It’s no secret that Russian is notoriously difficult to translate into English—and the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky are no exception. Since the first English translation of Crime and Punishment appeared in 1886, over twenty different interpretations of Dostoyevsky’s most famous novel have made their way into the Anglosphere, establishing Crime and Punishment as one of the most retranslated books in literary history.

But what entices translators to keep revisiting a novel that now exists in more than twenty English iterations?

Perhaps it’s the recognition that no translation of Crime and Punishment will ever fully capture the spirit of the original.

Indeed, we need only look at Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of Raskolnikov in the novel’s early stages to apprehend several linguistic idiosyncrasies embedded in the Russian text. Part of Dostoyevsky’s genius lies, after all, in his ability to capture the inner lives of his characters, and nowhere is this psychological mastery more apparent than in his description of Raskolnikov’s mental state in the days leading up to the murders. One cannot comprehend why Raskolnikov—a seemingly moral and otherwise rational human being—is led to commit two such atrocities without first understanding the nature of his peculiar spiritual condition.

Most English translations will nonetheless misrepresent that very condition because of one fundamentally untranslatable Russian word.

Towards the end of the novel’s opening chapter, Raskolnikov leaves the pawnbroker’s apartment and tarries in the street in “anguish” before dashing into a pub—or so you’d think from reading the book in English. The problem, however, is that the “anguish” Raskolnikov experiences in nearly every English translation is not anguish at all—it is something far more upsetting.

In English, the word “anguish” suggests agony, suffering, or torment, and while Raskolnikov does indeed experience these emotions in the early chapters of the novel, the English word “anguish” carries a far more frantic emotional charge than its Russian counterpart.

Before we dive into this elusive word itself, let’s take a look at four different translations of the passage in question.

Constance Garnett:

Pevear & Volokhonsky:

Nicolas Slater:

Oliver Ready:

Taken together, these translations paint a remarkably consistent picture of a man consumed by both agitation and anguish. In each of these English versions, therefore, we sense that Raskolnikov is in a frenetic and almost manic state. Reading these English versions of Crime and Punishment, I picture a character standing in the middle of the street ready to tear his hair out or perhaps break into a panicked sweat; I imagine a man collapsing under the weight of the world without any means of escape.

But let’s take a look at the passage in Russian:

If you speak Russian, you’ll immediately read Raskolnikov in a completely different light. The word that most translators render as “agitation” (волнение) comes from our word for “wave” (волна). We typically use “волнение” to express a certain torment of the soul, and, in fact, the Russian dictionary defines the word as “душевное беспокойство,” which literally means “worry of the soul.” In other words, Raskolnikov feels a sort of spiritual disturbance rather than a sense of agitation or frustration.1

Yet the second of the two key concepts in this paragraph—“anguish”—is even more perplexing from a translation perspective.

The Russian word for Raskolnikov’s supposed “anguish” is тоска (toska). It appears six times in the first four chapters alone in reference to our protagonist’s early mental state and is therefore crucial to understanding the nature of his psychological disturbance.

To fully apprehend the meaning of toska, let’s turn to our friend Vladimir Nabokov. Despite his infamous hatred for Dostoyevsky, Nabokov perhaps understood his literary predecessor better than any other writer of his time:

No single word in English, writes Nabokov, renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

Toska, then, is not the sort of anguish that denotes a disturbed or frenzied state; rather, it connotes a deep spiritual yearning perhaps closer to nostalgia.

I like to think of toska in the following terms.

Imagine you’re sitting at your kitchen table staring out the window. It’s raining, and you see a little bird flapping its wings yet struggling to fly. Maybe it’s a Friday night, and you have no plans for the evening, and suddenly, you start to empathize with that bird—before realizing, of course, that it cannot understand you, and you cannot understand it. Yet despite this fundamental disconnect, the bird, you grow convinced, is somehow your kindred spirit. You get up from the table and brew yourself a cup of tea before resuming your seat, watching the raindrops sliding down your windowpane for the next twenty minutes. You don’t know what in particular has upset you, but you know that the rest of the evening—and perhaps the rest of your week—is ruined.

You fall into a muted melancholy before retreating to bed.

That’s toska in a nutshell.

Raskolnikov, therefore, isn’t alarmed or upset—he is, above all, spiritually homeless.2

In fact, toska itself is couched inside the phrase “он не знал, куда деться от тоски своей.” Contrary to what several of the above translations may suggest, this phrase doesn’t necessarily mean that there was “no escape” from his anguish, which points to a certain inevitable doom, but rather that Raskolnikov doesn’t quite know where to go or what to do with himself. Dostoyevsky therefore paints a portrait of a man who has grown nauseated in the Sartrean sense, burdened by the weight of his own existence.

Of the four translations above, only Garnett’s accurately captures the spirit of the original: “he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness.”3 While the other translators render the phrase in terms of “no escape,” suggesting an uncontrollable external force at play, Garnett manages to convey the internal nature of Raskolnikov’s conflict, emphasizing one of Crime and Punishment’s core ideas: Raskolnikov has trapped himself inside a conflict of his own making. He is not merely suffering but estranged from his own self. The difference may seem subtle, but it amounts to the difference between a man driven by panic and one driven by existential homelessness. The former is manageable; the latter is catastrophic.

So while no translation will ever perfectly capture the meaning of toska, perhaps that’s just the point of Dostoyevsky’s great work. Some words resist translation because they emerge from a particular culture’s way of experiencing the world. In this case, Russian gave Dostoyevsky a word for a feeling that does not exist in English.

Perhaps that’s precisely why translators keep returning to Crime and Punishment: buried inside that untranslatable “toska” is a more universal truth about an entire subset of people.

So how do we translate toska?

I propose the following solution.

Future translators ought to render тоска as “toska” in the English text and leave a footnote with an explanation of this untranslatable Russian word. Whenever it appears in the text thereafter, readers will not only be familiar with the connotation of the word but will also attain a unique window into the nature of the Russian soul.

But until someone comes out with such a translation, I suppose the Constance Garnett version will have to do.

I was 21 years old when I learned my father had gone to jail for being a Jew.

I had grown up without a rooted sense of Jewishness. I attended Jewish preschool and lit the menorah every December, but unlike many of my peers, I did not attend Hebrew school, did not have a bat mitzvah, and certainly did not parade the fact that I was Jewish. The first time I stepped foot in a synagogue was for my best friend’s bat mitzvah, and I am almost certain that my middle school friends did not even realize that I was Jewish.

There was no mention of Jewishness around my house apart from the hazy antisemitism that clouded my father’s happy memories of his childhood in the Soviet Union. My father grew up in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a country that had taken in many Jewish refugees during World War II and that had a history of being friendly to Jews despite its Muslim background. My father, a mechanical engineer, was one of the first people in Azerbaijan to use a modern computer, and in 1991 he took an engineering job at Azerbaijan’s first “tech firm.” His dedication to his work and desire to break from the socialist prescription of keeping everyone poor resulted in an early career victory when he took a relatively senior position at the company. Around the same time, he witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Azerbaijan became an autonomous state with no set legal process. When a few corrupt officials from his company were accused of fraud and money laundering, a group of antisemitic Azeri executives decided to pin the blame on “that Jew.”

My father describes the nine months he spent in prison as daunting yet enlightening. Through wisdom and resilience, he survived his unwarranted sentence by cunningly gaining the respect of a group of high-profile criminals. Shortly thereafter, following a series of tense phone calls and interviews on the part of my grandparents, he was granted political asylum in America. My grandmother likes to tell the story of how, after enjoying a stable life as a computer engineer in Baku, my father spent every morning of his first year in Chicago frying potatoes at Burger King (he hasn’t touched french fries since). Through the self-actualization that the Jewish tradition taught my father, he regained his professional status as an engineer in America and within 10 years saw his two kids off to private school.

So you might understand why I didn’t grow up very “Jewish.” My parents’ decision to de-emphasize our Jewish background might have been motivated by a combination of shame, fear and trauma. But I certainly felt quite Russian — or, more accurately, Soviet. I grew up on allegorical cartoons that promoted the welfare of the proletariat and restaurants where expats danced to Russian pop music until 2 a.m. We had a Christmas tree in our apartment every December, and I could almost pass as Protestant to my array of WASPy elementary school friends. But instead of celebrating Christmas, we were commemorating Noviy God, the Soviet New Year’s celebration that had moved Christmas to New Year’s in a successful attempt to secularize the holiday. In the Soviet Union, Jews and Christians alike celebrated Noviy God. But try telling your elementary school friends that you’re a Jew whose grandfather dresses up as Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa Claus.

