Friday! Brooklyn! Come to Unnameable Books on 615 Vanderbilt Avenue and hear me read from Colossus. Here’s what Bret Easton Ellis has to say about my new novel: “Barkan is reaching back to the past, to a traditional kind of novel, one much closer to Richard Ford and John Updike ... We are seduced as readers by Teddy Starr, enough to find him sympathetic, relatable, a victim, which I don’t think Ross Barkan cares about as much as is he interesting? And yes, he is.” Buy it wherever books are sold or get it on audiobook.

The present can be a cage. Now is always now, and the future is a great fog. This is especially true when the times feel dire. Can it ever not be this? American politics can feel, for all the volatility, like it’s reached a dark stasis: Donald Trump in power, and always in power. I was talking to a Canadian friend recently and he asked me how I felt, as an American, about Trump as my representative on the world stage. I explained, as best I could, there are two conflicting currents. One, Trump is not America because he has never, even at the apogee of his popularity, won over more than half the country. His 2024 popular vote share was barely 50 percent. His approval ratings haven’t ever edged much higher. At the same time, any liberal who declared—and, to be fair, you hear less of this talk today—this is not who we are is plainly deluded. In three national elections, Trump won many millions of votes. He is a three-time Republican Party nominee. He embodies deeply American traits, and makes honest the venality and savagery that has, along with our ability to inspire hope, characterized these 250 years. He has joined history. There will be no discussion of the first 25 years of the 21st century without Donald J. Trump. In terms of impact on the body politic—his ability to, like a demented sun-king, assert himself over daily life—he is a rival to Reagan, Nixon, and Roosevelt.

A mistake we might make, however, is assuming it will always be so. Just as Trump was once treated as an impossible president, an aberration who might make noise in a primary but never seriously contest the presidency against Hillary Clinton, he must not be assumed to be eternal. It’s not just that he’s 80, and the odds are quite long he finds a way, as a widely hated octogenarian, to seize an illegal third term. Age is but a number; the legacy of Trump is what we must start to care about now. And there are real questions about what MAGA will look like when he’s off the stage. Who can knit the disparate coalitions together? Who has the moxie, the verve, the mania? Not the guy who can barely make it through an interview on “The View.” A better question might be whether another politician can run the Trump playbook and win, or be a reasonable facsimile of the 45th and 47th president. Hasn’t Trump proven the American hunger for an entertainer-in-chief, a born showman who thinks purel in the terms of a 30-second TV hit? Perhaps. No one can argue with that record.

Allow me, though, to hazard a prediction: the next president will not be like Donald Trump. The president after that one might not be like Trump, either. The politics of dull predictability—even, dare I say, technocratic governance—might just return to the American scene. Boring is coming back.

Can I really predict this? After the chaos of the 2010s and 2020s? If I have one theory of modern American politics, it’s that everything boils down to the two p’s: polarization and the pendulum. A two-party, winner-take-all presidential system where the parties are ideologically distinct—liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are mostly extinct—guarantees that polarization is not leaving us. The era of the landslide popular vote victory is dead. No one can break 60% like Nixon in 1972, or Reagan’s 59% in 1984. A Democrat won’t approach the 2008 Obama margin. We simply do not live in that world any longer. Fewer voters are willing to ticket split or cross party lines. The Senate is a good example of this: consider how few senators are left who belong to one party and represent a state that supported the other party’s candidate in the last presidential election. There’s a reason, even with all his scandals, Graham Platner has to be considered a slight favorite to defeat Susan Collins in Maine.

The pendulum is an even simpler concept: in this polarized landscape, American voters get tired of one reality and want another. Trump was once novel and fresh. The jokes landed. Enough voters thought, over three successive elections, he was worth a shot, especially in 2024, when he had been out of power for four years and 2010s nostalgia took hold. It helped, too, that the alternatives offered were Joe Biden (doddering, barely able to speak in public) and Kamala Harris (substandard political talent who dropped out before the 2020 primaries). But Trump’s act, in 2026, is played out. Unless you are one of the shrinking number of MAGA foot soldiers who will follow Trump into the abyss, you understand there is very little to celebrate about this second term. Interest rates are high, gas prices are elevated, and housing costs too much. The Iran War is a disaster. DOGE needlessly eviscerated the federal government. ICE is the most hated federal agency in America. It is all chaos for the sake of chaos, and the underlying conditions of the country are poorer, for working and middle-class people, than they were in 2019. It’s all very tiring. The Republicans will get immolated in the midterms; that’s a foregone conclusion. Democrats will have power again because the Republicans squandered it.

A decade of Trump is a very long time. As the pendulum swings away from him, it might swing towards a politician who promises normalcy. This was, of course, the Biden campaign of 2020, but Biden’s problem was age and poor timing. His mental acuity had devolved too rapidly to attempt another term, and he was barely able to sell himself while in the Oval Office. The timing aspect was Covid: he entered office in 2021, just as the pandemic era inflation was taking hold. This phenomenon, global in scope, unraveled incumbent governments across the world. Biden/Harris crumbling in 2024 didn’t look so different than the Conservatives getting swept out of power in the United Kingdom or Macron’s coalition taking a beating in France. Biden’s anti-Trump messaging, though, wasn’t wrong. Americans were prepared to move on from Trump in 2020. Four years was enough. His handling of the pandemic was shambolic. The quirk of history was that Trump lost and got four years to refresh himself while benefiting from a Democratic president who was lying to the American people about his mental fitness. Trump got to feel new again.

That’s all gone. I won’t predict who the next president will be. What I will argue is that competency and predictability will be values more cherished by the 2028 electorate. This is less about optimism and more about the pendulum. A presidential candidate who promises to fix the mess of DOGE (I will hire Americans!) and keep the U.S. out of idiotic, destructive wars (We won’t invade Iran!) will go far. It would be nice if a presidential candidate promised something more transformative or even delivered on it, but I’m not sure, in the short term, how necessary that will be. Not-Trump could be enough. After that, who knows what will happen. Perhaps, because I’ve made a quick trip to Canada, I’ve been thinking about Mark Carney and his success as prime minister. Carney is a technocrat with some muscle. He promises the management chops of a Keir Starmer but appears far less feckless—and more committed to a concrete policy vision—than the UK Prime Minister who might be chased from office soon. Do Americans want a Carney? Is anyone like that running in 2028? I don’t know. I do think, though, that any candidate who seems like they can run the United States reasonably well is going to be strong. The Democrats do not need a generational political talent like Barack Obama, but they do need to stop nominating gravely flawed politicians. Odds are, after 2016, 2020, and 2024, this will happen. The dynasties are dead and the establishment is too fractured. The Clintons can’t put their fingers on the scale. Neither can Obama. No one wants to hear from Bidenworld ever again. The 2028 primary will be the widest open since 1992. For most Americans, that’s an exciting prospect. We’ll get to enjoy democracy for once.

I’m in Ottawa tomorrow at Octopus Books doing a reading for my novel Colossus. If you’re in the area, come out! And I’ll be at Unnameable Books on Friday, June 19th in Brooklyn, reading from Colossus as well. I’ll be joined by several other excellent writers. The extravaganza kicks off at 7 p.m.

Not everything I write, naturally, ages well. In the summer of 2024, I became briefly bullish about the prospect of Tim Walz on the Democratic ticket. I thought Walz, the governor of Minnesota, would be a tough left-populist in the mold of Paul Wellstone, the liberal conscience of the Senate who died, tragically, in a plane crash. Wellstone was, in addition to being a genuine progressive and successful a political organizer, a jock; he won a wrestling scholarship to the University of North Carolina and went undefeated in the ACC. In an era when Democrats seem to be bleeding the support of working-class men, the Wellstone spirit is one worth recapturing. And Walz, progressive Minnesotan and veteran and former football coach, seemed to offer Kamala Harris a real political weapon in the home stretch against Donald Trump. Instead, he came under fire for exaggerating his military experience and appeared passive, even overwhelmed, in his televised debate against JD Vance. The Coach Walz persona was shtick that never quite landed. The failure of 2024, ultimately, lay with Harris and the senile Joe Biden, but I can admit I was wrong about Walz: he wasn’t much of an asset after all.

With Vance, I’ll stick to my guns. In 2024, I questioned the wisdom of Trump adding him to the ticket. He was a political underperformer in his 2022 Senate race and I was not impressed when I sae him speak at the 2024 Republican National Convention. I even called him a beta, comparing him unfavorably to Trump who remains, for all his catastrophic failures, an alpha to his supporters. Vance, to me, seemed like a squishy, warmed-over keyboard warrior trying far too hard to be a MAGA brawler. Vance sounded and acted like what he was: a formerly liberal pundit who wrote a middling memoir and pivoted rightward as it became obvious he was never going to have a political career in his native Ohio if he ran as a Democrat. The JD Vance of 2002 or even 2012 might have campaigned as a Democrat for Senate, but he understood, by the 2020s, the only path to power was seizing the Republican nomination. To do that, he’d have to grovel to Trump, his family, and the ultra-rich. Donald Jr. and Peter Thiel, together, made the quondam idol of the coastal liberal set—the earnest young man who could explain MAGA to Manhattan and Marin County—the potential successor to Trump himself. Vance, to his credit, played the inside game very well.

But one wonders, in 2026, whether becoming the Republican vice president was really the booby prize. Trump is deeply unpopular, and he’ll never again near the highs of 2024 and early 2025. His power to inflict damage remains; his actual grip on the country, however, loosens by the day. As I wrote, to much backlash, in 2024, the United States is too big for fascism, and if it ever Happens Here in this byzantine federalist republic, it won’t be because we elected an incompetent reality TV star with a child’s attention span. The real fascist will know what he’s doing. In the meantime, Trump will confront a Democratic House next year and maybe, just maybe, a Democratic Senate. At that point, he’ll have nothing left but executive orders, the sort that can be wiped away by the next president. He can always start another war. Trump promises, if nothing else, more chaos in his final years.

Vance is still the favorite to be the Republican nominee in 2028. That doesn’t mean, however, many other Republicans would trade places with him right now. That doesn’t mean the road ahead isn’t imperiled.

Read more

My new novel, Colossus, is out now. Get it in print, get it as an e-book, get it as an audiobook. Buy a novel that has been called a “canny, twisty satire of all-American posturing.”

The small city, I’ve always believed, is most conducive to feeling the intensity of a championship run. Take a city with less than one million people, hand them a sizzling team, and watch the resurgence of a monoculture that, these days, can only exist for sports. The charitable view is that a smaller city is more communal, more intimate, neighbors more likely to know neighbors; the sneering New Yorker, like me, might shoot back that the small city just has less going on. I’ve long thought that, for New York, this was always a bit of a problem when it came to professional sports. I’ve been an inveterate Yankee fan from early childhood and I’ve followed basketball and football with varying intensity over the years—less in recent times, if I’m honest—and this has allowed me to make a study of big city fandom. And my observation, from watching the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Rangers, and Islanders go on long playoff runs, is that all of these teams will only matter so much in a city of eight million people, especially since loyalties are divided.

