[for the New Yorker, 6/7/26]
Social media needs the face because it burns attention for fuel, and the face is where I go when I look for you. But I can’t look to these platforms. I find it all so unsatisfying: the resculpted faces, the curated lives, the naked grabbing of my gaze. Something uncertain, something human, has been drained like blood from this world.
[for the Telegraph, 7/4/26]
We have, I believe, basic ethical obligations, and one of them is to treat humans, ourselves and others, as creatures worthy of dignity. To filter your self-expression through a robot that cannot “know” anything, that blends other people’s writing into an oracular mulch – the plagiarism device in your pocket – is to degrade everyone involved.
[for the LRB blog, 2/4/26]
Unless you’re in it for the indulgences, pilgrimage isn’t a practical affair. It costs time and effort and money. It’s a rare triumph of uselessness in a world that prizes the reduction of daily life to utility.
[for the Telegraph, 1/4/26]
If I had to suggest, in a nutshell, what Lerner’s fiction is “about”, I would say: our need to connect, a need that, repeated every day for an entire lifetime, becomes calmly desperate. Without someone else listening, there’s no-one to tell you you’re wrong.
[for the New Yorker, 21/10/25]
For Kingsnorth, the Industrial Revolution marked the point of no return. Playing gods, we turned our backs on the Earth. It is, in his account, the Fall — or, in secular terms, human history as tragedy, a swan dive into the dark.
[for the TLS, 14/3/25]
Every voice, even a printed one, longs for a listener.
[for The Telegraph, 19/9/24]
Intermezzo seems to me a deeply millennial novel — suffused with an elegiac awareness of how we eventually stop being young.
[for the LRB, 8/8/24]
Inigo Philbrick looked the part. He wore ‘tailored Milanese suits and shirts’; he lived in a flat on Grosvenor Square; ‘he was known by the maître d’s at some of the toniest restaurants in town.’ He is said to have begun his day by screaming ‘Inigo! Inigo! Inigo! Inigo!’ in the shower.
[for The Telegraph, 8/12/23]
You sense that Stagg wants to be pithy, but refuses to trust the instinct. In an age where shrill essayists swarm the internet, writing as monotonously as they can, she prefers grey areas.
[for the LARB, 11/11/23]
The most gorgeous internet art offers us pictures of time preserved, whether they’re peachy or strange or sad.
[for The Telegraph, 12/10/23]
Fiction critics too often use “dreamlike”: it’s almost never accurate. But for Fosse’s writing, it is – both because dreams have a compulsive logic, and because they rework, in thin disguise, the many dreams we’ve had before.
[for Artforum, 8/5/23]
Pilvi Takala seeks honesty in Marc Augé’s non-lieux: those purposive spaces we visit but in which we never dwell.
[for 4Columns, 13/1/23]
I’ve always associated Ellis with a yearning for tenderness, however occluded it may seem. Even the brutalised voids of Less than Zero are holes where emotions should be.
[for Artforum, 3/1/23]
He owned a Reichian “orgone energy accumulator” and, just as uselessly, a Cold War bug-detecting kit. Much was made in this show of his interests – a hinterland where curiosity and paranoia met.
[for Astra, 7/11/22]
The true paradises, Proust wrote, are the ones that we have lost. Eden was never a hope: it was the first departure point.
[for the Spectator, 30/9/22]
Neon lends itself, like the Church, to kitsch.
[for 4Columns, 10/6/22]
You don’t have to be bullied by writing like this, by its belief that its specialization makes it special somehow. Style, among other things, is a matter of mutual respect.
[for Astra, 12/4/22]
And suddenly, even with two years to prepare for the question, Galliano is lost, exposed.
[for Artforum, 1/4/22]
The picture planes go dancing between zones of space and time, both windows upon their scenes and surfaces free of illusory depth.
[for The Nation, 16/3/22]
Fuccboi may represent the last fumes of alt-lit – its clubbish stylistic tics, its hatred of “mainstream” writing, its contempt for the novel as a form. Fiction is a medium, not an intercom.
