I read one of these about a decade ago. I don’t recall thinking it was any good; others apparently agreed. Dick’s literary agent couldn’t get anywhere with the stories and returned all of his sad, unsold manuscripts in 1963 in one big, pitiful parcel. While one of these was eventually published during Dick’s lifetime—Confessions of a Crap Artist—his disappointment as a literary novelist dogged him the rest of his days.

Which is a bit odd.

Amazingly, the same year his fragile hopes dropped with the thud of that package on his doorstep, Dick won sci-fi’s highest accolade, the Hugo, for his alternative history, The Man in the High Castle, published the prior year. After a decade of feverish writing and precious little fame—he’d actually decided to quit writing—he finally attracted the attention he desired, just not in the genre he wanted.

Fate is fickle, something any character in The Man in the High Castle could tell you.

Questionable Authenticity

In Dick’s telling, the Allies lose World War II and the Axis powers occupy America in an uneasy alliance showing signs of strain. Japan controls the Pacific States with a measured hand, while Germany takes everything from the Rockies to the Atlantic, ruling with predictable brutality. The neutral Rocky Mountain States provide a buffer between the two competing world powers.

The novel follows several characters through this perilous landscape as their paths intersect and sometimes collide, particularly along three narrative strands.

The first is geopolitical. The Nazi chancellor has died and various factions jockey for control in Berlin. One group, led by Goebbels, is pushing for Operation Dandelion—an unprovoked nuclear strike against Japan. Rudolf Wegener, a German intelligence officer, learns of the plan and resolves to warn the Japanese. He assumes the identity of a Swedish businessman named Baynes and rockets to San Francisco, where the trade minister Nobusuke Tagomi has arranged a meeting with a retired Japanese general.

Before Baynes’s arrival, Tagomi receives a coded cable from Tokyo about his visitor: “Skim milk in his diet.” It’s an allusive cipher pointing to a song lyric: “Things are seldom what they seem/Skim milk masquerades as cream.” What could it mean? Tagomi consults the I Ching, the ancient book of Chinese divination, and confirms his suspicion: Baynes is a spy. But he can’t determine what kind or for whom.

After several setbacks and delays, the meeting finally occurs. Baynes explains the plan but also reveals another quandary: the only faction in Berlin opposing the strike is the SS, the most vicious arm of the Nazi state. To stop the annihilation of millions, the Japanese would have to ally themselves with the architects of the Holocaust. “That man should have to act in such moral ambiguity,” Tagomi reflects. “There is no Way in this; all is muddled.”

Bad news for Tagomi; it gets more muddled from there. Baynes’s mission is less covert than required. The German government has dispatched assassins. When they burst through the door, the mild Tagomi grabs an antique Colt .44 he keeps on his desk and kills them both, an act that saves Baynes but shatters Tagomi’s sense of himself.

Afterward, Baynes examines the bodies. They’re not German nationals but American citizens from San José, carrying Japanese-made pistols. Nothing connects them to Berlin. And Tagomi’s Colt .44—presumably a “perfectly preserved” Civil War relic—is the same model that has already turned up as counterfeit.

As for the second strand, Frank Frink is a self-doubting Jew trying to hide his ancestry. He loses his factory job manufacturing counterfeit American antiques (like Tagomi’s pistol) for Japanese collectors. Sick of the whole enterprise, he and his friend Ed McCarthy strike out on their own, making handcrafted, original, contemporary jewelry.

McCarthy brings the work to Robert Childan, an antiques dealer catering to wealthy Japanese collectors, who has just discovered that much of his own inventory is bogus. Childan is skeptical. He’s in the business of selling the past, not the future; and besides, Frink and McCarthy’s jewelry lacks a certain refinement. He takes some pieces on consignment—no risk to him—and then shows a pin from the collection to Paul and Betty Kasoura, a young Japanese couple he hopes to impress.

Paul studies the pin and identifies what he calls wu, something no counterfeit can possess: a mysterious quality of spiritual presence. “To have no historicity, and also no artistic, esthetic worth, and yet to partake of some ethereal value—that is a marvel,” he says.

The third strand of the narrative belongs to Frank’s ex-wife, Juliana Frink, living in the neutral Rocky Mountain States. She meets an Italian truck driver named Joe Cinnadella, and the pair bonds over an outlawed novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, written by a reclusive author named Hawthorne Abendsen, whom everyone calls the man in the high castle. The book, a work of alternative history, imagines a world where the Allies won the war.

Juliana and Joe travel to find its author. But like many of the collectors’ items Childan sells in his shop, Joe is counterfeit. He’s Swiss, not Italian, and he’s carrying a tiny radio transmitter to stay in contact with Berlin. He’s been sent to assassinate Abendsen and picked Juliana as his unwitting cover. When she realizes what’s happening, Juliana wants no part of the plan; instead, she finds a way to escape and visit Abendsen alone.

What’s Real? Who Can Tell?

The first two strands converge in Tagomi. After the shooting, he’s psychologically wrecked. A harmless bureaucrat who has committed violence he can’t process, he wanders into Childan’s shop and ends up buying a piece of Frink’s jewelry. Sitting on a park bench, he meditates on the piece. Its mysterious authenticity—the only genuine thing in his world at that moment—provides him a form of solace and surprise about the nature of the world.

Early in the novel, Frank’s former boss Wyndam-Matson—the man running the factory making counterfeit collectibles—pulls out two cigarette lighters to impress his girlfriend. One supposedly filled Franklin Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated (that’s part of the reason the Allies lost the war). The other lighter? Not so much. Can she sense any difference, whether one possesses a feel of historicity the other lacks? She can’t. Who could?

“It’s all a big racket; they’re playing it on themselves,” he tells her. “A gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.” He points to his head. “In the mind, not the gun.” Contrast that to Frink’s jewelry. Paul Kasoura holds Frink’s unelegant piece and finds wu, something self-evidently, transcendently real in it. And Tagomi, meditating on Frink’s jewelry, finds a mysterious source of perspective. Fakes can’t do that.

The Books Within the Book

Juliana’s strand arrives somewhere else entirely. She finally reaches Abendsen’s house and opens the novel’s final question. Two books run through the novel. We’ve already met both, the I Ching and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

Dick collapses them into each other. When Juliana finally reaches Abendsen’s house, she presses him about how The Grasshopper was written. Just as Tagomi used the I Ching to help him navigate the situation with Baynes, Abendsen used it to write his novel. Abendsen’s wife, Caroline, explains how: “One by one Hawth made the choices. Thousands of them. By means of the lines. Historic period. Subject. Characters. Plot. It took years.”

Juliana pushes: “I wonder why the oracle would write a novel. Did you ever think of asking it that?”

Neither Hawthorne nor Caroline says anything at first, but then Abendsen responds. “If I ask it why it wrote Grasshopper, I’ll wind up turning my share over to it,” he says. “The question implies I did nothing but the typing, and that’s neither true nor decent.”

I find the line as provocative as it is prescient. Abendsen is a novelist defending his authorship against the system he used to write. He prompted it, he shaped the results, he spent years doing so, and yet the question nettles: If the I Ching provided the direction, who really wrote the book? In the strange economy of the novel, the issue gets even murkier when Juliana discovers (or at least she thinks) that the I Ching says Abendsen’s novel is true and the world the characters seem to inhabit is the forgery.

Dick’s ‘Lasting Contribution’

People praised The Man in the High Castle from day one. “It’s all here—extrapolation, suspense, action, art, philosophy, plot, [and] character,” raved Avram Davidson, reviewing the novel for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Dick’s 1963 Hugo cemented his reputation in the genre, and the book’s reputation has only soared since. In her introduction to the Folio Society edition of the book, Ursula K. Le Guin called it “the first big, lasting contribution science fiction made to American literature.”

Dick wrote more than 40 novels and well over 100 short stories, and while none other contains this mix of alternative history and political machinations, The Man in the High Castle obsesses over themes he continued to circle the rest of his career: how can anyone be certain what is real, and by what test could they tell?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, the basis of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner) asks whether synthetic humans can truly feel. Ubik (1969) drops its characters into a world where existence itself proves questionable. Then, in A Scanner Darkly (1977), the divide between law enforcement and lawbreaker slips, until the protagonist can no longer distinguish the observer from the observed.

That preoccupation with shaky realities and unstable selves has become one of the standard ways we talk about our own world. In a culture dripping with alternative facts, conspiracy theories, scams, and worse, it’s not surprising that Reason editor says “we’re all living in one or more of [Dick’s] stories.” Public life, he says, feels like “Dick novels all the way down.”

Dick died in 1982, just before the release of Blade Runner. In 2007, he became the first sci-fi writer included in the Library of America. Films based on his work—Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau—have become a distinct subgenre of Hollywood science fiction, and it keeps going; in 2015, Amazon adapted The Man in the High Castle into an acclaimed streaming series.

But there’s another reason the novel might feel particularly relevant now, and it has to do with the question Abendsen ducked: Dick didn’t just write about the I Ching; he used it himself.

The Oracle and the Algorithm

“I wrote The Man in the High Castle with the I Ching,” he told one interviewer. “Every time my people would cast a hexagram, I actually cast it for them and let them proceed on the basis of the advice given.” The I Ching’s answer shaped the story. Juliana visited Abendsen because, when Dick used the I Ching, that’s what it said she should do.

At the time, Dick felt his career was over and he was unhappily helping out in his wife’s jewelry business (everything is fodder for the writer). He started working on the novel to avoid the drudgery. “I had no pre-conception of how the book would develop,” he said in another interview, “and I used the I Ching to plot the book.”

Dick was, like Abendsen, prompting an external system and curating the results. It’s hard to miss the parallel to a writer working with a large language model, like Claude or ChatGPT. You prompt the system; it generates a response; you massage the result. But then who’s the author, Abendsen/Dick or the I Ching?1

He might have hated it, but it’s a good thing Dick’s literary novels failed. If he’d gotten what he wanted—respectability, mainstream success, realistic fiction about miserable Bay Area couples—we wouldn’t have The Man in the High Castle, not to mention so many subsequent books that possess the potential to help us puzzle through our present anxieties about what’s real, what’s fake, and how to weigh the difference.

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Her office—this was about twenty years ago, but I’m pretty sure I remember the editor was a woman—was packed, hoarders-style, with books, many still in their mailers, stacked in waist-high piles and taller across every square inch of available space, excluding her desk and a narrow, precarious path to it.

After brief introductions and pleasantries, we stood there uneasily for a few minutes before I left. She wasn’t interested in talking with me. Publishers of every kind had sent her books of every kind, hoping for a review; the last thing she wanted was one more standing in her office, gunning for the same.

My memory of the encounter is somewhat fuzzy, but the news about newspaper book review sections isn’t. There are far fewer of them today than back then, for which there are many upstream causes and downstream effects.

Death Toll

To get a sense of that decline—what New York Times critic Dwight Garner recently called “a near-extinction-level wipeout of the American book review”—here’s a partial chronological list of major market papers where book coverage has either decreased or deceased. I’ve included approximate dates of their demise, but the timing is a little squishy in some cases.

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2007). Books editor Teresa Weaver lost her position, same with most of the arts staff. The cut prompted the National Book Critics Circle to launch its Campaign to Save Book Reviews—with only, alas, marginal success.

• San Diego Union-Tribune (around 2007). In a typical move, the separate books section was merged into general arts and entertainment coverage.

• Chicago Sun-Times (late 2000s). Most book coverage was dropped except for local authors.

• Boston Globe (early 2000s, then again 2014–2015). The book review section was merged with the opinion pages, then later folded into the Ideas section.

• Philadelphia Inquirer (late 2000s). The separate Sunday book section was eliminated and coverage folded into arts and entertainment.

• Los Angeles Times (2008). The separate Sunday Book Review was folded into the Calendar section, and two book editors were shown the door.

• Hartford Courant (2008). Books editor Carole Goldberg was laid off the same week as the LA Times cut.

• San Francisco Chronicle (2001, 2006, ongoing). The twelve-page pullout was folded into the Datebook in 2001, reinstated after public protest, then cut by a third in 2006, and has been steadily reduced since.

• Cleveland Plain Dealer (2013, 2015). Books editor Karen Long left in 2013 and was not replaced; the paper dropped local freelance reviewers in 2015.

• Chicago Tribune (2015). The separate weekly book-review tabloid, Printers Row, was discontinued and books coverage was radically trimmed.

• Newsday (late 2010s). Books editor Tom Beer left in 2018, and books coverage has since been substantially reduced.

• Tampa Bay Times (2024). Books editor Colette Bancroft took a buyout after seventeen years, ending dedicated books editing at one of Florida’s last serious book sections.

• Associated Press syndicated reviews (2010, then fully in 2025). AP cut its monthly twelve-review package in 2010, then ended weekly book reviews entirely in 2025—removing a key source of book coverage for hundreds of smaller papers who already eliminated their own departments, if they ever had them to begin with.

• Washington Post Book World (2009, again in 2026). The separate Sunday pull-out was folded into the rest of the paper in 2009. The section was resurrected in 2022 but then eliminated again during layoffs—this time taking critics Michael Dirda, Ron Charles, and Becca Rothfeld.

And that’s to say nothing of the Kansas City Star, The Oregonian, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and countless others where editorial positions were eliminated throughout the 2010s and replaced only by occasional book coverage. Cue the dirges.

The Why Behind the What

This decline represents one basic story told from two sides, demand and supply, all of which starts with the much discussed crisis in reading. Fewer people are reading books, which means fewer people are interested in reading about books, which means less ad revenue for the sections that cover them, which means cuts, which means lower visibility for books, which means still fewer readers. It’s a feedback loop in which each turn worsens the next.

Several developments have accelerated that cycle on the demand side, as Steven Mintz explains at Inside Higher Ed. Niche and genre-specific online outlets have siphoned readers from broad-market publications. The web has flattened the hierarchy of critical taste; blogs, Substack, Goodreads, BookTok, online reading groups, and the like have empowered readers and eroded the newspapers’ gatekeeping role, all while trust in professional, credentialed expertise has also eroded. Beyond that, what might be called the middlebrow project of the twentieth century—the effort to ferry highbrow ideas to middle-class readers—has declined, taking with it the audience the special Sunday book sections were edited to serve.

“Book reviews no longer attract sufficient eyeballs to generate the ad revenue that used to support book sections,” says Mintz. And that revenue collapse represents the supply-side of the story.

The rise of the internet didn’t just undermine cultural gatekeepers; it undermined the business model that kept all those gatekeepers employed. The standard account provides a decent if somewhat insufficient explanation. Classifieds migrated to Craigslist, display ads to Google and Facebook, and what funds remained had to buoy the shrinking newsroom. Book sections were among the most obvious places to trim—minimal ad dollars, an absentee audience, and they were easy to cut or squirrel away in other parts of the paper.

In that sense, book sections were the canary in the coal mine of newspaper collapse. The Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tampa Tribune, and scads more dailies eventually ended their book coverage when the whole enterprise fell apart—a reminder that the entire business was (and remains) as precarious as those teetering stacks in the Washington Times office.

I’d be hard pressed to say all of this is necessarily bad. It just is. But the simplest way to frame the current reality is this: If those pages got clicks, would they have gone away? We can say with Becca Rothfeld, who regrettably lost her perch at the Post, that “a newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing.” I sympathize and agree. But someone has to pay for it.

That’s not to say there aren’t downsides. I can think of several.

The Changing Landscape

I’ll skip over such negatives as the recession in local literary culture once fostered by the work of hometown critics. Instead, I want to focus on what it does to the publishing industry, which exacerbates the feedback loop mentioned above.

One immediate loss? The discoverability of midlist books. Local newspapers once provided the primary venue for general readers to discover serious new nonfiction and novels. That’s now fragmented into a thousand new channels—about which more in a moment. Major releases still get attention because they have large marketing and publicity budgets, but mid-tier authors miss out.

This hits nonfiction especially hard. These books have traditionally depended on the kind of nonspecialist—but still generally interested and serious—audiences that consumed daily newspapers. Without that avenue to raise awareness, the genre gets harder to publish, harder to sell, and harder to justify on a publisher’s P&L. Consequently, fewer such books have a chance to break out.

For both fiction and nonfiction this means the midlist suffers, a well observed phenomenon in the industry. But we can overstate the harms and miss the upsides. After all, the decline of newspaper reviews has been underway for two decades; meanwhile, the publishing industry as a whole has continued to grow, including nonfiction. One reason is that the kind of discoverability publishers relied on newspapers to deliver has migrated to other platforms and channels.

I saw a version of this when I first started in publishing in 2001. The imprint where I cut my editorial teeth published conservative political titles—hence the reason I was visiting the Washington Times. The majority of those books had a snowball’s chance of winning the affections (or even requisite ire) of books editors at mainstream newspapers or magazines to elicit coverage. But we still sold boatloads through talk radio when we were lucky. If you could get your author on the circuit, you’d find your readers and move inventory.

Publishers and readers are facing a version of that same challenge now as discoverability shifts to specialty publications like LitHub and ’s new Portico, plus X, BookTok, podcasts, and—most glorious among them all—Substack, which plays host to a rich and wide array of literary subcultures.

Weirdly, Dwight Garner makes nary a mention of Substack in his piece for the New York Times—probably because it complicates his “wipeout” thesis. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there,” he says, “swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.” Hello, Dwight! Lots of those folks—and plenty of the old guard too—are having a ball here on Substack.

What Are Reviews For?

Behind all this fretting and handwringing about the decline of book reviews is why they exist at all. I’ve already mentioned one reason with both demand and supply-side appeal: discoverability. Readers want to know about books and publishers want readers to know about the books they publish. But there are other reasons.

Book reviews are a form of literary expression all of its own. A well written review is a delight to read, whether the reader ever picks up the book under consideration. Newspaper criticism sometimes achieved—and still achieves—that status, but not always and not often.

“It does matter what an unusual mind, capable of presenting fresh ideas in a vivid and original and interesting manner, thinks of books as they appear,” said the midcentury literary critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick in a famous 1959 essay for Harper’s. Her complaint? Newspapers of the day oozed with uninteresting, uncritical, unctuous reviews.

“One had not thought they could go downward,” she said. “Still, there had been room for a decline in the last few years and the opportunity has been taken.” She lambasted the “sluggishness” of the New York Times and Herald Tribune and the “lobotomized” slop churned out by all the rest.

Hardwick was so disgusted that when the 1963 New York newspaper strike created an opening, she cofounded the New York Review of Books as a corrective. Which seems to me like the right way to respond to the decline of newspaper review culture: Start something new.

Now I want to hear from you: What are you favorite literary newsletters and reviews here on Substack? Please share in the comments.

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Best known for his Hoke Moseley detective novels set in Miami, Willeford painted with all the same familiar colors for this portrait but chose an entirely different canvas: the cockfighting pits of Florida and Georgia.

The narrator? Frank Mansfield, thirty-something professional cockfighter. The setup?Frank starts the story with just ten bucks. His last bird dies in a fight. He needs to regroup for the next season of fights or he’s done for. The story arc? Frank needs to raise enough cash to buy more roosters, reenter the circuit, and win big at the season’s invite-only final tournament in Milledgeville, Georgia. (Yep, the very same Milledgeville Flannery O’Connor called home.)

If he succeeds, Frank stands a decent chance of being named Cockfighter of the Year, the only distinction he really cares about.

Complicating the story? The fact that cockfighting is technically illegal is the least of Frank’s worries. More problematic are such obstacles as getting the required scratch to buy more birds; navigating expectations with a fiancée dangling off the end of an eight-year commitment; collecting debts from people just as broke as he is; rousting his underemployed brother off the family farm; and doing it all having taken a vow of silence.

That’s right: Frank hasn’t uttered a word since he let his big mouth sink his prospects a few years before. He refuses to speak again until he’s redeemed himself. While he narrates the story for the reader in blunt but vivid prose, he only communicates to those around him through body language, small gestures, and the occasional scribbled note.

As Frank rebuilds his flock, Willeford conveys all the intricacies of the ancient sport: the bird breeds, their personalities, their diets, their training, their conditioning, the brutal methods used to decide if a bird is “game,” the language and techniques of the fights, the etiquette of the pits, the size and positioning of blades attached to a bird’s sawed-off spurs, how to get the jump on an opponent, and blow-for-blow descriptions of the fights themselves.

Willeford also somehow manages to make Frank sympathetic to a surprising degree. Frank is, as his name might too easily suggest, honest. And his matter-of-fact way renders him relatable, despite living in a world to which we most of us have no access—hopefully (ahem).

The humanizing happens by degrees. At first, we feel sorry for the guy with the worst luck in the world. As he begins rebuilding, the sympathy comes from the relationships Willeford depicts, especially with an old-timer retiring from the sport to save his failing heart and a former Madison Avenue ad man who chucks his career to raise gamecocks on a neighboring farm.

Willeford cares little about character development in the usual sense. Frank’s moral arc is as flat as the Florida landscape. He doesn’t grow as person, experience any epiphanies, or repent of anything. He does defy the odds and become shrewder. But the real test of his character comes down to whether he’ll break that vow of silence while trying to redeem his place in the sport he loves. Without that vow, Frank’s life would dissolve.

“It is a funny thing,” he says.

A man can make a promise to his God, break it five minutes later and never think anything about it. With an idle shrug of his shoulders, a man can also break solemn promises to his mother, wife, or sweetheart, and, except for a slight, momentary twinge of conscience, he still won’t be bothered very much. But if a man ever breaks a promise he has made to himself he disintegrates. His entire personality and character crumble into tiny pieces, and he is never the same man again.

I don’t buy it, not for a minute; people break promises to themselves all the time. But Frank believes it wholeheartedly, and the entire novel depends on his commitment to himself. The vow forms the closest thing to a moral center in Frank’s world.

As you might guess, Willeford offers no ethical guidance through this strange, even revolting world. He simply lets the story work by its own logic, unconcerned about squeamish readers, reasonable as their recoil might be. You’ll need to bring your own moral GPS to navigate this one, but you’ll never forget the trip.

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The address placed him a quick stroll from Blackfriars Theater and across the street from the Sign of the Cock tavern. A bridge across the Thames offered easy access to the Globe—until the theater burnt down a few months later.

As for Blackfriars, the tony enclave had recently begun lurching downhill—perhaps evidenced by Shakespeare’s entree into the neighborhood. Some of the Bard’s more established neighbors were particularly miffed about incoming theater riffraff and tipplers. “Neighbors, you are tedious” (Much Ado About Nothing 3.5). Tough! “Every fair from fair sometime declines” (Sonnet 18).

The amazing thing, of course, is that we care at all about where Shakespeare lived. An obscure property record from 1613 snagging our attention in 2026? That we take note owes almost entirely to a fortunate bit of posthumous publishing—without which half of Shakespeare’s plays wouldn’t exist for us to read and news of his London address would be (pardon me) much ado about nothing.

¶ “Fame lives long” (Richard III 3.1). A few years ago now Shakespeare’s First Folio, a mammoth collection of his work compiled by friends and fellow players, crossed the century mark for the fourth time. An estimated 750 copies were originally published in 1623, seven years following his death.

Two hundred and thirty-five of these volumes are still extant, mostly in institutional hands; the Folger Library, for instance, holds 82. Some private collectors do possess copies, and it’s thanks to the original private collectors that so many copies have survived the centuries.

