Writers like to blame capitalism for their problems.

Listen—I get it. We work just as hard as anyone else, and unless we luck out and fall into the top 0.01%, we’re usually about as financially stable as the local barista. I make about $10,000 a year on my writing—including my Pens and Poison social media work—and run a separate college consulting business to keep my writing career afloat. When I’m not college counseling, I’m usually writing weekly Substack essays, shooting Instagram videos, and querying my novels; these tasks require much more time, effort, and brainpower than anything I do in my college counseling work (hopping on sales calls, editing essays, writing emails), yet running my business is exponentially more lucrative than my more “intellectual” work as a writer.

The outcome is frustrating to say the least—and I don’t blame anyone for taking this information and concluding that there’s something wrong with the publishing world at large. In a fair system, after all, hard work should reap commensurate rewards—but that’s unfortunately not the case when it comes to writing.

Such a reality is precisely the reason that many writers fall into the “capitalism is bad” rabbit hole.

Viewing the world through a Marxist lens, these writers become convinced that “the system” is rigged against them; growing bitter at the nebulous “corporate machine,” they conclude that capitalism is responsible for their failures and blame the commercialization of the publishing industry for their literary struggles.

In many ways, these writers aren’t wrong. It’s no secret that the publishing industry has largely swapped out deep, introspective literature for gimmicky genre fiction. I am guilty of making this argument myself, and I do genuinely believe the industry’s hyper-fixation on “books that will sell” is partially responsible for the downfall of great literature. After all, the top comment I’ve gotten from literary agents on my own novels is “I just don’t know how to sell this.”

The fact is that publishing isn’t fair—but not in the way you’re thinking.

It’s not that there’s no longer a market for “non-commercial” or more traditional fiction but that these books never get the chance to compete with their more “commercial” counterparts in the first place.

In other words, it’s not the publishing industry’s capitalism that’s to blame but the absence of it.

Now, if any of these more “commercial” books actually did sell—and if we had data that they performed better than their more “introspective” counterparts—we could certainly blame capitalism for our problems and conclude that current market demands have brought good contemporary literature to a state of near obsolescence. The problem, however, is that none of these “commercial” books actually do sell, suggesting that the publishing industry is working directly against market demands and—by extension—against the fundamental principles of capitalism itself.

According to data from Nielsen BookScan, 95 percent of trade titles published in the U.S. sell fewer than 1,000 total copies. Earnings reports from Penguin Random House suggest that every other book published in the United States sells fewer than twelve copies. What this means is that while publishers supposedly optimize for sales, the vast majority of books—even the “commercial” ones—barely sell at all.

Are publishing professionals just that terrible at assessing sales trends, or is something else going on here?

I suspect it is a mix of both: ignorance of market demands and knowing opposition to them.

Trained in “grievance studies” at elite liberal arts universities, publishing professionals bring their lopsided worldviews to the workforce and believe that the purpose of literature is to create societal change or to elevate LGBTQ+ and BIPOC voices. One such professional recently lamented the fact that books authored by the alphabet soup tribe don’t sell—all while insisting that the “conversation about diversity in publishing” needs to make “real progress.” It is no wonder that many literary agents can no longer support themselves on book sales, as this particular agent confesses—they are so far removed from reality that they have no pulse on what people actually want to read. As a result, many agents and editors base their decisions on past trends, concluding that if Fifty Shades of Grey became an overnight bestseller, the strategy should be to push out more BDSM books—or that if Sally Rooney’s fourth-grade sentences sold copies, then readers want minimalist prose and elementary vocabulary.

The issue with this line of thinking is that it defies the fundamental principles of capitalism: risk-taking and innovation. Running on formulas and “comp titles,” the publishing industry promotes sameness rather than difference, insisting on disseminating books that all sound like one another. The problem with this strategy is that while Rooney herself might drive sales, few other authors writing in her style will see the same success. If I make a knock-off of a famous shoe, after all, most people will still purchase the original—but if I make a completely different shoe, my product is guaranteed to gain attention on the market.

Why, then, do publishing professionals keep making the same shoe over and over again—and expecting it to sell just as well as the original?

The answer lies in ideology: because many literary agents are self-proclaimed disciples of Karl Marx, few understand how capitalism actually works. The result is a series of erroneous judgments on “what will sell”—and the scapegoating of unrelated external factors (the social media age, the death of reading, the
“evil” capitalists) to account for low sales numbers. In time, this self-perpetuating loop only causes agents and editors to double down on their Marxist convictions—which brings us to our second point.

Publishers knowingly defy “what sells” to promote certain ideological messages over others.

Agents and editors represent books based on personal taste rather than the desires of the greater populace. How many times, after all, have you been told by a literary agent that they didn’t “relate” to the book or that they don’t “believe” in it enough to champion it? Such language suggests that the industry runs on subjective taste rather than objective market demands. Compare the job of the literary agent to that of any other type of salesperson, and the ludicrousness of such a model becomes immediately apparent: a good salesperson, after all, should be able to sell anything. When literary agents therefore claim that they “can’t sell” a given book, they are either a) admitting that they are bad at their job or b) purposely rejecting books they don’t “relate” to.

What this suggests is that agents actually don’t care about selling books—not, at least, if these books run counter to their personal convictions. Back in the 1940s, for instance, Victor Gollancz—one of the biggest publishers of the past century—famously refused to publish Animal Farm on the grounds that it was too “anti-Soviet.” While Gollancz was busy going out of his way to turn publishing into the ideological project we know it as today, Orwell found a different publisher, and Animal Farm became one of the bestselling books of the 20th century. Gollancz, meanwhile, lost not only an enormous sum of cash but also the opportunity to represent one of the most accomplished writers of the decade.

To Gollancz, the goal of publishing was to promote a particular ideological message rather than to drive book sales, and such is precisely the mentality of many literary agents today. These agents don’t care about selling books as much as they are interested in promoting their hyper-specific political agendas.

In this way, the publishing industry becomes fundamentally anti-capitalist. It actively thwarts market demands and creates a monopolistic system to prevent the people from accessing products they could otherwise consume in a free market. Couple that with unfair barriers to entry, and the result is the broken publishing system we are all familiar with today.

In an ideal capitalist society, after all, barriers to entry should not discourage any given individual from stepping into competition. Take my industry, college counseling, as an example. I started my company at the age of 24 with no prior business experience. I nevertheless created a profitable business in less than a year of operation because I provided a service that people responded to. While the market ultimately decided the value of my product, I had a fair shot of getting my service out there and letting people decide whether they wished to step into exchange with yours truly.

Such is not the case for the publishing industry: most writers aren’t given a chance to let the market decide the value of their product because the barriers to entry are based on arbitrary, subjective criteria. That is not to say that barriers to entry shouldn’t exist at all—I make the argument here that some gatekeeping is necessary in the literary world—but that the barriers must be ultimately beneficial for the consumer. In the case of the medical industry, for instance, high barriers to entry are set in place out of safety precautions—you wouldn’t want your doctor to botch a brain surgery, after all—and even then, a true capitalist would argue that medical licensure creates a monopoly-like system that promotes artificial scarcity. Under a truly capitalist system, we would let anyone practice medicine and allow the consumer to take on the associated risk. You might want your brain surgeon to have a medical license, sure, but if you have an eye infection and just need an antibiotic prescription, you might choose to go to an unlicensed doctor. Under this system, the consumer is given the ultimate free choice of what he wishes to consume.

And while one can make a strong argument in favor of barriers to entry in the medical world, such instances are completely illogical when it comes to publishing, where a greater number of books in circulation would do no one any harm—and would only ultimately benefit both the producer and the consumer. Yet because the publishing industry erects insurmountable barriers to entry, limiting the different sorts of books that see the light of day, it ultimately harms the interests of the people. In order to secure a literary agent in hopes of getting one’s manuscript in front of an editor, authors are required to go through a score of undefined hoops, the majority of which are determined by arbitrary people with arbitrary motives. Under a capitalist system, on the other hand, the author would simply be allowed to prove that his book would sell by placing it on the market—and take responsibility for all flops.

Now, one could argue that such a system is already in place with the existence of self-publishing, a system often held up as proof that the publishing world is a free market, but while self-publishing allows for distribution, it does not grant access to the infrastructure—bookstore placement, media coverage, institutional legitimacy, prize circuits, and cultural conversation—that actually creates readership. A self-published book, therefore, while technically “available,” does not pierce the market in any meaningful sense. Self-publishing, then, is simply a parallel economy in the same way that nurses are parallel to doctors—and most writers are shut out from meaningful participation before readers ever get the chance to decide what is worth reading.

No—publishing isn’t failing because it’s “too capitalist.” Publishing is failing because it isn’t capitalist enough.

Under a truly capitalist system, every book would get the chance to compete equally. The market would adjust to what it wants to see, and the soulless novels that industry pushes out today would stop selling.

Your book isn’t selling because it’s not “commercial” enough. It’s not selling because it never got the chance to make sales in the first place.

Capitalism would fix that.

Under a capitalist system, after all, the people—rather than arbitrary gatekeepers—would decide what they want to read.

And the people have had enough.

Welcome back to the Pens and Poison Podcast!

This is not your ordinary literature podcast. Join me as I explore the state of humanities education, the publishing industry, and the literary world at large through a series of spicy interviews, hot takes, and literary ramblings.

On today’s episode, we talk to Sasha Zeiger, a Philadelphia-based novelist and marketing strategist with a background in philosophy. We discuss everything gothic and existential, with a deep dive into Camus, de Beauvoir, and the writing that makes us human.

Sasha is the self-published author of The Tower of Theo and is currently writing her second novel, a gothic historical murder mystery set in 1888 Philadelphia. Her work explores existentialism, moral ambiguity, and truth as subjectivity. Passionate about promoting public philosophical discourse, Sasha aims to make complex ideas accessible through fiction, essays, and conversations that invite readers to question who they are and why.

You can follow her on her Instagram, @sasha.zeiger.

On April 17, 2024, pro-Hamas protesters seized my alma mater, Columbia University, and nearly tore it to shreds. The incident, featuring Nazi-era harassment of Jewish students and a Vietnam-style encampment, culminated in the violent occupation of Hamilton Hall—a notable campus building housing several humanities departments—and remained at the forefront of American political discourse for nearly a month. Later that year, three campus administrators were suspended for sending antisemitic messages in a group chat, leaving Jewish Americans across the country both perplexed and disturbed.

Why was an allegedly open-minded Ivy League university suddenly so hostile to its Jewish population?

To make matters worse, no one could have predicted that, two years later, this seemingly isolated incident of Jew hatred would become the new norm for Jews around the world.

But why?

I’ve spent the last two years trying to answer that question. What I found was far more disturbing than anything I could have predicted.

Read more

Most women want to have children—at least, that’s what The New York Times wants you to believe.

I’m not so sure.

In her recent viral Times article “Women in Their 20s May Not Be Having Babies, but by 45 Most Probably Will,” Claire Cain Miller argues that “most” women “want” children—and are simply delaying childbirth due to “anxiety about the future and finances.” She predicts that most women will bear children by age 45 and that “a period of very low fertility… could eventually rebound.” Another Times piece makes a similar argument, claiming, “It is not yet clear if the youngest cohort — Gen Z women — will eventually have children and make up for the delay… but the example of the 1970s shows that they might.” After all, as of 2024, “88 percent of 45-year-old women were mothers.”

I do not doubt any of this data in the slightest. What I do doubt is the conclusion Miller draws from it.

At the heart of Miller’s argument is a critical faux pas in inductive reasoning: she analyzes older cohorts of women to predict future behavior patterns of young women today.

The problem is that these young women have entirely different values from their predecessors.

Today’s 45-year-old women were born at the start of the 1980s. These are young Gen Xers who came of age in a society that largely promoted monogamy and traditional family values, portraying childbirth as a source of deep emotional fulfillment. In other words, the reason that 88 percent of Gen X women in America eventually became mothers was because they believed that children would make them happy.

Such is not the case among young women today—who do not look favorably on childbirth. According to data from Good Housekeeping, nearly two-thirds of women believe that motherhood is “detrimental” to their careers, with the number rising to 71 percent among Gen Z respondents. Similarly, Gen Z overwhelmingly believes that having children can damage your “self-confidence,” and over half of young respondents claim that motherhood ruins relationships.

Social media messaging accounts for many of these negative feelings, with childfree women blasting their supposedly “perfect” lifestyles to impressionable young viewers, who, bombarded by images of expensive vacations and luxury handbags on their phone screens, conclude that motherhood will preclude them from forming of other meaningful life experiences. The comments section of one such “childfree” influencer abounds with the words of jaded women giving reasons for their decisions not to become mothers. Top comments read, “I’m way too lazy … waking up before 8am and having to constantly clean are my worst nightmares” and “I don’t like people, and I don’t want to make one.”

But perhaps the worst of the anti-natal propaganda comes from the woke leftists at outlets such as The New York Times and their allies at New York Magazine, with a recent essay from The Cut diving into the “reasons that women regret having children,” painting motherhood as a sort of disease that will plague innocent young women for the rest of their lives. Couple the proliferation of such messaging among the liberal elite with the glorification of abortion in many leftist circles, and it is no wonder that birth rates are on the decline.

In an intellectually dishonest sleight-of-hand, Miller attempts to minimize the damage done by her anti-natalist compatriots by suggesting that most women actually do want children but that evil societal forces—i.e. “future and finances”—are preventing them from doing so. As is characteristic of many leftist commentators, Miller places the blame on external factors instead of urging women to take accountability for their personal decisions. And while it is true that finances may play a role in young women’s decisions to forgo making babies, the majority of childless women under 50 (57 percent) say that they aren’t having kids because they “just don’t want to.”

The fact is that young women have been fed the narrative that kids will destroy their quality of life and impinge on their personal freedoms. As a result, most women—contrary to what The New York Times wants you to believe—actually don’t want children.

Indeed, Miller goes through many hoops to present the—at best—tenuous claim and—at worst—blatant lie that women actually want children but simply can’t afford them. Citing three studies back to back (insecure much?), she presents a muddle of information that, if anything, does more to harm her argument than to support it. The first study from Pew Research is the most incriminating, fully contradicting her thesis that the “majority” of women “want” children by demonstrating that only 45 percent of women aged 18 to 34 without children want to have them someday. The second study from Gallup does not accomplish what Miller thinks: it simply reveals that most women view the “ideal family” as consisting of two children—a statistic that says nothing about individual intentions. The third study from Ohio University, bearing the misleading, clickbaity title “Most women want children – but half are unsure if they will,” claims the following:

On average, 62% of women said they intended to have a child and 35% did not intend to, with only a small percentage saying they didn’t know.

But up to 50% of the women who intended to have children said they were only “somewhat sure” or “not at all sure” that they would actually realize their intention to have a child.

In practice, this means that only 31 percent of women actually want to have children—a clear minority.

By all available data—including data from studies presented by Miller herself—“most” young women do not want to have children. Most women will not “probably” have babies by age 45. Meanwhile, as the birth rate hits all-time lows, the left continues to glorify childlessness.

So what do we do?

For one, dump the trad-wife messaging. While the right’s reaction to the left’s anti-natalism is understandable, no woman wants to feel as if her sole purpose on this planet is to bear children—especially not in a society that places so much value on professional achievement. Women who were already raised with traditional values, furthermore, gain nothing from having their views reinforced, and college-educated women unsure about having children only drift farther to the left after seeing women with few intellectual auspices and limited ambitions laud the stay-at-home mom lifestyle. After all, it is college-educated women who are having the fewest number of kids, and it is college-educated women who need the most persuading.

The answer, then, is to propose a middle ground: a woman can derive fulfillment both from her career and her family. If anything, we need more college-educated women raising the next generation of change-makers because these women are best equipped to instill the values of ambition, intellectual achievement, and professional success in their own children. The problem, however, is that our college system promotes lopsided messaging, accounting for the fact that a greater number of men than women say they want to have children in the future. While men are told that they must achieve professional success in order to provide for their families, women are told that professional success and motherhood are at odds with one another. In their early twenties, furthermore, women are repeatedly encouraged to focus on their careers and to not worry about marriage and children (I cannot tell you, for instance, how many times I heard such platitudes from friends and family members after each of my failed college relationships); as a result, by the time these women would otherwise be ready—in a more sane society, at least—to plan for motherhood, they have no marriage prospects and have never once thought about what their lives would look like with kids and a family. It’s no wonder that such a life-altering decision will feel uncomfortable: the topic of childbirth is seldom broached positively to women—not until it is often too late, that is.

One possible solution is to stop with the “focus on work and school” messaging—or at least to dial it back a notch. Professional success is not mutually exclusive with having children, and if we introduced the idea of motherhood earlier, it would feel far less daunting by the time many women are ready to settle down. Yes, women should focus on work and school—but that does not mean that relationships, marriage, and family should take a backseat. It is not revolutionary knowledge that the two can coexist harmoniously.

But even more importantly, we must present childbirth not as a necessity for the function of society but as a personal joy. Many women today turn away from having children because they are told, on the one hand, that the act of childbirth itself is a remnant of an outdated, oppressive system and, on the other, that they “should” have children because it is “morally good” on a societal level. While it is true that there are, of course, broader societal benefits to high birthrates, such messaging only depersonalizes the profoundly intimate experience of bringing life into our world, disfiguring joy itself by presenting it as an obligation. It is no surprise that when told to bear kids for an abstract societal purpose, many women will eschew childbirth entirely, not once considering the bliss that comes with raising little beings.

After all, The Cut can run as many pieces as it wants about women who “regretted” having children, but that does not erase the fact that for the entirety of human history, children make most people—men and women alike—profoundly happy.

We should not shame childless women—just as we should not shame a child who has not yet mastered his multiplication tables. Yet we have a duty to uphold a value system that teaches women—especially young liberal women with mental illnesses in record numbers—that children might be better for their general well-being than SSRIs and iced matchas. Because while motherhood may come with its fair share of challenges, it remains one of the surest paths not only to a meaningful existence but also to a life filled with utter joy.

The new Harry Potter series represents everything wrong with our morally ambiguous culture.

Following the release of the first Harry Potter teaser trailer—which has now amassed ten million views and an almost equal number of likes and dislikes—HBO launched Finding Harry: The Craft Behind the Magic, an exclusive first look at the filming of the new series.

