To a New Shining Hill

Beyond woke and anti-woke

Last week, I had the great privilege of going to Los Angeles to appear on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast. The author of American Psycho is one of my favorite writers—I believe AP is a contender for Great American Novel—and I still can’t quite process we spent almost two hours discussing my novel Glass Century and the state of broader literary culture. You’ll want to listen to this conversation.

Brandon Taylor, one of the leading novelists and literary critics of our time—and the author of an excellent Substack—recently wrote that Glass Century has “some of the best writing about tennis that I have ever read and I have read A LOT of tennis writing.” I appreciate the very kind words, Brandon! As always, Glass Century is available in all formats (print, e-book, audiobook) and if you’ve enjoyed, please rate on Goodreads.

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Midway through 2025, it’s safe to say woke and anti-woke are exhausting themselves. Cultural clashes that characterized so much of the last decade just do not matter any longer. Woke has dissipated, and the blindly anti-woke have lost their raison d’etre. Some have defaulted to furious Israel advocacy or embrace of MAGA, while others keep their free speech commitments. The woke have mostly gone quiet, with a few outliers straining to revive a movement that is mostly done. If they have any hope for a comeback, it’s in Donald Trump’s overreach. But while Trump’s attacks on civil liberties and academic freedom have provoked a great deal of backlash, they have not created any environment remotely like the 2010s, when many different social justice causes were dominant and the power elite were desperate to keep up. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo will never be cultural giants again. Their moment has passed.

All of this is easy enough to declare, but what is actually next? What is post-woke? Post-anti-woke? We are now going to find out. On the whole, I am optimistic: culture is reaching a healthier state, and you’re slowly seeing a richer, calmer discourse. The histrionics of the last decade are absent, and hustlers on each side of the war are not able to drum up so much attention. If I understood the allure of anti-woke in those years bookending Covid, much of it now seems stale, and most of the writers and intellectuals worth paying attention to have moved on. Cultural shifts do happen, as much as some might pretend otherwise, and we’ve got to take stock of where we are and what this all might mean. This is hardest to do in the moment itself, but that doesn’t make the work any less vital. It is important to try to grasp at the fluidity of culture itself, even when the waters run right through one’s fingers.

The new age is neo-Romantic in scope, but it’s early yet—it’s difficult, still, to describe particular works of art appearing today as “Romantic” or sharing a similar sensibility. In part, this is because novels, movies, and even music can have long incubation periods, and the individuals creating them may be reacting to currents that are more personal in scope. At the same time, 2025 is starting to feel like a turning point for art broadly: this year, the writer Mo Diggs has argued, is already a great one for cinema, and it feels there is a hunger again for excellence from filmmakers and movie-goers alike. The retreads can still dominate, but we’ve passed peak Marvel, and are exiting the Hero era. The Hero era transcended the movies themselves and extended to virtually all facets of life: politics, the internet, and the rise of Silicon Valley. In the late 2000s, 2010s, and early 2020s, the influencer model was dominant. Influencers, in most contexts, are individuals who post frequently on YouTube and TikTok, amassing large followings and parlaying the attention they receive into sponsorships, brand deals, and other marketing opportunities. These influencers were in deep parasocial relationships with their audiences, to the point where many viewers believed them to be their personal heroes. This engagement extended beyond YouTube—consider, for a moment, how men like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and even Jeff Bezos were once viewed by the culture. Musk, in the 2010s, was Iron Man, the brilliant, cosmopolitan polymath who could turn any company he touched to gold. Zuckerberg’s Facebook, in the late 2000s, was considered a new political Eden that could usher in America’s first Black president and make us all less lonely. Silicon Valley titans were not so different than Marvel superheroes, worshiped by millions while convincing the younger generations that such fortune-making—and even blatant monopolization and oligarchic behavior—was to be celebrated. How many Americans truly worried about Zuckerberg’s decision to buy Instagram and WhatsApp? Who truly fretted over Amazon acquiring Whole Foods? The tech heroes were rarely questioned.

A hallmark of the new era is skepticism of leaders in all walks of life; I can’t remember a time in which Americans were more jaded by celebrity culture and the range of influencers who exerted so much pull on the zeitgeist over the last decade. Katy Perry is a punchline and the Kardashians are a punchline. Taylor Swift is impregnable, but the heights of 2023 will never return again. Travis and Taylor are increasingly passé. Who is cool anymore? Who are today’s heroes? In any other period of recent history, these were very easy questions to answer. No longer. I wrote, a year ago, about an American left wing devoid of leaders—and not wanting them—and I am starting to believe that this trend now extends everywhere. Politicians are no longer unifying figures, and whatever fan bases they boast are deeply polarized—if these politicians, excepting Donald Trump, can truly exert a pull on most voters. Celebrity endorsements have certainly never meant less, as Kamala Harris’ failure demonstrated. The emergence of Trump and then AOC marked a sort of Hero era apotheosis; close your eyes and try to imagine, in 2025, a candidate for Congress winning one election and becoming a national celebrity literally overnight. It just would not happen.

