Any discussion of woke is bound to frustrate because the two ideological camps, right and left, can barely agree on what it is, how long it’s existed, or how dominant it remains. Like pornography, most seem to know woke when they see it. After that, there’s a good deal of dissembling, and an honest account of the last decade is rarely possible. But it’s a topic worth dissecting, even now. Is woke dead? Yes, mostly. More importantly, what is it? Was it? Loosely, I’ve defined it as social justice politics: the primacy of identity over class. Standpoint ideology is triumphant. I am X, therefore I am right. Woke is, understandably, conceived of as a phenomenon of the left. A liberal who wants to rectify the problem of racism will propose “woke” solutions—adjust language or procedure to achieve a desired outcome. Anti-woke is the reaction to this, the rejection of such language or procedure. The struggle dates back decades, to fights over “political correctness” in the 1980s and 1990s. For our purposes here, that era will be left alone.

Instead, we will focus on Woke 1.0 and what the cultural critic Mo Diggs has called Red Woke, or right-wing woke—the backlash to 1.0, the new identity politics conservative and MAGA forces have embraced. Right now, we live in something like a culture cold war, where neither side, absent the machinery of the government that conservatives now control, can dominate the other. Woke cancellation attempts, the sort that reached their apogee in the late 2010s and 2020, are no more. Woke 1.0 was withering by the time Donald Trump was running for president in 2023 and 2024 and died, definitively, when he won. He did not need to win for Woke 1.0 to die—the excesses of the George Floyd/pandemic summer and the collapse of old Twitter, along with the natural passage of time, had weakened woke—but it became obvious, come 2025, the last vestiges of woke would not survive the assault from the federal government, whether it was the swift dismantling of DEI, the bullying of college administrations, or mass layoffs triggered by DOGE. Rather than foster a culture of free speech and free expression, conservatives simply embraced Red Woke, taking all the pathologies of the regime they hated and applying it to their own causes. They became the language cops, with even larger truncheons. Red Woke’s apotheosis is the defense of Israel. Like the old woke power players, conservatives and Zionist centrists like Bari Weiss decry the language of protest chants, stifle speech on college campuses, and treat the pro-Israel Jew like a precious, exalted minority who cannot be exposed to any adverse phraseology or criticism. Despite their efforts, the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel movement is larger than ever. If a right-wing counterculture existed in the Biden years, embodied by the MAGA-curious Dimes Square subversives, the counterculture has returned to the left, since Trump is in power and hated by large swaths of the country. Trump’s relentless defense of Israel has made pro-Palestine politics decidedly cool among the young, the way, in 1969 or so, you were on the youth vanguard if you were against the Vietnam War. The Trump administration can continue to strangle speech on college campuses, but this is a war they will not win, in the same way the Larry Ellison TikTok takeover can’t just convince a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds to start loving Israel. 1984 was a fine novel but it didn’t really understand the future. Our era may have an Orwellian flavor, but the discourse is too free and messy for any one government to dictate reality, as hard as it might try.

What does this all mean? What’s in store for the culture in 2027 and beyond? Are we about to, finally, get off the woke/anti-woke carousel?

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We live in a strange political era. It has been that way for some time, since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator more than a decade ago, and it will be up to future historians to classify and contextualize this stretch of time. Are we witnessing the collapse of liberal democracy? The growth of a new kind of democracy? The resurgence of the hard left or the long march of the far right? In the present day, none of these questions are truly answerable, though we can try to conceive of where we are headed. I am fairly certain, for example, a Democrat will be president in 2029, but I can’t tell you who that will be. I also can’t rule out any other scenario: a Republican victory in 2028 (J.D. Vance or someone else) or Trump’s illegal attempt at a third term. All of it can come to pass. What I can do, at least, is gaze backward and consider how we got to where we are. Though Trump is obviously still president, he increasingly embodies a time that has already come and gone. MAGA cannot be said, anymore, to be on the ascent, and Trump himself is deeply unpopular. He has lost his grip on the culture. More prosaically, his party will lose the House and could, with enough luck for the Democrats, fumble away the Senate too. Trump is eighty now, sinking deeper into that second and (very likely) last term. If he is going to install his fascist dictatorship, he is simply running out of time.

That is why so much focus has been on the Democrats and why, despite all their failures, the energy resides with them. The 2028 Democratic presidential primary will be the widest open since at least 1992. There is no actual frontrunner. There are no party elites who can steer the primary in one direction or another. Barack Obama played a strong hand in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and he helped to persuade Joe Biden to finally step aside in 2024. In 2028, he will be a relic, along with the Clintons, who loomed for so long over the party. Plenty of debate will erupt over the Democratic National Committee’s calendar for the primary, but the truth is it won’t matter all that much. This will be a long, protracted primary. There are no powers at the DNC who can do anything, really, to favor one candidate over another. We’ve come a long way from Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s 2016 DNC and the fight over superdelegates. We’ve come a longer way from a time when party leaders were trusted by the voters.