While the thirty-minute segment, which focused primarily on set design, special effects, and costumes, caused less of a row than the official teaser, it only added to the overall veil of disappointment shrouding many Harry Potter fans over the past few weeks.

I’ve written previously about my eternal love for Harry Potter and the importance of the moral lessons the series has instilled in so many young minds across the world. Offering a powerful yet accessible window into the triumph of good over evil, Harry Potter shaped my own understanding of morality as a kid—and it is this moral clarity that lends the series its true magic.

My beef with the new TV series, then, is that it dilutes the universal themes that defined the original story in favor of overt political messaging—a phenomenon that will likely ruin Harry Potter for generations to come.

Before we delve into the fiasco brewing in the potions classroom (pun intended), let’s talk about the good stuff.

As John Lithgow, the new Albus Dumbledore, says in Finding Harry, the eight-episode structure of the series will allow the story to breathe as the creators dig into the literary nooks and crannies that were left out in the original film adaptations. The sets look incredible, and the revitalization of Harry Potter itself will bring the books back into the public eye, reintroducing a new generation of readers to the same series I fell in love with as a kid.

With that out of the way, let’s delve into the issue with the messaging of the new series.

From the outset of the trailer, it becomes clear that the 2026 Harry Potter reboot goes out of its way to avoid drawing a clear line between good and evil. In the original Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone trailer, the immediate focus is on Harry’s identity as a young wizard—inevitably shaped by his unsettling relationship to Lord Voldemort. We get a glimpse of his aching scar, his burgeoning magical talents, and his fame in the wizarding world. At the same time, we are asked to consider his relationship to the evils lurking around him—the troll in the dungeon, the hooded figure in the forbidden forest, and Professor Quirrell nursing a decaying Voldemort on the back of his head—all of which hint at the film’s eventual moral conflict. Most notably, the trailer features an important line from Hagrid that will define the tone of the entire series: “Understand this Harry, because it’s very important: not all wizards are good.”

With that one line, we are introduced not only to the main theme of the first film, but also to the pressing question of morality that will follow Harry throughout several more installments.

Yet in order to follow a “good versus evil” plotline, one must first have a clear understanding of good—and a definite picture of evil.

Though the films turn dark about halfway through the series, the first two Harry Potter movies clearly establish a sense of “good” through their famous wholesome or “feel-good” aesthetic. We continually return to The Sorcerer’s Stone and The Chamber of Secrets because they provide us with a broad swath of cinematic choices that establish Harry Potter as a “good” or noble character. While these ideas are often articulated explicitly through dialogue, they are also promoted in more subtle ways through John Williams’ famous whimsical score and a series of deliberate lighting choices. Indeed, as many commenters have observed online, these two aspects are blatantly absent in the new trailer.

The new show seems dark rather than wholesome—and the music and lighting are to blame. The new score is the work of Hans Zimmer, the musical mastermind behind Inception, The Dark Knight, and Dune—films that all share a certain darkness. Harry Potter, on the other hand, is a kids’ series that should foreground light over darkness. Zimmer’s score thus feels grossly out of place—quotidian rather than magical.

Indeed, if the new score lacks charm, it is because it lacks originality. Williams’ score, after all, feels magical precisely because of its uniqueness—it has that distinct “Harry Potter” sound. Zimmer, on the other hand, writes music that sounds like every other film score today, resulting in a jingle that sounds suspiciously like elevator music.

Without the warmth and whimsy of Williams’ notes, the series loses a clear sense of goodness.

Then there’s the color scheme. Like many films of the past several years, the entire series features drowned-out colors and dim lighting. Reddit tells me that this shift is primarily due to modern film equipment favoring darker color palettes and directors opting for more “realistic” ambient lighting, which apparently skews darker. But since when is a series about a boy flying around on a broomstick shooting magic spells out of a wooden rod supposed to be realistic?

And, if anything, wouldn’t advancements in film technology allow us to have greater control over color palettes?

Maybe studios are just trying to save money.

Reasoning aside, the new trailer is undeniably dark, lending the series an unsettling feel. Even the new Dursleys seem more sinister than their film counterparts, with the entire series resembling The Deathly Hallows Part 2—with none of Deathly Hallows’ warm, redeeming final scenes.

Watching the trailer to the reboot, in fact, feels like the aftermath of having had your soul sucked out by Dementors.

But the worst part of the new series is the casting—which, in its politicization of virtually every beloved Harry Potter character—forces the battle of good and evil to take a backseat to racial messaging.

The fact is that Rowling’s good and evil commentary in the novels is so powerful precisely because the political themes in the books—the bureaucratic power of the Ministry of Magic, the spread of propaganda at The Daily Prophet, the Death Eaters’ obsession with bloodlines—are mirrors of political issues in our own world rather than carbon copies of them. We see parallels between the Death Eaters and the Nazis, for instance, but the question of being Muggle-born is far enough removed from our world so as not to be a direct comment on the issue of race.

In other words, when the political themes of the Harry Potter universe are contained within the wizarding world, we can digest them in relation to a society that is not our own and focus primarily on the issues that do relate to us—such as the triumph of good over evil and the power of love. These are the universal ideas that make Harry Potter so memorable.

The political themes that will be ostensibly introduced in the new series are anything but universal.

In a desperate attempt to comment on political issues in our world rather than focusing on the ones that plague Harry and his wizarding friends, the casting directors—two liberal-looking women named Emily Brockmann and Lucy Bevan—have made overtly political casting choices.

Some people have expressed outrage over a darker-skinned Hermione, and while I’m mildly annoyed with how she looks, my own vexation is likely due to the fact that Emma Watson is inseparable from Hermione in my mind, which is not really a valid critique. I will be fair, therefore, and say that our new Hermione—Arabella Stanton—seems to be a much better actress than Watson herself. The behind-the-scenes footage, for instance, shows Stanton reciting William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus” for her audition, and she does a lovely job—especially for an eleven-year-old.

While I have no complaints about the new Ron—the young Alastair Stout—our new Harry’s personality seems terribly off. Dominic McLaughlin’s acting—at least in the trailer—creates the image of a miserable and pessimistic boy. And although Harry is mistreated in the books by the Dursleys, he nonetheless maintains a positive outlook—and, again, becomes more optimistic when Hagrid arrives. McLaughlin, on the other hand, plays a Harry who seems all-around resentful and miserable, contributing to the absence of a “wholesome” feel to the series.

The actor chosen to portray Hagrid also detracts from the Harry Potter magic. In the original series, Hagrid is a giant with a big heart who lives in a hut and acts as a sort of father figure to Harry. The reason we love Hagrid so much is precisely because he exudes a genuine warmth. The new Hagrid, however, gives off “liberal man who works in an office” vibes. He speaks like an educated Londoner, and something about his mannerisms remind me of an insufferable leftist professor rather than a friendly giant.

These are just my subjective feelings, of course, but there is undoubtedly something “off” about the Hagrid casting choice.

Then there’s Snape—the “sallow-skinned” professor with “greasy black hair,” a “hooked nose” who is played by a black man.

I’d like to preface my critique by stating that my heart goes out to Paapa Essiedu, the amazing Shakespearean actor set to play Professor Snape in the new series, who has been receiving a barrage of Internet hate over these past few weeks. Essiedu is just doing his job, and if he hadn’t stepped up to the role, the creators of the show, having already decided that Snape needed to be black, would have just found another black actor to replace him with. Essiedu is not at fault here—he was just miscast by a production team that wants to place politics at the forefront of Harry Potter. Because it is clear that this particular casting choice isn’t just a matter of featuring a diverse ensemble but a deliberate attempt to bring race to the forefront of a series that seldom tackles racial themes as we understand them in our contemporary world.

The issue a black Snape is that Snape’s relationship with Lily and James is so central to the development of Harry’s story that every detail is crucial. James bullies Snape not only because he is jealous of Snape’s close friendship with Lily but also because he unjustly perceives Snape as beneath him due to Snape’s lack of popularity. James’s actions both complicate his own character and lead Snape to temporarily turn on Lily out of resentment: most famously, he calls her a “mudblood” before turning to the dark side. But Snape soon grows into the perfect antihero because his undying love for Lily causes him to reject Lord Voldemort, demonstrating the power of love in overcoming evil.

Casting Snape as black creates an entirely different narrative.

All of a sudden, it becomes difficult to separate Snape’s bullying from his status as a black man. Under this paradigm, Snape’s resentment of James is much more justified, and his weaponization of a racial slur against Lily becomes motivated by his discomfort with his own race rather than any sort of intrinsic obsession with bloodlines—or, alternatively, mere teenage stupidity. In other words, by introducing real-world racial coding to a character motivated by abstract hierarchies and personal moral failings, the new adaptation risks shifting the audience’s focus from universal questions of love and resentment to historically specific frameworks like racial injustice, thereby stripping Snape of his moral agency and diminishing Rowling’s original message about the power of love.

The Snape phenomenon is, of course, nothing new—it merely follows the same patterns we’ve seen elsewhere in the literary world: universal human themes are often set aside to talk about racism, politics, and other particulars. So while I am not in the least surprised, I cannot help but feel disappointed at the bowdlerization of Harry Potter—a series that holds so much importance in both my heart and the hearts of so many other fans. Because black Snape aside, the new series seems like just another excuse for Hollywood to push a nihilistic, political agenda on our children (as they often like to do).

Of course, because we only have the trailer and a thirty-minute behind-the-scenes segment to assess, it’s possible I’m completely wrong, and the new series will be a huge hit. Perhaps the trailer is deceptive, and maybe black Snape won’t interfere with the overall story as much as I anticipate. I’ll have to watch the reboot once it comes out to form an actual opinion on it, and for my sake—and the sake of every other Harry Potter fan—let’s hope I’m wrong.

Expect my detailed dive into HBO’s new Harry Potter sometime around Christmas.

Until then, mischief managed!

I’ve been editing college application essays for about 10 years now. Every year, I encounter a broad array of writing abilities, ranging from high school seniors who submit fifth-grade-level essays to seventeen-year-olds who write better than their teachers. The fact is that “smart” kids have always been the minority, and despite never-ending claims that our students are getting dumber every year, I have nonetheless caught glimpses of the next generation’s most brilliant minds in every graduating high school class. These are the students who, whether matriculating into Ivy League schools or more modest universities, will go on to shape our society through medical discoveries, technological advancements, and bold ideas. They may approach problems in unexpected ways, but they have never been significantly duller than their older counterparts.

Not until this past year, however.

The graduating class of 2026 is the first cohort of students who have gone through high school with ready access to artificial intelligence (AI); as a result, they have never had to write an entire essay from scratch or map out a cohesive argument on their own. And while the return of the Blue Book exam structure has somewhat restored a baseline of individual accountability, it is now virtually impossible, with Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude at students’ fingertips, to simulate the experience of having to compose original argumentative essays from the ground up. The result is a sharp decline not only in student writing skills but also in the general capacity for critical thinking, as manifested in the cohesive formulation of written ideas.

But the most curious component of the AI phenomenon is that the approximate distribution of writing ability itself has not changed much over the past several years—there are still the same number of bad writers, mediocre writers, and good writers in every graduating senior class—at least when it comes to command of grammar and syntax. What’s changed, instead, is the prevalence of students who possess a high degree of technical writing fluency yet a low level of intellectual competence, resulting in a greater number of students who can produce perfectly structured sentences that say absolutely nothing.

How is that possible?

It’s simple: The same number of students with a natural aptitude for writing will still learn how to write, but they will no longer learn how to write well. Where previous generations learned to write from books, newspaper articles, and other written materials, the latest generation of students will be most influenced by their new primary source of information: LLMs.

In other words, because students now use ChatGPT and other AI tools to outline essays, skim readings, and solve homework problems—to perform nearly every assigned task—the majority of the writing they encounter will be AI-generated.

The problem is not just quantity, but quality: ChatGPT and other LLMs produce language that often says very little.

Here is an example of a paragraph it generated when I asked it to predict the next section of my essay:

What this reveals, more than anything, is that we have mistaken fluency for thought. A student who can produce a clean, grammatically sound paragraph—complete with varied sentence structure and the occasional well-placed em dash—now gives the impression of intelligence without having engaged in the difficult, often uncomfortable labor of actually forming an idea. But writing, in its truest sense, has never been about polish; it has been about resistance. It is the act of pushing against one’s own vagueness, of confronting half-formed intuitions and forcing them into clarity.

Read the first two sentences. What can you deduce from ChatGPT’s argument? We learn that a) students have mistaken “fluency” for “thought” and that b) students can now write clean sentences without having gone through the “labor of actually forming an idea.” There is truth to both claims, but the first claim is too broad to communicate anything substantial. The second claim simply repeats an idea I’ve already established without deepening it in any meaningful way. ChatGPT is a pro at regurgitating surface-level ideas without actually saying anything of substance.

Its next two claims, however, are the most egregious offenders. ChatGPT goes on to tell us that writing is not about “polish” but “resistance.” Garbage political bias aside, it is bad enough that this statement by itself means absolutely nothing—what follows is somehow even worse: an explanation that wastes an entire sentence on buzzwords and does little to elucidate the meaning of this so-called “writing as resistance.”

All of this is to say that ChatGPT likes to spew nonsense.

So what happens when students read this bad writing, and only this bad writing, daily?

For one, their own writing begins to resemble ChatGPT’s circumlocutious prose. This year, for instance, I’ve received an overwhelming number of student essays that feature the formulation “It’s not just this, it’s that”—one of ChatGPT’s signature writing moments that appears in the sample paragraph above. While many of these students admit to using AI in their writing, some vehemently insist that their writing is their own—even if their essays sound almost wholly AI-generated.

It might be tempting to assume that these students are simply lying through their teeth. But what is most remarkable is that when asked to produce their own writing on the spot, many of these students will recreate ChatGPT-sounding sentences without resorting to their AI sidekicks.

What this means is that students are beginning to write exactly like AI.

You are what you read, after all, and AI writing is the only writing that they have ever known.

As a result, an increasing number of students begin to sound like one another, and an increasing number of student writings become indistinguishable from robot prose.

But is this the end of critical thinking in our society?

Not necessarily. After all, the rise of the electronic calculator in the 1970s convinced an entire generation of pedagogues that students would grow dumber, but the result was simply a shift in intellectual priorities. While the general public is veritably worse at mental math today compared to 50 years ago, the handful of individuals who can multiply large numbers in their heads are now infinitely more valuable in certain fields of our society. Whenever a technology automates a basic function, therefore, the small minority who retain it gains a disproportionate advantage.

I predict that we will soon see the same phenomenon in writing.

After all, few students could really write well before the advent of ChatGPT. With that number now dwindling further, writers are about to become a valuable societal commodity.

As Peter Thiel said in a recent interview, the future looks bright for the “word people” because good writers may very well define our future.

Last week, I was “trending” on Substack.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know how this whole thing started or the details of how it played out. I don’t come from the hyper-online breed of humans, so I only noticed that I was “trending” on Substack after enough of my friends sent screenshots my way.

I had caused some nondescript backlash over an article I’d written chastising a set of men who had been bullying me over the last several weeks.

I had no idea that simply calling out a few cyber-bullies—and not even by name, mind you—would create such a backlash. I didn’t know who these people were, and I had never even heard of them until they started poking fun at me. I assumed that they were bots or Internet trolls, but it appears that they were minor personalities in obscure literary circles.

My bad.

In reaction to my observation that societally useless men are doomed perpetually to pick on their more successful female counterparts, the Internet came ready with its pitchforks, conjuring all sorts of juvenile monikers in an apparent race to see who could come up with the most clever Liza Libes insult. After several hours—when it became clear that no one was going to say anything of substance or actually engage with my ideas—the mob ended up proving the original point of my article: people with no ideas of their own can only gain prominence by pulling more unique thinkers down.

So maybe my article was cringe; maybe it wasn’t. But one thing is certainly clear: the mob’s reaction to my response was leagues more revealing than my original criticism.

Because if the backlash—a wellspring of hate posts against yours truly in response to one (1) article—wasn’t a “cringe” overreaction in itself, then I don’t know what was.

It was an enlightening experience to say the least, and now that it’s all behind us (luckily, internet fads have a lifespan of just several afternoons), I got to thinking about what it all says about our hyper-online culture. Why did these mysterious men attack me in the first place? What did I do to blister their egos other than exist with my commentary on literature, publishing, and the humanities at large? Sure, I have some controversial takes—but nothing that should have warranted such an artillery of snide posts. Part of it doubtless came from jealousy—I established a name for myself virtually out of nowhere just from disseminating my ideas—but that in itself doesn’t explain why they chose to go after me in particular. Lots of people have attained Substack fame in short intervals of time. Sure, I’m quite opinionated. Again—lots of people are.

I was also a woman.

I was a successful, opinionated woman.

Bingo.

I’m not saying that there aren’t many other successful, opinionated female writers in the Substack universe—of course there are. But many of the successful women I know writing on Substack are typically writing about sex, marketing, fashion, dating, parenting, or culture. With the exception of a few bigger names who have been around for a while, there hasn’t been quite a disruption to the Substack literature world from a woman in a hot minute. Couple that with brains and strong opinions, and you have the classic recipe for making insecure men feel threatened.

I’m just speculating, of course, but whenever the established order of things gets disrupted—in any domain—there is bound to be an uproar.

Perhaps I was such a disruption.

There are certain “categories” of writers on Substack and in the world at large. For one, there’s a certain “type” you think of when you think of the “Substack bro” (fellow Substacker Michael Mohr informed me the other day that they are colloquially referred to as the “lit bros”). This type shares many traits with the sorts of people I described in my controversial article. For the “lit bro,” everything is ironic and nihilistic. There’s probably a cigarette, a fedora, and a black-and-white profile pic involved. There’s also a weird cult following somewhere in the equation. This sort of writer is certainly not mainstream, and he claims he would rather die than become mainstream (likely because he knows he won’t ever get there).

The persona in question is likely to be a man.

The same holds true for the mainstream side of the aisle. Your household Substack names—Rob Henderson, Ted Gioia, Matthew Yglesias, to name a few—tend to be male. But because they’ve made such a name for themselves already, few people dare to touch them. And the several mainstream female writers who do enjoy a respectable following—your Abigail Shriers or Kat Rosenfields—are typically writing about politics or culture.

So what about literature?

Because the Internet literary world—both the mainstream circuit and its more obscure niches—is male-dominated, successful, opinionated women can’t be “opinionated” or “bold.”

