David Gessner keenly observes how humans have altered the cycle of the changing seasons and how animals and bird are coping, partly by migration.
After you’ve known a place for a while, you can see one season in another. It’s not mystical or even that hard. I find it reassuring, or at least it was reassuring. These comings and goings of birds and other animals feel like rituals, but that is not really an accurate description since they are the thing itself, not a reenactment, their lives depending on getting the timing right. These timetables have been fine-tuned over millions of years. In the cocoons of our virtual and electronic worlds, it is easy to ignore these primal timetables, but we lose something when we do.
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A wild ride through the algorithms that drive content, with talent manager Ursus Magana as your guide. Expect big characters and big energy!
The volume of work required to stay in the algorithms’ good graces can certainly be daunting. A 25/7 Media creator named Nixxi, who derives most of her revenue from her OnlyFans subscription fees, told me she is urged to post across multiple platforms every day, and that she uploads three folders’ worth of content to her manager’s server every Sunday so that posts can be scheduled in advance. Another client, an Oregon-based musician who goes by 93feetofsmoke, said that he was aiming to release around 50 solo songs this year and produce as many as 70 for other artists. “You can’t take weekends off,” he told me. “Like, I don’t take the weekends off, ever.”
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Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 26, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,149 words)
Let me tell you a ghost story.
My street—East 21st Street in Brooklyn, on the border of Flatbush and Ditmas Park—is filled with ghosts. A block up from me, in late 2020, there began to appear a series of strange signs in the Japanese elms that line the street. They were made from tile of marble, 6 by 18 inches, strung around the limbs of the trees that lined the block. Someone had used a Dremel to carve words and pictures on them. One in white marble read simply, Covid took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever. In the corner, a small heart with the street name, 21st, superimposed on it. Another, in blue marble, had the faces of three middle-aged Black men, and read For the ones we lost, the two first. A third, in black, was hung vertically; on it, written in cursive: For the stolen ❤️s of COVID, for the ❤️s stolen by COVID of Two First, Amen.
I walked by these memorials several times a day; I didn’t always need to, but I realized at some point I was altering my path to see them. They haunted me, in the sense that we often mean that word. “Haunted” as in a haunting melody, a haunting story—a thing that you cannot stop thinking about, that follows you like a ghost through your waking hours. Haunting like Hamlet’s father, reminding you what’s left undone, haunting like a vague blur, a noise or a whispered word, reminding you that the borders between us are porous, sometimes nonexistent. I saw the faces Dremeled into the marble—who were they? What stories did they leave behind?
By that point, I’d been thinking about ghosts, more or less nonstop, for months. In February of that year, I had been contacted by a magazine editor preparing a big summer issue on movies about New York City; would I, she inquired, be interested in writing about Ghost and Ghostbusters? I jumped at the assignment and the opportunity to write once more about this city I love and what haunts it. So I started writing about these two films. I wrote about them as the news each day got stranger and stranger, I wrote about them as a friend predicted “summer is going to be canceled,” I wrote about them as the city emptied out. I wrote about them after the magazine shelved its summer movie issue, I wrote about them after the editor stopped returning my emails. I kept writing; I wrote about them in cafés that were almost entirely empty, and I wrote about them at home when I realized it was no longer safe to write in cafés.
The usual idea behind a ghost is that they’re someone you shouldn’t normally see, someone who, due to some cosmic accident or injustice left unaddressed, has become visible again. The same, I understood, came to be true of pandemics: they are invisible until they suddenly become visible. The 1918 Spanish Flu had been more or less forgotten by history, a mere footnote to World War I, until we had our own pandemic and suddenly we couldn’t stop seeing the Spanish Flu everywhere. And watching these movies about ghosts as a new and terrifying reality loomed, I realized there were things there all along that I’d never noticed, that had, all at once, become all I could see.
So much lurks in the shadows of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film, Ghost. At first, there is only Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam Wheat. The film’s title, after all, is singular. It’s hard not to root for him: he’s likable, successful, and has just started a promising ceramics internship before he’s tragically murdered by a hitman hired by his scheming business partner Carl Bruner. Once it’s clear his girlfriend (Demi Moore’s Molly) is also in danger, he enlists Whoopi Goldberg’s huckster psychic, Oda Mae Brown, to help save her from murderous Carl.
Sam sees himself as uniquely important. At first, he’s the only one Oda Mae can see, but after he unlocks her “gift,” she’s beset by ghosts, all trying to reach loved ones. (At one point she barks at him, “Did you tell every spook in the world you met about me? I got spooks from Jersey coming in here.”) But Sam can’t see beyond his own problems, even in death, and forces her to shoo these other souls (almost all of whom are Black or Latino) so she can focus on his problems.
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In those early, terrible days, it became harder and harder not to see what Oda Mae saw, or forget these other ghosts as simply extras in Sam’s story. Who were they? What were their stories? We never truly know. The only other ghost whose story we get is Vincent Schiavelli’s subway ghost, who tells Sam, “Yeah someone pushed me. . . . What, you don’t believe me? You think I fell? You think I jumped? Well fuck you! It wasn’t my time! I wasn’t supposed to go! I’m not supposed to be here!” Beyond that, though, all we’re left with is the tantalizing idea of a city of ghosts, none of whom will get a chance to tell their stories.