Shakespeare’s work lives in a category beyond beloved; for a certain kind of person, it’s beatific. We can credit the First Folio for that—and the preservation of much of his work. “If we didn't have this book,” says Emma Smith of Oxford University,

we wouldn’t care about Shakespeare at all. Half of the plays would have just been lost. We wouldn’t have Julius Caesar. We wouldn’t have The Tempest. We wouldn’t have Macbeth. And we wouldn’t have all the kind of cultural significance that they have got.

¶ “What a piece of work is a man!” (Hamlet 2.2). Marking the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, Oxford University Press published a large commemoration of the Bard and his accomplishments in 1916: A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, recently reprinted at its own 100th anniversary. It featured praise and observations from leading English scholars, as well as commentary by those further afield—French, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Persian, Chinese, Armenian, and many others.

One of those commentators was the Serb Nikolai Velimirovich, an eventual hierarch of the Orthodox Church, Nazi resister during WWII, and today a recognized saint. “I do not know Shakespeare,” he began. “Even I cannot know him. But he knows me; he described me, he painted all the secrets of my soul in such a way that in reading him I am finding myself in him.”

High praise—and echoed by countless readers of the plays who find the Bard somehow touching on every strand of human feeling and experience. One University of Pennsylvania professor, for instance, refers to Shakespeare’s plays as “enduringly human.”

Where does this broad yet particular humanity come from? It’s there in Velimirovich’s title, referring to Shakespeare as the Pananthropos, Greek for “All-Human.”

Velimirovich pits this Pananthropos against Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the conquering “overman” who would transcend and discard all prior, lesser cultural forms. Opposed to this overman, as Velimirovich sees it, stands Shakespeare—the universal man, who embraces the entirety of humanity.

How else to explain his astonishing ability to spin out sentences still read and cherished by people around the world who feel somehow seen and known, mirror-like, in all those lines and phrases? It’s not that Shakespeare possesses universal appeal; rather, he makes a universal appeal: We can, he says by his own imperfect examples in his plays, identify with and connect to the humanity of all people: their hopes and horrors, their thwarted plans and pain, their happiness and folly. “I am no less in blood than thou art” (King Lear 5.3).

Biblical scholar James Kugel refers to the Hebrew scriptures as a “theater of the soul.” I think the same could be said of Shakespeare, and we share the stage with eight billion other players who are remarkably like ourselves (As You Like It 2.7).

¶ “Knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven” (Henry VI, Part 2 4.7). My dad teaches high-school English and has since before I attained the humble status of embryo more than fifty years ago. God only knows how many people in and around Sacramento, California, can still recall random bits of Romeo and Juliet, thanks to him.

But some teachers and students nowadays bristle at the mere mention of Shakespeare. There’s active controversy about the ongoing relevance of his plays. Pedagogues fret about their supposed eurocentrism, colonialism, toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, and so . . . yawn . . . on.

Meanwhile, students find him impenetrable, for justifiable reasons, as John McWhorter argues; e.g., words that meant one thing in Shakespeare’s day have wriggled their way under differing definitions today.

Still, the plays aren’t unmanageable. “The readiness is all” (Hamlet 5.2). Yes, says Philip Womack,

the language does put people off, but only if you refuse, fingers in ears, to venture beyond the bland prose of so much modern writing. . . . Shakespeare’s syntax, especially in long speeches, can appear knotty to the casual reader (particularly so in the later plays such as The Winter’s Tale). Yet if you train your eye and ear to it, by the simple process of reading a single play, you’ll find that syntax alive, vivid, contributing to sense, character and plot.

And, especially for students, there’s merit in the challenge. “My students were born a few years before the first iPhone-anvil crashed through our attention spans,” says Andrew Simmons, who teaches Hamlet every year to his high-school seniors.

A more merciful teacher might cut a word-drunk dinosaur like Hamlet, but I won’t. Not because I’m a canon-worshiper who thinks the mere presence of Shakespeare suggests rigor. With each passing year, I see my students struggle more and more to decipher Hamlet’s torrents of language, but they are also increasingly comfortable with Hamlet himself. As faith in the inevitably progressive trajectory of their world falters, they inevitably understand and identify with him.

Hamlet has always been a vehicle for our existential vibrations. . . .

Simmons goes on to explain how Hamlet speaks to the confusion and chaos of our time, crises especially felt by teens with little historical context for societal turmoil and even less control over it. What Hamlet provides is a “theater of the soul” to orient themselves amid all the angst.

A good teacher of Hamlet can, in other words, solve for all the problems troubling the handwringing pedagogues. And, if you’re determined to look at it this way, there are some progressive currents in Shakespeare’s stories.

“Disinterested as they might be in royal succession drama,” says Simmons, “students find the play reveals, in Hamlet’s words, their ‘inmost part.’” Like Velimirovich, students can find themselves in Shakespeare.

¶ “What counterfeit did I give you?” (Romeo and Juliet 2.4). Of course, there’s always the question of whether Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare. Is it all just Shakespurious? People have agitated on the issue since at least the mid-nineteenth century, most recently Elizabeth Winkler in her book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies.

Writing for Slate, Isaac Butler takes on Winkler’s book and the broader “Shakespeare Truther community” but does so gingerly, cautiously. Why?

Tear it apart, and your vicious pan becomes yet another piece of evidence that Shakespeare Truthers must be on to something. Treat it calmly and even-handedly while still making clear what its problems are, and you risk legitimizing its claims as worth debating. Refuse the assignment and not only might you disappoint your editor, but you allow the book to have the last word.

The problem is that arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship, however interesting or occasionally persuasive, tend to rely on the same methods—“Trifles light as air” (Othello 3.3)—favored by conspiracy mongers, especially when challenged:

Ask an escalating series of questions about the consensus view, shifting ground whenever you would lose the point being debated. Deploy shaky evidence that requires tendentious interpretation. Claim that evidence that disproves your theory in fact supports it. Needle those in power who refuse to engage with you. Use the contempt with which your position is treated as evidence that you must be on to something. Whenever possible, fall back on saying you’re just asking questions.

Trutherism abuses the liberal public sphere by using the values of liberal discourse—rational hearing of evidence, open-mindedness, fair-minded skepticism about one’s own certainties, etc.—against it. Once the opposition tires of this treatment and refuses to engage in debate any longer, the truther can then declare victory, and paint the opposition as religious fanatics who are closed-minded and scared of facing the truth.

In other words, it’s like arguing with a flat earther. “You do unbend your noble strength, to think / So brainsickly of things” (Macbeth 2.2). And so we’re left with “A tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (Macbeth 5.5).

Meanwhile, the focus has lamentably shifted from the thing to the thing about the thing; instead of enjoying Shakespeare, we are—God help us—fixated on the pedantry and intricacies of Shakespeare scholarship. “Hell is empty,” we might say, following The Tempest, “and all the devils are here” (1.2, words we wouldn’t even have, incidentally, without the First Folio).

The remedy? Drop the trutherism, open a play, and let the Pananthropos do his work.

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Meanwhile, the current price of a hardcover book? They commonly run around $28, $30, or higher. The price for The Idea Machine is $34.95 (naturally, a steal at any price).

It’s crazy how the prices of books have gone up, and it’s impossible to avoid people complaining about the hikes, whether in discussion forums, social media, or other publications. “We’re in a book affordability crisis,” Book Riot announced in October, and memes like this one, recently posted on X, garner millions of views.

But this is hogwash. Let’s all just breathe into a paper bag and do a little math, starting with nominal prices.

To Inflate a Mockingbird

Yes, the original price of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tolkien’s Fellowship were just $3.95 and $5. But those are nominal values. When we factor inflation, the picture changes dramatically. In today’s dollars—and you can run this exercise yourself—those cover prices would look more like $43 and $54.

But, of course, they’re nowhere near so high. I’ve got a hardcover of To Kill a Mockingbird right here by my elbow printed in 2023. Cover price? $27.99. So, while the nominal cost of books has gone up, factoring inflation, it’s nowhere near as high as we should expect. In fact, while not immune, books have been remarkably resistant to inflation.

Along with countless other goods and services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the cost of “recreational books” year over year as part of the Consumer Price Index. And guess what? $20 worth of books in 1997 would cost you a skosh less today: $19.49. “Recreational books experienced an average inflation rate of -0.09% per year,” reports the CPI Inflation Counter website.

Now compare that to housing, healthcare, or admission to sporting events, movies, and concerts—all of which have actually trended higher than general inflation. In the adjoining chart, books represent the only flat line.

Say this, repeat this, consider getting it tattooed:

Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.

Meanwhile, books are trying their darnedest to save you money. If they were tracking upward with inflation, as mentioned, your Harper Lee and hobbits would be $43 and $54. Instead, they’re 30–40 percent cheaper than we would expect them to be.

By that reckoning, books are dirt cheap. That’s not to say there aren’t upward pressures on price. I have personally participated in giving them a goose—and with good reason.

‘Leaving Money on the Table’

When people say they want cheap books, they forget there are many other interested players at the table: authors, agents, publishers, bookstores, book distributors, and so on.

I spent over a decade at Thomas Nelson Publishers. While most of the books I worked on for the first half of my tenure were general-market titles, primarily politics and public affairs, the majority of books published by the larger company were religious, and the religious market liked books a little cheaper than the general market; hardbacks ran, I’d say, at least 10–20 percent lower than their secular counterparts, which put me in a funny situation.

Regnery, one of my primary competitors, also published conservative political titles. This was 2005, 2006, 2007, and they stamped every book they published $27.95, minimum. Meanwhile, I had to fight my own sales team behind the building with bats, blades, and chains to get the number higher than $24.99.

The pressure for low prices created a real disadvantage in the acquisitions process. Every book I wanted to acquire required a profit-and-loss projection, and the cover price was a key lever. A higher cover price meant higher projected revenue, which meant I could justify a larger advance to win the deal. “You’re leaving money on the table!” I’d tell my sales team, trying to budge them from $22.99 to $24.99.

Those two dollars would make a difference, though not as much as you’d think since retailers take roughly half the cover price; the publisher only pockets a dollar of the increase. But, still, a dollar per unit adds up fast if the book sells 15,000, 20,000, 30,000 copies. Smear that effect over the entire catalog and it’s enough to get interesting.

I bring up this angle to nod at a hundred more and save the reader the rigmarole of working through each. Let me just say it this way. The costs of production are legion: author advance, price of paper, cost of printing and binding, freight and warehousing, editorial fees (developmental editing, copyediting, proofreading—often three or four different people), cover design, interior layout and typesetting, indexing, rights and permissions for quoted material, sales commissions, marketing and publicity, co-op fees to retailers for shelf placement, not to mention the returns system, which allows bookstores to boomerang unsold inventory for full credit back on the publisher, leaving the publisher with nary a dime for their trouble.

All of that—and more—has to squeeze inside that little number on the cover.

What’s wild is that, given the upward cost pressure of almost every line item on the list, the price of books stays well below the price of inflation. In any given year a journalist can look at prices and moan like someone stole their lunch. But when you survey the last few decades, you realize we’ve been eating on the cheap for a long time, mostly because publishers are highly reluctant to raise prices, despite the squeeze they feel from every cost center lobbing invoices across the transom.

Who Makes the Money?

Nobody, really. The only people who go into publishing dreaming of big dollars are those who also believe in the Easter Bunny. Just look at EBITDA—Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Taken as a percentage of revenue, EBITDA serves as a standard profit metric across companies and industries.

We can use the dataset compiled by Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern School of Business to compare publishing with other sorts of businesses. Start with Green and Renewable Energy—very profitable at 58.45 percent EBITDA. Nice work if you can get it. There’s also:

• Oil and Gas (Production and Exploration): 43.21 percent

• Semiconductors: 36.77 percent

• Software (System and Application): 35.93 percent

• Pharmaceuticals: 33.59 percent

• Alcoholic Beverages: 29.52 percent

• Real Estate (Development): 24.95 percent

• Healthcare Products: 20.34 percent

• Machinery: 19.62 percent

• Construction Supplies: 19.46 percent

• Food Processing: 15.25 percent

• Advertising: 14.06 percent

And publishing where they’re gouging everyone, jacking prices like pirates and extortionists? Publishing is down around 13.18 percent, three points below the total market EBITDA average of 16.56 percent.

The numbers I’ve seen for publishing usually range from 5 to 15 percent, depending on the year. For reference, grocery stores run about 5 percent. So even at the upper end of the spread, publishing is much closer to Kroger than to Pfizer or Salesforce. The only people publishers are gouging are themselves.

When you hear people say books cost too much money and demand that publishers cut their prices, where are they supposed to cut it from? Some years the only reason publishers are profitable at all is because of layoffs and other creative restructuring—a recurring risk when you run that lean to begin with. Grocery stores can afford to play close to the line because everyone needs groceries every week. But when the market’s wobbly, it’s very easy to put off buying a book. If buyers get frugal a couple months in a row, suddenly the publisher is in the red.

Can’t Have It Both Ways

Bookstores have been having a good run the last several years, and they’re positioned to continue the trend. It’s worth saying they didn’t get there by discounting books. They got there by adding value to their customers who prefer what they have to offer instead of the 20 or 30 percent they’d save on Amazon.

In fact, some indie booksellers are dogmatic about higher price books. They know what keeps their doors open. If the Raven in Lawrence, Kansas, discounted like Amazon, the owner calculates they could stay open less than a week before their costs outran their revenue.

If you want a thriving retail market—not to mention the wider publishing and literary ecosystem—it’s worth recognizing that cheaper books undercut the whole notion:

• reduced pay and perks for bookstore staff (health insurance? don’t be silly);

• reduced salary for editors (and fewer of them), which means poorly edited books;

• reduced financial wherewithal to start and maintain families while working for literary enterprises;

• reduced advances and royalties for authors, the vast majority of whom already can’t support themselves on their writing alone;

• reduced EBITDA for publishers, which jeopardizes their entire enterprise.

Cheaper books mean more than paying less for books you love; they mean fewer books, worse books, and fewer people able to make a living producing them.

The next time you pick up a $30 hardcover and wince, remember you’re holding a year (probably more) of someone’s creative labor; multiple rounds of professional editing; original cover art and interior design; paper, printing, binding, warehousing, and shipping; a bookseller’s rent; a clerk’s wages; not to mention an entire supply chain from forest to shelf.

What’s more, you get all of this distilled into an object that supplies you with ten to twenty hours of the most immersive form of entertainment humans have ever invented. And did I mention that you own it forever?

Books aren’t remotely too expensive. In real dollars, they’re cheaper right now than when John F. Kennedy was president. Everything else got more expensive, true, but books didn’t. We’re just so used to the bargain we forgot it was one.

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¶ First stop. ”The first thing I do in any town I come to,” said Robert Frost, “is ask if it has a bookstore.”

¶ World’s best narcotic, psychedelic, and stimulant. Some people do drugs. I prefer bookstores. The canny among you will say why not both?

Tempting, but I’ll stick with books.

¶ Natural habitat. A while back The New York Times followed actors around in the wild. Where do these strange creatures go? What do they do? Paul Giamatti’s favorite haunt? A used bookstore. “I like used bookstores more than new ones,” he told the Times. Why?

Because there’s just something about all the old books that feels more comforting and peaceful to me. I do have a big collection of books at home, and I actually had to get help from somebody a few years ago to organize it. I got rid of hundreds if not thousands of books about three or four years ago. And in the space of time since, I’ve almost reacquired everything I got rid of.

Naturally.

¶ The Fantastic Mr. Barton. I once worked at a used bookstore in Roseville, California, called the Almost Perfect Bookstore—a misnomer because it was, in fact, perfect. We had a loyal customer base including the fantastic Mr. Barton.

Mr. Barton was blind. Shabbily dressed in blue pants and short-sleeved checkered shirt with too many items crammed inside the breast pocket, he could actually read if he held the book up against the lenses of his quarter-inch thick glasses. And I mean up against. His nose would graze the crease of the book.

He loved fantasy and science fiction. Sometimes when I would shelve that section, he would stand there with his nose pressed into something by Philip K. Dick, David Eddings, or Stanisław Lem. He could always find his way to something interesting.

When not browsing the shelves, Mr. Barton would position himself in the middle of the passageway between a shoulder-high shelf of books and the cash counter near the front of the store. He stood there to talk with the staff with whom he possessed an incredible rapport. He could yammer on about anything and regularly conversed with the shop owner Kelley and other employees for two, three, four hours at a time.

Every now and then customers would queue up to the counter, a little unsure if he was in line. “Step aside, Mr. Barton,” Kelley or Amanda would say (he was always “Mr. Barton”), or “Make way, Mr. Barton.”

That was his cue, words he’d heard a thousand times before and would hear a thousand times after. He’d politely excuse himself (“Oh, I’m sorry”) and step back or step aside, usually pressed up against that shoulder-high shelf opposite the register, his white cane held vertically to his body, so as not to trip anyone passing by.

For many, he might’ve been an inconvenience, even a nuisance, but Kelley’s heart always held room for the fantastic Mr. Barton, the least likely bookstore patron in town.

¶ More to the story. Powell’s is a full city block. But there are other massive bookstores with legendary renown. To wit, Second Story Books in Rockville, Maryland, which shelves half a million used and rare books. Here’s , a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, basking in all that glory.

Am I jealous? Of course.

¶ Missing out. And then there’s the Strand in Manhattan. I was recently in New York launching my book, The Idea Machine. Alas, I couldn’t pull away to shop. Story of my life.

When I was an acquiring editor at Thomas Nelson and regularly traveled to New York, I had a hundred opportunities and never made it to Mecca. Hopefully, I’ll paddle my way back up the Hudson in the near future. In the meantime, here’s a delightful video that salves my spirit and stokes my fire.

Just watching economist and book reviewer Michael Orthofer (who’s reviewed well over 5,000 books at this point!) shopping the Strand is a joy. And as the video title suggests, there’s good advice here for shopping any bookstore. Did I say “advice”? It’s really more about fanning out and looking for whatever grabs your eye.

¶ Regarding Henry. If you need to entertain , figured out the trick. I suspect this recipe might work well on any bookish soul. It’s worth trying on a few of your own out-of-towners and reporting back.

¶ Opinionated bookstores. If you’re going to be a big-ass store, you can shelve a lot of inventory. When I shopped Powell’s, for instance—a full city block!—I checked out several sections but only had about ninety minutes. So I narrowed my browsing to the literature shelves, massive enough by themselves.

Starting in the A’s and going letter by letter, I got as far as maybe the L’s. Where had that ninety minutes gone? Just browsing the Hemingway took me six or seven minutes.

But if you’re going to be a small shop, you have to be more selective with your stock. You have to have an opinion. manages my local bookshop, Landmark Booksellers, in downtown Franklin, Tennessee. He argues every bookstore has an agenda, and those agendas, whatever they may be, are fine insofar as they go. After all, the owners set the vision; as patrons, we can choose to part with our dollars there or elsewhere. But there’s a business opportunity here worth mentioning.

While massive stores have gobs of inventory—so much choice!—smaller stores have something possibly better: a curated inventory that can more carefully and intentionally serve the local clientele. At Landmark, for instance, they have a massive installation along one wall, the Great Wall of Books. It’s all classics chronologically arranged. Gilgamesh on one side, Kurt Vonnegut on the other, and a world of treasures in between.

In a big-ass store, these books would be shelved all over, one in this section, another in that, all of them swamped amid the flood of titles. What might Plato, Dante, Dickens, and Philip K. Dick share in common? It’s easier to imagine the conversation those books are having at Landmark. And because of the superb merchandizing and selection, it’s almost impossible to walk out without purchasing something from that wall. I’ve tried and failed several times. (I don’t like losing, but I’m bearing up. Courage, friends.)

¶ Sharpening an angle. It helps to have an angle as a small bookshop, something that makes you unique—a destination. Little shops can’t compete on selection, but they can compete on selectivity.

Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, Alabama, sells only books signed by their authors. The angle is so unique the New Yorker traveled to get a look and write it up. explains the magic of the shop here as well.

Baldwin & Co. in New Orleans, Louisiana, is one of 306 black-owned bookstores in the U.S. When I was there a couple of years ago I spied ’s wonderful Reading Black Books on display. Black-owned bookshops are an anchor to local communities wherever they’re found and have a long and vital tradition.

Bestselling novelist Ann Patchett opened Parnassus in Nashville. As you might expect, the inventory reflects a heightened literary sensibility. And bestselling self-help author opened The Painted Porch in Bastrop, Texas. If you’re a fan of his work, wouldn’t you love to shop in his store?

¶ Buy from your friends. It turns out many Substackers run bookshops.

• I mentioned above and you can’t stop me from doing it again. Erik runs the show at Landmark Booksellers in my adopted hometown of Franklin, Tennessee. Erik also runs the Books of Titans podcast, where he’s reading through classics—incidentally, a great example of how a personal passion can inform a good business decision, vis-a-vis the Great Wall mentioned above. He is, as referred to him, “the marathon runner of the canon.”

• runs Goldenberry Books in Concord, North Carolina, with his wife Bethany. He also runs Close Reads here on Substack.

• Novelist runs Nooks in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with his wife Maile Silva. Along with writing novels, such as The Weight of Memory, he writes The Courage to Live It here on Substack.

¶ Where we meet. “Wherever I go,” said Gloria Steinem, “bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.”

¶ Not an easy job. The Almost Perfect Bookstore eventually closed. Happens, sadly, to a lot of shops. “With notoriously low margins, bookselling is a challenging financial proposition at the best of times,” says Chloe Fox. So, she did what any sane person would do; she dared opening a shop of her own, Fox & King: “the best, worst thing I’ve ever done.”

She tells the whole story in a wonderful piece for the Financial Times. It’s an inspiring account, one in which the whole community comes together to help her get it off the ground.

When her inventory arrives—some five thousand volumes worth about £20,000, randomly jammed in their boxes—Fox’s friends help sort, scan, and shelve the whole lot. “Robert McCrum,” she says, “a local acquaintance who happens to be former literary editor of The Observer, goes over my opening stock list with an expert eye and a red pen, simply for the love of books.”

On opening day, people entered with high hopes and fragile hearts. Some cried for the joy of finally having a bookshop in their village. Many told Fox she was brave to venture out. And they’re right. In Penelope Fitzgerald’s sad but wonderful novel, The Bookshop, the heroine fails to keep her little shop afloat. Still, Fox sold 150 books on that first day and she’s still in business.

¶ But actually, indies are doing pretty well. One of the great literary stories of the last fifteen years is the rebound of small, independent booksellers. The story was pretty grim at the turn of the century. With the rise of the mall chains, big box stores like B&N and Borders, and Amazon in 1995, indie numbers fell dramatically, precipitously, catastrophically. Nora Ephron got a movie out of it, but the rest of us watched our little favorites close.

Indies couldn’t be kept down forever. They began a remarkable phoenix-like turnaround in 2009, thanks in part to some of the features of small shops mentioned above: better, smarter merchandizing, catering to specialized interests, and so on. “Over the last five years,” reports Fast Company, “the number of independent bookstores in the U.S. jumped by 70%. In 2025 alone, 422 new bookstores opened, according to the American Booksellers Association.” More on that story here.