No. They can only have a “meltdown.”

Notice the gendered language here—this sort of description would only ever be applied to a woman speaking her mind. Imagine, after all, telling a man on the Internet who came out with a series of posts that he was having a “meltdown!”

A man who speaks his mind online is “provocative,” “fearless,” and “sharp.” A woman, on the other hand, is emotional or unstable. This explains why it was primarily men who came after me—and why women primarily came to my defense. My fellow female writers understood exactly what was going on. As one of my supporters wrote, “there’s a certain energy” to being “dark, feminine and independent,” suggesting that it was this very femininity coupled with independence that ticked off the entire Internet.

After all, the argument I made in my article was almost identical to the argument that Ben Shapiro makes in his most recent book, Lions and Scavengers—which is, in essence, that there are, indeed, many people in our society who profit off of bringing others down.

In other words, if a man had written the exact same article (and many have!), it is unlikely to have caused such a storm.

Because a man with opinions is intelligent, but a woman with opinions is unstable.

Look. I don’t even subscribe at all to the whole “I’m oppressed because I’m a woman” narrative. In fact, I don’t think I’m “oppressed” at all. The fact that I’ve been able to make a name for myself in such a short span of time suggests the very opposite—that there is little female “oppression” going on here. But while “oppression” itself is not at play here, there are undeniably certain nuances between the way our society views male and female intellectuals, writers, and cultural commentators—and the fact stands that it is still much more difficult to be taken seriously as a woman in these spaces.

Personality psychology explains part of the discrepancy. Studies mapping the “big five” personality traits across male and female responders, for instance, routinely demonstrate that women are significantly more agreeable than their male counterparts, creating a dynamic in which an authoritative woman disrupts a certain equilibrium. After all, a woman can be insightful or reflective, sure, but the moment she becomes declarative or critical, she violates a certain societal expectation—and the pitchforks emerge. In other words, a woman is allowed to interpret culture but not to define it.

That is why the second major criticism levied against me was for daring to voice my takes about the state of our literary culture.

After all, authority in literary spaces is still predominantly coded as male. When we think of serious literary critics, we think of Harold Bloom or perhaps George Steiner—the archetypes of the “literary voice” who brim with unapologetic confidence. But when a woman writes about the decline of literature, she has no right to—at least not without first being published herself, according to some comments I saw.

This argument, of course, is ludicrous. By that logic, all movie critics should all be directors, all music critics should be signed onto major record labels, and all sports commentators should be pro athletes themselves. Furthermore, I am not yet 30 and have lots of time to get published; waiting to speak my mind until after I do would be a pretty stupid career move, if you ask me.

What we have here is textbook silencing of the female voice. Men, after all, can just “do” things. Women need to have all of the credentials for it—and must fight to earn their spots as cultural authorities.

But the substance of the “I don’t have the right to critique or culture” argument wasn’t even that I don’t have the “credentials” for it (though if two Ivy League degrees in English literature aren’t “credentials,” then I don’t know how to help you) but that I was simply a woman voicing my opinions. What people reacted to was not my argument, therefore, itself but the fact that I made it unapologetically. Because people were expecting me to back down.

And that is the part that saddens me the most from all of this: many women would have backed down in response. After all, that was the goal of the haters—to get me to relinquish my claim upon the cultural commentary stage.

But I’m not backing down.

The “lit bro” stereotype exists for a reason—because there is one predominant “type” of voice that comments on literary culture. But when only one side of the equation is accounted for, an entire society suffers from a narrowing of culture.

At the end of the day, I was picked on because I challenged the status quo—because I dared to put my foot down and call out the pseudo-intellectualism that has infested the literary and art world. At the end of the day, I was picked on because I’m not a “type”—I’m an independent thinker who was only ever speaking her mind.

All of this is to say that our society still doesn’t know what to do with women who are unapologetically firm in their beliefs.

Maybe it’s time that we learn.

Until then, I’ve certainly learned my lesson. Don’t mess with Internet junkies with tiny cult followings.

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Between (eternally) querying my novels, outlining my next big literary project, managing my social media accounts, writing essays for Substack, running my college counseling business, and finishing a 1200-page history book on the Third Reich, I’ve been feeling a bit burnt out lately.

I’m sure many of you often feel the same way, so this week, I wanted to go through some of my favorite short reads—books that you can finish in one sitting or turn to when you just need a bit of a break.

There are many great novellas out, but here are the ones that most profoundly changed my life.

1. White Nights - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We start off strong with my favorite novella of all-time—Dostoyevsky’s White Nights. The story follows a pair of lovers—Nastenka and the unnamed “Dreamer”—as they bare their souls to one another in the span of just under a week.

A small detail that’s often lost on English speakers is that the girl in the novel immediately introduces herself as “Nastenka,” the diminutive of “Nastya,” which in itself is already a diminutive of “Anastasia.” Even today, it would be strange for a Nastya to introduce herself as Nastenka, a name typically reserved for lovers or parents. Thus Dostoyevsky sets up a paradigm in which we know that Nastenka and her unnamed lover will get too close too quickly.

At its core, the book explores the plight of loneliness and the nature of bliss. Thematically, it’s probably closest to Notes from the Underground.

I read it in one sitting in a bathtub and cried for three hours afterwards. I still cry every time I think about this book. I’m crying right now

2. The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy

As its title suggests, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a meditation on death and the meaning of life. Throughout the book, we follow Ivan in his final moments as he comes to terms with his imminent departure from our earth.

I actually didn’t like this one until the very last page. Then it all clicked together, and I also cried for an hour. (I cry a lot in books.)

3. The Queen of Spades - Alexander Pushkin

I apologize for the overrepresentation of Russian literature on this list, but you are reading a Liza Libes article, so I think you knew what you were getting yourself into.

I like to think of this novella as a sort of precursor to Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler (another fantastic novella that I did not include on this list for the sake of variety). Through The Queen of Spades, Pushkin explores greed, obsession, and madness as he delves into the mind of a man who becomes obsessed with winning at cards.

There’s also a fantastic opera adaptation by Tchaikovsky that I highly recommend.

4. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton might just be my favorite female author after Sylvia Plath, and lately I’ve been thinking that if I reread The Age of Innocence today, I’d probably like it more than The Bell Jar.

I did actually reread Ethan Frome recently because it makes a signature appearance in my latest novel, Blue Snow, which has some thematic overlap with Wharton’s famous novella. I actually liked Ethan Frome better on the second read because once you know the twist ending, you can pay more attention to the psychological nuances of the characters. On a fundamental level, Ethan Frome is about an affair, but the book is much deeper—it explores themes of loneliness, duty, and unfulfilled desire.

If you’ve already read Ethan Frome and are okay with spoilers, I’ve left the Ethan Frome excerpt from Blue Snow in the footnote (just for fun).

5. Bartleby, the Scrivener - Herman Melville

The primary reason to read this one is so that you can go around parroting the phrase “I would prefer not to” whenever someone asks you to do something you’d rather not do, but aside from that, Bartleby is an interesting meditation on alienation and the limits of compassion under a capitalist system.

I’m not personally a huge fan of this one because I tend to be generally wary of the whole “capitalism is bad” narrative, but I’ve included it here because it’s an important standalone work that paved the way for an entire generation of socioeconomic critiques in American literature.

6. Chess Story - Stefan Zweig

Chess Story was Zweig’s final literary work, published posthumously following his suicide in 1942. The novella traces the story of a political prisoner who learns how to play chess while in captivity… in his head.

This is the novella that made me fall in love with Zweig’s work and led me to binge-read basically everything else he ever wrote. It’s one of the greatest psychological novellas of all time and has rightfully earned its status as Zweig’s best literary work.

7. Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

Death in Venice is a fantastic gateway to the Mann oeuvre and certainly Mann’s most accessible work. Anticipating many of the themes that Mann would later explore in his magnum opus, The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice follows Gustav von Aschenbach on his travels to Vienna—and in his obsession with a young Polish boy.

Mann apparently based Aschenbach particularly on the composer Gustav Mahler. You gotta hand it to Thomas Mann for never failing to imbue his work with abstruse classical music references.

8. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

I didn’t like this one very much when I first read it in high school, but I appreciated it a lot more when I reread it more recently. If you weren’t lucky enough to be assigned Of Mice and Men in high school, I highly recommend checking out this short tale set in California during the Great Depression. It follows two migrant ranch workers, George and Lennie, as they dream of one day owning a farm. As you might expect, it doesn’t quite go as planned for them.

9. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

I almost didn’t put this one on here because everyone’s read it, but in the grand scheme of life-changing novellas, The Metamorphosis is certainly up there. Kafka needs no introduction, but if you haven’t read his most famous book, this is your sign to get on it.

10. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Finally, we have The Sorrows of Young Werther—one of the most depressing books ever written.

I said that this list was going to contain a series of short books. I didn’t say they were going to be light.

Werther is an epistolary novel about a young man who falls in love with a girl who is engaged to another man. It’s a key work of the German Sturm und Drang literary movement—a precursor to Romanticism—and inspired an entire generation of 18th century sad boys.

Incidentally, this one also makes a prominent appearance in my novel. As you can tell, I like literary allusion :)

I hope you enjoyed my picks! Which novella are you reading first?

Are agents writers’ friends?

Yes, if you can get one. And yes, if you write a certain way. And yes, if you hold certain beliefs.

For the past three years, I’ve been aggressively trying to break into the publishing industry. I’ve been writing novels since I was ten years old, and it’s been my lifelong dream to make a name for myself as a published author. I’ve completed six novels over the past ten years of my life, and of these six, I am particularly proud of my last three, which received glowing feedback from beta readers and even moved several of them to tears.

Nevertheless, every single one of my novels remain unpublished.

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest literary genius, but I know from both my pool of fifty beta readers and my six-thousand Substack subscribers that there is at least a decent audience for my writing. In fact, given my Internet presence, which extends to almost a hundred thousand people across Substack, YouTube and Instagram, my books would almost certainly outperform the majority of traditionally published novels, half of which sell fewer than twelve copies. From a marketing perspective, signing an author with a respectable Internet platform seems to make sense.

Not for literary agents.

Despite sinking thousands of hours into editing my novels to absurdity, connecting with literary agents at conferences, and even throwing entire paychecks at professional query package review services, I have been categorically unable to break into the traditional publishing industry. The best part is that everything I am doing seems to be in line with industry expectations: I have had over forty agents review full manuscripts of my three novels, suggesting that my pitch and opening pages are landing. I have had two agents make offers of representation, praising my writing to no end—only to mysteriously back out shortly after sending over paperwork.

There’s something fishy going on here.

Read more

One Battle After Another took home the award for best picture at last night’s Oscars, and no one was surprised. I haven’t seen the film, nor do I intend to—from what I understand of the plot and its political message, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is unbelievably asinine, and I’d prefer not to waste hours of my life on a film that stands so firmly against my personal values.1

But I have seen two of the other films that were up for nominations—Bugonia and Marty Supreme—and I am sorry to report that both of these films are absolute trash.

In fact, they reminded me why I rarely watch movies these days.2

It’s not that I don’t think film is a legitimate art form—far from it. In fact, I will die on a hill for older films like Citizen Kane, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

But the majority of films made today are downright atrocious.3

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I’ve devoted the past year of my life to dissecting the ills of the publishing industry. After (passively) watching the Oscars last night, I had the sudden realization that Hollywood has fallen prey to the same plague that’s taken over mainstream publishing: real art is getting pushed to the wayside in favor of soulless slop.

I’m not talking about the fact that Hollywood keeps making the same superhero movie 400 times. If anything, I’m all for that because no one is out there claiming that “Superman Remake 47” is true art. Rather, what bothers me is that the sorts of films that win Oscars—supposedly the highest cinematic achievement in our culture—are not much better than formulaic action flicks made for pure entertainment.

In fact, for the past several years, most Oscar-winning films have been really, really bad.

But why?

To answer that question, we must first understand what constitutes a good film.

Let’s take one of my favorite films, Citizen Kane, as an example.

I am not alone in believing that Citizen Kane might be one of the greatest movies of all time, but why is Citizen Kane so widely revered? Sure, it was ahead of its time, and, sure, it provides social commentary on a particular historical phenomenon, but before I rewatched the film the other day to write this essay, I’d only ever watched it once in high school—and after all of those years, what stuck with me wasn’t the critique of newspaper industry or the political subplot but Rosebud, Kane’s childhood sleigh.

You might think that’s natural—the entire plot of the film, after all, revolves around the quest to unearth the meaning behind “Rosebud,” Kane’s dying words, but the reason I’ll always be touched by the burning of that sleigh is far more rudimentary: Rosebud is tied to childhood happiness.

In other words, Kane’s love for Rosebud doesn’t tell us something particular about a specific moment in history but delivers a universal message about the human condition, warning us all against frittering our lives away meaninglessly.

In fact, as a Russian-Jewish first-generation American woman, I have very little in common with Charles Foster Kane. Nevertheless, I was ineffably touched by Kane’s attachment to Rosebud because I, too, am a human being who experienced childhood, and I, too, am a human being preoccupied with the fear of looking back on life with regret. Citizen Kane is a great film precisely because it contains a clear universal message about the human condition—and, perhaps even more fundamentally, because it tells us something about the things that lend meaning to our lives.

In other words, great art incites us to think about the big questions that we all share in common as a human race. That’s not to say that a film can’t have commentary about specifics—of course it can—but great art attains its renown precisely because it uses the particular as a vehicle to comment on the universal.

Early cinema knew how to do this well. Breakfast at Tiffany’s comments on the universal nature of love. Stalker tells us something about the lengths we all take to attain our greatest desires.

But what about contemporary cinema?

The reason that these movies are so lackluster in comparison is that they don’t attempt to tell us anything about the universal human condition or how to lead a meaningful life. Instead, they are either bogged down in particulars or reject meaning entirely, becoming not only nihilistic but downright repulsive. Instead of touching on the human condition, these films feature either a) hyper-specific, in-your-face social commentary (Bugonia) or b) indulgent moral chaos with zero attempt to define what constitutes a virtuous life. (Marty Supreme).

Let’s get into why, despite overwhelming critical acclaim, Bugonia and Marty Supreme are terrible movies—and why they function as proxies for a larger decay in contemporary filmmaking and art as a whole.

In my view, Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the most overrated artists of our time.4 His supposed appeal lies in his weirdness, but I can only describe his movies with the Russian word “противный,” which is something like the aggregate of nasty, revolting, disturbing, cringey, vile, disgusting, and blood-curdling. In other words, Lanthimos has a disgusting view of human beings, and that comes through clearly in his ugly art.

Wait, you’ll say, but didn’t Dostoyevsky have a similar view of humanity, and isn’t he your favorite author?

Sure, to some extent Dostoyevsky did hold similar views, but there’s one major difference: Dostoyevsky believed that human beings could be redeemed. Lanthimos just thinks we’re ugly—and doesn’t want to comment further.

Not only is such an outlook detrimental to one’s general well-being, but it also lends a certain ugliness to one’s art—such as in the case of Bugonia.5 I’ll grant you that the film is unique to a certain extent, but I walked away from it having learned nothing about the human condition other than, apparently, that human beings are evil, ugly creatures with zero hope for redemption.6

Bugonia follows two nutty conspiracy theorists who abduct a young female CEO—whom they believe to be an alien sent down from another planet to destroy the human race. There was a great opportunity here for Lanthimos to use this setup of particulars (contemporary conspiracy theorists) to make a universal statement about human nature (e.g. the propensity of the human mind to cook up all sorts of voodoo magic as a defense mechanism against pain). Instead, Lanthimos decides that, actually, the corporate lady really is an alien, that corporate people really are out to get us, and that human beings really are doomed because we didn’t listen to the crazy conspiracy people.7

By the end of the film, the evil aliens destroy all of humanity, and only animals are left to roam our planet.

I’m not sure what I was supposed to take away from this film other than a) human beings are ugly and irredeemable (which is false) and b) that corporations are evil (which is not only false but also stupid).

In the film’s defense, the acting was stellar, but no amount of great acting can save a movie with no moral backbone—and nothing to contribute to the eternal search for meaning in our lives.

But while Bugonia was a bad film, it didn’t anger me as much as Marty Supreme, which had the potential to be a phenomenal movie but failed drastically on all counts.

Most people I’ve spoken to who also disliked Josh Safdie’s latest flick took issue with the unfolding of the plot, much of which was loosely tied together through a series of non-sequiturs. My fiancé was particularly annoyed by the grandiose setup of the orange ping pong balls, which led absolutely nowhere, and repeatedly referenced Chekhov’s gun—the narrative premise that every element in a story must serve a distinct purpose—as we walked out of the theater. I didn’t adore the randomness of the story, but I have to admit, I wasn’t too annoyed by that in itself.8 After all, Marty Supreme is something of a picaresque, and, if done right, the picaresque form can yield a phenomenal film like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. The difference, however, is that every scene in Barry Lyndon—though arguably unrelated—advances Barry’s character in a meaningful way. Barry Lyndon, furthermore, carries a deeper message precisely because Barry gets fucked in the end—and Kubrick, like Thackeray before him, does not attempt to excuse bad people.

The issue, then, with Marty Supreme, is not the structure of the film but its messaging.

Throughout the entire movie, Marty runs around being an asshole to everyone in his life: his friends, his girlfriend, his other girlfriend, his mother, and the other arbitrary people he meets throughout his odyssey towards table tennis stardom. He impregnates his girlfriend and attempts to claim that the child isn’t his. He cheats on said girlfriend with an older actress, whom he also treats quite poorly. He is categorically ungrateful to his friends and his mother—and all in the name of “greatness.”

You’d think that a two-and-a-half hour movie would contain some sort of backstory about why Marty ended up so depraved or at least some nuance about the conflict between his goals and his values, but nope—it turns out that Marty is just an asshole.

In fact, the film gives us so little to work with that the only feasible explanation for Marty’s behavior is his Jewishness.

At its core, Marty Supreme is an antisemitic film, which tells us a lot about the double standards in our culture when it comes to “the Jews” versus any other minority group. In fact, it is unimaginable that Hollywood would ever create a film containing such a negative portrayal of any other race.

And while the Jew haters over at The New York Times have attempted to spin the film’s depiction of Jewishness in a positive light, the fact is that if one is to believe that Marty is an asshole (he is), there is no other way to understand Safdie’s message other than “Jews are entitled assholes who use the Holocaust as an excuse for their poor behavior”—a fantastic example of Holocaust inversion and an extension of notorious antisemite Norman Finkelstein’s argument in The Holocaust Industry.