In addition to the spirits that make brief cameos in Ghost are still others, even more obscured but no less vital. Sam Wheat, after all, is not the first to haunt 104 Prince Street, the loft he and Molly share at the beginning of the movie. In the film’s opening credits, a camera pans through the dusty, as-yet-undiscovered attic space: soft light catches dust in the air as we see dress forms and covered furniture, draped with sheets to suggest ghosts waiting to be found. Who might they be?
By 1990, the year the film was released, it was clear who these spectral traces belonged to—even if moviegoing audiences did not want to name them outright. A block from Sam and Molly’s fabulous loft is the former home of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. During the AIDS pandemic of the ’80s, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman worked tirelessly to rescue and safeguard LGBTQ art—including, likely, the same detritus that Molly and Sam toss out to make way for her own sculpture. Indeed, clearing SoHo of its longtime gay population lurks in the background of Ghost like a ghost haunting Manhattan. As Sarah Schulman writes in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation, “The process of replacement was so mechanical I could literally sit on my stoop and watch it unfurl. . . .Many died in their apartments. It was normal to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were thrown out on the street. I remember once seeing the cartons of a lifetime collection of playbills in a dumpster in front of a tenement and I knew that it meant that another gay man had died of AIDS, his belongings dumped into the gutter.” You can watch Ghost now and feel this presence, even if it’s never named as such—how did Sam and Molly luck into such a cavernous loft in SoHo, its previous owner apparently vanishing, leaving a lifetime of possessions still lingering in the attic?
In 1990, though, no one wanted to think about this, especially not in an Oscar-winning major motion picture. If these ghosts are referenced at all, it’s as a joke. In an early scene, Sam and Carl do a routine in a crowded elevator: Carl begins coughing (visibly not covering his mouth), and complains to Sam about some mysterious but highly contagious illness that’s affected his penis. AIDS isn’t named outright, but it’s clear from the horrified looks of the others in the elevator what they’re afraid of catching—all to the delight of Sam and Carl as they exit the elevator and laugh their way down the hall.
It’s just a joke, but it became hard to unsee, particularly as I thought more and more about uncovered coughs, about social distancing, about the proximity to illness, about the dead left behind who would go uncounted and un-remembered.
Lucy Sante notes in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York that the “ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes.” Rather, “New York’s ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.” To watch any ghost story set in a city like New York requires this kind of sensitivity, an awareness that every building is haunted, and that these hauntings happen in layers: as much as each generation tries to wipe out the traces of those who’ve come before, those memories are always there. Ghost is a story about haunting that’s haunted by a pandemic just out of sight—and to watch it as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded was to be reminded that cities have always been made and unmade by their plagues and epidemics, and it will always fall to the spirits to tell the whole story.
To watch any ghost story set in a city like New York requires this kind of sensitivity, an awareness that every building is haunted, and that these hauntings happen in layers: as much as each generation tries to wipe out the traces of those who’ve come before, those memories are always there.
Ghost stories always used to work like this: the ghost lingered because something was left undone, or because the living forgot something or someone that should not have been forgotten. Ghost is atypical in this regard; it follows the same track as A Christmas Carol, Lewis Allen’s 1944 classic The Uninvited, and the 1980 George C. Scott vehicle The Changeling. These stories have their moments of terror, but they’re ultimately comforting stories about making the past whole. A justice is rectified, a wrong avenged, a restless spirit comforted at last. The ghost story ensures that even if one doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion in life, there may yet be narrative resolution waiting after death.
This works well for a single ghost, but what about a city? How to make each and every one of these stories whole? What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone? There is so much left undone when it comes to the dead. They bustle and jostle, they howl and they carouse and they interrupt and demand your attention. They never sleep, the dead. How to imagine the work of Oda Mae, beset with spooks, each with their own unfinished narrative, needing a slow and careful expiation to make the past whole so they can rest?
One death is a tragedy, but as the bodies pile up, the ghosts and their stories become a problem to be dealt with en masse rather than one at a time. Ghost is rare as a New York City movie about a haunting that doesn’t stress exorcism, since usually ghosts are evicted against their will, like so many poor, queer, black, and brown tenants, their presence erased and their homes disinfected. It’s perhaps why the city’s most famous ghost story focuses not on ghosts like Sam but on the janitors sent to clean them out: 1984’s Ghostbusters.
Ghostbusters is the perfect fairytale of New York: a libertarian fantasy from the Reagan ’80s where the main villain is an EPA official and the all-powerful mayor has to turn to ordinary working Joes to save the city. (And after the bumbling government official shuts down the containment grid and unleashes these imprisoned spirits back into the air above Manhattan, you’re reminded that this, too, is a story about an airborne plague threatening to wipe out the city.) Their iconic coveralls are meant to remind us that the dead of New York are nothing more than pests to be exterminated. The fledgling start-up gets its start ridding the upscale Sedgewick Hotel of its iconic green ghost (later named “Slimer”), and much of their clientele appears to be the affluent, as they cleanse Central Park West condos. The moral of Ivan Reitman’s blockbuster is that the best thing for the city is to let unregulated small businesses wreak havoc and extort payments, mafia-style. (Who are the Ghostbusters, but a protection racket? After all, when the Sedgewick Hotel manager balks at the exorbitant fee, Bill Murray’s Venkman offers to release the ghost back in the now-destroyed ballroom.)