This fall, the Democrats are going to win many races. This doesn’t mean, however, voters are overly fond of the Democratic Party. We have yet to escape the era of negative polarization. Voters might like individuals, but they recoil from party brands. The Republican and Democratic parties are both widely disliked. This doesn’t mean they’ll crumble; we don’t exist in a parliamentary system. It’s two parties, red vs. blue, first past the post. This means voter frustration—and volatility—comes in the primaries. Republicans learned this in the 2010s when the Tea Party and then Trump himself toppled the establishment and wrenched the GOP in a new, radical direction. Trump remade the party in his own image. The Democratic establishment was able to stop Bernie Sanders twice and this, into the 2020s, gave them a false sense of security. A Trump-style insurgency wouldn’t overtake their party. Then came Zohran Mamdani and the democratic socialist uprising of 2026.

As sympathetic as I might be to the DSA upsurge—I am an old friend of Mamdani and even once belonged to DSA—I am not going to tell you that many millions of Americans suddenly decided they loved socialism. They’ve certainly grown discontented under capitalism and no longer fear the “S” label now that it’s been more than thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The economic policies DSA supports are all welcomed by wide swaths of voters. It’s not as if the American healthcare system, as it currently stands, is popular. And DSA’s strong political organizing will ensure they stay competitive for a long time. One major part of DSA’s success, beyond the socialist branding, is how they’ve been able to tap into the anti-establishment mood coursing through American politics. DSA’s critique of the Democratic Party, resented by so many high-ranking politicians and liberal pundits (an assemblage that includes the likes of Hakeem Jeffries and Matt Yglesias), is resonating with a growing share of the electorate. They like that the DSA Democrats aren’t all that fond of the Democrats. When someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier has an old deleted tweet that says “fuck Kamala Harris,” she doesn’t pay a political price. When Mamdani himself is found to have never proudly endorsed Harris in 2024—he was a strong supporter of the Uncommitted movement—the voters shrug, even as the Democratic apparatchiks fume.

Why? Why are these elites so resented? Why can’t they discipline these democratic socialists? One answer lies in 2016, the single most important year for American elections in the twenty-first century. The other, in 2024. In these two years the crises of the elites emerged, crises they have never lived down. The result of their failures has been a democratic socialist and progressive uprising, a collapse of an old order, a reimagining of who can hold power. It’s a reality that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris never welcomed and tried hard to head off. But it was their decision-making that helped make it so. Whether they know it or not, they’ve reaped what they sowed.

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DSA, once more, is in the news. Walk around New York City today and you’ll find, on the front page of the New York Post, a giddy story about a prominent Black politician accusing the democratic socialists of “white supremacy.” The spat originated on Twitter/X, and the Post was glad to amplify. There is little the right-wing tabloid enjoys more than Democratic infighting. The politician, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, was responding to criticism another Black politician, Assemblywoman Phara Souffrant Forrest, had leveled at a recent New York Times story about Black and Latino anxiety over gains DSA have made in New York City. After the assemblywoman had criticized the Times reporter, Jeff Mays, for failing to note she had represented a largely Black and working-class area for the last six years, a TV host and commentator sometimes critical of DSA, Errol Louis, responded, claiming the Times had acknowledged her point. It was then, quote-tweeting Louis, that Richards posted “White supremacy comes in all forms.”

The squabble highlighted what has become the primary attack line against Mayor Zohran Mamdani and DSA as they continue to win seats in New York City and across America: they are interlopers, mostly white and wealthy, and they’ve invaded working-class communities with their alien politics, installing leaders who don’t listen to longtime residents. This was the subtext, certainly, of the Times story, and now that DSA is on a hot streak, its criticism coming from both Democrats and Republicans. Establishment Democrats, in New York, view themselves as the embodiment of the “true” city, the tribunes of the working-class standing up to a whiter, wealthier invasion. Long-serving Black Democrats, in particular, have been very hostile to DSA. Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklynite in line to be the next speaker of the House, has clashed repeatedly with DSA candidates, and his colleague in Queens, Gregory Meeks—the boss of the Queens Democratic Party—has warred with the democratic socialists as well. These anti-DSA Black Democrats are usually pro-Israel, supportive of privately-run and publicly funded charter schools, and happy to accept donations from real estate developers and corporate interests. Some, like Jeffries, were once themselves products of insurgencies, but they view themselves as defenders of an old guard that is fast losing ground.

The real question, though, is whether these criticisms of DSA have merit. Is DSA racist? Do members embody white supremacy? Are they not attuned enough to race?

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Every year, there is more handwringing about New York’s Specialized High School Admissions Test. The SHSAT, as it’s known, is the sole means for determining whether a New York City eighth grader can enter one of nine specialized public high schools. Three of them are very well-known to New Yorkers: Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. All of them boast a dazzling roster of alumni, including Nobel Prize winners. Plenty of future politicians have passed through their halls, including Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor. When I was an adolescent, the SHSAT schools had no real political valence. You either took the test or you didn’t. I never did because my bar mitzvah fell on the test day and my parents were sending me to the local private school anyway. I had many friends and acquaintances who went to SHSAT schools—Brooklyn Tech in particular—and plenty who attended other public schools. No one much cared, either way.