New York, I’d argue, is a baseball town, but neither the Yankees nor Mets can unite the mass of New York baseball fans behind them. Met fans will never cheer on a Yankee playoff run. If the Yankees reach a World Series, as they finally did in 2024, Met fans will hope, desperately, they don’t win. Yankee fans, generally, have been more indifferent to the fate of the Mets, but the Juan Soto signing changed that dynamic, perhaps for good. Yankee fans now delight in the suffering of the Mets. While I’ve personally enjoyed Mets playoff runs—I was supportive, in particular, of the 2015 drive to the World Series, and hoped for a Subway Series in 2024—I can’t imagine ever seriously cheering them on. The dark part of me now hopes they lose in embarrassing fashion. All of this is ultimately ancestral: New York has been a city of baseball divisions dating back to the dawn of the American League, when the Highlanders, the predecessor to the Yankees, were formed in 1903. The National League had two New York baseball teams, the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, and when both moved to the West Coast in 1958, the Mets were created to give Yankee-hating National League fans their own replacement franchise. The Yankees could not be the sole baseball team of New York City for very long.

Read more

Not sure whether to buy Colossus, my new novel? Take it from American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis: “Barkan is reaching back to the past, to a traditional kind of novel, one much closer to Richard Ford and John Updike ... We are seduced as readers by Teddy Starr, enough to find him sympathetic, relatable, a victim, which I don’t think Ross Barkan cares about as much as is he interesting? And yes, he is.” Get it in print, e-book, audiobook, whatever you like.

Despite the fact that I identify as a person of the left—the democratic socialist mayor of New York City was once my campaign manager—I’ve always maintained a grudging respect for Rupert Murdoch. It can be argued, genuinely, Murdoch’s Fox News has been venom for American democracy, and his British tabloids are not much better. The moral legacy of Murdoch is quite poor. But like with anything else in life, assessing Murdoch, now ninety-five, is not a straightforward endeavor. This villain had something to offer the world. Unlike Jeff Bezos, who has run the Washington Post into the gutter, Murdoch always understood media. He cared about newspapers, magazines, and television stations. One of the quirks of the twentieth century was that Murdoch, on the balance, was a solid steward of two decidedly left-wing media properties: New York Magazine and the Village Voice. He did, at various points, own both, and they were profitable, strong publications on his watch. He understood he couldn’t fully impose his reactionary politics on either. The same was not true of the New York Post, which he remade as a hard right tabloid after buying it when it was a liberal voice in local affairs. What he did do, however, was invest in the New York Post. He never let it rot. Even today, despite the havoc it might cause, it’s a useful newspaper, and anyone who wants a complete understanding of New York City needs to read it. A more encouraging Murdoch tale is the Wall Street Journal: it remains a robust, respectable, and ethical publication. Compare the health of the Journal in 2026 to the Washington Post; it’s night and day, with the former retaining its subscriber base and reputation.

The long wind-up with Murdoch is intended to put Bari Weiss, a mere forty-two, into perspective. Two realities can be true simultaneously: Weiss is a visionary who built The Free Press into a digital juggernaut and she’s a blatant failure at CBS News, a hapless media mogul who has committed the sort of unforced errors Murdoch always knew to avoid.

Weiss’ politics might be dubious—to me at least—but that isn’t why she’s failing. It all comes down to competence.

And it all begins with “60 Minutes.”

Read more

I had the honor of appearing on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast to discuss my new novel, Colossus. BEE was a fan! You should be too. Order my novel now—in print or audiobook. Make your dream come true.

There are now to two congressional insurgents in New York City who have endorsements from the Democratic Socialists of America and Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The first, Claire Valdez, is a state assemblywoman running against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn Borough President. I’ve written pretty extensively on this primary and the fundamentals haven’t change all that much. In another era, Reynoso would be the vaunted frontrunner: he has the endorsements of major labor unions, the Working Families Party, and the outgoing popular congresswoman, Nydia Velázquez. He holds a higher office, and he’s been in politics far longer. Unlike Valdez, he grew up in the Brooklyn and Queens district.

Despite all that, he isn’t in the lead because of the rise of Mamdani and DSA: both are extremely potent in the district, which runs through neighborhoods like Bushwick and Ridgewood, and they could be enough to drag Valdez over the finish line.

The consensus, among the political observers I’ve chatted with, is that Reynoso has been the more impressive candidate. It’s not just that Valdez was only elected in 2024 and Reynoso has been active in Brooklyn politics since the 2000s. It’s that Reynoso has emerged as the more energetic campaigner, running like he’s behind, and he was even able to outflank Valdez when ICE showed up at a Bushwick hospital and the community furiously protested. While Reynoso immediately staged a rally and seemed wholly available to the media, Valdez appeared caught between challenging ICE and NYPD coordination and running afoul of her endorser, Mamdani, who controls the NYPD. Reynoso, too, turned in a better performance in their TV debate on NY1. Again, I do not think this will be enough for him to win, and Mamdani and DSA’s combined might will probably get Valdez to Congress. If you want a politician who will automatically join the Squad and be unapologetically pro-Palestine, Valdez is the choice. But this has not been the most sizzling campaign.

The second DSA challenger Mamdani, my old campaign manager, has now endorsed is Darializa Avila Chevalier, a political organizer and doctoral candidate running against Congressman Adriano Espaillat in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Not long ago, I suggested it would be beneficial for Mamdani to back Avila Chevalier because she’s an insurgent worth taking a risk on. Even if she loses, DSA builds power in upper Manhattan, where Mamdani performed very well last year. And I am not sure, anymore, Espaillat is much of a favorite, even as Avila Chevalier’s old controversial tweets resurface. There are a lot of younger, college-educated newcomers and left-leaning Latinos who could break in her direction, especially around the issue of Israel. Espaillat, despite belonging to the Progressive Caucus, has been an Israel hawk, taking many thousands from AIPAC and refusing to stand up for Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestine Columbia activist the Trump administration has been trying to deport. Espaillat is four decades older than Avila Chevalier, and the dynamic of the primary is reminiscent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs. Joe Crowley. Espaillat, at least, is taking the race far more seriously than Crowley, and has a long history of political organizing in the district. He has a Dominican American political machine that will be put to the test on June 23rd.

For Mamdani, much is on the line. There are risks inherent in supporting Valdez and Avila Chevalier. It’s also notable, in his decision to back certain insurgents, Mamdani has passed on supporting DSA challengers to incumbent members of the State Assembly, where he is trying to maintain a strong relationship with the Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie.

Either way, for a variety of reasons, it will be a fascinating summer for the new mayor. What he’s already learned is that it’s impossible to make everyone happy—and that concessions to the establishment forces he ran against only get him so far. This has been evident in the complaints about his decision to go against Espaillat, apparently breaking a promise he had made last year.

Why does this matter?

Read more

If you’re in Ottawa, I’ll be holding a Colossus book event on June 16th at Octopus Books. If you’re not in Ottawa, buy my novel, which has been called a “canny, twisty satire of all-American posturing.” It’s now available on audiobook! Listen in, and get your copy now.

Almost one year ago, I was talking to Brad Lander’s press secretary on the eve of the mayoral primary. Lander, the city comptroller, had worked out a co-endorsement deal with Zohran Mamdani, and they were campaigning together to stop Andrew Cuomo. At this point, the Democratic primary had become a two-horse race between Mamdani and Cuomo; Lander was mired in third, where he’d remain, but he was undoubtedly helpful to the Mamdani campaign. As a veteran pol and stalwart of brownstone Brooklyn, he was able to nudge college-educated, affluent voters away from Cuomo and towards Mamdani. On that sweltering evening right before the primary, though, I had a different idea in mind: Congress. I told Lander’s press secretary that if her boss ever wanted to run against Dan Goldman, he would probably win. I even posted something to that effect shortly after, and never wavered from that prediction. Today, Lander leads Goldman, the sitting congressman in New York’s 10th District, by more than 30 points, according to one recent poll. I don’t highlight these posts to claim I am always right—no one has a perfect track record—but merely to underscore there was an inevitability to all of this. In a few weeks, Lander will probably blow Goldman out and be on his way to Congress, where he’ll be a Jewish progressive willing to challenge the Israeli government.

As inevitable as this all might be, it’s still rather remarkable. Dan Goldman is not a scandal-scarred incumbent. He is not elderly. He is not a weak fundraiser. He is not such a mismatch for his district. It’s rare, really, for politicians like Goldman to lose—and lose badly. Not very long ago, he was probably fantasizing about an eventual run for Senate or at least Attorney General. Maybe, with his Levi Strauss family fortune, he could have underwritten a gubernatorial bid if Kathy Hochul ever stepped aside.

Now his political career appears over. What happened, exactly? Why is Dan Goldman likely headed for the exits after just two terms in Congress?

Read more

My new novel, Colossus, is out now. It’s an American epic (“a challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man”) and you’re going to want to buy it wherever books are sold. Order it today!

I have a great deal of affection for Los Angeles. Maybe it’s because I am such a New Yorker, moored on the East Coast, that the city, like San Francisco, never loses its allure for me. I usually stay in Beverly Hills and rent a car. Last year, I drove up to Laurel Canyon, took Mulholland, and imagined what it might have been like to be young and rich there in 1968. I spent an afternoon baking in the sun at Venice Beach and strolled the Santa Monica Pier. This year, I meandered up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, then made my way all the way to Echo Park to meet a writer and grab pizza. LA is what people say it is—too sprawling, too dependent on the automobile. But I feel the dreams around me, the sense that this is, or was, the embodiment of a distinctly American ethos, a place to think very big. I still have stardust in my eyes.

The other drive I took this year was to Pacific Palisades. A year and a half later, it remains a site of devastation, like a little city that got bombed out in a war not very long ago. There are beautiful houses that stand, untouched, and just as many empty lots, rubble-strewn fields, scorched edifices, and the clangor of construction crews trying, sporadically, to resurrect it all. Over one lot hangs a large black sign with blocky white lettering: KAREN BASS RESIGN NOW. Karen Bass is the mayor of Los Angeles and she is up for re-election. She was the mayor last year, during the Palisades and Eaton Fires, which were two of the most destructive wildfires in the history of LA. When Pacific Palisades began burning, Bass was in Ghana, breaking a prior pledge to not conduct foreign trips while she was mayor. For her, it was rotten luck, and the cataclysm of the fires has hung over her mayoralty. Many residents, rightly or wrongly, blame her for what happened—the city’s halting response and the sluggish rebuild. Since I do not consider myself an expert on these matters, I’ll refrain from offering any analysis on how the Bass administration responded to the fires. In time, perhaps, I’ll form a stronger opinion.