As befitting pests and vermin, hardly any of the ghosts in the Ghostbusters franchise get a backstory; they are nameless squatters and vagrants, marginal figures to be vacuumed up and put in deep storage. Who, for example, was this green gluttonous ghost in their previous life? Presumably someone with a soul, with a family, with a place in New York’s history? Like Patrick Swayze, someone capable of feeling love and longing even in the afterlife, someone with regrets and rage and confusion—someone who deserved an end more dignified than being trapped in a box by three fools. It feels absurd to try to empathize with this gross green thing, but why not? Ghosts were people, too.
Our two options, it seems: the individual drama or the infestation. The solitary tragedy, the individual whose life we rescue from oblivion. Or: the mass to be removed, as quickly as possible. Ever since February 2020, as I’ve revisited these two movies a dozen times, I’ve asked myself in a hundred different ways: is there any way to write about death that is not as a single tragedy or as a mass cleanup operation? I care about ghost stories because I believe in them another possibility for storytelling, for understanding the past, and for processing grief. The ghost, perhaps, need not be exterminated or expiated. The ghost may not be a problem to solve. The ghost might be merely a gift.
Sam Wheat’s ghost is the kind Hollywood prefers: translucent and a little gauzy, but with a definite shape, features, and personality. They’re easy to visualize and demonstrate, and this form allows a star like Swayze to continue to be on-screen without being disfigured in some way. But as paranormal investigators (along with anyone else who’s ever reported an experience with the supernatural) will tell you, such a manifestation is exceedingly rare in the world of ghost hunting. What people describe instead again and again are invariably sounds, words, maybe a blur of color. Presence without shape. The ghost is disembodied: it does not have discrete form. It is not singular.
The ghost may not be a problem to solve. The ghost might be merely a gift.
In Ghost and Ghostbusters, the city and its multitudes are just the backdrop from which the narrow few protagonists emerge. But the reason I’m drawn to ghost stories is precisely because by its very nature the ghost blurs the edges of the individual. It flickers. It is and is not any kind of identity. It is and is not the subject of its own story. There’s possibility there.
To say I neither believe in ghosts nor fully embrace skepticism is also to say that I no longer believe that each of us is a discrete entity unto ourselves. The boundaries that separate you and I are porous, our lives not entirely our own. There is a line in John Berger’s 1972 novel G. that’s used as an epigraph in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, and again in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Berger’s G., the Casanova-esque protagonist is in the Alps as a friend attempts to pilot the first solo flight over the mountain range, but G is hardly paying attention, instead attempting to seduce a housecleaner. In Berger’s description of the seduction comes this line: “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one.”
I found the line first in Ondaatje’s novel, then traced it back to Berger, only to see it reappear in Roy’s when I read it after it won the 1997 Booker Prize. All three novels move between characters as they traverse past and present, reminding you that you can never tell the story of a single life without also telling the stories of all the lives that intersect.
But ever since late winter 2020, whenever I read a story of a single individual in a novel or an essay or a news report, all I can think about are the ghosts at the margins, those begging to speak. Every story of a single person is already embedded in a larger story, one where the writer has decided—consciously or not—to reveal or hide those other layers. It’s still the case, of course, that writers will attempt to tell a single story as though it is the only one. But having lived in this pandemic, I now see how impossible it is to read a single story as though it were the only one. Our duty these days is to enter the world of story aware of the ghosts in the background, to always be seeking their stories as well, coaxing them out.
Our duty these days is to enter the world of story aware of the ghosts in the background, to always be seeking their stories as well, coaxing them out.
More and more, to write solely about oneself these days has begun to feel to me like Sam Wheat bypassing the other ghosts in Oda Mae’s waiting room. A “post” pandemic means going back to our old ways when we could imagine ourselves as discrete individuals. But we are never going back; our lives are too interlaced now. Surely, by now, there are other ways to tell stories, other ways to acknowledge the other souls in the room alongside you and me, writer and reader, ghost and medium?
I went back, day after day, to the block where the trees were strung with memorials. The white one, which reads Covid took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever, called to me, demanding to be witnessed again and again. A sentiment so simple, and yet it ached with pain and longing and a story that I did not know, could not know. The first time I saw it, I broke in two. I stood there on the sidewalk and started to cry, crying for all that loss, all the grief from the entire year spilling out of me. In ways I still can’t put into words, it changed me, changed how I saw the city, changed how I saw those years. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of those signs, and the stories—unknown to me—behind them. This is what I mean by haunted. This is what I mean by a ghost story.
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And then, in early 2023, I was walking home one night and discovered to my horror that the white sign had been split in half, its two marble halves dangling from the wire that bound it to the tree. It was hard to imagine such an act—to imagine vandals so unthinking, so malicious, that they would destroy such a thing. Perhaps to console myself, I imagined it was some sort of horrible accident, that someone had backed up against it, or perhaps a fight where someone had been thrown against the tree. These objects were sacred. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing on purpose.
The blue one came down not long after. I don’t know if it was also broken, or if its creator feared for its safety. The vertical one remained; it would be months before I would learn why.