I see no other reason that Safdie would choose to emphasize Marty’s Jewishness so blatantly and repeatedly throughout the film. Marty wears a giant Star of David around his neck. He brings back a piece of the Egyptian pyramids to his mother, bragging about how “we built that” (the implication being, of course, that Marty has permission to act badly because it’s in his blood to do “great things” as a Jew). We get a completely random Auschwitz scene from one of Marty’s completely random friends that serves no purpose other than to bring attention to the fact that the movie takes place in the direct aftermath of the Holocaust, thereby reinforcing the film’s “Jews are entitled assholes who use the Holocaust as an excuse for their poor behavior” thesis.

But antisemitism aside, the primary reason that Marty Supreme is a terrible movie is that it never attempts to shame Marty for his behavior (other than through a completely out-of-the-blue, gratuitous BDSM scene with another irredeemable asshole). Worse, even, it shies away from punishing Marty in any meaningful way, allowing him to achieve all of his dreams and even come home to a fantastic rest of his life.

Towards the end of the film, Marty defeats the standing table tennis world champion and attains the “greatness” he has always desired. He flies home and rushes to the hospital, where his girlfriend (on whom he has now cheated a million times) is giving birth to their child. At this stage of the film, I was expecting something terrible to happen to him: maybe his girlfriend dies in childbirth, or maybe the infant comes out stillborn. In such a case, the film would leave us with the message that the pursuit of greatness comes at a cost—and that bad people cannot get away entirely with their actions, even if they reap partial rewards from them. Instead, however, we see Marty tearing up at the birth of his child, and the film ends.

As I told a friend the other day in a text message, “You cannot make a film about a guy who’s a complete moron and conclude that his life is actually great.”

Well, you can, and Safdie did. Marty faces no real obstacles, and everything ends up going his way despite his vast assholery. Hell, he’s even rewarded for his bad behavior—both in his personal and his professional life.

The reason that Citizen Kane is a great film is that in the end, Kane’s actions catch up to him: we realize that Kane is empty and lonely and everything in his life is actually meaningless—and thus we understand a universal human truth: human goodness always beats out the pursuit of so-called “greatness.” In Marty Supreme, on the other hand, Safdie seems to be implying that a) greatness excuses you from acting like a decent human being, b) society allows assholes to get away with everything and, c) “great” people tend to be assholes.

Anyone who has lived on this planet for more than three seconds knows that none of those things are actually true on a grand scale. Our actions as human beings always carry consequences—albeit sometimes unexpected ones. To suggest that terrible people suffer no consequences for their actions is not only a disservice to an entire generation of moviegoers, but also a shameful departure from art’s traditional role of helping us live meaningful lives.

But all of that aside, what’s most appalling about both Bugonia and Marty Supreme is that not once throughout these films did I feel touched.

By the end of Citizen Kane, I felt tears well up in my eyes. By the end of Bugonia, however, I felt repulsed, and by the end of Marty Supreme, I felt absolutely nothing—even though the final scene of the film is the literal birth of an infant, one of the most profoundly moving moments of the human experience. But I felt nothing for Marty because throughout the entire film, Safdie did not once attempt to humanize his protagonist. Like Lanthimos, he seems to believe that all human beings are just fundamentally ugly—and that there’s nothing we can do about it.

And therein lies the problem with our culture.

The reason that contemporary films are so terrible is that they lack a belief in humanity. Today, we are scared of making movies that show human beings in a positive light because, thanks to the advent of moral relativism, we have become terrified of taking a stance on the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. As a result, art becomes ironic and ugly; movies no longer feel “wholesome,” but alienating. We don’t care for contemporary film characters because we no longer see ourselves in them; like the aliens in Bugonia, we seem to be observing a completely different race at a sizable distance. Contemporary films lack substance because they’ve swapped out universals for particulars, replacing Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, with irony, alienation, and nihilism.

And that is why contemporary cinema feels fundamentally unwatchable—because it is profoundly anti-human.

I hope you enjoyed the Oscars more than I did. I’m off to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s to restore my faith in humanity.

Literary interpretation is one of the most powerful tools we have as intellectuals. It’s also one of the most dangerous.

Since sending out my novels to beta readers, I’ve noticed a curious recurring pattern. About a third of my readers just “get” my books, walking away contemplating the precise set of “big questions”—the importance of morality, the role of Beauty in our lives, and the pitfalls of artistic obsession—that I explore throughout my stories.

Another third of readers will come up with their own interpretations, perhaps focusing too much on plot details or missing the novel’s “takeaway,” yet providing thoughtful commentary nonetheless. These readers, often possessing divergent or even opposing personal values, will spark the very sorts of conversations I love in literary circles about what the author really meant or what his characters were really thinking. These exchanges reveal the power of the novel in yielding a broad swath of valid readings, highlighting the unique phenomenon of interpretive plurality, wherein a single novel will land differently based on individual reader background.

Yet another third of readers will completely miss the mark.

It’s not that these readers are any less competent than the first two groups—many of them, in fact, might be relatively perceptive. But they often come into a work of literature with preordained expectations, importing their own worldviews into a text that has little to do with the ideas most familiar to them.

Take a look, for instance, at the variety of reader responses to the question of “main themes” in my most recent novel, Blue Snow:

Reader A: “The theme of passion versus stability is very prominent.”

Reader B: “The tension and trade-off between passion and stability.”

Reader C: “Love and maturity.”

Reader D: “Living with sin vs. ridding yourself of it, the effects of sin and morality on real life.”

Reader E: “Attraction to “bad” men; … the shame that often surrounds sexual urges; how we only ever desire the things we don’t already have, or can’t have.”

The first two readers hit the nail on the head. The central conflict of the novel is, in fact, the age-old tension between passion and stability—the same conflict in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

The second two readers, on the other hand, understand the message through a slightly different interpretive lens. Reader C, for instance, conflates passion and love, but nevertheless is not incorrect: one could certainly read the novel and conclude that the affair I depict was driven by love rather than more carnal passion. Similarly, Reader D interprets passion vs. stability through a narrower lens, focusing on the novel’s discussions of sin and thereby elevating one aspect of the story into its central theme. She is not wrong either, and I appreciate both of these readers for revealing the wider array of narrative possibilities within my own work—one of the most valuable aspects of literary interpretation.

Yet Reader E completely misses the mark, believing the novel to be about “attraction to ‘bad’ men.” On the contrary, the protagonist’s love interest is not dangerous or morally corrupt but excessively moral, hiding behind ethical scruples in order to avoid the responsibilities of a stable partnership. In fact, at one point, he tells the protagonist, “We can’t do it… I won’t be that guy. I just won’t be. It’s not me—I’m not going to break apart a marriage… I have to be holy.” This passage alone undermines Reader E’s interpretation: far from embodying the archetype of the reckless or morally transgressive “bad boy,” the love interest is driven by an almost comical commitment to moral purity.

Likewise, the novel’s sexual conflict is not about shame itself, but about the repercussions of removing moral boundaries from intimacy and replacing them with hedonism. Reader E’s claim that the novel is about “how we only ever desire the things we don’t already have” does not once appear in the text. In other words, this reader does not interpret the novel as much as he imports his own psychological framework into it, projecting assumptions about desire and sexuality that the text itself never advances. That is not to say that this reader did not engage meaningfully with the text but that he perhaps subconsciously wanted the novel to be about something else.

Luckily for the outside world, my novel currently sits unpublished on my laptop. Misinterpretations of its core themes do no ill to the world beyond providing a mild annoyance to me, its author. But imagine now if Reader E were to pick up a novel by Hemingway or Nabokov. No one can prove that he is wrong without consulting either author, both of whom are no longer with us. And while his critique is often not driven by malice but a simple misapplication of values, once it is circulated in the academy, it nevertheless runs the danger of becoming gospel.

This is how literary interpretation gets corrupted on a larger scale—and how cherished classics about morality and beauty and love and death become about imperialism and class consciousness. Because if you take that segment of readers who didn’t “get” a book at all—and then put them in an ivory tower and call them literature “experts,” then an entire tradition of art and beauty becomes about power and politics—and all because a vocal minority of people start promoting their own viewpoints into a text instead of asking what the author actually meant.

Vladimir Nabokov warned us of this phenomenon in his 1962 experimental novel Pale Fire.

At the core of Pale Fire is a poem in four cantos by the fictional poet John Shade. While a bit cheeky, the poem itself is a standalone literary accomplishment, with memorable excerpts such as the catchy “A system of cells interlinked within/ Cells interlinked within cells interlinked” that famously appears in Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 film Blade Runner 2049. Unlike many of its abstruse contemporaries, the poem is not difficult to parse—in fact, its narrative format makes its themes abundantly clear. In simplest terms, the poem is about coming to terms with death and exploring the possibility of an afterlife.

Nabokov, however, turns that reality on its head by presenting us with a series of footnotes penned by the fictional Professor Charles Kinbote, who purports to comment on the poem by elucidating the circumstances of the life of his “friend” Shade. Nevertheless, it becomes almost immediately apparent that Professor Kinbote willfully hijacks Shade’s poem by importing his own worldviews, claiming that the poem is not about death but about the history of the land of Zembla, his fictional home country for which he harbors a preexisting obsession. While it is unclear just how much of Kinbote’s narrative is invented to advance his own agenda, what is certain is that Kinbote invents meaning: “Gradually,” he writes, “it dawned upon me that this poem was about Zembla.” In reality, of course, Shade’s poem has nothing to do with Zembla at all.

On a broader scale, Nabokov draws our attention to the dangers of literary misinterpretation. Kinbote might be more cuckoo than the average English professor, but not by much—after all, Kinbote does exactly what English professors like to do today: take a universal project (literature) that deals with universal human themes (e.g. death, love, loss, etc.) and turn it into an agenda about particulars (e.g. isolate political grievances or power struggles). Today, in the literary academy, many critics project theoretical frameworks onto a given text rather than deriving meaning from it; as a result, literary interpretation begins to resemble Kinbote’s fantastical commentary.

Nabokov’s perspicacity is incredible: just thirty years later, a real-life Kinbote would enter the literary stage and permanently alter literary interpretation with his similarly fantastical readings of cherished literary texts.

The resemblance of this literary critic to Kinbote is uncanny. Like Kinbote, he came to America from a faraway country to become an English professor. Like Kinbote, he is obsessed with rewriting the history of his land. And like Kinbote, he hijacks an entire work of literature to promote his warped interpretations.

I am talking, of course, of the infamous Columbia University literary critic Edward Said.

Said was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1935. His parents were Arab Christians, and his father earned American citizenship after serving in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. He moved to America to attend the prestigious boarding school Northfield Mount Hermon, propelling him immediately into America’s elite class, and later studied English at Princeton and Harvard. He joined the faculty of the Columbia University English department in 1963, where he taught until his death in 2003.

Said is perhaps singlehandedly responsible for the narrative that Israel is a settler-colonist state, that Jews are the new Nazis (Jews—not Israelis) and that Arabs have a greater claim to the historic land of Palestine than the Jews. Given his obsession with colonialism and Palestine, it is remarkable that he became a professor of English literature in the first place, but a quick overview of his contributions to the literary sphere make it clear that his aim was precisely to hijack literature as a whole in order to draw attention to perceived wrongdoings in his beloved Palestine—and he succeeded royally.

I have written elsewhere about Said’s role in the notorious 2024 “tentifada” protests that originated at Columbia University, and it is no accident that the leaders of these protests were students from the Columbia English department. Today, students of literature are taught Said for breakfast, reading a wide array of books through the interpretative lens of post-colonial theory—Said’s school of thought that analyzes literature through the lasting power dynamics between “colonizers and the colonized.” Said’s prime example throughout his work is, of course, Israel and Palestine, but he also frequently comments on the way in which European hegemony informed the creation of the literary canon and, more specifically, the importance of British imperialism in the development and interpretation of certain literary texts.

The most famous example of the latter comes from his book Culture and Imperialism in a chapter called “Jane Austen and Empire.”

If your first reaction is, “What the hell does Jane Austen have to do with empire?” then you are not alone in sniffing out Said’s Kinbotean bullshit.

If you haven’t read Mansfield Park or need a refresher, here’s a quick rundown of the novel. Our young protagonist, Fanny Price, is sent to live with her wealthier relatives in a house called Mansfield Park, where she meets her four mischievous cousins. Several years later, when Sir Thomas, the patriarch of the estate, departs for his Antigua plantation, the young people of Mansfield take advantage of his absence by putting on a somewhat immoral play, which grants them the opportunity to covertly flirt with one another. Fanny then rejects the advances of one of her suitors, believing him to be immoral, and ends up marrying her cousin Edmund (as one did in 1814). The novel is fundamentally about moral discipline, self-control, and virtue—not only as those ideas were understood in Jane Austen’s time, but also in our own. Fanny rejects her suitor Henry, for instance, because he is an adulterer—values that align with our contemporary understanding of morality.

But Said willfully ignores those values and Austen’s overall message, importing his own theoretical framework rather than deriving one from the text itself. Ultimately, Mansfield Park is about the triumph of moral character and the dangers of moral collapse. For Said, however,

“the novel steadily, if unobtrusively, opens up a broad expanse of domestic imperialist culture without which Britain’s subsequent acquisition of territory would not have been possible.”

What does Mansfield Park have to do with “Britain’s subsequent acquisition of territory,” you may ask? According to Said, Mansfield Park participates in ideological preparation for empire: “To hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it.”

In this way, Said, equates the Mansfield estate with the microcosm of “empire,” deriving a large theoretical claim from extremely thin textual evidence. He explicitly frames the novel in terms of imperial ideology, claiming that Austen “connects the actualities of British power overseas to the domestic imbroglio within the Bertram estate.” The irony is that Austen’s novel itself barely discusses empire at all. In fact, Said treats one single reference to Antigua—clearly a mere plot device to get the patriarch out of the house and set the stage (pun intended) for the salacious play—as the novel’s key interpretive framework:

“Sir Thomas’s property in the Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by slave labor… these are not dead historical facts but… evident historical realities.”

Said is not wrong in observing that the likeliest source of Sir Thomas’s wealth is slave labor, but to suggest that “empire” explains the moral structure of the novel is almost comical. In fact, Said’s entire claim—that Mansfield Park is a novel about British imperialism—rests almost entirely on the following exchange:

In the novel, the slave trade is mentioned exactly once—and in passing. And while it may be reasonable to assume that Sir Thomas owns slaves on his Caribbean plantation, direct mention of these slaves is never once made; the plantation never appears, and Antigua is mentioned only briefly. The plot revolves not around colonial economics but moral education, marriage choices, social responsibility, and character—none of which have anything to do with colonial politics.

Furthermore, because Sir Thomas’s trip to Antigua mainly serves structural narrative purposes, it is reasonable to assume that Austen wasn’t thinking about “empire” when she sent Sir Thomas to a plantation—she just needed an excuse to get him out of the house.

For Said, however, Austen unconsciously legitimizes “empire” by creating a culture that revolves around “imperial rule”:

“European culture often… validated its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule.”

To discuss “imperial rule” in the context of Mansfield Park is even more off the mark than the misinterpretation of Blue Snow I highlighted earlier. In fact, Said himself admits that his entire argument is predicated on reading what is not present rather than what is:

“We have to see them in the main as resisting or avoiding that other setting… whose formal inclusiveness, historical honesty, and prophetic suggestiveness cannot completely hide.”

In other words, according to Said, the novel is about empire precisely because it avoids mention of it.

That’s a major critical leap.

Worse still is his argument that the drama in the Mansfield estate mirrors that of the colonial plantation. According to Said,

“What sustains this life materially is the Bertram estate in Antigua, which is not doing well. Austen takes pains to show us two apparently disparate but actually convergent processes: the growth of Fanny’s importance to the Bertrams’ economy, including Antigua, and Fanny’s own steadfastness in the face of numerous challenges.”

He describes the household intrigues as an “economy,” arguing that Fanny’s rise within Mansfield occurs alongside its economic structure, and that, therefore, the domestic moral order and the colonial system are fundamentally intertwined. Mansfield itself, in fact, takes on an “inevitable association” with “an imperial estate.”

For Said, then, Fanny’s success is linked to “empire.” When Mansfield Park becomes morally stable at the end of the novel, Said implies that this occurs because the estate’s stability rests on its colonial structure. Thus the domestic English order and the colonial plantation become, if not virtually indistinguishable, then at least structurally connected.

But in the actual novel, Fanny’s rise has absolutely nothing to do with “empire” and more to do with moral steadiness, humility, and judgement. At the center of the novel is Austen’s suggestion that moral character matters more than wealth or status, a claim that is so astronomically removed from “empire” that one is invited to wonder whether Said ever actually read Austen’s entire book. Claiming that Mansfield Park is about “empire” is similar to insisting that Crime and Punishment is about Russian housing policy because Raskolnikov is unable to make rent for his room—technically relevant background information but wildly removed from the core premise of the book.

Said’s ramblings about colonialism in Mansfield Park—and the ensuing “postcolonial consciousness” in the mind of the reader—is no different from Kinbote’s insane musings about Zembla in relation to John Shade’s Pale Fire. And while Nabokov’s Kinbote—fictional as he is—cannot do damage to a real-life writer, Said certainly can—and did. Today, students of English literature walk away from Mansfield Park taking it to be a novel about empire and the postcolonial consciousness. It was in this way that Mansfield Park was taught to me in my freshman English seminar at Columbia, and it was this very essay that was assigned to me—and dozens of other eighteen-year-olds who don’t know better—during my very first week of college. The tragedy is that we did not discuss virtue, responsibility, immorality, or authority in the context of Austen’s novel but jumped straight into Said’s postcolonial critique. It is thus that I suspect many of my classmates will remember Mansfield Park for the rest of their lives.

I use Mansfield Park and Edward Said as simply one example of the dangers of literary interpretation, but the examples are limitless. Under this quack system of interpretation, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” becomes a speech not about suicide but about “oppression.” The Great Gatsby becomes a novel not about desire and the American Dream but about “the complexities of gender and sexuality.” These interpretations are not confined to the academy but make their way to the mainstream, infesting the minds of many young readers—such as in the case of the Hamlet lecture about oppression, which received over one million views on Instagram.