Rather, I want to explore the political dynamics of this mayoral race, and why Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star who once deemed an impossible longshot, might have a chance to dethrone Bass, a former congresswoman who has spent decades in politics. Pratt very well might miss the cut on Tuesday—California has top two nonpartisan primaries, and a recent poll shows him narrowly in third, trailing democratic socialist Nithya Raman—but the fact that he has run so competitively is meaningful in its own right. An unease permeates the city, and it’s one he’s prepared to seize upon—or at least exploit.

Here is why I am watching Spencer Pratt closely.

Read more

My new novel, Colossus, has been described by the National Review as one that “primes us to see a distinctly American form of grandeur and squalor, a colossus with feet of clay.” Sounds pretty interesting. Buy it now, wherever books are sold!

The 12th Congressional District of Manhattan, in its current form, has only existed since 2023. The product of a byzantine and deeply confusing redistricting season—an independent mapmaker, rather than the state legislature, brought the district into being—the seat is now open because Jerry Nadler is retiring. There’s been much written about the race already, and there’s a good chance you’ve read that coverage. For many decades, the East and West Sides of Manhattan sat in separate congressional districts. Now they’re united in the densest, richest, and most prestigious seat there is. Gramercy Park, Chelsea, Times Square, Central Park, the Met, MoMA, and the Museum of Natural History all sit within the district, as does the world’s millionaire and billionaire classes. The Democratic primary, set for the end of next month, will determine Nadler’s successor because the district is overwhelmingly Democratic. There are four viable contenders: Micah Lasher, Alex Bores, Jack Schlossberg, and George Conway. The winner might hold the seat for the next thirty years.

And only two Democrats, really, are in the hunt. Schlossberg, the social media influencer who is the grandson of John F. Kennedy, gobbled up much of the oxygen in late 2025 and early 2026. Various internal polls seemed to show him at the top of the heap. I was always a bit skeptical of them because Schlossberg’s roots in the district are shallow and Kennedy nostalgia is fading. A New York Times story would confirm what political observers long suspected: Schlossberg’s campaign is shambolic, and he doesn’t seem to be taking the race all that seriously. Though he’s literal political royalty, he’s positioned himself as something of a populist outsider, if it’s difficult to know how hard he’s thought about this campaign at all. Zohran Mamdani was attacked last year as a dilettante with a thin CV, and though I knew him, in my old political capacity, to be hyper-competent, I could understand why some voters were skeptical of a 33-year-old running for mayor. But Mamdani was a state assemblyman and had spent a decade doing actual political organizing. Schlossberg hasn’t; he is what Mamdani’s critics erroneously said of Mamdani. He’s never had a real job, and he’s a lot less impressive than his forebearers. A recent Emerson College/PIX 11 poll showed him in third, with 11%, and that means, with only a few weeks left, his fate is probably sealed. He will not be a congressman. A highly discerning electorate will look elsewhere.

George Conway, the ex-husband of Kellyanne Conway and liberal hero of the cable TV resistance, sits at 10%. Like Schlossberg, he’s got his ceiling, and he is likely not rising past it.

Two state assemblymen, Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, polled at 22% and 20% respectively. This makes the primary a toss-up. But it also hints at what’s to come: as it was at the start of 2026, it’s Lasher’s race to lose. For a few reasons, he remains the frontrunner, and a Bores victory would still represent an upset.

Read more

Colossus is here! Buy the novel that has been called a “challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man.” You won’t regret it.

The Colossus book tour has begun. On Tuesday, May 26th, I’ll be in Los Angeles, in conversation with franknews. Come to 7151 Beverly Boulevard. Doors at 7 pm.

There’s one month left in another unusual and very consequential primary season in New York City. A year ago, Zohran Mamdani, my old campaign manager, was surging to the top of the pack against Andrew Cuomo, who was seeing his lead in the mayoral race evaporate. Even then, with all the momentum behind Mamdani, it was almost impossible to imagine this future—Mamdani, firmly ensconced in his first term, the youngest mayor of New York City in a century.

Mamdani’s insurgent days are behind him. He’s now a political power unto himself, and like anyone in his position, he must decide how to wield his influence to build alliances. So far, he’s used this power sparingly—though that may soon change. While Bernie Sanders has endorsed the local DSA slate running in the state legislative primaries, Mamdani has not. It would be a surprise if he didn’t—what’s the point of electing a socialist mayor if he can’t even back the socialists downballot?—but there is a reason he’s proceeding so cautiously. A vast majority of the primary campaigns are against members of the State Assembly, and Mamdani just endured a trying budget season working with the Assembly Speaker, Carl Heastie, to ensure New York City was protected in Albany. And it was. The state legislature, along with Gov. Kathy Hochul, offered billions to help close the city’s budget gap and fund the beginnings of Mamdani’s universal childcare program. They agreed to a tax on luxury second homes, which partially fulfilled Mamdani’s campaign pledge to tax the rich. It was a successful few months in a place that can be foreboding or outright hostile to New York City mayors.

It’s no coincidence, then, Mamdani wasn’t engaging in primary campaigns against state assembly members voting on his priorities in Albany. That, however, might have to change. DSA wasn’t the only reason he became mayor, but they represent his electoral base, and they must continue to be engaged if he’s going to be an influential two-term mayor. They are the backbone of his de facto political machine, or what passes for one in 2026.

These are the competitive DSA state legislative candidates Mamdani should, in the coming days, endorse: Aber Kawas, Christian Celeste Tate, Conrad Blackburn, David Orkin, Eon Huntley, Samantha Kattan, and Illapa Sairitupac. He should also take a hard look at the congressional campaign of Darializa Avila Chevalier in Manhattan and the Bronx.

The question, really, is whether Mamdani is ready for this sort of political combat. His political project might rest on the decisions he makes as soon as next week.

Read more

My new novel, Colossus, is out now. It has been called “masterful, as thrillingly devious—and as brilliantly controlled—as Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” Buy it today.

One morning, the phone in Tony Asher’s office rang. He was sure, at first, it was a prank. “Hello, Tony? This is Brian Wilson. I need to write an album for Capitol Records, and I don’t have anybody to write it with. I’m under a lot of pressure because we’re already three months behind and I was wondering if you wanted to work on some of the songs with me.” Asher, a twenty-six-year-old advertising copywriter, did not know Brian Wilson very well. It was a call he never expected to receive. But he had only one answer, because no one in 1966 could say no to Brian Wilson. “I’d love to do it,” Asher said, when he realized the person on the other line wasn’t a colleague down the hall trying to trick him. “Just tell me where and when.”

“Great,” Wilson replied. “Come out next Tuesday.”

Asher, the son of the silent film star Laura La Plante and film producer Irving Asher, only had the dimmest idea of what awaited him. There was no sense that he would soon be working on an epochal album, both making and bearing witness to history, and that he would be forever linked to one of the great pop auteurs of the twentieth century, a symbol as much as a man, the embodiment of far-reaching and volatile genius. Brian Wilson, at the beginning of 1966, was a very famous man—or, more accurately, his creative project was very famous. The Beach Boys had spent the last three years belting out hit after hit, including two chart-toppers, “Help Me, Rhonda” and “I Get Around.” Few rock acts could speak more to this fizzing era of postwar American exceptionalism; with their odes to surfing, hot rods, and summertime bliss, they were something of a synecdoche band in the popular imagination, standing in for all the promise of Southern California. And there is no way to understand the United States of America without California, the gleam and hush of the Pacific, the bleeding edge of the godly frontier. Brian, one of three Wilson brothers, had been born during World War II and inherited this particular form of manifest destiny, part and parcel of the Golden State’s youth bomb, a capitalist transcendentalist. The story of the Beach Boys has been told and retold, swallowed up in books and films and documentaries and endless reams of oral recollections, and all of it, for a writer attempting to apprehend the history, can be like scaling a mountain in a dream, the crags and cliffs forever shifting, the laws of gravity bending and breaking, nothing to do but let go and hope there’s rock beneath. Writing on Pet Sounds is no easier. Forever deemed the second greatest album of all-time—no matter how many times, in seeming anguish, Rolling Stone reshuffles its rankings, Pet Sounds can always clock in at number 2—it defies the English language, as all great music does. This is why music writing, as a genre, can be a muddle, and a lot of it reads like maudlin prep school poetry. I’m no better. I am here, like most Beach Boys emissaries, ex post facto, born far too late to have enjoyed anything approximating their peak. I did not even become the devotee I am until my thirties; there are no childhood memories of singing along to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” in the backseat of the car, and my own adolescent angst never aligned with Brian’s. I fell in love with this music as a full-fledged adult, my sensitivities and neuroses dulled. When the Beach Boys reunited in 2012, the news meant nothing to me. Music, as Brian once said, is God’s voice, and there’s no telling when the holy spirit might whisper through you. For me, it was at the age of thirty-two, and I’ve been a convert since, buying up more than two dozen Beach Boys vinyl records and at least dozen books on the band. My brain is swollen with the trivia of their lives. It would be easier, in some sense, if I knew less. The gothic saga of the Beach Boys threatens to occlude the music that made them immortal.

On May 16th, exactly sixty years ago, Pet Sounds reached record stores. This will be the most understated and anticlimactic anniversary of the album because so many of the principals are dead. Brian died last June, which means there are no surviving Wilson brothers. A vast majority of the Wrecking Crew, minus the likes of Carol Kaye and Don Randi, are gone. Chuck Britz, the brilliant sound engineer, is long dead. Glen Campbell, who played on Pet Sounds and toured with the Beach Boys before vaulting off to country and pop rock superstardom, died in 2017. So many other voices that might have popped up during past anniversaries to opine on the record and swap war stories are no longer here. Jerry Cole, the session guitarist whose 12-string plugged directly into the console to play the iconic guitar intro in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” died in 2008. Hal Blaine, the legendary drummer who coined the term Wrecking Crew (the session musicians who played on Pet Sounds and most other major albums of that era did not have a nickname for themselves), died in 2019. A decade ago, Brian was still touring, and performed songs from Pet Sounds, somewhat distractedly and listlessly, for fans across America. In past decades, there were various anniversary editions and rereleases and box sets, ongoing celebrations to further canonize an album that was met, in the United States at least, with genuine befuddlement in 1966. For the sixtieth anniversary, there is a curious Beach Boys-themed Santa Monica 5k and a few more vinyl reissues, but nothing approaching what we might have seen in past decades. That is inevitable. As Paul Simon, a Brian Wilson admirer, once wrote, the leaves that are green turn to brown. There are surviving Beach Boys, and important ones, like Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston. Asher, who just turned 87, still lives. They all made vital vocal contributions to Pet Sounds and, in Love’s case, a smidge of songwriting. But there’s a reasonable sense that 2026 might be it—who’s to know which band members and associates survive another decade, or who is left to remember that glorious and very strange time.

