Another Week Ends

1. A very Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there! Unless, of course, you’d rather fast forward through it all, in which case forget I said anything. But also: you probably deserve to treat yourself a little, perhaps with one of our books or magazines or even a brand new Mockingbird Sweatshirt?

I kid, but that’s where my mind went when reading the latest column from new fave Ellen Cushing on the Atlantic, “The Brands Are Very Sorry About Your Trauma.” She explores why so many companies are inviting people to opt out of Mother’s Day emails, looking at the increasingly absurd expectations we have of the corporations we patronize, not only to sell us things but also to understand and nurture and, well, love us.

While I think a fair amount of cynicism is justified here — i.e., corporations only express sympathy and solidarity with consumers because they know we’ll be more likely to part with our cash as a result — I suppose a more charitable interpretation isn’t off the table. Namely, the degree to which corporations are doing this is a measure of the pain and loneliness their consumers feel. If the emotional need (be it existential panic, identity overwhelm, or genuine parental woundedness) weren’t so acute, these tactics would backfire. So perhaps a little compassion is in order alongside the skepticism.

If only, as Cushing points out, survival were as easy as clicking “no thanks” on an email solicitation:

This holiday really can be difficult, for any number of reasons. Being a mother and having a mother are also two of the most profound experiences a person can have, and profundity is rarely uncomplicated. Not being a mother if you want to be one can be a sadness you carry in your pocket every day. Whatever’s going on, I can guarantee that no one wants to be reminded of their familial trauma by the company they bought a soft-rib bath bundle from five years ago. And so they email us, asking if it’s okay to email us.

The Mother’s Day opt-out email suggests that the brand sending it sees you as a whole person, not just as a market segment (at least for a moment). It uses an intimate medium to manufacture more intimacy. It allows the brand to suggest that it is different from all of the other corporations competing for your attention and money — while simultaneously giving them more access to your attention and money.

But like a lot of what makes for good business these days, the effect is a little absurd. So many emails about Mother’s Day are flying around, all in the service of sending fewer emails about Mother’s Day. Advertisements are constantly shooting into our every unoccupied nook and cranny, but the good ones are now sensitive to our rawest family dynamics. Also, not to be too literal about it, but: The idea that pain, or regret, or tenderness, or whatever the brands want to call it, is something a person can decide not to participate in is fiction. “Everyone is grieving something at any given point in time,” Jaclyn Bradshaw, who runs a small digital-marketing firm in London, told me.

2. Long read of the week would have to be “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” by Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic, which takes as its jumping off point a recent YouGov poll, in which Americans rated the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. According to the cultural doomsayers who Kornhaber interviews, which includes Ted Gioia (the prescient critic behind The Honest Broker Substack), algorithms and venture capitalist firms have gutted the creative fields, and whatever we’re left to enjoy/consume today is merely the fumes of what used to be. Regurgitation is the order of the day and has been for longer than most of us realize. It’s a provocative thesis and a hard one to dispute entirely. That said, Kornhaber has his reservations — as do I. More commentary below, but first:

What’s so jarring about these declarations of [cultural] malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. More than 500 scripted TV shows get made every year; streaming services reportedly add about 100,000 songs every day. We have podcasts that cater to every niche passion and video games of novelistic sophistication. Technology companies like to say that they’ve democratized the arts, enabling exciting collisions of ideas from unlikely talents. Yet no one seems very happy about the results.

Critics are citing very real problems: Hollywood’s regurgitation of intellectual property; partisan culture wars hijacking actual culture; unsustainable economic conditions for artists; the addicting, distracting effects of modern technology.

Entertainment companies have long understood the power of giving people more of what they already like, but recommendation algorithms take that logic to a new extreme, keeping us swiping endlessly for slight variations on our favorite things. In every sector of society, Ted Gioia told me, “we’re facing powerful forces that want to impose stagnation on us.”… If Bach were alive today, “he’d spend a few weeks trying to break into the L.A. music scene and say, ‘Ah, I’ll be a hedge-fund manager instead.’”