And when a small group of ideologues hijack literary interpretation, an entire civilization suffers.

So what is to be done? For one, we must return to the text itself and to authorial intent as a starting point. Literary interpretation should begin not with the critic’s theory but with the words on the page. In other words, derive your own interpretations rather than blindly trusting “authorities.” After all, Kinbote, too, was a professor—and someone gave that Hamlet lecturer a microphone.

It turns out that Nabokov was a very wise dude.

Every fall, I attempt to convince my yearly cohort of college-counseling students that writing is the single most important skill they will ever learn. Many of them stare at me in disbelief, insisting that the rise of generative AI has made the need to write nearly obsolete. Deep into college-application season, however, my students soon realize that the good writers among them will not only have an easier time cruising through their college essays but may also see better admissions results. After all, the college essay is meant—at least in theory—to identify innovative thinkers.

Despite what our schools may have students believe about the relative uselessness of writing, strong writers achieve disproportionate professional success because good writing is a proxy for creative thinking—and creative thinkers become society’s visionaries. Take Steve Jobs, who was a storyteller before he was a programmer, or Thurgood Marshall, who reshaped American law not only through legal mastery but through powerful rhetoric. These mavericks have gone down in history not necessarily for their technical proficiency but for their aptitude for creativity.

Writing is the best tool we have to showcase creative thought.

The act of writing allows the human brain not only to communicate existing ideas but also to generate new ones, with countless studies demonstrating the power of writing when it comes to shaping critical thinking.

A good writer is therefore a strong thinker—and this distinction transcends academic disciplines. In my counseling practice, for instance, I routinely observe smart STEM students producing more insightful essays than average humanities students, because good writing is not so much a measure of technical ability as it is a proxy for the capacity to express ideas. Because creative thinking is invaluable in any walk of life, writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.

Such is the rationale behind the college-admissions essay, which helps colleges identify students who demonstrate a unique aptitude for critical thinking and, by extension, a potential for long-term success.

Or at least that should be the rationale. Even in the college essay’s earliest days, critical thinking was never the main criterion.

The American college-admissions essay was born in the early 1920s, when a growing demand for higher education prompted elite colleges such as Harvard and Yale to identify additional methods to screen incoming college freshmen. The first iteration of the college essay focused less on academic potential than on the nebulous designation of “fit.” In 1919, Columbia University—my alma mater—unveiled the first “modern” college application, requiring applicants to provide information on their religious values and other metrics that allowed admissions officers to evaluate applicants on the basis of not just intellectual potential but of ideological conformity. As a result, the college-essay process soon became a racist endeavor meant to weed out “undesirable” candidates of Jewish origin, on the grounds that these students would not be a good “fit” for an educational environment driven by Protestant values.

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, however, with many universities forced to drop their racial quotas, the college essay evolved into a tool for admissions officers to gain a glimpse of applicants’ “backgrounds and perspectives.” Soon, the college essay became less about the discriminatory idea of “fit” and more about the ideas that students could bring to the intellectual table.

Around the same time, the revamped college essay shifted admissions practices towards a more holistic evaluative model that relied less on grades and test scores than on the applicant’s intellectual potential as a whole. In one sense, this model is still in use today: I have students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores who not only fail to secure admission to “elite” colleges but who are also destined to land in menial professional roles—not because they aren’t smart but because they have never learned to effectively express their ideas. In theory, the college essay should be an effective tool to separate “smart but dull” from “smart and interesting” students. Though many college-consulting professionals have expressed doubts about the viability of the college essay in the face of generative AI, so-called large language models will only ever fall into the category of “smart but dull,” giving truly visionary students a chance to shine by demonstrating their capacity for original thinking.

That is, if college admissions departments still cared about original thinking.

For a brief moment in time—the halcyon decades following the Civil Rights era—the college essay did indeed allow strong writers and thinkers to rise to the top of our society. In his book On Writing the College Application Essay, for instance, former Columbia admissions officer Harry Bauld wrote that the college essay “shows you at your alive and thinking best.” That was 1987. Today, colleges seem to be doing everything they can to move the college essay away from the model of “thinking” prowess towards the infamous doctrine of “fit.”

Sound familiar?

After decades of fighting against discriminatory admissions practices disguised as filters for “character” and “belonging,” our society has begun once again to evaluate college applicants on the basis of arbitrary values, reenvisioning the college-admissions process as a convoluted exercise in virtue-signaling.

Let’s take several colleges in North Carolina as examples.

Of the five most competitive colleges in North Carolina—Duke, Davidson, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State—three ask the ubiquitous “fit” question, prompting students to identify their reasons for wishing to attend these universities in a short-answer statement. Duke explicitly uses the language of “values” in its prompt, suggesting that the university cares less about academic preparation than it does about the morals of each individual applicant. Share the wrong moral values—conservatism, religious traditionalism, or moral absolutism, among others—and risk facing a rejection letter in your inbox the coming spring.

The “fit” question is not the only way these colleges screen for values. UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest both insist that students demonstrate their readiness to make contributions to their “community,” thereby favoring students with a natural bent towards communal rather than individualistic values. Wake Forest, in fact, has no reservations about framing its “community” prompt in terms of social justice:

Dr. Maya Angelou, renowned author, poet, civil-rights activist, and former Wake Forest University Reynolds Professor of American Studies, inspired others to celebrate their identities and to honor each person’s dignity. Choose one of Dr. Angelou’s powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?

Similarly, Wake Forest asks students to identify their top-five favorite books. While this might seem an innocuous and even intellectually worthy question, there is no doubt that a student who includes Born a Crime by Trevor Noah will fare better in the admissions process than a student who dares to list Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Perhaps the most egregious sin of the college-essay process is the way that its covert screening for “values” goes hand-in-hand with its conformity to the current political moment. Every year, colleges adjust their prompts to reflect the spirit of the times rather than focusing on students’ intellectual merits, and these amendments allow colleges, in turn, to virtue-signal to the rest of the world that they care more about arbitrary political movements than they do about the intellectual caliber of their students. Adapting to the rise of wokeness in 2014, for instance, Duke added the following college-essay prompt:

Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.

This year, however, with wokeness falling somewhat out of vogue—and despite Duke students’ defense of the “queer” essay prompt—the university scrambled to replace the “gender identity” statement with the following:

Meaningful dialogue often involves respectful disagreement. Provide an example of a difference of opinion you’ve had with someone you care about. What did you learn from it?

My gut reaction to the viewpoint-diversity essay, which overtook this year’s college-admissions process, was excitement: It seemed that colleges were finally moving away from screening for arbitrary values and more towards tolerance. The further we got into the college-admissions process, however, the more I grew skeptical of the prompt’s intentions. The college-essay process still largely denies intellectually curious students a chance to share their ideas in favor of pandering to the current political moment. Indeed, the “viewpoint diversity” prompt has become this year’s new “it” essay, with colleges largely looking to avoid censure from the Trump administration following 2024’s disastrous “tentifada” phenomenon. While the prompt may have been implemented with good intentions, the vast majority of my students chose to take the liberal position in their essays, not only virtue-signaling that they can “talk” to conservatives (a ludicrous concept to begin with) but also once again giving colleges the excuse to screen for viewpoint over intellectual merit.

While colleges can claim they don’t discriminate, the very act of asking about “fit,” “values,” and even “difference of opinion” on an application raises eyebrows, especially given what we know about historic discrimination on the basis of “fit.” After all, neither ideological conformity nor interest in community service correlate with long-term professional success—especially when the majority of students from elite universities will graduate to pursue individualistic roles in the private sector.

Good writers who refuse to outsource their thinking to ChatGPT will often emerge victorious in the college-admissions process. But they largely go against the tide of a system increasingly hostile to original thought. Forced to draft hackneyed essays about the virtue of doling out soup to undocumented migrants, these visionary thinkers have been effectively deprived of the opportunity to showcase their intellectual merit by admissions officers who police virtues at the expense of humanistic inquiry.

If colleges wish to remain institutions devoted to intellectual excellence rather than moral choreography, they must abandon their obsession with “fit” and return to the college essay’s original purpose: to identify students most capable of independent thought.

It is precisely those students who go on to shape ideas, build institutions, and sustain our free, pluralistic society.

Welcome back to the Pens and Poison Podcast!

This is not your ordinary literature podcast. Join me as I explore the state of humanities education, the publishing industry, and the literary world at large through a series of spicy interviews, hot takes, and literary ramblings.

On today’s episode, we talk to Ricardo Lugo, the founder of Bibliotecando, a platform that explores literature and cultural criticism. We discuss the evolution of Lugo's platform, his favorite authors, the challenges of translation, and the intersection of literature with political realities. Our conversation explores the flaws of utopian ideals, the role of competition in human nature, and the importance of slowing down in a fast-paced world.

Ricardo Lugo writes Bibliotequeando. You can also find him on Instagram and YouTube.

Bibliotequeando

Análisis del mundo a través de los libros, literatura y cultura

Por Bibliotequeando - Ricardo Lugo

Russian literature has a bit of a reputation problem.

You’ve been told that Dostoyevsky is too depressing, Tolstoy is too dense, and Chekhov is too dull.

As we say in the Motherland—chto za huinya (what rubbish)!

I’m a native Russian speaker, and I’ve been reading Russian literature my entire life. I might be biased, but the Russians have produced some of the most profound literature ever to grace our world, and it’s time we all gave it a chance.

But in a sea of Ivan Ivanovich Ivanovs, where does one even start?

I’ve made this nifty guide to take you through Russian literature across the ages—from imperial ballrooms to Soviet labor camps—and to hopefully give you a tour of my people’s most insightful literary creations.

And trust me—Russian lit isn’t scary.

(Well, maybe a little.)

I’ve also made these cute little graphics to go along with your reading experience. The graphics took me longer than the article itself (though this might be because I am a better writer than I am a graphic designer), so please enjoy the fruits of my labor.

The Foundations

Before we get to existential agony (don’t worry, it’s coming), let’s take a trip through satire and society.

Alexander Pushkin — Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, The Bronze Horseman

We begin our journey with Pushkin—the father of Russian literature himself. I grew up memorizing Pushkin poems, and it’s a rite of passage for every Russian child to commit his words to memory. I still have many of his poems memorized, but my two favorite Pushkin works are Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades.

I like to think of Eugene Onegin as the original situationship story, and The Queen of Spades as the precursor to Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. I also have a soft spot for The Queen of Spades because the protagonist is named Liza.

Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is another favorite. I used to think that the statue in St. Petersburg was put up as an homage to the poem. Apparently, it’s the other way around (Pushkin wrote his poem as an homage to the statue), but my version is dreamier.

Nikolai Gogol — Dead Souls

Gogol’s most famous novel reminds me a bit of Kafka’s The Castle—I suppose because they’re both about the ills of bureaucracy. There are some really funny jokes in here that might get lost on English speakers (one character is named Korobochka, for instance, which literally means “little box”), but it’s absolutely still worth the read. In fact, the first half might be one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written. Sadly, the second half doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor, and there’s a whole story here. Apparently, Gogol wrote an alternate version, but because all writers are crazy, he… burned it. Along with the rest of the book.

That’s right. Dead Souls sadly remains unfinished. If I had a time machine, I’d go back to the moment Gogol decided to burn Dead Souls and prevent him from doing so. Someone convinced Virgil not to burn The Aeneid, after all, so maybe in another world, it would have been done!

Ivan Goncharov — Oblomov

There’s a lot of sleeping and dreaming in this novel. In fact, it’s basically a novel about not getting out of bed—and why that might be a moral, philosophical, and civilizational problem. And in case you thought I was making a joke about Ivan Ivanoviches, our protagonist is named Ilya Ilyich Oblomov. (At least he’s not Ilya Ilyich Ilyichov.)

Mikhail Lermontov — A Hero of Our Time

My grandmother was always talking about this book when I was a kid, and it’s certainly one of the early Russian greats. It’s widely considered to be the first psychological Russian novel and a precursor to Dostoyevsky. There are some great Pushkin allusions in here—as well as a Byronic hero.

Alexander Griboyedov — Woe from Wit

When I was growing up, my dad would always say that I had “gore ot uma” (woe from wit). He still says it, actually, so I had to figure out where the phrase originally came from. Turns out it’s from this little comedy in verse about post-Napoleonic Moscow. The maid in this book is named Liza, and she likes to speak her mind even when she’s not supposed to.

Huh. My dad was onto something.

Dostoyevsky

I could write you an entire dissertation on Dostoyevsky. In fact, I probably would have if English departments were still sane across the country, but I’ll try to keep this short. Here are my favorite works by Dostoyevsky—in no particular order (they are all wonderful except for The Adolescent).

Dostoyevsky is probably my favorite author of all time (which tells you everything you need to know about me), so again, I might be slightly biased here.

Crime and Punishment

A man decides he might be Napoleon and acquires an axe. As you might expect, things don’t go so well for poor Raskolnikov.

If you’re new to Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment is by far the best entry point. It’s the most accessible and most famous of his major novels. It’s a deep dive into “not all ideas are created equal,” a lesson on the virtues of redemption, and a ton of fun.

A small detail that’s lost on English readers—our protagonist, Raskolnikov, is named after the Russian word for “split.” That’s all I’ll say before you dive in yourself!

The Brothers Karamazov

I don’t even know where to begin with this one, but we have a lot to get through, so I’ll keep it short.

The Brothers Karamazov is the deepest novel about the nature of religion and man ever written—and I don’t think anyone will ever beat it. I love theological dramas because religion provides us with a moral framework to ask and answer some of the most important questions known to man.

The Brothers K tells the story of three brothers—Alyosha, Dmitri and Ivan—and the investigation of the murder of their father, Fyodor Karamazov, but it’s more a philosophical meditation on life than it is a murder mystery. The most profound insight on the nature of religion occurs halfway through the book in Ivan’s story of “The Grand Inquisitor,” a tale of religion and free will. It’s this chapter that’s always stayed with me, even fifteen years since I first read the book.

Yes—I read The Brothers Karamazov in the 10th grade. This might be why I had no friends.

I need to reread this one for sure.

Notes from Underground

Wherein a man who doesn’t leave his room explains society.

This is one of my favorite Dostoyevsky novels, and I think it’s by far the most underrated one. It’s not as widely read as The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers K because the first 80 pages or so are basically just a philosophical treatise, but it’s a direct response to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done?, a utopian novel that would inspire many of Lenin’s philosophies in the coming century (we’ll get there). Dostoyevsky, as you can imagine, takes the opposite stance and argues that utopias are impossible given all we know about human nature.

Nabokov famously hated this novel, writing,

I would like you further to ponder ‘”Crime and Punishment” and “Memoirs from a Mousehole,” also known as the ‘’Notes from Underground’‘ (1864), from this point of view: Is the artistic pleasure you derive from accompanying Dostoyevsky on his excursions into the sick souls of his characters, is it consistently greater than any other emotions, thrills of disgust, morbid interest in a crime thriller? There is even less balance between the esthetic achievement and the element of criminal reportage in Dostoyevsky’s other novels.

Ouch. Can’t please everyone, I suppose.

White Nights

This one holds a soft spot in my heart. It’s an early Dostoyevsky novella that follows a pair of lovers as they bare their souls to one another in the span of just under a week. Again—a small detail that’s lost on English readers is that the girl in the novel immediately introduces herself as “Nastenka,” the diminutive of “Nastya,” which in itself is already a diminutive of “Anastasia.” Even today, it would be strange for a Nastya to introduce herself as Nastenka, a name typically reserved for lovers or parents. Thus Dostoyevsky sets up a paradigm in which we know that Nastenka and her unnamed lover will get too close too quickly.

White Nights is the ultimate exploration of bliss and human closeness. I read it in one sitting in a bathtub and cried for three hours after (still in the bathtub). I still cry every time I think about this book. I’m crying right now.

The Idiot

What happens when a genuinely good man enters a corrupt society? Spoiler—society does not look kindly on him. The Idiot builds on many of the themes from White Nights, asking what is “socially acceptable” for us humans, who are at once too shallow and too deep (depending on who you ask). Once again, we have Dostoyevsky’s clever name play. Our protagonist, Prince Myshkin, is named after a мышь (mysh’) or “mouse” in Russian.

Demons

This is Dostoyevsky’s most political novel and the least well-known of his four major novels. It’s an epic takedown of Russian nihilism (which we’ll get to a bit later) and a story about finding meaning in our society. I’ve also included it in my nihilism section and will explain it a bit more in depth once we get there because there’s some context you’ll need to know first.

The Adolescent

You can honestly skip this one if you want, but I thought I’d throw it in here to give a full rundown of Dostoyevsky. I’ve actually read it twice (I thought maybe I missed something the first time) and I can still barely remember the plot because it’s so much duller and less profound than his other novels. A mark down for Dostoyevsky with this one, but even the world’s greatest geniuses have their lows.

The Double & The Gambler

These two novellas are usually published in pairs. The first of these is consciously influenced by Gogol’s Dead Souls and tackles the uncanny nature of Russian bureaucracy; the second was inspired by Dostoyevsky’s own gambling addiction and echoes the themes in The Queen of Spades.

Tolstoy

I’m a Dostoyevsky girl rather than a Tolstoy girl, but Anna Karenina is still one of my top ten novels of all time, so, actually, I’m also a Tolstoy girl.

Let’s get into it.

Anna Karenina

A bored society lady gets herself into big trouble.

We’ve all had a Count Vronsky in our lives—or, at least, we’ve met him. But most of us aren’t as stupid as Anna.

Or are we?

Anna Karenina is Tolstoy’s masterful work of literature on domestic life. At the center of the novel, of course, lies the affair, but through the character Levin and his eventual marriage to Kitty, we’re also asked to consider themes of Christianity and death—two philosophical topics that are hallmarks of Tolstoy’s overall work.

Anna Karenina explores what constitutes “the good life” and what duty we owe to our families. It’s the ultimate work of great literature because, unlike the morally ambiguous crap being published today, it actually arrives at an answer.

War and Peace

I distinctly remember reading War and Peace over winter break in the 10th grade (I had a Russian literature phase at fifteen that I’m still in to this day) and imagining that I was Natasha Rostova dancing in a ballroom. I definitely resonated much more with the “peace” sections than the “war” sections, and I still don’t quite understand Tolstoy’s random treatise on military strategy at the end of the book, but there’s something for everyone in this behemoth of a novel. In fact, one of the scenes in my most recent novel Blue Snow was directly inspired by Tolstoy’s ballroom scenes with Natasha.