There are misnomers about the Beach Boys of 1966, or at least half-truths that became conflated with other realities, other quasi-myths. Brian Wilson did not write Pet Sounds in a sandbox in his living room—that was the next album, the aborted Smile. Pet Sounds was not the first time the Beach Boys featured music that had nothing to do with surfing, the beach, or the thrill of the drive-in. Pet Sounds, as much as it was a Brian solo effort, the product of a miraculous vision of a single twenty-three-year-old man, could not have existed without the rest of the Beach Boys. And for those most attuned to the currents of the age, Pet Sounds did not emerge from a vacuum. Like a vast emerald wave building on the horizon line, it was visible to those who knew where to look—and listen. In 1964 and 1965, Brian was, in his own way, getting ready for Pet Sounds. Traces of what’s to come can be heard in “Wendy” and “We’ll Run Away” and, most clearly, in the second half of The Beach Boys Today! As Al Jardine, Beach Boys guitarist and occasional lead singer, once said, Pet Sounds wasn’t so much music you could dance to as music you’d make love to; there are sonic textures of the album found in the shimmer of songs like “Please Let Me Wonder” and “In the Back of My Mind.” And then there’s “Let Him Run Wild” which, like “California Girls,” promises a higher aural realm, the vibraphone, horns, tremolo bass, and Brian’s piercing falsetto engineered for a different, and better, pop future. One of John Lennon’s favorite Beach Boys songs (“This is the greatest! Turn it up, turn it right up. It’s GOT to be a hit”) was “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” another classic single from 1965. Randi’s ringing organ, Kaye’s thumping bass, the great bouts of silent that frazzled disc jockeys—it would have been deemed a success by almost any other band, but it’s failure to crack the top 10 meant it was not going to make Pet Sounds.

Pet Sounds was composed, produced, and sung by Brian Wilson when he was at the peak of his creative powers—and when, arguably, he was most sane. Any discussion of Pet Sounds requires the context, where Brian and the boys were, how the album was able to emerge in the first place. In the mostly excellent biopic “Love and Mercy,” it’s implied Brian’s retreat from the stage was what made Pet Sounds possible—that he stopped touring to write his masterpiece. But again, that’s a half-truth, and neglects the reality of 1965. At the end of 1964, the Beach Boys had crisscrossed the nation and embarked on a global tour, cementing themselves as the greatest American rock rival to the Beatles. They kept a punishing touring and recording schedule—in 1964 alone, they’d release three albums, including the seminal All Summer Long—that was, for a naturally shy frontman like Brian, a great mental strain. He was also partially deaf in one ear, the result of a genetic defect or a beating from his domineering father Murry, depending on which story you’re told. The primitive rock concert sound systems were damaging to Brian’s hearing.

At the end of 1964, on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston for a concert, Brian had a panic attack, sobbing uncontrollably. He played the next show but told the boys, not long after, he was done touring. He wanted to stay back and focus on composing and producing. At first, the other band members did not take this well. Brian, who played bass on stage, was the unquestioned leader of the band, the oldest Wilson brother, the chief songwriter, and de facto producer of every one of their albums. What was a tour without Brian Wilson? But they quickly understood this was for the best. The newly-married Brian—in a panic, he had recently wed 16-year-old Marilyn Rovell—was clearly uncomfortable away from home, and his value, to the band, lay in the songs he could dream up and produce. He was not Elvis Presley; fans were not paying, necessarily, to see Brian Wilson on stage at the Hollywood Bowl or at a fairground in the Midwest. They were there for the Beach Boys. The surf rock machine would hum on, the boys continuing on the road, Brian heading back to California to unveil their next hits. The plan, for 1965, went swimmingly. “California Girls” would not have been possible without Brian’s retreat. Nor would have the wonders from The Beach Boys Today! Two years before the Beatles stopped touring and became a studio band, Brian had done it on his own, showing what possible.

It is important to understand that, before the Beach Boys burst on the scene in 1962, what Brian Wilson accomplished was unheard of—not just in the sounds he conjured, but in how he went about making them. The three Wilsons were born in the unfashionable Los Angeles suburb of Hawthrone to Murry, a fledgling songwriter and the owner of a machining company, and Audree, a homemaker whom Mike Love, her nephew, once insisted was the real musical talent in the marriage. Murry was physically and psychologically abusive; the Murry tales are legion, from taunts to beatings to one story, that may or may not have been true, of Brian being forced to defecate on a plate as a form of punishment for a prank he pulled. Murry was probably hardest on Dennis, the middle child, who was the most energetic and rebellious. Dennis, in his youth, was the least interested in music and the most willing to fight—and fuck. From his teen years onward, he was an inveterate womanizer and the embodiment of the California myth, what people believed the Beach Boys were. Chiseled and tan, he surfed regularly, and he convinced Brian, when they started the band, to write songs about the new surfing craze. Carl, the youngest Wilson (the boys were born in two-year intervals from 1942 to 1946), was the quietest, an introspective, doughy child who avoided, for the most part, Murry’s wrath. There are, as Brian once sang, heroes and villains, and Murry was both to the Beach Boys. Without Murry, the band would not have signed with Capitol Records. Dreaming of songwriting stardom that would never come for himself—Murry was interested in easy-listening schmaltz and had little hope of breaking through beyond a song recorded by the Lawrence Welk Orchestra—he pushed the boys incessantly, and, in his tender moments, nurtured Brian’s budding interest in music, buying him records and encouraging the harmonizing he undertook with his brothers. Belying his later image as a neurotic and bloated shut-in, young Brian was a strapping jock, an adept outfielder on local baseball teams and a backup quarterback on the varsity football team who might have been the starter if he cared enough. It was on that football team where he met an undersized but dogged fullback named Al Jardine; in a botched play that was, apparently, Brian’s fault, Al’s leg was broken. Mike, the first cousin of the Wilsons, lived nearby in a far wealthier neighborhood, and it was at family singalongs where the cousins found their chemistry and first mulled a future in music together.

In truth, nothing about the Beach Boys was inevitable. Hawthorne, tucked near LAX, was no crucible of Southern California glamour. The Wilsons were unremarkable, working-class, and Brian headed off to junior college after graduating in 1960. The fortunes of the Love family declined rapidly, and Mike, who had impregnated a high school girlfriend, found himself working at a gas station. Al went out of state to take up pre-dental studies. In 1961, they were barely a garage band when they recorded their first single, “Surfin’.” Brought out by a very small label called Candix, the song, to the surprise of the boys, was a regional hit. They were originally called the Pendletones, a pun on the Pendleton shirt that was popular with surfers, and were only renamed the Beach Boys at the last minute after the Surfers, the alternative choice of the label, was found to be taken by another band. Shortly after, a neighbor who took guitar lessons with Carl, David Marks, would join up and remain with the Beach Boys until 1963, when clashes with Murry forced his exit. From the beginning, the Beach Boys did not sound like the surf rock that was beginning to dominate the local airwaves, if they shamelessly were glomming onto a trend.

Surf music, at the time, was constituted hard-driving instrumentals, like the sort heard from Dick Dale, the King of the Surf Guitar. The Beach Boys reflected Brian’s obsession with jazzy vocal groups like the Four Freshman and the jazz and classical compositions of George Gershwin. They owed plenty, too, to early rock, to the point where Brian directly cribbed Chuck Berry for “Surfin’ U.S.A.” In 1963, Brian heard Phil Spector’s “Be My Baby” and the musical trajectory of his life would change forever. Whereas the mercurial Spector could be alternatingly admiring and dismissive of the young Beach Boy leader—he once derided “Good Vibrations” as an “edit” record—Brian worshipped Spector’s compositions, and sought to learn, as much as he could, from the magisterial Wall of Sound. Another influence was Burt Bacharach, hugely popular in his era if underrated now, and Brian quickly began experimenting with unusual arrangements and classical instruments, layering his recordings with a high, bright gloss that Spector could never quite achieve, making them stand out well beyond the 1960s. Even the best Spector productions sound very much of their time, caged in 1964 or 1965, whereas Brian’s retain, sixty years on, an inarguable brightness and vigor.

The Beach Boys were the first major rock act to have a band member produce the records. Before Brian walked into the studio and seized control of his albums from the Capitol heavyweights, record labels exerted enormous control over recordings. Performers were often not writing their own material. The Beach Boys’ first album, Surfin’ Safari, was not billed as a Brian Wilson production. Neither was Surfin’ USA. This was because Capitol Records still operated by the standards 1950s, crediting production to their young staffer, Nick Venet. Venet helped sign the Beach Boys but he was not writing or producing the songs. The projection credit would be rectified on Surfer Girl, which jumped to 13 on the charts. It was the first of many albums that gave Brian the sole producer credit. One early reality of the Beach Boys, despite their peerless harmonies, was that they were deceptively weird, a superstar musical act melding and violating old traditions. They pulled off complex, a cappella glee-cub arrangements with sophisticated chords and modulations. They brought jazz harmony to surf. They smashed together Chuck Berry, the Ventures, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Brian’s compositions outstripping whatever rock had previously brought to bear.

It was Carl who followed the Beatles most closely; Brian, also a fan, took an interest in their artistry and dominance. Beatlemania ensured the Beach Boys were no longer the preeminent rock group in the United States. It didn’t help that Capitol, the label the Beach Boys belonged to and increasingly resented, was the Beatles’ distributor in the U.S., and that their band names were so close alphabetically. Any record store, naturally, would throw the bands together. If the other boys wanted to keep producing hits to keep pace with the Beatles, Brian wanted something far more—to create art that would both surpass the Fab Four and transcend, in ways unimaginable, what they had all been doing to that point in time. If the Beatles had the marketing savvy to overcome Capitol’s dreadful instincts—butchered track listings on American releases, album titles like The Beatles’ Second Album and Beatles ‘65—the Beach Boys never could properly position themselves, from a public relations perspective, for the era of sophisticate rock. The public only saw them as the barely pubescent men in striped shirts singing about summer days and summer nights. Even the arrival of Pet Sounds wouldn’t chase that image away, the Beach Boys as rubes of the sepia-toned age, and Capitol had no incentive to market them differently, anyway. Surf and sun sold records.

At the dawn of 1966, Brian Wilson found himself at a crossroads. He wouldn’t turn twenty-four until June, but he was already an industry veteran under immense pressure. Rock and pop acts were largely ephemeral, and record labels were quick to ditch anyone who couldn’t demonstrate an obvious upward trajectory. In 1964, he had fired Murry as the manager of the band, but his father still dominated the lives of his sons. If Brian produced a hit, the executives at Capitol—and Murry—might each simply bark for the next one. The Beatles had more hits anyway, and they weren’t slowing down. It helped, too, that they were a band of at least two pop geniuses, along with a renowned producer in George Martin who could translate their ambitions in the studio. Brian was the George Martin of the Beach Boys, as well as the John and Paul. This isn’t to say the other band members weren’t talented, or were irrelevant to the tremendous success of the band. Carl, the youngest brother, had emerged as the leader of the touring band, and it would be his vocals ringing out on seminal records like “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations.” It was Carl, too, taking the lead on the Beach Boys’ most Beatlesque song, the underrated “Girl Don’t Tell Me.” In 1966, Dennis was the dashing drummer, making all the girls scream when he walked on stage. Dennis loved the rock star life but was somewhat indifferent, then, to recording, happy to jet off with his women or his automobiles as session drummers filled in for the band’s newer albums. In time, Dennis’ creativity would flower, and he would write some of the most soulful, yearning, and idiosyncratic songs in the Beach Boys catalog. Improbably—for anyone living in the 1960s, at least—he would become the first Wilson brother to release a solo album.

