway. At the minimum, ordering the book is a nice and cheap way to support me, assuming you’re reading this Substack for free. A hardcover, after shipping, is still running you under $40. An annual subscription here is $60. Order a book and help make my livelihood possible.

In early May, I’m going to have a big launch party in New York. I also plan a mini-tour. If you’re interested in hosting me or having an event, get in touch. Just reply to this email.

See you soon! (And buy Colossus)

My new novel, Colossus, arrives at the end of April. Library Journal calls it a “challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man.” I agree. Please preorder it now. You won’t regret it.

I confess, at the outset, I won’t spend as much time on this essay as I’d like. I am under pressure to finish a nonfiction book by the spring, and that eats up a lot of the time I have for more exploratory and analytical writing. Such is life; I don’t complain, and the project is exciting. What I will offer, in lieu of the many thousands of words I’d prefer to disgorge, are a few thoughts about artificial intelligence.

If you’d like to categorize me, I am an AI “skeptic.” This does not mean I am a luddite or not a futurist. I want to be awed by human advancement and achievement. I want to see diseases eradicated, new vertiginous cities arise, and planets settled, if the latter is not plausible. (Sadly, everything I’ve read about Mars tells me humans will never, ever live there.) I very much want to be excited by tomorrow. By disposition, I am an optimist; I believe the United States is going to survive Donald Trump, and may well thrive into the 2030s, 2040s, and 2050s. I believe humanity is going to exist in five hundred or even a thousand years from now. I believe we have the technology to adapt to climate disaster and, when the dust settles in the deep future, we probably will.

That all being said, I am not impressed by AI. This does not mean I do not take the threat of AI seriously. The tech is quite strong, already, when it comes to automating away lower-level white collar work. I believe many workers, those at the beginning of their careers especially, are going to suffer. Corporations will, one way or another, hire less. I don’t see much upside to this. It strikes me as a version of what happened to heavy industry in the second half of the twentieth century, when globalization and automation crushed cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Gary, the steel colossus of Indiana. There was upside to this immiseration—just not for anyone who lived there. Consumer products became cheaper, factories boomed in poorer countries, and the American economy, on the balance, grew. The deindustrialization of America was one of the great tragedies of the last century, but I understand why the professional managerial class and a certain kind of pundit might defend the carnage.

With AI, such a bounty does not seem to exist. Instead, there will simply be more unemployment, as companies trim headcounts because they can automate functions away or they anticipate, in the near-term, new developments that will make the human worker obsolete. Were AI promising Edward Bellamy-style utopic socialism—enormous amounts of leisure time, a social safety net to ensure no American ever wants for housing and healthcare—I might be more intrigued by the future ahead. But while I can’t, truly, take all the prognostications of an imminent AGI or “singularity” arrival all that seriously, I do think there are going to be employment challenges that the federal government, sadly, won’t be up to solving. The current government, at least, wouldn’t dream of a UBI program or a jobs guarantee. Americans will be left to fend for themselves, as they usually are. The politics of it all might grow ugly.

I couch all of this only with the understanding that AI, as of now, appears to have nothing approaching a plausible business model. OpenAI, for example, has said it will burn through $115 billion by 2029. Anthropic thinks it will be profitable by 2028, but still loses billions of dollars. Theoretically, there might be enough businesses and individuals who pay hundreds of dollars a month for AI products to make these companies solvent without infinite venture capital, but the real economic riddle is the data center. How do you keep affording to build them? How do you keep getting permission to build them? Amazon alone wants to spend $200 billion this year on data centers, along with satellites and other tech related to AI. Alphabet has said it would spend as much as $185 billion in 2026, and Meta said last week that its capital expenses, in large part to support AI, could hit $135 billion. Investors, finally, seem to be starting to ask the more difficult questions. When, exactly, will this all pay off? What can profitability possibly look like with spending that’s this titanic, unlike any we’ve witnessed in history? Data centers are still opening, but it’s no longer a guarantee that a tech behemoth can roll up into a town, make a few fast promises, and win political support for new construction. More and more states are pushing for moratoriums on data centers. What should worry tech leaders and investors is the nature of this opposition: in a deeply polarized age, it’s strikingly bipartisan. Local Republicans who might care less about environmental concerns than Democrats but they hate how data centers can drive up electricity bills and suck up water. Rural opposition has grown in states like Texas. Unlike the factories of old, they simply do not employ many people. In the abstract, Americans are fine enough with the existence of data centers. But like with many other issues, opinion shifts when one shows up nearby. There’s little evidence to suggest Americans will warm to data center expansion in the coming years unless they show they will not drive up utility costs and can employ a sufficient number of locals. There was plenty of tolerance for coal plants and textile mills when they lifted up enough townspeople into the middle-class.

Is this a bubble that’s going to spectacularly burst? I do not know. AI hopes it can follow the example of Amazon, which lost gobs of money for years—nowhere near as much as the AI giants, however—before turning handsome profits. That is one path forward, if there’s little to undergird it other than blind hope. Another path that is, in my view, more likely is the one OpenAI spoke out loud last year—one that, for a fleeting moment, terrified investors. Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, said several months ago that she thought the U.S. government should “backstop” her company’s aggressive AI investments. “The backstop, the guarantee, that allows the financing to happen, that can really drop the cost of the financing but also increase the loan-to-value, so the amount of debt that you can take on top of an equity portion,” she said. In short: what could amount to a federal government bailout for the debt AI companies take on to make their investments. Once it became clear this was effectively an admission that OpenAI might never actually be profitable, Friar and Altman scrambled to clarify that, in fact, they were not seeking a bailout. To some extent, the damage was done, if most AI evangelists pretend Friar never made the remarks in the first place. If, indeed, OpenAI cannot ultimately pay for its $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments, the entire industry may implode. Altman has lucrative deals with Nvidia, Amazon, and many others. “If we screw up and can’t fix it, we should fail, and other companies will continue on doing good work and servicing customers,” Altman said later. “That’s how capitalism works and the ecosystem and economy would be fine.”

That’s how it usually works. But my sense is, with AI, we may be entering new terrain, where the federal government might eventually view the technology as too vital in its cold war against China. Like the space race, with far less romance, the government might find itself fully in the AI business, to the wariness or even fury of the American taxpayer. As we learned in 2008, socialism is alive and well in America, but it exists mostly for the extraordinarily wealthy. Bailout packages can always be available for the richest corporations in need. The spending on AI is, collectively, unfathomably profligate, and some of the cash appears to be just swishing back and forth between Nvidia, the chipmaker, and companies like OpenAI. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft all have other core businesses to make the cash they lose on AI palatable, but Anthropic and OpenAI do not. If there’s no road to profitability and the U.S. government doesn’t arrive with a backstop, will both these companies crumble? Will Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta be content to keep burning cash on their AI investments? We do not know. The rubber, as they say, might hit the road sooner than these companies think.

There are romantic arguments to be made against AI—how it largely debases the arts and most creative endeavors—and I will be glad to make those in the future. For now, though, I prefer to remain in the realm of the dollar. I find that the philistines who most slavishly boost AI are most reachable this way. Or, at least, they are more likely to respond and engage, and bring their own math to the table. The numbers will add up, they yowl. They could very well understand what I don’t—that, in fact, there are endless streams of money just waiting to be had, that don’t rely on a gullible investor class or a government spooked by China. I am open to being proven wrong. In the meantime, I will wait and see what glories or destruction might be wrought. What makes AI such a challenge is that it has placed the American worker in an obvious bind. Either it is a success and we see the mass unemployment that those like Andrew Yang warn against—I do not dispute this is one possibility—or it fizzles, and we suffer the bursting of a bubble that cracks the economy like the dot com and housing crashes. The pop of an AI bubble, as satisfying as it might be to someone like me, is not something I particularly welcome because it’s going to take a great deal of the stock market with it. Recessions don’t help anyone. And neither do frenzies like these, with numbers that go up and up and up and defy base logic.

We race forward, into the dark. Perhaps that’s how it always was. What we can never approximate is the sheer confusion of history. How hard it might have been, for example, in 1942 to truly imagine what 1952 or 1962 looked like. We could be on the cusp of greatness, disaster, or something far more banal. The middling outcomes excite AI evangelists the least. They want you to believe that AI is a development on the order of electricity, indoor plumbing, and penicillin. They long for this great leap forward—to have the grand feeling of living at a pivot point of history, within the eye of the gyre—because the alternative is a bit more chilling: society will grind on as it is, with most of the frontiers settled. Apple has not innovated since the iPhone. Google still hasn’t blown open as many minds as it did when it introduced their search bar. Meta is coasting off the fumes of Facebook and the two savvy acquisitions it made more than a decade ago, WhatsApp and Instagram. In some sense, AI must “happen” because the oligarchs are, for the most part, bereft of other ideas. Elon Musk can dream of Mars all he wants, but mankind can’t live there. The surface is too inhospitable and will remain that way. We can settle for little moon colonies. Perhaps AI will start to cure a bunch of incurable diseases; that would be welcome, and I would never sniff at a medical breakthrough. We will never be immortal, but living a bit longer, in peace, would be nice. If Claude has any ideas about that, may Claude live long and prosper. If not, I’ve got better things to do with my day.

Both Zohran Mamdani and the New York Post are on a bit of a run. The former is the 34-year-old mayor of New York City and one of the most famous politicians on Earth. The latter is a tabloid newspaper that, amid endless turmoil in the industry, boasts one of the most popular news websites on the internet and makes enough cash for its owner, Rupert Murdoch, that a sister publication is now launching in California. The Post—not to be confused with the Washington Post, which is being gutted by its rapacious and bumbling owner, Jeff Bezos—is undeniably a success, and occupies an unusual and large position in the New York City media ecosystem. Its rival, the Daily News, has a much smaller headcount because its hedge fund ownership is refusing to invest in the newspaper, and the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal ripped up its New York section years ago. The New York Times is a juggernaut, but is still far more focused on national and international coverage. I have hope for the revamped City Hall bureau, which the star local reporter Sally Goldenberg recently joined; if their city coverage will improve, the Times is still not shifting back to the granular daily coverage of the five boroughs it was known for decades ago. There is no standalone Metro in print. There are hardly any city columnists left.

The Post, in this environment, can throw its weight around. Many New Yorkers need to read it to know, to some extent, what is happening in their city every day. The Post regular writes about the public schools, local politics, and various outer borough drama that the Times ignores. Its politics are a frothing, populist conservatism on local matters, and neoconservative when it comes to foreign affairs. The tabloid is furiously hawkish on Israel and hasn’t yet found a war it doesn’t like. Reflecting Murdoch’s own anguished relationship with Donald Trump, it has tried, at various points in the last decade, to break with the Republican king—Ron DeSantis was once DeFuture—only to return when it became clear the Republican base wasn’t done with Trump. The Post, politically, has always been canny. Its editors know Trump reads the newspaper regularly and they’ll never fall out of favor for too long. In the end, the Post is MAGA until better options come along.

Naturally, the Post despises New York liberals of all kinds. Their editors whack around the Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul. After boosting Andrew Cuomo early in his gubernatorial reign, they turned on him in the late 2010s and giddily led the charge when it became clear he was masking Covid deaths in nursing homes. They cheered when he resigned from office following his sexual harassment scandal. They were decidedly not thrilled when he decided to run for mayor again, and circled the wagons around Eric Adams, the only mayor in the last decade that had the editorial board’s buy-in for multiple years. For a period, the Post begged the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, to run for mayor. Finally, when it became obvious the only way to stop Mamdani was to elect Cuomo, the right-wing tabloid begrudgingly backed the former governor.

What was far less begrudging—naturally—was their war on Mamdani. A Muslim democratic socialist was a foil engineered for the Post in a lab somewhere. The Post relishes publishing alarming, red-baiting reporting on the Democratic Socialists of America, and once it became obvious Mamdani was gaining momentum, he made their front page repeatedly. As the Democratic nominee, as the mayor-elect, and as the new mayor, Mamdani has been subject to relentlessly negative coverage from the Post. For the Post, “Zo” is the rich boy Islamic communist who will destroy the city. He now, in their view, has blood on his hands because seventeen New Yorkers froze to death during a horrific cold snap that covered much of the Eastern United States. Minor scandals, to them, are major scandals. A distraught Cea Weaver naturally had the front page to herself in early January.

This kind of coverage, twelve years ago, did tangible damage to Bill de Blasio, the new progressive Democratic mayor. De Blasio rode into office on a raft of goodwill, taking over from the billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who had grown unpopular over his decision to force through a third term and radically escalate the number of stop-and-frisks the NYPD conducted. Unlike Bloomberg, de Blasio was a resident of the outer boroughs with a biracial family and a son in the public school system. He was cosmopolitan, even relatable. The Post, though, sniffed blood, and eagerly reported out and inflated every morsel of news that was unfavorable to de Blasio. Crime was very low, but any shooting or murder was a warning that the “bad old days” were just around the corner. Homelessness had plagued the city for decades but every vagrant was now a product of de Blasio’s failed state. De Blasio was an awkward, hectoring politician who made plenty of unforced errors, and he deserved his share of criticism. What made his mayoralty inarguably more challenging, however, was the constant opposition from the Post, which was able to successfully drive anti-de Blasio coverage in other outlets. Radio and local TV took their cues from the tabloid. It wasn’t uncommon for me, as a young reporter, to see the radio and TV reporters at City Hall leafing through the Post for story ideas.

Will Mamdani, my old campaign manager, fall victim to the same dynamic? Will the Post’s opposition slowly erode his support and make him, over the next few years, politically vulnerable? Will they claim another scalp?

Read more

You’ve got time, still, to pre-order my new novel, Colossus. It’s about a pastor in the Midwest who harbors a dark secret. I had the pleasure of reading an excerpt in London recently and it went over well. Kirkus has called the novel a “canny, twisty satire of all-American posturing.” Sounds about right.

There is always danger in endings. The beast, cornered and bleeding, lashes out. Not quite enervated, still worked into a frenzy, it bites harder. What else does it know? How can it fade with dignity?

Especially when the beast, in twilight, is still powerful enough?

