You might know me from social media as that girl who fights wokeness in literature, but in 2015, I came into college as a liberal.

Educated at one of the nation’s premier private schools alongside Malia Obama and Rahm Emanuel’s kids, I was steeped in the intellectual tradition of the great progressive educational philosopher John Dewey. A renowned American pragmatist, Dewey believed that the primary purpose of education was to inspire social reform; armed with this conviction, he collaborated with the University of Chicago to found the Lab School, one of the most progressive private high schools in the country.

To say that my foundational education was progressive is an understatement—as early as second grade, my classmates and I were bombarded with climate change documentaries and readings in civil rights. My seventh-grade humanities class, in fact, spent the year discussing “Social Justice in a Democratic Society”—the official name of our middle school English seminar—and that same year—back in 2009—the school cancelled classes for a week to shepherd us into “Diversity Day” workshops. My eighth-grade English teacher—sporting a mullet and an array of beaded necklaces—looked like she’d walked right out of Woodstock, and my high school history teacher complained in our school newspaper several years ago that “neoliberal influence” had caused the school to lose sight of Dewey’s original “radical” mission. The “real” John Dewey, he writes, would have been just like “Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Brandon Johnson or AOC.”

All of this is to say that my school was “woke” beyond proportion even decades before the word had formally become part of our lingo—and that, educated by Dewey’s disciples before continuing my education at Columbia University, progressivism was all that I had ever known.

It’s not that I was ever a staunch Social Justice Warrior or that I’ve ever voluntarily introduced myself to anyone as “she/her.” I was just liberal in the old-fashioned sense: I cherished intellectualism, women’s rights, equality, and—most importantly—freedom. Swayed by these values, I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, prancing out of the booth with a cheeky “I Voted” sticker on my chest.

At 19, in fact, I’d often get into arguments with my grandmother, a retired Soviet chemistry professor, who insisted that a vote for Donald Trump would lead our country in the right direction.

I remember feeling bewildered that my biggest role model, a woman who had lived through and escaped the oppressive regime of the Soviet Union—where neighbors snitched on one another to the KGB and the press kowtowed to the whims of Joseph Stalin—would support a candidate whom John Oliver and Trevor Noah told me would erect an American Third Reich.

We were Jewish, after all.

During the several months leading up to the 2016 election, I attributed my grandmother’s scorn of the Democratic Party to her senility—after all, she had always taught me the value of diverse perspectives and embodied the highest ideals of feminism as the former chair of her department back in the Soviet Union. But even more importantly, she had taught me that we should never take our American freedoms for granted.

So I was rightfully perplexed by her allegiance to Donald Trump. Trump did not understand the value of freedom, I would always argue. Trump did not have values.

Yet on Wednesday, November 9th, 2016, walking into an exam for my Abnormal Psychology lecture at Barnard, Columbia’s all-girls sister school, I was surprised to find that the morning’s most abnormal behavior patterns were not nestled in the exam questions but plastered on the faces of my classmates, many of whom burst into the classroom bawling, insisting that they were unable to sit for the exam because of the election results.

The professor acquiesced and moved the exam to the following week.

I was rightfully taken aback. What were these girls even crying over? No one had died. Barack Obama would still be president for the next several months. We would have a dullard for a president for the next four years, sure, but did these girls really think that they—members of the privileged elite whose parents were paying $80,000 per year for them to attend one of the best universities in the world—would be personally affected by the reign of Donald Trump?

What was more astonishing was that my classmates—girls who supposedly represented the apex of female empowerment—did not at all embody the feminist strength that my grandmother once taught me. Incapable of sitting through a 45-minute exam because they had read on their phones that the world was ending, my classmates weren’t strong or independent—they were weak.

Back across the street at Columbia, I expected to be met with a dose of sanity—liberal-minded people like me who, although critical of Trump, would spend the day brainstorming solutions to keep democracy alive instead of narcissistically upending everyone else’s lives to make space for their mental health crises. Instead, a fever had set upon campus. These students, either melodramatically sulking to class or barricading themselves in their dorm rooms, genuinely believed that Trump’s presidency would be the end of liberal democracy.

Expecting to have a candid conversation with my peers about the future of America, I was instead branded a misogynist for daring to ask why everyone seemed so upset that afternoon.

Over the next several months, the menacing spirit of November 9th permeated classrooms, infecting the rhetoric of my professors. In a course called “Masterpieces of Western Literature,” for one, I was told that it was “incorrect to argue that a patriarchal structure can benefit society’s women.” On the flip side, I received an A in the same class for a paper that argued against prevailing gender norms in Ancient Greek society.

It wasn’t just one class. In a Shakespeare seminar the following year, my professor—believing that Titania and Bottom’s “relationship” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was an example of “queer desire”—took points off of my exam because I disagreed with her “queer” reading about the play. When I later turned in a paper proposing that Twelfth Night was a play about transgenderism, I was greeted with an A+ grade.

Later, in my senior thesis program, I was called a misogynist for daring to cite the contrarian scholar Camille Paglia—before being ejected from the program entirely. My thesis advisor—with whom I have since cut ties over his despicable pro-Hamas rhetoric—believed that Paglia was not a scholar to be taken seriously and sent me an ominous article from The New York Times that seemed to disprove Paglia’s take on Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” The implication was, of course, that I was not free to explore the angle of the poem I was most interested in because it ran against the grain of the prevailing feminist scholarship that shrouds Plath’s work.

In other words, there was no consistent standard for what constituted “good scholarship.” A scholarly essay from Paglia—who holds a PhD from Yale University—was not taken seriously by faculty at Columbia University, while a random article from a bad journalist at The New York Times became the gold standard of literary critique simply because it said the “right” things. The same department that had rewarded me for advancing fashionable ideological readings penalized me for citing scholars whose conclusions fell outside the accepted orthodoxy.

And while I can only personally attest to such incidents at Columbia University, they reflect a much broader transformation in elite higher education, which is now increasingly defined by growing hostility toward dissent.

Indeed, I soon noticed a pattern across my English classes: my classmates and professors alike were allergic to disagreement. Parroting talking points about the death of democracy while brandishing The Communist Manifesto like a pitchfork, they refused to hear out the experiences of a young woman—me—whose parents had suffered actual oppression because of that same disturbing book. Teaching Edward Said, academia’s premier critic of the State of Israel, those same professors warned us about the resurgence of Nazism while refusing to acknowledge Israel’s role in helping so many Jews find safe homes in the wake of Hitler’s reign. Inspired by Said’s delusional “literary” essays, my classmates would claim that Jane Austen would have been complicit in imperialist expansion and that T.S. Eliot’s poems were “trash” because he was a conservative—all while refusing to engage with the actual writings of these literary greats.

The plague was not confined to English classrooms—it shaped the ideologies embedded in our school newspaper and informed the viewpoints of my literary magazine’s editorial team, which began prioritizing submissions from underrepresented demographics regardless of quality, because, as our secretary put it, “If they’re writing about oppressed minorities, it has to be good.”

How did liberalism, once the label for all things good and free, transform these publications into Joseph Stalin’s Pravda?

Back in high school, I had been taught the importance of liberalism in all its forms, and I still staunchly believe today that liberalism is the way forward when it comes to free inquiry in our society. But what the so-called progressive left embodies on college campuses today is far from the liberalism I’ve always known; instead, it is the same regressive energy that took over the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It is the same spirit that informs the politics of Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez—both of whom picked up their radicalism at Columbia University—and is responsible for the socialist fever that has taken over New York City over the past year. It is the same antithesis to open discourse that Dewey himself—with all his progressive tendencies—would have gawked at had he witnessed just how intolerant the educational sphere he helped shape has become.

Graduating from Columbia, I was left not with the open-minded experience I was promised in my acceptance letter but with a new acceptance letter to the Republican Party, now the more tolerant of our two major political factions. And while strands of the podcast bro right have their own racism and intolerance problems, the more moderate right—the new embodiment of classical liberalism and tolerance—offers hope for a society built on freedom and open discourse. There is, after all, undeniably more intellectual diversity on the political right than on the political left.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed major American institutions replicate what I observed that somber November 9th morning on the campus of Columbia University: a narcissistic tendency to blow all dissenting viewpoints out of proportion and a refusal to engage in open discourse. If Columbia taught me one thing, it’s that the intellectual (anti-intellectual?) left does not stand for freedom of expression but is concerned solely with shutting down dissenting viewpoints. This absence of free speech was exactly why my family had fled the Soviet Union back in the early 90s, and it’s the same reason that my grandmother had been so wary of Hillary Clinton back in 2016.

Today, I realize that my grandmother was never for Donald Trump at all but against the loss of freedom in our society. Having lived through the Soviet Union, she recognized the earliest symptoms of a culture that no longer tolerated dissent long before I could, and though it would take years for me to understand what she had seen immediately, I understand today that we must ask ourselves whether any given political cause can ever justify the abandonment of open inquiry. Because when challenging socialist doctrines gets you called a Nazi and a bigot, we lose the sorts of freedoms my grandmother predicted we’d lose back in 2016—the sorts of freedoms I want to fight for today.