My Soviet identity was confusing enough to explain to my friends, most of whom came from Protestant backgrounds. I struggled too much with my linguistic and cultural identity to even begin to process my Jewishness, so, perhaps as my parents had desired, Judaism remained a latent facet of my identity. And boy, did I struggle with identity. My Russianness meant that I did not fit in with the American kids. My Judaism meant that I did not fit in with the Christian kids. My secular upbringing meant that I did not fit in with the Jewish kids. My Azeri roots meant that I did not fit in with the Russian kids. And somehow I still held an American passport.

Whenever I tell friends I’ve made within the last five years that I was deeply introverted growing up, they chortle in disbelief, but my identity confusion meant that I kept to myself and failed to find any space in which I belonged. I resonated most strongly with being Russian because it was the language we spoke at home, but I felt so alienated from every imaginable cultural space that I retreated into novels and found closer friends in literature than in high school. When I moved to Manhattan to attend Columbia University, I hoped to find community in the English literary scene, only to be thwarted once again as I became cognizant of my conservative political leanings (likely informed by my parents’ suffering under the communist system) within an overwhelmingly liberal space.

By junior year of college, I had given up on the concept of community. I had a sporadic array of friends I had met through clubs, events and classes, but no set group I could retreat to in times of distress. Given my political beliefs and my (perhaps self-inflicted) ostracism, I avoided larger social settings and continued to keep to my books. But during finals week that semester, a classmate I had met in a course called “Russian for Heritage Speakers” invited me to an evening of durak, a Russian card game I had grown up playing. Drawn by the desire to relive warm family memories, I left the library that evening and ventured to the campus Hillel, stepping inside the Jewish center for the very first time.

I sat next to a boy whose black curly hair looked just like my dad’s and who started speaking Russian to me the moment I looked his way. A dark-eyed girl from across the table introduced herself as Maya, the founder of the new Russian-Jewish club. Most of the club’s members spoke a sort of broken Russian that reminded me of my little brother, and they didn’t have a clue what prayers to sing over the menorah. We laughed about our Christmas trees on New Year’s Eve, and I learned that no one there was properly from Russia. The possibility of this sort of secular Judaism, embedded in old Soviet tradition, began to intrigue me.

I attended my first Passover seder at Hillel that April with my new Russian-Jewish friends and came home that spring break showing off my new Hebrew vocabulary to my parents. Maybe it was this accidental stumble upon Judaism that prompted my mother to invite me out to brunch on the cusp of my college graduation and divulge the story of my father’s imprisonment, or maybe she had been waiting for my 21st birthday all along, but either way, the events of that spring endowed me with a cohesive cultural identity: I was a Russian Jew, and the entire reason I existed as a citizen in the freest country on Earth was because of antisemitism. Because my dad had been chased out of his home country for being a Jew. Because I was a Jew.

Judaism, to me, is not so much a religion as it is a cultural identity and a beautiful set of values that have inspired me to always reach higher. It is an identity intertwined with the dictates of nostalgic Soviet traditions; it is a group of people who have never quite felt as if they belonged. The vast majority of Russian Jews faced persecution in the former Soviet Union for their Jewish identity and now reside in either America or Israel, where they are allowed to practice Judaism freely and rediscover their roots as I rediscovered mine.

So when my grandmother burst into tears upon seeing the hatred and violence at my alma mater two years back, I felt again what it meant to be a Russian Jew. “We left that country and came to this one,” she pronounced, “so that my grandkids would never feel unsafe or singled out as Jews, and I am ashamed that something I thought I’d never have to deal with again is happening in this country, too.”

Now I rush to every Russian-Jewish cultural event because I have lived vicariously through my father’s pain, and I hold my grandma close every time she is forced to relive what happened to my father through the aftermath of October 7. In my Russian-Jewish community, I have found a group of people who understand what it is like to be fervently connected to Jewish identity without keeping kosher or memorizing Hebrew prayers. Being a Russian Jew is a poignant reminder that we have never quite belonged, but that we find belonging amongst each other — and that no matter what, we must do everything in our power to allow the Jewish people to live on.

The best paper I ever wrote for my English classes at Columbia University was a final paper arguing that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was a proto-transgender text.

Well… best according to my professor, at least.

During my junior year of college, I enrolled in a Shakespeare seminar with a newer department hire taking over for renowned Shakespeare scholar James S. Shapiro. Shapiro was on leave that semester, and unbeknownst to me, I had chosen the worst possible time to dive into the works of the great Bard—under the tutelage of the worst possible professor.

The professor in question was in her early thirties and had just completed her PhD. Contrary to many other English department faculty profiles—which abound with descriptions of various mental illnesses—this professor’s profile seemed not only completely benign but surprisingly serious: her research interests included the “Renaissance / Early Modern Drama,” “Aesthetics,” the “History of Ideas,” and “Europe.” She had shoulder-length blonde hair, no apparent body piercings, and nothing else to suggest that she had sprouted from the garden of academic crazies.

So I took the chance—and was thwarted, as they say, by the hands of fate.

The first several lectures were nothing out of the ordinary: we learned about Shakespeare’s family history and the rise of drama as an art form before launching into our study of The Merchant of Venice. The professor went on about racism and xenophobia, yet because these themes do genuinely appear in the play, I didn’t initially think much of it. Similarly, our discussion of The Taming of the Shrew focused on gender roles and social class—an accurate reflection of the play’s themes.

Then things got a little weird.

Romeo and Juliet, said my professor, was a “staging of sex.”

I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but the following week, we were learning not only about how Shakespeare’s sonnets suggested that he was gay but also about how A Midsummer Night’s Dream was about queer desire.

Below are the actual notes I took during the lecture:

You can imagine how, from that moment on, it might have been difficult to take the class seriously.

Nevertheless, I resolved not to let my professor’s obsessions interfere with my enjoyment of Shakespeare. I studied hard for my midterm exams and had nearly committed Midsummer Night’s Dream to memory by the time I entered that classroom halfway through the semester, ready to wow the professor with my burgeoning knowledge of Shakespeare. Disregarding my professor’s BDSM fetish, I composed essays on the nature of Helena’s love for Demetrius and Titania’s famous prank on Oberon.

Several weeks later, I received the following comments on my two short midterm essays:

I had lost two points on an otherwise perfect exam because I had failed to mention—on two separate occasions—that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was about “queer desire.”

Embracing the absurdity of the class over the next several weeks, I wrote my final paper on the topic of Twelfth Night and transgenderism (because Viola dresses up as a man and so on).

I got an A+ not only on the paper itself but also for the entire course.

My college Shakespeare seminar has given me quite a story to tell, but it reveals a series of alarming truths about the poison that has taken over literary study in English departments across the Western world. In a word, English departments no longer teach literature proper but either a) focus on ideology or b) put a leftist spin on every work of classic literature ever to grace our civilization.

If you’d like to be entertained by further examples of radical leftist ideology in the Columbia English department, you can read some of my past essays here, but today, I’d like to explore how we got here—and why.

To answer that question, we must first understand the nature of literary study prior to the leftist takeover of the academy. And as it turns out, the idea of “the humanities” has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years.

Read more

I’ve written about many of these themes on Pens and Poison, and I’m excited to bring them to you today on the Andrew Klavan Show.

Watch the full episode here:

“Comrades!”

Scanning the first message I received in my Columbia University MA English group chat, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“We need you guys trained and up to speed for the strike…”

This couldn’t be real.

Bookmarking my copy of Ayn Rand’s We the Living, a novel about the ills of post-Revolutionary Russia, I took a deep breath and recoiled. Reviewing the text, sent by a researcher of “imperial conspiracy” in a “postcolonial context,” I felt my vision blurring.

The text might as well have come from a Soviet labor camp leader.

But it was real.

My colleague had inadvertently verbalized the plague that had set over English departments across the nation: English is amongst the most left-leaning and pro-labor departments.

From the moment I stepped foot on campus to study English Literature at Columbia University, I felt that something was amiss. My freshman year of college, for instance, the university had removed Ovid’s Metamorphoses from an introductory freshman literature course called “Masterpieces of Western Literature” because several students had complained about its “graphic” (the work is far from graphic) depictions of rape.

The eighteen-year-old literature nerd in me couldn’t help but balk: the Metamorphoses, the largest Ancient collection of Greco-Roman myths in a single text, is arguably one of the most important works to the foundation of the Western canon.

Yet after speaking with several professors about this decision, I grew disheartened. These professors seemed convinced that “just because the Metamorphoses is on the syllabus,” as one professor put it to me, “does not mean that it is necessarily a valuable piece of literature.” The work that my favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, alludes to several times throughout his monumental 20th century poem, The Waste Land, was not important?