We talked about all this at some length on the Mockingcast we just recorded (out Monday), and I told the story of attending a high school lacrosse game this past week and being taken aback when the varsity team took the field, blaring the pump-up song of their choice, which was … “What I Got” by Sublime. A decent enough song (I guess) but also one that came out in 1996 when I was still in high school. It made me sad that these guys didn’t have something from the past, say, thirty years that they’d felt that kind of connection with. Kornhaber’s essay unpacks why that may be the case. He goes on:

Dean Kissick, 42, is a writer known in large part for his annoyance at the state of the art world. He believes we’ve been stuck in “the long 2017”: a period in which anxieties related to Donald Trump and Brexit have smothered culture with moralism, navel-gazing, and conformity. Although transcendence — achieved through beauty, originality, and skill — should be the primary goal, art has “become much more about messaging, raising awareness, or a kind of ambient healing of the world,” he told me. Art should capture its era, he said, but the culture wars are not the only important thing about the 2020s.

Okay, okay, while I totally recognize the trend Kissick describes and am just as tired as anyone of movies and music that are evaluated by their (political) message first and aesthetic quality second, methinks the man doth protest too much. I can’t speak for the art world itself, but I can speak for my own consumption. I look at my Spotify and it’s nothing but 2025. Already this year we’ve had incredible stuff from Hamilton Leithauser, Smoking Popes, Pulp, Craig Finn, Jon Guerra, The Beths, Elbow, Andy Gullahorn — even the new Mary Chapin Carpenter song smokes (above). In TV, there’s plenty of trash, but I’ve never seen anything remotely like The Rehearsal on television, to say nothing of a movie like Into the Spider-Verse or Bo Burnham’s Inside. I even thought The Minecraft Movie was pretty clever in its incorporation of meme culture and I’m dying dying dying to see the new documentary-mockumentary-dramedy mash-up Pavements which sounds fresh as can be. Kornhaber lands somewhere close in his conclusion, thankfully:

Great media of the 20th century — the art-pop album, the feature-length film, the gallery show, the literary novel — may be fighting for their life, but that’s because of competition from new forms defined by a sense of immediacy: short-form video, chatty podcasts, video games, memes. Like the old media, these forms foster tons of mediocrity. But they also invite surprising excellence: the minute-long songs of PinkPantheress, which glitter with detail and emotion; the writing of Honor Levy, who weaves lurid short stories out of internet slang. “It’s more of an aphoristic culture than an essayist culture, isn’t it?” Simon Reynolds said. “You can say quite clever, profound things in just a few sentences.”

3. Still not convinced? Enter Andy Squyres to put a nail in the coffin of decline with his much, much anticipated new single, “Miracle Service,” which came out today. I love this man and his music. There’s simply nothing else like it. When I listen to Andy, I hear something that hasn’t existed before. Closest I can come to a description is if Leonard Cohen grew up Assemblies of God, was raised by Saturday morning cartoons, could recite the McDonalds menu by heart, had binged Robert Capon, and could build a boat with his bare hands if required. But really you just need to listen.

Stream the song, save it to your library on Spotify, tell all your friends, and then go follow the man on Instagram. Andy Squyres is not the poet-priest we deserve, but he’s certainly the one we need.

4. In humor, the Onion gave us “‘My Work Doesn’t Define Me,’ Says Man Who Will Spend 90,000 Hours Of Lifetime At Office” and “You’re Not The Man I Married—You’re Significantly More Attractive And Loving.” Elsewhere, McSweeneys skewered the increasingly awkward virtue signaling I’m seeing around town with “This Five-Hundred-Word Bumper Sticker on My Tesla Explains Why I’m Not a Bad Person,” and Reductress came through with “Woman Entering Grocery Store Loses Capacity to Plan More Than Two Meals Ahead.”