In the 2010s, that began to shift. It was becoming obvious SHSAT schools were not demographically representative of the city. The number of Black and Latino students admitted into Stuyvesant, Tech, and the others continued to shrink. Bill de Blasio, the progressive Democratic mayor, fretted over this status quo, and announced his intentions to abolish the test and introduce new criteria. This sparked intense backlash among Asian American parents, who prized the schools, and they began to leave the Democratic Party. De Blasio never did scrap the SHSAT or add new criteria, like GPA or extracurriculars, to decide who entered the specialized schools. His successor, Eric Adams, left the SHSAT alone, and despite his own opposition to the test, Mamdani has also not taken any action. His progressive allies, though, are restless. After it was announced just three Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant High School’s incoming class of 777, a city councilman close to Mamdani, Lincoln Restler, declared that “we urgently need state legislation to modify the admissions process.” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who is Black, said there “needs to be a real, independent investigation into the admissions process for NYC specialized high schools.”

Every headline about the new SHSAT numbers focused on the dearth of Black and Latino students (just 21 heading to Stuyvesant) admitted, and the fact that, in a city where they make up about half of all residents, this is wholly unrepresentative. But does that make it racist? What progressive critics always miss about the SHSAT is that it is hardly creating a swell of white students in the specialized high schools. At best, they’ll match the demographics of the city in a given year, but even that number is deceptive. Anyone who lives in New York knows the “white” Census category is incredibly broad. These are not fifth or sixth generation WASPs, or the children of wealthy lawyers. They’re not kids sprung from a John Hughes film. A white student in a SHSAT school might be the child of Ukrainian immigrants or even Middle Eastern.

The actual story of what’s happening at the SHSAT schools—the only story, really—is that Asian Americans continue to dominate the admissions test. Any change to the test would adversely impact them. All debate must start there or it’s deeply dishonest.

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If I had to dispense any advice to a young writer or someone who aspires to an intellectual life, I would tell them they have to know their enemy. It is striking, in the current age, how few people do. The left and right are equally guilty, equally ignorant. The right-wing argues against an idea of the left, failing to comprehend the nuances and the gradations, how Bernie Sanders and Hakeem Jeffries might be different people. The left often lumps all conservatives, all Republicans, into a single blob, failing even to understand differences among various Trump supporters. Standpoint epistemology was all the rage in the 2010s—I am X, therefore my views are valid and correct—and this bled into an inability, among practically all factions, to comprehend why someone who thought entirely different from them approaching an issue in a certain manner. This is where, I believe, my fiction career has come in handy. A good novelist is constantly inhabiting the consciousnesses of characters unlike their own. This is imagination. And it’s not all that different in the realm of nonfiction and policy debate—if you’re doing your job well, you’re imagining how another person might perceive an issue since you are, ultimately, trapped in your own body. Imagination works hand-in-hand with analysis. One of the worst things any public thinker can do is simplify the opposition, caricature it. This is intellectual laziness and it’s common enough, especially in the upper echelons of partisan media. Enemies get identified, and they are frozen in amber.

These days, there are few schisms more bitter than those between leftists and centrist, establishment-aligned Democrats. This goes beyond the primaries themselves, which the democratic socialists (and non-socialist progressives) have been winning with greater and greater frequency. It extends into the pundit class and prestige media, which tends to be far more populated with centrist Democrats than proud socialists. To this day, it’s very hard to find an open socialist who is also a working columnist for the New York Times, a regular contributor to the Atlantic, or a talking head at CNN. The journalists themselves, in a bid for objectivity or neutrality, default to the political center. Rather than an explicitly liberal or left bias, American media has a bias to the status quo. A Times columnist or editor can be equally skeptical of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Political “extremes” are suspect. The middle is the only sensible place to be. As voters have shown themselves to be far more open to both democratic socialism and MAGA-style politics than any political mandarin would have predicted—both, certainly, have endured a long time—the media races to catch up, creating some awkward dynamics. Trumpism, at last, is something the establishment media does understand, having reckoned with the man’s two presidential victories, but democratic socialism continues to befuddle. Even non-socialist progressives can be tough to digest. Dana Bash’s recent interview with Brad Lander, the progressive who just unseated Dan Goldman in a contentious New York House race, illustrated this reality. Bash, a CNN veteran, seemed to struggle mightily over the concept that Lander, who is Jewish, might describe himself as a “liberal Zionist” while condemning the Jewish State for its brutal occupation of the West Bank and the immiseration of the Palestinians in Gaza. Bash didn’t sound, in that moment, all that different than an AIPAC press secretary.