To me, therefore, conservatism does not necessarily represent the caprice and turbulence of MAGA Republicanism but a hope for the return to a tradition that once forged our free and open society. The American right has abandoned many of these values, too, but through a return to the tradition of classical liberalism and open inquiry, we can recover the values that New York City and Columbia University have already abandoned. That’s what conservatism has always meant, after all—conserving the tried-and-true values that contribute to a flourishing society. Conserving the values that my grandmother once crossed an ocean to find, and the freedoms that make our liberal democracy worth preserving.

Christopher Nolan butchered the most important detail in The Odyssey—but that might not be his fault.

I just saw the new Odyssey this past Thursday, and to Nolan’s credit, the film is not only cohesive and engaging but also a fantastic standalone piece of art. I came into the movie with low expectations—especially given the online discourse surrounding its DEI casting—but with the exception of a few minor hiccups—Ellen Page, Zendaya, Travis Scott, and Lupita Nyong’o—I didn’t mind the casting overall. Matt Damon shone in his performance, and the action scenes were both suspenseful and entertaining.

Given my general distaste for contemporary cinema, I would go so far as to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed my overall experience.

But there’s one detail I just can’t get over as a literature lover: Nolan changes the fundamental ethos of the Homeric universe—and the results are disastrous to the Odysseus our civilization has cherished for thousands of years.

At the core of Nolan’s Odyssey is the premise that Odysseus has suffered immense trauma during his time at war and just wants to forget. As the mastermind behind the Trojan horse, he feels responsible for the Trojans’ suffering and experiences PTSD-like flashbacks not unlike those of a Vietnam War veteran. Throughout the film, the goddess Athena haunts him in the form of a young girl his men behead during the sack of Troy, and by the time Odysseus reaches home, he breaks down in tears.

These are all clever plot devices that no doubt resonate with a contemporary audience familiar with the ills of war in the abstract.

There’s only one problem. Homer never wrote such an Odysseus.

In the original Greek text, Odysseus is not only largely unaffected by the Trojan War but actively revels in his conquests. In keeping with the heroic ideals of Homeric Greece, Odysseus is proud of his actions at Troy—and he wants everyone to know that he, the sacker of cities, was largely responsible for the Achaean victory.

It is no accident, then, that Odysseus’s pride also becomes the source of his sufferings.

When Odysseus and his men come up against the Cyclops Polyphemus, our hero tricks the giant by calling himself a “Nobody,” prompting Polyphemus to declare “Nobody is killing me!” Taking these words literally, the Cyclops’ allies leave Odysseus and his men alone, but Odysseus can’t stand the thought that Polyphemus will forever believe that “Nobody” defeated him. In his all-consuming pride, he pompously declares that he, Odysseus, the sacker of cities, gouged out the giant’s eye—before making his final escape.

Armed now with the knowledge of Odysseus’s identity, Polyphemus prays to Poseidon and asks the god to ensure that Odysseus and his men never return home.

In other words, Odysseus’ hubris not only sets the entire epic into motion but is also responsible for the entirety of his sufferings on the way home.

Nolan, however, consciously omits this scene from his film, claiming that it would be far too difficult to pull off such a joke in an English-speaking context. But far more plausible is that including the “Nobody” scene would have undoubtedly thwarted his efforts at creating a weaker Odysseus who believes the Trojan War was all for nothing.

But why make a weaker Odysseus in the first place?

We can only speculate, but boy, do I have some theories.

Sure, Nolan likely altered Odysseus’s character to appeal to a more sensitive, modern audience—perhaps the sorts of anti-war activists who have opposed Israel’s war in Gaza or American involvement in Iran—but it is equally as likely that Nolan simply never got the chance to understand Odysseus’s true character in the first place.

We know for certain that Nolan based his adaptation of Homer’s great epic on Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation. And the fact is that Emily Wilson portrays Odysseus as a moral coward.

It is no secret that Emily Wilson harbors a negative bias against Homer’s eponymous hero. In her introduction to The Odyssey, she calls him an “adulterer,” a “thief and a liar,” a “colonial invader,” a “mass murderer,” and a “soldier with a traumatic past” (among other far-fetched epithets). She portrays Odysseus’s intrusion in Polyphemus’ cave as an “episode” that “seems to meditate uneasily on the processes of colonization,” and repeatedly foregrounds the victims of the Trojan War rather than the Achaeans’ heroic achievements. In a Guardian interview, she admits to changing Homer’s πολύτροπος (polytropos)—an adjective that has previously been rendered as “resourceful,” “skilled in all ways,” and “cunning”—to “complicated” out of a personal belief that Odysseus does not merit a positive description at the outset of the poem.

And, of course, she repeatedly jumps at any opportunity to portray Odysseus as a coward throughout her bizarre translation.

Let’s take a look at her portrayal of the Cyclops episode—that “colonial invasion” that reads very differently between classic translations and Wilson’s abomination of a text. Specifically, we’ll examine the moment that Odysseus reveals his name to his formidable opponent.

I’d like to first show you a translation that’s not mentioned very frequently today but that you may have heard of from another literary genius—George Chapman’s Odyssey that is perhaps most famous for its appearance in John Keats’ poem.

Chapman writes,

By great necessity conquer’d, in my breast:
‘Cyclop! if any ask thee, who impos’d
Th’ unsightly blemish that thine eye enclos’d,
Say that Ulysses, old Laertes’ son,
Whose seat is Ithaca, and who hath won
Surname of City-razer, bor’d it out.’

Notice Chapman’s glory-filled diction: necessity “conquer’d” Odysseus’s breast; he “impos’d” a blemish on the Cyclops’ eye; his “seat” is in Ithaca, reemphasizing his kingly status; and, of course, he’s a “City-razer.” With Odysseus’s heroic spirit shining through so clearly, it’s no wonder that Keats was inspired to write such a beautiful homage to the epic’s first full appearance in the English language.

And it’s not just this more archaic translation that exudes glory—Robert Fagles’ 1996 translation has the following:

I called back with another burst of anger, ‘Cyclops—
if any man on the face of the earth should ask you
who blinded you, shamed you so—say Odysseus,
raider of cities, he gouged out your eye,
Laertes’ son, who makes his home in Ithaca!’

In Fagles, Odysseus, the “raider of cities” shamed the Cyclops. He’s proud of his time at Troy, and he views his connection to his Achaean homeland as the source of much of his glory.

Let’s take a look now at what Emily Wilson does to this passage.

I was
still furious, and shouted back again,
’Cyclops! If any mortal asks you how
your eye was mutilated and made blind,
say that Odysseus, the city-sacker,
Laertes’ son, who lives in Ithaca,
destroyed your sight.’

In choosing the word “mutilated,” Wilson shifts the emotional center of the passage from the victor’s glory to the victim’s injury. Her word choice frequently alters the tone of the passage, with “Whose seat is Ithaca” and “Who makes his home in Ithaca” becoming the bland “who lives in Ithaca”; similarly, the more neutral “anger”—or even Chapman’s charged “By great necessity conquer’d, in my breast”—takes on a more negative connotation with “I was still furious.”

The language is modern, sure, but it sounds more like a series of text messages rather than a victorious declaration.

Similarly, in an earlier passage, Wilson renders “Nobody” as “Noman” (in one word), deemphasizing Odysseus’s outrage at the thought of himself as nobody. In fact, English readers unfamiliar with the Greek story may miss this pun entirely, believing, perhaps, that Odysseus has simply chosen an arbitrary name for himself to disguise his identity.

But the most telling sign of Wilson’s disparagement of Odysseus’s heroism is not in this passage but in the one that follows.

In the Cyclops’ ensuing prayer to Poseidon, Fagles has the following:

‘‘Hear me—
Poseidon, god of the sea-blue mane who rocks the earth!
If I really am your son and you claim to be my father,—
come, grant that Odysseus, raider of cities,
Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca,
never reaches home...’

In repeating Odysseus’s declaration verbatim, the Cyclops acknowledges Odysseus’s noble lineage and his glory as a Greek warrior.

Wilson, on the other hand, does this:

‘Listen, Earth-Shaker, Blue-Haired Poseidon:
acknowledge me your son, and be my father.
Grant that Odysseus, the city-sacker,
will never go back home...’

She completely omits the line “Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca” (which, by the way, does indeed appear in the Ancient Greek), thereby weakening the Cyclops’ recognition of Odysseus’s lineage and kingship. One can surmise that this is Wilson’s attempt to sever Odysseus from his national ties, creating a sort of omni-cause where all are one and where lineage no longer matters.

But in the world of the Homeric epic, glory—and specifically Odysseus’s glory—is uniquely bound up with the theme of nostos—our hero’s burning desire to return to Ithaca. Indeed, Odysseus’s stubborn pride is reflected in the fact that he will stop at nothing to come home—even if it means enduring a greater amount of suffering along the way.

