Selection Bias no. 4: In medias crisis

Dear friends,

I hope this email finds you well. It's been over a year since I sent out my last newsletter, and I don't know if now is the best or the worst time to send out my next. What I do know is that, for better or worse, now is the first time in a long time that I've had time to write again, and that now is also a time that has made me all the more grateful for the people in my life and all the more desirous to reach out to you all. So here it is.

(Fair warning: A lot of this newsletter is filled with heavy, heady stuff. If that's not what you need right now, scroll down to the bottom for the sweet pop jams. Or just close this email and watch this live jellyfish cam.)

I process everything by thinking, but how does one think their way through this? As I write, each passing day still brings both too much and too little new information. What's clear, perhaps all that's clear, is that we're all in this together, both in terms of what we'll suffer and in terms of what we can do. And part of me takes comfort in this fact, in this reminder of our shared vulnerability and power.

But another part of me shudders at it, since I know that collective action isn't exactly our strong suit. Indeed, I've been thinking a lot lately about how similar this present crisis is to all the other crises we've been living with in recent years. Climate change, economic inequality, surveillance capitalism, fake news, #MeToo, BLM, MMIWG. What's common to these crises is their collective shape, their epiphenomenal nature, the fact that they are emergent features of systems rather than isolated acts of harm. They feel out of our hands, because they are not in any one person's hands.

Yet it's not just that these crises are hard to do anything about, due to our tendency to think in terms of individual rather than collective action. They are also hard to talk about, write about, even think about, due to our tendency to gravitate toward individual rather than collective narratives. The stories we're drawn to, and thus the stories we've come to expect, are personal, psychological dramas: stories about individual people and their struggles, evolutions, and odysseys. Yet as much as we attend to the individual casualties and malfeasants of these crises, no amount of such spotlighting can fix the underlying issues, since the issues are all, at root, structural problems, which can only be rectified at the structural level. What these crises require is a different form of storytelling from our default, one that is able to see our collective struggles for what they are and to offer a view that is synoptic and yet nonreductive.

I process everything by thinking, so I'm especially appreciative when others help me think through things more clearly than I can on my own. And in the past year, I've been fascinated by the capacity of this different form of storytelling – whether it be in the form of fiction, nonfiction, or personal essay – to provide, if not an antidote to, then at least a clear-eyed understanding of our current cultural moment. Nearly all the writing that I've liked most in the past year has been writing of this kind, and that's most of what I have to share in this newsletter. I don't know if this is what any of you want or need right now, but one of the things that helps me make sense of new situations is reminding myself of how I've made sense of old ones. So, in the middle of our current crisis, here's some crisis media.

(By the way, just to give credit where credit's due... These thoughts about the mismatch between the collective nature of our societal ills and the individualistic form of our storytelling began to crystallize for me after I read, of all things, Zeynep Tufekci's critical analysis of the Game of Thrones finale (published, in all places, as a blog post in Scientific American). The brilliance of GoT's first six seasons, Tufekci argues, was that they were "sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual"; the total disaster of its last two seasons was due to its showrunners "steering the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifting to the psychological". This seems to me just right as a critical analysis of Game of Thrones (though the real problem with the final season was, of course, that the Trump administration assumed creative control). But I'm not here to wax nostalgic on what was the greatest fumble in contemporary storytelling. The real takeaway from this essay for me was the psychological/sociological distinction as a lens through which to understand our sociocultural shortcomings. As Tufekci observes, "Whether done well or badly, the psychological genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change.")

ON MASCULINITY, TOXIC AND OTHERWISE

The best novel I read last year was Ben Lerner's The Topeka School. It's worth the read for the writing alone, but what I found truly remarkable about the novel was its poetic examination of modern day masculinity. Through its story of a middle-class teenage boy coming of age in Middle America in the mid-nineties, the novel provides, as it were, a genealogy of contemporary white masculinity, tracing out its silences, violences, confusion, and fragility. Better than anything else I've come across, Lerner captures something essential and elusive about what it is to be a man today and how it got to be this way.