How will we ever be the same again? To treat a death in isolation, to treat a story as though it is the only one—these are choices. They are forms of active denial, active forgetting, active erasure. You cannot tell a narrative of those years—of these years—as a single story, as a personal narrative of an individual. Our lives have always been intertwined, but “how to live?” is no longer a question that one can answer solely for oneself.
As the world tries to move on from a pandemic that has left us all scarred and traumatized, you can expect more ghost stories, because they’re one of the few available modes we have for dealing with the unresolved. Expect a language that allows us to see grief as a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one’s eye, there and beckoning, waiting for us to be ready. But beware the sleight of hand that would use a ghost to tell a single story, a homogenized or sanitized version, a discrete narrative.
It was sometime in the summer of 2023 that I saw the fourth sign—not on a tree, but on the stoop of a brownstone on the same block. A larger slab, but the same carved sentiment: For the ❤️s stolen by COVID-19 of the Two-First. Leaning on the steps, nearly obscured by a garden in full bloom. Suddenly, it felt like I had the key to it all. An address, perhaps the artist behind the signs I’d come to know so well. On a late summer day, I happened by while the building’s occupants were out front, gathering herbs from their garden to give to a neighbor who was standing on the street with a granny cart. I asked them—their names were Emily and Andy—if they were the ones who’d made the signs that were hung from the trees.
“No,” Emily told me. But they knew who made them. Amber had lived in one of the apartment buildings on the block but had since moved to California. The mosque on the corner, they explained, was undergoing a renovation when the pandemic halted construction. That was where the marble tiles had come from: discarded building materials. Amber had taken a few of them and carved the memorials, and then hung them on the trees.
“This block alone lost 13 people to COVID that first summer,” Andy told me. “And all while people on the television were saying it was made up.” One woman, he said, pointing to a house near the end of the block, survived both World Trade Center attacks, and then died of COVID, her first year into retirement.
He kept on gathering parsley while his neighbor waited patiently, happy to talk but focused on this act of generosity. Emily was picking spinach for a friend; she offered to let me have some as well, anytime I wanted to pick the leaves I was welcome. Our conversation was punctuated by the matter at hand: “Do you want some mint as well?” he asked the woman on the street, who nodded. Emily explained that the sign on their own stoop was not Amber’s work; Emily had made it herself, inspired, a way of keeping the story going, a way of keeping the ghosts alive.
I felt sheepish interrupting them at their work, this act of care for the living that is just as vital as the care we offer the dead, so I left shortly thereafter. But at the end of our conversation, Andy explained to me how the memorials had broken. It hadn’t been vandals as I’d feared, or even an accident. When they’d been hung around the tree limbs, Amber had bound them tightly with wire. But it had been over two years—the trees had grown, slowly, steadily, stretching the thick wire until something had to give, and the marble broke in half. The one hung vertically stayed only because the wire was looser and there was less tension on the brittle marble. What I’d thought was carelessness, or desecration, had been instead the stubborn reality of life going on, even at the expense of our memorials to the past. When I went back to the trees the next day, I saw how thoroughly the limbs had grown around the wire, still there—a vestigial remnant now bound inextricably to this living, growing thing. There may come a time when no one knows the story of that wire, how it got there, what it once held. But it will remain there nonetheless, a presence without a shape.
What I’d thought was carelessness, or desecration, had been instead the stubborn reality of life going on, even at the expense of our memorials to the past.
A slender thread—thin and sharp as a steel wire—connects each of us to these lives we lost, people we don’t know, will never know, but who stay with us every day. It connects you to the ghosts all around us, the ones that remind you that you are not singular, that you are not just the protagonist in your own story, that your own story is a part of a million other stories. That’s what makes a city a city—it’s that slender thread that holds us, the living and the dead, holding us even after we break.
The slender thread that reminds us that never again will a single story be read as though it were the only one.
Colin Dickeyis the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and, most recently, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.
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Will Speer is scheduled to be executed tomorrow. What a sentence to type. Bekah McNeel grapples with this reality as she talks to Speer, who has been in the Texas prison system since he was a teenager, after a life of abuse. She is compassionate in her reporting, and respectful of the work Speer carries out as one of the first-ever inmate faith-based coordinators on Texas’s death row. A piece that will make you troubled by what Thursday will likely bring.
He thinks about the people who lost their son, brother, and boyfriend long before this week. There are people no longer in his life because of his choices, he said. His dad died of cancer, and his mom was murdered by the stepfather who had abused him. They died without their son in their lives, and he feels sad for that. He also prays the “sinner’s prayer”—which evangelical Christians pray in committing their lives to Jesus—on behalf of his victims, because he feels sorry that he stole the opportunity from them to pray it for themselves. And he thinks about the family members of the men he murdered—especially Sammie Gail Martin.
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A two-prison complex was constructed in the California city of Corcoran, a poor agricultural community in the Central Valley, in a dry lakebed—previously Tulare Lake, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi. When the first facility was built, the Department of Corrections convinced lawmakers to exempt it from environmental law. Fast-forward several decades, and the two prisons at Corcoran now houses 8,000 people—the largest incarcerated population in the state. California’s wet 2022-23 winter resulted in a record-high Sierra snowpack—great for drought conditions, but a threat to the state’s agricultural interior, bringing epic flooding to the region. In this longform comic—the first of its kind at The Marshall Project—journalist and illustrator Susie Cagle chronicles how decades-old decisions to hastily build the prisons has put thousands of incarcerated people at risk.