I didn’t know what these professors were on, but I intended to find out.

Over the next four years, I grew increasingly disheartened by the volume of literary theory assigned throughout my English classes. I had arrived at Columbia intending to become a humanistic scholar, which is what was advertised to me during my application process. Yet, I found the vast majority of critical theory readings not only biased but also far off the mark: I was asked to understand Jane Austen’s early 19th-century novel Mansfield Park under the 20th-century postcolonial lens of the notorious anti-Semite Edward Said, and I was fed Karl Marx in nine out of the sixteen literature courses that I took during my time as an undergraduate student.

Each winter break, I’d update my parents, who are Soviet expats who had come to America on refugee status, on every new Marxist text we had been assigned. In response, they’d nearly fly off their chairs, raising their voices in fulmination: “We did not leave that oppressive regime founded on Marxist-Leninst values just so that our daughter would be reading Marx for breakfast!”

As I prepared myself for graduate English applications, vowing to restore literary study back to its proper foundations—to explore the humanistic tradition—I wondered why English literature had become so forcefully seized by far-left ideologues. While one explanation might be that English professors, who work long hours and feel under-compensated for the value that they bring, are turning to Marxism to voice their grievances, the history of Marxism in the academy hits even deeper.

A New York Times piece from the late 1980s chronicles the “mainstreaming of Marxism” in the academy and argues that while Marxism had fallen out of vogue in terms of practical application—likely due to the imminent failure of the Soviet Union at the time—it has been co-opted in “the abstract world of literary criticism.” Where Marxists did not find a voice politically, they found it in the study of literature—a field so subjective that no one could call out these extremist takes as erroneous. It is no wonder that an increasing number of faculty members now identify as far-left and that these lopsided ideologies have found a home in English departments nationwide.

As a daughter of Soviet immigrants who personally suffered under Marxism, I understand the pitfalls of this noxious ideology and have been disheartened to see it prevail in the study of English literature. Yet while Marxist ideologues have indeed annexed literature, it doesn’t have to continue this way.

Throughout my years as a reader and literary scholar, I have witnessed countless works imprint themselves on my psyche as I have grown into a richer human being. Jane Eyre taught me the value of trust and persistence in the name of love. Notes from Underground provided me with a window into the human condition. East of Eden presented me with the nature of good and evil. In reminding ourselves that literature is a vehicle through which we can understand ourselves, we can focus on what we have in common as members of the human species rather than augment our differences.

Across American college campuses, English literature students are being taught that literary study must necessarily rest on the far-left ideologies of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others. As a result, literary fields such as publishing, academia, and journalism are increasingly becoming dominated by ideological extremists who are bringing the focus of literary study away from the humanistic tradition and towards their own political agendas.

It is unsurprising that in studying English, a field that claims to understand human beings through the written word, I was assigned more Karl Marx than Charles Dickens. If we continue to politicize literature to these extremes, it will die away, and then we will be left—dangerously—only with Marxism for its own sake.

To restore the true purpose of literature, we must promote the idea that literature is a work of art through which we can understand what makes us uniquely human—only thus can we begin to bridge our differences.

What are my top ten books of all time… and why?

When I first started my Substack two years ago, I compiled a list of my top 10 favorite books of all time for my 60 or so subscribers. Now that there are so many more of you in the Pens and Poison universe, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit my list two years (and many books) later—and implement some revisions. While the list remains largely unchanged, I’ve reordered a few of my picks and added my latest favorite literary icons to reflect my evolving preferences.

It’s always hard to choose just ten books to call my “favorites,” but if I had to pick just ten, here are the books I believe to be the greatest literary creations of all time—and why you should read them, too!

10. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

We start off strong with Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I always turn to this book whenever I need to explain why reading literature is still important to us today: Anna Karenina is full of the very universal moral messages that make classic literature so relevant to contemporary readers. To me, the mark of a great work of literature is the ability to comment on the universal by way of the particular, and Tolstoy nails this exercise by giving us a glimpse into the lives of several families who lead radically different lives.

Most people know Anna Karenina as the story of a woman with a dicey extramarital affair, but what gives Anna Karenina its philosophical weight is not necessarily Anna’s story arc but Levin’s. Through the character of Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy depicts the quest for redemption and shows us the virtue of religion, marriage, and family. I would recommend this novel over any self-help book that purports to teach you how to live a “good life.” Tolstoy has far more answers than Mark Manson.

9. Middlemarch by George Eliot

As Wikipedia puts it, Middlemarch is a novel about “The Woman Question”—and perhaps the only major Victorian novel to tackle the question of womanhood without putting marriage at the forefront. Middlemarch follows the story of the nineteen-year-old provincial orphan Dorothea Brooke and her marriage to the scholarly Edward Casuabon… which doesn’t work out too well for her. Meanwhile, over in town, we meet the doctor Tertius Lydgate and follow his own adventures as he becomes literature’s first modern doctor.

If you’re interested in learning more about the birth of the modern doctor in literature, I wrote about Lydgate and his role in the Victorian medical community here.

8. The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

Next up is not a novel but a memoir. I wanted to keep this list strictly to fiction titles, but Zweig’s memoir reads so much like a novel that I thought I’d throw it on here because it really is one of my favorite books of all time.

The World of Yesterday is essential reading for anyone who cares deeply about art, culture, and Western society. I am continually baffled by the fact that Zweig isn’t as widely read today as he was during his lifetime, but maybe Pens and Poison readers can change that.

Zweig’s memoir—written on the cusp of his suicide in Argentina—traces the author’s childhood in his beloved Europe and his despair upon witnessing the decline of the beautiful civilization that gave him life as an artist and an intellectual. In The World of Yesterday, we meet famous artists and intellectuals—Richard Strauss, Theodor Herzl, Rainer Maria Rilke, to name a few—and learn about their effect on Zweig’s life in prewar Europe.

What I personally love most about the memoir is its reminder of the integral role that Jewish intellectuals played in the development of Western culture and civilization, especially in Zweig’s Vienna. Douglas Murray, in fact, opens up The Strange Death of Europe with a reference to Zweig’s Europe, which shaped the dying civilization he explores in his book.

The World of Yesterday is perhaps one of best accounts ever written of cultural collapse and historical grief. More about it here.

7. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I originally picked up Brideshead Revisited because the book appears on virtually every single LGBTQI2AS+ reading list, and I was curious to learn about the depiction of homosexuality in literature before the ideological capture of the publishing industry. So I came into the novel expecting a hot love story between two young men, and instead I got a nostalgic depiction of the decline of the British nobility and a sharp foray into Catholicism. In fact, if I hadn’t been primed to read Sebastian and Charles’ relationship as homosexual, I would have likely glossed over that aspect of the novel entirely because it plays such a minor role in the book compared to its more important themes of faith and decay.

It’s a shame, really, that this book is often lumped in with such contemporary atrocities as A Little Life or The Song of Achilles because it really is much closer to the works of C.S. Lewis than anything we might think of today as LGBTQI2AS+ “literature.”

Oh, and don’t forget my favorite character—Sebastian’s teddy bear Aloysius.

6. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

I discovered The Unbearable Lightness of Being relatively late in my life compared to many of the other books on this list. I read the majority of my top picks in high school or early college, but I only got around to Kundera a few years ago. Nevertheless, this one very quickly became one of my absolute favorites.

The novel is probably most famous for its depiction of polyamory and sexual freedom through the character of Tomas—who constantly sleeps around despite being in love with his supposed girlfriend Tereza—but what I love most about this book isn’t necessarily the romance plot but its use of classical music to explore human relationships. Like T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets were inspired by Beethoven’s string quartets, Kundera draws on Beethoven’s sixteenth string quartet to lay explore the novel’s philosophy on the fragile nature of human relationships. His allusion to Beethoven’s sixteenth string quartet inspired my own use of the piece in my novel The Leverkühn Quartet.

5. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I have a love-hate relationship with Hemingway. The older I get, the more his minimalist style irritates me. To me, writing is a direct manifestation of the human soul, and Hemingway’s prose only flattens the full scope of the human mind—after all, we don’t think in short sentences and choppy phrases. That’s one of the reasons I love Faulkner so much—he masterfully captures the inner turmoil of the human mind.

But while Hemingway’s prose is far too flat and sterile for my liking, I still believe that he’s a master at capturing the decay of a particular societal moment, and his prose style admittedly works well for this particular novel.