But Dennis was not yet a songwriter, Carl was only nineteen, and Mike, while pivotal to the band’s very existence and the lyricist for many of the most durable hits, was not who Brian wanted to turn to. At least, not for the unnamed album that was burbling up inside of him. Though he was plenty capable of writing lyrics, Brian had a certain shyness and sensitivity around the language of songs; he never quite believed in himself enough to commit words to the sensations and melodies he could imagine at will—the “feels” he’d get from playing his piano—during those fruitful early years. From the start, he sought out lyrical collaborators. There was cousin Mike, who was present most. But he wrote “In My Room” with Gary Usher, a neighbor who he might have formed a more long-lasting songwriting partnership with if not for Murry’s meddling. To write some of his car songs, Brian teamed up with Roger Christian, a local DJ who was heard on the air explaining the intricacies of the hit “409.” From that partnership came “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Don’t Worry Baby.” Brian was fickle too, and he was always ready to cycle in a new voice when a fresh creative impulse seized him. By 1965, he was smoking marijuana and experimenting with LSD, which was in its earlier, more unadulterated form. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe Brian as an acid casualty; the heavy acid use likely tipped a young man prone to mental illness into deeper psychosis. But that lay in the near future: the early 1966 version of Brian Wilson was plenty coherent, sociable enough, and a songwriting factory unto himself.

Pet Sounds was a response to Rubber Soul—not so much in sound as in form. The album era was just dawning, and Brian was deeply impressed that the new Beatles release seemed complete to him, devoid of the filler that made up so many rock albums of the period. Until the 1960s, albums were an afterthought, with singles dominating the market. A record label did not care about anything approaching a unified artistic statement. The story goes that Brian, upon hearing Rubber Soul, charged into the kitchen and told his new wife, Marilyn, that he would make “the greatest rock and roll album ever made.” For anyone else, this would be a sign of mania. Brian meant every word.

Why was Tony Asher his principal lyrical collaborator for Pet Sounds? As Chuck Granta writes in his outstanding account of the making of the album, Asher held appeal because he was such an outsider in Brian’s world. He was free of the band’s fraught internal dynamics, and represented the clean break Brian was seeking for his new work. A handsome Hollywood scion with a successful career of his own, Asher had written jingles for Mattel, Barbie, and Chatty Cathy dolls. The men had first met in 1965, at United Western Recorders, but Asher did not imagine he’d be receiving an actual phone call from Brian to write an album. One advantage Asher had over Mike Love was that he played piano—if the musical ideas for Pet Sounds would be Brian’s, Asher could sit with him, at the piano, and speak in the intimate language of the keys. They would meet at Brian’s house in Beverly Hills to write. This was not the Bellagio Road manse of legend, where Brian would build a home recording studio. He was not yet pressing his feet into the sandbox, smoking hash in his Arabian tent, and hiding out, like a paranoiac, in his swimming pool. The Laurel Way home was far more modest, a California-style ranch house that did not seem like it belonged to a rock superstar. There were a few large sofas, a fireplace, and a piano that dominated the living room. Asher’s employers were happy to give him a sabbatical to co-write the album—this was Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, after all—and he would arrive at the house in the morning, waiting for the pop auteur to rustle himself out of bed. Brian sat at the piano bench, Asher standing next to him, and made up melodies, singing without words. Asher might offer small comments on the melodies, but they were wholly Brian’s. It would be up to the copywriter to imagine words, both at Brian’s side and when he went home at night.

If Brian forgot a chord change, Asher would remind him of it, and there was a give-and-take that Asher found surprising, given Brian’s stature in the field. He was open to input, to tweaks and adjustments. He was guileless, and largely devoid of ego. Asher’s recollections of his collaborations with Brian are far more generous in Granata’s account, published in 2003, than in Steven Gaine’s best-selling and quasi-notorious Heroes & Villains, a gossipy Beach Boys biography that appeared in 1986. Speaking as a much younger man to Gaines, Asher called Brian the “single most irresponsible person” he had ever met. Uncashed royalty checks totaling over $100,000 were splayed around the house. Brian could alternate between uncontrollable fits of laughter and crying jags, and he would sometimes halt songwriting work to watch “Flipper” on television, tearing up over tender moments. He anguished, openly, about how he was sexually attracted to his wife’s sister.

Brian, though, was no fool. The term “concept album” did not exist, but Pet Sounds, still untitled, would have a unity of theme and spirit. It would sound like almost nothing that came before it; this novelty, in fact, would help to doom it in the short term. In the cultural furnace of 1966, Pet Sounds did not exactly make sense. It was a performance of angst and melancholia, the beauty and sadness and fragility of young love, a glittering representation of interiority approximating the power of a modernist novel. Pet Sounds did not make any obvious gestures to the Sixties zeitgeist. It did not have a politics. It did not rock. Most of these songs were not getting blasted out of car windows or ringing out at anti-war rallies. The burgeoning hippie movement wouldn’t know what to make of them. Jefferson Airplane, Joplin, and Hendrix were more their speed. Or, for the sensitive and cerebral types, there was Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, who spoke to the English majors haunting the coffee houses. An album called Pet Sounds—what a peculiar appellation!—with that photograph of the boys feeding animals at the San Diego Zoo was bound to confound record buyers. An album called Pet Sounds that was, loosely, about the rise and fall of an adolescent romantic relationship would only befuddle them more. Brian Wilson and Tony Asher didn’t necessarily premeditate the album’s sequencing or imagine there would be this sort of emotional arc. When they wrote, there wasn’t a single concept—it was two young men who came together to write about love, the romantic situations they had known, the longing and the heartbreak. The music itself would be startlingly complex, but the lyrics were crisp, unpretentious, and legible to any young person who had ever loved another—or wanted, very badly, to be loved.

The procession went like this: hammering out melodies and lyrics over Brian’s piano, then the instrumental recordings with a wide array of seasoned session musicians, and finally vocals from Brian and the rest of the band, who were touring Japan at the beginning of 1966 and would return to find the album nearly done, waiting for them to sing over instrumental tracks Brian and the Wrecking Crew had already laid down. Pet Sounds can, to an extent, be understood as a solo album, the creative effort that least involved the rest of the Beach Boys. This spurred tension that would take years to dissipate, and would only resolve itself when Brian began to retreat, ceding more and more songwriting and production to the rest of the band. It would be wrong to say Pet Sounds could have happened entirely without the rest of the Beach Boys, because they were the brand—they, in concert with Brian, made his ambitions possible. Capitol Records would not allow in excess of $70,000 to be spent on the first Brian Wilson solo album. Only for the Beach Boys could there be such an indulgence. And it’s worth noting that Brian’s instincts, impeccable most of the time, could fail him during the making of the album. While working with Asher, he began playing an intricate song about the “vibrations” one might feel from a girl, building off of an anecdote his mother had relayed to him about dogs sensing these “vibrations” from humans. By the early months of 1966, Brian had grown serious about this strange new psychedelic symphony, and once the rest of the band heard it, they begged for its inclusion on Pet Sounds. The album, they fretted, lacked a clear hit, and here was one. But Brian refused. He wanted to tinker with the song further and further, shuttling among studios to realize his avant-pop dreams. What could the rest of the boys do but wait? In October, nearly a half year after Pet Sounds was released, “Good Vibrations” hit the airwaves and because the Beach Boys’ third number one hit. All was well, except the other band members couldn’t help but wonder what Pet Sounds might have been with “Good Vibrations.” Thematically, perhaps, it didn’t quite match the melancholia of the record, but it would have undoubtedly improved sales. Imagine, for a moment, the effervescence of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”—the smashing opener—followed by “Good Vibrations” instead of “You Still Believe in Me”, a majestic but slower number that stalls some of the album’s early momentum. What a rush that would have been.

The beating heart of Pet Sounds was Brian Wilson in the studio, commanding the greatest session musicians in the world. It was here, like a fresh-faced Californian Bach, where he shone the most and burnished his well-deserved legend. For these guitarists, bassists, cellists, violinists, clarinetists, flutists, pianists and drummers who had played, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, on the most successful pop and rock records anywhere, working with the twenty-three-year-old would be an experience like none other, one they would be compelled to talk about for the rest of their lives. Pet Sounds was not just one of the first albums where one individual was responsible for much of the music, from writing to arranging to producing and even performing. It was, arguably, the very first time someone of Brian’s stature as an artist was in control of all aspects of a record. The session musicians could sit for many hours, late into the night, as Brian dictated every part, every note. Unlike the record, film, and TV recording sessions the musicians were used to, the gigs with Brian were not scripted; they followed, fully, the movement of his mind. The music paper before them was blank. Brian would hum and sing his ideas, and the musicians would hurriedly transcribe them into chord symbols on their charts. They would begin playing, only to stop—Brian might hear something in the orchestration, almost ineffable, that he did not like. And they’d start again. Twenty-two starts and stops before, after much chiding and instructing and toying, Brian had a take he liked. Take one, begun twenty-two times. The French horn, the harpsichord, basses, a seraphic flow of sound, and here is, finally, the “God Only Knows” that Brian had heard in his head. He was satisfied. Brian, with his one good ear, leaned in absurdly close to the monitor. He strained, on the playback, to hear the sounds other people could not hear. The musicians who had cut records with Elvis and Sinatra and virtually every other legend of the last two decades could sigh with some relief. Brian liked what he heard.

He was an intuitive producer, a warm-hearted perfectionist. Like Spector, his idol, he recorded vocal and music tracks separately. He shuttled among three different studios to achieve the sound he needed. Each studio could have its own character, since there were not yet standard console manufacturers. Spector’s low-ceilinged Gold Star was where the Wall of Sound was birthed. This was the mono wall, the blasting panorama, what entranced Brian. But Pet Sounds would swim past Spector’s horizon line. It was a supple, sublime record, like a shimmering starscape; it did not assault the senses, and it did not thunder. Recording originally in mono, not stereo, Brian was still able to extract the most from the 1960s multitrack technology by recording on different channels, layering the instrumental and vocal components he had captured independently. There was an ethereal quality to the mono, with certain sounds, far more perceptible on stereo, barely heard in the original mix, like the French horn at the end of “God Only Knows” that is a mere whisper. Working with sound engineer Chuck Britz, who was something like a surrogate father, Brian could tease out every sound he wanted, even at times when it seemed like he was asking for a certain part the professional musicians couldn’t imagine. In many ways, Brian worked like a jazz composer, improvising riffs and chord changes on the spot, hunting out ever stranger combinations and movements. He could barely write music: the notes would be on the wrong sides of the stems, sharps and flats rendered incorrectly. But it was his music, and he could, to the shock of the veterans in the studio, keep it all in his head, no matter how kaleidoscopic it became. They played exactly what Brian wanted. The peculiar keys, the harmonic modulations, and the polytonality were all out of place in any pop rock record of the era, and this could be its own thrill. Many of the songs on Pet Sounds, which was still untitled when Brian went into the studio, were punctuated by irregular breaks in tempo, sudden shifts, and keys that were highly unusual, the F sharp for “That’s Not Me.”