There’s a War and Peace film starring Audrey Hepburn that I absolutely don’t recommend, and I usually love Hepburn. Just read the book.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

I actually didn’t like this one until the very last page. Then it all clicked together, and I cried for an hour. That’s all I’ll say about this novella. It’s Tolstoy at his best.

The Kreutzer Sonata

I’m also still not over this one. I’ll do a lot of audiobooks during the day when I’m running around meeting with clients or filming content for the Pens and Poison Instagram, and I did this one on audiobook. The cool thing about Russian books and movies is that everything is always available online for free. I guess there are a few good things that came out of the USSR.

The Kreutzer Sonata was Tolstoy’s most controversial book when it came out. I can’t tell you why without giving it away, but hopefully that intrigues you enough to pick it up. Don’t worry—unlike War and Peace, this one won’t take you more than a few hours.

The Nihilists

All right. It’s time to talk about Russian nihilism—and, no, it’s not just the belief that nothing means anything. Russian nihilism was as political as it was philosophical—and a lot more complicated than the nihilism we associate today with, say, postmodern theory.

Russian nihilism was a fundamentally anti-tsarist movement that rebelled against the old order of society—against the tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality that this group of young revolutionaries believed was irrevocably intertwined with everyday Russian life. The movement gained popularity in the 1860s and culminated in the eventual assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. It was this revolutionary fervor that would later inspire the Bolsheviks.

Nihilism makes quite an appearance in Russian literature.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky — What Is to Be Done?

I don’t like this book. It’s an attack on marriage, traditional family structures, capitalism, and everything else you can attack if you’re a bum who takes his personal problems out on society. Nevertheless, this is one of the most important works of Russian literature not as a standalone piece but because it inspired Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky was not happy with this book, as you can imagine), and that’s a win in my book (no pun intended).

Ivan Turgenev — Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons is about the nihilists, but it certainly isn’t a nihilist book itself. In fact, through the characters Arkady and Bazarov, Turgenev critiques the nihilist movement and advocates for a return to humanity. It’s one of the most moving pro-tradition novels in the Russian literary canon, and I highly recommend it.

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin — The Golovlyov Family

The Golovlyov Family isn’t exactly a nihilist novel either (in fact, What Is to Be Done? might be the only actual pro-nihilist novel in the Russian canon), but Saltykov-Shchedrin certainly explores some of the “hot nihilist themes” in this family saga, which tackles the ills of spiritual rot.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Demons

All right. Now we can explain Demons in the context of the nihilists. I took a whole class on Demons, and I’ve read the novel twice, but I’m sure I still don’t understand the full extent of the political complexities woven into this novel—it’s really that complex! Nevertheless, I’ll do my best to give you a quick run-down.

Dostoyevsky was apparently a leftist revolutionary in his youth. He went to prison for it, and on the brink of death, had a sudden epiphany about the meaning of life, and became deeply conservative (or so the story goes). Demons was inspired by both his early revolutionary days and the real-life Nechaev affair, where a group of revolutionaries murdered one of their own in the name of “ideological purity.”

Never heard that one before…

Unlike Turgenev, who takes a more sober stance on nihilism, Dostoyevsky paints spiritually hollow characters who meet their demise precisely because they reject everything that gives us meaning: God, family, morality, and love.

Chekhov

Chekhov was a doctor before he was a writer, but we remember him today more for his writing than his contributions to the medical field (though I’m sure he was a great doctor as well). Most people today know Chekhov for his gun—the dramatic principle that states that if a gun appears in the first act of a play, it will most certainly be used by the last—and, accordingly, Chekhov is most famous for his plays and his short stories.

Uncle Vanya

A lot of intelligent people fall in love with people they’re not supposed to fall in love with, and no one gets what they want. Uncle Vanya is fundamentally a play about wasted potential. I think it was the play that inspired me to really do something with my life because I didn’t want to end up like any of its characters.

The Cherry Orchard

With the decay of the old social order, an aristocratic family argues about… nothing in particular. The Cherry Orchard is a lament for dying traditions and a reminder that people have their funniest moments in times of despair—at least, the Russians do.

Fun fact—there are two guns in this play that don’t serve any purpose. Chekhov did not even follow his own advice.

Three Sisters

Three society women spend years dreaming of a better life in Moscow while—you guessed it—doing absolutely nothing to get there. Three Sisters is Chekhov’s foray into longing and dying ambition—as well as the horrors of the passage of time.

Short Stories (Ward No. 6, The Lady with the Dog, The Little Trilogy, A Joke)

I’ve left my favorite Chekhov stories above, and they’re all great starting points for Chekhov. A Joke isn’t as famous as his other stories, but it’s one of my favorites and demonstrates Chekhov’s mastery when it comes to the short story.

The Silver Age

Alexander Pushkin inaugurated what we know as the Golden Age of Russian poetry. Following on Pushkin’s heels, the Silver Age poets were a group of Russian poets in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Here are my favorite poems from each of the four major Silver Age poets. Several of these poems feature prominently in Soviet films. The Soviets might have had terrible economic ideas, but a culture that puts poetry voiceovers in their movies has its redeeming qualities.

From this list, Akhmatova is a particular favorite of mine.

Anna Akhmatova — Requiem, I’ve ceased to smile long ago

Akhmatova’s “I’ve ceased to smile long ago…” is the first poem I read from the Silver Age poets at the age of 18. While the Brits and the Americans were writing weird, abstruse modernist poems in 1915, the Russians were still keeping it simple, observing more classical traditions of form and rhyme. I think it’s this poetic simplicity in Russian poetry that’s always drawn me to it. Even the most complex and heart-wrenching Russian poems remind me of childhood because of the lyricism embedded in their verses.

“Requiem” is Akhmatova’s most famous poem. Written over three decades, it explores the terrors of the Great Purge in Soviet Russia with beautiful linguistic precision.

Alexander Blok — On the Field of Kulikovo

Blok’s most famous poem is a simple but profound war poem and an homage to Mother Russia. There’s a recording of him reading it from 1920. As you might imagine from a 1920s recording, you can barely make out what he’s saying amidst the static, but you can hear Blok’s voice full of emotion as he reads out his glorious words.

Marina Tsvetaeva — I Like…, Homesickness

“I Like…” appears in the most famous Soviet film of all time, The Irony of Fate, where it was set to music by Mikael Tariverdiev and performed by the legendary diva Alla Pugacheva. It’s a perfect example of how literature, music, and cinema came together in Soviet Russia—and how Russian pop stars actually engage with serious poetry (unlike some fake “English teachers” in our culture). The poem itself is something of an unrequited love poem, but unlike in the typical unrequited love poem, both parties are in separate relationships. It’s one of the most touching poems in the Silver Age canon, and may have been inspired by Tsvetaeva’s affair with fellow poet Osip Mandelstam.

Osip Mandelstam — The Age, Stalin Epigram

Oh, hey. There he is!

Mandelstam died an early death in transit to a Soviet labor camp. He was arrested twice—once for insulting Stalin in his “Stalin Epigram,” and a second time for “counter-revolutionary activities.” Out of the Silver Age poets, he was certainly the most politically active, and his poems reflect deeply counter-revolutionary themes. Because of the heavy political bent to his work, Mandelstam resonates less with me personally than the other three poets do, but I love his poem “The Age,” which is less of a political poem and more of a lament for the decay of a lost era.

The Soviets

Well, well, well. It’s time to dive into Soviet Russia, where massive censorship dictated what you could or could not say in literature. The Polish writer Czesław Miłosz has a fantastic description of the nature of the Soviet-era publishing machine and the typical “Soviet writer” in his book The Captive Mind:

The intellectual of whom I speak is not one who believes in writing for the bureau drawer. He curses and despairs over the censorship and demands of the publishing trusts. Yet at the same time, he is profoundly suspicious of unlicensed literature. The publishing license he himself receives does not mean that the editor appreciates the artistic merits of his book, nor that he expects it to be popular with the public. That license is simply a sign that its author reflects the transformation of reality with scientific exactness.

Huh. That reminds me of something. I have no idea what it could be.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

If you’re familiar with the Soviet gulag, you probably know it from Solzhenitsyn. I read this one not too long after I first read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and it’s eerie to consider the parallels between the Soviet gulag and the Nazi concentration camp—even though the latter might have been marginally worse. Solzhenitsyn also has The Gulag Archipelago, which is a non-fiction series diving deeper into the ills of the gulag. I’ve been keeping this list to fiction, so I won’t go too far into it, but it’s worth reading alongside One Day in the Life.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky — Roadside Picnic

I don’t think I’d ever pick up Roadside Picnic on my own—I typically don’t read sci-fi—but this is the book that inspired Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which might be my favorite film of all time. The book is a bit different from the film and has a lot more plot, but this might be one of the rare cases where the film is a lot better. Still, Roadside Picnic is a cornerstone of Soviet literature and absolutely worth the read.

Mikhail Bulgakov — The Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog

The devil comes to Moscow—with a cat.

The Master and Margarita is a critique of the Soviet Union through a devil who roams the streets of Moscow and a cat named Behemoth (which is actually funnier in Russian because “behemoth” is also our word for “hippo”). Coming from a post-Soviet household, I resonate deeply with the novel’s commentary on decaying social norms in the Soviet Union, as well as its satire on Soviet life. The principal theme in the novel is the erosion of traditional Christian morals through the eradication of religion under the Soviet regime.

Bulgakov’s other famous novel is Heart of a Dog. I don’t know why I’ve never gotten around to reading it, but from what I understand, it’s worth a read, so I’m including it here. I don’t want to look up anything about it because I don’t like to have context when I dive into a new work of literature (it’s more fun that way), so you shall have to decide for yourself whether it’s worth reading. It probably is, and there’s a great Soviet film that I’ll watch one day after I’ve read the book.

After Ideology

With the ebb of the Soviet chokehold on society, Russian literature spread its wings (in the case of Nabokov, the famous lepidopterist, there was also a lot of literal wing-spreading).

Vladimir Nabokov — Pale Fire, Lolita

Even though Nabokov hates Dostoyevsky, I forgive him because he’s certainly a better stylist than Dostoyevsky. Lucky for you, Nabokov wrote mostly in English, so you can access his original ideas in their original form. In fact, Nabokov famously left parts of Lolita untranslated when he went to translate the book into Russian, deeming certain passages fundamentally untranslatable. That should tell you everything you need to know about this literary expat.

Nabokov is such a master of his craft (English was his third language!) that he manages to create beauty with respect to one of the most vile topics known to man. Because of its subject matter, Lolita gets quite a bad rep from people who haven’t read it, but I don’t know a single person who has read Lolita and still turns away in disgust.

Pale Fire is a different beast entirely. It’s one giant footnote to a poem, but unlike DFW’s footnotes to Infinite Jest, it’s quite readable. Pale Fire is about a crazy guy named Kinbote who analyzes a series of Cantos written by the famous fictional poet John Shade. Through Pale Fire, Nabokov explores obsession and delusion as you decide who’s mad, who’s lying, and whether objective truth ever stood a chance.

Vasily Grossman — Life and Fate

I’m still reading this one, but it seems appropriate to include it here. More than one person whose intellectual opinion I trust has cited this book as an all-time favorite, so I will take the liberty of including it here. It’s about as long as War and Peace, so expect an update no sooner than six months from now. I am also biased in favor of this book because it was written by a Russian-Jew and explores the horrors of Nazism. Once I exit my non-fiction binge (I just finished a 1200-page World War II history book), I will return to this one and finish it up.

Joseph Brodsky — Selected Poems

Brodsky is one of my favorite Russian poets. He fled the Soviet Union in 1972 and, with the help of our friend W.H. Auden, settled in America, where he taught at a variety of universities. Like the Silver Age poets, he has a broad range, but I’ve done an in-depth analysis of his poem “Odysseus to Telemachus” here.

Victor Pelevin — Homo Zapiens

If you’re familiar with White Noise by Don DeLillo, this might be its Russian counterpart. We’re now in the world of post-Soviet Russian critique as we follow Babylen Tatarsky, a poet turned advertising copywriter. You can see where this might be going.

The book’s Russian title, by the way, is Generation “P”. The “P” stands for Pepsi.

A Note on Translations

Let’s talk about translations—because if you don’t speak Russian, it’s crucial to get a good one.

There are several notable Russian translators.

• Constance Garnett — Garnett is one of the pioneers of Russian translation, and her translations are still widely read today because they’ve been in the public domain for quite some time now. Garnett gets criticized by detractors for “Anglicizing” certain moments, but I genuinely think that her translations are more spiritually faithful than any of the contemporary translations being pushed out today.

• David Magarshack — An older and established Russian translator. His translations are clean and elegant. A safe choice.

• Oliver Ready — Ready is part of the newer generations of Russian translators. I don’t hate his translations, but he tends to over-modernize, making Dostoyevsky sound like Philip Roth, or something.

• Pevear & Volokhonsky — Pevear & Volokhonsky are a husband-wife duo and the most popular translators today among English speakers because of the readability of their prose. That said, he doesn’t speak Russian, and she writes poorly in English, so much of Dostoyevsky gets lost in an inefficient game of broken telephone.

• Michael R. Katz — I haven’t looked into Katz too much, but he’s frequently cited in the world of Russian lit translation, so he might be worth the read as well.

Best translations typically have a strong command of both the original language and the target language. They must balance preserving the original tone and meaning while also making the text most fluid in the target language.

In my view, the Garnett translation reads most smoothly in English and preserves the spirit of the original Russian. Other translators tend to modernize texts in ways that don’t reflect the Russian times.

If you ask me, skip the modern trends and get the Garnett.

Whatever you do, please just don’t read Pevear & Volokhonsky.

Or better yet, start your Russian language learning journey today! I’m happy to help!

I’d always wanted to be a professor of literature. Sitting in Columbia University’s academic advising office during my freshman year at one of America’s premier institutions for literary study, I pressed my heels into the carpet to dispel my nervousness—I was about to plan my journey to the ivory tower. Shaking my advisor’s hand, I remember sharing my vision of myself ten years down the road: I would stalk into a lecture hall in a cashmere collared sweater and glasses, and, poetry book in hand, recite the opening lines of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Then, I would ask my students what they thought it all meant.

I can’t quite remember my advisor’s exact reaction to that particular vignette, but if she laughed at me, she would have had a point. Ten years from that day, I would not be in academia.

Columbia University nearly eradicated my lifelong love of literature. You might be thinking that anyone asked to read for a living would eventually learn to detest the very act itself, and while this may have contributed to my disillusionment with the literary academy, the real plague that drove me away was something much more insidious: literary theory.

All across American college campuses, literature departments have been infested by a lopsided political agenda that masquerades as “literary theory.” This ideology, often presented under the guise of feminist scholarship, Marxist critical theory, or Postcolonial thought-experiments, has poisoned the study of literature and convinced students of English that the purpose of literature is not to explore the human condition but to drive political and societal change. As a result, literary fields such as publishing, academia, and journalism are increasingly dominated by ideological extremists who seek to bring the focus of literary study away from the humanistic tradition and towards their own political agendas.

What is Literary Theory?

To understand how literature has become captured by the ideological left, we must first understand the concept of literary theory—both a tool for literary interpretation and a lens through which students of literature are asked to consider broader cultural and political debates.

For centuries, literary study has always asked fundamental questions about human nature: “What is the importance of family?” (Anna Karenina), “What is revenge?” (Hamlet), or “What is the nature of love?” (Jane Eyre). More recently, however, the ideological overtake of literary theory by the political left has convinced young students of literature that all literature must necessarily speak to contemporary political questions, shifting the discourse away from universals to particulars. Through queer theory, “What is the importance of family?” becomes “What are the oppressive structures inherent in the traditional family model?” Similarly, Postcolonial theory reimagines “What is revenge?” as “How do power dynamics shaped by colonialism inform acts of resistance?” Feminist theory takes “What is the nature of love?” and asks “How does love reinforce or challenge patriarchal systems?” These shifts exemplify how modern literary theory often prioritizes a critique of societal systems over the exploration of timeless, universal questions about human nature. While these new approaches may offer valuable insights in limited settings, they risk narrowing the scope of interpretation by subordinating the text’s inherent questions to contemporary ideological agendas; in turn, the overreach of theory diminishes the magic of literature by reducing it to a political vehicle rather than an art form.

But how did we get here—and why?

Early Literary Study

We can date the modern American academy back to the 19th century, with the emergence of the “liberal arts” education system in many elite universities such as Harvard and Yale. Inspired by the Greek paideia—a type of education concerned with well-rounded humanistic inquiry— scholars of the 1800s such as Matthew Arnold promoted the idea of literature as a repository of moral and cultural wisdom, laying the groundwork for the methods that would shape the study of literature into the 20th century. The liberal arts system, structured around a centralized European canon, emphasized both critical thinking and Protestant ideals yet left many unanswered questions in terms of literature’s actual purpose.

Enter 20th century literary scholars.

Conservative thinkers of this era set out to develop a more centralized purpose to studying literature and believed that education should be instrumental in the development of moral character. Among the most prominent of these intellectuals were Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, who spearheaded the New Humanist school of pedagogical thought. Discrediting the naturalist, romantic, and utilitarian thinkers of the previous century, this movement emphasized the need for humanistic inquiry—asking important questions about what it means to be human—in the literary academy.

Deriving many of their views from the tradition of classical liberalism, More and Babbitt had a heavy influence on my personal literary idol, the American-turned-British poet T.S. Eliot—arguably the most important forerunner of modern literary criticism. Drawing on More and Babbitt’s foundation, Eliot devised the school of thought we know today as New Criticism—the default method of literary analysis presented in American high school classrooms. While its formal name has fallen out of fashion, New Criticism is the methodology we all know today as “close reading.” With its relatively straightforward premise of deriving meaning through the observation of word connotation and sentence structure, New Criticism soon established itself as the dominant ideology of the early 20th century literary academy. While its reign never quite faded into total oblivion, it would soon be overshadowed by the beast of literary theory.