The Sun Also Rises is a novel about the Lost Generation—a group of disillusioned expatriates searching for meaning in post-WWI Europe. Their grandiosity, however, is nothing more than a veneer for their mental sickness and inauthenticity. Hemingway’s writing is itself a metaphor for this emotional repression of his characters—they are not living their lives to the fullest, and the minimalist prose reflects that meaninglessness.

And Lady Brett Ashley is the coolest f*cking character ever invented.

4. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita was actually the first novel I ever read fully in Russian when I was in the ninth grade. I originally picked it up because it inspired parts of Harry Potter, and I was immediately blown away. The experience kickstarted my love of Russian literature, and Bulgakov became my gateway to Dostoyevsky.

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 (this detail is quite funny 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. There’s also a little bit of magical realism as we explore questions of spiritual guilt, morality, and redemption.

3. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

I was debating between Lolita and Pale Fire for this list, and I ended up picking Pale Fire because of its commentary on the absurdity of literary criticism in the academy (a topic that hits very close to home).

Pale Fire takes place shortly after the death of the renowned poet John Shade and is structured as a commentary on the last poem he left behind. The book starts off with a foreword to the poem written by Shade’s supposed friend—Professor Charles Kinbote—and then launches into a line-by-line analysis of Shade’s four cantos. As we soon start to realize, however, something isn’t quite right…

As someone who always complains about the ills of literary criticism in the academy, I think that Nabokov was very much onto something here.

Pale Fire also inspired my own exploration of the thin line between fantasy and reality in my most recent novel, Blue Snow.

2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

A year or two ago, I would have said that The Sound and the Fury is my favorite novel of all time, but I have demoted it to second place after revisiting the novel that took my first place spot. Nevertheless, it’s still my second favorite book of all time and deserves its time in the spotlight here on Pens and Poison.

The book’s title comes from Macbeth’s famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” monologue and reflects the novel’s focus on the absurdity of life. It’s a difficult read, and for that reason, it’s not as widely read as some of the other books on this list. Nevertheless, I recommend it to anyone looking for a deep dive into human psychology.

The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the downfall of the Compson family through the perspective of three of the Compson family members and their longtime household servant Dilsey. My favorite section is narrated by the neurotic nineteen-year-old Quentin Compson, the first person in his family to go to Harvard. Caught up in the ideals of the old South, Quentin becomes obsessed with his little sister Caddy, and eventually meets a gloomy demise.

There’s a real-life plaque dedicated to him on the Anderson Memorial Bridge at Harvard. I spent an hour looking for it last time I was in Boston.

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Over the past few years, I have come to the conclusion that The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel ever written—and I don’t think I’m alone in holding this opinion. In terms of its religious depth, philosophical complexity, and understanding of human nature, I don’t think that any other novel even comes close.

The three Karamazov brothers each represent radically different ways of approaching life: Alyosha is deeply spiritual and compassionate, Dmitri is impulsive and emotional, and Ivan is something of an intellectual skeptic. His “Grand Inquisitor” passage is perhaps the deepest meditation on religion ever to grace the page.

If you’d like to learn more about which translation to read, I’ve put together a nifty Dostoevsky translation guide here.

Wow, that was difficult, but there you have it—my top 10 books of all time. There are obviously so many other books that I cherish deeply, so don’t forget to follow along for more great books and curated reading lists.

What are your top 10 books of all time? Let me know in the comments and don’t forget to read The Brothers Karamazov as soon as you can.

When socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani got elected last year in New York, no one was surprised to learn that the majority of his supporters held four-year university degrees. After all, it is no secret that American colleges and universities have been woke indoctrination camps for several decades, teaching Marxist propaganda in the place of classic literature and feeding students critical race theory for breakfast. But there’s another reason that the majority of students emerge from these programs with staunch socialist convictions: colleges and universities themselves are run like miniature communist societies.

If you went to college in the last 15 years or so, chances are you’ll remember skyrocketing tuition costs, nebulous bureaucratic systems, and an abundance of student clubs that seem to have more money for free food and merch than the company you work for today. In college, after all, everything seems “free”—free medical services, free counseling, free food, free clubs—until you realize who’s paying for it.

Colleges charge exorbitant tuition fees not only to fund your education but also to support the endless supply of extraneous perks that absolutely no one has ever asked for. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a whopping 40 percent of spending at private non-profit colleges goes to “academic support, student services, and other institutional support.” Spending in this category includes but is not limited to “registrar activities,” “student health services,” and “activities for which the primary purpose is to contribute to students’ emotional and physical well-being.” In practical terms, this means that almost half of your tuition money goes to services that most students have never heard of. Just think of how many times you actually attended a university-sponsored “mindfulness workshop” in the student enrichment center.

But the issue isn’t that these services exist per se, but that they derive their funding from a socialist-like system of wealth redistribution.

Such redistribution starts in the financial aid department. It is common knowledge, for instance, that most middle and lower-class students don’t end up paying the “sticker price” at many four-year institutions but only contribute what they can “afford.” While it is often assumed that endowments help fund generous financial aid packages, in practice, they are largely insulated from direct use—operating more like small investment funds designed to preserve and grow capital rather than to be spent down.

So how can lower-income students afford to attend pricey four-year universities, many of which now cost over $90,000 per year? Well, other students pay for it.

Many financial aid packages are now funded by charging wealthier students more in tuition. In effect, colleges and universities have constructed their own redistributive system, one that operates with little transparency. More troubling still, it is justified in socialist moral language: once “equity” becomes the guiding principle, the idea of a clear exchange—getting X for Y—begins to disappear.

There is, in fact, a fundamental detachment between payment and consumption on American college campuses. In a capitalist society, after all, you choose what to pay for and which products to consume. On a college campus, however, you pay the institution, which—much like a centrally planned economy—chooses which products you will consume.

A student who enrolls in a university thus faces a fundamental lack of choice in terms of what he or she pays for—and ends up coughing up an exorbitant amount of cash to fund so-called “free” university services. Not only will this student seldom use the services he funds, but he will also relinquish the power to demand higher-quality alternatives—once something feels “free,” evaluation of quality falls to the wayside. As a result, dining hall food becomes almost universally inedible: there is no option to upgrade your dining plan for a better meal or choose a competing dining hall company that may provide a better product. Similarly, gyms are always overcrowded, and it may take several weeks to secure an appointment with a school counselor or a doctor—closed systems, after all, create artificial scarcity and lead to an overall decline in quality of service.

The subsidization of student clubs poses similar problems: one’s tuition funds all student organizations regardless of that group’s productivity or ideology. When I was enrolled at Columbia, for instance, my tuition money funded “Students for Justice in Palestine”—a group that periodically declared their desire to murder me—and as a tuition-paying student, I had no option to opt out of supporting the group’s atrocities. Similarly, my tuition funded many clubs with little use to the college “society” at large. Several clubs did nothing but throw parties all semester. Under a capitalist system, such defunct or unpopular organizations would not stand a chance, but at a university, all student clubs, kept alive through shared funding, survive regardless of popularity and functionality.

Worse still, at most universities, all student organizations receive the same amount of money through an allocated semesterly budget. When I ran the Slavic Department’s lit mag, for instance, we had several thousand dollars to play around with every semester, and because the money went away if we didn’t use it by the end of the term, we spent most of it on takeout food. I can only imagine how much tuition money was wasted on such frivolous spending across all student groups, creating massive inefficiency on a university-wide level.

The worst part, however, is that any given student can’t just decide to opt out of these terrible services and thereby save tuition money—his money is distributed equally across a variety of services that the college has deemed “essential.” While one might argue that such a model resembles taxation in a democratic society, taxation depends on earning income rather than paying for goods and services. A better analogy would be going to the Apple Store to purchase a new phone. Let’s say the latest model of the iPhone costs $1,000 by itself. To purchase the phone, however, I am told that I must pay $5,000 for a bundle containing matching AirPods and the newest MacBook. While each of these items may, in theory, increase my general productivity, they will only serve me well if I wish to purchase them voluntarily. In this case, I would prefer to save my money and walk away with only a phone, yet if I am told that the phone comes only in the bundle and I am in desperate need of a new phone, then I have no choice.

It is precisely because of such inefficiencies that colleges and universities now cost an arm and a leg. Mandatory participation in the system means that you can’t redirect your money while staying enrolled at a university, and because all universities follow this model, I can’t simply choose to take my money elsewhere. Meanwhile, as services expand, administrative layers grow—and higher education becomes even more unaffordable for everyone.