¶ Bookmobile. If you’d like to start a bookstore of your own, you could start small with a bookmobile. Here’s what you need to get started.

¶ Still going. “Historically speaking, bookstores are oddly, almost eerily, susceptible to disaster and scandal,” writes Oliver Darkshire. “In short, they go bust, they explode, people steal all the floorboards and make for the hills, and so on. Unlikely catastrophe and financial ruin follow booksellers like a vocational curse.”

Darkshire tells the story of Henry Sotheran Ltd. Sotheran’s, as it’s usually known, has—despite plenty of scandal and disruption—carried on for more than a quarter millennium now. It has a reasonable claim to being the world’s oldest bookstore.

¶ Cultural survival. “On a daily basis, bookshops—whose margins are already tiny—are finding their viability compromised,” says Booksellers Association president Fleur Sinclair. “But the huge cultural, social and commercial value of bookshops cannot be overestimated; it is crucial to the future of our society that they survive.” Overstating things? Only a skosh.

¶ Signs of civilization. “Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk,” said John Updike. “They civilize their neighborhoods.”

We could use more of that.

¶ My little haul. After scouring the shelves at Powell’s I walked out with a few titles: Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s The Things We’ve Seen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Dorothy B. Hugh’s The Expendable Man. But the real win? I got to spend ninety minutes basking amid all those glorious books in a national institution. If you’ve never been, I hope you get to go yourself someday. I certainly hope to go back and see what’s between M and Z.

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But here in Tegel Prison things changed. For a year and half he lived, as Devin Maddox and Taylor Worley say in a wonderful article for Christianity Today, “in relative comfort, allowing him the time and space to read and write prolifically for most of his imprisonment.”

So, he jumped back into Ethics, right, the partially completed, urgently needed book everyone anxiously awaited?

No.

As Maddox and Worley detail, along with piles of letters, Bonhoeffer wrote poetry, worked on a play, and started a novel. Given his passive and active resistance against the Nazi juggernaut, including joining an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Hitler, this might strike us as curious, maybe even disappointing.

“Bonhoeffer spent his final months,” they say, “creating art.”

Wasted Effort?

The reason some might judge this pursuit frivolous comes from our tendency to reduce people to what we deem their primary purpose. If you’re an activist theologian working against a maniacal and murderous regime, we expect you to keep up the routine—not drop out and start telling stories, let alone counting iambs.

Activist theologians are on the clock, after all. And as soon as the authorities could nail Bonhoeffer for his involvement in the assassination plot, time ran out. His enforced writer’s retreat was cut short, and he was shunted off to more forbidding confines, including Buchenwald and eventually Flossenbürg.

The Nazis hanged Bonhoeffer there just before the end of the war in April 1945. And that book everyone was waiting for? He never finished it. Nor, it’s worth saying, did he finish the novel. So, was it all a waste? We did get some penetrating poetry. Here’s a bit from one of those prison poems, “Success and Failure”:

Success is full of foreboding,
failure has its sweetness.
Without distinction they appear to come,
the one or the other,
from the unknown.
Both are proud and terrible.

People come from far and wide,
walk by and look,
pausing to stare,
half envious, half afraid,
at the outrage,
where the supernatural,
blessing and cursing at the same time,
entangling and disentangling,
sets forth the drama of human life.
What is success and what is failure?

Time alone distinguishes.

An apt thought for a man in prison for virtues misconstrued by an unjust state as crimes. But it’s the motivation behind the lines that matters most of all. Why write poetry when more productive pursuits await?

“What appears to us as such a curious choice must have been a desperate attempt to hang on to his own humanity,” write Maddox and Worley. “In the midst of threatening death, creativity allowed him some recovery of his most authentic self. . . . Creative expression is our life-giving cry of freedom.”

The Consolation of Art

Bonhoeffer’s story reminds me of another writer and occasional theologian imprisoned for supposed involvement in a coup. Boethius was partway through translating Aristotle’s corpus when he was accused of trying to undermine the sixth-century Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great.

Behind bars and awaiting his own execution, did Boethius resume his translation efforts? It might have changed the course of Western history if he had.

As it stands, it took the Arabic translation movement and half a millennium of additional time for the Latin West to access the Greek philosopher because Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy instead, interspersing prose and poetry to illumine life’s reversals and why our favored paths to happiness reliably disappoint.

As with Bonhoeffer, art trumped productivity. Scholasticism could wait.

Maddox and Worley provide a theological rationale for this tradeoff. As humans, we bear the image of a God who creates. Creative engagement allows us deep and needful access to what makes us human; in creating art we are returning to form.

But one needn’t hold Christian convictions to recognize art as fundamentally generative and affirming of our humanity. And what makes us human is perhaps more relevant now than ever.

Do Robots Write Poetry?

I’m unsure if we ever satisfactorily answered whether androids dream of electric sheep, but let’s complicate it with another puzzler: Do robots write poetry? As it happens, Bonhoeffer and Boethius’s prison pastime intersects with a fascinating development emerging from Silicon Valley.

“A string of job postings from high-profile training data companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a PhD or master’s degree,” reports Andrew Deck for Rest of World. “Dozens more seek general annotators with humanities degrees, or years of work experience in literary fields. . . .”

The reason? “The companies say contractors will write short stories on a given topic to feed them into AI models,” explains Deck. “They will also use these workers to provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text.” One company, Mercor, currently pays poets $150 an hour for such services.

Poets training robots: It’s a sci-fi story come true. It also exposes something interesting about the basic divide between human creativity and its algorithmic derivatives. “Tools like ChatGPT were built to mimic human writing,” says Deck, “not to innovate on it.”

As Mercor’s 22-year-old CEO Brendan Foody tells economist , these poets aren’t just writing poems; they’re also building rubrics—criteria to train large language models on what good poetry supposedly sounds like. “When one of the AI labs wants to teach their models how to be better at poetry,” he says, “we’ll find some of the best poets in the world that can help to measure success via creating evals and examples of how the model should behave.”

Does it work? Depends on what you expect.

Insufficient Training Data

Poetry—or any creative work worth the name—doesn’t really follow rubrics, not exactly. Every art has norms and forms the artist follows, but for the final product to succeed the artist must use the conventions to do something unconventional, something that subverts expectations and surprises the audience. Otherwise, what’s the point? Is there anything more disappointing than a novel whose end you easily anticipate?

When Cowen asked Foody how long until an LLM can write something as good as the median Pablo Neruda poem, both agreed it’s less than a year away. But the best Neruda poems? “Much further out,” says Cowen. Foody agrees. The rubric gets you to the median, but to surpass the average you need something that better evals and more training data can’t manage. What is it?

When we ask ChatGPT to write us a poem or tell us a story, it’s doing so based on all the data upon which it’s been trained, including innumerable books of poetry and other works of literature. One dataset used by Meta, Bloomberg, and others contains over 191,000 books—much to the frustration of many of their authors. And that frustration is illuminating, actually essential.

Where, after all, does poetry come from? Thinking of Bonhoeffer and Boethius, from a place of longing and suffering, of fraying hope and discouragement and the need for self-assertion amid humiliation and abasement.

We can train AI models to mimic the product of those emotions, but I don’t see how even the most advanced models can originate such products without experiencing a feeling as simple as frustration, let alone the higher yearnings and struggles of the heart. The AI don’t have—and can’t get—the training data. They don’t experience fear and disappointment, anger or love, or any of the raw encounters with life that humans transmute into art.

And, atop that limitation, they’re missing something else, something Bonhoeffer and Boethius show us.

The Choice to Create

I’m a fan of AI, particularly large language models, as I’ve made clear here before. As I argue in The Idea Machine, large language models represent the latest development in a long line cognitive tools humans initiated 3,000 years ago with the invention of writing to help domesticate data and manage the wild tangle of information we create.

What’s more, I see tremendous upside from AI’s ongoing development as a creative partner in all sorts of human endeavors, including writing and translation, medicine, manufacturing, finance, energy, engineering, and more. The whole point of technology is to emancipate human labor by enhancing human capabilities. As our tools allow us to transcend our native limitations, we are free to pursue other, higher aims—such as, for instance, art.

Critics of AI say we risk dehumanization as technological capabilities expand. I agree, which is why mindful engagement is required. But while the future of AI is every bit as undetermined and unknowable as all other futures, there still stretches a vast gulf between man and machine, something Foody acknowledges.

Models are quickly advancing, capable of automating, say, 50 or 75 percent of what human experts can do. But, admits Foody, they “will really struggle with that last 25 percent.” Some of that struggle is permanent because, as stated above, it involves the raw human data AI can’t access.

But the examples of Bonhoeffer and Boethius point to the deeper challenge for robot poets. Knowing all the reasons for doing one thing—say, completing Ethics or translating Aristotle—we can nonetheless blow it off and do something else: write a poem, or paint, or garden, or make music, or bake bread, or dance, or really anything else. The choice to create, especially when supposedly more important work awaits, is every bit as human as the ability to do so. And in some sense, that’s the whole 100 percent, not the last 25.

Wasted effort? “Time alone distinguishes.”

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Before you go, see these:

Answer: Possibly. I found Crime and Punishment riveting, and I’ve been putting off The Brothers Karamazov for over a decade.

Did you finish it?

Yes!

Great. Do you want to say your stupid joke? You know this is the last time you’re allowed to use it.

I sometimes say I’ve quit The Brothers Karamazov more times than other people quit smoking. Not anymore. I finally dropped the bad habit! If I had a nickel for every time I avoided the book, I could have bought two houses by now.

Congratulations, I suppose. Welcome to what probably millions have already accomplished. I mean, I’ve read it too; so, it’s not much of a brag, is it?

. . .

What surprised you most?

That it was actually easy, maybe, nearly unputdownable. I read it in about two weeks. Previously, I’d bounce off an invisible wall of boredom and disinterest around page 100. I was never quite resigned to that fate, however. I knew I’d eventually come back to it and find my way to the end.

Did you struggle at all with the usual complaints: challenging names, the rambling, discursive style, all that?

For whatever reason, not this time through. I read the David McDuff translation.

Not one of the better regarded . . .

True, but it’s serviceable. I think probably all modern translations are fine, honestly. I don’t buy the idea that any one translation so vastly exceeds the others that we should only allow our eyes to absorb that one cherished, sainted version.

Once you’re really in it, all the standard complaints disappear, including the pedantry about the “right” translation. Yes, Dostoevsky is all over the place. Yes, there are more names to manage than a phone book. Yes, yes, yes. But who cares?

It’s actually a breeze, and a thousand pages blow by. You just need—I certainly needed—my sails pointed in the right direction. Maybe that’s what Crime and Punishment did for me.

Now having finished both, I’d say The Brothers Karamazov is the better novel.

You’re wrong about that.

Crime and Punishment is dark, claustrophobic, and oppressive, like the ceiling is coming down on your head.

Yes, but you can’t stop reading because cramming all that drama through such a narrow aperture creates a sense of propulsion. You’re confined within the murderer Raskolnikov’s fevered brain as he frets his way to the conclusion. Hold on! Or you’ll get blown off the back.

Okay, but The Brothers Karamazov has those same propulsive episodes, too. You’ve got Dmitry’s midnight bacchanal, Ivan’s story of the Grand Inquisitor, and his conversation with the devil. But on the whole, the novel is more airy and exuberant, even comical, despite the fact it’s about a murder.

Did that surprise you? So far, I’ve only read two novels by Dostoevsky, same as you—unless you’re somehow reading behind my back. Both turn on murder.

True crime and crime fiction was a big deal in Russia at the time, apparently. The government had recently opened the courts for public attendance and also expanded press freedom. According to literary critic Jennifer Wilson, “The two developments created a Russian reading public that was rabid for shocking tales of murder and a liberated press that was happy to supply them.”

So Dostoevsky was capitalizing on the trend?

Sure. He was writing about people amid social and cultural upheaval. The nineteenth century was boiling with ideas, progressive proposals, reactionary responses, and all the people in the middle trying to work it out for themselves.

But it’s not like Dostoevsky was going to write a treatise or a manifesto or whatever. He was a novelist. Crime stories gave him a vehicle to explore the direction Russian society was headed in a mode he could exploit.

This is where we probably wander into a real disagreement.

How so?

Well, one standard treatment of the novel, which it sounds like you’re endorsing, is to essentially back-read the Bolshevik Revolution into it, and elevate Dostoevsky as some kind of prophet who saw all this doom descending on his country. The book was written, what, almost forty years before everything hit the fan.

Maybe, but if we’re going to have it out, I think we need to set up the basic storyline.

Start with the three titular brothers.

Dmitry is the oldest. He’s sensual and impulsive, a total hothead. Aggrieved that his father, Fyodor, has squandered his inheritance, Dmitry believes he’s owed a substantial sum.

Worse, though he’s engaged to be married, he’s infatuated with another woman, Grushenka, and his father is loopy for the same woman. Father and son are bound to tangle.

Right, then there’s Ivan, the ambidextrous atheist who can play the religious game when needed but who submits to no real authority higher than himself. All three boys were foisted off on others to raise, but Ivan comes home as a young adult and, despite loathing his father, gets along with him. Fyodor assumes he’s loyal and faithful but has no idea what creatures are growling behind the boy’s eyes.

And then, finally, we have the youngest of the dysfunctional brood—

Maury Povich would’ve strangled his own mother for an hour with these people—

I can’t believe you said that, but yes. The youngest, Alyosha. Contemplating becoming a monk, Alyosha genuinely loves his father and both brothers, despite the fact none of them are lovable—not even very likable—and all fail to understand him in the slightest.

But this is where the cookie-cutter interpretation takes over, isn’t it? These aren’t characters so much as templates. Dmitry is the mass of Russian society, Ivan the new breed of radical, and Alyosha the faithful Orthodox Christian whose way of life represents the only real reconciliation and thus salvation for the nation.

Wait, before we get there, we’ve got the murder. The father, Fyodor, is a repulsive fool with no trouble making enemies and finally gets it. They find him dead in his house with his money missing.

I think any reader will easily track up to this point and follow the narrative like a standard crime narrative. The question of who killed Dad drives the plot. You’ve got suspects, motives, a trial—all the basic pantry items for baking a flavorful whodunit.

But then Dostoevsky complicates the recipe. In some ways, the guilty party is beside the point—at least in the sense that the typical murder mystery reader would care.

You’re going to spoil it if you’re not careful.

No, I’m just saying that Dostoevsky is not interested in a doing a typical procedural. He’s up to something else, and that gets you headed in the direction of the ideological reading—I reject that label, by the way—that you’re rejecting.

You can’t have it both ways. Either this is the most disappointing murder mystery ever written, or Dostoevsky has another point in mind.

I would like to introduce you to the concept of the false dilemma. I can accept that Dostoevsky isn’t Erle Stanley Gardner without buying your paint-by-numbers interpretation.

I haven’t even offered an interpretation yet. You’re projecting.

Then how do you read it?

Disintegration. The whole novel is a study in what happens when people lie to themselves—about what they believe, about what they want, about the gap between their ideas and their actions.

Early on, we meet Father Zosima, the elder at the monastery where Alyosha is a novice. Zosima is the spiritual center of the novel, and one of his core teachings concerns the danger of lying to yourself. The person who lies to himself, Zosima warns, loses the ability to sort the bogus from the believably true.

 It sounds like a monastic chestnut, but it’s the key to the entire novel. Because what Dostoevsky keeps showing us is that self-deception results in disintegration. Your ideas say one thing; your life says another. And as the gap widens, you can’t psychologically cohere any longer. You fracture.

Show me how that works with each brother.

Dmitry is all action, no thought. He’s the easiest to read because his self-deception is the thinnest. He knows he’s dissolute and degraded. He knows he’s capable of violence. But he keeps telling himself a story about his own nobility (his honor, his officer’s code) that doesn’t survive contact with his actual behavior—excluding one blazing insight near the end.

Ivan is the more dangerous case, because his self-deception is sophisticated enough to pass for philosophy. You prefer Crime and Punishment; Ivan is one half of Raskolnikov. All theory and no action. There’s a fundamental dishonesty in his character—no integration between what he believes and does.

He’s constructed an elaborate case that without God, everything is permitted. For him it’s an intellectual game. But ideas don’t idle in the salon. They wander outdoors; they enter other minds and have consequences.

You’re coming dangerously close to ruining the story as far as one of the suspects goes.

How am I supposed to say more without saying more? Let’s just say that others, whom I shall leave unnamed, suffer from the reverse problem. They’re stupid enough to act but don’t have any ideas of their own. It’s a perverse division of labor for moral evasion: the intellectual gets plausible deniability and his agents get permission.

Fair enough. And Alyosha?

Alyosha is the opposite of Ivan, and he’s the only major character who’s fully honest with himself, despite all the struggles that presents him. And on that note, let me just argue with someone not in the room right now.

I’ve heard several people say Alyosha is just too good; he’s not believable. I don’t get that. Dostoevsky repeatedly places him in spots that test any sort of integrity he possesses. He stumbles through like anyone attempting to live true to his convictions. That’s not only believable, it’s almost boringly normal. This is why you’re wrong about the template comment, too. Each of the main characters is fully realized given the stuff they’re made of.

But the point is that where Ivan’s incoherence drives him nearly mad—or actually so—Alyosha’s integration produces a coherent ethic rooted in love with the moral courage to live it out.

So, this is an ideological reading. The clever will sit and burble in their parlors, while the clamjamfry will take those ideas into the streets. The nation will suffer dire consequences because of the dangerous ideas of the intellectuals and the mindless actions of the common people. Meanwhile, the only person capable of resisting such a future is someone who, in your terms, is fully integrated—and whose integration tends toward the good.

Frankly, I don’t see how this isn’t just back-reading the Bolsheviks into the book.

Forget the Bolsheviks!

Give me a second. The interpretation does have one virtue: It might help make sense of puzzling subplot—the boys. Woven through the main plot is a storyline involving a group of school kids and Alyosha’s friendship with them. On first reading, these sections feel extraneous, Dostoevsky just being undisciplined. Paid by the page? But on your reading you can see them as part of Dostoevsky’s warning—maybe even his counterproposal.

Supposedly, Dostoevsky originally intended to write a novel about the youth of Russia. And then his son, incidentally named Alyosha, died. It drained the life from Dostoevsky.

(I find it telling, by the way, that he not only names his most virtuous character after his departed son but gives his buffoonish murder victim the name Fyodor. And I accused you of projection.)

Ivan’s philosophical rebellion is the novel’s great question: Can God be justified in a world that tortures children? That’s the backdrop for his Grand Inquisitor story. And Christ’s only answer for all the misery in the world is a kiss. How does that suffice? Especially when you realize that Dostoevsky is writing this in the wake of his own son’s death. Alyosha’s patient, embodied love for actual children is the answer.

But if I take your reading correctly, that’s really only half the explanation for why the subplot exists. The boy Kolya is a Raskolnikov—maybe even a Bolshevik—in waiting. He’s brilliant, precocious, already posturing with borrowed ideas about socialism and rationalism. He could become another Ivan. Or he could follow Alyosha. Your reading not only makes sense of his character but also the ideological reading you seem attached to—precisely because he’s a child and therefore represents the future and its possibilities, both good and terrible.

And Dostoevsky leaves his fate undecided at the novel’s end—again, pointing to future possibilities. So, you’re conceding my point?

No. But it’s the least boring thing you’ve suggested. What about Elder Zosima’s rotting corpse: How does that work with your integration idea? He preaches holiness, but in Orthodox understanding incorruptibility is a mark of sainthood. And yet, despite his reputation for sanctity, when he dies his body immediately begins to stink. It’s like a judgment, right? Meanwhile, at the funeral of Ilyusha—another of the boys and not particularly holy—the casket emits no smell of death. How do you square that?

I can’t exactly. The monks are scandalized. But grace doesn’t always square with merit. There’s nothing incongruous about that, at least not in Christian terms.

Of course there is! Your reading depends on knowing these people by their fruit, and Zosima leaves a barrel of rotten apples.

No, I don’t think so. My disintegration argument hinges on self-deception. Zosima wasn’t deceived; the problem is that everyone around him is. They’ve told themselves a story about what sanctity looks like and expect a miracle of incorruptibility as a result.

If anything Dostoevsky uses the scandal as a test of Alyosha’s integration. He attends Zosima during his life; few people know him better. Will he trust the evidence of his own experience, or succumb to the pressure of the crowd?

This is exactly what I was getting at earlier, saying that Alyosha is not portrayed as simply, uncomplicatedly good. Zosima’s corpse is a crisis for him. If he believes the lie that Zosima wasn’t who he witnessed on a daily basis, he falls apart. If he resists the lie, he maintains his integrity. Alyosha passes the test—it’s the one event that validates everything he does next, back to his coherent ethic of love with the moral courage to live it out.

I take your point, but I think I’m with Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s not about the ideological struggle or any of that. Knausgaard says the minute we step back from the novel and try to see it as about freedom or obligation or morality, we’re losing sight of what it really is.

Say more.

Well, focus on the ideological angle. It reduces all the verve and vitality of these characters to abstractions. Suddenly, they’re all just premises in an argument. Who wants to read that?

I mean, plenty. Even people like me who struggle multiple times to get through it.

Yes! Because there’s something more here than a thesis dressed up in costumes. The ideological thing gets it backwards. Knausgaard says, “If this novel is drawn toward anything it is to the place where ideas and abstractions dissolve into life.” There’s simply too much life here to boil it down to a battle of ideas, or faiths, or philosophies, or what have you. You’re killing the book when you do that.

I didn’t find that killed the book at all.

Because you didn’t understand what was happening when you read it.

When you’re in the story, it has an energy that comes directly from the sheer life of it all, the characters, their animosities, their fears, their doubts, all the stuff that humans feel and deal with. You’re reading yourself in that; the characters hijack your cognitive and emotional faculties and put them to their ends. But the minute you step out from that immersion and try to dissect it with this ideological argle-bargle, you sour the magic.

That’s what I mean by saying you’re reducing the characters to templates. They’re nothing of the sort! They’re people. And they’re recognizably like us in a thousand ways.

I’m not conceding an inch, but what’s good about your approach is that it does allow the multivocality of the story to mean something. One feature of the story is the insane number of perspectives—most of which clash. I’ve seen many people describe the novel as polyphonic or even cacophonous. All these voices competing to be heard.

Knausgaard says that.

I think everyone says that. Wilson, who I quoted earlier, she says that too. She also says the story “unfurls at the mad and authentic pace of human emotion.”

That’s how it captures some of the sorcery of Crime and Punishment.

But here we disagree again. The Brothers Karamazov does that at, like, ten times the scale and intensity. It’s not just a battle of ideologies—and I still reject that term—it’s a battle of conflicting wills and emotions. I also have to push back at your template characterization. The characters aren’t caricatures; they’re fully realized.

But that’s precisely why it doesn’t do to reduce them to ideas; they’re not! If they were, then Dostoevsky wouldn’t care for them all the way he does. Alyosha would simply emerge as the winner of the struggle, but he doesn’t. Everyone’s perspective is challenged, and everyone’s position is treated as if it’s legitimate on its own terms—even Fyodor’s terrible way of living. Very little is actually resolved in the story, right? You’d have to admit that.

True. But that doesn’t mean that Dostoevsky wasn’t trying to say something through these fully realized characters.