(The excerpted text below is integrated and displayed within illustrations in the story.)
We can be prepared.
That’s a choice the state can make and it is choosing not to.
Emily Harris is Co-Director of Programs at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and advisor on a report on climate hazards facing California prisons.
A lot of the California prisons are located in remote areas, they have aging infrastructure, and a long history of overcrowding.
It’s very clear that people in prison are distinctly vulnerable.
Corrections says it has plans in place to deal with climate emergencies at its facilities.
As the incarceration rate drops, the department says it is prioritizing prisons for closure based on factors mandated by state law.
Those factors do no include environmental hazards or climate change.
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For The Baffler, Palestinian American writer Sarah Aziza publishes a series of dispatches and vignettes sparked by the Hamas attacks on October 7. The piece includes snippets of conversations with her father and other family members in Gaza in the first week following the attacks on Israel, and weaves in raw, compassionate, and powerful reflections.
In the kitchen, my Jewish partner stands soberly over the stove, making food we will not taste. My father sighs. We flounder in complex grief.
It is a sorrow lifetimes larger than words. One wide enough to acknowledge Jewish pain, both recent and historical. As a Palestinian, I refuse to mimic the oppressor by denying the humanity of the deceased. But this sadness sits inside the crater of certainty that the world will still refuse ours. It is a chasm carved by decades of discourse in which only certain bodies bleed. Inside this consensus, there is no violent dispossession of our land, no acceptable form in which we may resist our many slow and instant deaths. It refuses the fact that for decades we have buried hundreds of slain for every one Israeli killed. In this selective, Western gaze, there is only our barbarism, which must be brutally contained.
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Megan Marz | Longreads | October 24, 2023 | 4,164 words (15 minutes)
This spring, the literary critic Laura Miller got annoyed with Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans. A fan of Taylor’s “brilliant” Substack and “irresistible patter” on Twitter, she found his book disappointingly lugubrious. “Brandon Taylor’s online writing is vibrant, funny, and true,” read the subhead of her review. “Why is his fiction trying so hard to be something else?” The Slate piece subjected the novel to some churlish complaints. But it was the inclusion of “online writing” that attracted minor controversy; writers and critics tweeted in response that to compare an author’s novel to his tweets was to insult the author and embarrass oneself. One respondent wrote, “this may be the worst piece of writing on a book or author I have ever read.” Another said, “it’s gauche to even mention a professional author’s twitter account in a review.”
People have been writing all kinds of things online for decades now. If you count Justin Hall’s links.net as the first blog—and many do, though Hall himself credits Ranjit Bhatnagar—the original form of popular writing on websites will turn 30 in January. Thirty years ago, I was a child; now I’m middle-aged. Writing on the internet remains young. Its literary milestones and genres are too short to ride the roller coaster of critical regard. Online literature is still usually self-published, doesn’t receive major writing prizes, and isn’t reviewed in newspapers or magazines.
The late Robert Silvers, a founding editor of TheNew York Review of Books, lamented this situation in 2013. “If a novel is published, we have a novel review,” he said in an interview with New York magazine. But the “millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs” were not getting the critical attention they deserved:
[I]f one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language . . . then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.
Ten years later, that absence is 10 years wider. We have trendpieces about platforms used for writing; posts that aggregate other posts; newsstories about thingspeople say and do online; novels, poems, and memoirs that would not exist without having germinated on the internet. But the literary qualities of online writing remain mostly invisible to U.S. literary institutions—even as countless people read it—until the moment it becomes a book.
And, of course, much of it never does. For 30 years, writers have been using blogs, social media, and email to do things with words that are difficult or impossible to do inside books. They have immersed us in stories still unfolding, created personas that interact with readers, woven their writing into inboxes and feeds, and used code to write at a distance. The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down.
In the 1990s, the literary press became briefly excited about digital literature. Some writers were using Storyspace, a software program introduced in 1987, to compose hypertext. The ability to add links, even before the web, let them write high-concept, choose-your-own-adventure narratives. In one of the first and best known of these stories, the protagonist’s son lives or dies depending on the reader’s selections. Works like these debuted on floppy disk; you can now buy them on USB or find read-throughs on YouTube. More than the most postmodern novel could, they embodied the era’s values of fragmentation and nonlinearity. TheNew York Times Book Review ran a handful of articles to introduce the new concept: hypertext fiction. The most famous of these articles, published in 1992, was headlined “The End of Books.”
But books were never really threatened by hypertext fiction, which did not attract many writers, let alone readers. Self-styled “electronic literature” settled into an academic niche dominated by conceptual and technical experiments, while “an always-skeptical literary mainstream gleefully rejected the digital outright,” as the scholar Simone Murray wrote. Thanks to the Kindle and other e-readers, the book eventually became the primary unit of even fiction read digitally.
While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down.
Nonfiction is another story, though—one that has not permeated the literary mainstream or the experimental “e-lit” margins, despite flowing all around both of them. The story is: around the time hypertext fiction was failing to find an audience, hypertext nonfiction was attracting thousands and then millions of people. “I’ll never forget the Monday morning in the mid-90s when I rushed in to work . . . and hurriedly pointed my browser to www.links.net to see if Justin Hall had broken up with his girlfriend over the weekend,” Rob Wittig, one of the few e-lit people to write much about Hall, remembered in 2003.