It is no wonder, then, that students emerge from four-year colleges with staunch Marxist convictions. They fail to understand that someone must pay for their so-called “free” services because universities deliberately obscure how those services are funded. Similarly, these students don’t shy away from central planning because there’s no alternative at the higher education level—and they don’t understand that competition could make so many of the services they complain about so much better.

It’s time for academia to rein in spending and adopt opt-in models. Tuition should cover only classes, with other services available for purchase. Students who desire to use athletic facilities can pay an additional membership fee, and students who wish to spend their afternoons protesting on lawns can join Students for Justice for Palestine for a cost. Under such a model, unpopular services would disappear, and in-demand services would be incentivized to provide better results.

Most importantly, under such a system, college and university students would see the beauty of a functional capitalist society—and come out ready to tackle the real world.

Which translation of Dostoyevsky should I read?

Well… none of them.

To this day, I have no good answer to the most common question I get from fans. Sure, there are “good” translations, and “bad” translations, but I’ve never come across a translation that fully satisfies me. Even the best translations make sacrifices, and many lines—especially in Dostoyevsky—are fundamentally untranslatable. That said, some translations are much better than others, and it’s important to find a “good” translation if you want to fully engage with the scope of Dostoyevsky’s psychological commentary.

During my time studying translation theory at Columbia, I’ve looked at over a dozen Dostoyevsky translations, and while choosing a translation might be a matter of personal taste, a “good” translation will certainly enhance your reading experience—while a “bad” translation can ruin it entirely.

But what sets a “good” translation apart from a “bad” translation?

Most people think that a “good” translation is simply the most accurate one, and while “good” translations often do stay true to their source material, an “accurate” translation on its own does not necessarily yield a pleasant reading experience. Many “literal” translations, in fact, turn out choppy, awkward, or fundamentally unreadable. A “good” translation, on the other hand, will always flow naturally in the target language of translation.

We can therefore define a “good” translation not as a reproduction of the original text but as a rewriting that preserves the spirit of the original while allowing it to live naturally in a new language. In other words, a good translation reads fluently in the target language while capturing the overall meaning and tone of the original text.

Most translators accomplish only one of these two things.

Let’s take a look at some examples—starting with translations from Oliver Ready, Pevear & Volokhonsky, Michael R. Katz, and Constance Garnett.

Crime and Punishment

We’ll use the opening of Crime and Punishment as our first case study.

I’ve included the original Russian text for us below—while you don’t have to know how to read it, pay attention to Dostoyevsky’s comma placement, which we’ll examine shortly:

We’ll use the Russian verb «нанимать» (“to rent”) to exemplify the difficulty of Russian translation: in order to accurately translate this verb, one must understand the nature of Russian verb forms. In Russian, verbs are frequently organized into aspectual pairings—perfective and imperfective—to distinguish a completed action from an ongoing or habitual one. The verb «нанимать» appears here in the imperfective aspect, suggesting that Raskolnikov’s room rental is an ongoing rather than a one-time process—a plot point that will become relevant later in the text.

If you studied French or Spanish in high school, all of this will sound familiar: you’ll remember learning about the “perfect” and the “imperfect” tenses in these two languages. While the Russian perfective and imperfective forms are different grammatically from, say, the French passé composé and the imparfait, we can draw a parallel between these two forms, which makes it easier to translate this passage into French than into English.

If I wanted to say in French, for instance, that Raskolnikov rented his room yesterday, I would use the perfective verb «нанять» in Russian; if I wanted to say, on the other hand, that Raskolnikov rented his room once upon a time, I would use the imperfective verb «нанимать». In French, therefore, the choice is simple: one would translate the verb «нанимать» as “louait” (imparfait) as opposed to “a loué” (passé composé); indeed, this is the only “correct” translation in French, for the use of the form “a loué” completely alters the meaning of the entire passage. Notice, however, that in English, the same verb form—“rented”—accounts for both the idea that Raskolnikov rented his room yesterday and that he rented his room once upon a time.

Luckily, in English, we have another tense that exists neither in French nor in Russian: the continuous past. We can therefore also say that Raskolnikov “was renting” his room over a period of time.

Both “rented” and “was renting” are therefore acceptable translations in English, but each produces a slightly different meaning. If we want to emphasize Raskolnikov’s ongoing struggle with his rent (as we should), then we’ll want to employ “was renting” rather than “rented” in our translation.

Looking at different translations of Crime and Punishment, we’ll see this verb rendered both in the past and the past continuous tenses—both as “rented” and “was renting.” Let’s compare Oliver Ready’s translation for Penguin to the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation:

Oliver Ready gives us “was renting,” while Pevear and Volokhonsky give us “rented.” Notice, however, that “was renting” not only reads slightly more smoothly in English but also more accurately captures the imperfective aspect of the original Russian. Ready, therefore, creates a fluid English translation while also capturing the meaning of the original Russian. In this case, therefore, I would pick Ready over P&V any day.

Then there’s the problem of readability.

You’ll notice that the original Russian sentence contains several subclauses. Because these clauses are quite short, however, any attempt to mimic the Russian syntax in English creates a choppy reading experience—such as in Ready, P&V, and the following translation from Michael R. Katz:

Such attempts to closely mirror Russian syntax in translation often lead English readers to conclude that Dostoevsky is a poor stylist. While it is true that Dostoyevsky does not quite attain the linguistic perfection we see in Tolstoy, he is far from a bad writer: these subclauses, in fact, read far less “choppily” in Russian than they do in English, and it is simply the fault of several of his translators that he’s managed to be so poorly regarded as a writer in the English-speaking world.

Here’s what Constance Garnett, for instance, does in her translation:

Out of the four translations we’ve examined, Garnett’s yields by far the cleanest English version. She reduces the number of choppy clauses while still retaining the overall meaning of the original, producing, in many ways, the superior English translation.

The biggest issue with the Garnett translation, however, is her verb choice for «нанимать», which she changes from “rented” to “lodged” to preserve the fluidity of her sentence. Those of us who have read Crime and Punishment know, of course, that it is precisely this detail that sets his mad plan into motion. Omitting this nuance therefore deemphasizes Dostoyevsky’s clever foreshadowing of Raskolnikov’s struggles and draws the reader’s attention away from the novel’s inciting incident.

So while I typically like Garnett’s translations for their readability, she certainly commits a translation faux pas with this particular sentence, creating an opening that deviates in meaning from the original text.

But just how important is such “accuracy” in meaning?

Well, it depends on the passage—but I’d argue that even more important than meaning is tone and spirit.

Garnett gets a bad rap for “anglicizing” certain passages, but because she writes in a Victorian-style voice, she most accurately captures the spirit of Dostoyevsky’s time rather than over-modernizing (my biggest pet peeves with many newer translations).

It is precisely this ability to capture the spirit of the original text that defines a “good” translation. And it is precisely in their inability to capture the spirit of the original text where the beloved Pevear and Volokhonsky often fall short.

To this day, I have no idea how this translation duo was not only hired by a major publishing house but also gained the respect they enjoy today in literary circles. I’ve studied dozens of Dostoevsky translations, and I truly believe that they are some of the worst Dostoyevsky translators out there. As I understand it, Pevear doesn’t speak Russian very well, and Volokhonsky writes poorly in English, so much of the spirit of Dostoyevsky gets lost in an inefficient game of broken telephone. Volokhonsky supposedly translates the Russian for Pevear into poorly written English, and Pevear cleans it up to sound more “literary.” The issue with this model is that Pevear does not possess a deep understanding of the original text and misses many of Dostoyevsky’s linguistic nuances—especially the irony in many of Dostoyevsky’s observations about human nature.

As a result, P&V not only manage to write a series of choppy sentences but also end up sacrificing the original meaning of the text; because their translations are more “literal,” however—and because so many people are convinced that 1:1 translations are the “best” sorts of translations—they are praised right and left by many readers who don’t really understand that a good translation must be not only linguistically but also spiritually accurate.

Pevear and Volokhonsky fail on both counts, and their shoddy translations reveal their poor grasp of the Russian language and their misapprehension of the overall meaning of Dostoyevsky’s ideas.

Notes from the Underground

Let’s take a look at their translation of an example passage from Notes from the Underground.

Below is the original Russian text:

Pevear and Volokhonsky translate this passage in the following way:

In order to understand what is so appalling about this translation, we must first understand what’s happening at this stage in the novel.

If you’ve read Notes, you’ll recall the dinner party of the Underground Man’s former classmate Zverkov. The passage I’ve excerpted comes from a scene leading up to the party and represents a key psychological turning point for the Underground Man, who spontaneously decides to invite himself to Zverkov’s party even though he senses that he is unwanted.

