What I Wrote About in 2016
What is literary criticism for? A few years ago, I was taking notes on a book at the laundromat, when a male member of the public approached me.
He opened with: “Hey so are you a writer?”
“Sure.”
“That’s so cool.”
“…”
“Fiction or poetry?”
“Book reviews.”
He went to check his laundry.
To plenty of people, criticism doesn’t look like other writing. It’s not like opinion writing: Spending so much time thinking about someone else’s thoughts sounds a lot like not having thoughts of your own. (This is a misconception.) Nor is it like reporting: You can do the whole thing without getting up from your laptop. No character in a show about 20-something Brooklynites aspires to publish reviews. When we talk about longform journalism, we’re not often talking about the tradition of the long essay-review.
But my favorite stories are still stories about books: what they mean, how they are formed and who creates them, and the lives they take on after publication as they pass through the hands of different groups in different cultures and periods in history. And at least in one of its incarnations, criticism is a lot like longform feature writing, only instead of going out into the world to report, you have to set out to various places in your mind, some of which might not exist yet.
Last year I wrote about some of my idols, and cultural phenomena that mystified me. This year I ended up writing a lot about books that had uncontrollable afterlives. Books like William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations, which gave us a slew of misconceptions about millennials, and Sallie Tisdale’s essays, which she shouldn’t regret, but does.
Murder They Wrote (Dissent)
I started the year with this essay about Making A Murder, Serial, The Jinx, and The Staircase for Dissent. These shows presented stories, but then their fans investigated and created hundreds of competing versions of events.
Vladimir Nabokov, Scientific Genius (New Republic)
Nabokov was a novelist who also collected butterflies. Collecting butterflies had almost no effect on the way he wrote. But people want to believe!
Jenny Diski Understood Things That No One Else Could Explain (Lit Hub)
I think Jenny Diski has meant more than almost anyone to a lot of essayists my age. Reading back through her work after she died made me realize how much of an entire atmosphere — of the things that lasted and the ephemera — she captured. This is the only piece I wrote entirely on my phone, and it wasn’t nearly enough.
#FF00FF
This was a fun project for Jo Livingstone’s WebSafe 2k16. Even if it made my eyes hurt.
Sallie Tisdale’s Quietly Groundbreaking Essays About Caring For Others (The New Yorker)
I would have liked to call this ‘Caring Is Creepy.’
The Tyranny of the Office Blanket (ELLE)
Researching this gave me the chance to read hundreds of office style tips from the 1950s.
The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel (New Republic)
People need to stop pretending that millennials want to live in crawl spaces. I set out to the find the first use of the term “millennial” and ended up piecing together its crackpot origins. I also got to talk about this one for On the Media’s episode about Kids Today.
The Flaws of the Overton Window Theory (New Republic)
This year I noticed more and more commentators using this term, often wrongly. I wrote this mini-history before the election. Now that the center has well and truly vanished, I expect the concept to lose currency.