Russian Formalism

Across the ocean, in a Russia shattered by a recent revolution, the Russian Formalists aimed to create a system of textual analysis that would focus on a work’s structural or linguistic elements rather than its relationship to politics. Leading Russian Formalist critic Roman Jakobson, for one, believed that a text’s distinctive syntactic features were inseparable from its fundamental meaning, and it was through this close analysis of syntax that the Russian Formalists proposed we approach literature. Rejecting the idea that literature should be evaluated on the basis of its ideological or moral messaging, Russian Formalism instead focused on how narrative structures and poetic devices shape the meaning of a given literary text.

As Russian Formalism seeped into the American academy, it gained immense popularity and was soon established alongside New Criticism as the dominant mode of literary thought. And had the study of literature been organized around a broader scope of texts instead of a primary Western canon, perhaps they would have retained their rightful place in the academy. Instead, scholars soon encountered a seemingly insuperable problem: if you keep close-reading the same set of texts, you eventually run out of new things to say.

The ebb of New Criticism and Russian Formalism thus gave way to a new ideology: progressivism.

The Influence of Pragmatists and Progressives

While Babbitt pushed a model of education that primarily focused on the individual—i.e., the effect of a given text on personal moral development—his main adversaries, a group of philosophers belonging to a school of thought called Pragmatism, believed that education could not be self-contained and introduced the concept of “practical effects” to the educational sphere, according to which any object might be defined by the nature of its external repercussions. Under this model, the big names in Pragmatism—Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and William James—began to blur the dictates of objective truth; by 1903, in a lecture delivered at Harvard University, Peirce encouraged this pragmatic maxim to “allow any flight of imagination provided this imagination ultimately alights upon a possible practical effect.” In other words, Peirce and his fellow pragmatists began to claim that individual truths were predicated on one’s surrounding reality. Dewey, in turn, believing that education should serve a social function, founded the University of Chicago Lab School, an experimental private institution founded on the premise of learning through discovery of individual truths. It was at this school that I spent my most foundational intellectual years.

I do not wish to blame the Pragmatists for the downfall of our society, but if you sense where this might be going, you might observe that this innocuous group of philosophers opened quite the can of worms. And while the Pragmatists didn’t explicitly dabble in literary theory, their educational philosophy soon found its way to Babbitt’s greatest rivals—the Progressives. Backed by Woodrow Wilson, the Progressives incorporated pragmatist philosophy into their teachings and introduced the idea of government intervention in education as a function of greater social good. By the 1930s, Babbitt’s classical liberalism was on the way out, and a new perspective—based on fostering empathy and social awareness—was born. Thus literature shifted away from its humanist ideals toward humanitarian ones.

Reader-Response Theory

Meanwhile, back in the literary academy, scholars such as Louise Rosenblatt and Wolfgang Iser, influenced by this new strain of progressivism, began toying with the idea that a reader’s personal experience is central to understanding a given literary work. Borrowing from Rosenblatt and Iser, critics William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley soon published a 1947 essay titled “The Intentional Fallacy,” which challenged the concept of authorial intent and proclaimed that a reader’s response to a given text should be independent of its author’s original intention. This revolutionary idea—that it didn’t matter what the author meant—gained immediate traction in the academy and soon became the cornerstone of many schools of contemporary literary thought.

In the present day, this method of analysis is often associated with Yeshiva University professor Stanley Fish, whose writing focuses on subjective reader experience and argues that the meaning of a given text should depend almost entirely on a reader’s individual interpretation. According to Fish, meaning is not inherent in a given literary text but is rather produced by “interpretive communities”—groups of readers (e.g. academic departments, fan clubs, or students in a single classroom) who share a set of conventions and strategies for making sense of the texts in front of them. This method, Fish argues, allows for “shared understanding,” even if such an understanding is not the “correct” one.

While Reader-Response theorists did not completely obliterate objective meaning from the study of literature, they certainly contributed to its downfall.

Structuralism

But before we jump ahead to the complete erasure of the concept of objective truth from the literary academy (it’s coming), let’s take a brief detour to France.

The year is 1916. A posthumous publication of a series of lectures by Ferdinand de Saussure effectively creates the field of modern linguistics and redefines the way that we think of words. Saussurean linguistics—as outlined in his Course in General Linguistics—is predicated on the concept of the “sign,” a double entity that is composed of a “signifier” and its “signified.” Picture a horse, for example. Under the Saussurean linguistic system, the physical horse standing before us is the “signified” and the word “horse” is the “signifier” that denotes the idea of a horse in our language. We use words to communicate meaning, and the meaning of each “signifier” is inherently tied to its “signified.” If I say the word “cat,” for instance, an image of a different sort of animal materializes in your brain. However, that horses are called “horses” and cats are called “cats” is completely arbitrary—at least according to Saussure. There’s no particular reason, Saussure argues, that a horse is called a “horse” and not a “kompumpum” (I made that up, please don’t attempt to Google it).

Signs, then, are completely arbitrary in our language—or in any language. But they are not only arbitrary but also differential: their value is determined by the nature of the other signs around them. You knew I was talking about a physical horse because I told you to picture a horse, but if I had told you to picture two little kids horsing around, you’d have a completely different image in your mind despite the fact that I’d just used the same word. The idea here is that we know what words mean based on context—and that no words can attain their proper meaning when considered in a vacuum.

Saussure meant no harm. He was only attempting to explain how language works. But his revolutionary Structuralist ideas quickly paved the way for the rise of Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction—which began to erode academic discipline in the literary world once and for all.

Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of Post-Structuralism, was not a literary critic but an anthropologist. By now, you might be picking up on a pattern—few theorists who contributed to the downfall of intellectual rigor in the literary academy had anything to do with literature at all. Yet Lévi-Strauss’s ideas were instrumental to the development of postmodern literary thought, and he remains one of the most widely read figures in the academy today.

Borrowing from Saussure, Lévi-Strauss argued that the fundamental unit of structure in mythology—what he called the mytheme—could be explained using a concept called binary opposition theory. Lévi-Strauss was initially only interested in the field of ethnography and the way in which different civilizations have historically approached mythology, yet his contributions to ethnography were quickly repurposed in English departments across the world.

Following an infamous trip to Brazil, Lévi-Strauss set out to reinterpret Saussure’s Structuralism by arguing that just as the meaning of language arose from setting words in opposition to one another, cultural myths have always been constructed by juxtaposing two opposing ideas. Drawing heavily on the Hegelian dialectic, Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that mythology was created by humans to reconcile and examine opposing concepts in life and to help us understand binaries such as good/evil, day/night, man/woman, etc.

That rings true—even cross-culturally. But what does that have to do with literary theory?

Well, Lévi-Strauss’s reinterpretation of Saussure’s Structuralism was central in establishing the school of Post-Structuralism that surfaced in the 1960s and still informs literary study today—and an academy that soon became obsessed with destroying the idea of the binary.

But it is no accident that our society began to lose faith in the notion of objective truth specifically when it did: midway through the twentieth century. The advent of World War II had shattered worldwide trust in both classical liberalism and the old order, leaving previously established truths either in complete shambles or in danger of subversion. By the 1960s, societies across the Western world had experienced a fair share of revolutions that disrupted the way the West had always conceptualized liberal ideals. Worldwide social reform throughout the decade opened up the academy to more progressive ideas amongst members of the New Left. When the Marxist thinker Herbert Marcuse, for one, joined the faculty at Columbia University, he brought his theory of “repressive tolerance” to the literary sphere, arguing that traditional tolerance in society perpetuates repressive ideologies and that true liberation can occur only when society becomes intolerant of hierarchies based on race, class, gender, etc. Marcuse’s ideas found fertile ground in the academy, where scholars began questioning the notion that literature could be viewed outside of a sociopolitical context, and by 1966, an Algerian-French professor named Jacques Derrida published a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University called “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”

It was this essay that would change literary theory forever.

Derrida’s lecture drew heavily on Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, but unlike his predecessors, Derrida believed that Structuralist theory relied too heavily on the idea of a privileged “center.” In Derrida’s view, binary opposition in the West had always developed with a hierarchical dimension that necessarily privileged one binary over the other. Good always trumped evil, day always trumped night, man always trumped woman, and so on. But what if nights were equally valid? And weren’t women just as competent as men?

There is, of course, value in Derrida’s claims. The problem, however, is not that women can’t be superior to men but that when you eliminate hierarchies as a whole on a societal level—when you tell human beings that evil is just as valid as good (because who is to say what constitutes evil and what qualifies as good?)—you begin to open doors to a nefarious system of moral relativism that strips human beings of the very tenets of existence that have always given them meaning.

The following year, Derrida adapted this morally relativistic view into his longer work Of Grammatology, where he set out to deconstruct the entire history of what he termed “Western Metaphysics.” In Of Grammatology, Derrida argued that the Western tradition had always privileged one side of the binary over the other—specifically, speech over writing—and in so doing coined the term “logocentrism” to identify a system in which words constitute an objective, external reality and create immediate access to meaning. For Derrida, this mode of interpreting the world around us was a giant faux pas. Logocentrism thus took on a negative connotation as Derrida began to destroy the pillars of objective reality and create a school of thought called Deconstruction. In Derrida’s view, the idea that the meaning of literature—or any other facet of external reality—was so readily accessible to readers was flawed almost to the point of deplorability. There was no objective meaning in literature—and those who purported to extract it were doing the whole thing wrong.

It was thus that Derrida created a world where objective humanistic inquiry in literature was on its way to extinction.

Postmodernism

Following in Derrida’s footsteps, as well as in those of Wimsatt and Beardsley, French critic Roland Barthes shifted literature’s burden of meaning entirely to the reader with the publication of his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” As its title suggests, Barthes claimed that authorship and historical context were irrelevant to literary hermeneutics—and that a reader’s personal interpretation of a given text should take precedence over its objective meaning.

Two years later, fellow French postmodern scholar Michel Foucault reinforced Barthes’ ideas with the delivery of his lecture “What Is an Author,” insisting that the concept of “author” itself was simply a societally constructed abstraction that had historically served to ascribe meaning to a given autonomous text. If you’re familiar with this fashionable concept of the “social construct,” you might not be surprised to learn that Foucault was one of its prime architects. In fact, Foucault’s four-volume History of Sexuality, which explored the development of and attitudes towards sexuality in the West, introduces the idea that sexual morality is culturally relative and that sexuality itself is ultimately just a social construct. These writings soon set the stage for queer and feminist studies, which would politicize literary study once and for all.

Queer, Feminist, Marxist, and Postcolonial Studies

The year is now 1976. Even before Foucault made his entrance onto the academic stage, the concept of objective truth was already losing ground in the academy. The expansion of American higher education after World War II resulted in a massive influx of PhD students, who, pressured to publish at astronomical speeds, aligned themselves with the hazy theorizing of the French postmodernists rather than adhering to academically rigorous inquiry. It didn’t help that McCarthyism of the previous decades had propelled an overwhelming number of self-proclaimed Marxists into the academy, who welcomed intellectual dissidents rejected from all other mainstream institutions.

Feminist and gender theorists thus entered the spotlight in swarms, with writers such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick building on Foucault’s lazy theorizing and setting out to redefine society’s conception of “gender”—especially in the context of literary analysis. Ethnic studies followed suit, with the entrance of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak’s Postcolonialism examining the repercussions of white exploitation of colonized peoples in both literary and anthropological studies. Around this same time, Columbia and UCLA Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw began to advocate for the welfare of marginalized black voices and thereby established Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. The Neo-Marxism of Walter Benjamin, Frederic Jameson, and Theodor Adorno similarly informed the ensuing discourse on equity in the academy and soon became yet another staple of literary criticism. Out of Neo-Marxism came Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, which stripped literature of its “fixed” literary value and ascribed objective literary quality to the existing power structures of the time.

By the 1980s and early 1990s, the ideological transformation of the academy was complete.

Literature in the Academy Today

Today, literary study is no longer an academic pursuit but a battleground for social justice, where the value of a given work is judged less by its aesthetic or intellectual merit and more by the political and social messages it conveys (or, in many cases, the messages imposed upon it). The literary academy has become an intellectual playground for identity-based literary criticism—feminist, post-colonial, and queer theory, to name a few—and seeks to challenge traditional, “mainstream” narratives through theory, which has become an excuse for academics to parrot certain ideologies over others. This approach is not merely a matter of prioritizing one overly-politicized lens over another—rather, it has become the only acceptable way to study literature, with all dissenting viewpoints shunned and eradicated.

Because literary theory has become the sine qua non for the study of literature, there is no more room for conservatives or traditionalists in the English departments across America. Furthermore, as English departments continue to dig themselves further into the theory rabbit hole, many scholars of literature are no longer studying literature itself. In the spring of 2024, for instance, we witnessed the overtake of college campuses by the ideological far left through illegal encampments; these prolonged protests, which often culminated in hatred and violence, were often led by graduate students in English departments and other related fields. They spouted the rhetoric of Edward Said and claimed that they were doing social justice work—without knowing a thing about the world outside of the narrow viewpoints they had been taught in their departments.

By the time I hit my own graduate years at Columbia, I had learned every detail about Karl Marx and Judith Butler yet had been asked to read only a few—if any—novels as a part of my program. Moreover, I found myself among a cohort of students driven not by love of art and beauty but by hatred and resentment.

The following year, I withdrew from academia.

Looking back, I recognize that the problem arises with the way that English departments teach students to analyze literature—far-left schools of literary theory have become so intertwined with literary study that it seems unfathomable to think that they might have very little to do with the study of literature itself.

Yet this narrow-minded focus on ideology obscures the broader, more universal themes that literature can and should address, resulting in an environment where literature is less about exploring the complexities of the human experience and more about advancing a particular political agenda. In many cases, these agendas have nothing to do with the texts in the English literary canon (though this notion in itself is on its way out as well) and are artificially imposed through the methods of postmodernist thinkers. Literary study, once a place for deep intellectual engagement, has thus been reduced to an ideological battle, and literature itself has become nothing more than a political vehicle, abstracted from its former glory as an art form.

But true lovers of the humanities know that the fundamental purpose of literature is not to create societal change but to fill the world with beauty through which we can better understand ourselves.

I once thought that I was alone in loving literature in this peculiar way, but I know now that there are so many reasonable voices who are equally as disheartened by literature’s annexation by the far left—and that we can do our part to encourage modern readers to consider literature in a different way and restore it to its onetime place among the classically liberal tradition. Above all else, literature is an expression of human emotion and beauty, and if we are to salvage humanistic inquiry, we must emphasize literature’s ability to explore the human condition and foster empathy across cultural and historical boundaries. By re-centering the study of literature on its aesthetic and philosophical dimensions, we can preserve its relevance and richness for future generations.

Should you pay for private school if you can afford it?

My fiancé and I are starting to think about having kids in the next few years, and naturally, as the child of two Soviet immigrants who put education above all else, I was quick to raise the question of private schooling for our future children. Although we disagree on the merits of private schooling, there is no question that my Chicago private high school was leagues ahead of his Miami public school in educational rigor.

In English, I read Macbeth while he read Percy Jackson. In math, I had the option to take linear algebra and discrete math as early as tenth grade. I became interested in philosophy early in life because my high school assigned Nietzsche in tenth grade, and I spent hours memorizing John Keats’s poems after my English teacher encouraged me to enter a poetry competition. Even on the STEM side, my high school gave me the chance to explore college-level math and science courses that rounded out my academic development.

That’s not to mention my private school’s abundant resources: premier college counseling, connections to prestigious internships, funding for more than 300 student clubs, and access to the University of Chicago’s library system.

And, of course, my private school gave a no-name immigrant kid (me) the chance to attend an Ivy League university.

I am forever indebted to my high school for enhancing my intellectual development, and I would argue that the private school price tag is worth it for that reason alone. You won’t find a single public school in America that encourages fifteen-year-olds to grapple with Hegel or think through the limitations of the Collatz conjecture. In fact, my high school was so rigorous that I assumed I would find a similarly thriving educational environment at the nation’s most elite hub of intellectual inquiry: the Ivy League.

But at Columbia University, where I completed both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, students and professors were not only disinterested in the spirit of classical academic inquiry but actively opposed to it. The search for objective truth was deemed racist and colonialist, and all heterodox or otherwise contrarian opinions were immediately stamped out by professors or administrators trained on Stasi playbooks.

But the issue cuts deeper than ideology.

In STEM, where ideology has thankfully had minimal effect on classroom learning, I saw virtually no difference between the math courses my friends at Columbia were taking and the courses my younger brother later completed at our local state university. Similarly, because professors secure tenure-track positions based almost exclusively on availability, my Ivy League education was not necessarily equipped with quality professors. Worse, hiring in academia is now based on diversity rather than merit.

In other words, the Ivies have lost their educational edge.

So why do we still live in the era of the “Ivy League” hype? And does paying up for an Ivy League school still make sense?

Let me start by saying that I do not believe you will receive the same level of education from Columbia University as you would from, say, Weber State University. What I do believe, however, is that the difference between a Columbia education and a Rutgers education—at least in terms of the basic information students absorb over four years—is negligible. You might have a slightly deeper discussion of Hegel at Columbia than at Rutgers, depending on the professor, but if you enroll in a “Philosophy 101” course at either university, the syllabi will look more or less identical.

Nevertheless, when comparing salary outcomes between your typical Ivy League kid and your typical large state school kid, the narrative is clear: the Ivy League will set you up for much better financial success than your typical large state school, with Columbia students earning a median of $102,491 ten years out of college and Rutgers students earning almost $30,000 less ($74,479). Compare Columbia’s number to that of the University of Alabama ($59,221), and the value of an Ivy League education could not be clearer.

From an ROI perspective, then, the price tag of an Ivy League education is justified. What is less clear is why, if course content at four-year universities is broadly similar, large earnings discrepancies persist.

The simplest answer is the pipeline to top-tier firms. Columbia and other Ivy League schools benefit from extensive alumni networks, many of whose members are willing to offer referrals that help graduates secure jobs at prestigious firms. Similarly, many employers use the “Ivy League brand” as a heuristic for competence: the mere appearance of “Columbia” at the top of a résumé signals intellectual worth.

While there is an argument that the Ivy League, on average, leads to better professional outcomes, the question remains whether the price tag is justified. After all, learning for its own sake has gone out the window at many of these schools. And in an age where college has become more of a pre-professional training facility than a Platonic symposium, is it really worth paying up for the Ivy League?

I would argue yes—and not for the educational quality or the connections to prestigious firms. The primary reason that it is still worth paying for the Ivy League today is to upgrade your social circles—and your social status—in a way that no amount of money can ever buy.