While Pevear and Volokhonsky manage to capture the Underground Man’s rashness (“suddenly and unexpectedly”), their translation of the next few words completely undermines the complexity of the Underground Man’s psychology.

In Russian, the phrase «очень красиво» in this context is perhaps closest to “very polite” or “very fine” or even “very dignified,” implying that the Underground Man becomes suddenly aware of the social customs of his frenemies and is mocking the overall practice of pretense and decorum in many social circles. The word «красиво» on its own, however, can also mean “beautiful” or “handsome,” and we use this word typically when referring to physical appearance. That Pevear and Volokhonsky render this word as “handsome” in this context suggests a general lack of Russian fluency: translating «очень красиво» as “very handsome” is not only a mistake but an ignorant stylistic choice that completely derails the point of the scene. We no longer sense that the Underground Man wishes to mock the social customs of his peers—we understand, instead, that the Underground Man is a vain attention-seeker, which strays from the point of the original Russian text. In Dostoyevsky’s Russian, the Underground Man comes off as cruel and spiteful; in P&V’s English, he simply sounds self-absorbed and shallow (not to mention that the English “handsome” in this context sounds more facetious rather than sardonic).

Let’s compare Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation to Constance Garnett’s:

Garnett does a much better job of capturing the spirit of the Russian original and bringing the Underground Man’s scorn to light. The “positively graceful” translation of «очень красиво» mirrors the tone of the original Russian and conveys the Underground Man’s disdain for social customs. The latter half of the sentence—especially “they would all be conquered at once”—accurately captures the grandiosity of the Russian «побеждены», which is much closer to “conquered” than “won over.” While “won over” isn’t an incorrect translation, the Russian word choice here is purposefully over-the-top: “conquered,” therefore, captures its spirit much more accurately than “won over.” Readers of Garnett, therefore, immediately understand that rather than trying to make friends, the Underground Man wants to move mountains in a Napoleonic fashion to conquer the respect of his former classmates—and he will stop at nothing to get there.

Suffice it to say that Pevear and Volokhonsky butcher one of Notes’ most pivotal lines by altering its fundamental meaning. I can only surmise that non-native Russian speakers fabricated the P&V craze—I don’t think it’s possible for any native Russian speaker to read P&V and derive any sort of satisfaction from their translations.

But while some failures of translation can be avoided with a skilled translator, others are inevitable: Dostoyevsky’s linguistic depth and psychological nuance are often fundamentally untranslatable.

White Nights

Here’s a great example from White Nights.

This is the famous closing of Dostoyevsky’s most well-known novella. As far as I’m aware, there are only five English translations of White Nights—Constance Garnett’s classic translation, Ronald Meyer’s translation for Penguin (which, for whatever reason, is not widely available in the U.S. and caters to the Indian market), O.N. Shartse’s translation (which pops up on Goodreads but does not seem to be available anywhere), Alan Myers’ translation for Oxford, and a new translation by Roger Cockrell for Alma Classics.

I have not yet had a chance to take a look at Cockrell’s new translation because I couldn’t find a single eBook version of it, and O.N. Shartse’s translation seems to be a fever dream, so we only have three translations to compare. Nevertheless, let’s take a look at each:

If I were translating this line, I would translate it something like this:

You’ll notice less variation across these four translations than in the previous examples—but don’t think that that means this line is “easier” to translate. If anything, none of these translations—mine included—do justice to the original Russian, and therein lies the genius of Dostoyevsky.

In Russian, the word for “bliss” («блаженство») is perhaps closer to beatitude, but «блаженство» is also frequently used in reference to “holy fool” characters (which appear frequently in Dostoyevsky’s work); the word is also used to communicate delusion. What this suggests is that the Dreamer is aware of the delusion inherent in his bliss—yet he cannot let go of it because the feeling makes him rapturously happy. The message of the final line, then, is not simply about bliss or happiness but about the madness of indulging such all-consuming thoughts. No translation can convey the sum of these ideas in a single English word: “bliss” simply doesn’t do «блаженство» justice, and “beatitude,” is slightly too heavy while lacking the despair embedded in Dostoyevsky’s original sentence.

The next line is even trickier to translate. The Russian sentence uses a word («человеческую») that we might translate as “man” but that also means “human” or “humanity.” What that implies is that the Dreamer isn’t talking about just his own bliss but a feeling we all share as a human race—he refers not only to the whole of an individual man’s life but to the entirety of human existence. In this way, the Russian line carries a universality that the English lacks, emphasizing the divine gravity of the Dreamer’s happiness.

Through this last line, we therefore understand that the novella is not about love or happiness but about indulging delusion—and the universality of such an error. So while English readers walk away from White Nights with the image of bliss, Russian readers walk away with the weight of humanity’s foibles on their shoulders.

Perhaps that’s why I love Russian literature so much: it not only grapples with the gravity of the human experience but also comments on the universality of human nature—the hallmark of a great literary work.

So which Dostoyevsky translation should you read?

None of them. But you can learn Russian online for free.

(Though if you are not up to the task, I suppose Garnett will have to do.)

At Columbia University, we read every socialist theorist under the sun—from Theodor Adorno to Jacques Derrida to Frantz Fanon to Karl Marx himself.

But we never read the other side of the aisle.

In colleges across the nation, socialism has become the dominant ideology—and by no accident, either. English departments teach almost exclusively far-left theorists, and as a result, the majority of students emerge from humanities departments with staunch socialist convictions that carry over into their adult lives.

I’ve always been a capitalist—my parents’ abysmal experience living under socialism in the Soviet Union overrode every pro-socialist argument I heard from my professors—but until fairly recently, I’d never explored the intellectual underpinnings of capitalism in the same way that I was forced to dive into socialism during my undergraduate and graduate years. So over the past year, I’ve made it my mission to read as many liberal-minded (in the classical liberal sense!) theorists as possible, and I’d love to share some of my favorites with you all today.

So if you believe in capitalism—or are just curious to learn from intellectuals who aren’t radical Marxists—here are seven books that will get you started in understanding the pillars of capitalism and a free society.

1) Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

While somewhat dated, Capitalism and Freedom provides a broad overview of capitalism and how it plays out in different parts of our society—from racial politics to education.

For supplemental reading, I recommend Friedman’s well-known 1970 essay The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. There was a lot of buzz after the social revolutions of the 1960s about the “social responsibility” of businesses, and Friedman does a great job demonstrating that a profit-driven model will actually yield the most social good.

2) The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

Across the ocean, Friedman found a close ally in Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom dives into the dangers of planned economies. As an increasing number of academics developed socialist proclivities in response to the rise of Nazism in Germany, Hayek made it his duty to challenge the notion that socialism was necessarily opposed to Nazism by highlighting the similarities between the two ideologies. In The Road to Serfdom, he argues that the Nazis hated the socialists not because of their economic convictions, but because they represented “cosmopolitanism” (i.e. Jewish identity).

But what I love most about Hayek is the lucidity of his prose. While many “theorists” of the latter half of the 20th century were busy hiding behind buzzwords and obscurantism, Hayek set out to write for the people. I always say that the mark of an intelligent person is the ability to lay out any idea—no matter how complex—in accessible terms. Hayek certainly passes this test.

3) The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz

The Captive Mind is an overview of the dangers of totalitarianism with a specific focus on the Soviet Union. While Milosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980 for his fiction, he is best known today for this unique work of non-fiction, which masterfully captures the psychology behind Soviet authoritarianism. The most famous concept from this book is “ketman”—the act of outwardly conforming to totalitarianism while secretly maintaining different true beliefs. Of course, this idea is quite relevant to us today.

4) Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

My next pick is not a work of theory but a novel. Darkness at Noon tells the story of a political prisoner in an unnamed state inspired by the USSR. Koestler fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside George Orwell, and while the two share many literary sensibilities, Darkness at Noon never enjoyed the popularity of Animal Farm or 1984, (perhaps because it wages war on the philosophical underpinnings of socialism themselves, whereas Orwell focuses on authoritarianism as a whole).

I personally prefer Koestler to Orwell because he nails the individual psychology of your typical authoritarian. Orwell, on the other hand, is more concerned with the collective authoritarian psyche.

You can access my YouTube deep dive into Darkness at Noon here.

5) The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

The Virtue of Selfishness explores Rand’s philosophy on objectivism through a series of short essays co-written by her longtime partner Nathaniel Branden. Ayn Rand gets a bad rap, of course, and while I don’t agree with everything she has to say, I don’t think that she deserves much of the hate she gets from the literary and philosophical world. There are aspects of her philosophy that we can certainly learn from today—and her ideas make even more sense in the context of her Soviet background.