The idea that Israel’s war in Gaza could produce a generational cleavage on the level of the Vietnam War—something I’ve perceived to be evident for several years now—is still difficult to understand for many centrists, particularly that shrinking pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party. There are few columnists and pundits who embody this dynamic more than Jonathan Chait, the Atlantic writer who also spent many years at New York Magazine. Chait is a particular kind of liberal that was once dominant in the Democratic Party: pro-Israel, pro-charter school, a proud internationalist, and a general skeptic of economic populism. Throughout his career, he’s been both prescient and foolhardy. He was one of the early pundits to diagnose the woke turn in the 2010s, and once argued, in 2016, that liberals should root for Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee because he “would almost certainly lose” and could, if he won, morph into an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like moderate. For a columnist like Chait, the MAGA right and the socialist left are both to be scorned. In a new Atlantic piece, he argues the Democratic Socialists of America, who have helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor and are set to swell their ranks in Congress, represent an “encroachment of illiberalism.” DSA, for Chait, is a leftist MAGA that wants to swallow the Democratic Party whole or destroy it entirely; it is, in his view, in an “asymmetrical conflict.” “One side is concerned with taking control of the Democratic Party,” he writes, “while the other just wants everybody within it to get along.” DSA is villainous because there are members of the organization who are outright communists and supporters, in various forms, of authoritarian regimes in China, Cuba, and Venezuela. He points, in particular, to DSA’s Red Star caucus, which is openly communist. DSA is not for liberal democracy, he believes, since their members want capitalism overturned and “the proletarian classes” seizing “political power through their representative vanguard (that is, them). Totalitarian states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) accordingly labeled themselves ‘democratic.’” One of Chait’s main contentions, which is echoed by the disillusioned elderly members of DSA who have either criticized the post-2016 itineration of the group or loudly departed it altogether, is that it is now a rebuke of Michael Harrington’s founding vision. Harrington’s DSA, founded in the early 1980s, was anti-communist and also pro-Israel. “Communist organizers, as Harrington feared, began to reshape the DSA as an ally of any anti-Western force, even the most murderous and oppressive,” Chait writes, pointing to a statement released by DSA after Russia invaded Ukraine that put blame on “expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations.”

There aren’t any bare facts in Chait’s Atlantic piece that are wrong. There are proud communists in DSA, there are DSA members who hold very unpopular views, and there are plenty who advocate for the so-called “dirty break” which would amount to DSA running Democratic candidates for a period before breaking away to form a third party when the Democrats are properly enervated. Many in DSA are, indeed, hostile to the Democratic Party. The trouble with Chait’s argument, with its well-marshaled facts, is that it misses the actual context of DSA in 2026. Like many opponents of the American socialist left, Chait fails to really understand them. This is not great sin—most commentators don’t—and Chait should get credit, even in bad faith, for doing some research. As a former DSA member—I joined in 2017 and remained in the group for about a year while running for State Senate and getting to know the future mayor of New York—and someone who has been writing about them, off and on, for more than half a decade, I do think deeply about their present and future. I am both sympathetic and a critic. There are DSA members who read me and like me and those who are suspicious of what I argue. I did not leave the organization for any ideological reasons; I simply departed when I was no longer running for office and returning to journalism. I do vote in Democratic primaries, but otherwise do not participate in politics. I don’t donate to candidates and I don’t knock on doors. Keeping a remove, I do believe, strengthens my analysis.

DSA, today, is booming once more. It is in at least its second phase of hyper-growth following the post-Sanders surge in 2016. After a lull during the Joe Biden/pandemic years, DSA has swollen to around 120,000 members nationally. DSA itself is over forty years-old, but it has only been relevant to electoral politics since 2017. This is the first piece of context that must be understood about them. Any older DSA member who is lamenting what the organization has become is, ultimately, asking for the return to a faculty lounge-style debate club that could not impact Democratic politics in a meaningful way. Yes, there were prominent DSA members in office like David Dinkins, the mayor of New York City, but DSA had a limited volunteer base to push its priorities. Harrington’s great insight was to create an organization that advocated for running in Democratic primaries instead of forming a third party, like the old Socialists of the Eugene Debs era. The Socialist Party of the early 20th century was potent—today’s DSA is still only nearing that pre-Red Scare peak—but doomed because the Republican and Democratic machines would team up to crush them. It hurt, too, that the United States has a first-past-the-post presidential system that disincentivizes third party growth. The Democratic Party can pivot left and absorb the Socialists. This is effectively what happened with Franklin Roosevelt, who rendered the Socialists more and more irrelevant as his New Deal adopted their economic program. As radical as today’s DSA might seem to Chait and his allies, it is absolutely fulfilling Harrington’s political vision. DSA members of Congress, a DSA New York mayor, and DSA state legislators would all hearten Harrington, who died in 1989.