5. This next one hit very close to home, and was exactly what I needed the week of my new book’s release. Publishing a book these days is a lot of things: a privilege, a push, a relief (ha!), a psychodrama, and a crash course in fierce fundamentals of the Attention Economy. That last part is the most punishing and spiritually perilous part, for reasons that Belle Tindall spelled out on Seen and Unseen. The occasion for her piece was the Met Gala, which has come to serve as an uncanny if relatively benign (read: fun) distillation of the forces at work:

If a Met Gala happens and nobody is around to see it, does it really take place? I think I can hazard a guess at what Anna Wintour’s answer would be. Our attention is the currency of the entire event; every celebrity is vying for it. And it’s not enough to have a little share of it, the prize is to have the most […]

This year, I noticed a slight slant to the reporting of the event. My social media feeds seemed to be brimming with two lists they wanted me to pour over: those who were there and, more notably, those who were not there. I’ve been so struck with how odd this is. Again and again, I was being offered names of celebrities who were not in attendance. Publications and influencers were lamenting the absence of Emma Stone, sneering at the Blake Lively shaped gap in the attendee-list, and insisting that poor old Meghan Markle must have been barred from the proceedings.

The speculation is a waste of time – but it does act as a doorway into understanding our perception of success. I think it can be boiled down to this: success is being seen … Success is being there. And so, it’s unfathomable to us that anyone would want to be anywhere other than where the eyes of the world are directed.

A need to be seen is written into the rock of my being. In 2021, I felt as though I had been snapped in half – my fear of obscurity exposed – by Michaela Coel’s Emmys acceptance speech. She had just won a prize for I May Destroy You, a limited series that she both wrote and starred in. Clinging shakily to her piece of paper, Michaela implores anyone listening to ‘disappear’. She says,

‘In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible, for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — do not be afraid to disappear. From it. From us. For a while. And see what comes to you in the silence.’

An unperceived existence still counts. We need to remind ourselves of that, and sharp-ish. Only then will we stop deifying attention and vilifying anonymity.

6. Next, in The New York Times, David Marchese interviewed Vietnamese-American poet (and MacArthur Genius Grantee) Ocean Vuong, whose new novel The Emperor of Gladness comes out next week. “Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life” is how they titled the exchange, and holy moly they’re not kidding. This is a run-don’t-walk kind of article. If you only have time for the fever pitch, it’s where Vuong goes after Marchese asks him what it is about places like East Hartford, Connecticut, that doesn’t get communicated widely enough:

As a culture, we always want this grand arc: rags to riches, gets the girl, gets the guy. I wondered if I could write a book that didn’t have improvement arcs, because it aligned with my observation of my communities. My brother has worked at Dick’s Sporting Goods his whole life. My stepdad works at this auto-parts company. For 25 years, he worked from 3 p.m. to 12 a.m. We want stories of change, yet American life is often static. You drive the same car, people live in the same apartment, but it doesn’t mean that their lives are worthless. So what happens? I’ve been interested in this idea of kindness without hope. What I saw working in fast food growing up in Hartford County was that people are kind even when they know it won’t matter. Where does that come from? I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards. They could just dig themselves out and leave, go home sooner, hug their families, but they all stayed, and they dug each other out. What is kindness exhibited knowing there is no payoff? […]

There was a moment when I was 15 — I’ve been trying to articulate this for so long, because it’s important, but I’ve been ashamed. People ask me, why did you become a writer? I give the answer that makes sense: I went to Pace University, I tried business school because I wanted to help my mother. I couldn’t do it, and I went to Brooklyn College and to an English department, and then I became a writer. That’s not untrue, although I don’t know if it’s honest, and your question is now bringing me to this idea of cruelty and goodness. There was this one event when I was 15 that I think altered the course of my life, although at that time it was not an epiphanic moment.

When I was 15, I decided to kill somebody.