6) The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel

In his book The Power of the Powerless, former Czech president Vaclav Havel warns us of the dangers of totalitarianism—and, in this case, the system he dubs “post-totalitarianism.”

The book is most famous for its depiction of a hypothetical greengrocer who puts a sign on his window with the slogan “Workers of the World Unite!” The sign, of course, isn’t there because the greengrocer genuinely believes in its message—it’s simply a social and political signal to everyone around him that he’s done the “right” thing.

In other words, Havel described virtue signaling long before we had people putting the Palestinian flag in their Bluesky bios.

7) The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper

Finally, we have The Open Society and its Enemies, and it is criminally underrated. Popper was a friend of Hayek’s and a notable opponent of Karl Marx. In this particular book, he takes down Plato, Hegel, and Marx as he lays out the pillars of a free society. I’m actually still in the middle of reading this one now, but Popper already has me hooked on his critique of Plato’s Republic. I don’t agree with him on everything, and, of course, he decides to open the book by blaming the Jews (classic), but aside from that, I’m excited to get to the next part, where he’ll go after Hegel and Marx. Havel actually wrote the preface to this book, so this one is a great read directly after The Power of the Powerless.

So there you have it—the starter pack to anti-socialist intellectual thought. Let me know which book you’re starting with in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe to Pens and Poison for more contrarian literary and cultural takes.

When I first moved to New York City, my entire world went up in flames.

I was starry-eyed, ambitious, and eighteen. I had just achieved my lifelong dream of studying English literature at one of the best universities in the world—an Ivy League school famous for paying homage to the great intellectual achievements of Western civilization—and I couldn’t wait to spend the next four years of my life immersed in discussions of Homeric epics, Shakespearean monologues, and modernist poetry at Columbia University.

I went to a STEM-oriented private high school. My classmates, versed in math, chemistry, and economics, had spent the past four years preparing for careers in banking, medicine, and engineering—the so-called “lucrative” jobs of our time. Their wealthy parents had set them on these more “stable” paths for good reason, yet in an unusual twist of events, my immigrant family was much more lenient with me—and I’d always been encouraged to chase my dreams.

For me, those were studying literature and becoming a famous writer.

It’s not that I was wholly impractical. I still applied myself in math and science classes and bandied about business and law as alternative career paths. In college, I enrolled in psychology and economics courses to give myself a backup plan, but I knew from the start that my heart was never set on any of my Plan Bs. I was going to be a writer no matter what it took—and not just a writer but an academic versed in the great humanistic tradition of studying literature.

And how cool would it be if, in the vein of David Foster Wallace or Toni Morrison, I could one day teach my own novels to the next generation of great thinkers?

Being an academic would also be my fast-track to writerly proficiency. The only way to become a great writer, after all, was to read great literature—and by devoting myself to the academy, I could no doubt make my own contribution to a longstanding tradition of verbal storytelling.

In my view, after all, literature and tradition were inseparable. I had inherited this line of thought from my literary idol, the modernist poet T.S. Eliot, who believed that literary creation could be possible only by establishing a centuries-long dialogue with the masters of the past. Perhaps the American modernist poets had always wanted to “make it new,” in the words of Ezra Pound, but there could be no “new” without the old.

Eliot was quite the Burkean, and it is no accident that Edmund Burke went down in history for not only insisting that we ought to respect the tradition of our forefathers but also for suggesting that aesthetic experience was uniquely bound up with beauty and the sublime.

And that was what literature had always meant to me—and why I wanted to study it so badly: it was the closest thing we had to a physical manifestation of beauty in the human soul.

To me, then, the study of literature was by nature a traditional pursuit—a discipline that believed in the preservation of beautiful things. It was a course of study that allowed us to probe the depths of our psyches and examine the questions that make us all human.

You can imagine my astonishment, then, when I learned that by some twisted perversion of fate, literature had become virtually synonymous with radical leftism in the contemporary literary academy.

I wouldn’t quite put my finger on it for another year or two, but even on the first day of freshman orientation in college, I felt that something was off.

The year was 2015. A plane had just crashed in England, and Trevor Noah had just taken over The Daily Show. Tensions were mounting in Germany with an intensifying Syrian refugee crisis, and the country still knew Donald Trump primarily as a billionaire real estate mogul. The GOP debates were coming up at the end of the week, and the newest buzzword on campus was “political correctness.”

That was how things stood on that balmy morning in late August. No one had yet heard the term “woke” in the context that we understand it today—but unbeknownst to 18-year-old Liza, Columbia University was leagues more “woke” than the rest of our society.

Sandwiched between Columbia’s two famous libraries—the now-defunct Low Library and the infamous Butler Library where we all cried our eyes out before exams—we sat in a circle on a patch of grass. There were about fifteen of us—nervous freshmen from all over the world who had come to New York City in the hopes of becoming the future’s greatest minds—and we would be completing orientation activities with each other for the rest of the week.

These were supposed to be our first set of college friends.

I don’t remember a single person from my orientation group, but I can tell you that the orientation leader—a huffy junior from Connecticut—was not very pleased with me throughout my first week on campus.

I remember locking eyes with her right after she’d read off instructions for our first “icebreaker” activity: we were supposed to go around in the circle and state our name, where we were from, our intended major, and our pronouns.

Pronouns?

Picking at my chapped lower lip with my front teeth, I immediately felt some sort of imposter syndrome. Had I, a prospective English major with a deep love for grammar and the written word, forgotten what a pronoun was?

It didn’t make sense in this context.

I began to run through the parts of speech, second-guessing everything I had ever learned in school. Verbs were action words. Adjectives were descriptive details. Prepositions denoted time, place, or location. Pronouns… Pronouns…

Pronouns were words that replaced nouns in order to avoid needless repetition in spoken or written text. I wasn’t going crazy—we’d had even gone over pronouns in French class: tu, il, elle, nous, vous.

Were we learning languages all of a sudden?

As my classmates went around declaring their hometowns and prospective majors, my mind was racing. I had no idea what I was supposed to say.

It seemed that everyone was stating the third-person singular pronouns—subject and object—that corresponded to their sex.

But why?

There I was in my mascara and my baby blue halter dress, rummaging through my dainty purse for one of the small water bottles I had filched from the dining hall—and I was being asked to confirm whether I was a woman.

“I’m Liza,” I stammered. “I’m from Chicago, and I’ll be majoring in English. My pronouns…” I stared off into the distance, turning violet as fifteen pairs of giant eyes glared at me in expectation. “My pronouns are she and her.”

That, my friends, was the first and last time I would ever voluntarily report my “pronouns.”

But back then I was still trying to blend in.

I brushed it off until our next orientation meeting—the last activity I would attend before claiming I had a fever and playing hooky for the rest of the week’s activities.

We were piled into an old classroom in Columbia’s famous Hamilton Hall (the same building that was taken over by pro-Palestine protestors in 2024). Our orientation leader had divided the whiteboard in front of us into seven columns, asking us all to come up and place sticky notes containing each of our “identifiers” under each corresponding column: sex, gender, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability.

Eighteen-year-old Liza—having never heard of “ability” before—wrote “normal” on her Post-It and pinned it proudly up on the whiteboard.

I was pulled aside at the end of the activity and given a stern lecture on “ableism.”

No matter, I thought. Classes would start soon—and I was going to meet my more traditionally minded counterparts in the English department.

But on the first day of my freshman English department seminar, we were given the writings of the so-called literary critic Edward Said.

The chapter in question—from his famous book Culture and Imperialism—was on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

That was strange, I thought. Why were we reading criticism of a book without first having read the book itself?

I had read Mansfield Park in high school, so I could at least follow Said’s entire argument: that Mansfield Park was a novel about colonialism and imperialism.

Had we read the same novel—or, like many of the other students here reading critique before primary source text, had Said simply made up an idea without once ever having touched the actual book?

That evening, we were asked to produce a paragraph response to the Said chapter to prepare for our discussion that coming Thursday.

“The argument that Mansfield Park can only be understood from a colonial standpoint seems entirely farfetched,” I wrote. “Fanny’s entrance into her home as a metaphor for some colonizing force at work is too great a stretch.”

The professor was not very impressed. I had not sufficiently understood Said’s argument, in her eyes, and besides—it didn’t matter whether Mansfield Park was about imperialism or not—what mattered was that Jane Austen was complicit in British imperialist expansion.

Huh?

Before I knew it, I was being fed the writings of Edward Said in virtually every English seminar; the professors who hadn’t yet fallen prey to the Said fever flooded our reading lists with excerpts from Karl Marx and Judith Butler—theorists who defined the English curricula but who seemed to have little—if anything—to do with literature itself.