Any analysis of DSA is faulty if it doesn’t account for how decentralized and democratic the organization remains. This is both a strength and weakness and it is, in every sense, the central feature of DSA. A candidate doesn’t win a DSA endorsement until braving multiple rounds of voting among organization members. It is not top-down like a labor union or the Working Families Party. There is no DSA leader or boss who can determine the next congressional slate. Local chapters take up the cause of candidates. There are open debates. To win an endorsement in a New York City race, a candidate must clear several votes, from a hyper-local chapter to the citywide affiliate. Nationally, there are real schisms, though it’s an open question how much, in the long run, they will really matter. When centrists like Chait lash DSA or conservatives mock some bit of hyper-woke theater, it typically emanates from the national leadership, which is both weaker and more performatively radical. While NYC DSA adores Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the national DSA leadership has been at odds with her for years, attacking her for being insufficiently socialist and even yanking an endorsement. Right now, there’s another fight brewing between the national leadership committee and local chapters over how to conduct a presidential endorsement in 2028. Centrists who yearn for DSA’s destruction may salivate at this infighting, hoping the socialists eat themselves alive like the leftists of the twentieth century. They might—but it’s also important to understand that DSA’s decentralization means the national leadership could cut New York off entirely and it wouldn’t really matter. Big city chapters make up the bulk of membership, collect sizable dues, and make their own political decisions. If anything, the national “needs” New York much more than the reverse. It’s not all that clear to me, as an outsider, what the national committee can offer to the local chapters.

Critics of DSA have been caught flat-footed because it is such a multifarious organization. There are many caucuses, some of them very hard left, and it’s difficult to know how much it matters that DSA entertains tankies, Marxists, and conventional progressive Democrats. Rather than face any takeover from the far left, DSA is probably more at risk of moderating, over time, and becoming indistinguishable from any other left-leaning NGO. This is Bhaskar Sunkara’s argument, and one that resonates more with me. The socialist mayor of New York City is partnering with a right-leaning billionaire police commissioner. This is an alliance that has, so far, served Mamdani, if I am skeptical of its long-term success. If DSA grows more comfortable with the Jessica Tisches of the world, that will dilute the organization’s identity. It is funny that Chait, who is a proud Zionist and undoubtedly approves of Tisch’s tenure as police commissioner, does not mention her at all. Here is DSA governance in action, and it has nothing to do with “police-abolitionist, Hamas-apologizing candidates.” The triumph of Mamdani and AOC’s own quiet repudiation of the Defund movement shows the police abolitionists, within DSA, have lost. Yes, Darializa Avila Chevalier is heading to Congress as a prison abolitionist, but she won’t have any say over police departments or local jails. Were she in Mamdani’s shoes, she’d probably sound more like him. That’s politics. That’s “sewer” socialism.

The growth of DSA has been driven by a newfound interest in socialism and the Democratic voter’s growing hatred of the Democratic Party. Pundits like Chait still seem a bit bewildered by the latter reality. Even the normies aren’t terribly fond of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Mamdani did win the highest turnout mayoral election since 1969, after all; the days when socialist triumphs could be handwaved away as the product of tiny turnout primaries are long gone. The Democratic Party is much more of a shell organization than its reputation would suggest. Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the DNC, said recently that Leftists and socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” Harrison posted on X. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” It was an absurd statement—not only because Harrison was the DNC chair who hoped to deceive the American people over Biden’s fitness to seek another term, but because it revealed a belief in a politics that effectively no longer exists. There are no Democratic Party “volunteers,” nor any real “infrastructure.” Candidates are responsible for recruiting their own volunteers and building out their own get-out-the-vote operations. This is what American politics is, and will always be. If Chait and Harrison want to defeat DSA, they’ll have to run their own candidates, find the volunteers, raise the money, and do the grubby work of electioneering. They’ll have to convince voters DSA is wrong and they are right. Can they? Who really knows. At the minimum, they’ll have to better understand their enemy. Right now, they’re little different than the 2015 Republicans who were hoping and praying that Donald Trump was a fad, a summer fever dream that would be dead in the fall.

I haven’t talked all that much about the fact that, from last November to this April, I wrote a book about Zohran Mamdani’s rise to power and early days as mayor. I spent several hours interviewing Mamdani and spoke with more than two dozen people, including intimates in his orbit, allies, and foes. I spoke to Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon. It was an effort I’m proud of, and one that took many intense days and nights. Now the edits are (almost) done and the book, The Revolutionary, is headed to bookstores this October. Random House is doing the honors, and there will be a few foreign editions. You can buy it anywhere. Please preorder it now. This is the first book from a major publisher about Mamdani and one of the first of its kind anywhere. You’ll want to own it, especially if you’re a person of the left.

Let me, though, make a case for The Revolutionary to my sizable readership that is either Mamdani-skeptical or thinks this will be another boring book that mindlessly cheerleads for its subject.