Maybe. But that’s the only reason you’d read a thousand pages about them—the fact that they suffer and strive like us: because they are us. Lean too far your direction and you suck the life out of what Dostoevsky was trying to do.

But lean too far your direction and you completely miss what he was trying to do.

One thing I like about your approach is that by highlighting the multivocality of it—all those competing perspectives crammed into the skulls of incredibly relatable characters—it brings the relevance of novel into the present day. The limitation of my view is that it risks ossifying the interpretation into something that feels of its time. But the book is timeless precisely because it speaks to the present moment with all our competing truth claims and arguments about which way is up.

We’re living in Dostoevsky’s world, or at least this novelization of it.

Yes. On that we can agree.

Which our therapist will probably appreciate.

I was going to say the same thing.

I’m reading twelve big-ass classic novels this year, but I’m throwing in some bonuses! Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was one of my supplementals. Here’s the full schedule for 2026. I’m reading Dickens’s David Copperfield right now.

• January: John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• February: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

• March: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• April: Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

• May: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

• June: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

• July: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

• August: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

• September: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

• October: Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

• November: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

• December: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

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And check out my new book, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future—one of Big Think’s favorite books for 2025.👇

See also John Stamp’s guest review of Michael R. Katz’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov.👇

Since this April marks the thirtieth anniversary of National Poetry Month, I thought it’d be good to explore why—and what we’re missing.

Weinersmith notes that a few generations ago people would regularly pepper their correspondence with verse, lines picked up here and there and then shared on the assumption recipients would appreciate the poem as much as the sender. “This used to be part of our culture,” says Weinersmith. “And somehow it got murdered, and I don’t know why.”

There’s evidence poetry has experienced a bit of a revival in the last decade, though the number of readers are still low. Only 12 percent of U.S. adults have read a book of verse in the last year; in 1992, that number was 17 percent. As Roberts notes, poetry doesn’t come easy for most people. “Poetry often, not always, but often requires work,” he says. “And work is a bit of out . . . fashion.”

¶ Lyrical labor. It’s not that poetry’s hard, exactly. The required labor mostly involves slowing down. We’re used to scanning articles online, chasing our eyeballs down listicles, and hoovering up information. But poetry doesn’t reward rapidity. It invites lingering, savoring, sometimes wrestling, and usually rereading many times over.

Poetry’s very shape and sound cause friction for the reader or listener. Line breaks interrupt rapid decoding because they force us to recognize the author’s intended emphases and rhythms. Prose permits rapid scanning where the reader sets the pace. Poetry interrupts. It also serves up words whose meanings might appear obvious but which hide layers of nuance only accessible to those willing to turn them over several times.

If the pace and pressures of life feel unsustainable, poetry offers a temporary detour from the race. As Roberts suggests, you might have to work a bit for it. But when I read a book like ’s debut collection, Call Out Coyote, I find it well worth the trouble. Same with the rest of the Weinersmith episode; you can find the video below. And Bea Wolf sounds like a riot.

¶ Free verse. Phillis Wheatley was enslaved at the time her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. A brilliant and precocious child, she first published her work in a local paper when she was just thirteen years old. By 1773 she’d amassed quite a collection of verse, and the publication—the first book of poetry by an African American—garnered her international fame and led to her manumission in 1774.

I was excited to share Wheatley’s story in my new book, The Idea Machine; she plays a key role in one of my later chapters. She’s also still with us in surprising ways. Despite dying almost 250 years ago, Wheatley made news just a few years back when an Albany professor identified a hitherto unknown poem by her, tucked away in a Quaker commonplace book.

¶ Words to rile and console. “When poetry is a backwater it means times are O.K.,” says poet Jane Hirshfield. “When times are dire, that’s exactly when poetry is needed.” Hirshfield is speaking of society-wide moments of trouble. And poetry can certainly serve a protest function, as shows in her history of black sonnet writing. But poetry works when times are individually demanding as well.

Poet David Whyte explains why in a conversation with Psychology Today:

Poetry’s invitation is to bring the qualities we feel inside into conversation with what is occurring in the outside world. When those two come together, we experience it as beauty. There is always something beautiful about the truth in poetry, even when it’s difficult and frightening. Even in the asymmetry—when the world outside is beautiful, and, yet, we feel as if we’re dying inside. A poem extends the invitation to make the correspondence between inner and outer in that asymmetry. The poetic art is about living at the frontier between things.

You can’t rush that process, and it’s that process that can bring consolation amid tumult.

¶ A verse for adversity. “Can reading poems relieve the physiological symptoms of stress and anxiety?” asks science writer Marissa Grunes. Yes, as a matter of fact. “A series of studies have shown that reading rhythmic poetry can increase both your resting [heart rate variability] and cardio-respiratory synchronization,” both of which are correlated with “mental health, well-being, and even long-term resilience to stressors and trauma.”

So, if you’re feeling stressed, try dipping into a poem or two. Also, check out this video.

¶ An inheritance. I possess a few books of poetry once owned by my Grandpa Olson, including a collection of T.S. Eliot’s verse. He received the book as a Christmas gift in 1944, several years before my mother was born. Appropriately, a small black-and-white photo of a hippopotamus marks the poem, “The Hippopotamus.” There’s no date on the photo.

I received this one shortly after he passed away and his library was dispersed. I received his copy of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad at the same time.

Then there’s this collection of Thomas Wolfe poetry, A Stone, a Leaf, a Door. My grandpa loved Wolfe’s books. He kept this one beside his typewriter, according to my Aunt Chris. Grandpa included two stanzas from Wolfe in my grandmother’s funeral service, and I think the lines were from this volume, though I’ve long since lost the program to check.

But wait, you say: Wolfe wrote novels, not poetry. True enough. A Stone, a Leaf, and a Door was published posthumously in 1945 (Wolfe died in 1938) and features passages from three posthumously published novels rendered in verse: The Web and the Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond. Many thanks to my mom and aunt for conspiring to get me this precious volume.

¶ If memory serves. My grandpa could quote line after line of poetry for hours on end. I don’t know where he kept it all or how those neurons followed the crumb trail back to his reading, but his memory was phenomenal. And he’d do it spontaneously—as context prompted.

Grandpa owned seven acres in Fair Oaks, California, with several orchards, gardens, and patches of this or that growing here and there. As we’d work among the trees or digging up potatoes, something might trigger a recital: a bee, a butterfly, a shovel, almost didn’t matter. He had a poem for almost anything.

In his conversation with Russ Roberts, Zach Weinersmith recommends memorization:

I think is extremely valuable. . . . In order to memorize, you have to make sense of it. . . . It’s very hard to remember something that's just gibberish. It would be very hard to remember a 100 lines of nonsense. But, like, 100 lines of the Iliad is quite doable. . . . When you commit it to memory, it’s like putting a little room in your personality.

But isn’t memorizing poetry hard? Not according ot Weinersmith. “It’s very easy to memorize a lot of verses,” he says. “You’ll surprise yourself. If you start trying to memorize something and just add a line a day, you would think would top out somewhere. And, it just becomes very natural. It’s part of your working knowledge.”

¶ Along the same lines. offers six practical tips for memorization, and if you can find the videos of him reciting from memory—something does as well—it’s worth it.

¶ Smoking Dante. I started this post with a podcast and will end it with another, this one a moment from Robert Harrison’s wonderful show Entitled Opinions. Back in 2006 (incidentally, the same year EconTalk started), Harrison interviewed Seth Lerer on the history of the book—an early prod in my own interest in the subject and which eventually helped birth The Idea Machine.

While talking about the orality and later materiality of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics, Harrison spun out a delightful tangent about their mutual friend and colleague Ian Watt:

He, during the Second World War, was imprisoned for a very long time, and the prisoners in their cells, they had tobacco, but they didn’t have paper. And they had an edition of the Divine Comedy in very rarefied paper. But they were all literate and lovers of literature. So what they would do is each of them would memorize a canto by heart, and then they would rip off the pages and roll their tobacco in them. So when you asked Ian Watt, ”So, Ian, you know Dante pretty well?” he says, “Know him? I’ve smoked him.”

¶ Fakeout—for the children. I lied when I said I was wrapping up. I just recalled a wonderful event hosted at the American Enterprise Institute, organized by in 2005, and packed with luminaries like Christopher Hitchens and (’s prolifically poetical brother). Ostensibly, these and others gathered to discuss and read children’s poetry, but there’s more to it, and it’s a delight from beginning to end.

It also occurs to me that the public’s backsliding on poetry is really just a subset in the broader crisis in reading. And we know the only solution for that starts with parents reading to their kids. Thankfully, the panel offers a pocketful to try on for you and yours.

¶ Favorite poems or poets? I’d love to hear if you have any favorite poems or poets. Please share those in the comments.

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And see also my book about books, The Idea Machine. You’ll see why poet Phillis Wheatley stands out as an essential figure in the American story👇

Joyful Noise

Some words are just goofy. Maybe they’re packed with plosives that give them pops in the mouth and propulsion on the tongue. Some, like hullabaloo, sport long “oo” sounds and echoing consonants, which are inherently comical; no one utters fopdoodle with their dignity intact.

Some, like higgledy-piggledy, are playful and possess, like discombobulate, amusing rhythms and resonances. While some point to ideas and things as absurd as they sound, others take their comedy from a combination of sound and meaning. Callipygian sounds funny on its own but also means “nice butt”; tell that to an eighth-grade boy and watch his vocabulary improve overnight.

English is a circus if you know where to look for the red-striped tents and words on stilts. Bamboozle? Come on, it’s pure clownery. After recently reading a tweet with bamboozled hanging from the high wire atop such a list, I thought back to my glorious roster and had a stroke of inspiration: An LLM would be great at packing a Volkswagen with all those guys in funny face paint.

Recompiling the List

So, I fed Claude several examples of what I was looking for, and back it came with about 50 words. Gimme more, I said. And it did. More! I said. I ended up with around 200. I dragged that pile to ChatGPT, repeated the process, and nudged the total closer to 300.

Bonus? These are mostly words neither Claude nor Chat would ever use on their own. LLMs are too serious to use words that sound as if they’re dangling from the tip of Dr. Seuss’s pen ready to belly flop onto the page, and there’s something impishly jocose about having LLMs build a list of words they’d rarely ever employ.

Of course, three hundred items is too many for a newsletter. I whittled down the full list to what I considered the choicest examples. Some are funny for what they mean, but all are delightful or preposterous for how they sound and even look. I suppose some might not strike your ears and eyes as amusing as I find them; I apologize in advance for your lack of humor.

Herewith, 109 terms you can use to enliven your prose and, who knows, maybe even your entire life.

The List!

1. Absquatulate. To leave abruptly, sometimes with the silverware.

2. Argle-bargle. Copious, meaningless talk; what passes for programming on Fox News and MSNBC.

3. Bafflegab. Deliberately confusing jargon; the sound of a poststructural theorist talking.

4. Balderdash. Senseless talk, utter nonsense; Howard Lutnick explaining economics.

5. Ballyhoo. Extravagant publicity or fuss; whatever Kylie Jenner is up to now.

6. Bamboozled. Tricked or cheated; having voted.

7. Bloviate. To speak pompously at length; the standard mode of American political discourse.

8. Blunderbuss. A trombone with bullets.

9. Boondoggle. A wasteful or pointless project, often of bureaucratic origin. We’re only in the B’s, and I’ve already crossed a line with politics, haven’t I?

10. Borborygmus. The rumbling sound of intestinal gas. Somehow a real medical term.

11. Bumbershoot. An umbrella, naturally.

12. Bumbledom. Petty, fussy officialdom. Politics again.

13. Bumfuzzle. To confuse or perplex; what a life-insurance salesman does to you on the way to securing your signature.

14. Bumptious. Obnoxiously self-assertive and oblivious to others. A word that even sounds like it’s elbowing you in the ribs.

15. Bupkis. The premise of Seinfeld: absolutely nothing.

16. Caboodle. An entire lot of something, as in “the whole kit and …”

17. Callipygian. Possessing well-shaped buttocks. Try working it into date night.

18. Canoodle. To kiss and cuddle with amorous intent. Try that too.

19. Cattywampus. Crooked, askew, not quite right; most furniture assembled at home.

20. Clamjamfry. A rabble, a mob; originally Scottish, obviously.

21. Cockalorum. A self-important little man. Regrettably back to politics.

22. Cockamamie. Ridiculous or implausible; an adjective curiously absent from the U.S. federal budget.

23. Codswallop. Nonsense. Howard Lutnick strikes again.

24. Collywobbles. Stomach pain, queasiness; the feeling of reading the abovementioned federal budget.

25. Dingus. A thing whose name one can’t recall or doesn’t know; a serviceable name for pretty much anything, including some people, after 2 a.m.

26. Discombobulated. Confused and disconcerted. Fun to say, less fun to be.

27. Doodad. A dingus.

28. Doodlesack. A bagpipe, of course.

29. Doohickey. A doodad.

30. Doozy. Something outstanding or surprising: “Careful, that last step is a …”

31. Fizzle. To fail or die after a promising start, like all the novels I’ve tried writing.

32. Flabbergasted. Utterly astonished; economists listening to Howard Lutnick.

33. Flapdoodle. Nonsensical talk. You still here, Howard?

34. Flummery. Empty flattery; the rhetorical mode employed by tech journalists interviewing Sam Altman.

35. Flummox. To bewilder or confound; what Sam Altman does when answering journalists; alternatively, what IKEA instructions do after four beers.

36. Folderol. Trivial fuss about nothing; 90 percent of your email inbox.

37. Footle. To engage in the subspecies of fruitless activity popular across corporate America.

38. Fopdoodle. A fool. Note to self: enough with the Lutnick jokes.

39. Fustilugs. A ponderous, clumsy person; me, the night before Christmas and birthdays, assembling the children’s toys.

40. Gallimaufry. A confusing medley of doohickeys.

41. Gardyloo. A warning hollered before emptying slop from a window, rendered less useful after modern sanitation but awaiting revival to introduce tweet threads.

42. Gazump. To renege on a deal when new buyer offers more money. Legal in Australia, which—no connection, I’m told—was originally colonized by criminals.

43. Gizmo. A doohickey; a single item in a gallimaufry.

44. Glockenspiel. A percussion instrument with tuned metal bars, surprisingly underutilized in heavy metal music.

45. Gobbledygook. Pompous, unintelligible jargon; what passes between a poststructural theorist and Howard Lutnick (mea culpa) in a conversation.

46. Gongoozler. A person who idly gawks at canal boats. Possibly, more diverting than it sounds.

47. Haberdashery. A shop retailing men’s accessories, such as hats rarely worn at baseball games.

48. Higgledy-piggledy. In a confused, disordered jumble. Note to self: see the earlier reminder about Lutnick jokes.

49. Hobbledehoy. An awkward, gangly youth; me, at fourteen.

50. Hodgepodge. A confused mixture or jumble; the omnibus spending bill.

51. Hootenanny. An informal gathering in which folk music plays a prime role; how all business meetings would end if we were lucky.

52. Hornswoggle. To bamboozle. One of America’s greatest gifts to world English.

53. Hullabaloo. A great commotion or fuss; the state of my family getting ready for church every blessed Sunday morning.

54. Jalopy. My first car.

55. Jiggery-pokery. Deceitful trickery; what the used-car salesman resorts to when you’re ready to walk off the lot.

56. Katzenjammer. A hangover, a discordant clamor; scene at the local sports bar when your team loses, again.

57. Kerflooey. To go haywire; to break down suddenly; a state into which my jalopy sometimes flew.

58. Kerfuffle. A fuss or commotion; an event that often results in jail, a breakup, or a meeting with HR.

59. Kerplunk. With a heavy splashing or thudding sound; your hopes after jail, a breakup, or that meeting with HR.

60. Kibitzer. A spectator who offers unsolicited advice; your Uncle Frank.

61. Knickerbocker. Baggy breeches gathered at the knee.

62. Kumquat. A tiny, tart citrus fruit eaten whole. As fun to say as to eat.

63. Logorrhea. Excessive, uncontrollable talkativeness; the standard mode of communication on television talk shows and fandom podcasts.

64. Mugwump. A person who (prudently) stays aloof from party politics.

65. Mulligrubs. A state of depression or low spirits often experienced after not following the mugwump’s lead.

66. Nincompoop. A stupid or foolish person; a voter.

67. Ninnyhammer. A simpleton; also a voter.

68. Oojiboo. A gizmo.

69. Palaver. Prolonged, idle discussion. Yes, politics again.

70. Pandiculation. Stretching and yawning simultaneously. Odds are good you’re doing it right now.

71. Panjandrum. A pompous, self-important person of authority; synonym for Stephen Miller.

72. Pantaloons. Baggy trousers. An article of clothing I wish Stephen Miller would publicly don; it would improve the whole vibe.

73. Pettifogger. A petty, unscrupulous lawyer; a quibbler, but I repeat myself.

74. Piccalilli. A pungent relish of chopped pickled vegetables, sometimes served at hootenannies.

75. Piffle. Nonsense.

76. Poodlefaker. A man who cultivates feminine society for personal advancement.

77. Popinjay. A conceited, vain person; synonym for Andrew Tate.

78. Poppycock. Utter nonsense; Andrew Tate’s X feed.

79. Pumpernickel. A dense, dark German rye bread, good with piccalilli.

80. Quagmire. A boggy area of soft ground; a complex predicament; synonym for Iran.

81. Rattletrap. An automobile held together by zip ties and prayer; a jalopy.

82. Rigmarole. A lengthy, complicated, and tiresome procedure, such as filling out monthly expense reports.

83. Rinky-dink. Old-fashioned, small-time, or cheaply made—the parts from which a rattletrap is constructed.

84. Rumpus. Technically speaking, a ruckus.

85. Scuttlebutt. Top-shelf gossip.

86. Shemozzle. A muddle or chaotic situation; also Iran.

87. Shenanigans. Mischievous or deceitful tricks. Will never escape politics, will we?

88. Shindig. A hootenanny in which the music might be incidental but at which piccalilli might nonetheless be served.

89. Skedaddle. To absquatulate.

90. Smithereens. Tiny fragments or pieces; what politics blows my hopes for humanity to, if I dwell on it too much.

91. Snafu. A chaotic mess, military acronym for “Systems Normal, All F—ed Up”; the House appropriations process.

92. Snickerdoodle. An unserious cinnamon-sugar cookie.

93. Snickersnee. A large knife, also a knife fight. Has a word ever sounded less like the thing it is?

94. Snollygoster. A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician. Note: I didn’t even intend to do that; it’s just what it means.

95. Sozzled. Drunk off your ass.

96. Spelunker. A person who explores such dark caves and caverns as the U.S. federal code.

97. Spondulicks. Money, cash; something Jerry Maguire would like to see.

98. Squeegee. A rubber-bladed oojiboo for wiping smooth surfaces.

99. Tatterdemalion. A person dressed in ragged clothing, commonly observed in Beverly Hills.

100. Thingamabob. An oojiboo.

101. Thingamajig. A thingamabob.

102. Throttlebottom. An ineffectual, incompetent officeholder. From a 1931 musical but, sadly, still applicable.

103. Troglodyte. A cave dweller; ergo, someone encountered while spelunking; a person regarded as deliberately ignorant (must not invoke the name of Howard Lut—).

104. Twaddle. Trivial, foolish speech or writing; more from the producers at Fox News and MSNBC.

105. Ukulele. A small, four-stringed Hawaiian guitar, currently underrated at hootenannies.

106. Waffle. To speak or write vaguely and indecisively, usually reversing yourself from one utterance to the next; the mode of speech favored by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

107. Whatchamacallit. A thingamajig.

108. Widget. A small gadget or device, though it could be a dingus, doodad, doohickey, gizmo, oojiboo, thingamabob, thingamajig, or whatchamacallit, depending on need or application.

109. Zugzwang. A chess position where any move worsens your situation; roughly the position of American voters of either party.

Send in the Clowns!

Perhaps this entire list is frivolous. Great! Send in the clowns. Frivolity has its uses, especially in a world saturated in godawful seriousness. Words should do more than shuttle ideas from one dreary point to another; they should also surprise and delight us, maybe jounce around the mouth and mind. Language is a tool, of course, but it’s also a toy box. And it’s well stocked if you’re an English speaker.

So, please, make like Abbie Hoffman and steal this list. Better yet, add to it. Share your most comical words in the comments below. These 109 only scratch the surface.

Leave a comment

Whatever you do, please try slipping these marvelous mouthfuls into your conversation and writing. It’s a do-unto-others thing; imagine how much better your day will go after receiving an email sprinkled with snafu, ninnyhammer, and argle-bargle.

You know you want to contribute to the circus! Label the next bureaucratic fiasco a boondoggle, the next public uproar a hullabaloo, the next talking-head show bloviator a fopdoodle. You’ll be rendering the entire species a service we can never fully repay.

And if you work for Anthropic, or OpenAI, or wherever, it’s time to up your training game.

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Her debut novel, The Unmapping, released in 2025. The premise: New York City’s buildings silently switch locations overnight—and then it happens again the next night, and the next, and the next. How do people manage amid the chaos?

Robbins is hard at work on a new novel now. Along with her long-form writing, she’s written for Barcelona Review, Chicago Review of Books, Gulf Coast Journal, and other outlets, including The Creative Independent (where Robbins recently interviewed me).

In this exchange, we cover the challenge of noticing where you live, the case for letting art manipulate you, and why a novelist needs a body.

In your novel The Unmapping New York buildings silently switch places overnight. You go to bed with one version of the city and find it’s totally rearranged itself by morning. Where did that premise come from?

I was living in DC at the time and would go on the same hourlong walk home every day after work if weather allowed. One day, halfway through my walk, I realized I had no memory of the past thirty minutes. If everything had changed during that time, would I even realize?

We take so much of our surroundings for granted, without really looking. Even now, I’ve lived in my house for more than two years and I can’t tell you what the houses across the street look like unless I get up and go to the window. When you treat a place as brand-new, you pay attention to every detail. But eventually you start to take things for granted. So I wanted to write a story about getting lost where you live.

How did you sustain it?

Equal parts logic and fantasy. I asked myself dozens of logistical questions: What would happen to the electricity system, the sewage pipes? What about trees? What about basements? How do zoning codes come into play? Sometimes I created answers based on the story’s needs, other times the story morphed around it, still other times I let those questions lie (like with zoning codes, for example—perhaps some lawyers can argue about that later).

Then this one vivid idea became a receptacle for a ton of other ideas. It started with one character, Esme, looking for her lost fiancé. It became so much more. Suddenly there were all these bigger questions about chaos in the world and how we deal with that, both societally and individually.

While writing this, I was thinking a lot about climate change (which I work on for my day job), but Covid happened while I was drafting, and that informed the writing too. At the end of the day, though, the characters themselves mattered more than the set pieces, and their arcs drove the story.

You’ve said you take George Saunders’s advice and try following the energy in a piece of writing. When you’ve got a strong top-down idea and then all the bottom-up feedback as the story develops, how do you balance the two? What’s the interplay between those two in practice?

I do like to have a strong vision of the story before I write it, and I love to outline, but I’m always completely open to changes as I go. Sometimes the writing will veer away from the outline and I’ll readjust accordingly. Sometimes when I find myself avoiding a key scene, it’s just because I’m not ready to write it yet; I need to do more reading or research first. A lot of change and discovery happens in the first and second drafts.