With every seminar I took, the overall aim of the Columbia University English department became clearer and clearer: these professors collectively wished to use literature as a force of resistance against “illiberal forces” to make our society a more just world for all.

But to me—someone who grew up with parents who’d fled the Soviet Union—Marxism wasn’t synonymous with liberalism in the least.

Sure, there was nothing wrong with trying to make our world more just and equitable—and there were so many great writers who had worked toward that aim—Shelley, Ibsen, Orwell, to name a few. But the promotion of social justice was simply one possible outcome of engagement with literature—not its sole aim.

But if you asked anyone in my department, literature was inseparable from resistance and justice.

How had I, then, come to such a radically different conclusion?

I began to look at trends across reading lists in my English classes. There was always an abundance of literary theory—yet few actual literary works. We had been handed literary theory on the first day of classes without having first read any literature itself.

English departments had slowly replaced literature with literary theory—and so slyly, at that, that no one seemed to have noticed.

The fact was that in the Columbia English department, the “Western canon” was “racist” and “Eurocentric”—and if a text had not come from a multicultural bisexual woman, it was seldom introduced in our classrooms. Sure, we had a Shakespeare seminar, but not without a professor or two demanding that Shakespeare was gay or actually a woman—or teaching his plays through the lens of “queer desire.”

By the time I hit grad school, literature itself had fallen entirely to the wayside. It was assumed that everyone had already read all of the important classics during their undergraduate years, and all that was left was to study them through the lenses of different theories. The one required course for all students in my master’s cohort featured all theory and no literature—in a degree program for English literature.

I had come to Columbia years ago to study English because I loved tradition and beauty. To me, literature is an extension of a broader thousand-year tradition of telling stories, and at Columbia University—a campus whose neoclassical library bears the names of the Western literary greats—I had expected to find so many other old-school lovers of the humanities who clung to beauty and tradition with their entire souls. Instead, I was met with students and professors alike who only wanted to destroy everything I’ve ever loved, calling it “English literature” in the process.

But true scholars of the humanities know that literature is about understanding beauty, culture, art, and society—those special facets that make us uniquely human—rather than about radical leftist activism. We call this the humanistic tradition—and it is this tradition that has been abandoned in English departments across the world today.

I know I’m not alone in approaching the study of literature in this unique way. I came to Columbia to become part of a longstanding tradition, and tradition does not disappear simply because our institutions have abandoned it. Traditions live on, and it only takes a believer or two to revive them completely.

In returning to aesthetics and beauty, we can do our part in saving literature and restoring it to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition. Because after all, literature is our best bet for understanding not only the world around us but our own selves.

“The secret to a great marriage,” says E.J. Dickson in a viral The Cut article from earlier this month, is having “crushes on other people.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I don’t think it is.

I’m still young and unmarried (though that’s changing in a few months), so while I may not have the authority to comment on the “secret to a great marriage,” I’m the same age as several of the women Dickson cites in her piece.

So if these morons are out here womansplaining relationships to other people, I see no reason to sit this one out.

So let’s go through why Dickson is completely delusional—and why having “crushes on other people” while you’re married is most certainly a bad idea.

Dickson begins her piece with an anecdote about an office crush named Phil. She describes sprucing herself up for Zoom calls and the “little frisson of nervous energy” she experiences whenever she’s around him, comparing him to a “swarthier Jake Gyllenhaal.”

Her husband not only knows about all of this but sees no issue with her behavior.

“I did not, and do not, know Phil well,” Dickson writes, “by the time we stopped working together, we’d maybe exchanged 40 words in total, the vast majority of which were about Steely Dan. But my husband, to whom I have been married for almost ten years, heard about him every once in a while.”

I don’t know what I hate more—this woman’s choppy writing style or her deplorable outlook on human relationships.

Worse still is her conviction that having a crush on someone while married is some sort of entertaining hobby.

“If your partner has a face with eyes and ears, and has not been chemically castrated,” she says, “of course they’re going to find other people attractive. Why be dishonest about it — especially when it provides an opportunity to talk about anything other than this week’s grocery list or parent-teacher-conference schedules?”

Are these people crazy? Were they born yesterday? Are we supposed to share our every intrusive thought with every person around us? On the contrary, it is our duty as civilized human beings to develop intuitions that help us discern which thoughts are worth putting into words and which thoughts we are better off keeping to ourselves. In this case, not every thought or impulse is equally as valid as the next—and some may even hurt the people closest to us.

But Dickson doesn’t seem to care about hurting someone close to her—in fact, I would venture to say that it doesn’t appear that her husband is close to her at all: she describes him as “the sexiest person on the planet” but does not once comment on the redeeming factors of his character. It is no wonder that she feels the need to develop attachments to other people—her marriage is ostensibly based on lust. Just take a look at her line about groceries and parent-teacher conferences: she is so emotionally distant from her husband that their conversations have little substance. Of course she’s excited to fantasize about Phil—she doesn’t realize that there could ever be a middle ground between grocery shopping and “I want to schtup my coworker.”

But perhaps we shouldn’t expect much else from a woman who proceeds to craft her foibles into an adultery manual for women—and who somehow thinks that this is a good idea:

“The ideal crush should be someone from whom you have a fair amount of emotional distance (e.g., the local barista/diner waiter) but who still gives you “butterflies.” (If it’s someone you interact with regularly, or text on the side, or who actively threatens the parameters of your relationship, then that’s probably something you need to assess.)”

Don’t worry, guys—it’s okay if it’s someone at a reasonable distance!

Is it, though?

As adults, we rarely fixate on someone who barely knows we exist—this isn’t middle school, after all. In the majority of cases, we develop crushes in the wake of some baseline emotional connection or mutual exchange—and therein lies the danger. Any emotionally charged interaction—even at some “distance”—always runs the risk of turning into something more. Literature, for one, abounds with such examples—Anna Karenina, Ethan Frome, and Madame Bovary—and the result is almost always that someone gets hurt.

But the most telling piece of Dickson’s article is the following prescription:

“A crush should be like writing something vulgar in the condensation of a car window on a chilly day. It’s juvenile. It’s ridiculous. It reminds you not to take yourself too seriously.”

Therein lies the greatest issue both with Dickson’s worldview and our society at large: we have completely stopped taking things seriously.

Marriage was once the most important decision every one of us would ever have to make. Today, however, when fake diamond rings can now be purchased for $50 a pop and when almost every other marriage ends in a divorce, marriage proposals no longer hold much weight, and matrimony has lost its solemnity. It’s no wonder that everything has to be a reminder “not to take yourself too seriously”—serious commitment itself has become nothing more than a farce.

Furthermore, there’s nothing “ridiculous” or “juvenile,” about infidelity—and there’s nothing amusing about engineering crushes for yourself because you and your husband have nothing else to say to one another.

That’s quite sad, actually.

I do not mean to suggest that extramarital crushes never happen to good people or that we should shame anyone who has ever experienced unexpected butterflies. These initial feelings are often beyond our control, and at the end of the day, we all make mistakes. What matters, however, is what we choose to do with those feelings. Rather than celebrating them, we should feel guilty about them. Because at the end of the day, guilt is simply there to save and protect us. It’s the surest way, after all, to renew your loyalty to your spouse and become a better person after having experienced conflicting yet very human feelings.

So while there is no shame in experiencing extramarital desire on its own, spinning that desire into a virtue—like Dickson does in her article—creates an amoral “everything-goes” mentality where nothing means anything anymore. And in a society where everything has to be “explored” or “celebrated,” we’ve forgotten that marriage used to mean a lot to a whole lot of people, and that there is a reason that monogamy requires choosing one person and renouncing all others. Marriage is holy precisely because of its exclusivity: we do things with our spouses that we would never dream of doing with anyone else—and it is that very scarcity that makes us feel loved.

The response, then, to developing an illicit crush should not be to run to your spouse and to tell them all about your fantasies but to remember why you fell in love with your special person in the first place. If they are no longer special to you, then by all means abandon your marriage—but don’t pretend that there’s anything virtuous about seeking validation from another person. And if you simply can’t restrain yourself, then it is your duty to remember the vows you made on your wedding day and to renew your allegiance to both your spouse and to your own self. Because marriage is not only a continual series of sacrifices for the greater good of two people but also a bond whose magic lies in loyalty.

The quicker we learn to take these bonds seriously, the quicker our society will heal.

As for E.J. Dickson, it sounds like she may need to find some hobbies that do not appear in the letters of her name.

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.

Read more

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?