I was working on the tobacco farm, and I rode my bike every day. It was five miles out. You wake up at 6 in the morning. I rode my bike, and I went to work mostly with migrant farmers. You’d get paid under the table, and if you show up every day, you get a $1,000 bonus at the end of the season. It was this hot July evening. I was in my room and I look out the window and see that someone has stolen my bike. It was someone I knew in our neighborhood. He was a drug dealer. You would put your bike outside on the stoop when you’re running in and out, and this guy was known to grab your bike, and there’s nothing you could do about it. But I snapped that day. I saw him, and I was so angry, because I knew: I’m not going to get this back, I’m going to lose my $1,000. For context: My mom made $13,000. I go outside and say, “Give me back my bike.” And essentially he said, “Eff off.” I lost it. I went across the street to my friend Big Joe’s house. I knocked on his window. I remember putting both of my hands on the windowsill. I have no shirt on. I’m sweating, I’m so angry, and I said, “Please let me borrow your gun.” [Vuong begins to cry.] I’m so sorry.

I think what I’m trying to get at is that I didn’t become an author to have a photo in the back of a book. Writing became a medium for me to try to understand what goodness is. Because when I was begging my friend, “Please give me your gun,” he said: “Ocean, I’m not going to do that. You need to go home.” What was so touching to me is that I was not responsible for that. Someone else’s better sense saved me … You tell yourself you’re in control of your life, but moments like that happen and you’re just like: Wow. I don’t know that it was up to me that I got here.

7. Trying to follow up that story is a fool’s errand, so I probably shouldn’t even try. Then again, fools are some of my favorite people. (The only kinds of people there are?) A favorite literary example would have to be the character Tom More in Walker Percy’s prophetic, hilarious 1971 apocalyptic novel Love in the Ruins. Russell Moore took a dive into that masterpiece this week over at Christianity Today with his column, “Love in the Ruins of 2025,” and the conclusion doubles as a pertinent final word for us, too:

The collapse in Love in the Ruins is not just political or cultural — it’s personal. The world is falling apart because people are falling apart. The underlying issue is a civilization that no longer knows what a human being is for. That’s a question politics cannot answer, yet politics has become a surrogate religion for people without a deeper anchor. Percy’s vision is strikingly familiar: a society beset by mental illness that seems tailored to political tribe.

So what do we do? The answer is not utopian schemes or dystopian despair. It is, paradoxically, to move deeper into the crisis — until we can feel what’s missing. As Percy put it, the goal is to recover the self “as neither angel nor organism but as a wayfaring creature somewhere in between.”

That requires humility. We can’t fix the world or ourselves. The novel ends not with More’s invention saving the day but with its failure. What was meant to heal only deepens the wound.

And yet More finds a way forward — not through grand solutions but through the small, human steps of humility, connection, and grace. Even recognizing his lack of contrition becomes its own kind of mercy. He stops trying to save the world. He starts to live.

We can begin again only when we are willing to be asked—and to answer—the question “What are you seeking?” In this way, catastrophe becomes the precondition for hope. Only when we realize we are not “organisms in an environment” to be perfected—or to perfect others — can we begin to feel our cosmic homelessness, which might just point us home. Only when we see that we are in the ruins can we begin to look there for love.

Strays:

• Goodness gracious, apparently this is a thing. Lord, save us.
• Goodness Goodness gracious, Rolling Stone’s reports that “People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies.”
• Goodness Goodness GOODNESS gracious, Nick Cave being Nick Cave. “‘I love you’ and ‘I am sorry’ spoken into the universe are two sentiments forever worth declaring.”
• Podcast rec of the week would have to be Ezra Klein’s conversation with Ross Douthat about religion and reality, in which Douthat witnesses to his friend in about as compelling (and touching) a way as I’ve heard in a public forum in some time.
• The announcement about the new pope was made while I was compiling this, so I’m as surprised as you are that one of the best articles I’ve come across in the initial rush appeared on Vox, “Is the new pope liberal or conservative? Neither.”
• While you’re on that site, don’t miss the left-field-but-totally-on-point stewardship sermon they included in a recent newsletter on the question, “Why Won’t My Family Give to Charity?.” Spoiler alert: the data-(over)-informed answer Sigal Samuel gives has everything to do with Grace, AKA The Big Relief.
• Speaking of which, we now have signed copies available in our store. Opt out at your own risk.