These are the contradicting realities of the MAGA movement in the year 2026. Never has it been more ascendant. Never has it been more relentlessly alienating, except perhaps in those first few days after Jan. 6, when liberals predicted the demise of Donald Trump, forgetting Richard Nixon roared back from 1960 and 1962. In less a month, ICE has killed two American civilians in Minneapolis. They are flooding and occupying a small American city for reasons that transcend any rationality. There is no great or unusual migrants surge in Minneapolis. It is not a border city, or along a drug route. It is run by left-leaning Democrats, in a state that is overseen by Democrats, but the same can be said for New York or Boston or Los Angeles. MAGA has special hate for Minneapolis, it seems, because of the Somali immigrants and a fraud scandal blamed on them. It was also ground zero for the George Floyd uprisings. The people there are suffering mightily under the mad king president, who has deputized so much governing to rank and frothing nativists like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, and it appears the administration is slowly learning how vastly they’ve overreached. If there was any ambiguity in the killing of Renee Good, there was none with Alex Pretti; the 37-year-old was held down and shot repeatedly. Miller and J.D. Vance, drone minds with hearts of palpable darkness, rushed to lie to the public about what they saw, but it did not work. Trump is losing in Minneapolis. As the National Guard, without much fanfare, exited cities like Los Angeles, the surge of ICE in Minneapolis will, at some point, dissipate. Tom Homan is no moderate, but his deployment there is a subtle recognition that this sort of savagery, wholly idiotic and entirely unnecessary, is not benefiting the administration at all. Trump retreated on Greenland and he will begin to retreat here. What comes next is anyone’s guess. An ICE roadshow in other cities can’t be ruled out, if a Minneapolis-level occupation has offered such diminishing returns for MAGA. Trump is, without question, deeply unpopular and his party is going to get crushed in the midterms.

When assessing the nation of my birth, I try to think, when possible, on longer time horizons. What does the United States look like in five, ten, or twenty years? What form will our republic take? I am, by disposition, neither a great optimist nor pessimist on this question, if I still believe, even in the cauldron we’re in, abject domestic decline is overestimated. Spending time in London over the last few days, I’ve come to believe the permanent damage Trump has done to the United States is in its global reputation. It will take many years—and probably more than a single successor Democratic administration—to undo the last few weeks. The Greenland threat has deeply rattled the NATO countries and Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, in which he effectively encouraged Europe to declare its independence from America, will resonate for years to come; it was, in its own way, epochal. The Europeans have spent decades as quasi-content vassals of the U.S. and that era is drawing to a close. They don’t trust the American government and they might, in turn, draw closer to China, which offers a predictable technofascism that does not directly menace them. Xi is too wise to threaten to steal away a European territory. He merely wants to sell everyone an electric car and make this the Chinese century.

The Trump era, at the close of 2028, will have spanned a full thirteen years, if one measures from descent on the golden escalator in 2015 to what would be the end of Trump’s second term or, in the event of his death, Vance’s first. Trump is, undoubtedly, a world-historical figure, and the most significant American of the twenty-first century thus far. In terms of time spent in the public consciousness—and political power wielded—he is comparable to Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Franklin Roosevelt. Nixon, Reagan, and Roosevelt all loomed, in one form or another, for a longer period of time—Nixon as a two-term vice president and comeback artist; Reagan as the governor of California who made his name cracking the skulls of the counterculture; Roosevelt through a 12-year presidency—but Trump has the advantage of thoroughly bending a major political party to his whims and obsessions, defeating the very idea of factions. Roosevelt still had to manage the southern and northern Democrats, and Reagan, as popular as he was, did not constantly purge the party of Republicans who wouldn’t declare their total fealty to him. Trump’s long-running feat has been to make MAGA and the GOP synonymous. Even now, the anti-Trump wing of his party is bleeding out on the floor. It’s plausible, if the Republicans have an especially bad midterm, opposition to Trump builds in the Republican Party, as lawmakers wake to the possibility of life after Trump. He will be, in 2028, eighty-two years old. Seizing and holding power indefinitely, at that point, will be far easier said than done.

What I’ve still struggled with is what sort of tangible domestic legacy Trump will leave behind. He might be the ultimate strong-weak executive, startingly dominant in one fashion yet fated to be more impermanent than he appears. Trump, as Ross Douthat recently argued, helped to annihilate traditional late twentieth century conservatism, best exemplified by Reagan. The wholehearted belief in internationalism and neoliberalism is gone from his Republican Party. Trump, through DOGE, has certainly pursued Reaganite goals, and in the violent capture of Maduro, there are echoes of the neoconservative right, but it is all far too disordered and dismissive of alliance-building to be regarded as anything close to a continuation of the old ways. The tariff regime, certainly, has little to do with how Republicans of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s thought about international trade. The question that no one can answer is what future Republican leaders—those set to preside over the party in the 2030s and 2040s—will make of the Trump period. Will they, too, believe in tariffs? Tearing up the postwar international consensus? Maybe, maybe not. A strength of Trumpism that is also its glaring vulnerability is that so much of it is tied up in one man, one cult. If Trump dies, it is hard to see where it all goes.

Consider Trump vs. FDR. Roosevelt’s death in 1945 did not lead to the crumbling of the New Deal order. In fact, the political consensus that Roosevelt forged around social spending would last another thirty years, only to be unraveled at the onset of the neoliberal era in the 1970s. The Democratic Party was an FDR party in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was Lyndon Johnson who ushered in Medicare and Medicaid, building dramatically on the New Deal. Republicans, for thirty years, governed in the shadow of Roosevelt, and neither Eisenhower nor Nixon sought to dismantle the welfare state that FDR and the Democrats erected. Many voters, no matter how socially conservative, remained Democrats for decades because they had revered Roosevelt in their youth. Roosevelt died an American icon, and remained one, with even the evils of his administration, like the internment of Japanese Americans, mostly forgotten or willfully ignored. Is MAGA going to carry on like that in a post-Trump America? What exactly gets left behind? Trump, like Reagan, sits in the right-wing pantheon, but it is harder to see Trumpian policy outlasting him. Republicans can be plenty anti-migrant but no half-sane president will ever again manage immigration like Trump, who has eschewed targeted enforcement for the catastrophe in Minneapolis and made the issue itself, once such a winner for Republicans, an actual liability. Trump did stack the courts with right-wing judges but this is as much the legacy of Mitch McConnell as Trump’s; the fall of Roe v. Wade was a collective effort, decades in the making, with McConnell and the Federalist Society laying much of the groundwork. When Trump leaves office, Americans are liable to take a much warmer view of abortion and immigration, and the most fervent Trump supporters simply don’t exist in large enough numbers to fully define a MAGA Republican Party without its patriarch. There was a brief time, following the 2024 election, when Trump could claim that he had begun to realign the nonwhite working-class behind the Republican Party. If the Democrats haven’t solved their own struggles with the working-class electorate, Trump has squandered many of the gains he made with Latinos and it’s becoming apparent, through a year of failing to tame inflation while ICE racially profiles American citizens, that Spanish-speaking voters won’t have any special loyalty to Trump’s GOP. In the next presidential election, they’ll be up for grabs.

The fascist analogy doesn’t work with Trump because fascism demands a certain coherence and discipline. America remains too large, too sprawling, for all of it to be subdued by one man, but if dictatorship and the collapse of democracy wait in the future, they will come deeper into the century or beyond, assuming a great weakening of the American economy and the withering of institutions along what was witnessed in Weimar Germany—assuming an America, ultimately, that looks very different than the one that exists today. That doesn’t mean we aren’t a damaged nation or even a sick one. It doesn’t mean that Trump isn’t still dangerous, that there isn’t more death on the horizon. ICE will continue to menace the country as long as Trump sits in the Oval Office. MAGA, diminished with each passing year, will grow desperate, and it’s in this desperation where further chaos might lie. There’s reason to believe, like 2020, the Republicans won’t go quietly if they lose in 2028. A deluded movement can keep lying to itself. Fresh right-wing mythologies are born and propagated across the internet. None of this is probably going to end very well. But it will end.

In April, my new novel, Colossus, arrives. Dana Spiotta, National Book Award finalist, describes it this way: “The slick, rich, right-wing pastor Teddy Starr is a charismatic confidence man in the American vein (part Elmer Gantry, part Jay Gatsby, part Donald Trump). As fast talking as he is, as amoral as he is, Barkan gives him a fascinating, complex inner life. This thrilling novel skewers the cynicism of our current moment, but it also strikingly renders the human drama of fathers and sons, the tension between legacy and possibility.”

Normally, I’d leave it there, and tell you to the preorder Colossus. But I’ve got a special treat: an excerpt from the actual novel. You will get to meet Teddy Starr. Teddy is a pastor and local real estate tycoon, the king of his rural Michigan town. And he’s got a dark secret. Today, you’ll follow him along on one of his daily adventures, where he gets to see a woman who is not his wife.

Today is May 3, two days after the first of the month. For anyone in real estate, that day looms with all its hope and dreadful opportunity. The hope, if you’re in my shoes, is obvious enough, and the dread comes, naturally, from not being able to collect when you should. I consider this, driving alone, farmland sprawling on each side of me. The roadway unnerves me, though I’ve never admitted this, even to Daniella. A two-lane east-west artery, it pits you against oncoming traffic at all hours, typically trucks and campers hungry to make good time on whatever expedition has taken them out into roaming country. One wrong twitch or wince and you’re over the double yellow and into the grille of a much larger, possibly faster vehicle, your bones mashed in with the hot, twisted steel. I’ve played out this scene many times in my mind—the exploding glass, the bursting blood, lithe EMTs swarming my long-dead body. There’s an assumption that a pastor can’t fear death, and that’s just not true. I’m comfortable with where I’m going, but I’m not, necessarily, in any hurry to get off this Earth.

It’s true that in one sermon, I said just the opposite. It was six months ago, trending into Christmastime, and I wandered onto an anecdote about happy Christian funerals. My contention, which was well received by the church, was that you won’t see as many tears and frowns and crinkled expressions at truly Christian funerals. There is outward joy, not sadness, because the dearly departed loved one is now going to meet Jesus. There can only be so much to lament, I said, because so much love awaits you. This was, in no way, an endorsement of death or what they might call suicide ideation—it was an observation worth making. When you believe, you secure an inner peace that can deliver you through the worst of life, a belief that slowly strips your fear away.

Fear, though, is on tap for a bit longer, until I can veer off onto East Putnam and drive the three miles to the Breckenridge homestead. Daniella has Chloe and Austin at home. Theodore Jr. is on a playdate—well, he’s too old for it to be called that, but that’s what I still think of it as—with Garrett Hannon, Brendan’s second oldest, and they’re probably knee-deep in cheese puffs and ice cream, playing lurid video games on Brendan’s forty-three-inch LED, F22 Series, smacked snugly against the oaken side wall of his supremely finished basement. A house I sold to him, which was no easy feat given that Brendan’s credit and cash flow were a bit more tenuous than expected, at least in those days. This was before his promotion at E&I that vaulted him gracefully two tax brackets upward. Now he entertains my oldest in style, and I drive alone to repair a leak. At least that’s what Gertrude called it over the phone.

I approach East Putnam slowly, sure not to yank my Chevy too far to the right, lest I hum into a muddy ditch and start kicking up dirt on a road barely large enough for my four-door. Dust clouds dutifully swirl, hanging like dragon breath, and I click my tongue, an old habit. If you’re conscientious around here, you’re taking your automobile in for a weekly deep cleaning, and I’m six days out from my last trip to Chip’s Wash on Huron. Time to get on with it and I wish I weren’t approaching the Breckenridge homestead in such a soiled vehicle. I like coming out here with a gleam, a near sparkle, and I can only imagine what the cold-blue swabbed Chevy would look like under a heavy late afternoon sun.

It’s a straight shot on East Putnam, past two glum intersections, corn flanking me on all sides. There’s nothing quite like the high after a good sermon, the trace it leaves in your mouth and stomach. It must be something like the buzz of a ballplayer, a job well done, a synchronicity that nearly transcends words.

Driving through the country has reminded me I don’t want to live in the country. I am glad Trinity of Pine Haven is situated on prime real estate near the college, that the founders had the wisdom to build near a secular liberal arts institution. If they resented the godlessness of Pine Haven—that’s the college, neatly named for the town—they at least understood, intrinsically, it made most sense to own tax-free land two streets away from its outer border. I don’t like the overt emptiness of the country and the darkness that encroaches.

Lonely farmers, even those engrossed in prayer, are a particularly mournful lot to me, and I wish they could all congregate nearer the warmth of a municipality—a city in the technical bureaucratic sense, a town to anyone who is functioning there—that will remain around nine thousand until Jesus Christ’s return. The country here is stripped of hills, of right angles and jagged edges on the horizon, and the flatness in twilight can bring a man real low, like he’s soil-bound in the face of a starshine he’ll never reach.

In town, I know where I am. I know it teleologically. I know I am closer to God there, too. It is why, as much as we may pray alone, we’re ultimately bunched like bugs on Sunday, clustered under one roof. I don’t want to preach to myself, but here, in the corn, that’s all you can do. You collapse into your homestead.

Gertrude hasn’t succumbed to this, but poor Harry has. Harry, now laid up in Luce Memorial, that staph infection taking a nasty but manageable turn. He’s four months younger than me, thirty-nine teetering on forty, and I know he doesn’t want to start a new decade this way. I’ve gone three times to visit him there, where he’s now sequestered in a stepdown unit with an ornery roommate, a fiery seventy-year-old Episcopalian from Mount Pleasant who’s recovering from a heart attack. Harry has a television he can stare at straight above when he adjusts his bed just right and the last time I was there, he was intently watching a Jeopardy! rerun.

He wants, more than anything else, to get back to his farm, where work can drown out all the noise that comes with merely existing. They have one child, Aidan, who’s thirteen and already liable to wander; there’s a scissor-flash in his eyes and I don’t trust him very much. He’ll mutter about wanting to beat it from Pine Haven altogether, though there will be no better place for him, nowhere that will ever care so much for his future. Harry, at least, has chosen to recede into the life he has, while Gertrude, with limitations, ranges about. She drives into town every weekday to sit in the admissions office at Pine Haven College, answering telephones with two other ladies. And if Aidan hasn’t already, he’s probably planning on getting into drinking, and fornication isn’t far off. When I pull into the homestead, I figure this will come up and I’ll need to prepare comforting words for Gertrude.

Soon, the big red farmhouse looms. I’m close. Dust swirls again and a pheasant, a highly decorated male, skirts overhead.