It would surprise you to know I am not enamored with most modern political books and do not, as a rule, read all that many of them. My favorite political book is probably Gary Wills’ Nixon Agonistes and I do not know how it finds a publisher today. It’s wonderful. Political books about progressive politicians aren’t especially exciting to me, either. I don’t like pablum and propaganda; despite holding obvious political views, I try to retain a degree of independence, and I do think that’s why some conservatives and heterodox readers have been able to tolerate me. Partisan politics can be tiring.

When it comes to The Revolutionary, I am hardly impartial. I count Zohran Mamdani as a friend because I’ve known him since the end of 2017, when he was an anonymous political organizer trying to get me elected to the State Senate. I’ve discussed politics with him numerous times. This book, certainly, is personal. But I did not set out to flatter him or anyone else. I wanted to report out, as much as I could, how Mamdani won this shock mayoral election and how he’s begun to govern. Though I did not speak to Andrew Cuomo—he was not made available for interview—I was able to talk to those who worked for his campaign. I also spoke to anti-Mamdani activists and business leaders. To understand MAGA’s view of Mamdani, I went straight to Bannon. (I called Trump’s cellphone but the president did not pick up. Sometimes, though, he does!) What I am trying to underscore is that I was interested in the fullness of the Mamdani story, understood from as many perspectives as possible. For those who hate him but still want to understand why a 34-year-old Muslim socialist ended up in charge of America’s largest city, The Revolutionary will be worth your time.

And if you like Mamdani—if you are enjoying these first six months—this is a book you’ll devour.

Mamdani can’t be ignored any more than Trump can be ignored. He sits at the vanguard of a new kind of politics. What is it, exactly? My book seeks to answer that question. It takes, seriously, the phenomenon of American socialism, and the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel currents now coursing through the body politic. We live in strange times. This is a book that attempts to reckon with them.

I’ll be saying more about this all in the near future. For now, preorder the book. Preorders matter quite a bit. I’ll share more information on talks, tours, parties, and all that good stuff soon.

Happy 4th!

My new novel Colossus is available wherever books are sold. Here’s what Bret Easton Ellis had to say about it: “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 in print or get it on audiobook.

There are elections that not only realign politics but change how we understand concrete reality. Donald Trump’s 2016 triumph qualifies; it remains one of the most consequential elections of the last half century. Trump showed what was possible, reshaping a major political party in his image and dramatically altering how ordinary people relate to their leaders. Zohran Mamdani can never be president, so he cannot shift the currents like that. He is the mayor of New York City. He is, as a 34-year-old Muslim democratic socialist, the most unlikely of mayors, and this lends him national and even international reach. The rest of America is paying a great deal attention to him and his mayoralty, six months into what might be eight years in power. Without the White House, Mamdani cannot impose his will on the Democratic Party like Trump has on the Republicans. The moderate, institutional Democratic faction lucked out; they will not, for now, be driven to extinction. They will not suffer the fate of all the Republican politicians who stood against Trump over the last decade.

Luck, though, comes with caveats. Within the five boroughs—this beating heart of Empire—they are going to have to fight for their life. Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America are still a very long way from demolishing their opposition. The centrist Democrats, that old-line establishment, still outnumber the leftists. They’ve got the governor of New York, enough members of the House delegation, and plenty of state legislators. The socialist caucus in Albany next year will number fourteen: ten state assembly members and four state senators. This isn’t yet enough to dominate bodies of 150 and 63 respectively, but they can begin to apply serious pressure on the legislative leaders and the governor, especially when partnered with Mamdani. In Congress, there will at least three DSA members from New York City. One, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was mostly absent during the primary season, while two others, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, were priority races for Mamdani. He expended tremendous political capital and both won significant victories, along with Brad Lander, who annihilated an Israel hawk incumbent, Dan Goldman.

The spin out of New York—and sometimes, there’s only one kind of spin and it’s correct—is that Mamdani, my old campaign manager, had a fantastic night. All of his endorsed candidates won. He is not the first politician to pick winners. But he is one of the few who is interested in adding allies to a greater political project. Mamdani believes in a stronger welfare state; he wants higher taxes to pay for it. To get what he wants, he must elect politicians who think like him. He also, though he speaks less about it these days, cares a great deal about foreign policy. The Palestinian cause has been vital to him since he was a teenager. A pro-Palestine Democratic Party is, unequivocally, a goal of his, though his primary focus remains on managing the municipal government and implementing his version of sewer socialism. Last night was an absolute disaster for the Israel-adoring flank of the Democratic Party, those who believed they could gobble up AIPAC dollars with impunity and sign off on unconditional military aid for Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard right, theocratic government. The war in Gaza has shaped a young generation like Vietnam. Israel hawks won’t regain the ground they lost. They will, in time, be a minority faction of the Democrats, and many might end up in the GOP, where AIPAC will be tolerated for a little while longer. For American Jews on the left, this is a fine development. A 5,000-year-old faith must be divorced from a single malevolent nation-state that should have little to do with the future of the United States of America. Adriano Espaillat, the incumbent felled by Avila Chevalier, now understands why bowing to such a pernicious donor class wasn’t helpful for his political future.