Mass culture, as a concept, is rapidly dying off. It exists, and there are certain movies or streaming shows that can get Americans talking, but it is frailer than ever. There might be figures who are famous to one person who may mean nothing to another. There are fewer cultural totems, fewer shared reference points. The internet has created an eternal present and handed off the task of cultural curation to the users themselves. The term user speaks to how the relationship between human beings and digital technology has long been framed—the goal, from the perspective of anyone who reaps a profit off this tech, is to make the human being addicted, to own their time as much as any drug might—and it’s one, in this new protean era, that we are now aware of, if we haven’t necessarily broken free. Smartphone bans in public schools are becoming more and more common. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a massive best-seller. There are more people conscious of their tech consumption in 2025 versus 2015, and there are growing, if limited, movements built around rejecting the smartphone. Physical books endure, and readers defiantly purchase them. The mere fact that AI is being challenged at all speaks to how differently technology is being approached in the 2020s; we are more reflexively wary. If ChatGPT had emerged in 2014, Sam Altman would have become, by now, a household name, with fawning media coverage burnishing his image as one of the great thinkers of our age. AI is popular, no doubt, and its usage will only expand with time. What is clear, though, is that techno-optimism is not returning soon. The tech titans will not be heroes again.

We do need to be optimistic as a culture. Dreaming is the greatest weapon humans have, and it is how we advance. There’s a balance to be struck between the old-style worship and the emerging cynicism. I am confident we might get there. That is what the post-woke world is about: the middle-ground. We should neither be stultifying nor reactionary. We do need leaders and heroes, but we should not be subsuming ourselves so greatly to others. Was there a corollary between the peaks of hero and woke culture? To an extent, though anti-woke warriors could fall prey to the same para-socialism. The woke era was one of enthusiasms, nearly religious, and it could be millenarian in spirit. Its opposition took on a similar, and dangerous, moral clarity. Soon, a great change would come. We were almost there, if only we tried harder—if we fought for it and if we truly believed. Zeal is addicting. What will we feel zeal for now? As a novelist, I am glad enough to see the untethering of art and politics continue apace. This does not mean art with politics should be rejected or we should be striving toward a mythical apolitical ideal. Politics are everywhere. What it does mean is that art should no longer be forced to carry a certain kind of politics. If a writer wants to embrace didacticism, let him. And if he doesn’t—or his political bearing, for whatever reason, isn’t especially fashionable—judge the art object itself, as all art should be judged. The perceived moral failings of the creator are irrelevant because the art, once created, exists beyond the creator. For some authors, painters, filmmakers, and musicians, this can be a disorienting concept. They grow possessive of their creations, hoping, in perpetuity, to impose their will on an object that, once finished, exists in the public. But a novel is no longer entirely yours once it is read by others. I’ve felt this most thrillingly with Glass Century. Each person has their own reading of the novel; if they’ve spent time with it, it is as personal to them as it is to me. They form their own ideas, interpretations, and arguments. If I may believe some of these are incorrect, it does not actually matter; there is no universal law, no final judge, and the author cannot issue a unilateral decree and declare all matters settled. I can argue and perhaps my arguments get taken more seriously, but they can only be relevant for so long, especially as time passes and more and more readers have no contact with me or any particular author. This is true, even more so, in death, as the novels of the deceased 19th and 20th century authors join up with the currents of whatever age they are consumed in, and the flesh-and-blood creators hover as mute ghosts. This is the natural progression of things.

Art, then, for art’s sake—now more than ever. The artist today may be less likely to attain fame or celebrity than those in prior generations, but there’s only so much rocket fuel available for that kind of creator, the one who labors solely for worldly accolades. We must have art that escapes old frameworks and binaries. It is possible, and it’s beginning to happen more. If this age remains deeply uncertain, I believe it will be a more creative one, especially at the independent level. There is no shortage of talent nor hunger for greatness. Artists have not given up. If AI, for a writer, does have value, it will show her that it is possible to do much better. The machine has no consciousness, no spark, and the works that radiate with the obvious light of the human soul will endure and find an audience. The artificial can, at least, create a greater appreciation for the real, and the real will carry the day. There may be a time, not long from now, when art created by human beings marks itself that way—like “Made in America,” “Made without AI” could be a point of pride—and that is how the wheat will get separated from the chaff. Humans must remember they can dream, and machines never do. The human dream is the reason we have a civilization at all. The coming age will be about remembering that; it will be, I hope, a bid to reinvigorate high culture from below.