My automobile is making a kerplunking noise I don’t especially like and I take note, to get it looked at before next week. I inch up the rambling driveway, spotting two well-fed cows and a gelding beyond a picket fence. One of them is named Fredrick, and I forget if this gelding, the color of chocolate left in the sun, is him. Harry’s truck and trailer are farther up the driveway, as well as Gertrude’s Wrangler. All the vehicles are parked slightly askew, as if a microburst had tossed them around a bit, and I chalk this up to country folk ways I’ll never quite understand, no matter how much I come here. I park far enough away to give the Wrangler a wide berth for escape; suddenly, I’m assuming it has a mind of its own.

There are no doorbells on the homestead and Gertrude isn’t one for texts. I’m here won’t suffice. I knock on the soaring wood door twice, hearing my own echo and enjoying the feeling of skin in hard contact with material that long predates me. The homestead was built by Harry’s maternal great-grandfather in the 1910s and it’ll have to be Aidan’s someday. A child, always a son, has inherited it, and Aidan can only flee his birthright for so long. Kings abdicate, but not farm boys due their treasure. Land, excepting God, is the greatest lure. I listen for Aidan’s potential pitter-patter, hoping he’s not home, and hear nothing as I wait on the cramped porch, which was grafted onto the two-story some decades ago.

Sounds behind the door, a solitary two-step, and I know I’m fine. In my right hand, I have my leather pouched tool kit, good for fixing the kind of penny-ante kitchen sink leak Gertrude needs help with today. I dabble in minor repair work. I would never call myself handy or pit my limited skill set against the men with round, firm guts who tinker away weekends on their F-150s and craft their own hunting blinds, but I’d like to think, here anyway, I can hold my own. A man has to know what to do with his hands, particularly in a world like this one. Daniella likes that I can install showerheads and lay tile. None of this was taught, just as the men vanished beneath the undercarriages of their F-150s had to learn most of what they do on their own unless they were blessed with daddies who took the time to helpfully guide their grease-soaked hands.

“There you are,” Gertrude says when she opens the door. I peer behind her briefly, checking to make sure that there are no sounds of a wayward son.

“On time, just through the dust clouds.”

“You always hurry when you’re needed. And you’ve got a bit of sweat on your brow already. It was supposed to hit seventy today, but never did.”

“Weathermen deceive, or they talk out of ignorance. I still find comfort in them, though. I wait for the five boxes. Monday partly cloudy, Tuesday chance of rain, Wednesday clear, humidity inching up. I feel you can set your watch to it, even when it isn’t right.”

“You want facts for facts’ sake. Even when the facts are incorrect.”

“I do think we’d all be calmer if we all agreed to collectively watch the weather forecast every night.”

“We’d be calmer if the television told us all what it really thinks.”

I follow her inside, enjoying the lightest jousting, what’s possible when two people are alone and allowed to perform. At church, a crowd (a lovely one), and at home, another, also lovely, three children, a wife who is languorous until she isn’t, and a stack of bills always hitting our kitchen table. None of that here, in Gertrude and Harry’s shadow-sunken foyer, smelling lightly of sandalwood.

In here, the sunlight dribbles in just right through the leaded glass windows, leaving a wide, crescent-shaped pool on the grand piano. Our feet creak over the hardwood, no carpet anywhere, and I’m grateful for the sound. We make way for the kitchen.

“How is Harry?” I ask, straining to summon up worry.

“Harry is complaining about the food. He thinks Luce Memorial wants to poison him to keep him there indefinitely, to soak him dry and steal the homestead.”

“That would be quite the scheme. Workable, in some sense.”

“I’m going to see him before it gets dark. It’s best visiting him at that time of day.”

Gertrude is a crisp, trim thirty-six, her dark brown hair slashed at the shoulders, her eyes a curious milky hazel. Her name belies who she is and what she looks like: even around here, she’s the only Gertrude under sixty, and neither of the surnames she’s possessed in this life—Howell, the maiden, or Breckenridge, the married—lend any credence to her relative youth. She’s never Gertie, either. She and Harry joined the church four years ago and have been regular attendees since, Gertrude’s devotion increasing over the past year. That’s when she joined Bible study.

“Let’s see that leak.”

Gertrude is dressed for a run. She’s the only person I know of who jogs the country roads, risking her life on choking dirt and gravel, no shoulder to dip into, drivers comfortably lured into committing manslaughter. Right now she’s in dark Lululemon high-rise track shorts and a sleeveless Nike top, her upper arms thin and lightly toned. I can’t tell if she’s about to run or has already.

Exercise or not, she doesn’t seem to sweat. That’s its own talent.

“I don’t think it’ll be too much trouble.”

I’ve never pressed Gertrude on why she and Harry only had one child. I have my theories, one of which she has alluded to: one child was enough. Neither Gertrude nor Harry, despite the pressure of their environs, longed for more. She was twenty-three when Aidan was born and could be presiding over a teeming household by now, four or five at least barreling through, a brood not far off from what the Muellers have brought forth. Three is enough for me and plenty for Daniella; we’re satisfied. I’m always surprised Harry, so in need of a descendant to care for the homestead, didn’t demand more. What passes between them is still unclear to me, even with the time I’ve spent with her, turning over her relationship. If they were a city couple, I wouldn’t wonder much at all.

Apartments are filled enough with childless couples, let alone three children stomping through, and no one can feasibly afford an apartment with four bedrooms unless it shows up in an area that has just suffered a dire fiscal crisis or seismic crime spike. A house like this is hungry; it aches to be filled. Right now, we’ll do.

I bend down and inspect. There’s hardly a leak at all. Well, of course. And how many tools are actually in my tool kit? I grin to myself, in the semi-dark around the piping, and slowly rise. I’m six-one or six-two depending on the day and who is measuring, and Gertrude comes just up to my chin. The leather pouch rests at my foot. There’s an interior weight to this house I’ve always liked, of lives lived and fortunes sought, and I spy an oversized metallic wall clock against the kitchen’s far wall, ticking away softly. It’s nearly a quarter to four.

“No trouble,” I say. “Water is hardly dripping at all.”

Longer ago, I could savor the anticipation, the silence heavy between us before fast action. Gertrude’s face is warm yet impregnable, like a poster board for a vanished icon only I can recall, and I glance downward, toward her flexing calves and shoe tops.

Daniella has a white pair of Adidas she wears for walks that are not so different than these.

“Good, Teddy.”

I forgo whatever ceremony is left—the lingering gaze, the breathy intake, the heartbeat at a nice hop—and kiss her on the lips, harder than I intended. I always enjoy this taste. If I haven’t been chewing gum, she has, and I catch the aftertaste of something cool, Eclipse or Extra, and let it settle on my own tongue.

Her eyes are closed, as usual, and I kiss her again, biting her lower lip, feeling the light, delicious click of her incisors.

“Upstairs,” she says.

I watch her on the banister, careful, and we go to one of the guest bedrooms. My favorite, where we typically end up, has the best view of the verdant farmland, two lace curtains parted for miles of surging corn. The sheets are an off-white, cottony, and the mattress has a good spring to it because so few (other than us) sleep there. She hesitates slightly at the top of the stairs—a cramping in her calf? a second thought?—and veers left, thankfully, to our spot. I slide after her like a furtive child, my toes soft on the hardwood, and I’m mouse quiet behind her. There’s no reason to be, really. Only Aidan is a threat to return and Aidan has better places to be on a Sunday afternoon. If he returns at all, it’ll be at sunset, when Gertrude will start calling him on the cell phone Harry bought for him last year.

“I’m glad we’re here,” I tell her as she undresses and I’m unbuttoning my trousers.

“This house?”

“This room.”

“Oh, I hate it.”

“I love it. Look at the view.”

“You can only look at it so many times.”

“You want a view of town.”

“I don’t want that either.”

“A straight shot to the Pine Haven College clocktower, the sprawling quad, coeds with Shakespeare tucked under their arms.”

“The college is hell-bound.”

“Not all of it.”

“Oh, Pastor Starr has done a survey, examined every last soul.”

She’s drawn the curtains and soon I’m on top of her. Usually, she wants to rush under the sheets, but not today. We haven’t even shut the door.

“Realistically, in a school of fourteen hundred undergraduates, there are a few who’ve accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior.”

“If they said it, they’re lying.”

“Don’t underestimate the human heart, Gertrude.”

I take my own survey of her naked body. I hope, in those distant eyes, she’s doing the same of mine.

We slide under the covers after we’re done. I have my hand on her breast and she’s noodling with my chest hair. It was one of our best yet, and I’m trying to recall, almost desperately, how many times we have been together. Suddenly, this catalog matters. If a memory can’t be summoned, did the experience ever produce it?

This is why, perhaps, we need God. God is always watching and God can remember for us.

“I meant it about the college,” Gertrude says.

“We can pull up stakes and move Trinity then. Maybe the Breckenridge homestead will have us.”

“I’d like that. Harry would finally get that heart attack he’s threatening to have.”

“Pine Haven College was founded by Presbyterians. At some point, they gave up.”

“I don’t like Presbyterians, but I wish they stuck with it. I can’t go in there every day and listen to these people.”

“These people? The students? The coworkers?”

“All of the above. They’re a hive. They want to rewrite history, rewrite the human body.”

“It’s the fad of the moment, but I think it’s giving way. The social justice enthusiasms.”

“They are all filled with hatred. No one hates more than a Democrat at a liberal arts college. No one burns more. No one aches for more blood.”

“They believe they have clarity, even if their vision is confused. That can be a dangerous thing.”

She sits up slightly, her hazel eyes flitting in my direction.

Whatever I’ve said, it’s not good enough.

“You speak about it with such detachment.”

“Not at all. I’m only saying, they’re confused. A liberal mind builds a church without God. A church of deconstruction, a church of, well, academia. It’s a confused church, since it lacks a center.”

“I need to get out of there. But then I’m here. I’m on this farm. Do you know something, Teddy—what I think about sometimes?”

I’m still in a state of postcoital placidity, my eyelids slightly drooped, my groin tingling faintly. I could fall out for a few hours, doze until nightfall, though curling up here is simply not an option. Daniella will set dinner by seven, Theodore will be home, Chloe will be asking for Daddy, and little Austin may want to be held. Images of the very near-future rush through me and it’s hard to focus on what Gertrude is saying. I want to give over myself fully, as I might at Trinity, particularly when she raises a thorny theological matter. Gertrude is a close, close reader, and I appreciate her surgical precision in all matters of life. But here and now, I’m not sure I want her to tell me so much about herself—about the homestead, the college, Harry. I understand it well enough. It’s all weight on her she’d rather shed.

“What do you think about?”

“How it would be great if it all burned down.”

It’s advice I should give and it’s advice I don’t necessarily have. Not now, anyway, not in this state. I can rack my brain for a Bible passage but I know that’s not what Gertrude requires from me. She wants wisdom from a friend, a lover, even a therapist, and I can only be all three for so long. I counsel several couples at Trinity (not Harry and Gertrude) and their difficulties, which are common in long marriages, are not quite so charged, so rage-flecked. Their unions have a sort of irritable ease that is salved by more communication, empathy, and prayer. CEP (hard C), I call it privately, and I can offer a dosage a week and stroll out of there arm in arm with man and woman if I so choose.

Gertrude does not want, I assume, to communicate with Harry. She does not want to empathize with him. She will pray alone, undertaking her own winding and very private conversation with God. This is the first time she has told me she wants to burn down the homestead.

“You shouldn’t burn down the homestead.”

“Who said I will? I never will. It’s a wish for an act. I don’t want Aidan or Harry to be home.”

“When does Aidan get home?”

“You’ll be long gone by then, don’t panic. I know that’s your worry, Teddy. You didn’t bargain for this. It’s like when your real estate clients want to talk God. If it bothers you so much, you should get two cell phones.”

“It doesn’t bother me at all. I welcome such talk. You can tell me anything. I understand you and Harry are in a rough patch. It can be hard, at times, to get along. Have you told him how you feel?”

A ludicrous suggestion, and I know it the instant it leaves my mouth and hangs between us. I’ve been lured into an exchange I’ll have to abort soon. Typically, Gertrude is not this way, her resentments toward Harry buried stomach-deep, out of view.

The hospital stay, if anything, was supposed to short-circuit such chatter completely and give us more running room in our time together. He’ll be at Luce Memorial at least another week, from what I understand. Beyond that, Harry is a problem I cannot solve.

I won’t recommend divorce. It’s not as if a sizable minority of the congregation hasn’t been divorced already or is living together unmarried—and I’m not such an obstinate goat that I wouldn’t advise separation, under such and such circumstances—but I won’t be in the business of actively encouraging disunion, even if it adds to the cleansing side of the ledger. Aidan, deluded as he might be, deserves a married father and mother. This homestead won’t be haunted by Harry alone—Gertrude would have to leave, and that’s clearly what Gertrude wants—and it won’t be my responsibility when that balky scenario inevitably devolves, an unmoored single father barely tending to the corn as the child spins off into nefarious orbits.

“I tell him all the time. I tell him every week.”

“Direct.”

“He’s somewhat like you. He’s comfortable in abstractions.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m here. You can tell him something twelve consecutive times and he won’t believe you because it hasn’t yet settled into the makeup of his universe. It’s neither right nor wrong—it just doesn’t exist.”

“At some point, it will exist. You just have to wait for it. You have to wait for it to settle. He’s that species of livestock.”

“I don’t have that kind of time.”

True enough. God can call us up whenever he decides; He is the only timekeeper of relevance here. No one has a kind of time. They have a ceaseless ticking forward, sometimes deadening, sometimes sprightly, and you hope to sniff out the worthwhile moments in between. Mostly, I hope, those are at Trinity. I do believe most of the congregation, even Gertrude, views it as a peak of the week. When I preach, I want them all to feel relevant.

They are the hum, the news, what the worthy talk about. They are onstage. God is watching and they must be celebrated. True worshippers know they are being watched and they cherish this knowledge, hugging it close like they would their own children.

Gertrude has stood up and I follow the unsunned undersides of her thighs as she hunts for her discarded clothing. I should do the same. At the foot of the bed are my trousers, my leather belt still hooked in, and somewhere down below my argyles.

My unbuttoned dress shirt, an understated clamshell white from Ralph Lauren, has fallen down too, and I mimic a blind man as I reach for it on the floor. There’s no good way to depart, really—certainly not from here.

“Remember,” I say, when I’ve got my shirt buttoned and my pants up, “the people of the college can’t change you.”

“And I can’t change them.”

“Their time will come.”

I say this, nearly believing it, and decide now is a good enough time to get home to my wife and children.