Hall was a 19-year-old student at Swarthmore College when he started his site in 1994, soon naming it Justin’s Links from the Underground in homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, a book he hadn’t read. The word “blog” wouldn’texist for another few years. At first, Hall collected links he’d found browsing the web, including links to sites about sex and drugs. In those days before search engine ubiquity, this was a popular service. But Hall was also a writer. “I just said, I have this medium, so why don’t I see what my stories look like there,” he said on a podcast in 2021. “And if people are coming for this utility of finding links that they want to traverse, well, maybe they’ll accidentally read a poem. And if they want to read a second poem, well, that’s on them.”
Eventually Hall published thousands of pages of interlinked poems and stories, a yearslong diary cataloging his life’s events, people, and thinking in explicit detail for his thousands of readers. During the months he spent as an intern at Wired, his site often got more traffic than the magazine’s. A documentary filmed in 1996 described it as an On the Road for the ’90s. When he took a pause in 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story, estimating that he’d amassed 4,800 pages and wondering if he’d come back. He did; his last post was in 2021.
Hall’s style is evident from what amounts to his About page:
My mom, dad and step-father were/are lawyers, and very dedicated ones at that. Due to their work ethic, I was raised primarily by a series of nannies. When I was eight, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself; much of my early writing wrestles with this.
It is funny, matter-of-factly intimate, and granularly self-documentary in a style that would soon spread everywhere. And while early hypertext fiction used links within closed systems, Hall used links to weave his writing into the outside world. He linked to other people’s sites in addition to his own writing on pretty much anything he mentioned. You could read his story in a straight line, but you didn’t have to. Hall is sometimes juvenile, his prose occasionally rough or purple, but that’s a fair price to pay for his co-inventing the 21st century’s most influential literary genre so far.
But a lot of online writing has important temporal and contextual dimensions, and unless someone records the experience of reading at the time or in the context, those dimensions are lost.
In November 2000, The New Yorkerestimated there had been only 50 blogs on the internet as recently as spring 1999. After Blogger made it easy in summer 1999 to post without writing HTML, blogs proliferated exponentially. By 2007, when their growth started to taper, there were about 70 million. (Today, a commonly cited count is 600 million.) Like the authors of most books before them and most tweets after them, bloggers were largely uninterested in producing literature. They wrote to help themselves or others, to do journalism or scholarship, to evangelize, to get attention, to find community, to make money if they were lucky, and mostly to share their lives. But none of those motivations excludes the possibility of artmaking, and a few bloggers followed Hall in approaching their writing as art, at least implicitly.
Emily Gould was the one I read most frequently. She began posting at emilymagazine.com in 2005, when we were both just out of college. Like a lot of good blogs, hers was full of the improvisational energy that, before the internet, had been the aesthetic province of comedians and jazz musicians. Gould was documenting her life in real time—books she read, thoughts she had, food she ate, daily enthusiasms and frustrations—which meant she was writing it fast. But those of us who read it as it happened read it slowly. People like to say the internet speeds reading up, but a personal blog, read in real time, can slow a story’s pace down to the timescale of life; the thickest book in existence can be read in less calendar time. Not even the author knew when a blog would end, which is what made it feel so alive.
Gould’s eye for detail and sense of pacing contributed to this vitality. I remember learning that she was quitting her publishing job from a post in which she described the office cafeteria’s switch from “marmalade” to “orange jelly”—a semi-lighthearted complaint that doubled as an augury of corporate decline. Marmalade is real, and a beautiful word. One look at that dignified dactyl and you know you’re in for something good. Orange jelly sounds fake and embarrassing. When Gould said it was the reason she was leaving, you knew it was a joke, but there was also something to it. The actual reason was a gossip-blogging job at Gawker, which raised her profile enough that she was assigned a 2008 New York Times Magazinecover story about her life as a blogger. The story includes a moment when her boyfriend at the time demanded she take down something she’d posted about him. On the surface, the post seemed trivial. But his request “felt like being stifled in some essential way.”
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The same thing had happened to Hall. When a former girlfriend asked him to scrub her from his blog, he’d said, or so TheNew York Times Magazinereported in 2004, ”This is my art. I’ll remove specific things that bother you, but I can’t go through the entire Web site and remove every mention of your name.” When another girlfriend asked him not to blog about her, he agreed, but the inability to write freely led to an emotional breakdown, about which he posted a video. Gould and Hall felt deeply about what they were doing. They commanded large audiences and appeared in mainstream media, becoming national avatars for a new kind of writing. They also repeatedly referenced literary influences. But journalists categorized their efforts as sociocultural rather than aesthetic phenomena. This would happen again and again to writers who tried new things on the internet. Always a curiosity, sometimes a trend, never a work of art.
It was a practical matter, and a matter of tradition. Books are an excellent medium. Book publishers have always been a useful filter for a world in which the quantity of writing is always increasing. They still manage to publish great written art, thanks to fragile and fraying systems built by writers and editors. Doing so has given them a power around which the literary world revolves. Even the least commercial magazines do not tend to review work not currently being marketed by a publisher. And books—whether e-, audio, or print—are important to certain writers’ compensation. (Though few writers make much money publishing literature, and some writers who do make money are turning away from books.)