One of the most revealing episodes of Odysseus’s unwavering devotion to his homeland is when he and his men encounter the lotos-eaters; while Odysseus’s compatriots just want to eat the flowers to forget, Odysseus pulls them all away:

But I brought them back, back
to the hollow ships, and streaming tears–I forced them,
hauled them under the rowing benches, lashed them fast
and shouted out commands to my other, steady comrades:
‘Quick no time to lose, embark in the racing ships!’

Nolan’s Odysseus, however, displays no such steadfast heroism. In fact, Nolan completely alters the storyline in keeping with his depiction of Odysseus as a traumatized war veteran by having Odysseus willingly eat the lotos flowers on Calypso’s island. Instead of glorying in his war efforts, he simply wants to forget them, and at one point in the film, Calypso even warns him against eating any more of the flowers, urging him to remember his wife and son.

The fact that Odysseus would even forget Penelope and Telemachus on Calypso’s island in the first place is so grossly out of keeping with Homer’s original character that one can only presume that Nolan inherited a version of Odysseus already stripped of Homer’s heroic sensibility.

Finally, there is Nolan’s portrayal of Odysseus’s PTSD-ridden flashbacks. War-torn and emotionally destroyed by the time he reaches home, Odysseus dives into a regretful recollection of the Trojan War and gradually admits that he believes it all to have been for nothing. Viewers are thus asked to consider Odysseus’s actions in the context of our present world, and while such an artistic decision works within the universe of the film, it’s certainly not the story that Homer tells in his epic—especially given that such an anti-war ethos would have been completely foreign to the Ancient Greeks.

Nolan, nevertheless, insists on creating a world where the Achaean onslaught at Troy will have civilizational repercussions for the next several centuries—and it’s an idea he borrows again from Emily Wilson.

Let’s first take a look at Fagles’ depiction of Odysseus’s triumph in the Trojan War—and then compare it to Wilson’s.

Retelling the story of the Trojan Horse to the Phaeacians, Odysseus reminisces on his conquests in the following terms:

For Troy was fated to perish once the city lodged
inside her walls the monstrous wooden horse
where the prime of Argive power lay in wait
with death and slaughter bearing down on Troy.
And he sang how troops of Achaeans broke from cover,
streaming out of the horse’s hollow flanks to plunder Troy—
he sang how left and right they ravaged the steep city,
sang how Odysseus marched right up to Deiphobus’ house
like the god of war on attack with diehard Menelaus.
There, he sang, Odysseus fought the grimmest fight
he had ever braved but he won through at last,
thanks to Athena’s superhuman power.

Fagles consistently preserves the epic grandeur of Homer’s scene. Troy is “plundered”; the Achaeans “ravaged the steep city”; Odysseus advances “like the god of war”; the entire battle is “the grimmest fight he had ever braved.” These are the memories of someone who is proud of his conquests at war—and wants everyone around him to revel in his glory.

Wilson, on the other hand, has this:

The town was doomed to ruin when it took
that horse, chock-full of fighters bringing death
to Trojans. And he sang how the Achaeans
poured from the horse, in ambush from the hollow,
and sacked the city; how they scattered out,
destroying every neighborhood. Like Ares:
Odysseus, with Menelaus, rushed
to find Deiphobus’ house, and there
he won at last, through dreadful violence,
thanks to Athena. So the poet sang:

Notice how Wilson immediately downplays the glorious register of Homer’s original text. She translates Homer’s αἰνότατον πόλεμον (awe-inspiring war) as “dreadful violence,” toning down the glory embedded in the Greek to make a political statement about the ills of war from a contemporary perspective. Rather than celebrating Odysseus’s martial prowess, she emphasizes the evils of bloodshed, replacing heroism with shame and judgment. The very fact that she translates poleimon—the word that gave us our word “polemic”—as “violence” suggests that she cannot help but insert her own biased interpretation of the Trojan War into her translation of the poem. Instead of “awe-inspiring,” she puts “dreadful,” giving Homer’s language a distinctly negative connotation and inviting readers to interpret Odysseus as a man filled with sorrow and regret.

To be fair to Nolan and Wilson, there is some nuance at this stage in Homer’s poem. Odysseus does, indeed, start quietly weeping after his recollection of the war, but he’s not regretful in any way. He’s simply a human with deep and conflicting emotions.

And therein lies the beauty of Homer’s Odysseus. He is complex in a way that Wilson’s Odysseus is not.

Despite her supposed expertise in Ancient Greek, Wilson does little to understand the complexity embedded in Homer’s characters—or willfully misrepresents them in order to promote a lopsided worldview. She strips Odysseus of his charisma to appeal to a more liberal audience, resulting in the very Odysseus we saw this past week on the big screen. With this in mind, one can hardly blame Nolan for creating the Odysseus we’ve been shredding to pieces this past week in think-pieces across the Internet—he was simply trusting a supposed authority who gravely misled him.

The reality of any book-to-film adaptation is that it will inevitably make changes to the source material. But in this case, one particular change alters the entire world of The Odyssey, portraying a culture built on shame rather than one that revels in glory. The ending of the film is appropriately bleak, with Odysseus, though reunited with his family, grimly sailing off to honor the dead. Such a bittersweet end inserts a negative ethos into Homer’s otherwise triumphant closing chapter, and while it fits nicely into the world of the film, it’s certainly not an accurate depiction of The Odyssey we know and love.

So should you go see the film if you haven’t already? If you want a three-hour flick with Matt Damon running around trying to get home, then absolutely—and to Damon’s credit, he nails his performance. But if you want an accurate retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, then you can skip out on this latest blockbuster and wait until it hits your favorite streaming platform.

If you want to know exactly what’s wrong with a culture, take a look at the literature it produces.

There has been one such artifact floating around the cultural stratosphere—Yesteryear by influencer Caro Claire Burke—and while I’d hesitate to call it “literature,” it exposes everything that’s wrong with both the contemporary publishing industry and our civilization at large.

Burke’s novel follows a “tradwife” influencer who travels back in time and wakes up in the 19th century—only to realize that the “perfect” life she’s been living isn’t as fulfilling as she’s always believed.

Given what we know about the leftist women who run the publishing industry, you don’t really need to read the book to extrapolate its exact message, but out of curiosity (and a naive willingness to give ideologues the benefit of the doubt), I decided to read the first several chapters.

And, boy, were all of my assumptions wrong.

Yesteryear defied my expectations in the worst possible way: it was somehow even more inaccurate, judgmental, and ludicrous than I could have conceived in my wildest dreams.

Let’s take a look at the first page.

Burke’s “satire” is clumsy at best. Before we see our protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, make a single meaningful decision, we’re told—through a self-righteous monologue—that she’s disciplined, sober, and effortlessly successful; motivated by material gain, she looks down on anyone who doesn’t embody her values.

While such a setup could be intriguing, there’s only one problem—no human being on the planet thinks this way.

In order to pull off a successful internal monologue, one must study the basic tenets of human psychology. Take Dmitri Karamazov from The Brothers Karamazov, for one. Dmitri is the last person we’d think of as a saint, and he often comes up with the most off-putting defenses for his poor life choices. Nevertheless, he possesses a basic self-awareness that makes him not only sympathetic but believable as a character.

Yesteryear’s Natalie, on the other hand, exhibits no such depth. Reduced to a list of assumptions about a given archetype, she comes off less as an individual consciousness and more as a direct embodiment of Burke’s own prejudices. And while it is true that one might expect a satirical novel to contain a greater number of over-the-top characterizations than a “serious” social critique in the vein of The Brothers Karamazov, an effective work of satire must nevertheless retain a degree of artistic subtlety. Pride and Prejudice’s ever-so-frivolous Mrs. Bennet, for instance, leaps right off the page; likewise, London’s “bright young things” in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies are every bit as psychologically convincing as they are ridiculous.

Put simply, the best satirists effectively humanize their targets.

Not so in Yesteryear. Burke’s writing has zero subtlety—and it is clear that she has done zero research on the values of the conservative Christians she’s set out to mock.

One might excuse Burke if she had merely written a sloppy opening paragraph, but the morally self-righteous tone continues for pages on end:

One is tempted to write Natalie off as an ideological construct rather than a character in her own right. Everyone outside of her immediate circle becomes an absurd caricature—”the Angry Women,” “some hateful witch in Manhattan,” the people “crazy with bloodthirst”—and throughout it all, Burke can’t help but continually point out the supposed shortcomings of “tradwife” parenting. Natalie’s asides, after all, are so obviously written through the lens of the author rather than through the eyes of our protagonist that one is tempted to dismiss the entire novel as a second-rate manifesto.

By the end of the first chapter, it becomes painfully obvious that Burke has never once meaningfully interacted with the sort of person she means to satirize, and therein lies the biggest problem with her critique: Burke is only capable of presenting a series of cardboard villains because she refuses to acknowledge that her political opponents are human, too.

One is left, therefore, to characterize Burke’s novel as revolting and despicable. Sure, the “tradwife” life isn‘t for everyone—trust me, I’m certainly no conservative Christian—but one cannot deny that many women who do become stay-at-home mothers report feeling more fulfilled than ever. To portray conservative women as power-hungry grifters devoid of self-awareness is not only grossly inaccurate but mind-numbingly evil.

