John Waters at 80: The Last Great American Trash Intellectual By Bergotte For more than half a century, John Waters has made an art of what polite culture tries to throw away: vulgarity, deviance, low glamour, bad taste, and the people condemned for possessing any of them. At 80, he looks less like a relicContinue reading “Happy 80th Birthday To This Legend”
Category Archives: Essay
To See Someone Truly: On Great Are the Myths
There is a moment near the beginning of this novel that contains, in miniature, everything the novel will spend three hundred pages unfolding. The boy has come to visit Birdie’s house for the first time. He is thirteen, working-class, new to Memphis, not entirely sure why he has been invited. The house is enormous —Continue reading “To See Someone Truly: On Great Are the Myths”
The Second Novel: On the Chapter Titles of Great Are the Myths
Great Are the Myths has sixty-six chapters. It also has a prologue, a section heading, a commencement, a coda, and an author’s note. But before any of that — before the first sentence, before Birdie’s voice begins — there is a title. And then another. And then sixty-four more. Read in sequence, the chapter titlesContinue reading “The Second Novel: On the Chapter Titles of Great Are the Myths”
The Companion Who Lives in Your Head: Imaginary Friends, Spirit Guides, and the Inner Life of the Boy
An Essay on Reading Great Are the Myths “What if you’re my imaginary friend?” The boy asks this near the very end. They are lying side by side on sun loungers in the California desert, covered in blankets, the way they used to lie in the garden in Memphis when they were thirteen and fourteenContinue reading “The Companion Who Lives in Your Head: Imaginary Friends, Spirit Guides, and the Inner Life of the Boy”
The Man Behind the Curtain: What the Farrow-Marantz Investigation Tells Us About AI’s Dangerous Moment
Originally published in The New Yorker, a landmark investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz into Sam Altman and OpenAI raises questions that go far beyond Silicon Valley boardroom drama. Here is what the rest of us should be paying attention to. There is a particular kind of power that operates best in the gapContinue reading “The Man Behind the Curtain: What the Farrow-Marantz Investigation Tells Us About AI’s Dangerous Moment”
To Whom Little Is Not Enough: On Sufficiency, Excess, and the Self That Cannot Stop Wanting
The Greeks had a precise diagnosis for the condition that defines our age. They called it pleonexia — the desire for more, the wanting that has no natural limit, the reaching that cannot stop because it does not know what it is reaching for. They considered it not merely a practical error but a moralContinue reading “To Whom Little Is Not Enough: On Sufficiency, Excess, and the Self That Cannot Stop Wanting”
Things My Therapist Taught Me…
On Hierarchy, Belonging, and the Strange Relief of Being Understood There are moments in a therapy session when something is said so plainly, so without drama, that you feel almost cheated. You expected the revelation to arrive with more ceremony — a swelling of strings, perhaps, or at least a lengthier preamble. Instead it comesContinue reading “Things My Therapist Taught Me…”
My World of Interiors 