Brian was giddy to throw precedent out the window. The instruments and sounds themselves were, for a rock record, idiosyncratic, if not subversive. “Sloop John B,” the lone cover, was a blend of rock and marching band instrumentation, with flutes, glockenspiel, and baritone sax meeting with bass, guitar, and drums. Exotic percussion, guiros, steel guitars, and bass flutes were melded with traditional instruments in this new pop orchestra. A detuned guitar could conjure the sound of a calliope. A bicycle bell, bicycle horn, and finger cymbals were layered for spritely juvenilia, while a bass harmonica was the ominous undercurrent to “I Know There’s an Answer,” Brian’s meditation on LSD—his struggle with ego death—that cousin Mike originally resisted. (Al was tapped to sing lead.) For “I Wasn’t Made for These Times,” haunting Electro-Theremin made its debut, and Brian would soon make the instrument itself famous when he featured it on “Good Vibrations.” Pet Sounds’ plaintive closer, “Caroline, No,” is a percussive marvel, water jug, tambourine, and muted bells backing the enchanting flutes and saxophones, the instruments doubled and playing one octave apart, Brian’s tearful vocal, sped up slightly, quavering with the loss of romantic innocence. This would be the first track ever released under Brian’s own name, reaching the airwaves two months before Pet Sounds.

Anyone who plunges deep enough into the lush mysticism and light eroticism of Pet Sounds will find one track they privilege over another. This might change with time. It is fair to call “God Only Knows” the premier pop record of the twentieth century. But there might be times you prefer “I’m Waiting for the Day” or “That’s Not Me” or “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” You might marinate in the two instrumental breaks, “Pet Sounds” or “Let’s Go Away for a While.” The track that I found, with time, I lost myself inside of the most was “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).” One of the more overlooked songs on the album, it features, like “Caroline, No,” only Brian on vocals. I do not prefer it because the other band members are absent—their voices are, on most of the tracks, essential—but it works with Brian’s vaporous vocal lead, backed by a string section that, unwittingly, harkens back to Brahms. It might have been my experiments with psilocybin that unlocked the power of the song for me—I am not sure, and I can only speak to what I noticed before and what I noticed after—or the simple act of repetitive listening, an ear tuning to a frequency, the ineffable nature of a revelation. Four violins, one viola, and a cello layer the melody, Brian singing of the sensation of a lover in your grasp, that moment of trepidation, the catch in your throat: “Don’t talk, take my hand and let me hear your heart beat.” And then: “Take my hand and listen to my heart beat—listen, listen, listen.” Asher’s lyrics exquisitely match the sound, which is still difficult to fully render, which begs, like a heartbeat, to be listened to with every atom left in you. There is music sing to, and then there is music to melt to, melt within, empyreal music, music of the body and music beyond the body. Paradise, in just under three minutes.

The vocals of Pet Sounds were constructed no less meticulously than the instrumentation. Brian’s bandmates were, at times, unsure about his new musical direction, and Mike openly questioned how commercial this all might be. At first, said Al, they were “dismayed” because they had been on the road, touring, and returned to find all of this new material, these instrumental beds they did not quite understand. But once they began to comprehend what Brian was reaching towards—how revolutionary this all might be—they took much more enthusiastically to the sessions. They’d meet in the studio in a football-style huddle, Brian coaching them around a piano. Bruce Johnston, the newest Beach Boy, described him as a good-humored General Patton, explicit and exacting. The vocal sessions didn’t last as long as the instrumentals, and the boys could arrive in the afternoon and be done in the evening, when there’d be time have dinner or go to a club. Luau was a hot spot on Rodeo Drive, where the Beach Boys, usually sans Brian, could be found over Polynesian drinks, comely girls always nearby. But it was nothing but work within the studio; Brian pushed his bandmates just as hard as he would the session musicians, forcing already great vocalists to heights they hadn’t known before. One passage of “Wouldn’t Be Nice” might require close to thirty vocal takes, some of them indistinguishable to even the most seasoned of singers. Brian, though, knew what he wanted, a melding that was almost cosmic, beyond the range of conventional hearing. What continued to amaze his bandmates was how he could keep so many different vocal parts in his head. A session might begin with him “dealing” out the parts to a song, singing the melody, the high falsetto, showing Mike, Al, Carl, Dennis, and Bruce what it was he required, treating the vocal tone of each band member as an instrument. Mike’s bass, his doo-wop inflections, added weight to the blend, and he’d contribute his own ideas for lyrics and vocal arrangements. Decades letter, he’d successfully sue for a songwriting credit on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

The rest of the band had every reason to believe in Brian because they had found such fantastic success when following his lead. Trepidation gave way to excitement. The reverberant glow of the vocals was made possible by Brian’s penchant for doubling them, recording a voice and then superimposing another on top of it. The sound was bigger, brighter, escaping the gravity of the present day. Mike would have his own microphone, because his bass parts were mostly inaudible without amplification, while the other boys would often sing together on a different microphone. Part of Brian’s power was that he could, if he wanted, sing every part well, but he understood it was the multipart, weaving harmonies that, for most of the songs, lent them their resonance. “God Only Knows” was the vocal summit of the album, a performance one could transmit into outer space as representative of the heights of human civilization. Only three Beach Boys actually sing on it: Brian, Carl, and Bruce. Celestial, angelic, godly—all adjectives apply, as trite as they might sound. The song, already somewhat taboo because anything featuring “God” in the title was exceedingly rare on the radio, was deceptively sophisticated, with counterpoint and a weak tonal center, the vocal parts numerous. Brian, originally, chose to sing lead, but decided the part worked best for his brother Carl, who sounded very much like him. He had planned, originally, for a nonvocal bridge, overdubbing a saxophone solo. Dissatisfied with the mix, he instead created the three-part vocal interlude, superimposed over violin, cello, bass, tambourine, and wood blocks. Each vocal part conveyed a sense of motion, opposing rhythmic elements merging in stunning fashion to provide a release in the tension, the jazz-inflected “ba’s” bleeding into the sigh, which was unheard of in pop. The round-style ending tagged onto the song’s final verse only featured two voices, though it sounds like far more. Together, Brian and Bruce overdubbed the successive rounds, part by part. Carl had finished singing the lead and the center harmony parts, but he was tired. Brian sent him home, and the boys found they had extra time in the studio and open tracks. Brian took the top and bottom parts, and Bruce hung in the middle. Together they went. By the time the vocals for Pet Sounds were finished, the band members had lost all hesitation or even cynicism about the effort. They understood the sublimity. They knew, with Brian, they had done something great.

Pet Sounds did have its imperfections. The original mono mix was sloppier than Brian probably should have allowed. Distant talking can be heard on “Here Today” and the volume suddenly spikes on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” during Mike’s vocal entry on the bridge. The author Chuck Granta speculates that these technical imperfections matter less to Brian than the “feel” of the album that he had produced. On that front, his high expectations were met, so the final mix was of less interest. Meanwhile, at the behest of Capitol Records, “Sloop John B” was added to the album, and it never quite squares up thematically with the other tracks, despite its inherent beauty. The executives feared Pet Sounds didn’t have a breakout hit, and they correctly guessed “Sloop John B” was going to climb within the top five. (Credit goes to Al Jardine for having the idea to record the song at all, since he was the folkie of the group.) Though iconic now, the album art, and even its name, do not quite suggest what’s on the record and even underplay the ambitions of the actual music. This was something the Beatles, who paid meticulous attention to album presentation, noticed. How the name of Pet Sounds came to be is still debated. Brian once credited Carl with naming the record, while Mike claimed he had the idea. The end of “Caroline, No,” the last sounds heard of the album, are Brian’s dog barking and a passing train. During the writing of the album, there was no indication Brian was going to use the title “Pet Sounds”—in retrospect, it seems like an afterthought. Tony Asher’s original reaction to the album title was that it trivialized Brian’s songwriting, though he warmed to it as the years passed.

On May 16th, 1966, the world would get to judge Brian Wilson’s masterwork.

There were warning signs, stateside at least, that Pet Sounds was not going to reach the lofty commercial heights that the Beach Boys, over the last three years, had almost treated as their birthright.

Capitol Records was not enthused about the album. The sound and style confused them. Where were the surfing songs? The odes to summertime bliss and cute girls? Why were the tracks so somber? Some executives pondered whether they should reject it altogether. Nick Venet, who had production credits on the first two Beach Boy albums, believed that Brian was “screwing up” and “no longer looking to make records, he was looking for attention from the business” and attempting to “torment his father.” Capitol decided to accept Pet Sounds, but the marketing team would struggle with how to position it. They were used to promoting tracks like “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Barbara Ann,” and could not relate to what was on the record. While the Beatles were permitted their aesthetic pivot, accepted as sonic pioneers, the Beach Boys were meant to remain as they were, frozen in the amber of 1963-1965. This ruminative, cerebral turn was not especially welcome. Upon release, Pet Sounds sold around 200,000 copies, an impressive sum for almost any band in the world. But this was the Beach Boys, still the most successful of all the American rock acts, and 200,000 was a lower number than prior releases. On the Billboard charts, Pet Sounds never climbed higher than number 10—new Beach Boys albums typically reached the top 5, and a live album had been number 1 less than two years prior—and failed, domestically, to make its mark with the record-buying public. Beyond the Beatles, Americans were buying up Herb Alpert records, Herman’s Hermits, the Rolling Stones, and the Mamas & the Papas. The Grammy’s ignored Pet Sounds entirely. American critics were, at best, polarized, with some celebrating the album as a masterstroke while other questioned the whole premise and wondered where the real Beach Boys had gone. To head off a downturn, Capitol quickly rushed out a Beach Boys compilation record that, to the quiet humiliation of Brian, promptly outsold Pet Sounds. Brian, having measured his self-worth by chart performances, despaired. “God Only Knows” barely reached the top 40 as a single. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” rose to number 8, but this was no salve.

The reception to Pet Sounds was dramatically different in Europe. If Brian couldn’t quite take heart in it, the other boys could because they were the ones hitting the road, excited still to find, as their sales declined in the U.S., crowds in London and Paris and Amsterdam were still desperate to hear their music. Wisely, the Beach Boys hired Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ publicist, to promote Pet Sounds, and he enlisted Kim Fowley, the record producer who would go on to manage the Runaways, to drum up publicity in England. Bruce Johnston, the most socially adroit of the Beach Boys, traveled to London to promote Pet Sounds, playing it for the music press there and ensuring the most important audience of all got their exclusive listen. Keith Moon, an enthusiastic Beach Boys fan, helped to bring John and Paul to the London hotel where Bruce was staying so they could hear, at last, the next progression of pop music.