By the third draft, I have a stronger idea of the overarching story and I sometimes need to tell the sentence-level writing to stay in line. Without that discipline, I can find myself writing three pages about rabid foxes giving birth that are completely irrelevant to the overarching story. (This is a true anecdote.)

You’re currently at work on a new novel. Can you describe your process? Does it differ from how you wrote The Unmapping?

My new novel is based on a short story I wrote many years ago, inspired by a Russian father-son duo aiming to rewild Siberia with Ice Age-era mammals. I later rewrote it into a novella as part of a novella collection, but it didn’t go anywhere because no one wants to publish a novella collection (unless you’re already mind-bogglingly famous, like Stephen King or Gabriel García Márquez).

My agent encouraged me to turn one of the novellas into a novel, an idea I pushed back on at first because I adore the novella form, but when I reread my tundra story, I fell back in love with it and thought there were enough burgeoning ideas in it that I could really expand it out.

This is probably the slowest I’ve written a novel because a ton of research is going into it on ecology, linguistics, evolution, and so on. But otherwise, the process is pretty similar. I have my outline, I actually have two complete versions of the story, and now I’m rediscovering how the story will actually shape out in this new form.

Intellectual curiosity seems to undergird your work. You read history, philosophy, physics, and you have a background in ecology and statistics. How does all of that end up in your fiction?

All fiction is a metaphor, but there needs to be something on the other side. My favorite novels span history, philosophy, physics, ecology, and so on. I want to write a great novel. Therefore, I must read about history, philosophy, physics, ecology, and so on. Great novels aren’t just about characters completing tasks, they reach for something greater, something universal about the world.

But also, I find it really fun to read about these things. Channeling them into my fiction just gives me an excuse to read about topics I already find interesting.

What books made you want to be a writer—not the ones you admire most now, but the ones that triggered something in you when you first read them?

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. Tenth of December by George Saunders. Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link. It’s interesting that they’re all short-story collections, given that now I prefer reading and writing novels. But these books in particular inspired me when I was in the in-between state of wanting to be a “real” fiction writer but not sure if I was ready to commit yet. At that time, only short stories felt accessible and manageable to me.

Has MFA culture blunted what novelists can do in their work?

I wouldn’t know since I haven’t been! I think the biggest risk of MFAs is probably ending up with a cohort that doesn’t match your wavelength. You’re stuck with them for two or three years and they define the MFA experience with the feedback they provide on your work. This can be a little dangerous. The writing starts to be geared towards what the group would like, not necessarily aligned with excellence.

This danger exists in any literary scene, however, like in edgy Brooklyn readings where the hot thing is to write poems about having sex with your dad (this is another true anecdote). The difference is that it’s harder to extricate yourself from your MFA cohort once you’re in. But if you’re getting paid to read and write and talk about writing for two to three years, there’s obviously freedom there, too. Everyone I know who attended an MFA loved their experience. (Or at least claimed they did.)

Socrates complained that books say what they say and nothing more, but you’ve argued that books need the equivalent of DVD extras: director’s commentaries, annotated chapters, behind-the-scenes materials. Are we bringing back appendices? What’s the argument for “more book beyond the book”?

I don’t watch too many movies these days, but I have fond memories of finishing a film, then turning straight to the bonus features so I could live in that world a little longer. When I finish a book I love, I feel the same way: I’m not quite ready to let go. I want to understand it more, to unlock its secrets. So I often look for reviews and author interviews and read whatever I can find. But it’s not the same when you’re reading something meant as promotional material versus commentary provided to someone who’s already finished the book. (Of course, the famous books that have been anointed as classics have dozens and dozens of commentaries, so much that it gets overwhelming, but I’m talking about the average contemporary novel.)

It’s a bit of a selfish desire and a way to push back against my own tendency to read quickly and want to move on to the next book right away. But I also do believe that if books in general had more “fun stuff” attached to them, we’d see more people get excited about reading.

(Some people already do this! Vanya Bagaev has been posting chapter-by-chapter annotations to his new book Tulubaikaporia. I hope to see more of it.)

Your Substack essays often take a distinctive shape. You start with something concrete, and the essay spirals outward into larger questions about meaning, logic, what’s real. Is that how your mind naturally works, or is it something you’ve learned to do on the page?

If there has been any consistency to my Substack over the years, it is this shape. It comes from the intention behind the newsletter, why it’s called “noticements,” or moments worth noticing. I started it in the height of Covid as a way to remind myself that life stuck at home could still be interesting, that every small thing could lead you somewhere else. It’s kind of trite: everything is connected! But it’s true and has guided my writing and sparked ideas and helped me find meaning in the everyday.

I could write impersonal essays about literature and music and science, and I have for other publications. If something goes on my own Substack, though, it has to be more personal and connected to something happening in my life. That’s really all that distinguishes it from anything else. It has me in it. I don’t think my life is particularly special, but I think it’s interesting, because every life is interesting.

So I’m bringing together all of my interests into the narrative of living because all of my interests do impact my way of living. People often make this argument about books and art: they can and should change you. It’s one thing to say this, another to show it. It’s why many people read fiction over nonfiction: they are learning about the world through the lens of one particular life. One life is so much bigger than itself.

My most-read post so far takes on this shape. It starts with the mole in my belly button and expands to grief, Russian literature, and some wild ideas about time. It’s hard to categorize and would be impossible to publish anywhere else.

You wrote an essay connecting Impressionism to AI, arguing that what makes human art matter isn’t the product but the relationship between creator and audience. But in your “Slow News Day” essay, you wrote that we may not be constructing reality so much as being constructed by it—by algorithms, by feedback loops. If that’s true for readers, does the relationship you’re describing still exist? Can it?

Art can be manipulative, but I don’t think that’s always a bad thing. The artist puts themselves and their perspective into a piece of work in hopes that whoever engages with it will have an experience that changes them. The consumer (although I hate that word) gets to choose what to consume (blech) and how to respond. They can be intentional in doing so. They can ask themselves, before they read or watch something: “I’m going to be manipulated by this. Do I want that?”

I have a Reddit account and tried to create an intentional homepage, with subreddits exclusively about sourdough, cello, gardening, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. And yet because it is Reddit, popular posts from other subreddits make their way onto my home page, so I click on one conspiracy theory about Taylor and Travis, and suddenly that’s my whole feed. Lesson learned: Reddit is not the best place to edify oneself.

I still believe we’re constantly being constructed by our surroundings, but we have some say in what those surroundings are. It can be really hard to tell the difference. It’s like in David Foster Wallace’s classic “This Is Water” speech. It’s hard to see what really surrounds you. Sometimes it requires breaking your own patterns and stepping out of your comfort zone.

Hobbies. You’ve got several: you play cello, you run daily, you garden—wrangling rabbits, studying soil science, and all the rest. Do these practices feed your writing? How?

Just like my thoughts on science and history, it’s all connected and everything is a metaphor for something else. There’s music to writing fiction, a story in the music, an art to gardening, a fruitfulness and growth to making art. (And sometimes weeds you need to cut, nutrients and water, and so on.) These hobbies also make me feel like I’m building something tangible in my day-to-day life: with cello, I can see myself slowly improve; with gardening, I’m creating a miniature ecosystem.

But these hobbies in particular also require me to step away from the computer and clear my head and remember I have a body, am a body, and my body interacts with the real world, not just brains in a vat. I love having a body.

You’ve interviewed several authors—Abraham Verghese, John Pistelli, Caoilinn Hughes, and many others. You even recently interviewed me! Has interviewing people about their work affected how you think about yours?

I’m sure it all affects me in some way, but the main reason I interview authors is because it’s so much fun. It’s like I’m putting together my own “DVD extras,” asking questions that weren’t necessarily answered in the book. Often a book will connect to something else I’m thinking through, like, recently, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on how language shapes one’s perception of reality, so I’ll ask about that.

Sometimes authors will basically ignore the question and say what they want to say about their book, and that’s fine too. (When I’m on the other side of the equation in live conversations, I often do the opposite, sometimes to my own detriment, focusing too intensely on the specific question and forgetting what I wanted to actually say.)

Either way, I’m happy to help authors I like by bringing more attention to their work. And the act of interviewing is its own fun art form. I usually put together way too many questions, then ignore almost all of them, instead following the conversation where it goes and asking what comes to mind based on the answers I receive.

Is there a question you’ve asked someone else that you wish someone would ask you?

I often ask people about their moms, but nobody asks me back. So my mom is doing great, thank you. She likes to learn new musical instruments. I’m guessing the tuba is next.

Final question. You can invite any three authors—living or dead—for a long meal. Neither time nor language is an obstacle. Who do you invite, and how does the conversation go?

Homer, Shakespeare, and Bud Smith.

With Homer and Shakespeare, I would solve two great centuries-old questions right away! Who are they really? What is their true identity? And are they one person or many? (If they are many, it still counts, right?)

Once that matter was solved, I would ask them about their mothers. Then I would probably get overwhelmed, but that’s okay, because Bud Smith would be there for backup. He’s hilarious and quick and equally interested in the classics. He’s an incredible writer, but also likes a good beer and a laugh, so would be able to keep up the conversation whenever I get shy. Dinner parties should be fun. I want to show them a nice time.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below and share it with your friends (or anyone else thinking about writing a novel).

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But Orwell saw something more sinister beneath the chumminess. Lewis was, he implied, a “reactionary,” and his apologetics amounted to “an outflanking movement in the big counter-attack against the Left.” It’s laughable, actually. But how and why Orwell misread Lewis is illustrative.

Orwell was a socialist who had watched fascism ravage Europe, and he was quick to see it wherever he looked—including in an Oxford don’s radio lectures on Christian faith and practice. Lewis, for his part, was a medievalist and convert who thought modernity had talked itself into a series of incoherent positions and needed, above all, to recover more fruitful ways of thinking. Each could see the other as part of the problem.

What neither could easily see, however, was how much they shared. They were both Englishmen of the mid-twentieth century (Lewis was actually born in Ulster, Ireland, but worked his entire life in England), both products of the same educational tradition, both writing for audiences shaped by the same wars. They stood on different sides of the room, but shared the same floor beneath their feet.

The things they took for granted—about institutions, the value of plain English prose, the importance of ordinary decency, how arguments ought to be conducted, not to mention all the cultural scaffolding that upheld their lives and work—overlapped far more than what they disputed. Theirs was, in a sense, a family quarrel, conducted across common ground neither man had any particular reason to examine.

The Athanasius Principle

To his credit, Lewis understood this problem even if he couldn’t fully escape it in practice. Can any of us? That same year—1944—he wrote his famous introduction to Athanasius of Alexandria’s On the Incarnation, and the core argument was about exactly this kind of blindness.

“Every age has its own outlook,” Lewis wrote. “It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” The trouble is that few experience these mistakes as mistakes, because everyone around them is making the same ones. The whole period shares “a great mass of common assumptions,” and these assumptions are invisible precisely because they’re universal.

Lewis’s proposed remedy was old books but not because old books are reliably correct. People in the past were, he said, just as prone to follies and fumbles as we are. Helpfully, however, they were prone to different mistakes. Their thinking was conditioned by different presuppositions, different contexts, different anxieties. Reading old books doesn’t automatically give you the right answers, but it can disrupt the wrong ones you didn’t know you had.

“Two heads are better than one,” said Lewis, “not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.” Lewis would probably hate the term, but he was arguing for a sort of epistemological crowdsourcing, and the crowd has to include the dead because only centuries of distance guarantee a sufficiently different perspective. Lewis admitted that future books would be helpful too; they’re just harder to find on interlibrary loan.

“All contemporary writers,” said Lewis, “share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.” He could have easily dropped Orwell’s name in there; he is, after all, an obvious case in point.

Orwell could see, or thought he could see, the reactionary premises behind Lewis’s talks; what he could not so easily see were the assumptions of his own moment—the wartime habit of reading moral and religious language through the lens of ideological conflict. But Lewis was no exception either, as he himself admits. Even those most opposed to the spirit of an age remain partly formed by it; it’s unavoidable.

Contemporary conservatives and progressives can, for instance, tangle over a hundred issues without recognizing they both share assumptions formed by liberal, individualist impulses inherited from their common western inheritance.

Catching Each Other’s Epidemics

Twenty years after his Athanasius introduction, Lewis hit the same challenge from a different angle in The Discarded Image, this time demonstrating how it played out across an entire civilization. As I recently detailed, The Discarded Image presents Lewis’s reconstruction of the medieval worldview, the whole mental model by which medieval people understood reality.

Two primary tributaries fed that model: Greco-Roman paganism and Christianity. The streams were distinct and sometimes bitterly opposed. But Lewis noticed something that complicated the usual story of conflict.

“In a prolonged war,” he said, “the troops on both sides may imitate one another’s methods and catch one another’s epidemics; they may even occasionally fraternise.” The pagans and the Christians fought, but “the influence of the one upon the other was very great.” Tying this back to the Athanasius Principle, Lewis goes further; the pagans and the Christians of late antiquity, he observes, “were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man.”

The medieval Christian and the medieval pagan stood upon the same floor, a floor built from shared cosmological premises, shared assumptions about hierarchy and order, shared habits of mind inherited from centuries of inhaling the same intellectual air. Their fights happened within a frame neither side had built and neither could fully see. And, importantly, that frame differed from that shared by both their predecessors and their heirs.

What Lewis says here about pagans and Christians offers us a way to re-read Orwell’s complaint. As contemporaries, they were more alike than they realized. Their dispute took place within a shared midcentury English frame neither man had built and neither could fully inspect. In that sense, they resembled the antagonists Lewis describes: genuine opponents who nevertheless breathed much of the same intellectual air.

The same is, of course, true in every era. Opponents in any serious dispute tend to share more presuppositions than they contest. They imitate each other’s methods; they catch each other’s epidemics; they fraternize. The fiercer the fight, the harder this is to recognize, because the emotional intensity of the disagreement obscures how much common intellectual and cultural ground makes the disagreement possible in the first place. You have to share the same floor to throw punches.

Lewis saw this across centuries of intellectual history. What makes his vision useful is that he also saw the remedy: Read outside your own period. Let “the clean sea breeze of the centuries” blow through your mind, as he said when introducing readers to On the Incarnation.

The trick is, as ever, awareness.

The Floor Beneath Our Fights

We have to inspect our own assumptions before we can challenge them. Orwell and Lewis each managed this easily with respect to other people’s assumptions—they were equally devastating in arguments—and sometimes with their own. We probably shouldn’t expect to do much better. But the floor always sits there, whether we look down or not.

Our political arguments, technological opinions, and moral frameworks all rest atop assumptions we share with the very people we’re arguing against. We can see a version of this playing out in (God help us) the endless woke/anti-woke debates. Both sides can be equally petty and vindictive, not realizing they’re behaving the same way. And, as Tom Holland argues in Dominion, many of the combatants are working from the same Christian cultural source code, even if they’re oblivious to it.

We can also see it in the arguments about AI, where both sides happily enjoy the varied fruits of automation and efficiency, rarely pausing to explore where they draw what line or what standard they apply when doing so, or why.

The truth is we can see it everywhere if we look, which is no surprise: The very ground we’re standing on to throw our punches is usually the part we don’t examine.

Postscript: With the Athanasius Principle in mind, Lewis invites us to go a little further down this track, and I’d love your help. What books from the past might be helpful in navigating the present? Given the nature of our various controversies, I like to think that Erasmus might be useful. Same with Montaigne and maybe Adam Smith. In my coming review of The Brothers Karamazov I’ll mention why I think Dostoevsky can help us too.

Who else? Please share your recommendations in the comments!

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Evidence for the rumors? AI “tells” in the book—artifacts signaling text generated by a large language model, such as ChatGPT or Claude. (Maybe like that em dash just now.) “Readers began flagging what they surmised was A.I. slop,” according to the New York Times,

slamming the book for its generic and confusing metaphors and repetitive phrasing.

“Really bad,” one reader wrote in a one star review. “Pretty sure this was A.I. generated.”

Ballard denies the claim but admits, as the Times reported, AI was used when an acquaintance edited an early, self-published version of the book. Yeah, no. Speaking as an editor, that doesn’t pass the sniff test.

In a traditional publishing arrangement, the publisher reserves the right to edit the book as it sees fit. The author gets plenty of input but rarely the final say on the edits; the publisher has to protect its investment, after all. But that wouldn’t hold for a self-published book.

We don’t know how the editorial process worked in this case, but if the editor’s pass left enough AI residue to deep-six the project, that would indicate (a) the editor overplayed their hand in altering the work and (b) the author didn’t object or correct their meddling. At best, that suggests this editor ought to field IT help-desk calls instead of abusing manuscripts and that Ballard has no sense of her own style. She didn’t object to the editor ruining her book?

¶ Garbage prose. As I was digesting the Ballard story, another landed on my plate. On X, Becky Tuch flagged a New York Times piece from last year with suspicious formulations. The article involves a child-custody battle and its aftermath on a fraught mother-son relationship. Here’s the bit Tuch quoted:

Not hate. Not anger. Just the flat finality of a heart too tired to keep trying.

That’s when I stopped fighting.

I didn’t give up. I shifted.

I stopped thinking love was something I had to prove with court documents and supervised visits and legal bills. I stopped chasing every possible way to make him see I had changed. I started focusing on actually changing.

I thought so too. I ran the full piece through the AI detection service Pangram—caveats below—and it came back as 58 percent AI generated with about a third of the text tagged as “high confidence” it was AI. That said, you don’t need an AI detector to wince when you read the excerpt; the surprising thing is that the Times editor didn’t wince.

It’s not like the offending material is subtle, and there’s plenty more of this in the piece. Picking up where Tuch’s excerpt leaves off, we have:

I stayed sober.

I stayed steady.

I stayed available.

I learned not to fill the silence with explanations or apologies. I stopped trying to fix things and started showing up in quiet, invisible ways. And over time, the texture of our contact began to shift.

We still had the occasional visit, the birthday phone call, the expected check-ins that had always felt slightly choreographed. But now, something else started to surface. Subtly. Slowly.

Tuch was quick to say, “I don’t want to falsely accuse writers of AI-use. But”—and who could disagree?—“this reads EXACTLY like AI slop.” I can appreciate her reticence to throw someone under the bus. I share it. What I share less of is the concern with whether she used AI in writing her piece, or Ballard in her book.

I personally don’t have any significant problems with that, though I get the ethical issues at play. I also get why people object to AI writing; nothing against that position. What does bother me, however, is the prose itself. I feel empathy for the writer and the plight she describes. I feel annoyance at how she chose to describe it. Shouldn’t I? It’s bad.

There might be a time and place for that sort of stuttering, staccato delivery with its single-phrase paragraphs and single-word sentences, hoping—vainly—to land every thought with gravity and earnestness, not to mention the faux poetry (fauxetry?) of phrases like “texture of our contact.” Since when does texture shift?

Maybe a few writers can pull it off, but everyone else is mimicking the style and producing garbage in the process, especially as it proliferates through low-threshold publications and social media. AI lets people create content faster than they can think of what they want to say or how they want to say it, and it shows.

I asked Claude what it “thought” about the passages in question. Even AI knows the writing stinks:

What you’re identifying is a specific degeneration of paratactic prose—that staccato, anaphoric, fragment-heavy style where every sentence gets its own paragraph, parallelism substitutes for development, and whitespace is doing all the emotional heavy lifting. . . . It’s pure pattern: anaphora, short declaratives, lexical repetition, abstract nouns (“silence,” “texture,” “shift”). . . . The style has become its own content, which is more or less the definition of kitsch.

Ouch. It’s also ubiquitous now.

¶ AI is everywhere! The writer Vauhini Vara expanded on Tuch’s tweet in the Atlantic, exploring how newspapers and magazines are increasingly publishing AI-generated or -inflected work. Vara points to a preprint edition of a paper looking at the prevalence of AI in the news.

The researchers, as they say in their abstract, analyzed 186,000 digital articles from 1,500 U.S. newspapers published last summer. “Using Pangram, a state-of-the-art AI detector,” say the authors, incidentally the same service I used above, “we discover that approximately 9% of newly-published articles are either partially or fully AI-generated.”

They also audited opinion pieces from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. They found the op-ed pages are “6.4 times more likely to contain AI-generated content than news articles from the same publications, with many AI-flagged op-eds authored by prominent public figures.”

Being more likely among public figures makes sense. Those same people often have teams that handle all or most of their writing: speeches, articles, blog posts, social media posts, whatever. Under pressure to produce, those teams might turn to AI now that it’s available. It’s like having an extra staff writer who doesn’t complain about the deadline or the workload.

Of course, AI can’t care about the product either. As with Ballard, no checking on the work, or no editorial sense to begin with?

¶ Or is it? At the same time we’re primed to look for AI wherever we turn, we have access to AI-detection tools that render this process as simple as cutting, pasting, and hitting a button. A report awaits in seconds. I used Pangram with the Times piece; the study cited above did too. There are many others. But are they accurate?

Studies, like this one, raise questions. After the Ballard story, social media erupted with people stumping the detectors. Reports flagged such work as the opening bits of Genesis, St. John’s Gospel, and chapter 5 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as AI generated. Could you even get a ChatGPT account in the first century A.D.? Must have been a very early model.

I’ve seen stats on AI in books, and the estimates are smaller than many might fear. That checks because, even with AI, producing a book that anyone would want to read requires an immense amount of patience and (at least a little) human intelligence. We should be wary of witch hunting, as Lewis said upon outing St. John. At minimum, I think it gets us focused on the wrong thing.

¶ Training data. The reason for these false flags? AI was, of course, trained on prose like St. John’s and Mary Shelley’s. Not to mention countless other writers who use rhetorical devices in their prose that AI slurped up and now regurgitates. AI doesn’t have a sense of style or the writerly chops to know how and when to use the various techniques available to it. This can be overridden with effective prompting on the front end and editing on the back, but AI’s native voice reads like someone still learning to write.

Humans whose sense of style is impaired by . . . simply not having any make the same mistakes. This is ’s gripe:

Of course no one at Hachette caught that it was AI-written—because AI writing is virtually indistinguishable from all the other MFA slop they like to push out.

For those of you who are outraged that Hachette published an AI-written novel over the many wonderful human submissions they receive, I have one message for you: this is what happens when you strip writing of its soul and put minimalist gimmicks on a pedestal, insisting on cutting long sentences and eliminating all digression from literature.

Whether you’re human or machine, if you don’t know how a screwdriver works, you might use the butt end to pound nails. This is a larger reason why, for me, style trumps provenance as the primary consideration.

As a long-time editor—going on three decades now—I’ve waded through gobs of slop created by genuine humans with fingernails, DNA, and everything. Can you blame the machines? They mostly learned it from us. Editors at Hachette and the Times are so used to reading it they evidently can’t tell if it’s human or AI.

¶ Hollis to the rescue! So far, I’ve encountered no one who gets the semantic and stylistic issues of AI prose more than , nor anyone so helpful in explaining the problems. Since last summer she’s published several essential pieces that explain why AI doesn’t write like humans do, including the stab-me-in-the-face “it’s not X, it’s Y” construction.2

Most recently, Hollis has covered a personal pet peeve: that LLMs—not to mention everybody on social media and New York Times editors, apparently—don’t get what paragraphs are for. If you’ve ever seen Murder by Death, you might remember Truman Capote’s Lionel Twain yelling from the head of a moose at Peter Sellers’s Sidney Wang about his broken English: “Say your goddamn pronouns!”