One can only hope that Yesteryear—like many other contemporary “literary” novels examining hyper-specific contemporary problems from hyper-specific contemporary angles—will disappear into the sands of time like the might of King Ozymandias. But the fact that Yesteryear has caused quite a national storm over the past few months raises a far more interesting question than whether Burke can write believable characters (she can’t): why was this particular story—with its one-dimensional ideals and insufferable writing style—given so much attention in literary circles?

The answer, of course, has less to do with Yesteryear’s objective literary merit and more to do with the ideology embedded in its pages.

I can almost guarantee, in fact, that if someone had written a novel with a similar one-dimensional caricature of a radical leftist, the entire literary world would be losing it as we speak. We’d be seeing thinkpieces right and left about how the author is “dehumanizing political opponents by reducing them to ideological caricatures,” how the novel is “a shallow culture-war screed masquerading as literature,” or how the writing style itself is “artistically bankrupt.”

We can speculate, of course, about what such a reaction might look like, but we might never know for certain because the publishing industry would never allow such a novel to reach our shelves in the first place.

Literary agents and editors alike have declared an industry-wide boycott on stories with traditional sensibilities, blacklisting everything from “conservative leaning books” and “dated ideals of relationships” to “love triangles” and “‘clean’ romance.” While any one of these exclusions might seem innocuous in isolation, when dozens of gatekeepers begin rejecting the same sorts of books for the same ideological reasons, these biases permeate the editorial practices of an entire institution.

In other words, when enough gatekeepers create similar laundry lists of topics they don’t want to read about, an entire literary culture becomes intellectually homogenized.

If the vast majority of agents, after all, decide that they don’t want to represent stories about religion, then it becomes virtually impossible for an author writing positively about religion to get his or her book on the market, effectively boycotting that topic from the entire industry—and from the carefully curated books that get delivered to the shelves of your local bookstore.

But how bad is the problem, really?

I analyzed trends across 14 “Anti-Manuscript Wish Lists” from literary agents and editors, and the results are both illuminating and disturbing.

Here are the lists I hunted down from various corners of the Internet:

While it is industry standard for publishing professionals to reject genres outside of their specialty, a more chilling pattern emerges upon a closer perusal of these guidelines. Nearly every agent and editor above reports an aversion to religious themes, and a striking number reject books that feature police officers, military protagonists, conservatives, and Zionists. Several agents discourage the submission of stories that portray marginalized identities (unless written by authors sharing those identities), and others explicitly dismiss books they see as politically or morally out of step with their own values.

While a list of 14 is by no means representative of every professional in the publishing industry, the fact that many agents and editors now feel comfortable publicly announcing these ideological exclusions should concern anyone who believes that literature benefits from genuine viewpoint diversity. Because regardless of intention, the practical effect of these lists is to send a clear message to religious and conservative writers: your stories are not welcome here.

Even conservatives who don’t write overtly “conservative” fiction face the possibility of rejection for promoting “dated ideals of relationships” (whatever that means) or “morality stories” (which just means “morality I disagree with”). One literary agent, for instance, lamented that my novel, which examines the role of beauty and religion in our contemporary culture, failed to adequately address “privilege” and featured “emotionally supportive men.”

Across my three novels, I frequently explore themes of marriage, faith, duty, and morality because they rank among the most enduring questions of our civilization. Yet because my characters ultimately choose marriage over polyamory, faith over spiritual nihilism, and objective morality over moral relativism, they become alien to literary agents who have actively imposed an embargo on the traditional moral imagination.

I was lucky enough to gather tangible evidence of ideological bias in the literary establishment, but the fact is that these prejudices are seldom expressed so bluntly. Instead, they are often reframed as matters of “personal taste,” with agents and editors frequently writing off manuscripts on the basis that they didn’t “connect” with the story or that they couldn’t “relate” to the characters. What this means in practice is that literary agents don’t end up championing the sorts of traditional or religious ideals they don’t subscribe to themselves, resulting in an entire literary milieu where manuscripts become filtered not only by literary merit or commercial viability, but also by ideological compatibility.

This is soft censorship at its finest—and it defies literature’s very purpose to portray a diversity of characters and convictions.

It is true that some of our culture’s greatest authors have been devoted leftists—Jean Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, to name a few—but it is also true that many others have produced great works of literature—Crime and Punishment, Brideshead Revisited, Anna Karenina—with more “traditional” takeaways. Both are equally valid, and both deserve to live on our shelves. At the end of the day, after all, a healthy literary ecosystem should welcome a variety of viewpoints, featuring novels that sympathetically portray Christians, Republicans, police officers, soldiers, stay-at-home mothers, and traditional families—as well as socialists, atheists, progressives, feminists, environmentalists, and leftists. One need not come at the expense of the other.

Today, however, authors are increasingly discouraged from writing believable, likable characters from across the ideological spectrum. They are either confined to launching an attack on their opponents in the vein of Yesteryear or producing “relatable” protagonists with leftist beliefs. The result is an entire literary culture that has become convinced that the general reading public only wants books like Yesteryear—when in reality, novels that contain alternative worldviews are filtered out long before readers ever have the opportunity to choose them.

But I would predict that if we allowed books with more traditional messages and more politically diverse characters to exit the publishing pipeline, then such books would find a much broader readership than Yesteryear—because most of us are sick of this crap.

The success of Yesteryear poses a grim reality for heterodox readers and writers across the country, but not all hope is lost for the ideologically contrarian novel. As readers, we must actively push for a publishing culture that welcomes writers from across all aisles of the political spectrum. We must make our voices heard and fight against soft censorship in the publishing industry, reminding gatekeepers that literature cannot fulfill its highest purpose until it is free to imagine every possibility of the human mind—and to challenge our existing sensibilities. Because the purpose of fiction has never been to reassure us that our political opponents are monsters but to remind us that, like us, they are human, too.

The day we remember that lesson will be the day our culture regains its humanity.

Loving America has become something of a faux pas.

Across all aisles of the political spectrum, America hatred is now a rite of passage. On the left, America is a nation built on racism, oppression, and inequality—and should therefore be burned to the ground. On the right, America has lost its former glory at the hands of evil immigrants (especially the Jews) who wish to wipe out Christian values—and burn the country to the ground.

But those of us who aren’t preoccupied with America burning in its various iterations have more than a handful of nice things to say about a country that has always represented hope, dreams, equality, and freedom to millions of people across our globe. And as one of those deplorable Jewish immigrant kids, I wanted to do something special for my favorite country on her 250th birthday—so I wrote her this letter.

I hope you’ll read it, too.

Dear America,

I don’t remember the first time I heard your name, but it must have been sometime in my stroller days when, carted off to preschool with my brown kosichki (braids) and my turquoise varezhki (mittens), I was forced to learn a bunch of words that we didn’t have at home. See, the walls of my small two-bedroom apartment were plastered with Cyrillic letters, and I ran around singing the Russian alphabet at two before memorizing my first Pushkin poem at the age of three. I grew up on funny cartoons that the other playground kids had never heard of, and my favorite song—the one about a set of swings that hurled you up towards the sky—was in a language that my classmates didn’t understand.

Maybe my trouble relating to the other preschoolers sprouted from the fact that I didn’t speak their language very well—and they certainly didn’t speak mine. I could introduce myself and count to ten, but I didn’t know what my teachers meant by “birdhouse” or “windowsill,” and the only reason I knew the days of the week was because I’d learned them from my grandmother’s stockpile of common English phrases. She might laugh today at the seemingly far-fetched notion that there was ever a time that she taught me English—she barely speaks it herself—but back then, she was the only one in my family patient enough to teach a Russian girl how to talk to the Amerikantsi.

Yet it wasn’t until I was five years old that it dawned on me that I wasn’t properly a Russian girl.

See, by the time I hit Kindergarten, reading those Cyrillic letters began to annoy me—they were different from the letters that we had in school, and there were so many more of them to piece together. Overwhelmed, I’d stomp around that old apartment proclaiming that I didn’t want to read those letters anymore (too bad no one had told me about my future best friend Fyodor back then), and my dad was quick to take my side.

Nestled on our brown faux leather couch between a Russian picture book and a mug of chamomile tea, my dad crossed his arms. “Why do you keep bothering her with those Russian books?” he insisted, scowling at my mom. “She doesn’t need Russian. Our daughter is an American.”

An American? Was I really one of those?

It didn’t seem nice to be an American—whatever that was. Whenever the word was brought up in my family, it was always used as an insult—like “uncultured” or “stupid” or one of those other words that grownups don’t say around children. If my friend Megan’s parents didn’t bring their daughter to the symphony with me, for one, it was because they were Amerikantsi. If Annie’s dad packed her potato chips for lunch, it was because he was Amerikanets. If Josh’s mom signed him up for softball after school, it was because she was Amerikanka.