Then there are the inconvenient questions. While some online writers might welcome critical attention, for others it might be a nightmare with terrible consequences—broken relationships, lost jobs. How should a critic distinguish “published,” in the sense of technically visible, from “published” in the traditional sense of public? At what point in a work’s lifespan should it be written about? And what aesthetic criteria apply? Blogs are to novels as improv is to sketch or song lyrics are to poetry. They can reach and even surpass the standard set by their finer cousin, but they should not necessarily be held to it.
“I wish I had the courage to let the blog be my book instead.”
A great time to answer these questions would have been when books began drawing heavily from the well of online aesthetics. Some of the most celebrated literature of the 2010s recounted daily life in granular detail; incorporated real conversations; was made of plotless fragments; or, even in fiction, used real people’s names. These books were copiously compared to one another under the banners of “autofiction” and “lyric essay.” Names like Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tao Lin, Maggie Nelson, and Claudia Rankine were difficult to escape if you were the type of person who read book reviews. Critics correctly described their books as successors of everything from Saint Augustine’s Confessions to Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. But I have yet to read a book review that acknowledges the influence of specific online work not written by the book’s own author. Blogs and social media are described en masse as a social phenomenon to which these authors responded, but rarely as a textual one to which they are indebted.
The omission is particularly glaring given the number of literary writers whose books grew out of their own online work. While Gould’s novels are pointedly unbloggy, her short-lived e-book startup distributed several examples: Making Scenes (2001), whose author, Adrienne Eisen, claims it was the first “blog-to-book” ever; Meaty (2013), an essay collection inspired by Samantha Irby’s bitchesgottaeat.blogspot.com; and Prostitute Laundry (2015), collected from Charlotte Shane’s email newsletter about her love life and sex work. Blogs lost more in translation than a serialized novel from the 19th century: links, the comments of other people, a cadence determined by the author, a length that could always grow longer. In the words of Bhanu Kapil, whose blog “incubated” her book Ban en Banlieue (2015), “You know that putting Ban in this form is like wearing a three piece suit in the hot springs. I wish I had the courage to let the blog be my book instead.”
That’s what the writer Megan Boyle was going to do. In 2013, she got the idea to liveblog her entire existence, “everything that I could think of on a relatively constant basis,” as she told an interviewer for TheCreative Independent five years later. She began on March 17 and intended to do it forever. “That’s what began to excite me,” she said. “That I’d just do this for my whole life, and that would be the ‘art’ of it.” Timestamped passages moved back and forth between quotidian—”mail the goddamned packages”—and poetic:
4:43PM: louis called. interesting dynamic, these phone calls with louis. we sound slow and happy and surprised to hear each other’s voices. let him in. assembled table and chairs while he assembled bed. NPR was on and I felt sometimes … like i wanted to say ‘the opinions on this radio do not reflect the other person in this room.’
After five-and-a-half months, she stopped. In 2018, Tyrant Books published what she had written as a novel called Liveblog. Like any given blog, hers had been followed by real-time fans but not reviewed. The moment it became a book, however, critics suddenly were able to see and expound upon its literary qualities. It was positively reviewed in TheNew Yorker and Bookforum, and compared to other serious literature. But this valorization could only happen after the “art” of Boyle’s project—its ongoingness—had been stripped from it, compressed into an object that could be read in a few days or weeks.
In a rare expression of literary bullishness, the novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán had suggested at the blog’s apex in 2007 that it was “threatening to supplant the novel as the great genre in which everything can find its place.” But the blog ended up becoming one more thing that found its place in the novel, which has yet to be surpassed as a tool of literary legitimation.
Boyle was associated with “alt lit,” a group of writers in the late 2000s and 2010s who endeavored to “assimilate to literary art the mutant sensibility of a new mass medium,” as Frank Guan said of Tao Lin, the group’s figurehead. They were also some of the first, and remain some of the only, writers to position their online work as equal to books. The poet Mira Gonzalez copublished her Selected Tweets with Lin in 2015. She toldTheCreative Independent they had done so to show that “once you take Twitter out of the context of being reliant on this relatively new form of technology, there’s no difference between Twitter and any other kind of literature.” By Twitter, Gonzalez clarified, she meant the internet. Twitter was the stand-in closest at hand because by then, social media had overtaken blogs as the dominant form of online expression, and Twitter was popular with the verbally oriented.
While alt lit writers on Twitter mostly continued the bloggy tradition of documenting real-time experiences, other writers experimented with other genres. Patricia Lockwood did absurdist “sexts.” (“Sext: An iceberg whispers to you, ‘Just the tip.’”) Teju Cole did “small fates,” which compressed news stories into epigrammatic tweets full of ironic humor and social critique. (“In Kubwa a man armed with a toy gun stole a real Camry.”) Ranjit Bhatnagar, the blogger who inspired Justin Hall, created @pentametron, a bot that paired tweets written in iambic pentameter to create rhymed couplets. The couplets were sometimes absurd and sometimes surprisingly sensical. One random user’s “I’m kind of thirsty for a valentine” led into another’s “My volume doesn’t have a minus sign.” With recontextualization alone, they put everyday language in a higher register—suggesting, Shakespeare-style, that the line between poetry and daily speech is invisibly thin, a question of viewpoint.