That’s how I feel about sentence-fragments passing for paragraphs. Do it more than a few times, and I’m ready to yell: Paragraphs are free! Available to everyone! Use them!

Humans have ways of formulating texts that AIs don’t. We’re semantic, they’re statistical. When we rely on AI to generate words, we’re leaving out what we, as humans, can uniquely do.

Personally, I don’t care that much when it comes to marketing copy or business reports, especially if a human has bothered to ensure it’s readable and makes sense to other humans. I’ve read plenty of AI-generated text that was perfectly serviceable for its intended use. And I know people who put a tremendous amount of effort into ensuring their AI output reads well. Some of it does.

But then there are those who want to write but can’t, or don’t have time, or are behind on their latest Apple TV series. They see what AI can do and think they’ve found the holy grail. And I suppose it might be if they don’t care about the quality of whatever dribbles out. They are, after all, usually the least equipped to judge whether the product sounds like something humans want to read. It likely isn’t. And, as points out, readers can tell.

Not just because of the standard tells, like em dashes (out of my cold, dead fingers!), x/y constructions, and beating the rule-of-threes to death—by the way, I just came dangerously close to committing all three offenses. It’s more than that. AI writing doesn’t sound human because it doesn’t use language the way humans do.

Go back to the complaint about Ballard’s writing, full of “generic and confusing metaphors and repetitive phrasing.” As Jeff says, “When I’m reading a piece of AI writing, I realize about halfway through: ‘Wait. Half of these sentences don’t need to exist.’” AI doesn’t know that. For all sorts of reasons, humans do. Or should.

¶ The human exclusive. I have more ideas for novels than a reasonable person should have. I’ve played with AI in developing concepts. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in that process, it’s that AI can’t do it very well, or I don’t know how to get decent outputs. But I don’t think it’s the latter.

Fundamentally, I don’t think AI can write literature; it doesn’t know what it is because it lacks the necessary training data: suffering, joy, frustration, boredom, angst, despair, exultation, and all the other stuff Dostoevsky throws around like he’s lived a hundred lives. And humans can read what writers like Dostoevsky produce and sense nuances of form and effect that AI can’t grasp.

If I ever write a novel, it’ll be because I finally figured out how to do it on my own. But the next question is, why would I want it to write for me in the first place?

¶ Writing as secondary. People have messages to share, information, ideas. And they don’t always have the time or knack to get it down on paper. Remember those “prominent public figures”? They’re only a boisterous eddy in that vast, teeming sea of humanity. LLMs can help. All these folks are using it already, and some do it really well. But in such cases, the writing itself is somewhat secondary to the purposes they have in mind.

I use AI in my work every day. I’m the chief content officer for Full Focus. I’ve used LLMs (usually Claude) to automate various parts of workflows. It helps me run NPS reports. I built an entire business plan for a product using ChatGPT’s deep research feature. It took me about a week; had I done it unaided, it would have taken me four times as long. I can give it access to spreadsheets and databases, and it’s far better at processing all of that than I am unassisted. With the right nudges, I find it’s also serviceable for synthesizing, copyediting, and proofing documents. Prompts matter, so mileage may vary.

But! And this is a mammoth but: I’m also a fan of the humanities. I love literature. I love writing. I read about 80 or 90 books every year. I read and write every day, have since I was a teenager. I don’t want AI doing my thinking and writing in that domain. It’s not secondary for me. I’ll use it—and do—to research, to challenge my understanding, to test ideas, to catch my typos when I remember to check.3 I want AI to handle all the drudgery of my work, especially since it does some of it better than I can, but I don’t want it to do something that gives me immense joy and satisfaction.

¶ The risk of deskilling—and something worse. Speaking of Full Focus, we have a couple of excellent podcasts. My wife and father-in-law host one, the Double Win Show. They recently interviewed Nicholas Carr and this question came up. A couple of his comments are worth sharing here.

On the dangers of offloading writing, after discussing some AI upsides:

There’s also a bad way to use it, which is simply to offload everything onto the machine. So, oh, I don’t need to read anymore. I can get AI to gimme a summary. I don’t need to write anymore. I can get AI to crank something out. And then the danger is . . . you stop practicing things that are actually important, communicating, forming your own thoughts, reading, making sense of what you read.

On drawing a personal line:

I’m a writer and one of the first things AI has been adopted for is doing your writing for you. And it’s quite good, you know, for a lot of students, I think they can pump out a paper with AI that’s better than they could do, frankly. And so it’s very, very enticing. But what I realized is, you know, this work, the work of writing is very important to me. And so I’m gonna draw a line there. . . . I’m not gonna ask AI to write stuff for me. Even if I get stuck as I do quite often and have to really work on the words and try to get them right, I’m not gonna bypass that struggle because I think ultimately, even though it takes more time, and it can be frustrating, when I get to the end of it, I produce something better, something that’s more my own and something that’s more satisfying to me.4

Deskilling represents a real problem, especially for those who haven’t quite built the skills in the first place (back to those students Carr mentioned). But the other worry concerns me more: losing the satisfaction of having written something worthy of personal pride—not to mention the sheer joy of doing it. Writing is one of my favorite things to do, not not do.

¶ Authors can do what they want, readers can too. For those who want to have a book with their name on it more than they want to write a book, AI is a perfectly capable tool, provided they’re up to the task of making it read like something humans would enjoy passing their eyes over. If they don’t care—or even know what it would mean to care—they can publish whatever they want as is.

Traditional publishers, who have business interests to protect, won’t want it. And such authors shouldn’t be surprised if readers don’t either.

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The trilogy consists of three novellas, City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986), usually published together in one volume. All three violate the rules, and the third throws you for a loop that—how do I even talk about it without giving away the whole game?

A Life in Shards

City of Glass begins with Daniel Quinn, a writer and recent widower, who’s lost both his young wife and son. Driven by a mix of numbness and submerged grief, he retreats into himself. He writes pulp detective novels to make rent under the pseudonym William Wilson—a play off an Edgar Allan Poe doppelgänger story that hints at things to come. Quinn lacks ambition, friends, a reason for living. He pushes on by little more than inertia, until a fateful late-night phone call.

The voice on the other end, strange and foreign sounding with an androgynous “mechanical whisper,” asks to speak with the detective Paul Auster. (An amusing and telling feature of the novel is how Auster writes a version of himself into the storyline.) Quinn tells the caller they have the wrong number. The same thing happens again the next night. Again, Quinn corrects the caller and hangs up. But the third time? Quinn decides to play along: “This is Auster speaking.” The desperate caller tells Quinn that someone is planning to kill him.

After writing God knows how many detective novels, and with nothing better to do, Quinn decides it can’t be that hard: He agrees to meet with the caller, a man named Peter Stillman, the next morning.

He visits Stillman’s apartment, meets his wife Virginia—toward whom he finds an immediate attraction—and then settles down for Stillman’s weird explanation of the threat he faces. Weird because the of the nature of the threat and weird because of Peter himself. His movements are strange, his speech even stranger. Nothing comes out normally, which turns out to be part of the story.

Peter’s mother died when he was a little child. “No mother, then,” he says. “Ha ha. Such is my laughter now, my belly burst of mumbo jumbo. Ha ha ha. Big father said: it makes no difference. To me. That is to say, to him. Big father of the big muscles and the boom, boom, boom. No questions now, please.”

If that makes little sense, imagine poor Quinn trying to understand as Peter rambles on: “Wimble click crumblechaw beloo. Clack clack bedrack. Numb noise, flacklemuch, chewmanna. Ya, ya, ya. Excuse me. I am the only one who understands these words.” What the heck has Quinn stumbled into? He tries keeping track of it all in a red notebook, purchased especially for the case.

Mystery Unsolved

It turns out Peter’s dad, Peter Stillman Sr., was a Columbia professor, obsessed with linguistics, though incapable of the real work of his obsession. But the death of his wife? That allowed him freedom to conduct a horrific experiment. He locked Peter in a room with no external stimuli to see how his language abilities would evolve independent of human interference. Shouldn’t he learn to speak the language of God himself?

A fire exposed the crime, and young Peter—twelve years old, practically feral, and unable to communicate much at all—was finally freed of his room. The senior Stillman was prosecuted and sentenced to thirteen years behind bars. And now he’s being released. Peter’s convinced he’ll come back and kill him. Peter and Virginia want Quinn to follow the father once he hits town and keep them apprised of his whereabouts.

Immediately, the case becomes intellectually interesting to Quinn: stories of children raised in similar deprivation, Stillman’s loony linguistic theories, and one detail haunting him from beyond the grave: Quinn’s deceased son was also named Peter.

As planned, he spots Stillman leaving the train station and tails him. But the old man shows no apparent interest in heading to Peter’s apartment to even say hello, let alone murder him. Quinn regularly checks in with Virginia to update her on his progress, but there’s little to report. No surprise, his fascination with her continues. In the meantime, Stillman just seems to aimlessly wander around the city. Might there be some message in his movements?

At last, Quinn decides to provoke something by engaging the old man—no admission of his interest—just to see what comes of it. And so begin several queer encounters in which the elderly felon unpacks his theories, forgetting who Quinn is between each visit. It’s clear Stillman has lost his marbles. At one point Quinn pretends to be Peter, which delights the old man, who finally seems to experience a moment of peace in what feels to him like a resolution, even a reconciliation.

And then he disappears. Without Quinn realizing it, Stillman moves out of his rooms and vanishes. Everyone goes on high alert, Peter, Virginia, Quinn. Now might be the moment the he decides to strike. Quinn figures the only solution is to go undercover as a homeless man outside Peter’s apartment so he can maintain 24/7 surveillance.

I won’t spoil what happens next, but when this bizarre assignment ends, nothing is the same for Quinn. Virginia stops taking his calls. In fact, the couple vacates their apartment. What does he have to show for all his work? He can’t find the man he’s tailing, and he can’t even find his clients!

Ghosted

As a novel, Ghosts is stranger still. Auster strips the basics of the detective story down to the studs. The only names in the tale are mostly last names, all colors: Brown, Green, Gray, and so on. White (the client) hires Blue (the detective) to surveil Black (the subject).

At first, Blue assumes it’s a marriage case, maybe catching someone in an infidelity. His only job is to report on Black’s activities and mail a written weekly report to White. He starts well enough, holing up in an apartment across the street and spying through the windows, dutifully noting all he sees. The trouble is that he sees practically nothing. Black reads and writes. He leaves to buys groceries. He returns to read and write.

Black’s behavior is so routine that Blue realizes he doesn’t even need to keep an eye on him to know what he’s up to. Soon he knows everything about Black, and there isn’t anything worth his time. Blue starts leaving his post, going to movies. No worries. Nothing changes. But the longer he’s responsible for keeping tabs on Black—which goes on for months—the less connection he has to the rest of his life.

It comes to head when he realizes his fiancée assumes he’s dead and has moved on with her life. “He has lost whatever chance he might have had for happiness. . . .” And for what? There’s no progress in the case, he’s got nothing to show for his work, and his life has dissolved in the meantime.

The crisis forces Blue to confront White. It doesn’t go well. So he then decides to confront Black. It goes even worse, and that’s when the whole case flips on its head. Was Blue actually the subject of the investigation the entire time?

“I wanted to turn everything inside out,” said Auster, describing his work.

Melting Down

If City of Glass was pointlessly tragic and Ghosts simply baffling, you have to keep moving into The Locked Room, which makes roundabout sense of both its predecessors.

The story starts with an author Fanshawe and an unnamed narrator, who has known him since they were boys. Fanshawe has disappeared. His wife Sophie contacts the narrator to let him know that Fanshawe left a pile of unpublished work, and told her should anything happen to him that his old childhood friend, a writer and literary critic with publishing connections, should step in as his literary executor and determine if it should be published.

He reads the material and sees its worth. It takes some finagling, but he secures a publishing deal for one of the novels and makes plans to publish the rest. It’s a sleeper hit and sales take off. So does a relationship with Sophie. The two marry, and the narrator now steps in to father Fanshawe’s son, as well as parent his old friend’s work.

And suddenly faint signals begin glowing. Blue loses the woman should have become his wife. Quinn lost his wife and his son, and when Quinn finally meets the novel’s version of Paul Auster he finds he’s not actually a detective at all, but a writer; what’s more, he’s married with a son. These novellas are talking with each other—only in whispers—three different stories not so different after all, circling the same questions.

While technically not a detective, the unnamed narrator of The Locked Room becomes obsessed with finding Fanshawe. He doesn’t believe he’s dead and soon encounters reason for his belief. Meanwhile, his publisher wants more Fanshawe since the books are doing so well. The world wants more Fanshawe!

So he agrees to write a biography of his long-lost friend with the secret hope of locating his whereabouts. The project becomes all-consuming, jeopardizing his relationship with Sophie, even—and you probably knew this was coming at this point since the same thing happens in the prior novellas—his own sanity.

He interviews old connections and colleagues, reads old letters, and eventually follows the trail to Paris, despite Sophie’s plea to abandon the biography which has now fully swallowed him and driven a wedge between them. While overseas, he hits nothing but dead ends and falls apart, suffering a total collapse.

The Real Mystery

Auster rejected the idea that he’d written three detective novels in the New York Trilogy. They are, after all, only playing with the form. “I tried to use certain genre conventions to get to another place,” he said in an interview.

You know you’re in a different sort of book when you start noticing the way the books not only talk to each other, but how they talk with other literature: Poe, Cervantes, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. The name of the vanished Fanshawe is a direct reference to Hawthorne’s first novel, which the author loathed so much he tried to destroy every copy printed, much like the fictitious Fanshawe does with his own life and the unnamed narrator does in trying to understand why.

Said Auster,

The whole process Quinn undergoes in [City of Glass]—and the characters in the other two, as well—is one of stripping away to some barer condition in which we have to face up to who we are. . . . At some point or another, all three characters undergo a form of humiliation, of degradation, and perhaps that is a necessary stage of discovering who we are.

The real mystery is the self, our drives and desires, our moves and motives. Why do we do what we do, think what we think, fear what we fear? The answers to those questions are elusive—no matter how determined the detective because, unlike real detective work, the crimes, the victims, the perpetrators, and all the rest are sometimes unknowable.

“It was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels,” he said in another exchange. The trilogy is “about uncertainty, and the fact that there are no eternal givens in the world. Somehow, we have to make room for the things we don’t understand. We have to live with obscurity. I’m not talking about a passive, quietistic acceptance of things, but rather the realization that there are things we’re not going to know.”

And what we do discover comes, as the narrator in Ghosts says, “at great personal expense.”

Locked in the World

The convention of locked-room mysteries dictates a murder happens within a set space, impermeable from the outside. Somehow a person is killed by whatever and whomever is in the space, usually by some elaborate and complicated means, hence the mystery. Auster’s play on the concept in the title is the interpretive key for the three novellas.

The whole, wide, confusing world is the locked room, and we’re all detectives trying to make sense of the puzzle. It requires all our wits, which prove insufficient, and usually the collapse of what we think we know to finally attain some sort of understanding of what it all means.

Fanshawe leaves his friend a notebook, red—a callback to Quinn’s log in City of Glass—which he says will explain the whole story. It doesn’t. The narrator finds it impenetrable. Still, he reads on, tearing out the pages one by one like days as he goes.

Auster described City of Glass as a “fictitious subterranean autobiography,” and in a way we can read it, the whole trilogy, like our own diaries.

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Dostoevsky, an unlucky gambler himself, knew the experience down to his nerves’ frayed ends. He’d been losing at roulette for several years when he agreed to write The Gambler under a murderously tight deadline. Why? To settle his debts, naturally. He dictated the novel in a three-and-a-half-week sprint to a young stenographer named Anna Snitkina. It worked out. He delivered the book. Better, he and Anna fell in love and married.

But we have to pause and chuckle, right? A book about gambling, written to pay off gambling debts: It would be neither the first time nor the last that publishing and betting found themselves amusingly enmeshed.

Spin the Wheel

A slow learner, Dostoevsky felt drawn to the tables. During a four-year exile in Europe the newlyweds haunted the casinos of Baden-Baden, Homburg, and Saxon-les-Bains. The author had a system, or thought he did: stay cool, stay patient, ride out the losses—the big win was just around the corner! Sometimes it was. He once trotted home with a bag of gold coins. But he couldn’t stop when he was ahead and blew it all just hours later.

Anna didn’t know what to do. The couple pawned everything, even Anna’s wedding ring and underwear—all so Dostoevsky could bet one last time and finally pull them out of their ever-worsening predicament. Friends took pity and extended loans. Dostoevsky lost most of that too.

While some folks still squander their worldly wealth at roulette, today significantly more gamble from their living-room sofas. We have apps for that. It’s hard to scroll more than a dozen posts on X before running into someone complaining about the problems of sports betting. But have they ever considered publishing? It’s a $100 billion dollar industry, and it’s all gambling, all the time.

When people discuss the dollars and cents of publishing, they refer to the “business model.” What they fail to realize is that there’s very little business and even less model. Publishing is, at its most basic, betting. What Dostoevsky did for a thrill at the gambling halls, I used to do for a living at Thomas Nelson. Once you see it for what it is, the whole enterprise makes a lot more sense.

Every Book Is a Bet

The fact that every single, individual book represents a unique product makes publishing structurally different than almost any other consumer business. Chevrolet can consult decades of truck sales and make reasonable projections about next year’s Silverado. Maytag can crunch sales figures and forecast demand for their next washer. These companies sell consistent products into consistent markets with piles of usable data.

Publishers have none of that. Every book is a one-off and behaves accordingly. An author who moves 100,000 copies of a title may sell just half that on the next—after bidding up their advance based on their prior success, of course. A genre that sizzles one year may cool by the next loop around the sun. No truly reliable data on trends exists because there’s no consistent product from which to derive it. The closest anyone gets is a guess draped in a spreadsheet.

I saw this play out every day when I was in publishing. Here’s an example. We had an author who’d been with us for years. Every book he published sold at least a quarter million copies. Reliable as gravity? So it seemed. He eventually grew dissatisfied; like any author, he wanted his publisher to do more. A competitor sniffed an opportunity and swooped in with a massive deal, convinced they could do more with his books than we had. And who knows? Maybe they could. The author figured it was worth a try. Why not?

But when the new house released the first book on the contract—a two-book deal—it sold about a tenth of what he’d been moving with us. The loss was so severe the publisher canceled the second book in the deal. After a few years, the author found his way back to Nelson.

So, why did the publisher flush all that money? They made a lousy bet. They looked at the author’s sales history and told themselves a story about how they could outperform it. Maybe they could, all things being equal. But nothing is ever equal! They studied the data, built their projections, and convinced themselves their investment was sound. It wasn’t, but not because they were foolish; it’s because there is no such thing as a sound investment in publishing. There are only bigger and littler bets. This was a yuge bet, and they lost. Happens all the time.

In one form or fashion, every publisher sits in the same position, gambling on a thousand variables they can’t control. The only question is how much you’re putting on the table.

A Thousand Variables

What determines whether a book flies or flops? The honest answer is that nobody fully, truly, actually knows. Publishers create pro formas or P&Ls for each book to spec out the basics: projected sales, per-unit price, print and design costs, marketing spend, author royalties, and what have you.

But that’s only a partial inventory of the variables. Here are a few more off the top of my head:

• the ups and downs of the economy and whether consumers feel loose or tight with their pocket money;

• competing titles releasing the same week or month;

• the author’s platform and whether it’s growing or shrinking;

• whether the author’s last book disappointed readers;

• how long it’s been since the author’s last release;

• the author’s skill in an interview (some can’t talk their way out of an open double door);

• whether the author is getting hammered for something real or bogus in the media;

• whether a news event breaks that either complements the book or drowns it like a cat in a burlap sack;

• the state of the author’s personal life—health, marriage, kids, all the rest—and whether they can show up for the launch;

• whether the author is willing to promote at all (some aren’t—it’s weird);

• title and packaging, which is judged in a nanosecond by someone scrolling on their phone at a stoplight;

• the price point relative to the competition;

• format and whether the publisher guessed right on hardcover versus paperback;

• internal enthusiasm at the publishing house, which directly affects marketing spend and sales-team energy;

• the publisher’s relationship with key accounts and how hard the reps push this title versus the fifteen or twenty others on their seasonal list;

• retailer enthusiasm and shelf placement;

• whether the publicist has the right media contacts for this particular book;

• whether a major media figure, podcaster, or influencer takes a liking to the project;

• the quality of the book’s metadata and discoverability online;

• consumer reviews in the first week;

• supply chain timing and whether books are actually in the warehouse when the orders come in;

• print-run accuracy and whether the publisher printed too many (returns) or too few (missed sales);

• whether the book lands on any bestseller lists early enough to generate momentum;

• word of mouth (which is essentially uncontrollable); and

• the merciless gods of chance.

Of course, there are more. Not to mention the book itself. A brilliant idea can fail miserably in execution. But, hey, there’s a budget number attached, so it’s the editor’s job to polish the turd and send it to print, preferably on schedule; you don’t get to book the revenue till it ships.

No pro forma can account for all of these. Some are within the publisher’s control, some not. The spreadsheet creates a feeling of rigor, but it’s essentially an encouraging story with decimal points and percentages. Of course, that doesn’t stop anyone from producing the spreadsheet. It’s helpful for what it does.

Rituals of Risk Mitigation

Whether they admit it to themselves or not (“the first step is to admit you have a problem”), publishers know they’re gambling, and they’re not stupid. To compensate for the wild uncertainties of the trade, they’ve developed sophisticated ways to mitigate the risks, or at least get cozy with them.

Consider comp titles. Authors, agents, and editors include these in proposals to demonstrate that similar projects have previously succeeded in the market. The stated reason for comps is to map the competitive landscape: What else is out there? Who’s the audience?

But the more practical reason is to conjure a number you can finger and say, “The market absorbed 20,000 copies of something like this, so our bet isn’t crazy.” What the exercise misses, however, is that the comp had a different author, different cultural moment, different cover, different marketing, different luck, different everything. But comps can offer a story to woo and wow your pub board, and a good story goes a long way in a business built on stories.

Or consider platform, the size of the author’s audience. A big platform feels like a sure thing. You’ve got built-in followers, plug-and-play leads, reduced risk. But audience size and platform reach don’t guarantee an author can actually convert followers to buyers. It doesn’t account for topic mismatch, or the gap between people who’ll linger on Instagram and people who’ll spend $28 on a hardcover. A big platform is a better bet, but it’s still a bet.

None of this is, by the way, useless. Real information comes through comp titles and platform data. They just provide far less certainty than anyone would like. They exist less to divine the future than to give stakeholders sufficient confidence to roll the dice.

Sizing the Bet

As uncomfortable as it is for authors to hear, publishers sometimes think of their authors in tiers. You’ve got A authors, those at the top of the list, the ones who reliably move large volumes and are deemed worthy of serious commitment. Then there are B authors, who perform dependably but at a lower level, and C authors, who sell modestly but are still worth publishing because the ideas are good and the economics work at a smaller scale.