And on the nonfiction side of this topic, I loved Peggy Orenstein's recently published Boys & Sex, which is an equally eye-opening ethnography of modern day masculinity. I'd especially recommend the audiobook version, which has the added bonus of getting to listen to Orenstein herself recite all the bro speak she quotes.

ON THE INTERNET & LATE CAPITALISM

The best essay collection I read last year was Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, a book I never expected to love as much as I did. Tolentino deftly lays bare all the distortions of modern life, especially as those distortions pertain to modern day femininity, and especially insofar as they arise from how everything is inflected by the Internet, the attention economy, and virtual identity. Pairs well with How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

And on the topics of love and work in the time of late capitalism, Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends is incredible for so many reasons, but especially for how perfectly it captures the intracicies of modern life and romance; and Halle Butler's The New Me is a mordantly funny novel that perfectly captures the hysteria of precarious employment.

ON INJUSTICE

There are so many issues that could be discussed under this heading that I'm not even going to attempt to touch on them all. Here, rather, are two notable examinations of two issues that generally don't get enough attention: First, there's Thunder Bay, produced by Ryan McMahon for CANADALAND, which is a veritable masterpiece; what seems at first like your typical piece of investigative journalism, inquiring into the deaths of nine Indigenous teens in a single Northwestern Ontario city, quickly blossoms into something much greater, which has much to tell us about structural racism in all its forms. Second, there's Automating Inequality, by political scientist Virginia Eubanks, which has got to the best work ever written on the structural harms of algorithmic decision-making, not only because of its overall brilliance and insight, but also because of how it grounds its discussion in real human stories and makes palpable the lived experience of those living with and under our oppressive automated systems.

ON #MeToo, TWO YEARS IN

If 2017 was the year of the floodgates opening, and 2018 was the year of mass reckoniing, 2019 seemed like the year of retrospective reflection for the #MeToo movement. This is no surprise; reflection takes time, especially with something as messy, all-encompassing, and world-upending as #MeToo. All the same, I've been grateful for the kind of journalism we're now seeing, which is able to capture the issues in all their complexity and is willing to leave things complicated and unresolved. In particular, Jane Meyer's profile of Al Franken and his downfall was one of the most nuanced investigations I've ever come across, and made me look differently at not just this incident but all others like it. And this audio documentary about John Fahey and what it was like to live with him, produced for KCRW's excellent Lost Notes, was a riveting exploration, one of the best I've ever seen, of the vexed question of 'What do we do with the art of monstrous men?'.

ON CONSPIRACIES & HATE

Like many others, I've been baffled and horrified by the continued ascendancy of the alt-right and other cognate groups in American and global politics. But occasionally I find something that makes it all make a little more sense. I've been especially fascinated by the work of Kathleen Belew on the White Power Movement, which presents a clear-eyed and eye-opening historical perspective on how we reached our present moment. And on the upside-down world of Internet conspiracists, this episode of This American Life and the whole "Failure" series on Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything are must-listens.

ON THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PLANET

No amount of writing is going to save the environment. But some recent writing has given me some solace as I stare into gaping maw of our eventual demise. Richard Powers's The Overstory, the so-called "novel about trees", was a tour de force, inspiring new awe and reverence for nature amidst a moving portrait of its disappearance. And Learning To Die, by Canadian poet power-couple Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, felt like a gift, from two genius minds nearing the end of their lives and watching the world end from their home on Quadra Island, British Columbia.

ON TECH BRO & SOURDOUGH CULTURES

Those of you who know me know that I'm an avid bread baker, so I can't resist sharing this incisive Eater article on the intersection between Silicon Valley the sourdough revival, wonderfully titled "Do You Even Bake, Bro?".

OTHER EXCELLENT THINGS

Now, as ever, is a good time to read On Immunity by Eula Biss, one of my top books of all time, and a brilliant reflection on our very concepts of immunity, bodies, and the body politic. Originally written in response to two coinciding births – that of Biss's first child and that of the anti-vax movement in the United States – the book continues to be an essential reflection in these much different times.