Kirkus calls my new novel, Colossus, “a canny, twisty satire of all-American posturing.” You should preorder it now. You won’t regret it.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was, for a large swath of the right, supposed to be epoch-defining. Though Kirk, as popular as he was among conservatives, never enjoyed great national fame, Donald Trump and the Republican Party aimed, in the weeks after his death, to make his name synonymous with any slain politician or civil rights hero of old. Republicans were wise enough not to invoke Martin Luther King Jr. directly, but in their furious broadsides against anyone who dared question Kirk’s legacy—he had a long history of vicious rhetoric, including attacks on King’s record—they were clear enough in their intentions: sanctify Kirk and chill any criticism of his politics. J.D. Vance, among several other prominent Republicans, cheered on the firing of anyone who spoke ill of Kirk, and the federal pressure was enough to get Jimmy Kimmel suspended from his late night show. There was a brief period, in September and October 2025, that slightly echoed the hysteria following the September 11th attacks, when jingoism surged and the nation, collectively, brayed for war. Kirk’s death, it seemed, could be a pretext to both suppress speech and force-feed a new idol onto the American public.

Three months later, it’s clear the Republicans have lost that culture war. Kirk has not been forgotten, exactly, but he’s been buried under too many successive news cycles to matter. Conservatives might invoke his memory, but few others do. He seems to live on, mostly, as yet another internet meme. Scroll Instagram and TikTok for a few minutes, and you’ll find endless parodies of the “I am Charlie Kirk” song and jokes about his widow, Erika, having an affair with Vance. There is no reverence on the internet. Self-seriousness, for better or for worse, cannot survive, and the Trump regime can do little but look on with a sense of disappointment—or trick themselves, as they are wont to do, into believing they are still winning. I had a similar thought as the horrific news out of Minneapolis rocketed across the country, and I went to cover a press conference Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, held at the World Trade Center on Wednesday. An ICE agent shot an unarmed woman who appeared to be trying to drive away from him. Even if you believe otherwise—if you think the woman was attempting to run him over, or the agent credibly feared for his life—you can mourn the death of the woman, Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three. Human decency—and the Christianity that Republican elites purport to subscribe—would tell you this.

Instead, Noem has called Good a domestic terrorist, Vance has said the shooting was a “tragedy of her own making,” and conservative activists like Jack Posobiec have likened Good to the alien insects from Starship Troopers. It’s all vile, and if you spend enough time on Elon Musk’s X you are confronted with MAGA pundit after MAGA pundit insisting that this woman deserved to die. These were the same sort of characters who wept crocodile tears when a bullet split open Charlie Kirk’s neck; they berated any liberal who dared to question his greatness. They said the Democrats were the dark party, the party of death, and they would uphold morality from here on out. The Democrats have their own problems, but that was plainly not true.

What Trump and his MAGA acolytes hope to do is make this all popular. You’ve got to like ICE. Successful propaganda could accomplish this. Make the ICE agent the new American freedom fighter. There’s time, in theory, make that nightmare fully real. Americans elected Trump and they wanted a strong border. Now he’s acting—promises made, promised kept. Except ICE, according to a recent poll, has fallen from a +16 to -14 net approval rating in a single year. This is extraordinary. It’s not as if the police or the military are now uniformly unpopular. Even with Trump in charge, Americans are going to respect their troops. Police killings haven’t convinced the average American voter to want to defund or abolish their municipal police force. But it’s not political suicide, in 2026 America, to campaign on abolishing ICE. In fact, given how much these hastily-trained agents have menaced towns and cities over the last year, it might be something approaching a mainstream position. Beyond sowing chaos, what’s the point of all this? Who actually voted for it? The many Spanish-speaking Americans who voted for Trump are certainly have regrets.

The plummeting of ICE’s reputation is a reminder that, in fact, MAGA cannot engineer the culture they want. They can’t, by fiat, make Americans think like them. Vance’s manic posts into the X echo chamber aren’t persuasive. Trump is plenty dangerous, but Trump is not winning.

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Now that it’s 2026, you can do yourself a favor and pre-order the great novel of the Trump age, Colossus. Don’t take it from me. Take it from National Book Award finalist Dana Spiotta. “The slick, rich, right-wing pastor Teddy Starr is a charismatic confidence man in the American vein (part Elmer Gantry, part Jay Gatsby, part Donald Trump). As fast talking as he is, as amoral as he is, Barkan gives him a fascinating, complex inner life. This thrilling novel skewers the cynicism of our current moment, but it also strikingly renders the human drama of fathers and sons, the tension between legacy and possibility.”

I was extremely cold standing outside for the Zohran Mamdani mayoral inauguration; too cold, perhaps, for proper reflection. On New Year’s Eve, at least, I was warmer, having bolted a party at a Spanish restaurant to make the midnight swearing in beneath City Hall, in an abandoned subway station that’s only open to guided tours and can be glanced at as the 6 train swings around to head back uptown. Mamdani disembarked with his wife, parents, and aides, arriving four minutes before midnight and grinning behind the podium as he was told he could not be sworn in until 12:01. He bantered with one reporter about new year’s resolutions, and chuckled when the reporter told him he wanted to do more pull-ups. Attorney General Letitia James, at the proper time, swore him in and there he was: Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani. The new era was upon us, one that would have been, one year earlier, democratic socialist fan fiction. Mamdani paid $9, cash, to the city clerk. He bounded up the stairs to leave. The media had to wait for a special 6 train, dutifully boarded, and rolled onward into the early morning.

There are times a little voice, like a tom-tom drum, pounds inside of me—this is history, this is history, this is history. I am not sure if the voice is helpful. Remaining within moments is not my strong suit, given how past and future-oriented I am. I am, too often, either plotting ahead or delving into long ago times, turning over the aged moments in my brain. I did my very best to appreciate the hyperreality of the last twenty-four hours. There is joy, of course, and triumph, if I try in my studious way to hold myself apart from factions, even when one faction is headed by a famous friend. What I can say, refreshingly, is that Mamdani, in my interactions with him over the last month, is no different than he was when I met him at the close of 2017. The old self remains. Mass fame hasn’t swallowed it whole. You don’t feel he has transcended you. He has no imperial affect, no hint of condescension. To me, he is still the guy hustling up his morning order at the Bay Ridge Bagel Boy or seizing my Hyundai Elantra to shuttle canvassers about or sitting in a folding chair, late at night, wondering whether we’ve actually found enough positive IDs on the doors in Marine Park and Gerritsen Beach. I picture him in t-shirts and kurtas. The suit and tie is still a visual adjustment.

What kind of mayor will Mamdani be? One can guess. I can guess. He reminded his inauguration audience, on the steps of City Hall, he is a democratic socialist who is pro-Palestine. He underscored that Bernie Sanders is his political north star. He delivered an unabashedly populist address, promising to uplift working-class New York: the taxi drivers, the halal cart workers, the home health aides. His major administration hires, thus far, have been relatively cautious, and should reassure those who assumed he was a dangerous radical bent on the unraveling of New York. Many of his picks are conventional: well-regarded veterans of the Biden and de Blasio administrations, left-leaning bureaucrats who will know where to find the paper clips. One misfire, an appointments director who had tweeted out anti-Semitic messages in her late teens and early twenties, was promptly forced to resign. Knowing Mamdani personally, I can attest that he will be extremely focused on delivering as much as he can as quickly as he can. He will want, in the first six months, to take significant steps towards universal childcare, free buses, and a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments. He will try to stand up his Department of Community Safety, pairing mental health professionals with police. He will renew mayoral control of the public schools while trying to incorporate, as much as possible, more parental input. And he will find out whether he can govern with a much more conservative police commissioner. On the politics front, I expect him to offer endorsements for any candidates that DSA first endorses. He is still cadre.

The task of governing New York City, though, is so challenging because the variables are manifold and unknown.

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In April, my new novel Colossus will appear. People are talking about it already. Matthew Specktor declares Colossus begins “firmly inside the troubled pastoral sublime of John Updike and Richard Ford, but it’s a feint—or a partial feint. What Barkan has in mind is something far more expansive: a broad interrogation of the American psyche in its myriad conflicting parts. The result is masterful, as thrillingly devious—and as brilliantly controlled—as Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” Preorder the novel now.

Next year, America will celebrate its 250th birthday. With no tongue in cheek, I plan to stage some kind of event honoring the most misunderstood Founding Father, Aaron Burr. This was the year I fully understood Burr had been maligned by history. Credit Gore Vidal’s Burr, my late father’s favorite novel, with triggering this need in me to undertake the Burr renaissance. I do not know why I didn’t read the book when he was alive; perhaps it was my slight allergy to historical fiction. Vidal was one of the great writers of the 20th century, but he is remembered more today for his essays and heterodox political views than his fiction. As a novelist, at the peak of his powers, he was every bit the equal of the midcentury giants. Burr can sit against the best of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo. That I feel certain about. It is a marvelous hybrid of the 19th and 20th century novel, urbane and hilarious and startling in its poignancy. It is also, as I came to find out, mostly historically accurate, its portrait of Burr comporting with the reality of our third vice president and supposed villain of the Founding. Pair Burr with Nancy Isenberg’s Fallen Founder, a work of tremendous scholarship, and you’ll come to understand that much of the history you thought you knew is something close to propaganda. Don’t bother with that famous 2010s musical either. Its view of Burr, at best, is skewed.

Where to begin? Like Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr Jr. was an orphan. His father, the president of what would become Princeton University, and his mother, the daughter of Jonathan Edwards, were both dead by the time he was a small child. Raised by an uncle on the Edwards side, he entered the College of New Jersey (Princeton) as a young teen, initially planning to become a theologian. He was a voracious reader and a star student who could study for fifteen hours at a time. Coming of age in the 1770s, he joined up with the Revolutionaries and saw extensive combat. While his future rival, Thomas Jefferson, hid at Monticello, Burr risked his life in numerous battles and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Despite his bravery and aptitude as an officer, he never rose higher because he had not aligned himself with the proper generals who, beneath George Washington, vied for recognition and approval. Nevertheless, he was celebrated for his service and entered the 1780s as a man on the make.

Hamilton obsessed over Burr, slandering and libeling him repeatedly from the moment Burr entered the public eye. Burr did not do the same back; he considered himself a high-minded gentleman of the Enlightenment, and political attacks to be, on the whole, unbecoming. Burr attracted great attention and opprobrium because he was an unusual politician in New York—where he launched his political and legal career—or anywhere, really. He was a devotee of Mary Wollstonecraft who believed, completely, in the equality of men and women. He thought women should be educated like men and sought to rear his daughter, Theodosia, like a boy, which meant teaching her arithmetic, Latin, Greek, and English composition. Burr drilled her like he would any star male pupil of the era. Theodosia was named for his first wife, ten years his senior, who drew Burr in because she was such a formidable intellect. In New York, Burr was a rising star, a state assemblyman, an attorney general, and a U.S. Senator. To become a senator, he defeated Hamilton’s rich and powerful father-in-law in a vote in the state legislature. In deeply factionalized New York, Hamilton was alienating enough to united rival groups against him—Burr, in many ways, was their compromise candidate. Burr was also a successful trial attorney, and a less successful land speculator. Lashed by Hamilton, the arch-Federalist, as unprincipled, Burr in fact had plenty of them. Though a slaveowner, he submitted a bill to outlaw slavery and another to allow women to vote. He was a threat to Hamilton because he was such an adept political organizer, helping to bring the rival Democratic-Republicans to power in the state. He was a populist who wanted more Americans participating in politics, not less. The bank he formed, the Manhattan Company, drew Hamilton’s ire because it was a challenge to the Federalist banking monopoly and gave the middle-class access to loans. Unlike Hamilton and John Adams, Burr was a defender of immigrants; he challenged the Alien and Sedition Acts and fought to keep his Swiss-born friend, Albert Gallatin, in the Senate.

Burr did not try to steal the election of 1800. He was Thomas Jefferson’s running mate, organizing the northern faction of the Republicans—this party had nothing to do with today’s GOP—as Jefferson united the southerners. Burr delivered New York’s electoral votes to Jefferson as he routed the Federalists up and down the ballot. He professionalized political campaigning like no American before him, and helped to found Tammany Hall, the legendary political machine. Jefferson and Burr, running against Adams and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, finished in a tie in the Electoral College. In those days, the runner-up became vice president, and that had been Burr’s plan. Just forty-four at the time, Burr had every assurance that he would eventually end up president once Jefferson’s terms were up. With a deadlock, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives, where divisions were stark along both political and sectional lines. The outcome of the election was a true disaster for Hamilton because both Jefferson and Burr were his enemies. Jefferson, he decided, would be the lesser of two evils not because Burr was a would-be Caesar or Cataline— as Hamilton repeatedly alleged—but because members of Hamilton’s own party, the Federalists, actually preferred to support Burr over Jefferson. Burr, for a moment, looked like he could lead a joint Federalist-Republican venture that would crush Hamilton’s political career for good. There is no evidence, though, Burr plotted to do this, or truly made a serious attempt to win the battle in the House against Jefferson. Had he schemed like his detractors suggested, he might have actually won. Instead, after more than thirty rounds of balloting, Jefferson emerged victorious, and Burr headed to the new capital city of Washington as the third vice president.

It would be the 1804 New York gubernatorial election that ended Burr’s political career and Hamilton’s life. Jefferson began to distance himself from Burr as the Virginia Republicans plotted to have one of their own succeed Jefferson. They didn’t trust Burr as an exceedingly adroit northerner with his own power base. For 1804, they’d have a new running mate, someone devoid of any particular ambitions. For the Virginia junta, this would prove wise enough; Virginians would control the White House, from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison to James Monroe, for the next twenty years. To save his own career, Burr ran for governor of New York and was bitterly opposed by Hamilton as well as local power brokers, including the young DeWitt Clinton. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, newspaper editors and pamphleteers lied with impunity, and the attacks took their toll on Burr, who never enjoyed responding with the same furor. (One editor went as far to suggest that Burr was sexually preying on his younger male acolytes or they were sexually obsessed with him.) Burr lost the race, and it came to his attention that an Albany newspaper had published a letter that referenced a “still more despicable opinion” Hamilton had made about him. Burr had endured countless attacks from Hamilton over the decades, but this enraged him because the word “despicable,” in the post-Revolutionary era, carried especially dark or even sordid connotations. (Vidal, in Burr, imagines that Hamilton accused Burr of carrying on an incestual relationship with his beloved daughter. We do not know the specifics and Hamilton never supplied any.) Burr demanded, through a letter, an apology. Hamilton obfuscated and refused to apologize. The men traded letters, Hamilton was predictably obstinate, and finally Burr challenged him to a duel. Hamilton accepted. None of this, really, would have happened if Hamilton had simply apologized.

