We Are All the Monster: Frankenstein, Late Capitalism, and the Things We Made and Left to Die

Mary Shelley was nineteen years old when she wrote the defining myth of the modern world. She probably did not know she was doing this. Two hundred years later, the novel she produced in a wet summer beside a Swiss lake reads less like a Gothic romance than like a diagnosis — precise, unflinching, andContinue reading “We Are All the Monster: Frankenstein, Late Capitalism, and the Things We Made and Left to Die”

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Byron, the Romantics, and the Heroic Pose

They were young, they were beautiful, they were consumed by their own myths and their own fevers before any of them reached forty. Byron, Shelley, and Keats between them invented the idea of the artist as hero — as outcast, visionary, martyr to beauty and freedom. The invention was magnificent and partly fraudulent and changedContinue reading “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Byron, the Romantics, and the Heroic Pose”