Paul asked the hotel staff to bring a piano into the suite, and one materialized. Then, the needle dropped. The two Beatles silently played canasta, listening to the record from start to finish. Once it was done, they leapt up to the piano and began playing several chords. After a few minutes, they left. Soon, they’d commence work on Revolver, Pet Sounds swimming through them. They were properly awed. Unlike the American media, the British critics heaped praise on the album, and followed Derek Taylor’s lead in referring to Brian, for the first time, as a “genius.” The plan by Taylor was to elevate Brian to the realm of Dylan and the Beatles as a rock maestro. And Brian was—there was no deception there, no fluffing of the record. If anything, when it came to wielding the studio as an instrument, Brian Wilson had superseded all of his contemporaries. He had found the new sound, at last. At the end of 1966, the Beach Boys were officially—for a brief moment at least—more popular than the Beatles in England, topping a New Musical Express readers’ poll. “We haven’t been doing much and it was run just at a time when the Beach Boys had something good out,” Ringo Starr said. “We’re all four fans of the Beach Boys. Maybe we voted for them.”

When “Good Vibrations” shot to number 1 several months after the release of Pet Sounds, it should have been Brian’s valedictory moment, proof that a proto-psychedelic pocket symphony of titanic complexity could become the best-selling Beach Boys single of all-time. And it was—albeit, for only a few months, as psychic clouds gathered. Brian had begun work on Smile, his “teenage symphony to God,” which was intended as the spiritual successor to Pet Sounds. Here would be an album of even more sparkling ambition. This time, instead of Tony Asher, Brian teamed up with Van Dyke Parks, a young songwriter and producer who was almost as precocious as he was. They wanted Smile to be the final rejoinder to the British Invasion, proof that the American idiom of pop was the grandest tradition of all, a tradition that they could, through songs like “Surf’s Up” and “Heroes and Villains,” reinvent for the second half of the 1960s. Leonard Bernstein believed as much, featuring Brian performing a snippet of the former, left unreleased until the early 1970s, for a documentary on the young innovators of pop. The trouble was Brian: his mental state was deteriorating, the nascent psychosis beginning to manifest itself more plainly as he consumed copious amounts of marijuana, hash, and acid. He believed the “fire suite” he recorded had caused actual fires in Los Angeles. He thought a painting a close associate had made of him had, somehow, imprisoned his soul. He believed a film he was watching contained coded messages from Phil Spector. Brian’s perfectionism mutated further; the band members and session musicians struggled with hours and hours of takes that didn’t seem to further the music at all. Smile’s release date was delayed, and delayed again. Eventually, Parks walked away. Mike Love was not overly fond of Smile, and he’s been blamed in some accounts for opposing the album enough to hasten its dissolution. But this is a simplistic explanation, and doesn’t account for Brian’s instability.

It’s a misnomer, usually among people who don’t create, that volatility and erraticism are prerequisites to high art, even genius. A genius, naturally, can fall into instability, but in the moment of creation he or she is most clear-eyed, most functionable. The Great Gatsby was published before alcohol addiction sapped F. Scott Fitzgerald of his vitality. Sylvia Plath’s poetry appeared when depression wasn’t immobilizing her. Smile became the lost album of legend, the Pet Sounds successor that would never, until the twenty-first century, see the light of day, when an elderly Brian Wilson, with the assistance of younger musicians who toured with him, reconstituted it as Brian Wilson Presents Smile. Once it became clear Brian was not going to finish Smile, the band raced, in 1967, to complete Smiley Smile, a pared-down, whispery record that would prove to be low-fi pioneer but only polarize their fan base even more.

The late 1960s were not kind to the Beach Boys. The age of Aquarius had little use for surf rock, and it didn’t matter that the boys didn’t play that kind of music anymore. An image clung: white bread, square, harmonies that were safe for your uncle. With Pet Sounds and the fragments of Smile, the Beach Boys had shown themselves as the heralds of psychedelia, sonic prophets of neo-Americana, but little of that registered with many of the young rock critics and the broader record-buying public. In 1967, the center of gravity shifted from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and suddenly the kids wanted harder-edged, bluesy rock or any music infused, even superficially, with the politics of the anti-war movement. The brooding introspection of Pet Sounds, to the young hippies, was too deracinated, too divorced from the times. They’d tolerate “Mrs. Robinson,” maybe, but not “God Only Knows.” Record sales plummeted. Crowds bled away. Dennis Wilson became embroiled with Charles Manson, and the cult leader, before the Tate-LaBianca murders, would even record music in Brian’s home studio. The band that had been, in 1966, the chief American rival to the Beatles found themselves, by the close of the decade, playing half-empty gymnasiums in far-flung little cities. Still, even as Brian retreated from the band he had helped to will into existence, they continued to release consequential records, the sort noticed by the most discerning musicians and critics. With the additions of Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, two Black South African musicians, they even became, for a stretch of the 1970s, the rare multiracial American rock band. The Beach Boys catalog from the late 1960s and early 1970s alone stands up against any of their contemporaries; a whole generation of 1990s and 2000s rockers would pore through Wild Honey, Surf’s Up, Sunflower, Holland, and The Beach Boys Love You. There are gems on Friends and 20/20, too, and Brian and Murry would even team up to write a single, “Break Away,” that deserved a higher climb on the charts. It is difficult to find any band anywhere in the world that produced better and more significant music between the years 1962 and 1977. All of that before Brian Wilson was legally old enough be president of the United States.

The canonization of Pet Sounds, like all else in Beach Boys lore, was more convoluted than it should have been. In the first decade after the album appeared, it was rereleased several times, including as a disjointed pairing with a new album, Carl and the Passions — “So Tough.” Rock aficionados would celebrate the album, but it wasn’t widely appreciated in the 1970s, even as its influence continued to grow. The Beach Boys themselves, in part, can be blamed for this. In the summer of 1974, less than two months before Richard Nixon resigned, a Beach Boys greatest hits record known as Endless Summer was delivered to record stores, transforming what was a wondrous, mercurial, and commercially suspect rock band into the greatest nostalgia venture anyone had ever seen. Endless Summer shot to the very top of the charts and stayed there. In a matter of weeks, the Beach Boys were filling concert halls and stadiums, sun-bleached emissaries from a 60s past Americans suddenly missed very much. “It was funny. That image we were trying to get away from—it’s what saved us,” said Al Jardine in a recent documentary. The image was sun, surfing, hot rods, and the California myth, and Americans craved all of it in an era of political chaos and urban blight. Endless Summer would not include a single track from Pet Sounds. It was as if all Beach Boys music—their very history—ceased in 1965. The close of the 1970s would see more arena tours, multimillion dollar record deals, and the effective end of the Beach Boys as a creative force. Brian was under the dominion of his menacing psychologist, Eugene Landy, while Dennis was succumbing to drug and alcohol addiction. Carl was attempting a solo career. In the 1980s, there was “Kokomo” and not much else, and if Brian’s long-awaited first solo album, in 1988, was greeted warmly, it’s not revisited all that much today. An uncharitable—but not untrue—statement would be that there isn’t a great deal of new music Brian Wilson produced in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s that is worth a second or third listen. But it is remarkable he made any of it, given how close to death he probably was as a young man. Brian Wilson was a survivor.

And his survival was why Pet Sounds began to matter again. Still relatively obscure in the 1970s and 1980s, Pet Sounds received its CD release in 1990. This brought the album back into print—before then, your best hope of a listen was trawling discount bins at used record shops. In 1993, Capitol Records issued Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys, a box set featuring 141 tunes including demos, outtakes, and unreleased segments of the aborted Smile album. Interest continued to build leading into 1997, when Capitol released the four-CD collection The Pet Sounds Sessions, parlaying a thirty-six-minute album into a five-hour extravaganza—instrumental backing tracks, isolated vocals, and alternate outtakes made listeners feel they were back in 1966, hearing the album come to life. The box set included both the original mono mix and a first-time stereo mix, overseen by Brian, now much healthier and free of Landy, and Mark Linett, a record producer known for his remixing and remastering of the Beach Boys catalog. Nominated for a Grammy, the box set was part of a groundswell of media attention for Pet Sounds and Brian, who continued to tour as a solo act. For complicated reasons, following Carl’s death from lung cancer in 1998, the Beach Boys had divided into two entities, a touring band—the official band—with Mike Love at the helm, and Brian’s solo act. There were more well-deserved tributes and celebrations for Brian, tours for Pet Sounds and for Smile, which would receive its own box set treatment in 2011. He was feted as the living legend that he was, and even if these live performances, as the years wore on, could take on a discomforting quality, the bearish, graying musician sitting trancelike on stage, it was still miraculous that he was there at all. In 2022, he finally stopped touring, and Melinda, his second wife, died in 2024. Afterwards, unable to care for himself, Brian entered a conservatorship and died shortly before his 83rd birthday last spring. He was mourned by millions. The icons were no less generous; Elton John was a Pet Sounds obsessive, and Paul McCartney called “God Only Knows” the greatest song he had ever heard. Lindsey Buckingham remembered, in his teen years, playing Beach Boys records again and again, trying to understand exactly what Brian was doing.

Mike Love, at eighty-five, still tours with a band called the Beach Boys, though he is the only Beach Boy left in it. Eighty-three-year-old Al Jardine, with Brian’s old backing musicians, tours as well; they call themselves the Pet Sounds Band, and I’d like to see them if they come anywhere near New York City. When they stop, the music will remain, with Pet Sounds as the monument to what they were. The album is more appreciated today, arguably, than it was a half century ago, and assuming there is a functioning civilization in another half century, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows” and “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” will be played somewhere, on whatever technology facilitates the majesty of 1966. That is the wonder of music: it transcends cultures, languages, and empires. It defies the banality of politics. A statue of Ozymandias might crumble into dust, but an album like Pet Sounds can stand outside of time, even beyond it. Don’t talk, close your eyes and be still. Listen, listen, listen.

Colossus, my new novel, is out now. You can order it wherever books are sold! The reviews are coming in and they’re strong. “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,” Hugh Blanton wrote in Quadrant Magazine, one of the leading Australian publications.

In Compact, Stephen Adubato wrote that “I couldn’t help but continue reading as I walked from the subway onto the street, deterred neither by the raindrops ruining the book’s pages nor the pedestrians glaring at me. Indeed, there’s something about reading a Ross Barkan novel while riding the subway—or walking the streets—in New York that adds to the effect of the plot.”

On May 11th, I will celebrate the formal launch of Colossus with Shadi Hamid in Manhattan. Tickets are still available. Get one now.

Dwight Garner is the most prominent book critic at the New York Times which makes him, arguably, the most influential book critic in America. Book coverage has declined drastically as newspapers have shrunk or shuttered altogether, and the Times is one of the very last newspapers to maintain a standalone book review section. It is, as the critic Jan Harayda has argued, a flawed enterprise, and it has lost some of its intellectual heft. Garner, in my view, isn’t to blame; he writes with discernment, and his prose is muscular. I might not always agree with him, but I will read him.