There is nothing magical about DSA. One doesn’t go to a DSA meeting or watch one of their rallies and walk away with the snappy phrase or TikTok tip that unlocks a hundred new votes. They are a decentralized, dues-paying, membership-based organization that prioritizes political organizing above all else. Their top priority is recruiting and engaging enough volunteers on their chosen political campaigns to ensure victory. If a candidate wins a DSA endorsement, they are guaranteed dozens or even hundreds of people who will show up, usually for free, and knock on doors for them. (DSA runs paid canvasses as well.) This is why, in a given year, DSA will keep its endorsement slate relatively small. A labor union or the Working Families Party might endorse in twenty or thirty different races. DSA, conversely, only hands out endorsements to candidates they can bolster with a volunteer operation. The endorsement process itself is fairly intensive. Candidates must fill out a questionnaire and win votes from the borough and citywide chapters. DSA members vet their candidates extensively. Their goal is to elect politicians who will be loyal to the organization, who will listen, collaborate, and back future campaigns. They want politicians who will support a democratic socialist agenda, whether it’s taxing the wealthy or abolishing ICE, and won’t go back on campaign promises. DSA politicians, in office, must remain accountable to the people who elevated them. I know this well because, in 2017, I joined DSA when I decided to run for State Senate. I attempted to win their endorsement. They only supported one Senate campaign in that cycle and it wasn’t mine. I understood. The other race was the only one they had capacity for and Julia Salazar won anyway. She was much more active in DSA than I was. Once my political career ended, I didn’t renew my dues, and that was that.

DSA has existed since the 1980s, but has only mattered, in a political sense, since 2017, when the followers of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign sought an outlet for their ambitions. Sanders had lost, but why abandon politics altogether? DSA boomed. After membership tailed off in the early 2020s, it ballooned again when Mamdani ran for mayor. They are at a new apogee, or still far away from a peak—we won’t know for a while. As long as they have a mayor who is willing to stump for them, anything is possible. Mamdani, notably, did not endorse the entire DSA slate. To appease Carl Heastie, the Assembly speaker, he remained neutral in races where DSA insurgents were directly challenging members of the Assembly. It was a move I questioned, but one that ultimately worked to Mamdani’s favor because he got everything he wanted: the insurgents, minus one, won anyway, and he got credit for delivering the victories of Valdez, Chevalier Avila, and Lander. And it’s inarguable that his support was essential for the two women, who were in much tougher fights than Lander and had far less political experience. Espaillat does not get beaten without Mamdani. Valdez, with DSA, might have eked out a victory against Brooklyn Borough President Antontio Reynoso, but it’s hard to imagine she’s obliterating him by twenty points without the full-throated Mamdani endorsement. He cut ads for her, campaigned for her, and ensured every voter of his knew who he wanted for Congress. Mamdani brought her to the mountaintop.

A complaint about DSA, lodged from those who resent their presence, is that it’s a club for lonely young gentrifiers—the childless, the drifters, the people who’ve yet to get “serious” about their lives. The youth element, in particular, is often skewered. These people just want to hang out. They don’t know any better. Maybe. But really, it doesn’t matter at all why they do what they do, if they knock on doors for Claire Valdez because they care about passing Medicare for All or they want to meet their next lover. In fact, it was once the political establishment—the so-called machines—that understood this best of all. One of my chief contentions, borne out by the last ten years of politics in New York, is that the political machine as we know it is dead. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slayed Joe Crowley, the Queens Democratic boss, in 2018, an illusion was finally shattered. It had been a decade, maybe more, since the actual Queens Democratic Party organized voters for their chosen candidates. The political clubs had become, by the 2010s, shell organizations, and the establishment stopped doing the difficult work of signing up new voters, passing out palm cards at the subway stations, and trudging up apartment staircases to meet registered Democrats. In the twentieth century, they in fact did all of this work. The machines were real. They could support a candidate and a guarantee a thousand votes. They had, of course, patronage to dole out, and that kept enough voters in line. You backed the party candidate so, maybe, you or your cousin could get on the public payroll and enjoy the sort of job that paid you for full-time labor but only needed you there on a Monday or Thursday. The political clubs—reform and establishment alike—were also packed with human beings, many of them young and excited to volunteer on a campaign. I know this because my own mother, in her twenties, belonged to a political club in Brooklyn. It was how you found friends and dated around. Jobs, too, could be on the offer.