Those Amerikantsi did some pretty weird things, too. Where I grew up in Chicago, they were always having arguments about some cubs and some socks, and over winter break, they always got presents a week before I did, which didn’t seem very fair. They went outside without their shapkas and scharfs (hats and scarves) and sat in front of the air conditioner all day, which was going to give them pneumonia. They didn’t save their plastic bags and mason jars, and they liked to prance around the house without their tapochki (slippers). They didn’t even congratulate you after you got out of the shower.1

The worst one was when you were in the airport and some teenager with a hoodie and a plastic suitcase would be sitting na polu—on the floor.

You weren’t ever supposed to sit on the floor.

My grandmother would shake her head and sigh. “Amerikantsi!”

Suffice it to say that I didn’t want to be one of those Amerikantsi. They were lazy, uncultured, rash, and, apparently, comically unprepared for reality.

So growing up, I liked to say that I was Russkaya—and that didn’t seem to bother anyone. The kids at school never seemed to like me anyway—because I didn’t understand their sports, their holidays, their food, their music, their TV shows—and I didn’t really like them back. I had my Ukrainian best friend outside of school, and she understood better than anyone that you had to wear your tapochki inside. Her dad was doktor, and her mom was doktor, and together, we watched our favorite Soviet cartoon about the wolf who always chased the rabbit—and I felt understood.

Maybe that’s also why I started reading Russian literature from an early age—there were people in those pages who understood my habits and my psyche better than I did myself. In fact, it might have been my status as a perpetual outsider that fostered my broader love of literature, where someone was always being misunderstood.

It was also through literature that I soon learned to speak English the proper way—where I’d picked up not only “birdhouse” and “windowsill” but also “dilapidated” and “alacrity”—and I couldn’t wait to wow those Amerikantsi with my new vocabulary.

Maybe that was what it would take to finally be understood.

So imagine my surprise when I realized that none of the other eight-year-olds had ever heard of “pariah” and “sagacity”—words I’d picked up from my friend Tom Sawyer—and I remained just as unintelligible as ever. Besides, no one wanted to hear about my travels around the world in 80 days with Phileas Fogg; they only wanted to talk about touchdowns and Nintendos and the Krusty Krab.

Frustrated, I sulked back home to orange fish soups and my stuffed Cheburashka—a character from my favorite Russian cartoon.

So, no offense, America, but I didn’t really get why you were special. Your kids didn’t stand a chance against me in fourth grade multiplication tables (I learned the Soviet way), and your grownups liked Wrigley Field way more than the Lyric Opera. In fact, you seemed kind of crummy to me—especially after I left you for the first time to visit my cousins in Britain and made some European friends.

God, it was just like in the Harry Potter books! And best of all, they didn’t do Amerikanskiye things.

Our friends across the pond liked reading novels and going to the ballet and eating strawberries and broccoli instead of hamburgers and learning new languages and visiting art museums and dressing like princesses rather than like the homeless guy next door. Instead of learning about slavery in thirteen different grade levels, they learned about kings and queens and Shakespeare, and instead of watching hillbillies on horses while munching on some chicken legs, they sat at proper tables eating crumpets with their Earl Grey teas.

Flying back from Heathrow, I couldn’t believe just how much I’d fallen in love with Trafalgar Square and the Globe Theater and those quaint little shops on Oxford Street.

In the last row of the economy cabin, I turned to my mom and asked her why I had to be American when my cousins could be British. After all, England was so much more culturally similar to the European mentality I’d grown up with.

Besides, I didn’t understand why my parents—who perpetually looked down on those Amerikantsi—had ever left the Motherland in the first place. It’s not like our lives were that great, anyway.

By then I was a teenager, and I’d learned in school from James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates that the American Dream was a lie, and that no one really got ahead in a country that was prejudiced against anyone who wasn’t Bill Gates (this was before Elon’s time). No one seemed to like us or to understand why we celebrated Christmas on December 31st—or why a bunch of Jews put up Christmas trees on New Year’s to begin with—and if it was really so great in America, then why did it take us sixteen years to afford one of those European vacations that my classmates had been on about since practically the second grade, and why did so many of the other kids have houses with four stories and gardens in their backyards when we were confined to our teeny two-bedroom apartment all our lives, and why did we have to fly in the very last row of the entire plane, and why did all my teachers say that America was mean and racist, and why did Hemingway and T.S. Eliot and all my favorite writers leave if it was so great back in America, where the plane would dump us off in several hours, and we’d go back to our lame sports and fake food and failing education system once again?

I could always move to Europe later on in life, my mom suggested. If I really wanted to.2

That was it! No more of these Amerikantsi! I could be a proper European—just like all the authors of my favorite books! I could walk up and down The Strand just like my favorite Dickens characters and maybe take afternoon tea at the Savoy. I could live a proper cultured life where people could pronounce my parents’ home country (Azerbaijan) or, at least, had heard of it. I could revisit my European roots and live my adult life in a world that understood good food and great literature and all the oddities of growing up very un-American.

America—I really thought that I was going to leave you!

In fact, if I hadn’t missed that application deadline to Oxford—my lifelong dream college where I was going to be just like Hermione Grainger—maybe I wouldn’t be here with you anymore.

Maybe I would have been irrevocably immersed in that strange European propaganda that somehow found its way into my childhood and convinced me—as it’s convinced so many other people—that America is the land of racism and uncultured boors.

Maybe you would have never had the chance to prove to me just how wonderful you are.

Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, longing to leave the Midwest and its baseball and its Irish pub obsession, I submitted an application to Columbia University. According to my homeroom teacher, my chances were slim at best. I hadn’t been immersed in endless community service projects like all the other American kids, and you really didn’t get into the Ivy League without connections, he explained. Most of those Columbia kids were either Chinese nationals who paid the full tuition or billionaires’ daughters who played weird sports like squash. You didn’t get into the Ivy League as some no-name immigrant kid with no extracurriculars (except reading books and writing novels, which hardly counted), and you certainly didn’t live out the American Dream because the American Dream did not exist.

America had been rigged against me, I was told at school, from the very start.

So when I got my acceptance letter to Columbia that week in March, I couldn’t believe it.

Could my teachers have all been wrong?

After all, this no-name immigrant kid with no money and no connections and no extracurriculars was going to the mystical Ivy League.

I won’t tell you, America, about how Columbia University kind of sucked (you can read about that here), but I know it’s not your fault that a bunch of clowns took a really great idea and flushed it down the toilet. (You might not be surprised to learn, America, that those same people tend to hate you most.) But despite Columbia’s many flaws, the fact is that you, America, helped create a system where a no-name kid like me who wrote corny novels in her tiny bedroom could receive one of the best educations in the world—and could one day see her words in bookstores. You helped me perceive a universe of possibilities where, suddenly, dreams weren’t “exclusionary,” like that schmuck Ta-Nehisi Coates had written, but where the American Dream was playing out right before my eyes.

All around me, my classmates were interning at the White House and starting companies and applying to medical school and working in banks and writing screenplays and becoming models—and, suddenly, I felt like I could do something life-changing, too.

I could be a writer—just like I’d always wanted to be! I could occupy a universe where no one was going to laugh at me for my vocabulary and where I could talk about all the times I’d ever felt alone. Somewhere along the way, maybe some other little girl—with her long braids and woollen mittens—would feel like she belonged amongst my stories just like I’d once felt that I’d belonged among Pierre and Andrei and Natasha. I could be just like the writers who had gotten me through years of alienation, and no one was going to stop me because this was America, and you could do anything you wanted.

These Amerikantsi—many of whom, contrary to what I’d always been told, also came from no-name immigrant families—were off changing the world!3

And I could change the world, too. I could move people with the same words that had once burdened me as a kid—the English words that were the lifeblood of my stories and formed the language of my people—the Americans.

America, maybe you were kind of cool.

But it wasn’t until my twenty-first birthday that I really fell in love with you—that I learned how much you’d done for my poor family when they’d needed help the most. It wasn’t until my twenty-first birthday that I learned why my parents moved here in the first place—and how passionately you had saved them.

It was over brunch not too long after my graduation—or maybe several weeks before it. Either way, I was back in Chicago for a few weeks, and it was time to catch up with my mom.

It was on that same morning that I learned that in 1991, my dad had gone to prison for being different.

An engineering job at Azerbaijan’s first “tech firm,” he scored a senior position at the company early on in his career. Around the same time, as the Soviet Union collapsed and Azerbaijan became an independent state, a few corrupt officials, jealous of his success, decided to frame him for money laundering because, as a Jew, he wasn’t like everyone else.

With no set legal process in a brand new country, my dad was carted off to prison in a place that didn’t like you for being different.4

I wish I could tell that genius Ta-Nehisi Coates that my family knows a thing or two about oppression.

But my dad didn’t let any of that get to him. He survived his sentence by gaining the respect of a group of high-profile criminals, who helped him secure a parole-like reprieve. By the time he got home nine months later, my grandparents had already been in contact with you, America. You promised us a new home where none of us would be persecuted for being different—because you said that being different was all right.