Poetry bots were one of Twitter’s most beautiful genres, bringing e-lit experimentation to the masses. But now most of them have stopped working. X, as Twitter is now known, announced earlier this year that it would restrict free access to its API, which bots need to function. The change was one of many points on the graph of X’s decline in users and cachet. But other longtime Twitter/X projects persist, like the internet-deranged persona @dril (“cops tazing wild hogs ultimate compilation”) and Melissa Broder’s serially sad girl persona @sosadtoday (“i’m alive in a dead way”).
In a New Yorker review of Broder’s So Sad Today, a 2016 essay collection named after the Twitter account, Haley Mlotek wrote that the book’s shortcomings made her appreciate the account’s accomplishments: “It captures how so many of us communicate on social media, crafting a careful persona that hides and reveals.” And yet, even though @sosadtoday was the true literary innovation in the critic’s estimation, it was the book that occasioned a review. I’ve written literary criticism for many publications, and I rarely have trouble placing a book review I want to write. But of the dozen or so pitches I’ve sent about an online work, none have landed. And as a reader of popular literary criticism for two decades now, I’ve only ever come across a single full-length review of an online work in a nonacademic venue: Matt Pearce’s 2011 essay on Cole’s small fates for TheNew Inquiry. It’s a single example, one that Cole’s status as a newly acclaimed novelist probably helped make possible. But it proves that answering the questions online work raises for mainstream critics is doable, fruitful, and not all that complicated.
In 2013, Lockwood gave a lecture about Twitter at the University of Pennsylvania. Before ending with a reading of sexts, she said:
Innovative literature happens where people have room to play, and it happens where no one is watching. It happens among groups that initially aren’t taken seriously. . . . It happens in darkness. And after a while, people become aware of it. And after an even longer while, it’s called literature. That’s a good thing. That is the way of the world. Mushrooms and literature grow in the shade, but eventually must enter the cold light of day to be eaten by yuppies at $14 a pound.
Calling for tweets or blogs to get reviewed in TheNew Yorker or become eligible for a Pulitzer is in part to call for their yuppification, which would ruin the fun. Many of the works I’ve discussed play with, and draw aesthetic power from, their lack of professional legitimacy. Having an incentive to get reviewed or win a prize might motivate more people to start writing in certain ways, but it would also change the character of the writing. A @dril looking to get reviewed by TheNew Yorker would not be @dril, and so the world might be deprived of such classics as: “another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it.”
But metabolizing the literature of previous generations is necessary to create new literature. And writing on the internet has a way of disappearing, so that it may not be available long enough for enough people to become aware of it, let alone to call it literature. An API might become too expensive, a hosting fee might no longer seem worth it, an author might delete or lock their account after a platform empties out, as X—and social media in general—feels like it’s doing now. In 2017, the Library of Congress decided to stop archiving all public tweets and instead collect only those that are “thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.” The Wayback Machine is a good but gappy source of disappeared blogs, and it probably won’t do any better with email newsletters.
Always a curiosity, sometimes a trend, never a work of art.
Even if we had a perfect archive, it still wouldn’t tell the whole story. You could find a forgotten novel in a used bookstore and, with some imagination, recreate the experience of reading it around the time of its publication. But a lot of online writing has important temporal and contextual dimensions, and unless someone records the experience of reading at the time or in the context, those dimensions are lost.
So let me tell you about some work that’s still living: there are new magazines, like thehtml review, which combine a traditional literary magazine format with a more computer-friendly ethos. Like Twitter bots did, they’re introducing more readers to literature written with both human and coding languages. And then, of course, there are email newsletters, which have been around for years but gathered more steam when Substack launched in 2017, giving writers a built-in way to collect payments. One Substack project that uses the form well is Samantha Irby’s “who’s on judge mathis today?” In more than 250 editions, she has twisted TV recaps into comic stories observed through a personal lens: “shearie says that one day she went over to rhian’s house and discovered a used condom.… rhian calls her ‘inspector gadget’ and i’m so sorry to side with a man but that really made me laugh! i loved that cartoon!!!!!!!!”
My favorite newsletter is Justin Wolfe’s thank you notes, which he started writing in 2015. Wolfe modeled his project on Joe Brainard’s I Remember, an experimental memoir published in 1970 in which every sentence begins with “I remember.” Wolfe chose “I’m thankful” as a refrain. “i’m thankful that even though i had built up going back to work as this horrible huge ominous thing, it’s actually been just fine and, as is almost always the case, the blurry projection i built out of anticipatory anxiety far exceeded reality,” he wrote early on, in a post I discovered in the archive and sometimes return to on Sundays. In well over a thousand editions ranging from hundreds of words to one (“pizza”), Wolfe has given a sharper angle to the practice of real-time life-writing. His constraint, even when broken, lends it more structure; his form, email, more tightly stitches the fabric of his days into the fabric of ours.
It’s still true, as the poet Mira Gonzalez said in her Creative Independent interview, that “there are people who are saying things like . . . ‘Writing on the internet doesn’t matter.’” But the internet is nevertheless, as she added, “the future of humor, of writing, of everything.” On our corporate-throttled web, this sounds like a frightening prospect. All we can do, in literature and in life, is try to make it otherwise.
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