Dueling was illegal in New York but still considered an acceptable way to resolve disagreements among the elite of early America. Hamilton had been a party, in one form or another, to almost a dozen duels in his lifetime, and almost dueled James Monroe, the future president. His own son had died in a duel. Burr had dueled before as well. The men rowed to New Jersey with their seconds and met on July 11th, 1804. Burr was still the sitting vice president. The evidence to suggest that Hamilton intentionally missed Burr is scant and derives mostly from Hamilton allies and the words Hamilton himself prepared for posterity. In actuality, Hamilton supplied the pistols for the duel and put on his spectacles before taking his shot. Like Burr, he was serious, and like Burr, he likely wanted to wound or kill his rival. Burr’s shot struck Hamilton’s abdomen. The former Secretary of the Treasury and George Washington’s right-hand, whose own career was in eclipse in the Jeffersonian era, died the next day a martyr. How would have history judged these men differently if Hamilton was the better shot—or Burr the worse one?

The next chapters of Burr’s life were especially remarkable. Initially indicted for murder in multiple states, Burr fled. Federalists vilified him, naturally, and his enemies in the Jefferson-aligned Republican Party were happy to regard him as a cold-blooded murderer. Still the vice president, he found a much better reception in Washington, and even amicably met with Jefferson. In early 1805, in his final months in office, he presided over the impeachment trial of Samuel Chase, a tempestuous Supreme Court justice Jefferson wanted to drive from the bench because he was close to the Federalists and not ruling enough in his favor. Even Burr’s detractors were forced to admit the infamous vice president was a beacon of impartiality during the trial and helped to ensure Chase was fairly scrutinized while the principle of judicial independence was upheld. Burr was one of the great attorneys of his age, plenty charismatic, and commanded the stage like few others before or since. Chase was acquitted and Burr delivered a farewell speech that brought the Senate to tears.

And then came what was soon known as the Burr Conspiracy, and what the vice president, beyond killing Hamilton, is best remembered for today. Those who vaguely know of Burr believe him to be a traitor who tried to topple the United States government. This is not true. After leaving Washington, his political career finished—he did try and fail to gain a judicial appointment from Jefferson—he headed West. This was natural for men of his station, who wanted to speculate on land and repay debts. Like many of the Founders, Burr lived beyond his means and never managed his money very well. He was also an adventurer, and still popular out West, and he imagined he might get a new start in one of the frontier territories. He was looking to acquire tracts of land as an investment or carve out a territory for himself, perhaps, in Spanish-held Mexico. His plan was to hope the U.S. declared war on Spain and then lead a small army into Spanish territory to claim his own land. Burr was well-liked in the Western territories, Kentucky especially, because he had fought for new states there and opposed the Spanish Empire. The Dons, as they were called, were the enemies of the frontiersmen, Andrew Jackson included, who counted Burr as an ally.

James Wilkinson, a high-ranking army officer who was a double agent for Spain, accused Burr of treason, claiming without any evidence that Burr wanted to establish a new country and crush the United States. Burr didn’t want to do this, nor did he have the means to. There was nothing treasonous about wanting war with Spain or trying to take territory from Mexico. Burr was arrested multiple times, and grand juries found insufficient evidence to indict. In Kentucky, his counsel was a young Henry Clay. Each time Burr won in court, Jefferson, increasingly swayed by the anti-Burr newspapers spreading the wild allegations of treason, became more determined to bring his former ally to heel. Finally, Burr was brought to Richmond, Virginia and put on trial for treason. Chief Justice John Marshall presided over the trial and it became apparent, very quickly, the government had no real case. Witnesses to Burr’s alleged treason couldn’t be produced and documentary evidence was virtually nonexistent. Burr was acquitted. He was then tried on misdemeanor charges and acquitted again. Jefferson tried desperately, without success, to sway Marshall. As Isenberg, the Burr historian, would later write, Burr “was not guilty of treason, nor was he ever convicted, because there was no evidence, not one credible piece of testimony, and the star witness for the prosecution had to admit that he had doctored a letter implicating Burr.” A young Washington Irving covered the trial, writing admiringly on Burr.

None of this mattered, though, for Burr’s reputation. He fled the United States, dodging his old creditors, and roamed Europe for several years. He spent most of his time in England, befriending the English Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and tried and failed to secure an audience with Napoleon. His wife long dead, he consorted with his share of women, as was recorded in a journal published after his death. (He had a number of different children, including those he adopted, throughout his life, and there’s evidence to suggest he fathered two children with a house servant, Mary Emmons, who hailed from India.) His daughter, Theodosia, was tragically lost at sea not long after Burr returned to America. Despite the chaos of his earlier years, Burr would live out the remainder of his life in New York in relative peace. He practiced law, took audiences with old admirers, and married a wealthy widow, Eliza Jumel, who divorced him not long after accusing him of spending down her fortune, a charge he denied. Burr would die at eighty, in 1836, living long enough to see his old friend, Andrew Jackson, elected president and nemeses like Jefferson and DeWitt Clinton pass away. He died on Staten Island.

One complication of Burr’s legacy is that he was uniquely disinterested in posterity. He promised, in letters to his daughter Theodosia, to author a great treatise on the rights and abilities of women, but never did. Many of his personal records were lost with Theodosia at sea. He did not leave behind books or tracts that fully told his own story. He did not press contemporary biographers and acolytes to relate history as he saw it. He did not, strangely, battle for himself very hard. There is a striking section in Vidal’s Burr where his daughter is urging him, despite his vow to back Jefferson, to take the presidency for himself. This is fiction, but it is true to how Burr actually approached power—and how the country might have been different if he took one more step forward.

“He must be president,” Theodosia says to a Burr ally. “He has no other choice.”

Burr tells her it is not possible. Theodosia replies that it is.

“Why are you suddenly so interested in the grubbier aspects of political life?” he asks.

“Because I am interested in you and I know that this is the only opportunity you will ever get to be first, and if you don’t take it you will regret it as long as you live.”

Burr explains that he has given his word to Jefferson. He can’t vie for the presidency. He adds, after Theodosia tells him Jefferson isn’t to be trusted, that the “people” want Jefferson, not him.

“The people will want you when they know you better. You admire Bonaparte. Well, think of him. He took his opportunity and now he is the first man in Europe just as you can be the first man in America, and may God strike us where we stand there is no point to being second.”

Burr is adamant: “I cannot break my word.”

“Then you will regret that you did not all your life.”

Burr, speaking now to his fictional protégé many years later, reveals what he’s learned.

“I behaved honourably and, as Theodosia foretold, I have regretted it all my life.”

Here is my 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 in reading.

And here is a list of all I read this year. Special shoutout to the excellent novelists Alexander Sorondo, author of Cubafruit, Denise Robbins, author of The Unmapping, and Carter Vance, author of Smaller Animals, who published debuts this year.

1. The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

2. Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

3. How I Won the Noble Prize by Julius Taranto

4. Jenny in Corona by Stuart Ross

5. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

6. Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman

7. The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda

8. Canceled Lives by Blake Bailey

9. Technopoly by Neil Postman

10. The City Mother by Maya Sinha

11. The Events in Order of Loving Someone by Emma Newman-Holden

12. The Cali Book of the Dead by Max Carp

13. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

14. Social Distancing by Scott Spires

15. See Friendship by Jeremy Gordon

16. The Wayback Machine by Daniel Falatko

17. Selling Anti-Racism by Jennifer C. Pan

18. The Requisitions by Samuel Lopez-Barrantes

19. American Dream Machine by Matthew Specktor

20. Wannabeat by David Polonoff

21. In Judgement of Others by Eleanor Anstruther

22. The Golden Hour by Matthew Specktor

23. Three Years Our Mayor by Lincoln Mitchell

24. Original Sin by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper

25. Uncharted by Chris Whipple

26. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

27. Love and Happiness by Zoe Dubno

28. Amputation by Bruce Wagner

29. Waseem by Lilas Taha

30. Cubafruit by Alexander Sorondo

31. Shibboleth by Thomas Lambert

32. The Boys by Leo Robson

33. The Unmapping by Denise Robbins

34. The Cuttlefish by Chris Tharp

35. The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

36. A Town Without Time by Gay Talese

37. Liars by Sarah Manguso

38. Uncharted by Chris Dalla Riva

39. Bloodline by Lee Clay Johnson

40. Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

41. The Sixties by Todd Gitlin

42. Scenebux by Cairo Smith

43. Things That Are Funny on a Submarine by Yannick Murphy

44. Fever: The Complete History of Saturday Night Fever by Margo Donohue

45. Traumnovelle by Grant Maierhofer

46. Burr by Gore Vidal

47. Help Me I’m in Hell by Timothy Atkinson

48. Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel

49. Child of Light by Jesi Bender

50. Run Zohran Run by Theodore Hamm

51. Washington D.C. by Gore Vidal

52. The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne

53. Don’t Step into My Office by David Fishkind

54. Smaller Animals by Carter Vance

55. Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg

In April, Colossus, my new novel, will appear. I encourage you to pre-order now. You won’t be disappointed.

Sometime after 2020, the literary nightlife came back to New York. It is plausible it existed in the 2010s and I simply missed it, but the more I inquire about that decade, the more I realize that whatever it was like then is very different than today. New magazines spring up like gorgeous little flowers and there are fresh reading series that are remarkably devoid of literary gatekeeping. The readers and writers aren’t famous, and may never be, and there’s a sense that the yearnings for the old markers of prestige are falling away—mostly because these markers have ceased to mean all that much. It is time, in these last days of 2025, to get a full handle on it all and describe what’s now before us.

In a recent essay, the writer Paul Franz argued in defense of the nascent neo-Romantic movement, and why it matters to think in these terms. “Romanticism rejects the triumph of the empirical; it continues to see the world in the light of desire,” Franz wrote. “Vitalism—raging against the dying of the light—is a version of that same spirit. Both assert life against death.” Of late, I’ve been thinking a great deal about vitalism. In our tech-swamped age, there’s been, among a certain number of young and middle-aged New Yorkers still interested in the written word, a rebellion. As the leader and co-founder of The Metropolitan Review, a new literary and culture magazine, I can boast of my own role, but this is a story much larger than TMR. It began in the pandemic, with the oft-derided Dimes Square which was, for all its faults and the ultimate reactionary bent of its politics, a clear attempt to break free from the 2010s screenworld and its suffocating techno-optimism. There were parties, plays, music, and readings. The reading itself, in this era, seemed to be reinvigorated, paired fully with nightlife and open to all. In the 2010s, the few literary events I brushed up against seemed to have an unseen hierarchy or arrayed around those who already carried with them a great deal of publishing credits. The Franklin Park Reading Series, based in Brooklyn and attracting the leading literary figures of that period, was emblematic of a scene that seemed far more closed off to outsiders and also, on the balance, safer. Genuine subversion was an afterthought.

In January, The Metropolitan Review will launch its own reading series and print issue, but it will be, thankfully, joining a much larger tide. It’s hard, right now, to keep track of all the new readings springing up in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and elsewhere—and this is how it should. Nick Dove, the photographer and writer, started his own earlier this year, which drew hundreds and has been packing out a new bar, the Monroe, next to the Manhattan Bridge on the Manhattan side. Dove’s reading series will merge with Danielle Chelosky’s popular “Weird Fucks” in 2026; readings about explicit sexual acts are, naturally, attracting more listeners. Mike Crumplar, the one-time Dimes Square chronicler who is now off on new adventures, recently deemed Flatbush, Brooklyn a little Laurel Canyon for writers—perhaps it is—and they’ve got their own series, Flatbush Follies, curated by Arielle Gordon and Adlan Jackson. Other series include Patio, Domino, Matthew Donovan’s Sweetychat, which began as a large Instagram chat and morphed into at least two readings, including a large Halloween bash. Beyond New York, there’s On the Rag/Casual Encountersz run by Sammy Loren and the Soho Reading Series in East London, which is the brainchild of Tom Willis. New York, London, and Los Angeles seem to be cities enjoying a cultural and literary synergy of late. I’ve begun traveling more frequently between New York and London, and find a similar, refreshing sensibility across the pond. Paris is now getting in on the action, thanks to Kyle Berlin, Samuél Lopez-Barrantes, and Augusta Sagnelli—their new Souvenir Magazine is one of the loveliest print products I’ve seen. Zona Motel, like TMR, launched on Substack and includes a mix of criticism, essays, interviews, and literary scene reports from across America.

When it comes to magazines hovering around New York, there is the left professional class’ favorite, The Drift—blurbed by David Remnick, among others—which arrived in 2020 as the unstated successor to n+1, a veteran magazine still very much kicking. Many other magazines are now proliferating. There’s Whitney Mallet’s Whitney Review of New Writing, Heavy Traffic, and Civilization—all, as far as I can tell, only exist in print. Byline, something of a successor to the Dimes-era Drunken Canal, has been operating for several years. The inspiration for this piece might have been Anthony Marigold’s Non Grata, another new magazine that held its launch party at a Lower East Side art gallery earlier this month and brought together a number of the newer literary luminaries, including Adam Pearson—on a whirlwind visit from New Orleans—Chris Jesu Lee, Mo Diggs, Alex Muka, Tom Watters, James Tussing, David Polonoff, Lillian Wang Selonick, and others I am likely forgetting. There was a migration, at some point, to Crumplar’s birthday, at a bar on Flatbush Avenue. This isn’t so much about scene-reporting as a recognition that there is fresh energy, tangible verve, in the literary arts right now, and much of it is coming from below. It operates almost completely outside of Big 5 publishing or the legacy magazines. The barrier to entry, socially, is lower than it’s ever been. You simply show up. Enough of it ends up on social media, but these kinds of magazines and readings exist without the same impetus one found a decade ago to “content create.” Juicing an Instagram following is beside the point. Pretty photography can result. Beyond that, the focus is on the night itself, and the community generated.

