Since its inception, the genre of self-help has been in constant flux. At times, it’s been exalted, even transcendent, as in the cases of the country’s original self-help thinkers, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, who helped define the genre long before the term came into vogue. It’s been hammy, if effective, as with Dale Carnegie’s 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People. In countless more cases, it’s been bottom-feeding, crass and pointless. But it’s always been somewhat ubiquitous in American culture.

Much of the American public’s relationship to self-help is now characterized by voracious, un-ebbing demand and adulation. Still, certain sub-sections of the culture have taken a more critical and generally sniffy view. Recall P.T. Anderson’s skewering of the self-help archetype in the figure of motivational speaker Frank T.J. Mackie in Magnolia, or Greg Kinnear’s wannabe life coach in Little Miss Sunshine, or SNL’s mock self-help show “Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley,” in which Al Franken must remind himself, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” …

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote an obituary—in the form of a publicity statement on behalf of the publisher, announcing its demise—for a much beloved and highly prestigious literary journal, one typically ranked in the top three of U.S. literary journals and magazines.

A few years back, writing a statement on the death of a great publication like this one would have been a profoundly sad experience for me. I grew up revering these kinds of publications as a kind of intellectual and artistic haven. …

With Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins wrote a marvel of a book. But, in the immortal words of Reading Rainbow, don’t take my word for it. The book has 18,000 reviews on Amazon, with an average of five stars. That’s crazy. It’s got the kind of word of mouth traction that would make a publicist giddy. And it’s a damn good book. So why didn’t it win—or become a serious contender for—a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction?

It’s not likely that Goggins even gives a shit (to take Goggins’ register for a moment) about the Pulitzer. …

The world has fallen in love with the story of a man who fell in love with an octopus. It’s an incredible, at-times gripping story. But it also holds deep lessons for our lives.

In the newly released Netflix documentary by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, viewers go on a journey through the kelp forests off the very southern tip of Africa. Wildlife photographer Craig Foster dives into the cold water kelp beds as a way of confronting a crisis in his life. …

For more than a decade, life hacking has been the dominant contemporary philosophy of life. The motivating principle behind the Life Hack movement is the idea of optimization. We can become better, more effective and more efficient all at the same time, the approach held.

Not only that, but, according to the life hack ethos, those three elements—improving our lives, reducing inputs and maximizing outputs—go hand in hand. Want to be abetter person? Start hacking. But the world has changed. We’ve changed. As a consequence, the days of life hacking are numbered.

Part of the reason for life hacking’s coming fall from grace is that its counter-philosophy, what we might call the Gratitude Movement, won the war of ideas waged between the two. …

Everyone seems really very confused about anti-Semitism. From DeSean Jackson to Nick Cannon to P. Diddy, we’re getting a whole lot of conflicting notions about who is, and isn’t, an anti-Semite.

This Jew wanted to take a moment to clear things up. So pay attention! I’ve got a media to run and a banking system to dominate before I get back to my episode of “Below Decks.”

1. Approvingly quote Hitler — DeSean got this one spot on. If you quote Hitler, and it’s in an approving manner, you nailed it. Never mind whether or not the Hitler quote is fake; and disregard any necessary mea-culpas about not having hate in your heart for any community. …

Writers hear a lot about ‘constructive’ criticism. Whether it’s at workshops, in writing groups or online, the idea is that criticism should be helpful and useful is a solid piece of conventional wisdom. What people often miss, however, is that it’s not the manner in which criticism is given that makes it constructive, but how it’s received.

The idea here is simple: wrongly construed, even the most well intentioned criticism can be to a writer’s confidence what battery acid is to shag carpet.

Despite this, in so many cases the “constructive onus,” as we might call it, is placed on the critic. The result is that criticism, couched in saccharine qualifiers and cloying reassurances, can end up being even less helpful than its un-constructive analog. …

A lot of writers, and artists more generally, are asking, “What’s the point?” With COVID-19 shutting down cultural life, nationwide protests cranking the volume of discourse to a 100 decibels, and an economic crisis threatening life as we know it, creators around the world are despairing there’s no place for them or their work in the blare of the current environment.

But the question itself points to a bigger issue, which is the real aim — the purpose — of art. Why do we create? No doubt, there’s an element of self-expression, of the pure joy of that flow state, of leaving a creative legacy behind. …