DSA has ended the organizing interregnum in New York City. In the 2000s and 2010s, establishment Democrats abandoned organizing; they lost interest. The best explanation is they got lazy and self-satisfied, and no one was holding them accountable until a bartender who grew up in Westchester decided to wage war against the boss of it all. Ocasio-Cortez, inspired by Sanders, kicked off an organizing revolution that has not let up. The old party bosses—the Meade Espositos, the Charles Francis Murphys—knew how to counter that. You get into the streets and find your own people. But who does that anymore? Organized labor, for the most part, is insular, and is only helpful if a district has any union density that is particular to that union. The NGO or Alphabet Left, which has both partnered with DSA and opposed it, has taken all the wrong lessons of the last decade. The Working Families Party, at its foundation, cared greatly about grassroots political organizing. Now it is hard to say, beyond handing out copious endorsements and spending a bit of money, what it truly does. The rule of politics, today and always, is that a group is only worth something to a candidate if they can bring volunteers or cut a check. The WFP does spend money and the left needs a vehicle like that; it is, effectively, a super PAC that is allowed to coordinate with campaigns because it is a political party in New York. But Reynoso v. Valdez should put to rest the fiction that they are able to marshal any kind of volunteer army for a candidate they endorse. Valdez’s DSA contingent overran a borough president who had also spent eight years in the City Council and had the support of the outgoing congresswoman. It was less a primary of people v. money than people v. people-less nonprofits. In that case, one might even wonder why Valdez’s margin wasn’t even larger.

Mamdani should feel less restrained in the next election cycle. Over the last eight months, he helped the political establishment quite a bit; he needed the backing of the governor to ensure significant elements of his political agenda, which require Albany approval, could be implemented, and he kneecapped primary challengers to her and Hakeem Jeffries, who is probably going to be the House Speaker next year. If Mamdani was right to leave Jeffries alone, he should not be so deferent to the rest of the political class going forward. Most either opposed him or wished him to fail. They are now soldiers without guns, bullies without muscle. They can’t raise more money than him. They can’t hunt up more volunteers than him. They can’t go on television or TikTok and sound a tenth as compelling as him. It’s time they understand there is a political boss in this city, and he lives in Gracie Mansion. They can do business with him; Mamdani is forever amiable. He is not a vindictive person. The next few years needn’t be bitter. But the establishment Democrats who revile Mamdani so much should understand 2028 is going to look like 2026. There will be more races to be run, more incumbents to replace. For a century, since successive Red Scares squelched socialism in this country, the left has been in a defensive crouch. Only now can the socialists hit back. Only now can they escape the margins. They found their generational talent. It’s a fair fight, at last.

And so another high profile election season has passed in New York City without the New York Times editorial board endorsing in any of the major races. Few, truthfully, have noticed. Ever since the Times announced it was no longer endorsing in local races, breaking with a tradition that had lasted many decades, if not longer, politically attuned folk like me have wondered what it all might mean. There was a time, not very long ago, when the Times editorial board might tell you who they thought should win in a City Council race. Now you are lucky if they dispatch a reporter to write on that race at all. The decision to not endorse in local contests—the Times still wants to tell their readers who they like in the next presidential contest—seemed to signal that the Paper of Record was not going to prioritize the local. This is, despite the protestations of the Times itself, mostly true. Ever since they abandoned the standalone Metro section in the newspaper, granular coverage of the city has faded away. This is not a reflection on the talent of the City Hall, political, and local reporters the Times employs. They are top notch. It’s more about choices management has made as the newspaper, unlike almost any in America, grows it profits. You do not open the New York Times to find out, each day, what is happening in New York City. For that, your best bet is the right-wing New York Post, Gothamist, The City Reporter, Hell Gate, and other local outlets trying to fill the gaps.

Does it actually matter that the Times editorial board is not endorsing anyone in the clashes between Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso, Brad Lander and Dan Goldman, and Darializa Avila Chevalier and Adriano Espaillat? Here’s a dull answer: yes it does, and no it doesn’t. Allow me, first, to admit I’ve long believed the idea of a newspaper editorial board backing a candidate with an unsigned editorial is an outdated and befuddling practice. I blame no media organization that refuses to do it. The average reader struggles to distinguish between a conventional column and an editorial. Publishing any writing that’s unsigned dodges accountability. Editorial boards tend to embody a corporatized groupthink. I rarely, if ever, turn to them for any sort of political guidance. And an especially lousy editorial can make life difficult for reporters on staff. I know this firsthand: I quit the Jared Kushner-owned New York Observer after they endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary in New York. It’s fine, then, the Times is not telling us who they prefer in any of the aforementioned races or the battle for the 12th District in Manhattan, the most Times-obsessed seat in America. Why should we care, really? For leftists, the end of local endorsements is an underrated boon. There is little chance the Times editorial board, which savaged Zohran Mamdani a year ago, was going to endorse Valdez or Avila Chevalier. In fact, they might have not only backed Reynoso and Espaillat but delivered stinging criticisms of their leftist rivals, who both lack the experience the editorial board prefers. Andrew Cuomo was not technically endorsed last year—it was year one of the no-endorsement policy—but he was effectively greenlit by the board, which was still somewhat enamored with the scandalous years he spent in government.

Still, it’s worth explaining why it’s not a good development for local democracy that the Times is no longer dragging candidates in front of its editorial board. There are several ways, I believe, the voter is losing out.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.