I can only nod along to his latest column, which laments the great decline of book coverage in the United States. “Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics. The alternative weeklies (I wrote for many of these) had feisty and clamorous and occasionally nutty book sections. ‘Sometimes an off-the-wall review,’ Norman Mailer said, ‘can be as nourishing as a wild game dinner.’” Garner writes. “Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation and knocked their heads together like bighorn rams. So much of this is gone. The strangulation sounds of early dial-up should have served as warning.”

Indeed. The death of the Washington Post’s Book World only made that clearer. To understand the decline of newspaper reviews, one only needs to pick up a semi-prominent novel from the twentieth century and see the sheer number of review blurbs on the front and back covers. Major newspapers in Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, St. Louis, and San Francisco might all have weighed in on a book. Many of these cities also had smaller newspapers and magazines that would have written reviews. Not all of these works of criticism were of high quality, but they guaranteed many novels would, in some form, exist in the public square, since a newspaper or magazine review would be included in a package that featured hard news, sports, the crossword, and movie times. A casual American reader would be exposed to literary criticism, and literature itself might have a more democratic quality; writing about a novel, certainly, wasn’t such a specialized or cloistered activity.

There’s nothing in Garner’s column that I would argue against. “It’s a grim business to linger on the numbers,” Garner continues. “In the 1960s, a good first novel might receive 90 individual newspaper reviews in America and England, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote in his memoir “Ardent Spirits.” By 2009, the year “Ardent Spirits” was issued, he reckoned the number was 20 at best. What would it be now? Two? Three?” Three, for some, if you’re lucky. This is the state of affairs. There aren’t anywhere near 90 newspapers left that would review a novel, let alone a first novel. Review coverage in the top publications is limited to writers who have already achieved prominence. Someone like Ben Lerner or Lena Dunham can expect copious engagement while the vast number of published writers are ignored entirely. The critics that remain, many of them freelance, know that to pitch on an author who is not famous is to expect rejection from an editor. More often than not, if the editor is to commission any kind of literary piece, they want it to belong to an already known discourse or debate. Or, maybe, the novel can be worked into a larger essay on a tangentially related topic. The standalone book review is on life support.

None of this is news. My less charitable question of Garner might be what purpose, really, does this column serve? Garner writes about a book every week. If most literate people know book coverage has declined, why use precious review space on a prolonged lament that breaks no new ground? The best argument I can summon is that Garner alerts the casual reader to a crisis. Your uncle in Westchester or Los Angeles who reads the Times fairly regularly, gets their news alerts, and browses book coverage might be surprised to learn about how much the landscape has withered. Garner, then, provides a public service. But what else? What’s new here? What should we do about it?

I’ve written plenty on cultural decline. I am a novelist, a journalist, and a critic. It is important to diagnose what ails us, and to not run away from it. But we’re now more than halfway through the 2020s. What irked me about Garner’s column is that it would have been more useful four or five years ago. It would not have seemed, at least, so obvious. And it could not be blamed for ignoring what’s come to the fore since. There are, in fact, a number of new little magazines that have sprung up to address, in their own way, this decline of criticism. There is my own, The Metropolitan Review. There is the Whitney Review of New Writing. There’s Souvenir, Zona Motel, the Cleveland Review of Books, Toronto Review, Heavy Traffic, and a host of others. The Nation saved Bookforum. In a paragraph, Garner might have named some of them, and thus, in a small way, contributed to a critical revival. But that’s not really the point, or one that should consume us too much. It’s not up to the Times, truly, to nurture other publications along. What matters more, for anyone who feels the need to lament decline—who is willing to admit the cultural landscape is not as robust as it should be—is what comes after critique. A more complete column from Garner might have mentioned Substack directly, and the growing number of independent critics willing to engage with new novels. On Substack alone, my new novel has been reviewed by John Pistelli, Alexander Sorondo, Kazuo Robinson, and Adam Fleming Petty, with more on the way. On Substack, self-published and independent works have a far greater chance at exposure. I’ve seen that with novels like Daniel Falatko’s The Wayback Machine, Peter Schull’s Why Teach?, Alex Muka’s Hell or Hangover, Pistelli’s Major Arcana, and Sorondo’s Cubafruit. A new ecosystem takes shape.

I don’t think a critic like Garner should avoid lamentations or pretend all is sunny in the kingdom. His failing is more the failing of a lot of mainstream journalism—there are rarely actionable solutions proffered for a crisis. A problem is shown, but a reader is not told how it might be fixed. There is no way forward. A reader must be told bad news and be left to ruminate on it until the next burst of bad news. Garner might have offered an answer to the decline of book reviewing. He might have spotlighted those attempting to resurrect criticism. He might have used his column space to write more on books—he writes once a week, and only on a single book. A year ago, I had the great thrill of Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal reviewing my novel, Glass Century. I give credit to Sacks, of course, for writing on a book that was published by a very small press—Garner and his colleagues rarely do this—and I think it was possible because Sacks, in his column, will write about multiple books. My review was one of three in that particular edition of the Journal. What if there were multiple Times book review columnists who wrote on, each week, three books? What if the Times made an effort to review more novels, and more that were not published by the same few conglomerates? What if, instead of acquiescing to publicity machines, the Times simply resisted them?

That might be a fantasy. It’s worth asking these questions, though, in light of the Garner column. A door has been flung open. A Times columnist can’t exactly critique the organization that pays his salary. That’s what a public editor is supposed to be for, and the Gray Lady eliminated that role years ago. It would be nice if we could hear some of Garner’s unvarnished thoughts on his employer. Getting beyond him, I am more interested in the new. What is happening in literature today? Where are the new movements coming from? What can be built? If you are an artist, how are you helping us to move beyond this stasis and decline? And if a critic, what are you championing? What sort of art would you like to see in existence? What are you demanding? It’s not incumbent on Garner, obviously, to go out and start a magazine. I can tell you that isn’t very easy. What would have been worthwhile, for this column and others like it, is to articulate a vision for a better cultural condition, one you would like to see realized. Offer a north star, aesthetic or otherwise. If that isn’t present, the reader—the young one, especially—only experiences paralysis. The culture, that way, does get stuck. We are too backward-facing already. The Metropolitan Review has run its fair share of retrospectives, but I’ve been in the mood, of late, to crack down on them. There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art. There is always another famous dead writer we can celebrate. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as I begin work, for this Substack, on an essay celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds. But I want new musical horizons, too. Imagine if the rock musicians of the 1960s spent much of their day fixating on the pop of the 1940s. As a culture, we need less mimesis and less retrogression. A lot of this is the fault of the algorithmic internet, which rewards copycat trends and wearying groupthink. Cultural nostalgia is nothing new, though it can feel especially repressive these days. That, perhaps, is what stuck in my craw about the Garner column. There’s a point where nostalgia becomes useless. It doesn’t promise a better or even different tomorrow. One can get drunk on it, drown in it, fetishize every last dead era; I know I’ve done it. It is easy enough to do. And it’s well-intentioned; I’m not here to demonize the nostalgic impulse. The aesthetic of The Metropolitan Review draws on it enough. What I want now is a world beyond it. We’re here, we’re alive. We have agency as human beings. The United States is still too rich and too vast and too multifarious to not inculcate cultural greatness. There is still a tremendous amount of talent out there, and belief. A belief, ultimately, in the exalted presence of art in human existence. If we are divine, art is evidence of that. Brian Wilson once said that music is God’s voice, and that makes sense to me, even in my most agnostic moments. Music, writing, film, painting—we keep doing it, and we must not let the machines create for us. If we do, we’ll be stuck for good. All we will have left is nostalgia. What a sad little species we’ll be then. Let’s pray that day never comes.

I’ll make this one quick, since you’ve got a great deal on your plate already. Today is publication day for my novel, Colossus, which is about a pastor in the Midwest who harbors a dark secret. Please buy it now wherever books are sold. You can order from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or anywhere else you’d like.

The coverage has been strong so far. In Compact, Stephen Adubato writes “Barkan is a master of building suspense. His previous novel had me turning page after page to get to the climax, but Colossus gripped my attention even more—to the point that I couldn’t help but continue reading as I walked from the subway onto the street, deterred neither by the raindrops ruining the book’s pages nor the pedestrians glaring at me.” And in The Arts Fuse, Bill Littlefield writes that “the risk of entrusting the narration of a contemporary novel to a character who so closely resembles contemptible figures in the headlines is that readers will dismiss Colossus as only being a political statement. Barkan is good enough of a writer to have avoided that trap.”

I had the pleasure of appearing on two more great podcasts to discuss Colossus. First, hear me on The Booking Club with Jack Aldane; this one was very fun because we recorded it at a restaurant in Tribeca. Vincenzo Barney might have been lurking. And then get to Salt Lake Dirt for another fascinating conversation on the novel and my writing life.

I’m finalizing my schedule of events for a little tour. It starts tonight, in Manhattan, where we’re having a party. Entrance is free. Nightclub 101, 101 Avenue A. 7 p.m. See you there. Reserve your slot.

Please get a ticket, too, to my formal launch and book talk on May 11th at P&T Knitwear in Manhattan. We’ve got a few left.

And I’ll have more to share shortly about events I’m having in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Ottawa.

Colossus is nearly here! The reviews have started to roll in, and they’re excellent. Alexander Sorondo calls it “smart, tight, compassionate and brutal.” John Pistelli declares Colossus is “as well as an American novel … also a Greek and a Jewish tragedy about the inevitability of sons rising against fathers and of fathers striking back.”

Preorder it now! And come down May 11th, where I’ll be in conversation with the legendary Shadi Hamid in Manhattan. Tickets are still available, but they’re going very fast.

Last week, at a party for media and public relations professionals and people adjacent to those fields, I was told by a friend that Zohran Mamdani had endorsed Lindsey Boylan for an open City Council seat in Manhattan. I didn’t quite believe it. DSA hadn’t endorsed Boylan, she wasn’t really a frontrunner, and she had, at one point, mounted a congressional challenge against the liberal lion Jerry Nadler. Boylan is best known for accusing Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment and triggering his political collapse. Boylan served Cuomo in high-level administration roles, and once she left that world, she pivoted left. In 2025, she joined DSA, and she was an enthusiastic Mamdani supporter. I believe people are allowed to change their political views over time. But, among some on the left, I do know skepticism of Boylan remains.

The endorsement surprised me because it seems to carry more downside than upside for Mamdani, and unless Boylan pulls off the upset in the April 28th special election, I am going to classify it as a real political mistake. It’s one he can certainly overcome—he’s relatively popular and he’s racked up tangible policy accomplishments already—but it will have represented a needless setback. The decision, to be honest, left me wondering if he was getting the best political advice.

Here’s the quick state of play, and why Mamdani might be headed for an entirely unnecessary defeat.

Read more

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.

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.