Now, as ever, is also a good time to start listening to The Slowdown. Every weekday, Tracy K. Smith (U.S. Poet Laureate, 2017–2019) releases a five-minute episode wherein she introduces a poem and then reads that poem aloud. That's all The Slowdown is, but I couldn't ask for more. For the last year it's how I've started my every morning, and I'd recommend this daily diet to everyone. The readings are always great, and have introduced me to so many new poems and poets, but what really keeps me tuning in are Smith's pre-gospel sermons, which are generous, expansive, and beautiful manifestations of the poetic vision she brings to bear on all facets of life and existence.

Lastly, if you're looking for a good way to pass a lot of time, and you want to learn more than you ever thought possible about the history of country music in the 20th century, check out Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine & Rhinestones, which makes a very serious attempt to tell the most authoritative and exhaustive version of this history. It's awkwardly produced, almost always runs too long, and is presented with an incongruous, Serial-esque level of scepticism, but it's also wonderful, thoughtful, and immensely entertaining. A good place to start is the episode on the industry sexism that plagued Loretta Lynn's "The Pill", or the one on Coe's heterodox but totally convincing interpretation of Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskokee".

MEANWHILE, IN POP MUSIC...

2019 felt like a landmark year in female pop, with every artist one could possibly wish for except Rhianna releasing the best music of their careers. HAIM won Song of Summer and probably Song of the Year with "Summer Girl". Lana Del Rey somehow distilled her entire oeuvre into four minutes with "Norman fucking Rockwell". Ariana Grande had the Mariah moment she's always been reaching for with "imagine". Dua Lipa singlehandedly brought disco back with "Don't Start Now". Carly Rae Jepsen released, in effect, 15 number-one singles, including the transcendent "Real Love", an earnest plea for a deeper kind of love delivered with the exhilaration and intensity Carly Rae typically uses to give voice to the thrill and rush of desire, as if real love, and not the lover, were the object of desire. Even Taylor Swift – whose catalogue of late has felt more and more like a soundtrack to late capitalism (🎶 Only bought this dress so you could take it off 🎶) – quietly dropped "Cornelia Street", a welcome return to form and, in my opinion, one of the best songs she's ever penned.

2019 was also a pretty good year for albums. There was LEGACY! LEGACY! by Jamila Woods, a stunning sonic meditation on Black American history, identity, and musical traditions. There was Agora by Fennesz, a glitchy and beautiful ambient record that sounds something like a cross between William Basinki and Aphex Twin. Angel Olsen's All Mirrors and Big Thief's Two Hands tied in my books for indie record of the year. My Album of Summer was The Sound of Love International #002, curated by Beautiful Swimmers, an eclectic cratedigger mix of house, funk, and new age that is somehow exactly what every long summer day should sound like. And last but not least, one more shout-out to Carly Rae Jepsen's Dedicated, which was the only album I actually listened to in 2019.

2020 has been pretty good so far, too. I continue to be captivated by Grimes's Miss Anthropocene. Everyone keeps saying this is a record about climate change, but I don't know what they're talking about; this is a record about Grimes channeling Evanescence and it actually sounding good. On the entirely other end of the spectrum, Andy Shauf's The Neon Skyline is a writerly gem of a record, a poignantly observed series of songs transpiring over one long hazy night in Toronto's Skyline Restaurant. In the world of electronic music, three long-awaited comebacks finally dropped last month: Caribou's Suddenly, Four Tet's Sixteen Oceans, and Disclosure's Ecstasy, all of which are excellent and move in exciting new directions. And I'm still trying to wrap my head around Jeff Parker's Suite for Max Brown, which is the most fascinating and imaginative jazz record I've heard in a long time.

AND BECAUSE WE'RE ALL IN NEED OF SOME MOVIES

The best movie of the year was Little Women. The other best movie of the year was Jojo Rabbit. Both are now streaming. Enjoy.

A PARTING PHOTOGRAPH

Shutdown, Day 18

Till next time,

W

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