It doesn’t matter that, in coming to America, my dad was forced to abandon both his career and his possessions. It doesn’t matter that he arrived at O’Hare Airport in Chicago with just $100 in his pocket after several years of professional success back home. It doesn’t matter that he lived in a Jewish ghetto and fried potatoes at Burger King while holding a master’s degree in engineering. It doesn’t matter that he learned English from his answering machine and got his bike stolen during his first year in his new home. It doesn’t matter that it took him years to save up to propose to my mom and to bring her to America with him.

None of that mattered because in America, my dad was free.

And no one was ever going to come after him just because he was different.

After several years, my dad, a no-name immigrant who had spent nine months in prison in his late twenties, had saved up enough money to buy that dumpy two-bedroom apartment I always compared to the mansions of my peers. After several years, he had put his entire savings into my education and sent me, a no-name immigrant kid, to the same grade school that was good enough for our own president. After another decade, he could afford to buy his kid an international plane ticket to go on a vacation, and after another several months, he saw his favorite daughter off to another school that had been good enough not just for that current president but for many more throughout our history.

All of the things that had seemed pretty lame to me growing up suddenly became amazing.

Miraculous, even.

It was a miracle what you could do as a random immigrant to America.

And suddenly, I understood why my parents had sacrificed everything they had back at home so that I could have my life here—in America.

It truly is a miracle that, today, I’m sitting here at 1:19am on Tuesday morning because I don’t have to get up early for work tomorrow because, as an American entrepreneur, I set my own schedule and earn my own money. It’s a miracle that I got one of the best educations in the world and found a way to make a great living for myself with my two English degrees. It’s a miracle that I’m lucky enough to hold a passport that allows me to visit almost any other country in the world, and it’s a miracle that, following every international vacation that I can now afford with my own earnings, I come back to a home that encourages freedom and innovation. And it’s a miracle that I live in a country where I can support myself financially while chasing my dreams of one day becoming a famous writer.

And the crazy thing is, America, I know I’m going to realize those dreams because I have you.

Jeez, America, I owe you an apology. You’re not just pretty cool. You’re wonderful.

I’ve never believed in God, but I do believe in miracles. And I know that it’s a miracle that, out of all of the places I could have been born on our lonely planet, I have the honor and the privilege to be the first person in my family to have been born in the greatest country in the world. Today, I wake up every morning (or afternoon, when I’m up late writing these essays) with an inordinate amount of gratitude that I’m lucky enough to call myself an American.

Maybe I won’t ever understand, America, why your people like watching guys with funny sticks hit balls and run around a field, and maybe I’ll have to talk to you one of these days about why none of them have ever seen a ballet, but I’ll take air conditioners and removable water bottle caps and 24-hour supermarkets and slop bowls and even those oblivious tourists in Times Square over Russian militancy and British totalitarianism any day.

America, I hope you know that your haters are wrong. The American Dream is real, and I can prove it!

I am the American Dream.

America, I’m glad we became best friends. I’ll always have your back when all the bullies come your way—just like you’ve always had mine.

Here’s to 250 years of freedom, innovation, diversity, and the power to be anyone you want to be.

And even though your hamburgers are really crappy, I love you dearly—and will love you forever.

Happy 250th birthday to the greatest country on planet Earth.

Your biggest fan,

Liza

One of the most common interpretations of Crime and Punishment is also one of its greatest misreadings.

When I studied Crime and Punishment at Columbia, we focused on Raskolnikov’s abject poverty, his relationship to masculinity, and the anguish that plagues him throughout the book.1 Though these themes do make an appearance in the novel in one way or another, they don’t even scratch the surface of the central question of his most monumental work: Why does Raskolnikov commit murder?

The modern university and the contemporary literary establishment often treat Crime and Punishment as a novel about poverty, oppression, and inequality. According to this reading, Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker because he has no other choice. Reduced to nisheta—a Russian word that suggests extreme poverty to the point of moral degradation—Raskolnikov acts out of desperation. Proponents of this reading often turn to the novel’s epilogue, where nisheta is cited as Raskolnikov’s primary motive, but curiously enough, Raskolnikov himself rejects this explanation. Earlier in the novel, in fact, he explicitly tells Sonya that his crime was not done to feed his family—and that it had nothing to do with money. Indeed, had Raskolnikov’s crime been economically motivated, we might have expected him to use at least some of the money he took from the pawnbroker for the greater good of society—or at least to help out his mother and sister. Instead, he hides the money and leaves it untouched. These circumstances stump the jury at his trial; nevertheless, they conclude that Raskolnikov had good intentions and commute his sentence.

It is still tempting to conclude that Raskolnikov’s crime is economically motivated: the reason we say sympathize so much with Raskolnikov, one might argue, is that he lives in an unjust society that has made such a murder practically inevitable—after all, what else could he have done to feed himself? Such readings often turn Crime and Punishment into an explicitly political novel that conveniently serves contemporary left-wing or even Marxist causes, inviting, for instance, comparisons between Raskolnikov and Luigi Mangione: both men were justified, these readers will claim, in sacrificing a single individual for the greater good of society.

But what such Marxist apologists often miss about Crime and Punishment is Dostoyevsky’s deeper exploration of human psychology. Indeed, Raskolnikov’s crime is philosophically rather than economically motivated, and Crime and Punishment is more a novel about morality than it is about poverty and oppression.

But if Raskolnikov’s crime isn’t motivated by poverty, then what is his motivation?

To answer that question, we must look beyond the economic circumstances of nineteenth-century Russia and toward the intellectual currents that shaped both Raskolnikov and his creator.

Dostoyevsky was a military engineer before he became a writer, but prior to military school, he attended a French boarding school, where he developed a love for French literature. His first literary project, in fact, was a translation of a lesser-known Balzac novel into Russian, and though the book flopped upon its release, he spent the next several years of his life enamored both by French culture and the progressive ideas coming out of the French academy. In his mid-twenties, he discovered the writings of Charles Fourier, the founder of utopian socialism, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the so-called “father of anarchism.” Around the same time, he joined an underground literary group called the Petrashevsky Circle whose founder was a known disciple of Fourier.

Fourier’s utopian philosophy shared a fundamental core with the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, who believed that the morality of a given action must be judged according to whether it increases the sum of human happiness, which, in turn, would lead to collective social harmony. Though Dostoyevsky was actively involved in Petrashevsky’s secret society, he was skeptical of the utilitarian idea that individual human beings could be sacrificed for the greater good of the collective, and it was this doubt that would eventually become the primary philosophical question of his two early great works: Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment.

The following year, members of the Petrashevsky Circle were sentenced to death for conspiratorial activity, and Dostoyevsky prepared to meet his fate in front of a firing squad—that is, before an incoming letter from the tsar saved his life. Pardoned, he was sent instead to exile in Siberia, where, much like Raskolnikov, he turned to religion and developed deeply religious tendencies. Transformed by his near-execution, he embraced Christian morality over abstract intellectual theories and espoused individual human beings over the collective abstraction of “humanity.” His transformation is famously captured in the final pages of Crime and Punishment: “Instead of dialectic, there was life.”

Following his release from prison, Dostoyevsky set out to challenge utopian socialism through literature.

While his later novel Demons tackles the intricacies of his early revolutionary days and the ills of Russian nihilism, his first great novel, Notes from the Underground, directly attacks utopian socialism through the musings of the Underground Man, who rejects utilitarianism’s “mathematical consciousness” and instead draws attention to the complexities of human nature. A direct response to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What is to Be Done?, Notes from the Underground critiques socialism’s central premise that human beings are rational creatures who can mathematically organize society for the greater good of the collective. Instead, according to the Underground Man, people deliberately act against their own interests and frequently desire freedom over happiness.

It is this attack on the utopian “mathematical consciousness” that lies at the heart of Crime and Punishment, which builds on many of Dostoyevsky’s ideas in Notes from Underground. But unlike the Underground Man, who rails against the utopian “mathematical consciousness,” Raskolnikov embraces it.

We first learn of Raskolnikov’s true motives in Chapter 5 of Part 3, where he and his friend Razhumikhin visit the police inspector Porfiry Petrovich.

Exasperated by the socialists at his housewarming party the previous night, Razhumikhin dismisses the utopian premise that crime is the natural consequence of an unjust and “abnormal” society. “They believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process!” he exclaims. Like the Underground Man, he observes that progressive socialists are quick to dispense with human nature and is skeptical of the assumption that the total eradication of poverty would lead to a thriving utopia. In attacking the Petrashevsky Circle’s philosophies, Razhumikhin thus becomes a stand-in for Dostoyevsky’s own ideas.2

But what is even more important to understanding Crime and Punishment’s overall message lies in one of the final observations in Razhumikhin’s monologue.

Razhumikhin tells us that the socialists believe that “the soul is retrograde.”

This characterization paints the most lucid picture of Dostoyevsky’s own convictions: the progressive nineteenth-century consciousness has lost sight of the human soul.

And that is precisely why Raskolnikov is driven to commit murder: he is spiritually homeless.