Is the art good? Great? Posterity, and some of the critics working today, will determine that. Some magazines are better than others, as some writers are superior to others; this has been true in every single era of artistic production. Not every writer at every reading is belting out a masterpiece. Scenes, on their own, can be performative; it’s hard, truly, to conceive of a historical literary scene that wasn’t infused with some degree of artifice or self-awareness. The Modernists were self-consciously tending to their images as they made their art. We can’t know, just yet, where any of this is going. What does separate this profusion of the arts, this New Romanticism, from the artistic ventures of the 2010s is that, with a few exceptions, they are explicitly operating beyond the left-right binary. They do not exist to service the progressive movement, the Democratic Party, or, in the case of the Dimes Square publications and artistic products, MAGA and its acolytes. The old Dimes Square personalities have either faded away or reinvented themselves. Donald Trump is in the White House, so he belongs to the establishment again. Artists, even those on the right, have come to understand he is an enemy because he is against free expression. Celebrating Trump, then, is gauche. It’s about the art itself, and getting outside.

It’s easy enough to be cynical about the second aspect. Yet in the age of AI and the smartphone panopticon, the social event—the party—is its own act of rebellion. This is not about tearing down the internet or wrenching the clock back to the twentieth century. The internet is an important part of our lives, with its own realms and customs worth understanding, as Katherine Dee wrote. The internet can be a tool for creation, and the artists of all eras engage, to varying degrees, with the technologies in their wake. What matters more, though—what speaks to that Romantic vitalism—is the insistence on human supremacy. Humans can work with tech, but should never be subordinate to tech. The transhumanists will talk up AI and other technologies as a way to become, in the best way, cybernetic, and there’s enough science fiction to validate this vision. Except what we’ve actually found in the 2020s is that tech enervates: we become lazier and twitchier. We lose our ability to focus and socialize. We grow anxious and sexless. Life loses its friction, and it’s friction that builds both metaphorical and literal muscle. Why read when AI can summarize for you? Why write when AI can write for you? The neo-Romantics understand the purpose of the action is the action itself; it’s to reify the fact that we are alive, and existence is the ultimate blessing. This is not an alien concept beyond the arts. A machine defeated a human in chess decades ago, and this has not dimmed the enthusiasm for chess. Machines can move faster than man and perform far greater feats of strength, yet we are no less enamored with human athletes. Tech cannot be defeated and time, indeed, marches forward. But human beings, artists in particular, have free will. They can choose how to be. More of us, I believe, will. These magazines will keep coming. As will the parties.

In April, Colossus, my new novel, will appear. I encourage you to pre-order now. You won’t be disappointed. Here’s National Book Award nominee Dana Spiotta on why you should read Colossus: “The slick, rich, right-wing pastor Teddy Starr is a charismatic confidence man in the American vein (part Elmer Gantry, part Jay Gatsby, part Donald Trump). As fast talking as he is, as amoral as he is, Barkan gives him a fascinating, complex inner life. This thrilling novel skewers the cynicism of our current moment, but it also strikingly renders the human drama of fathers and sons, the tension between legacy and possibility.”

Zohran Mamdani, naturally, has referred repeatedly to the legacies of Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia as he attempts to implement his vision of social democracy in New York City. Roosevelt, along with Lyndon Johnson, built the American welfare state, and LaGuardia was the popular mayor who benefited greatly from New Deal largesse. LaGuardia was a machine-busting man of the people, half Italian, half Jewish, and any progressive mayor would wise to nod to his legacy as much as possible.

There is another great populist power of the 1920s and 1930s who will, understandably, not be invoked by Mamdani as he takes office on January 1st. I certainly wouldn’t advise my old campaign manager to say his name. But since I’m a writer and do not have to take any political considerations into account, I can say that the history Mamdani should be studying most closely is not in New York at all. There was, once, a thirty-five-year-old insurgent Democrat who won a shock election, throttling the power elite of his state. The combined might of the Democratic establishment and the business class wanted this Democrat dead—politically, at least, and maybe literally. They did everything they could to stop him. The trouble for them was that this Democrat was young, dynamic, and knew how to exploit the new technology of his age. The problem, too, was that the working class and poor genuinely loved him. He was a mesmerizing public speaker; no one could look away from him for very long. He made grand promises to the underclass. He was going to, he vowed, make their lives better in a very short amount of time. He was going to free them, as much as he could, from ignorance and despair.

Remarkably, he nearly did. Even his bitterest critics could concede that.

Huey Pierce Long Jr. delivered for the people of Louisiana.

Long is mostly vilified today, remembered as Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s popular and overrated novel, All the King’s Men, and for serving as a model in a better, if unflattering, novel by Sinclair Lewis that was revived in the Trump age, It Can’t Happen Here. Historians on the left and right routinely portray Long as the American demagogue, the homegrown fascist, interchangeable with Father Charles Coughlin in the rogue’s gallery of 30s antagonists who could have brought full-blown autocracy to America if they ever got the chance. Long was plotting to run against FDR from the left, and he was assassinated before he could do so; most liberals and conservatives sigh with relief, just a bit, when they recount this turn of events. When Donald Trump first rose to power, the ghost of Long was paraded around again. There was no shortage of think pieces that sought to link the two men.

And there is reason to declare Long, at least, a strongman. As the popularly-elected governor and senator from Louisiana—Long, unlike actual fascists, believed in continually winning votes, and could do this very well—he dominated his state like no other politician before him. He routinely intimidated and browbeat legislators. His ironclad grip on the state police shielded him from legal scrutiny. He was accused, like many machine bosses, of committing voter fraud. He built a vast patronage network and fired those who rose against him. He derided the “lying” press and even created his own newspaper to counteract them. When he became a senator, he was still the de facto governor, and ensured only an absolute loyalist would sit in the executive mansion as he went off to Washington D.C. to promote his “Share Our Wealth” program. He meddled extensively in the affairs of Louisiana State University, getting students expelled who criticized him in the school newspaper. He was known to even try to devise his own plays for the football team.

All of this, however, must be put up against the actual record. In less than eight years—four as governor, the rest in the Senate—Long accomplished more for his state than any single executive, perhaps, in American history. The Kingfish oversaw the construction of a staggering amount of roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, and state buildings. He founded the LSU Medical School and aggressively boosted funding for the flagship university. He established night schools that taught 100,000 adults to read and established a famous free textbook program that boosted public school enrollment by 20 percent. He modernized mental health facilities. He was, for a Southern Democrat, notably not a race-baiter, and tussled with the Ku Klux Klan. Even as he himself lived lavishly—Long built a Pharaonic governor’s mansion and favored expensive suits—he fought for the poor against the rich, especially Standard Oil, the single succubus corporation that had dominated the pre-Long political scene. On the campaign trail, he promised to lower utility costs and understood, once elected, he’d have to follow through. He summoned the utility monopolies together and told them to lower their prices or he would have the state take over their companies. “A deck has 52 cards,” he explained. “And in Baton Rouge I hold all 52 of them and can shuffle and deal as I please.”

The Lousiania he found, upon his election in 1928, was desperately poor. Thousands had no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and could not read. What little income they drummed up was often dependent on the next harvest, and there was no easily accessible scheme of crop insurance to protect small farmers from disaster. Public services were mostly nonexistent because the political class simply refused to provide them. An aristocratic planter class, along with corporate interests in New Orleans, controlled the state Democratic Party, which held absolute power. The “Old Regulars” were Louisiana’s version of Tammany Hall and unlike its New York counterpart, there was only patronage and graft with little in the way that trickled down to ordinary people. Voters, largely, knew they were being cheated and oppressed, but no one until Long was able to organize them. He could, unlike other politicians, name his enemies: Standard Oil, the Old Regulars, anyone who was actually getting rich at the expense of the impoverished masses. He traveled the state with a sound truck, which had not been done before, and delivered speeches at a breakneck pace. On Election Day, the Old Regulars were startled to find out Long had led a genuine populist revolution and defeated them.

Mamdani, as mayor of New York City, won’t enjoy the same power Long, as a governor, could wield in his own state. He needs to answer to a governor and a state legislature. But unlike every other mayor-elect who came before him, Mamdani arrives with an actual base of mass support. Like Long, he is a mid-30s leftist insurgent who defeated the Democratic establishment. Within one term, Long had completely subjugated the Old Regulars and built his own machine in its stead. Mamdani, so far, has taken the more accommodationist tact, defending Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next House speaker, even as Jeffries only offered a tepid endorsement and could move to damage him if he ever felt it benefited his own political prospects. Mamdani has taken meetings with the real estate and Wall Street elites, and sought to work with them, as much as he can, as long as he can further his agenda. Mamdani is, by nature, friendly, and he wants to coalition-build. These are good instincts.

But at some point, Mamdani will have to wield sticks as well as carrots.

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My new novel, Colossus, arrives next year. The great Dana Spiotta, a National Book Award finalist, has this to say about it: “The slick, rich, right-wing pastor Teddy Starr is a charismatic confidence man in the American vein (part Elmer Gantry, part Jay Gatsby, part Donald Trump). As fast talking as he is, as amoral as he is, Barkan gives him a fascinating, complex inner life. This thrilling novel skewers the cynicism of our current moment, but it also strikingly renders the human drama of fathers and sons, the tension between legacy and possibility.” Pre-order it now!

Summer lost its allure for me in 2023. For most of my life, I was an unrepentant beach obsessive, hungering for a roasting sun, a deepwater bob, and a light doze as the radio hissed a baseball game. I once, by myself, spent an eight-hour day in the middle of September at Coney Island, in a desperate bid to extract as much waning summer from the cooling air as possible. New York is not L.A., but it is a beach city, and every June through September I could be found on the sandy, southern stretch of Brooklyn, my flesh pinkening. It was more important to me than synagogue ever was.

My father, who lived a double-life, died on the beach. Well, not on it, per se—in a rehabilitation facility wedged next to the Rockaway boardwalk, on Beach 114^th Street. Since he had gone, for so many summers, to the beach with me, particularly on weekdays when he was retired, this struck me as a bit of dark irony, like another factoid I know he would have appreciated even more: he was cremated, by absolute coincidence, in North Bergen, New Jersey, where he grew up. The ashes sit in an unceremonious cardboard box, lodged in a bedroom closet among long sleeve shirts, ballcaps, yellowing paperwork, and a cracked-screen cellphone with the last recorded voicemails from him, one about the joy of seeing an ex-Yankee second baseman, Robinson Canó, suddenly suiting up for the Braves in a game against the Mets. It’s important, for as long as I live, that I hear that voice because my father stopped talking to me four months before he died, when he was several weeks shy of his eighty-fourth birthday.

This was another savage irony, literary too, perhaps, because he was a Jewish jabberer seemingly sprung from a Philip Roth novel, an inveterate yenta on politics and sports and the city; our conversational threads were lush and always tangential, one topic, gloriously hydra-headed, perpetually birthing another. My father could be talking about Shea Stadium, the cavernous and alluringly drab old home for the Mets, and then how he, serendipitously, encountered Malcolm X there or how he less serendipitously—they occupied the same downtown Manhattan federal building—struck up several elevator conversations with Richard Nixon who, in his post-presidency, joined the tribe of Mets fanatics and would happily discuss last night’s game with anyone who might listen, including my father. Or I’d hear about the time when he was a content, if poorly-paid, high school English teacher in Hicksville, a Long Island hamlet, and had in his class a bright ninth grade student with a keen interest in rock music. They bonded, in part, because my father’s first and middle name was Joel William and the student’s full name was William Joel. Less illustriously, but no less intriguingly, my father happened to be a high school classmate of a boy named Michael Weiner who would grow up, upon moving to San Francisco, to become Michael Savage, one of the more famous and peculiar staples of right-wing talk radio. This was at Jamaica High School, in central Queens, where his family ended up after leaving North Bergen. A few years later, when my father had graduated college, he was a young aide to a long-forgotten liberal Republican congressman named Seymour Halpern. (This was, I believe, around the time my father decided to teach English.) Halpern’s district included the tony, if understated, Jamaica Estates home of a powerful local real estate developer named Fred Trump. Halpern and Fred were close, since Fred had, according to my father, gifted the congressman a low-cost (or entirely free) apartment. Fred had a rough-necked teenage son, Donald, who sometimes needed his homework done, and Halpern might have roped in a staffer or two to finish up an assignment.

Stories, stories, and they were gone, suddenly, when the hospital performed the tracheostomy to keep my father from dying. He had been, until eighty-three, relatively healthy, perhaps, I’d occasionally kid, the world’s oldest Type 1 diabetic. He was born just late enough (1939) to have access to the modern medical treatment that would prolong his life. With a smile on his face, he jammed an insulin needle into his skin throughout the day and religiously monitored his blood sugar, joking about his “dreaded disease.” And then it encroached, coming for his kidneys, and he was in and out of a hospital in Sunset Park, into a rehabilitation facility in Bensonhurst, and back at the hospital where he was intubated and, when he could talk, his voice took on the timbre of broken glass. There were only so many times, my mother and I were told, he could be intubated before he died. A tracheal tube was inserted into his neck and I would never hear him again. He communicated in short, written messages, his balky hand only able to scratch out a few sentences. This was at his last stop, in the Rockaways. He was deeply miserable there. He repeatedly tugged his tube out. He rapped his tray, or the wall nearby, with his anguished knuckles, frustrating the nurses. My mother visited every day and I did my best to make the drive from Brooklyn as much as she did. There were lighter moments, when I gave him George Santos updates or shared the baseball scores, and he could smile along for a period. But it became clear, as the summer wore on, he was deteriorating, losing interest in the voices around him, the pain in his body too great, too constricting. He stayed alive as long as he did for everyone else and died on the very last day of August.

There was another joke between us—we had many—that I would scatter his ashes in the bay in front of a Chinese buffet we frequented. Several months later, I drove out there, the cardboard box in the backseat of my Hyundai Elantra, and tried. But when I got outside, in the December chill, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I clutched the box and began to sob.

My father, unlike me, was not a professional writer. He sought out, first, the thrill of politics and then the stability of government, but became, in his free time, a voracious reader of novels and nonfiction alike, Chekhov and the Times Metro section happily sharing a pile. He worked for many years in various federal capacities, including at the General Services Administration. He belonged, stylistically, to the midcentury, always wearing a necktie, loafers, and dress pants. He smoked a tobacco pipe—no cigarettes or marijuana for him—and brought with him a rich, weathered scent that I relished from childhood on. Despite his longtime membership in the Republican Party, he was an iconoclastic leftist would declare, without reservation, Paul Robeson was the greatest American who ever lived. He was also, in the manner of a famed fictional character from a prestige television show about Manhattan ad men in the 1960s—a show he never watched, but a show very much about the men of his generation—a person who kept secrets. My mother kept them too, but he was in his own league: I love him very dearly, still, but I wonder why he was this way. Why I never got to meet my paternal grandparents, despite the fact that they were alive for much of my childhood. Why he couldn’t tell me the truth of my birth, the truth of his marriage, the family he kept—the first family—that wasn’t my own. Why, when I was a child, he couldn’t stay the night at the apartment I grew up in, why I had to tell my friends he had a nonexistent evening job.