This is essentially bankroll management, the gambler’s art of sizing bets to expected returns. You don’t pay a B author an A author’s advance. You don’t pay a C author a B author’s advance—unless, of course, you think you’ve spotted a breakout, which is just a euphemism for long-shot. Every acquisitions editor has a few of those stories, the books that hit big against the odds. Those are the projects that keep you at the table. They also have the opposite stories, the big bet that went sideways. Those are the best days in publishing!—and the worst.

I’ve been out of acquisitions for a while now, but I gather from industry reporting that the B tier—more affectionately known as the midlist—has been thinning out like the hair atop the head of a middle-aged man. Kensington Publishing CEO Steven Zacharius says the business pretty much looks all A’s and C’s at this point: a small number of bestsellers and everything else.

This means the stakes at the table are higher now than they’ve ever been. Roughly 60 percent of total profits come from just 4 percent of books, according to testimony in the Penguin Random House antitrust case. Only about a third are profitable at all. That maps to my experience, where the received wisdom was that about 70 percent of books lose money.

Risk mitigation explains why advances are shrinking for what’s left of the B authors and the ever-growing number of C authors. If you’re chasing mega bestsellers with the biggest bills in your purse, you can’t simultaneously give those dollars to everyone else with a book proposal. They teach you opportunity cost in Econ 101; you get to try it on for size in the acquisitions process.

As a publisher, you’re either making a huge wager or tossing petty cash at the wall to see what bounces. Both are forms of gambling. The vast C tier is where publishers and editors try their hand at speculating. Stay cool, stay patient, ride out the losses—the big win is just around the corner!

When the Fever Strikes

If you want to see the gambling at its most vivid (and entertaining), watch one of those big-bet authors go to auction. When multiple publishers have a jones for the same project, savvy agents pit them against each other. Your pro forma might justify an advance of, say, $250,000 for a particular book. That would already be a substantial bet, but the numbers work, or at least seem to.

Here lies the trouble. Every other publisher at the table can arrive at roughly the same math. Comps, platform data, sales projections—they all point to a similar ceiling, plus or minus. But then one of the participants decides to jump to $300,000, or $350,000.

Now nobody’s pro forma supports the bid. But as the stakes soar, reason sinks. Dostoevsky’s already twitching somewhere in the hereafter. Maybe, they rationalize, they can beat their own projections. Maybe the book doesn’t have to earn out its advance to be profitable (a book doesn’t, by the way, which is one of the industry’s more soothing pieces of self-consolation). Maybe they frame their bid as strategic move to bring a marquee author to the list. They tell themselves a story, and as long as their acquisitions budget can absorb the risk, they push forward.

And then? The other players do the same thing. When the agent announces the new high bid, every publisher has to decide whether to match or raise. They look at their own spreadsheets. The numbers stopped working at $250,000, and maybe that was already a stretch, but now they need to beat $350,000. But getting this author, this book, would be such a coup! So they get permission from whoever holds the purse strings. They come back at $400,000.

Then, maybe the agent says, “We can take this off the table for $500,000.” Bids are still coming. Now you’re double what your pro forma can justify with no rational path to ever recoup. But the race is on, and everyone keeps pushing chips to the center.

How high does it go? The bidding continues until the author has reached whatever ceiling the dynamics of that particular auction will bear. Usually the author goes with the highest bidder, though not always. The important thing to keep in mind: Every player around that table was prepared to risk money they couldn’t fully account for. And nobody lost a minute of sleep over it. Because this is Thursday in publishing.

How Do You Feel About It?

At Thomas Nelson, the acquisition process had a formal structure that resembled careful financial governance. It was at least defensible, even responsible, given that we were putting company money on the line. I could sign books up to a certain advance level on my own authority. Above that threshold, I needed sign-off from my group publisher. Higher still, I needed the CFO. For the biggest deals, I needed both the CFO and the CEO.

Here’s what that looked like in practice. The sales team would provide unit projections for their accounts—how many copies figured they could sell into particular retailers. Those numbers flowed into my pro forma, along with all my various expenses, including printing costs and proposed author advance. I’d work the variables until the math came together. An analyst would vet the numbers and sign off. The pro forma would then go to the CFO for approval.

The analyst I typically consulted had worked in publishing since before Moses floated the proposal for the Pentateuch. He would look over all my numbers carefully, reviewing every line. Then he would ask me a simple question, possibly the most important in the whole process: How do you feel about this deal?

He asked because he understood—probably better than anyone in the building—what the numbers were actually worth. The sales team’s projections might be genuine. Then again, sales might have felt pressure to give me numbers large enough to justify the advance necessary to win the author. Likewise, they might commit to a robust forecast today and quietly revise it downward tomorrow.

The analyst had seen enough deals to know that the entire apparatus of financial review—running the costs, building the pro forma, checking the break-even, securing the approvals—served a real purpose. But it wasn’t to eliminate risk. The point was to force me to confront the risk. We both knew we were belly forward at a card table, and he wanted to know if I liked my hand.

A publishing house is not a casino. The odds are worse. Some houses go under or get bought up. But they’re essentially in the same trade. Yet the industry rolls on because some books hit even when others flop. The wins fund the losses with enough leftover to keep the shareholders happy. And the promise of the next big score keeps everyone at the table—publishers, agents, authors, everybody else. Not a bad way to run an industry, honestly, but I don’t think it’s how most folks assume it’s run.

The Gambler’s Return

Late in life, Dostoevsky finally kicked his addiction to roulette. He had Anna to thank for that. She took control of the family finances, managed his publishing affairs, even became his publisher, and created the stability he’d never been able to build on his own. But it’s worth noting that Anna, by becoming her husband’s publisher, merely swapped one form of gambling for another.

I think about that sometimes: the unlucky novelist who wrote the book on gambling, married the woman who saved him from his vices, and then watched her make a fortune placing bets on his next manuscript.

We can all blow on our dice and hope for the same.

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With that in mind, I thought I’d share the biographies of three courageous and wise women: Maria Skobtsova, Henrietta Leavitt, and Hildegard of Bingen. If you don’t know their stories, you definitely should. We’ll take them in reverse chronological order.

Maria Skobtsova, aka St. Maria of Paris

She wasn’t your standard nun. She was divorced twice. She smoked and drank. She lived not in a convent with other nuns but with a ragtag group of refugees and outcasts in a house in Paris. She was once an atheist. She died in a Nazi gas chamber.

Born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1891, Elizaveta—the woman who would become St. Maria of Paris—moved to St. Petersburg as a young woman, circulated among literary and radical sets, and published poetry. 

Elizaveta unluckily married, divorced, and then moved to Anapa on the coast of the Black Sea where she became mayor—but only temporarily. She married again, but the ongoing Bolshevik Revolution caught up with her and pushed her little family to emigrate, eventually arriving in Paris in 1923. 

When Elizaveta’s daughter Anastasia died in 1926, her second marriage disintegrated. Her world in shambles, Elizaveta threw herself into social and charitable work—helping refugees and others who struggled pulling their lives together. She saw in these destitute and derelict “the very icon of God incarnate in the world . . . an awesome revelation.”

Sergei Hackel’s compelling biography, Pearl of Great Price, focuses primarily on events following Anastasia’s death and Elizaveta’s momentous decision to become a monastic. Her second marriage was formally dissolved in 1932 and she became a nun, taking the name Maria. She continued her charitable work, now fully part of her calling.

Never much concerned with her own appearance, she wore a shabby habit and men’s shoes. She could regularly be seen in such a getup at Les Halles, the main market in Paris, buying and begging food in the early morning hours to feed the people in her care. As she wrote in 1932,

I am intensely aware at present that any theory, however remarkable, is inevitably less valuable and less needed than any practical work, however unspectacular.

Or, as she put the same sentiment in verse,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

There are no prophecies. Only life
continuously acts as prophet.

Action proves more eloquent than words, and the severity of the circumstances did nothing but elevate the expression of her love.

When the Nazis invaded, she persisted in her work—and also resisted their efforts, tearing down recruitment posters, forging papers, sheltering Jews. Her subversion was eventually discovered, and she was taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she died in the gas chamber, possibly taking the place of another prisoner. 

Incidentally, she died the day before Easter, 1945, a week and two days before Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in Flossenburg. She is recognized as a righteous gentile for her efforts to preserve Jewish life during the war, and was canonized by the Orthodox Church in 2004.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Harlow Shapley, head of the Harvard College Observatory, called her “one of the most important women to ever touch astronomy.” The Commission of Stellar Photometry referred to her as a pioneer. 

Born on the Fourth of July, 1868, Henrietta Swan Leavitt was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister, highly educated, and very eager by twenty-five years old to learn astronomy. She began as a volunteer at the Harvard College Observatory, which housed a massive telescope and which networked with other observatories. Eventually, she started earning 25 cents an hour! But for what exactly?

The telescopes produced a steady stream of photographic plates in negative—stars sprinkled like black specks across seas of white. Someone had to analyze all those specks. The trouble was there were too many. 

“Astronomers were soon overwhelmed,” writes George Johnson in his treatment of Leavitt’s life, Miss Leavitt’s Stars. “That is where the computers came in.” Of course, this was a couple generations before the electronic and digital revolutions that occupied the second half of the twentieth century. “Computers” were people—usually women like Henrietta Leavitt—tasked with measurements, calculations, and the like.

“Early on,” says Johnson, “she was asked to look for ‘variables,’ stars that waxed and waned in brightness like slow-motion beacons.” Variables stood out by comparing pictures of the same stars taken over days or months. Leavitt proved adept at the chore, identifying a dizzying number of variables. The Washington Post even took note, reporting on her skills.

Though her work went beyond these variable stars, Leavitt’s greatest contribution to astronomy comes from her work with them. Studying the Magellanic Clouds she realized variability of stars indicated more than relative brightness, but also relative distance. In other words, by measuring the pulse of a star she might also measure how far away it was.

I say might because there was nothing yet to calibrate the measurement. Harlow Shapley, Leavitt’s eventual boss, later used her research to do exactly that, allowing him to calculate the length and breadth of the Milky Way. “Her discovery of the relation of period to brightness is destined to be one of the most significant results of stellar astronomy,” Shapley wrote at the time.

That was just the start.

Leavitt died in 1921, but astronomers indebted to her work used it to measure the heavens. None did so more famously than Edwin Hubble who formulated what’s known as “the Hubble constant—the number by which you divide a galaxy’s velocity to get its distance,” explains Johnson. “At its core lie Miss Leavitt’s stars.”

Would someone else eventually make the same discovery as Leavitt? Undoubtedly. But Leavitt got there first. Once, dealing with a particularly vexing variable, she said, “We shall never understand it until we find a way to send up a net and fetch the thing down!” But Leavitt did us one better: She helped us go up ourselves and compass the span of the universe.

St. Hildegard of Bingen

One woman who brings together aspects of both St. Maria and Henrietta Leavitt’s lives is their forebear in both faith and science, St. Hildegard of Bingen.

The first I ever heard of the twelfth-century abbess wasn’t in a book. It was an album of some of her music, performed by the medieval ensemble Sequentia. I was not quite twenty at the time and mostly enjoyed rock and hip hop. I liked classical and other forms of music as well, but nothing could have prepared me for Canticles of Ecstasy and medieval chant. More than three decades later, I still listen to that record while rock and hip hop have dimmed for me like one of Leavitt’s variable stars.

Hildegard might warrant our attention for her music alone, but she was far more than a composer. Writes biographer Fiona Maddocks,

She was a polymath: a visionary, a theologian, a preacher; an early scientist and physician; a prodigious letter writer who numbered kings, emperors and popes among her correspondents. She was an artist not only in the musical and literary sense but in painting and, it would seem, architecture.

By visionary, Maddocks means something other than our modern definition: a person who imagines a compelling future and attains it. From her childhood, Hildegard experienced overwhelming spiritual visions. For decades she rarely spoke of these visions and never wrote about them. Eventually though she gained confidence to put them to parchment.

Her first visionary work, Scivias—the title means Know the Way—earned papal endorsement and has held readers ever since, as I noted in a recent piece on women in medieval book culture. After that came two more mystical-theological treatises, two scientific and medical works, two exercises in invented language, roughly eighty songs, and a correspondence of nearly 400 letters written from her post as a Benedictine abbess to bishops, secular rulers, monks, and fellow nuns.

Any one of these works merits attention on its own. But her scientific and medical writings repay special focus. However primitive by modern standards, her two books—Physica and Causae et Curae—display formidable learning and genuine practical value. Writes Maddocks,

The Physica, consisting of nine books listing almost a thousand plants and animals in German, is a study of botany, zoology, stones, metals and elements, describing their physical and medicinal properties. Causae et Curae, as its title indicates, examines the causes and cures of diseases . . . and offering remedies, mainly using plants.

She was famous in her day for her curative methods but represents a wider movement toward medical advancement. Across Europe “monasteries became centres of healing and medical expertise,” writes Maddocks, “with their own elaborate herb gardens in which to grow their remedies.” 

Many of her cures and recommendations strike moderns as hogwash; others are still in use. But the important thing was not her accuracy. As we saw with the monk John Westwyk in Seb Falk’s The Light Ages, it was Hildegard’s curiosity and drive to explain that matters. Erring is part of scientific advancement; without venturing solutions, we never discover what works and what doesn’t.

While some have attempted to read Hildegard’s life as progressive or revolutionary, she was decidedly of her time—in ways that might even make some readers wince. But in many ways, that’s what makes her accomplishments so noteworthy now. The very same can and should be said for St. Maria and Henrietta Leavitt. Of their times, their achievements nonetheless speak across the years to challenge us in our own.

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“In adding detail to their illuminations, it is plausible to assume that artists would have occasionally licked their brushes to make a fine point, a practice that later artist manuals refer to explicitly,” write the authors of an extensive paper on the discovery. “The repeated activity of inserting the tip of the brush into the mouth could explain the distribution pattern.”

However it got there, we only know this woman by the residue of her work. But the lapis lazuli particles suggest this scribe not only participated in manuscript production but was also skilled enough to entrust with valuable materials. As I recount in my book The Idea Machine, she was far from alone.

Women in the Shadows

In his two-volume study published in 1896, Books and Their Makers in the Middle Ages, George Haven Putnam reviewed the data then available and said, “It is difficult to estimate too highly the extent of the services rendered by these feminine hands to learning and to history throughout the Middle Ages.”

Putnam recounted several examples of women scribes and convent scriptoria producing exquisite manuscripts. The examples have only multiplied in the years following, thanks to careful archival research and analysis of the manuscripts themselves.

The story of medieval book culture usually focuses on monks, and deservedly so. As Europe’s intellectual center shifted from Roman aristocrats to bishops and monastics, monks became the primary infrastructure of intellectual life. But men have unduly overshadowed women in this story.

“Christianity has no sacred tongue,” writes historian Robert Louis Wilken, “but it cannot exist without books.” Monastic communities required tomes of all types: liturgical volumes for conducting services, collections of canons and rules, penitential manuals, hagiographies, biblical commentaries, not to mention the biblical books themselves. In a world before print, human hands scratched out every letter on every page. Many of those hands—more than we have generally acknowledged—were women’s.

The signs are, to be sure, partial. While evidence for female learning in the Middle Ages “is far more impressive than that for both Roman classical and early Germanic societies,” says John Contreni of Purdue University, it is nonetheless “maddeningly submerged from modern view.” Of the 1,615 scribes identified in one major manuscript study, for instance, only 1 percent were female—just 16.

But that figure, says Stanford scholar Elaine Treharne, reflects only signed manuscripts, and the vast majority were “penned anonymously.” Throughout the history of medieval studies, scholars have generally assumed all scribes to be male unless compelling evidence exists to the contrary: talk about submersion. The lapis lazuli discovery should, however, make us wonder how many might emerge from the shadows.

We do know of many others.

Bookish Beginnings

The institutional foundation for women’s literary activity stems from the basic requirements of the monastic life. Literacy was obligatory and spread with the monastic movement.

“Always have a book in your hand and before your eyes,” St. Jerome counseled one prospective monk in a letter. More than an aspirational piety, it was a job requirement. The Rule of St. Benedict presumed monks and nuns knew how to handle books, and the Rule of St. Caesarius of Arles mandated literacy for monastics of both sexes.

In his Lausiac History, Palladius describes a nun named Silvania. “Being very learned and loving literature she turned night into day by perusing every writing of the ancient commentators, including 3,000,000 lines of Origen and 2,500,000 lines of Gregory, Stephen, Pierius, Basil, and other standard writers,” he says. And Silvania was no dabbler: “She laboriously went through each book seven or eight times.” This reading both lifted and liberated her. “Wherefore also,” says Palladius, “she was enabled to be freed from knowledge falsely so called and to fly on wings, thanks to the grace of these books; elevated by kindly hopes she made herself a spiritual bird and journeyed to Christ.”

Palladius, writing in the early fifth century, suggests Silvania’s devotion, though exceptional, fell within the range of what a nun’s literary life could look like. He intended his audience—women as well as men—to take note.

For women, the practical implications of this kind of literary attentiveness were especially significant. Women monastics had to manage the same readerly efforts as their male counterparts, but they were mostly on their own. Some “double houses” (co-ed monasteries that thrived at certain times and places) gathered men and women into a single community, though in separate quarters. In the dedicated women’s monasteries which predominated, however, men were largely barred except to administer the sacraments.

The absence of male clergy from daily convent life meant women’s reading, writing, copying, and teaching were of necessity substantially self-directed.

Founders and Cultivators

The women who moved from reading to founding—who built the institutions in which literary culture could take hold—began appearing in the sixth century, well before the Carolingian era that usually gets credit for reviving European learning.

Queen St. Radegund founded the Abbey of the Holy Cross in Poitiers. Her chosen monastic rule insisted all nuns learn to read and write. Radegund wrote poetry and was famous for her command of Greek and Latin church fathers. Tellingly, an eleventh-century depiction shows her sitting with a pair of writing tablets, evidence not so much of her advanced literary attainments (which were significant) as of the later assumption of how a scholarly nun should appear: ready to write.

In the same century, on the far side of Europe, St. Ita of Ireland schooled local boys and girls in her monastery at Cell Ide, including a young St. Brendan the Navigator. And across the Irish Sea in the eighth century, the abbess Hild founded and directed a double monastery where she supervised both daily life and the copying of books. “Archaeological excavations at Whitby,” says Robert Davis, “as well as a convent at Barking, have found abundant styli, the main tool of students, suggesting that there was robust scribal activity or education that included both women and men.”

In the mid-eighth century, the abbess Fausta commissioned a copy of the gospels. The volume, copied in Francia, now goes by the name of its male scribe, the Gundohinus Gospels. But Fausta’s purpose in acquiring the book was for the edification and education of her nuns. Along with the gospel text, the book contained expository notes (exposiciones) to elucidate various passages and themes. “Their inclusion strongly suggests that this book was intended to function as a type of teaching tool, designed to enhance its readers’ knowledge and understanding of the Gospels,” writes scholar Jessica Hodgkinson.

Sometimes the commissioning went the other direction. The missionary bishop Boniface, note Hodgkinson and John Barrett, commissioned a “deluxe copy of St Peter’s Epistles to be written in gold” from a woman named Eadburg, likely the abbess of Minster-in-Thanet. As with the earlier example of the lapis lazuli, the costly materials speak well of Eadburg’s access to scribes of significant skill.1

Why the gold? “To impress honor and reverence for the Sacred Scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach,” Boniface explained. Mary Wellesley quotes Boniface’s letter to Eadburg in her book The Gilded Page. She also mentions the story of Loeba—the first named English female poet—a nun who trained under Eadburg and later joined Boniface’s missionary work, becoming the abbess of Tauberbischofsheim in Germany where her bookish ways persisted.

These women were founders and cultivators who built the physical, intellectual, and institutional spaces in which reading and writing could be learned and practiced. What’s more, commissioning, distributing, employing books proved instrumental in how they governed their communities. They all preceded—or sat just on the cusp of—the great Carolingian reform movement, even helping to lay some of the groundwork.

When that renewal came, women joined right in. We’ve already met one participant: our lapis lazuli nun worked in the same period, somewhere in the eleventh or twelfth centuries.

Carolingians and Beyond

Contreni points to signs of intellectual curiosity and significant projects from the period. Rotrude and Gisela, daughter and sister of Charlemagne, read Augustine’s commentary on John for themselves and requested that Alcuin of York, a close advisor to Charlemagne, write another for them.

Contreni also highlights cases of women teachers of both boys and girls. One famous example, the noblewoman Dhuoda, authored an instructional manual for her son early in the 840s full of spiritual, moral, and secular advice. Beyond that, as we’ve already seen, women monastics copied their own books and books for others.

As I detail in The Idea Machine, the majority of ancient Latin manuscripts available today were copied during the Carolingian age—estimates climb as high as fifty thousand, with roughly seven thousand surviving, compared to around eighteen hundred for all the years prior. “Carolingian scribes were the unsung saviours of Western written culture,” says Steven Roger Fischer in A History of Reading. How many of those unsung saviors were women? Given the default tendency to gender unnamed copyists as male, I suspect it’s more than we assume.

Of course, we do have abundant evidence for Putnam’s “feminine hands” in some cases. Women scribes, for instance, customized standard texts for use in their communities, including prayers and monastic rules. Says Robert Davis,

In the Salisbury Psalter, a 10th or 11th century prayerbook, nuns appear to have replaced masculine-inflected words with feminine ones, suggesting that the book was adapted for use by a community of women. Where an original prayer read, “famulum tuum” (“thy servant”), it was rewritten with “famulam tuan” (“thy [female] servant” or “handmaiden”).

Davis also points to an Old English copy of the Regularis Concordia, modified to apply to the seo abbodysse (abbess), not abbod (abbot), along with other tweaks that signal the intended audience.

Some women went well beyond copying and modifying received texts to authoring their own. Consider the tenth-century canoness Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim Abbey in Saxony. Described as one of the first named Latin dramatists since classical period, she not only penned narrative poems and histories but also six plays modeled after Terence. In her self-deprecating preface, she speaks to the sexism of the time:

Through the grace of the Creator I have acquired some knowledge of the arts. He has given me the ability to learn—I am a teachable creature—yet of myself I should know nothing. He has given me a perspicacious mind, but one that lies fallow and idle when it is not cultivated. That my natural gifts might not be made void by negligence I have been at pains, whenever I have been able to pick up some threads and scraps torn from the old mantle of philosophy, to weave them into the stuff of my own book, in the hope that my lowly ignorant effort may gain more acceptance through the introduction of something of a nobler strain, and that the Creator of genius may be the more honoured since it is generally believed that a woman’s intelligence is slower. Such has been my motive in writing, the sole reason for the sweat and fatigue which my labours have cost me.

Though it’s probably not to the liking of many modern readers, the work that followed only tended to demonstrate Hrotsvitha’s skill and intelligence.

And then there’s St. Hildegard of Bingen, the Sibyl of the Rhine, one of the most celebrated and learned monastics of the High Middle Ages.

Sibyl of the Rhine

A Benedictine abbess, Hildegard produced three mystical-theological treatises—at least one earning papal approval and attracting readers in every subsequent generation—two scientific and medical treatises, two works of invented language, around eighty songs, and a collection of nearly four hundred letters addressed to bishops, popes, secular rulers, monks, and fellow nuns.