Indeed, Raskolnikov can no longer find meaning in his surroundings and therefore becomes easily susceptible to a tidy, hyper-rational way of thought. In his infamous article, he argues that there are so-called “ordinary people” and “extraordinary people,” and that the latter group holds the power to rise above the law for the promotion of the greater good. He repeatedly cites Napoleon as an example and argues that Kepler and Newton would have been morally justified in killing a dozen or so people if it meant that their ideas would benefit the rest of humanity.

This is the mathematical consciousness that Razhumikhin describes earlier in the chapter: the idea that each individual life has a set value, and that some lives are more valuable than others. Under this paradigm, each individual human action becomes nothing more than a series of calculations: Raskolnikov is justified in killing a woman who supposedly has no value to society—whom he repeatedly calls a “louse”—because her demise would theoretically benefit a great number of people.

But as Dostoyevsky will demonstrate by the end of the novel, that’s not quite how it works.

It is no accident that Dostoyevsky makes Raskolnikov into a student who expresses his ideas in an article: he wishes to show us that ideas developed in an intellectual vacuum often fall apart when brought into the context of the real world. The pawnbroker’s life might be useless to Raskolnikov in the abstract, but in reality, she is an individual human being with a living soul.

Crime and Punishment therefore protests against the utilitarian psychology that would soon infest not only Soviet Russia3 but also the more radical wings of our contemporary Western world. By analyzing the social movements of nineteenth-century Russia, Dostoyevsky masterfully predicted the eventual catastrophe of the Soviet Union and the “mathematical consciousness” that would lead to the loss of millions of lives in the name of greater social good.4 But what is even more astonishing is the extent to which Dostoyevsky anticipated the moral catastrophe of an ongoing radical leftist human experiment: when you can reduce humanity as a whole to an abstract mathematical equation, individual human lives become expendable.

Crime and Punishment is thus not a novel about poverty or income inequality but about the moral implications of a murder that’s supposedly done for the greater good—and about the dangers of utilitarianism. After all, Raskolnikov doesn’t kill the pawnbroker to feed his family or the world around him—he doesn’t even necessarily kill her because he believes that her life is worthless and that society would be better off without her. He kills the pawnbroker to prove a point to himself that he is one of these “extraordinary” people. In this way, Dostoyevsky masterfully highlights the arrogance and egoism that underpins a supposedly selfless and morally upright philosophy.

The catch is, of course, that Raskolnikov is not extraordinary in the least. Though Raskolnikov initially feels justified in defying moral law, as the novel progresses, he increasingly becomes sickened by his own philosophy and eventually confesses to his murder, learning that no one is above moral law and that innocent people die when you lose sight of the individual soul.

It is this idea that often makes modern progressive readers uncomfortable with the novel’s epilogue, which rejects the “mathematical consciousness” of Dostoevsky’s utopian contemporaries and challenges the Marxist “oppression” reading that is so popular on university campuses today. After all, if the novel were about the ills of Raskolnikov’s nisheta and the good intentions that underlie his murder, then we might expect the novel to end at the trial, where several witnesses testify to Raskolnikov’s morally upstanding character. If the novel were merely about the guilty conscience that accompanies Raskolnikov’s morally gray yet justifiable murder, then we might expect the novel to end after Raskolnikov’s confession—or, at the very least, we would witness Raskolnikov’s emotional recovery shortly after he turns himself in.

But the fact is that even after his confession, Raskolnikov continues to feel spiritually empty.

Confined to the Siberian prison camp—the katorga—he wonders how his fellow prisoners find meaning in their ordinary surroundings: “a ray of sunshine, the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden away in some unseen spot.” He laments the missed opportunity to kill himself like Svidrigailov and is disgusted by the idea that he’ll be free at 32 and will have nothing even then to live for.

But then Sonya pays him a visit.

It is at this point that Dostoyevsky delivers one of the most beautiful lines of the entire novel: Их воскресила любовь. They were resurrected by love.

The word choice here is critical: love doesn’t simply renew or inspire them—it resurrects them like the ailing Lazarus. Religion—channeled through Sonya’s love—becomes the primary vehicle through which Raskolnikov attains redemption for his sins. Life takes the place of dialectic in his consciousness, and all of a sudden, Raskolnikov feels that his fellow prisoners are more kind to him and that life is worth living again. The seven years that remain of his sentence feel like seven days because he suddenly finds meaning in his life again.

Raskolnikov regains the will to live because he finds beauty in the individual human soul.

Crime and Punishment is therefore not a novel about how the poor are oppressed by the rich or how extreme circumstances may justify certain violent actions—as many leftists will have you believe—but a novel about the value of the individual human soul, a book that explores the power of individual agency, and a beautiful encomium on the power of redemption. Raskolnikov commits murder not because society fails him but because he wishes to test a theory that strips him of a fundamental human element. Yet throughout the novel, Dostoevsky demonstrates that human beings cannot be reduced to theories or historical abstractions but that each and every one of us has value because we each possess a unique soul.

Crime and Punishment leaves us, therefore, not with a political but with a deeply spiritual and human message: when we lose sight of the human soul, people become reduced numbers, and when people are reduced to numbers, then individual lives lose meaning and value.

But there is hope yet for our society, argues Dostoyevsky, because each and every one of us can find redemption if we find meaning in the individual human soul, the wonders of the ordinary world, and the people we cherish most.

In 2014, I jumped into the “querying trenches” for the first time.

Ambitious, brazen, and seventeen, I had written a novel with a lofty Shakespearean title that explored the moral decay of contemporary adolescence. I wasn’t expecting to make it too far at that age, but none of the thirty agents I contacted so much as responded to my email, and I was left with a polished manuscript collecting metaphorical dust on my computer.

Yet as I moved out to New York City to study English at Columbia University—and to chase my publishing dreams in the literary capital of the world—I looked back on my high school novel with some embarrassment. Surely, I could write a better book.

And I did.

By the end of my sophomore year, a second novel had materialized on my laptop. I leapt back into those querying trenches but was soon informed that my book was too niche to gain a substantial audience. Disappointed, I enrolled in a creative writing class the following semester to see if I could hone my writerly craft as I prepared to draft my next novel. I rolled into the classroom with my pink leather Moleskine notebook and a fountain pen, excited to read Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants or Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find—short stories we’d analyzed in my high school creative writing class.

Instead, the professor dropped a poem shaped like a vagina in front of us.

I thought it was a joke.

The poem was from an MFA grad who had “liberated herself from the male gaze” by “reclaiming her vagina.”

The next two hours were an arduous exercise in dispelling the sardonic smile that kept creeping onto my face.

After weathering several more lackluster creative writing courses, I gave up my quest to learn to write from my professors and headed to the library to learn from a different sort of teacher: the literary masters.

By senior year, having cruised through almost the entirety of the Western literary canon, I had come up with yet another novel, and I was determined to graduate from form rejections and secure one of those mythical manuscript requests that would get my book in front of an agent.

I had to.

So when I got my first ever full manuscript request on the third query I sent out for my newest novel, I was elated.

The year was now 2023. My fingers no longer trembled every time I hit “send” on those cold queries. I was now twenty-six, and after countless Dickens novels and Salinger short stories, I had finally trained myself to write a good book. My newest creation, The Lilac Room, received glowing praise from beta readers, and months later, I found myself with no fewer than twenty-four full manuscript requests.

I sat tight until one bleak January morning, when I received the following email from a literary agent:

Liza—I finished the manuscript of THE LILAC ROOM, and I did so fairly rapidly because the narrative held my attention. That happens with less than 5% of the novels or memoirs queried to me. You are clearly a significant talent with a distinctive style and a versatile mind.

The agent wanted to set up a call to discuss next steps.

That was it, I thought. I was finally going to be a novelist!

But the agent wanted me to implement some “minor edits” before proceeding with a contract.

Over the next few months, I worked tirelessly through several more drafts of my manuscript. However, despite claiming at odd intervals that we were going to “make literary history together,” the agent soon expressed doubt about the viability of my novel on the current market.

One hundred thousand words might be too dense for a Gen Z novel, he wrote to me one morning.

A Gen Z novel?

I’m not writing just for Gen Z, I insisted.

Yes, but we’re going to have to market it as a Gen Z novel, the agent wrote back.

After I pushed back, insisting that my novel would resonate with readers of all ages—like any piece of literature—he vanished.

Squeezing my knees to my chest in the corner of my room several weeks later, I felt a tear dampen my cheek. My dreams were not yet shattered, I told myself, but how many more “better” books would I have to write?

Nevertheless, I stood up, wiped my tears, and dove into bed, resolving to write yet another book.

Manuscript requests on my next novel, The Leverkühn Quartet, flooded in once more—followed by the typical wave of rejections. Agents were excited about the premise but thought the novel was too “slow and philosophical.”

Then came the rejection email I’ll remember for the rest of my life:

I wondered if the story might benefit from a sharper lens on Elise’s privilege. She returns to her art on her own terms, surrounded by emotionally supportive men and buffered from real fallout. In today’s climate, readers are quick to pick apart depictions of class and access.

Depictions of class and access? Privilege? I had written a novel about the meaning of beauty and the cost of artistic obsession, and the agent wanted more about privilege?