The social psychologist has a fascinating explanation for this phenomenon through The Great Gatsby. “The central tragedy of Gatsby,” writes Henderson, is “his belief that access can be purchased. Gatsby has the external symbols (money, clothes, mansion, charm, etc.) but not the habitus.” On the other hand, Gatsby’s friend Nick Carraway, who attended Yale, easily blends into the old-money social world—even though he is not nearly as wealthy as Gatsby. In other words, Ivy League schooling provides a sort of social refinement based on the people you spend your time with.

The idea of social refinement is hazy in itself, but I’ll attempt to explain what I mean through my own experiences of gravitating in these circles for almost ten years now.

For one, Ivy League students are versed in a certain elite “code speak.” At Columbia, we were taught the history of Western literature, art, music, and philosophy through the famous Core Curriculum. Columbia often markets the Core not only for its intellectual value but also for its social value. Students of the Core are told they will better understand how society works. Indeed, two of my professors independently claimed that studying the Core texts would make us more interesting at dinner parties—and they were not wrong. In my current social circles, the ability to casually reference art, politics, literature, or history functions as a form of social currency.

There is, however, another aspect of Ivy League circles that matters even more: their relationship to risk and ambition. Ivy League students normalize “elite” outcomes by making them feel attainable. Since I was 18, I have watched my peers found companies, appear on podcasts, run for office, or publish books. In that environment, pursuits that seem like distant dreams to most people were treated as ordinary ambitions. That normalization—being surrounded by people who make extraordinary goals feel achievable—may be the greatest value of an Ivy League education.

As much as I like to disparage Columbia for its turn to wokeness and the decline in the quality of its education, what mattered in the end were the people I met there, who always pushed me to dig deeper and shoot higher in everything I did. By 28, I wrote three novels and started my own company—dreams that would have seemed unattainable if I weren’t constantly around other people doing it, too.

So while the value of a private school might be the intellectual foundation and the early exposure to ideas, the value of the Ivy League is different—the Ivy League not only embeds you in a certain class but also provides you with the built-in social circle to chase your dreams.

And I believe that that’s priceless.

Dear Reader,

When I first started Pens and Poison in the fall of 2024, I was a no-name writer with literary ambitions that always seemed out of reach. I wasn’t social media savvy, I was too awkward to network, and I didn’t hold the right viewpoints to be an automatic “yes” for the publishing industry. My full-time job was in a completely unrelated industry, and I had almost come to terms with the fact that writing would have to be a solely personal, cathartic project—that my words would never leave the many folders on my laptop or see life beyond the scribbles in my various physical notebooks. I wrote poetry and novels, and aside from the occasional failed early blog post, I had never written an essay outside of an academic capacity. Sure, I had completed 20-page term papers on eyes in Pride and Prejudice or desire in Hamlet, but I had no formal training in essay writing, and I didn’t even know where to start.

In my early Substack days, I wrote book lists and poetry analysis posts because that’s all I’d ever known—I didn’t yet have the intuition for the sort of work that would be widely read, and I didn’t know if I would ever develop it. My friends always called my writing “too weird” or “too niche,” and writing for a broad audience seemed completely out of reach. The only piece of expository writing I’d ever been proud of was my original personal statement for grad school, which a trusted professor had advised me not to submit to university English departments on the ground that it might have been too “controversial.” Thus it sat on my laptop, completely unread and discarded for almost five years, before I decided to post it on a whim to my new Substack publication. Launching an attack on the practices of university English departments, it was bound to offend, but in those days, I only had about forty subscribers—most of them friends, family, and acquaintances—and I knew that no one read my writing anyway.

What happened next would change my life forever.

Practically overnight, my graduate school personal statement, repurposed into my most popular essay “Leave Literature Alone,” went viral on Substack, bringing in a thousand subscribers, many of them names I recognized and deeply admired, and capturing the attention of established publications such as Persuasion and The Boston Globe. Suddenly, I had an audience, and I would need to learn how to retain it. And to me, the best way to learn how to write anything was through reading, so I got to it.

I read far and wide, skimming through op-eds and perusing other popular Substack posts until I gained an intuition for what “worked” in an essay. I became more comfortable sharing my controversial opinions and learned to shut out the haters that inevitably came with them. I watched my Substack slowly grow as I made both writer friends and enemies, and by the end of the next year, I brought in enough paid support to even become a Substack bestseller.

Today, a little over a year after the launch of Pens and Poison, I am humbled and elated to have reached six thousand subscribers—six thousand people who resonated in some way with words and ideas I once thought would never exit the confines of my brain. It’s been a long year, but every single Pens and Poison reader means the world to me, and I’d like to thank each and every one of you for your support of my small publication. Whether you’ve been here from the start or are a most recent subscriber, I cannot thank you enough for joining me in the fight to preserve the literary tradition, uphold the tenets of humanistic inquiry, and promote the importance of arts and culture. I’m so glad that you’ve found Pens and Poison and have helped to make my dreams come true.

Lots of love,

Last week, I wrote about the plague of soulless writing that has infested the publishing industry. But there’s an equally—if not more—disturbing trend in publishing today, and that is the obsession with “sex-positivity.”

I’m not just talking about the fact that virtually every other book that comes out of mainstream publishing today is nothing more than smut and porn—that’s a related problem that I’ve previously discussed here. I’m talking about the specific propagandistic way that the publishing industry insists on portraying sex—that is, sex must always be “empowering.”

In other words, contemporary literature demands that consensual sex be presented solely in a positive light, where characters “discover” themselves through kinks or other related sexual play as they become more “in tune” with their emotions and identities. Literary agents push this trend to absurdity across all genres, with a search for “sex-positivity” on Manuscript Wish List yielding over twelve pages of results.

And perhaps even more disturbingly, never will you find a work of contemporary literature that dares to question this dominant mentality when it comes to sex; such a book, after all, will never make it past literary agents, who refuse to confront the reality that not all consensual sex is positive by default. In fact, literary agents have developed such an obsession with “empowerment” and “healing” through sex that they will not only shoot down any work of contemporary literature that dares to argue otherwise—they will also be genuinely confused at the mere suggestion that this “do-whatever-you-want” mentality when it comes to sex may actually be both personally and societally destructive.

The plague has gotten so out of hand that even the negative depictions of sex that do slip through the publishing industry are almost always given a positive spin by readers of contemporary literature—even when it comes to portrayals of non-consensual sex. For instance, when writer and Instagrammer Jayden Jelso posted a video this past week decrying the trend of women “discovering themselves” through books that feature graphic depictions of rape, an army of women flocked to his comments section in defense of their perversions, claiming that there is no harm in “consensual fantasy” or that smut is just “literary work with romance in it.” Several comments even went so far as to claim that books depicting graphic sex were helping them heal from their own trauma. What these comments reveal is that the publishing industry has essentially conditioned women to view all sex in a positive light—even when these women are fantasizing about something as violent and disturbing as rape.

In other words, depictions of sex in contemporary literature are almost always delivered with the intention of convincing readers that any sort of sex is healthy by default. There is no harm, many women repeated in Jelso’s comments, of fantasizing about rape so long as no one is physically hurt.

Really?

A 1994 study in Child Abuse & Neglect found that “sexually abused women reported more fantasies of being sexually forced than did women without sexual abuse histories,” suggesting that many of these women getting off to smutty “literature” may be simply putting a band-aid over a more underlying source of trauma. A more recent 2025 study reached the same conclusion, demonstrating that individuals who report frequent coercive or non-consensual sexual fantasies are more likely to report higher levels of psychological distress. While these findings do not amount to a wholesale moral indictment of fantasy itself, they do complicate the publishing industry’s insistence that all sexual expression is not only benign, but actively “healing.”

Why, then, do publishing professionals continue to promote “sex-positivity” as the be-all and end-all? It is abundantly clear, after all, that while sex may of course be uplifting when done in the context of a stable, consensual relationship, not all sex is “positive” or even remotely “empowering.”

I am not a literary agent, so I cannot tell you exactly what is happening on an industry-wide level, but boy, do I have some theories.

The easiest answer is that “sex-positivity” is commercially efficient. If large publishing houses manage to convince the masses that all sex content is positive, then any sort of shame associated with consuming this explicit content becomes a non-issue, thereby driving book sales and legitimizing this industry-wide scheme. Similarly, framing sex in this way removes any sort of liability: sex couched in the language of “empowerment” allows publishers to sell erotic material without having to own up to the harm that it may cause. If smut becomes “identity exploration” and porn is marketed as “romance,” then literary agents and editors are no longer responsible for the psychological effects of the books that make them money.

But there’s a third, more insidious reason that publishing has succumbed to the “sex-positivity” mania: we have created a literary culture that has completely erased all discussions of morality from literature. Simply put, in a literary world that has embraced moral relativism to absurdity, an author who dares to take a stance on the morality of sex commits an egregious faux pas.

I was personally made aware of this phenomenon when working with a literary agent this past year on my novel The Lilac Room.

I have previously discussed my bizarre literary agent “situationship” here, and its demise was no doubt partially driven by fundamental ideological disagreements when it came to the purpose of literature. The most salient of these squabbles was directly related to this plague of “sex-positivity.”

My novel The Lilac Room explores the moral degeneracy of certain members of New York’s upper class. There’s an important ideological development when it comes to sex that forms the core of the book’s moral philosophy. Early in the story, a character named Adam, finding himself in desperate need of money after having gambled away fifty-thousand dollars, convinces his girlfriend Nelli to put on underground sex shows. They raise the money they need through what is, effectively, prostitution (a term that has been replaced today by “sex work” to strip the activity of its moral failures) and gradually enter the seemingly glamorous world of the upper class. Nelli, however, is left psychologically scarred by the experience.

Years later, Adam, still dating Nelli, takes our protagonist Cassie down to the room where he and Nelli used to put on their shows. By then, Cassie and Adam have developed an attraction towards one another, but Adam has learned that “just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done.” Cassie, similarly, values loyalty above all else, and though she is tempted to act on her feelings for Adam, holds herself together out of respect for his relationship. At this stage in the novel, therefore, Cassie and Adam both reach a moment of maturity that demonstrates their moral transformation—and they leave the room without so much as touching one another.

This moment of clarity is one of the most important scenes in the novel because it a) promotes the virtue of loyalty over impulse and b) retrospectively condemns Adam’s previous “sex work.” In other words, Cassie and Adam have now evolved into good people despite their previous sins.

Here’s what my literary agent had to say about all of that:

You can imagine how difficult it was for me to refrain from arguing with him (eventually, I did so anyway).

This literary agent, taught to treat everything as “sex-positivity”—including so-called “sex work” that has left a character permanently scarred—could not even fathom a scene whose whole purpose was sexual restraint rather than empowerment. In so doing, he completely misread the point of the scene because in his ideological world, where all sex work must be positive, scenes that comment on the absence of sex must be superfluous.

My experience adequately demonstrates the predominant mentality that has infested the literary world: there is no room for nuanced commentary on the morality or immorality of certain sexual acts because, to the majority of agents and editors, sex is positive by default, and there is no further discussion to be had.

Frustrated, I had the idea to write a “sex negativity” novel—my most recent novel Blue Snow—which portrays two characters whose sexual fantasy land slowly erodes both of their sanities. It’s probably the most uncomfortable novel I’ve ever written, but there is a conversation to be had about the danger of reducing sex to mere “positivity”—and now is the time to have it.

Because by insisting that all consensual—and sometimes even non-consensual—sex is inherently empowering, contemporary literature simplifies rather than enhances our understanding of human nature. As a result, our literary culture produces characters who are both one-dimensional and fundamentally amoral.

But in a publishing bubble that celebrates minimalist sentences stripped of all human feeling, is that necessarily surprising?

Today, in an industry that has mistaken simplicity for sophistication and ideology for art, we need not only a callback to morality but to literary depth. Because only literature that approaches all facets of the human experience from a nuanced perspective will ever be able to tell the truth about what it means to be human.

You might know me as the classics bookworm. I’m always reading something with one of those unassuming Penguin covers or quoting some literary visionary from two hundred years ago. I’ve read over a thousand books in my twenty-eight short years, picking up my first “real” work of literature—Tom Sawyer—in the fourth grade, and by my sophomore year of high school, I had read almost every major Dostoyevsky novel.1 Today, I gravitate almost exclusively to classic literature when it comes to fiction.

Call me a snob, but I challenge you to find me one book published within this century that will change your life as much as Crime and Punishment. You’ll have a hard time doing so, but there is one exception—or seven, rather.

Those are the Harry Potter books.2

There was a time in my life when I would have argued that Harry Potter doesn’t count as real literature: it’s not very well-written, and, at the end of the day, it’s a children’s book. Of course it doesn’t measure up to the standards of a Dostoyevsky or a Dickens, but it’s not supposed to—in fact, Harry Potter may be doing something far more important.

And as a kid, I loved Harry Potter more than anything in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to convey the magnitude of my Harry Potter obsession, and I must have driven my parents nuts quoting the all the books and begging for all the merch. It wasn’t a passing fad either—I was glued to Harry Potter for years.

I first read The Sorcerer’s Stone in the first grade. I had this precocious friend named Patricia,3 and one day during recess, Patricia wanted to play “Harry Potter.” I was six, and the year was 2003. The latest Harry Potter book, The Order of the Phoenix, had just hit shelves, and there were only two films thus far, so this was long before Harry Potter had become a household name, especially outside of children’s literature circles. Nevertheless, Patricia had already started reading the fifth book, and I was told to get on Harry Potter so I could be Cho Chang while she was Hermione.

As soon as I started the books the following week, I quickly fell in love with Hermione myself, and after a heated fight with Patricia, we swapped roles, and I would be Hermione on that playground for years to come.4 We ran around the slides and swing sets like morons waving sticks all over the place, and somehow, we never got bored of pretending to enchant some poor ladybugs with our gibberish spells.

Soon, our Harry Potter games became a way of life. I had Harry Potter–themed birthdays every year until I was about thirteen, and, in keeping with my ongoing playground role, I dressed up as Hermione every year for Halloween. I still bear some eerie resemblance to Hermione even today: I always have my nose in a book, and I have no doubt that my bossiness on the tire swing informed my present aptitude for leadership. My friends routinely observe that I still dress just like Hermione, and I’m pretty sure that the bangs I wear today originally had something to do with Emma Watson’s hair for the films.

In other words, Harry Potter was everything to me.

Eventually, of course, I moved onto bigger, more serious books, but Harry Potter always stayed in my heart. And looking back, it was no accident that I loved the Harry Potter books so much, though it wasn’t because Hermione inspired me to be more brainy (though she did) or because Harry’s adventures sparked my love of reading (though they did) or even because J.K. Rowling’s own story encouraged me to take up writing (though it did).

The reason Harry Potter changed my life is because it planted the idea in my mind—even before I was fully aware of it—that good literature ought to teach us something about our own lives.

Shortly after I exited elementary school, Harry Potter blew up as a phenomenon, and I was proud to be one of its early evangelists. Not only had I nagged everyone in my third grade class to check the series out, but I had even convinced our third grade teacher to plan an entire lesson on the history of Great Britain. Soon enough, Harry Potter was on everyone’s mind for about the next decade, and Rowling had sparked a revolution in children’s literature. You can attribute its mass appeal to Rowling’s innovative plot lines or the ease with which her whimsical stories lent themselves to the big screen, but I’d argue that’s not the sole reason for Harry Potter’s popularity.

No—the reason that we all love Harry Potter is because Harry Potter, at its core, is a retelling of the same story that has captivated human beings since practically the inception of our species: the triumph of good over evil. In the same vein, Rowling is a great author not because she has a wild imagination or because she’s a master of sentences—Rowling is a great author of children’s literature because she dares to use her voice to make morality judgments.

At its core, Harry Potter explores questions that human beings have been grappling with for centuries—the extent to which power corrupts, the price of refusing to accept death, the importance of our individual choices—and dares to answer them. Sure, you can read Harry Potter as a fun story (and I was certainly reading it that way when I was six), but in retrospect, Rowling’s fantasy series did serious work in terms of guiding little Liza through life’s biggest questions—questions that mirror the development of morality systems throughout human history. We sympathize with Snape by the end of the series not because he’s made all of the right choices in his life but because he seeks the age-old virtue of redemption. We trust Hermione not because she’s smart and savvy but because she uses her intelligence in the service of loyalty and justice. We sense that Voldemort’s Horcruxes are immoral not because they break the rules of magic but because we’re told from the very first book that Voldemort’s very pursuit of immortality is fundamentally evil.

Harry Potter is a magical book because it dares to take a stance on what is good and what is evil, thereby orienting us in our own lives.

Indeed, the Harry Potter books quickly helped me make my own value judgments about the world around us. In a unit on the Holocaust in the fifth grade, I was the first in the class to point out that the Nazis’ obsession with bloodlines reminded me of that of the Death Eaters. Similarly, when learning about totalitarian control of propaganda and discourse in the seventh grade, I was quickly reminded of the Ministry of Magic’s lies to the wizarding world.

And Harry Potter doesn’t just make societal judgments—it also makes existential judgments. We side with Lily Potter because her love literally breaks the rules of magic, suggesting that love will always trump all other considerations. Similarly, we cheer on Harry because he willingly accepts his own mortality, affirming that a life governed by moral courage will always win over a life of fear. In this way, Harry Potter isn’t just a children’s series—it’s a bold chapter in the history of literature that, like all great classic works, dares to take a moral stance.

Today, in a world where English departments glorify moral relativism, the publishing industry continues to push out meaningless novels with downright nihilistic protagonists. Today, when MFA programs applaud ambiguous endings and literary agents prefer “kid-focused books with no heavy moral[s],” it has become virtually impossible to find books with a clear moral backbone. And today, in a literary market that avoids taking stances in fear of offending anyone and everyone, we need a call back to the magic of Harry Potter and to the stories that are unafraid of moral clarity. Because the real magic of Harry Potter is that it does not flatter its readers by telling them that nothing is true or that everything is subjective; instead, it challenges readers to choose loyalty over ambition, courage over fear, and love over domination.

If Harry Potter has taught me anything, it’s that great literature should be bold and unapologetic in its message. And though at times Rowling and I may not see eye to eye, I applaud her for daring to use her voice to explore love, power, death, good, and evil—the universal questions that we have all been mulling over for centuries.

Because great literature dares to ask big questions and change our lives. And for an entire generation of readers, Harry Potter did just that.