My partner at the time told me I should write a novel about my parents. I took her advice—they were the archetypes, and then my imagination did the rest of the work. The book was finished three years before my father died, when he could have easily read it. My father read just about everything I wrote, but he would never read this. I held off sharing the manuscript, arguing to myself this should only happen after a publisher took it on, after I knew it was going to print. Time hurried on. Selling any work of literary fiction is a slog; selling a sprawling social novel that clocks in around 145,000 words is an invitation to purgatory. The novel wasn’t just about my parents; nothing is ever so straightforward. But like many authors, I drew from my life, where the well was deeper than I had imagined. A book deal with a tiny press was closed eight months after his death.

Though my father, when he was alive, had never explicitly said this to me, I knew it to be the absolute truth: he was married to a woman who was not my mother when I was born. And he stayed married to that woman, living elsewhere, throughout my childhood and adolescence. He cleaved his life, remarkably, into two universes, and I floated in the second, doted on anyway, even as I wondered how certain facts could not possibly fit together and why, as a child, he could not be present on weekends or major holidays or, in general, at nightfall. Even, as I aged, I grew more resistant to asking open questions, to knowing the shape of my own existence.

Everything I found was through sleuthing, beginning on my mother’s desktop computer, and continuing on into college. Every discovery I made without a hint from either my mother or my father, two loving people who were otherwise loath, in almost every conceivable manner, to discuss feelings. They had the façade of a marriage, and this could make my childhood, in most instances, quite placid. I was very good at pretending, too. I was very good at imagining what I didn’t have.

And I would have to imagine whatever was churning through my father. He never really told me.

Some of this, I realize, is my fault. Whenever I’ve divulged the unusual circumstances of my life—my father having me when he was fifty, his departures each weeknight for unexplained locales—I’m often asked why I didn’t ask him or my mother about what was going on. Did I really tell my elementary school friend my father had a “night job” and leave it there? Did I not inquire at all, at least force a heart-to-heart that every half-baked bit of filmmaking or novel-writing would tell you must come somewhere three fourths of the way in? Is it a plausible that an only child with enough time on his hands did not ask direct questions? The answer, I am sorry to report, is yes. That’s the irony of growing up to be a journalist and getting paid money to ask difficult questions of strangers.

In my own life, I could ask nothing.

There was one opportunity to know more, one I never seized: in my late twenties, my father seemed to want to tell me more about his full life. By then, he was living with my mother after the death of his first wife. This was not something I was ever told directly; I learned it through public records searches and, perhaps, a stray remark. I grew up in a junior four co-op apartment in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn and my father had moved there, fully, in my college years, when I was away at Stony Brook University on eastern Long Island. As a family, we cohabitated together for a brief stretch until I moved out on my own, just after my twenty-fourth birthday. My father, a restless sleeper who monitored his blood sugar throughout the night, had the living room recliner as his bed, which he preferred. A transistor radio, crackling news or sports talk, always played at night, and it comforts me still to think of him there, the boy of the 1940s who grew up on radio serials and afternoon ballgames, the honeyed narratives weaving a tapestry in his mind.

He called me when I was twenty-eight. I didn’t live at home anymore but we spoke on the phone frequently and I would try to have dinner with him and my mother at least once a week. My partner once said we talked so much about politics and art and sports because we said so little about our personal lives; she noticed this long before I did. Better to discuss the Yankees lineup or the Iraq War than how my father had kept another family, with two children, in a different county. The ballplayers and politicians would be family instead. But this time, it seemed, my father wanted to talk.

I was walking on a steaming summer afternoon through the Brooklyn neighborhood of Marine Park. I was knocking on doors for votes—votes for myself, since I had made an abrupt career change and decided to run for political office. I was not so ambitious as mayoral candidate Norman Mailer. This was a mere run for state senate, and I liked to think, at the time, I had more grit Mailer ever did, since he seemed to be torn between performance art and the deadly serious desire to be a leader of men. My father liked that I was doing politics, though he would confess, once the race was done, he was glad I had lost. My reward would have been shlepping up to Albany for half the year and my writing career would’ve been sidelined; he preferred writers to politicians.

“If you ever want to talk about anything…” he told me on the phone as I was door-knocking.

It wasn’t clear what had prompted him. He was seventy-eight then, perhaps considering his mortality and what needed to be conveyed to me. After all these years, he may have been ready. We could have the phone conversation. We could sit down to dinner, later on. Air would be cleared, secrets brought to light, and I wouldn’t have to skulk around the internet for answers and he wouldn’t have to wonder about what I knew and what I didn’t.

An elegant solution, right there. I stood still on the sidewalk, the phone jammed against my sweat-streaked ear, and considered all of this.

“That’s ok.”

I did not want the conversation. I never did. I was averse to whatever wasn’t breezy, what wasn’t banter about baseball statistics or Roth novels or the fate of Congress. I dealt in facts that had little do with myself or my parents. I dealt in in-jokes. I was, when it came to my own existence, among the least openly inquisitive human beings that have come forth in the last century, if not longer. My parents’ drive for secrecy had convinced me it was best to swat away inconvenience. I could imagine, rather, nothing was wrong. And isn’t that what writers do anyway? Imagine?

The conversation didn’t progress much further. I was busy and could always duck behind business; the ants are industrious, as Thoreau once wrote, if the greater question is what are they industrious about. Rather than engage with the reality of my upbringing, I could retreat inward. I could keep wondering in private.

This is, perhaps, the greatest power of an only childhood, of having no siblings and the silence that comes with inevitable solitude. For hours on end, my mind was my only companion, and I had to find comfort in this—in this movement of my thoughts, and what universes might coalesce in static, in blankness. My father was around only several hours every weekday and my mother was often working. I was not ignored—no, I was loved very much—but there were physical limitations of this childhood that would not be overcome: the absence of the sibling playmate or sibling charge or older guide looming above, offering a portal into teenhood and beyond. It was me, and only me. I was judge and jury, prosecutor and defendant. I did not become self-reliant as much as reliant on self, and there’s a subtle distinction that I’ll parse here, as best I can. If the only child makes the self his companion, his advisor, and his confessor, he is not gaining any of the muscular self-reliance that infuses so many American myths; rather, he is deep in the lagoons of his own thoughts and moods, and there is both power and poison in this.

At least, this way, I was going to be a writer.

Why don’t you write about your parents? When my partner suggested this to me, I had just turned thirty and I was contemplating what I wanted to do next. I was known, if I was known at all, for my journalism and essays, but fiction was what had nourished me since my teenage years, and was all I ever really wanted to do. The novel, as antediluvian as it might seem in this tech-addled age, was my totem, and I considered it the highest art form—or the art form, at least, where I could channel my skill into an object that would achieve permanence. Earlier that year, I had finished a book about a murderous upstate cult, pure invention, and I was at a loss for where to go. My parents was not where I imagined I would be, not when I had established, with them at least, an unspoken arrangement: we do not discuss the personal. I, certainly, was rarely one to bear my feelings, what sticky anxieties might have lurked below. Every day was good, every arrangement fine, and passion would be reserved for the subjects that floated far beyond us, in the realms of pop culture and current events and recorded history. Even writing about my parents—and not telling them—seemed absurdly daunting, like scaling the side of a cliff in the dead of night. I didn’t even truly know what I was apprehending.

I had a few ideas. The contours of my mother’s life were easiest to know. She was, at times, a de facto single mother, and her whereabouts were always accounted for. If I were to write a novel, she would be at its center. Or, no, a character with resemblance to her would occupy that place, since I was still inventing. All I had was my inventing. This would be the fuel for my novel, Glass Century.

My mother and father met when he was an adjunct professor in the City University of New York system, in his late twenties. He was married. My mother, ten years his junior, was a college student. At some point after that, an affair began. I could have simply asked my mother and father about all of this. But there remained an unexplained psychic barrier to such probing, one that held my tongue in place. In these lacunae, at least, I could devise my own fictions.

I had gleaned I was not “planned” in any serious sense. My mother was turning forty, my father fifty, and he had not left his wife. What I’ve mulled is how comfortable my jovial, witty, and easygoing father grew with the concept of a counter-life. It’s not one he ever articulated directly, but it’s one I’ve contemplated a great deal in my writing. The act of writing creates a counter, an immediate parallel universe. Even memoir is a form of fabrication, memories leaky unless they’re eidetic, and you’re left to plumb what is essentially a form of darkness—not evil, but the absence of immediacy. My father never seemed outwardly uncomfortable with us. My mother, who did know where my father returned at night, did not seem to outwardly care either. That was my childhood, a nuclear family that wasn’t. At seven p.m., my father took off, waving at me through the window, as was his ritual. I almost thought of him then the way I might have imagined the lives of characters on television shows beyond the strictures of the episodes, these twenty-two minutes of time (eight for commercials) when life was on and Goku or Johnny Bravo could strut across the world’s stage. Every viewer implicitly invents a reality for that character that extends beyond the episode itself, that gray stretch of time not covered in the narrative—what is not real, but must be real for the show to have a logic, an architecture. Where did my father go at night? Where did he sleep? As a child, and even adolescent, I had no concept. He simply vanished into his counter-life. I was giddy that he reemerged in time to pick me up from school. I was afraid, merely, he would vanish for good.

And he almost did. On a Tuesday in September, he was set to have breakfast with Neil Levin, the executive director of the Port Authority, to discuss a new job. Levin took his meetings at Windows on the World, the famed restaurant located at the top of the North Tower. My father worked in one of the small World Trade Center buildings surrounding the Twin Towers. In the days before his meeting, he was scheduled for his colonoscopy, and he very much wanted to keep his breakfast with Levin. My mother advised him to go to the doctor and meet with Levin later in the week. She thought it would be more difficult to reschedule the colonoscopy. My father didn’t agree. But he relented.

On September 11^th, 2001, my father went to the doctor. He was there when the airplanes screamed into the towers and changed the century forever. Neil Levin, who was last seen at Windows on the World, died at the age of forty-six.

My father was an atheist, and didn’t subscribe to anything that had the whiff of providence or mysticism. But he did believe that life was, ultimately, a matter of luck and timing. I was eleven when my father canceled his meeting with Neil Levin and I do not know what kind of person I would have become if I lost him that day. For a generation of children, 9/11 was Graduation Day, not so much a shattering of innocence as an inauguration into the destructive potential of life on Earth. I had my father, at least, so I could only lose so much.

Writing a novel is inevitably an act of excavation. Bits and shreds of yourself fall into the product. If you are writing a novel that tugs from your life—and one, like Glass Century, that begins with characters patterned off your parents—you may reach perilous terrain. You can, if you’re not careful, end up performing a kind of ventriloquism, with your characters as dummies actualizing all of your unresolved neuroses and longings. When I began writing the novel, a few months before the onset of the pandemic, I knew there’d be two characters: Mona Plotz and Saul Glass. Eventually, as Mona became the heroine of sorts, I decided Glass was suitable for her instead, since I had an inkling I wanted that surname in the title. Mona, like my mother, became a young tennis star. Saul, like my father, became a rising government employee in a liberal Republican administration.

I want to say I didn’t interrogate my parents on their past in order to attain a certain purity in the fictional landscape. Characters, if they’re written correctly, gradually escape your grasp—you find them chattering in a way you didn’t quite fathom at the outset, and having thoughts that resemble, in time, an organic interiority. Also, more importantly, I’ve never lived inside either my parents, unless you count in utero, pre-consciousness, so however I fathomed their thoughts, it all devolved into fiction anyway. I do believe we can only know people so well, that consciousness is somewhat like a coffin to the outside world, sealing away secrets for an audience of one. But, no, really, I was afraid to ask my father about his life. Afraid, afraid. There were uncomfortable facts I dimly understood when he was alive and comprehended to a far greater to degree after he died: that I, in fact, had grandparents who were living when I was alive, despite being told, to the contrary, they were all dead. Both my father’s mother and father were living when I was born. If my grandfather had died in the early 1990s (a photograph of his headstone, which I didn’t know—until my thirties—even existed, showed a death date of 1994) my grandmother had apparently lived even longer, until 2003, when I was thirteen years-old. I never met her.

Why? My mother told me, once, that my father’s mother had figured out a secret child existed because there was a pacifier left in his car. I don’t know anything else about this anecdote—when it occurred, or what the exchange between my father and his mother was like. How much shame did my father feel? How much did these secrets burn at him? Very much, or not at all? What is it difficult to hide like that—from both his mother and his son, to manage these counter-lives? In my fiction, I attacked these questions, and also ran away from them. I had a story to tell, after all, and I was decidedly going to make up a world. My father did not meet Donald Trump, but I imagine Donald himself, as a smirking twenty-something, following Fred into a Queens meeting that Saul must take.

Fiction, fiction! I love it so. My father would have liked to have read all of this, and I lament I never showed him a draft of the novel before he died. If he was secretive, he appreciated a good show, and as a deep admirer of Roth, he could never begrudge the writers who raided their own lives. A mediative memoir and essay like this one would conventionally conclude, in some form, with the old father-son heart-to-heart, all secrets revealed, all threads tied, closure obtained. That’s not how it works with flawed people. When my father got sick, we kept talking sports and politics. In part, this was because neither of us believed he would soon be dead—or at least I didn’t. He fell, not long after turning eighty-three, and cracked the glass on an antique armoire in my mother’s apartment. (They lived together, at that point, but I call it my mother’s apartment because she was on the co-op stock certificate, not him.) By that point, he was having some trouble walking, and we thought it was good to get him to a rehab facility to build up his strength. He ended up in a dismal room in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, not far from a clattering D train, and we bantered often about getting him out of there for Opening Day so he could watch the Mets in peace and not have to struggle with the rehab’s glitching TV or the keening of his roommate. His kidneys, though, were rapidly failing. The care at the rehab was middling, but even extraordinary attention wasn’t going to turn back the clock. He shuttled into and out of and into Brooklyn’s NYU Lutheran. He was told he probably needed dialysis, which he did not want, and we spoke for the last time on the telephone in March 2023, as I was driving back from Albany, having just had dinner with an old friend of mine, Zohran Mamdani, who was contemplating running for mayor in a few years. My father loved that kind of intrigue.