The Leverkühn Quartet was a loose retelling of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, itself a twentieth-century retelling of Goethe’s famous Faust. I had penned the work with my general philosophy of literature in mind; literature’s purpose, I believed, was to create a centuries-long dialogue about what it meant to be human. I’d always written novels with the Western literary canon in mind, but maybe, I realized, I was missing a piece of the puzzle. Perhaps I needed to see more of the great work of our time. Sure, I’d read a lot of “contemporary” literature—Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, Donna Tartt—but none of those authors, whose books were now as old as I was, were considered “contemporary” by publishing standards.

I needed to figure out what was getting published today.

After an afternoon at Barnes and Noble, I shuffled into my East Village apartment with about ten literary fiction titles published within the last several years, among them Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Flipping to the first page of Rooney’s most famous work, I couldn’t wait to be dazzled by a contemporary “Call me Ishmael” or “All this happened, more or less.”

Instead, I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.

Oh, hey, he says.

Come on in.

She turns and walks down the hall. He follows her, closing the door behind him.

I closed the book and stared at the cover, making sure I hadn’t accidentally picked up a picture book. But there was the neon blue and green cover with Rooney’s title, its minimalist facial sketches staring at me mockingly.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER.

That couldn’t be right. To be an international bestseller, one presumably had to learn storytelling techniques beyond monosyllabic dialogue and juvenile descriptions of a girl’s outfit. Surely, Rooney couldn’t be considered one of the great stylists of our era.

I was in some sort of cruel dream—and everyone seemed to be in on it.

Flipping through the other books I had brought home, I began to pick up patterns. The prose was minimalist and flat. The stories frequently revolved around racial identity and female empowerment. The sex was gratuitous.

This was what was getting published?

After about a dozen contemporary novels, I turned to Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov—one of the masters who had taught me how to write.

I can only describe the experience of reading Nabokov after slogging through “contemporary literature” as like eating a gourmet steak after months of McDonald’s meals.

Finishing Kinbote’s manic introduction to John Shade’s cantos, I burst into tears.

This was literature—and there was a whole group of people out there who would never know what it was like to cry mid-chapter because a beautiful sentence had been written!

Suddenly, my creative writing classes at Columbia started to make sense. How could those professors use great literature to teach students to write if their perception of “great literature” was limited to a narrow repertoire of marketable trends?

Meanwhile, inspired by Pale Fire, I was once again visited by the literary muses.

The result was my most recent novel, Blue Snow—and the rejections came pouring in as usual. At this point, however, I was nearly immune to the critiques that my novels were “too philosophical” or “too slow.” After all, I had received countless comments from a randomized group of beta readers—real readers—who didn’t seem to think so.

“It’s such a change of pace to read something deep for once!” one of my Gen Z readers wrote.

But literary agents didn’t seem to think so:

As a reader of literary fiction, I’m all for introspective characters who plumb the depths of their own psyche, page after page, to better understand the inner workings of their still-developing mind. But as a literary agent, I run screaming from that stuff as if I’d just emptied an entire can of Aqua Net on my head and lit a cigarette… Should you eventually choose to write something genre-specific and commercially viable, perish the thought, then feel free to send it my way.

Setting his unprofessionalism aside, I deduced that the agent’s primary complaint was that my writing was not “commercially viable”—and that I needed to try out genre fiction. But weren’t hundreds of new literary fiction titles being published every year, and didn’t “commercially viable” just mean that there would be readers who would want to read the book?

I had already sold hundreds of copies of my self-published poetry chapbooks—and novels typically had a much higher readership than poetry. I had had scores of people DM me expressing their interest in beta-reading my completely unpublished Blue Snow manuscript after skimming the pitch I’d posted to my Instagram story. Surely, my book was “commercially viable”—at least by the literal definition of the term. And sure, I could always write something “better”—any author could—but what happened when “better” was never good enough?

Something was wrong.

Over the next few months, I reflected on my experiences in both the Columbia English department and the query trenches. I read more contemporary literary fiction and poked around on Substack to see what other authors were saying about the state of fiction in the publishing industry. I quickly learned that I was not alone—and after some more research, I went public with my critique of publishing, on Substack and Instagram.

Soon, my DMs abounded with the words of jaded authors—many with even bigger platforms than mine—expressing their disillusionment with an industry that routinely turned away dense prose and philosophical musings. I listened to accounts from straight white men who felt shunned by an industry that looked down on stories depicting role models for young boys. I scheduled Zooms with Jewish authors who reported having their novels dropped by agents who claimed that the current climate would make it difficult to sell “Jewish stories.” I read messages from young women in creative writing programs who lamented the reign of buzzwords in their departments, and from older scholars of literature who had given up on contemporary fiction because the industry had lost sight of the broader literary tradition.

When my article on the soullessness of contemporary literary fiction became the third-most-read article on my Substack, I realized that my story was just one of many like it.

Every day, thousands of immensely talented novelists are shut out by an industry that pushes out the same type of novel produced by the same institutional pipeline because they dared to say something different.

While it might be tempting to blame the homogenization of fiction on literary agents or editors or even publishing houses, I believe the issue is not institutional but cultural—and our famed institutions are only succumbing to a uniquely fraught cultural moment.

To understand how we got here, we must first revisit the original purpose of the humanities.1

Traditionally, the humanities were about asking life’s biggest and most important questions: What is love? What is the nature of suffering? What is the purpose of my existence on this planet if I shall one day fade into nothingness? One can answer such questions through listening to a piece of music or reading a philosophical treatise, but I believe that there is no art form that more directly explores these ideas than literature, which poses questions through the stories we share and the words we all connect to.

We can call this concept of asking such questions as “humanistic inquiry” because these are the questions that make us human. Today, when we face an existential reckoning in the dawning age of artificial intelligence, I believe these philosophical questions are more important than ever.

But if publishing professionals routinely label incoming literary fiction submissions as “too philosophical,” how can we have these conversations in the context of contemporary literature?

It has become clear that contemporary literature has strayed far away from the tradition of humanistic inquiry.

But maybe we can fix that.

There are three main “issues” with the fiction in the publishing industry today. They are the following:

1) Aesthetic Standardization

Because the majority of literary fiction writers must pass through an MFA program to have a shot at publication in the genre, their writing style often conforms to the teachings of MFA professors, many of whom glorify minimalist sentences and emotional restraint. The result is a literary ecosystem where many writers, rewarded by our institutions for aesthetic and ideological alignment, sound more or less the same.

More about aesthetic standardization below.

2) Moral Flattening & Ideological Conformity

Traditionally, literature was meant to help us learn how to understand ourselves and the world around us. But in the latter half of the twentieth century, university English departments began to reject this tradition and instead embraced the postulates that a) meaning is relative, b) authorial intention is irrelevant, and c) universal truths are oppressive. Taught to analyze literature through these “postmodern” lenses, English department graduates—many of whom go on to hold positions of power in publishing or become writers themselves—believe that literature should passively observe rather than teach. Within this framework, literature is understood not as a vehicle for moral and humanistic inquiry but as a site for presupposing ideological conclusions without proper justification. Readers are therefore no longer asked to consider what a work of fiction means; they are asked to consider whether it signals the “right” kind of meaning. As these assumptions have spread from the academy into the publishing industry, novels themselves have increasingly abandoned moral seriousness in favor of ideological conformity.

More about moral flattening here:

3) The Commercialization of Sex and Eroticism

The retreat from aesthetic and moral seriousness, in turn, created fertile ground for the commercialization of sex. Today, the publishing industry encourages the inclusion of explicit sexual content in literature not because it operates as a meaningful artistic device but simply because it captures attention and drives sales. As a result, literary fiction has become gratuitously hypersexualized, and reading has become an erotic rather than a literary endeavor. Such excess reflects a market-driven literary culture that privileges immediate gratification over patience and thought.

I discuss the eroticization of literature here:

Read virtually any work of literary fiction published within the last ten years with these three pillars in mind, and you, too, will begin to pick up on these trends. But good literature is not “trendy”—nor is it gratuitous, morally bankrupt, or stylistically minimalist; instead, good literature explores the complexity of human nature through chaotic phrases that express the inner depths of human feeling and messy characters who prompt unexpected revelations about the human psyche.

To me, literature has always been about humanistic inquiry, and if there is any hope for our species to find meaning in an age that increasingly strips us of our human element, then it is imperative that we restore literature to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition.

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.

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“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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

But why?

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

Read more

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

I’m not so sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do we do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe studios are just trying to save money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Casting Snape as black creates an entirely different narrative.

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

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

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

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

Until then, mischief managed!

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

Not until this past year, however.

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

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

How is that possible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week, I was “trending” on Substack.

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

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

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

My bad.

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

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

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

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

I was also a woman.

I was a successful, opinionated woman.

Bingo.

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

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

Perhaps I was such a disruption.

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

The persona in question is likely to be a man.

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

So what about literature?

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

No. They can only have a “meltdown.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I’m not backing down.

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

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

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

Maybe it’s time that we learn.

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

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