The New Cultural Criticism

A movement for the 2020s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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