In late March, he had trouble breathing, and the hospital repeatedly intubated him to keep him alive. My mother and I considered options. At some point, a human being can’t keep getting a tube rammed down their throat, and he was going to die unless we authorized a tracheostomy. A smarmy young doctor badgered us for a fast decision, as if we were weighing whether to buy whole milk or the two percent. We decided for the surgery in April, he lived, and we hoped he could, at some point, escape the tube. A man who was once gushing with words, a wondrous motormouth of the highest order, was silenced. What misery those final months were. I don’t linger on them too much. I’ve come to take a quasi-Slaughterhouse-Five view of time, with past and future existing simultaneously on a continuum and the earlier holding as much value as the recent, so I don’t conceive of my father imprisoned in his own body, getting wheeled to immiserating dialysis at the beachside facility where he would die. I think of him, at age fifty-five or so, taking me out to the playground to dig holes in the mud. Or indulging in my toddler curiosity of fire hydrants, stooping down and unscrewing them so I could gaze inside. Some of these details made the novel, others didn’t. In the end, I couldn’t be upset about the secrets, that he withheld worlds from me and denied me the fullest conception of self. I couldn’t be upset because I loved him, and he loved me, and that, I decided, was enough. After he died, I had dreams of a shimmering intensity that I hadn’t known before and I haven’t experienced since—dreams that convinced me it was possible for the dead to commune with the living. I was grateful for having these dreams. In all of them, I told him I missed him.

Please pre-order my new novel, Colossus. It’s about a rich and powerful Midwestern pastor with a dark secret. Here’s what the great writer Matthew Specktor has to say about it: “Ross Barkan’s Colossus begins firmly inside the troubled pastoral sublime of John Updike and Richard Ford, but it’s a feint—or a partial feint. What Barkan has in mind is something far more expansive: a broad interrogation of the American psyche in its myriad conflicting parts. The result is masterful, as thrillingly devious—and as brilliantly controlled—as Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.”

Two recent pieces of breaking news, for very different reasons, drew my attention. One is obvious enough: the election of Zohran Mamdani, my old campaign manager, as mayor of New York City. The other, more niche: Dasha Nekrasova, the actress and Red Scare podcast co-host, was dropped from her talent agency, Gersh. Nekrasova was punished for hosting and acting chummy with Nick Fuentes, the young far-right activist. Given that Nekrasova, a one-time Bernie Sanders supporter who swerved rightward in the 2020s, has hammed it up with Alex Jones and been at the center of controversies before, it was somewhat surprising that only now she’d be dumped. Was Fuentes, a white nationalist and anti-Semite, just a bridge too far for Gersh? Probably. Her acting career, also, seemed to be stalling out—she is best known for her role in Succession—and perhaps, like any other corporate player, Gersh felt the Dasha juice simply wasn’t worth the squeeze.

Nekrasova was at the forefront of an artistic scene, Dimes Square, that seems definitively done. Dimes Square, as a literal place—a Manhattan microneighborhood between Chinatown and the Lower East Side—is still humming, with all its usual haunts, from Metrograph to Clandestino, jammed in the evenings. But the cultural artifacts of Dimes, and what it came to represent, are already confined to history. Taking root in 2020, in the first year of the pandemic, the Manhattan-centric Dimes Square took its name from the neighborhood and coalesced, chiefly, as a reaction to various left-liberal pieties. In the late 2010s and 2020, social justice or woke politics were ascendant, even hegemonic, and those within Dimes Square—primarily affluent young writers, artists, models, and various hangers-on—existed as a kind of red resistance. Dimes Square figures partied in violation of pandemic era lockdown protocols. They formed a print-only newspaper, The Drunken Canal. Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump only catalyzed Dimes Square because the counterculture, at least temporarily, belonged to conservatives—or at least those willing to defy the liberal establishment. Matthew Gasda, a playwright who has been contemptuous of the woke left, shot to local fame as the author of the play Dimes Square in 2022. Red Scare, racing away from its Bernie roots, backed Trump. Sovereign House, an event space in Dimes Square, hosted many readings and parties, a number of them MAGA-inflected. Curtis Yarvin, the tech millionaire and avowed right-wing monarchist, floated about. The Mars Review of Books, founded by Noah Kumin, sprung up as a heterodox counterweight to publications like the New York Review of Books and N+1. The patron saint of Dimes Square club music, The Dare, got a major label record deal.

I was on the periphery of all of this. I published in Mars Review, read at Sovereign House, hung out with Gasda, appeared on Kaitlin Phillip’s Montez Press Radio show—this being the unofficial Dimes Square broadcaster—and spied Yarvin at Kumin’s book party. I had a few drinks at Clandestino. My politics were then, as they are now, decisively of the left, but I never felt uncomfortable hovering in right-coded spaces. Some of that I attribute to growing up in a southern Brooklyn neighborhood with many Republicans. Some of that was also the aftermath of the pandemic; I wanted to enjoy the nightlife, mix about with other artists, and find any sort of literary scene I could actually participate in. That’s what drew me; there had been, in the 2010s, no success for me on the literary front beyond a novel I published that very few people read. I was not invited to readings, I hardly knew any novelists, and my attempts to publish other short stories, book reviews, and novels usually ended in failure. Whatever literary Brooklyn was, I had no role in it.

I don’t disdain Dimes Square. In part, that’s because I always sensed its days would be numbered, especially if Trump returned to power. In truth, very few of the scene participants were genuine MAGA die-hards or actual fascists. For most of them, the political mood was just that—a mood, a current, a vibe. They had wearied of the self-seriousness of college-educated liberal elites. This weariness, though, wasn’t enough to sustain a political movement, let alone one that was artistic. There was an election night watch party at Sovereign House last November that I did not attend, and I heard there was much celebration. Little did they know, they were cheering on their own obsolescence. Trump was the Man now. He was the establishment. Liberal woke would give way to right-wing woke. The old left-wing speech policing would devolve into something far more insidious: the full-frontal assault on free speech from the United States government.

Suddenly, MAGA was no longer cool. It was Stephen Miller’s Luthorian dome, J.D. Vance’s logorrheic X screeds, and Trump’s 38 percent approval rating. It was trying, and failing, to make an actual martyr out of Charlie Kirk. But Trump, alone, did not strike the Dimes deathblow. Had the New York City mayoral race proceeded differently, the downtown reactionaries might have had a chance.

They were, ultimately, no match for Zohran Mamdani.

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My new novel, Colossus, arrives next April. The below essay is about this book, which the writer Matthew Specktor has called “a broad interrogation of the American psyche in its myriad conflicting parts. The result is masterful, as thrillingly devious—and as brilliantly controlled—as Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” Please pre-order the novel now. It would mean a lot.

For a while in my writing career—a decade, perhaps—I was anguished over the state of the novel in the United States. What did it mean that people seemed to be reading literature less often? That novelists were no longer so famous? That whatever ceiling I reached, the spoils would never match those of my predecessors, especially the swaggering Jews of the midcentury? What was I to do? It is hard to say when, exactly, I stopped caring about these questions so much. If I had to guess, it was after I turned thirty and some of my youthful restlessness leaked away. I brayed less; I was, on balance, calmer. And I learned the lesson all artists, if they are worth anything, must take to heart: only the work matters.

You do it. That’s been my philosophy as a writer since my late teens, knocking out drafts of novels no one will ever read. Too many writers, particularly in this neurotic, tech-swamped age, agonize over a blank page but do nothing about it. They like the concept of writing but not the alchemy itself, and they do not understand that, often, this process must be forced. An athlete or a musician only gets better through the drudgery of practice. A writer is no different. This, really, is how novels happen. I’m thrilled that, next April, Arcade will publish my newest novel, Colossus. I believe in it wholeheartedly, as all artists must believe in what they put forth into the world. Describing a novel is always a challenge, especially one you wrote, but I can say it’s about a successful, wealthy pastor in a rural Michigan town who is harboring a dark secret. Set in the present day—this is a novel for our new Trump age, and our pastor is certainly an admirer of the president—and written in the first person, it’s both a departure from my last novel, Glass Century, and a continuation of a project that I hope will fully see the light of day soon. I am in the process of a loose trilogy, what I’m calling my American Saga, that will grapple with the American condition from the 1970s through the 2020s. The untitled third novel in this set will share a certain current, and maybe a universe, with Colossus. I’ve just completed a draft.

There’s been much discourse, some of which I directly spearheaded, about the state of the straight male novelist in America, as well as novels that wrestle with the male condition, even when it’s unseemly. I did not write Colossus, and my protagonist Teddy Starr, to participate in this discourse. But I did feel freer, generally, as I worked on this manuscript over the course of 2023 and 2024 to craft a character that, in many respects, is despicable. Whether a protagonist is “likeable” or not always seemed very silly to me; what matters far more, to any reader, is whether they are interesting. Teddy Starr, man of God and trailer park kingpin and irrepressible horn dog and inveterate liar, passed that test for me. He speaks directly to you, and his voice is erudite, rambling, and even warm. My North Star, here, was Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels, especially The Sportswriter. Like John Updike, Ford wrote a series of novels over many decades that traced the arc of Bascombe, a sportswriter-turned-real estate agent who lives in suburban New Jersey, sleeps around a good deal, and attempts to make sense of the quotidian absurdities of modern life. If asked about Teddy, I might say, at the jump, he’s dark Bascombe. His sunny exterior masks an inner ruthlessness, a furious drive to fully reinvent himself. America is a frontier nation, rich with strivers, hustlers, and hucksters. Live a myth long enough, and it may become real. Reality is waiting to be created; Teddy, who is not the upstanding Christian he says he is, understands this well.

In a recent essay, the critic Ann Manov argued that “contemporary publishing is hostile to the individual consciousness” because the individual consciousness is, by nature, “hostile to any consensus position or mass marketing.” With the exception of Arcade and a few other publishers, I’ve found this to be more often true than not. New releases are more insipid than they should be, and the hype machine is less trustworthy than ever. Consciousness, in all its ugliness and beauty, is not always rendered as it should be—or rendered much at all. If I found Teddy Starr unsettling, I still wanted to live within him. I wanted the full scope of his existence on the page.

Perhaps I felt this way because, when I was in college, I fell under the spell of the Modernists, particularly Virginia Woolf. Woolf was, in every sense, the anti-mass marketing writer, publishing glittering, and plotless, excavations of human consciousness. Her novels only found an audience because she and her husband created a printing press and forward-thinking critics dared to engage with her work. It is this spirit that fiction requires again, whether it’s emerging from large-scale or independent publishers. Yes, a novel belongs to a marketplace—I hope you buy Colossus, and I hope it sells well—but its value as an art form cannot be forgotten or cheapened. The novel plumbs and renders interiority like no other art form. It can tell us, more than almost anything, what it’s like to be alive, to see and think and feel and make sense of the inherent contradictions of existence.

It’s true, as Manov writes, this does not always fit a comfortable marketing paradigm. A lousy novel treats its characters like apparitions or symbols; a good one makes them whole, and lets you breathe with them. This is mimesis at its very best. And if novels are following this path, they can become, morally, more ambiguous. They are not merely modes of instruction for proper living. Readers are weary of the moralistic fiction that peaked sometime in the 2010s or the early 2020s, and they want literature, I believe, that more properly reflects the curiosity and even chaos of the human condition. And they’ve grown more sophisticated about separating character from author. One needn’t write “good” characters to be a good novelist (or, to write a good novel). Though I write on politics for a living, I am wary of any novelist hewing too closely to a single faction. Novelists, before anything else, represent themselves, and themselves alone.

I hesitate to say too much more about Colossus. For one, I don’t want to give up all the secrets of the novel when you’ve yet to read it. It’s not fun to know, right now, what Teddy is hiding. Or why his affairs, alone, aren’t bringing his marriage to the brink of collapse. What I can say is that this novel was written with great confidence and care, and it’s one I’m thrilled to see unleashed into the world. This is the wonderful privilege of publishing: to have your work in the world, and witness others try to make sense of it. For some writers, this is terrifying. They have their interpretation, their conception, and they blanche when readers try to tell them something they might not have imagined in the first place. For me, that’s the glorious pluralism of the reading and writing experience. It is, in that manner, fully democratic. I cannot be the sovereign who tells you exactly how to think about Colossus or Glass Century or anything else I publish. I may try, but the relationship between reader and text is too intimate for me, the author, to impose my will fully upon it. If we are lucky, our works outlast us—there’s no Shakespeare or Melville or Virginia Woolf to tell us, in 2025, what they actually meant—and remain contested into the distant future. I can only hope that you all read Colossus and feel stirred enough to react. Cheer Teddy Starr or damn him. Take a stroll around his town, his little kingdom. And feel the full weight of this strange twenty-first century on his shoulders—and your own.

A version of this essay first appeared on Arcade’s Substack.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has said he would retain Jessica Tisch, who was appointed last year by Mayor Eric Adams, as his police commissioner. Tisch is a favorite of the business class, the New York Post editorial board, and a number of prominent Democrats. Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg are Tisch boosters, since she served in both of their administrations. As Mamdani’s many conservative and centrist critics lashed him throughout the year, he offered what amounted to a sizable olive branch: confirming, during a televised debate and in subsequent interviews, Tisch would be his choice to lead the NYPD. There was much logic to this; Mamdani had to pivot to the center and placate restive moderates. Tisch is a Harvard-educated billionaire with no experience as an actual police officer, but she’s a well-regarded bureaucrat who seems dedicated, at the very minimum, to purging corrupt officials at the upper ranks of the NYPD. After years of scandal under Adams, Tisch is attempting some version of reform. For that, she’s won great plaudits in the press and put genuine pressure on Mamdani to keep her.

Now that he’s won, will she stay? Tisch is far more conservative than Mamdani. She’s a fierce critic of the partial end of cash bail, the reform of discovery laws, and the raising of the age of criminal responsibility. If she’s soft-spoken, she sounds no different than a Long Island Republican when it comes to the topic of criminal justice. There’s also Israel: Tisch, who is Jewish, is a proud Zionist, while Mamdani, who once managed my campaign for State Senate, is pro-Palestine. It’s hard to see, truly, how long the Mamdani-Tisch relationship can last. If history is any indication, they’ll have at least two years: that’s how long de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, was able to hold onto Bill Bratton, who had been Rudy Giuliani police commissioner and returned for a second tour of duty in the first de Blasio term.

If the choice to keep Tisch seemed to offer more pros than cons for Mamdani, a political maneuver by Adams in the final weeks of the campaign gave the con side plenty of fresh fodder. Mamdani will have a good deal of hard thinking to do now.

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