Hildegard’s scientific writings deserve special attention for what they reveal about the culture she emerged from. Though primitive, her two books—Physica and Causae et Curae—reflect immense learning and useful application. “The Physica, consisting of nine books listing almost a thousand plants and animals in German, is a study of botany, zoology, stones, metals and elements, describing their physical and medicinal properties,” writes biographer Fiona Maddocks. “Causae et Curae, as its title indicates, examines the causes and cures of diseases . . . and offer[s] remedies, mainly using plants.”

Hildegard did not spring from nowhere. She’s the product of a centuries-long tradition in which convents mandated literacy, founded schools, commissioned commentaries, and copied books. The tradition inaugurated by nuns like Silvania in the fifth century continued to flower in the twelfth through Hildegard—and countless others whose names we’ll probably never know.

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As a Penn State communications professor, he focuses on rhetoric, intercultural communication, media, race, sports, poverty, and gender violence. As a wrestling coach, he focuses on shaping the character of young men. The link? Great books.

Phillips holds a Ph.D. in speech communication from Southern Illinois University, with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies. His publications include the book Homeless: Narratives from the Streets (McFarland, 2016). He is married and a father, emphasizing a balanced life of intellectual and physical pursuits.

I wanted to talk with him about the classics, the reading crisis in education, and the intersection of literature with athletics and masculinity.

You’re an associate head coach for a high-school wrestling program who simultaneously serves as a college communications professor and posts on X about Tolstoy. How did those two lives end up in the same person?

What a great question! I hardly know where to begin. My parents (especially my dad) was always pushing us to read; and to read Great Books. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, but we were always allowed to buy books. Add the fact that we didn’t have television, and books were a main source of entertainment.

As for athletics, I’ve always been involved in some sort of sport. Growing up I played just about everything (at least for a season or two just to try it out). I started to really grab onto wrestling as my main sport in eighth grade. I liked the idea of one-on-one competition. There wasn’t a team where players could point the finger at one another. With wrestling, your effort determines your outcome. It didn’t matter if my teammates didn’t run or lift or work hard because I could always control my efforts and see the results.

As for the “lives of a professor and wrestling coach” living in the same person, that’s pretty easy: Wrestling has always been my escape when things got overwhelming. People talk about “imposter syndrome” a lot in academia. When I was in grad school and felt like I wasn’t smart enough or as capable as others in the classroom, I could retreat to the wrestling room where I felt comfortable.

The same was true early in my career. I’ll teach classes and go to admin meetings all day and then think “I have no idea what I’m doing!” But I know how to wrestle. I know how to coach wrestling. When I’m overwhelmed or feel like an outsider in academia, I know I can just go to wrestling practice and feel at home.

How does weightlifting improve the life of the mind? I’ve only been lifting for the past year, and I love it. But I waited till I was 49 to indulge my inner jock! What have I been missing all these years?

On a physical level, I just feel better! I need lots of exercise to have the energy and clarity for teaching! When I’m away from the gym for too long, I get brain fog. I can’t think straight.

Personally, I prefer lifting heavy weights. Lots of compound exercises. My guess is that I like the measurable goals that these lifts allow: Reach a certain number on bench; deadlift a certain amount of weight. It’s very Type A. But that’s how I organize my academic life too. I like lists. I like completing lists. Set a goal and try to achieve it. Plus, it’s nice to have a hobby outside of academia.

I encourage everyone in academia to do something outside of academia that has measurable results. Lift weights. Train for marathons. Learn another language. Play an instrument. Do something completely unrelated to academia, otherwise, you’ll burn out.

On a side note, I also have found it useful in relating to young men struggling to embrace the life of the mind—young men who see modern academia as too soft. There’s something about seeing your college professor in the weight room bench pressing more than you.

You can show young men that they can enjoy all the testosterone-filled lifting sessions and also enjoy reading Shakespeare. You don’t have to shy away from reading great literature because you want to uphold some narrow view of masculinity. Get your lift in and then go home and read Macbeth.

Does coaching change the way you read? I’m curious whether there’s something about the physicality of wrestling—the discipline, the suffering, the one-on-one confrontation—that shows up when you sit down with a difficult text.

Coaching probably doesn’t change the way I read, but it definitely informs the way I interact with my wrestlers (and young men in general). I’m around a lot of athletic young men. When they find out I’m a professor, they have a lot of questions about books; mostly recommendations. So I have a pretty well-curated list of books to offer to young men when they ask: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerlad. I’ve probably read more work by these authors than I would have otherwise because I coach.

I read and reread these authors so I can pass that information onto young men when they ask. Young men need specific books at a young age. So if I can get these authors into their hands during adolescence, then that’s a win.

You’ve mentioned retiring after a tournament to read E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. What does literature do for you in those moments that nothing else does?

In a word: Beauty. I like reading beautiful prose. I like relaxing with beautiful music. I like looking at beautiful art. Between teaching and coaching, I’m busy all day long. Constant rush. I don’t want to come home to a bright television full of colorful ads or loud pop music. I want to slow down. I want to enjoy the slowness of a well-written book. As Tolstoy put it, “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

Another curiosity of your CV: You regularly champion the classics, books in the so-called Western canon. And yet you’ve published papers on critical race theory, feminism, and topics that would seem to cut against that grain. How do you reconcile those differences? Is there something generalizable for the rest of us that we’re missing?

In my youthful naivete I entered university thinking it was a place to explore new ideas and play around with different theories. So with some of my writings, I found specific theories did something interesting to the topic at hand.

For example, I don’t like it when academics refer to themselves as a “[fill in the blank] theorist.” If a person says “I’m a feminist theorist,” then they tend to see every situation through the lens of sexism. A “critical race theorist” trend to see everything through the lens of race. And there are a lot of instances where I feel academics force a theory onto a situation where it is unfounded.

One thing I stress to my students is that the topic should drive the theory. If I’m exploring a topic and see clear evidence of sexism or something interesting about gender roles, then I use feminist theory to help make sense of that topic. I don’t think there is anything to reconcile in this instance.

I don’t want these controversial theories out of academia. I just want them to be used more judiciously. And I want a space for people (and students) to push back and “maybe sexism doesn’t exist in this instance.” Academia should be full of competing ideas so that we can have interesting conversations and try to figure things out.

As for my love of the Western canon, I don’t see the controversy. A beautifully written book that has long lasting appeal and has influenced the culture is in consideration for the canon. It would be foolish to ignore the feminist critique of George Eliot’s Middlemarch or the racial conservations imbued in Heart of Darkness or Things Fall Apart. And knowledge about Marxism will serve you well when you tackle Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck.

If books and history and culture are allowed to be complicated around these issues, then so am I.

You’ve said that if students don’t encounter Vergil or Chaucer or Dante in school, they simply won’t encounter them at all. And—weirdly, to me—a lot of educators up and down the grade levels have effectively decided that’s not their problem. I’ve argued that most of the reading crisis on college campuses are downstream effects of poor primary education. What’s wrong with the view of these hands-in-the-air educators, and why do you think they’ve given up?

To throw one’s hands in the air is a complete dereliction of duty. Exposing students to these great works is quite literally the job of teachers. Several years ago I made it a point to include hundreds of examples from great books into my college courses’ lesson plans. I don’t cover the entire book, but I’ll find a small scene from a book and use it to illustrate a larger point for the discussion that day. It’s just a small way of keeping these books in the minds of young people.

Additionally, the buck has to stop with someone. So, why can’t it be you? To keep saying, “The kid can’t read is someone else’s fault” just continues to pass on the problem. For crying out loud, be the problem solver! If the kids haven’t read Gatsby, then assign Gatsby!

Some have given up because they are tired. A more devastating reason is because more and more teachers haven’t read these books themselves. We are getting to a critical point where teachers who are now entering the profession haven’t read the books they should have.

How can a teacher teach Pride and Prejudice if they never read it (or worse yet, never even heard of it)? I’m more afraid of this scenario. It’s one thing to “give up.” That can be remedied by demanding teachers teach Great Books. It’s something quite different to be in a position of such extreme ignorance that teachers don’t even know what books kids ought to be reading.

What’s your case against the “let students choose what they read” approach? I can imagine a thoughtful version of that argument—I might even support it to a degree—but you seem to think something important gets lost.

The simple explanation is “when else will students be exposed to the Great Books?” Students will have plenty of time to read whatever they want when they are older and out of school.

Reading in school isn’t just about literacy: Can a student read the words on the page? Reading in school is about passing down cultural heritage. Students need to read the books that shaped their culture. To ignore these books is to rob students of their rightful inheritance.

So it’s about cultural foundations, not personal taste. But foundations for what, exactly?

To understand your current culture, you have to have read the books that helped shape your culture. Your culture wasn’t formed yesterday. It is a process that is centuries in the making. If you want to understand what your forebears were thinking when they created these cultural systems you currently live under, then you ought to read the books they read.

This is Richard Dawkins’s argument for reading the Bible, despite being an atheist. How does one understand Europe without knowledge of the Bible? The art, the architecture, the laws, the literature? We are fish in water who do not understand water. Reading the canon gives us insight into the waters we swim.

What do you think actually happens to a society that stops reading its inherited literature?

A culture that stops reading inherited literature can only live for the present. There is no past and there is no thinking about the future. The only thing that matters is “now.” When you read the canon, you realize that you are part of a long chain of stewards. You inherited something wonderful: Western Civilization. And you feel a duty to pass that civilization onto the next generation so that they too can experience something wonderful.

Shakespeare, Chaucer, Melville, Tolstoy have enriched my life immensely. How dare I keep those works hidden in secret from the next generation? It is my job to share these works so that someone else’s life might be enriched.

You’ve expressed enthusiasm for Jennifer Saint’s Greek mythology novels alongside recommending D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths for kids and Stephen Fry for adults. Some canon purists would say retellings are a distraction from the originals. Are they on-ramps or detours?

On-ramps. I have no problem with adaptations or retellings. Make Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar about Trump. Retell Romeo and Juliet in a 1996 setting with DiCaprio and Danes with gun fights instead of sword fights. I had quite a Twitter/X viral moment a few weeks ago when I expressed an opinion about how the new Wuthering Heights movie need not be a perfect adaptation of the novel. The Twitter/X purists let me have it!

I say, let contemporary artists play around with source material. My only hope is that these sorts of contemporary books and movies will lead audiences back to the original source material.

Here’s a mechanism question that interests me: It’s one thing to put The Odyssey on a syllabus. It’s another for a book to worm its way inside a student and change how they think and feel. What have you seen work in the classroom? What makes the difference between mere assignment and transformation?

My classroom time is limited and my syllabus reading schedule is finite. Yes, classroom reading can feel like a drag even when students ultimately enjoy the book. That’s why I like to “name drop” dozens of books throughout the semester during my lectures. And I always have students who will stop by later for more information about a particular book.

Having a student stop by office hours to discuss some of the books I mentioned always turns into something far more fruitful. We might talk about three or four different books a student might be interested in, and based on that conversation the student will head to the library to check out one.

Seeing and hearing about incredible books (through classroom repetition or scanning a professor’s bookshelf) and then discovering them for oneself seems to be far more transformational.

What about the question of meeting students where they’re at? If students come to you hobbled by crappy primary and secondary education—as I assume is often the case—how do you help bring them up to speed?

This will sound dismissive, but that’s not my intention: Assign shorter books. Not all the classics are as long as War and Peace or as difficult as Ulysses. I’ve assigned The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Metamorphosis, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

These books are easy to read and are fewer than two hundred pages. I want students to read the classics, and if they can only handle a hundred-page book by Hemingway or Tolstoy, then that’s what we’ll read. Hopefully, they enjoy it enough to tackle their longer books after they’ve left my classroom.

If someone wants to venture into the canon and they already know the basics—say, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare—where should they turn next?

This is what is so great about the canon: There are so many paths one can take. I would encourage them to figure out what genre they like. Take the American Lit path and read Twain and Whitman. Or the English Lit path with Dickens and Austen. Or spend time in France with Hugo and Balzac. They can read a bunch of gothic literature by Shelley and Poe. Or a bunch of literature on colonization by Conrad and Achebe. Dive into poetry for a year.

You definitely need the foundation you mentioned. But the canon is big enough where you can start to “pick and choose” based on personal interest after you’ve read a hundred-or-so foundational books.

Final question: You can invite any three authors—I’m not limiting you to classical or canonical figures; anyone is fair game—for a long meal to discuss whatever strikes your fancy. Neither time nor language is an obstacle. Who do you pick, why, and what would that conversation sound like?

Such an impossible question. I’ve stared at this question long enough and I reserve the right to change my answer at any point in the future! But for now, I’ve settled on: Dante, Tolstoy, and Sir Roger Scruton.

More than most, these three have given me insight on “how to live” a meaningful life. And ultimately, actions and behaviors shape the man. Dante provides guidance for living a moral life. Tolstoy (specifically through the characters of Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin in Anna Karenina and Prince Andrei in War and Peace) provide guidance on how to act with dignity, purpose, and duty. Scruton provides reasons as to why we should strive to preserve standards and heritage.

We would talk about how one should act in this life: towards self, towards others, and towards community.

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Since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations celebrates its 250th birthday on March 9, 2026, I thought I’d share my review of O’Rourke’s book; the American Spectator published it back in 2007. I give it to you here, dated references and all.

Despite their obvious differences, Das Kapital and The Wealth of Nations share at least one similarity: Nobody reads them. In the case of Karl Marx, this is no tragedy. Thanks to the colorful antics of history (many of them sticky and sanguinary), anyone can see that the bewhiskered dreamer was full of crap.

Not so with Adam Smith, whose tome revealed profundities from which anyone would profit—that is, unless you count the cost of actually digesting The Wealth of Nations. Any edition of this classic, published in 1776, is big and dense enough to double as a doorstop. Between American Idol and the latest Barack Obama coverage, who’s got the time?

Taking a cue from that thoroughly modern doctrine, “To each according to his attention span,” in steps P.J. O’Rourke with On the Wealth of Nations (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007) to explicate the truths of the great Scottish philosopher.

That is no small task. I speak from experience when I say that had Smith submitted his manuscript to a modern publisher at nine in the morning, it would have been summarily rejected by noon. That underpaid proletariat known as editors would have raised pitchfork and laptop at any text so unnecessarily long. Between the meandering sentences and discursive tangents, any reasonable editor would balk.

In handling Smith, O’Rourke has several advantages over the editors. First, his author is dead. Smith cannot complain that O’Rourke has missed some essential point buried 19 paragraphs into a wild goose chase that the distiller has just deleted. Next, O’Rourke is better paid and working on a more luxurious deadline than the typical editor—which means he can be more patient and gracious with his dearly departed author. Finally, O’Rourke is working from home, which means it’s easier to drink on the job when the job requires it (and this one surely must have).

The result is usually pleasant, generally useful, and refreshingly insightful distillation of Smith: from 900 pages down to 242. Not a bad day at the office.

The best example of O’Rourke’s concision also happens to be the most important for the book, boiling the entire thing down to a simple elevator pitch: “The Wealth of Nations,” he writes, “argues three basic principles and, by plain thinking and plentiful examples, proves them. Even intellectuals should have no trouble understanding Smith’s ideas [of] . . . pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade.”

It’s the Cliffs Notes version or, better, Adam Smith for Dummies (which a quick Amazon search reveals does not yet exist). This “trinity of individual prerogatives”makes a useful guidepost for meandering through the tangle. When Smith is going on about the history of currency, for instance, or handily dismantling the theories of the French physiocrats, readers can know the ultimate relevance is tied to the Big Three.

O’Rourke also does a decent job of intellectual backfill. A common but woefully misinformed criticism of Smith is that he was simply counseling selfishness. But The Wealth of Nations is not a self-help book; it’s a book about how to improve the station of humanity. And it happens to be a sequel. Smith’s first book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, deals with improvement from a moral perspective, while Wealth comes at the same subject from the material angle. To put it in more biblical terms, Smith’s books are the two tablets of the Law—one deals with more lofty concerns, the other says don’t boost your neighbor’s burro.

The whole of the man’s corpus is important to keep in mind because the people who pretend that they’ve read Das Kapital like to think of Smith as a monomaniacal prophet of greed. The critics have it exactly backwards. Smith attacks merchants and government officials (mercantilists) not out of a bizarre devotion to abstract principles but precisely because they are advancing their own good on the backs of others. Even capitalists think that’s bad.

As for Smith’s politics, O’Rourke writes that his views were “conventional” and “mildly reformist.” But in many respects, Smith was as radical as they come. He attacked the guild system and government planning when these were considered part of the natural order—as British as bad teeth and kidney pie. He defended free trade at a time when His Majesty’s government managed international exchange for the benefit of empire generally and London specifically. Though criticizing the American colonists as freeloaders, Smith nonetheless advised that “Great Britain should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies, and leave them to elect their own magistrates, to enact their own laws, and to make peace and war as they might think proper.” This act of goodwill might dispose Americans “to favour us in war as well as in trade, and, instead of turbulent and factious subjects, to become our most faithful, affectionate, and generous allies.”

On all of these points, Smith was eventually vindicated. The value-added for O’Rourke readers is that he shows the myriad ways in which Smith is still being vindicated, bringing the arguments and observations of Wealth to bear on such current headache inducements as the debates over globalization, privatization, even pork-barreling. As O’Rourke quotes Smith, “A great bridge cannot be thrown over at a place where nobody passes, or merely to embellish the views from the windows of a neighboring palace.” Sen. Ted Stevens, call your office.

Some of Smith’s arguments now seem so obvious that readers may wonder why our forebears didn’t see things that way (or why Congress still doesn’t in some cases). This book is a recovery effort, to acquaint a new generation with Smith’s work and his world. It’s no light chore. “Adam Smith,” writes O’Rourke, “helped produce a world of individuality, autonomy, and personal fulfillment, but that world did not produce him.”

Like all books, this one is a mixed bag. The insights are excellent, but the style is at times awkward—perhaps an odd thing to say of such an accomplished stylist. O’Rourke is a wag, a wit, a wisenheimer. His job is to be substantive while making readers snigger. He is a master of this delivery, having pulled off this combo brilliantly in the past; All the Trouble in the World and Eat the Rich are both minor triumphs in their scope and depth and snigger stimuli. But with this volume it sometimes seems as if the shtick is stuck.

There are points at which I wanted more lecture and less lark. It could be a simple problem of misaligned expectations. With authors such as Steven Landsburg, Tim Harford, even Steven Levitt, I’ve grown accustomed to popularizers of economics who explain things effectively, lightly, even humorously, without trying to punctuate every other sentence with a rim shot.

Still, if you want to get a sense of what Smith was trying to say and why it so radically changed the world, then O’Rourke provides an ideal point of departure. It’s either that or slogging on your own through Smith’s tangent about the “Variations in the Value of Silv. . . .” What was that about Obama?

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On one fateful trek to that grand emporium of words in San Jose, while hunting for God knows what, I ran across a reissue of C.S. Lewis’s Studies in Words, originally published in 1960. Of course, I bought it.

But what was it?

The Other C.S. Lewis

Lewis had at least three careers: novelist, lay theologian, and academic. How often is he tagged as an Oxford don? For a certain kind of reader, his academic credentials helped validate his other work, even if it had little to do with, say, his religious writing. But the focus was never on his academic work—only the legitimacy it supposedly conferred.

I guess I was pretty much in this camp. My awareness of Lewis’s scholarship was limited to whatever George Sayer mentioned in his biography (the only biography of Lewis I’d read to that point). Otherwise, I knew Lewis mostly from the Space Trilogy and books like Mere Christianity. I was an adult before I ever read The Chronicles of Narnia.

But Studies in Words was something else, an artifact of a career almost totally obscured by Lewis’s broader reputation. And there was more. Many years later, while visiting one of my authors in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as an editor, I stopped into Poor Richard’s and found another token of this other Lewis: a used copy of The Discarded Image, Lewis’s survey of medieval literature. Based on a series of lectures, Lewis prepared it for publication in 1962, but it wasn’t released until a year following his death in 1963.

By 1960 his celebrity as a popular writer and novelist had crested and he was publishing more academic work again. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, he published only one scholarly work, though it was a beast—maybe his best—took eighteen years to finish, and nearly killed him: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama.

Understandably, none of this academic output rose to the level of fame garnered by books like The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, or his memoir Surprised by Joy. But it’s all worthwhile—especially for readers with an interest in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and literary criticism more broadly.

I’ve since acquired more of Lewis’s scholarship and think, taken together, the eight volumes presented below tell a fascinating story. Read in order of publication, they reveal Lewis working for nearly three decades on a unified critical vision—one that begins with a straightforward but controversial conviction about how we should read, especially old books, and widens into a complete approach for reading literature of any sort.

The Allegory of Love (1936)

Every famous author has a book that first makes their name. For Lewis it was an academic work on the rise of the courtly love tradition in medieval poetry, The Allegory of Love, published in 1936—several years before his later fame as an apologist and children’s author.

The book opens with a trenchant observation, which modern people (me among them) often forget: We are not so different from our forebears as we suppose. “Humanity,” says Lewis, “does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.” The older forms, he says, have left “indelible traces on our minds.”

Those indelible traces have had an effect, however oblivious we are to it. Lewis argues the courtly love tradition did more than produce stirring poetry; by filtering throughout the later Western literary tradition it shaped how we moderns experience romantic love. The idea that love is the supreme human experience was invented, not inevitable, and the allegorical love poets of the Middle Ages were its creators.

Thus, says Lewis, “We shall understand our present, and perhaps even our future, the better if we can succeed by an effort of the historical imagination, in reconstructing that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression.” His method? To help modern readers recapture the feeling of reading such poetry as if we lived in the time of its composition.

A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)

Six years later, Lewis put that method to the test. A Preface to Paradise Lost is an attempt to salvage the reputation of John Milton’s masterwork, which Lewis’s predecessors (such as the Romantics) had misunderstood and his contemporaries (such as T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis) had not only misunderstood but devalued out of their ignorance. The sort of immersive inhabiting of past worlds he had championed in The Allegory of Love would have prevented the misreadings and denigration.

The problem was that later readers had lost touch with Milton’s world and—unable or unwilling to find their way back into the technique of epic poetry and seventeenth-century theology—failed to appreciate what Milton was doing. As a literary critic, Lewis’s lifelong mission was to take the work as the work, whatever it was, whenever it was written. To do that requires delving into the world of the author deep enough to recognize what he was actually trying to do.

Not that the author was always successful in that attempt. Lewis doesn’t hold back on fault-finding. Paradise Lost, he says, reflects “curiously bad” writing in places. But his contention is that we only get to judge a work if we judge it on its own terms and within the world of its creation. To assist that project, Lewis carefully reconstructs the web of assumptions and convictions that formed Milton’s world.

And, as always, Lewis marbles his argument with delightful observations, such as this:

What the Satanic predicament consists in is made clear, as Mr Williams points out, by Satan himself. On his own showing he is suffering from a “sense of injur’d merit” (I, 98). This is a well known state of mind which we can all study in domestic animals, children, film-stars, politicians, or minor poets; and perhaps nearer home. Many critics have a curious partiality for it in literature, but I do not know that any one admires it in life.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954)

With The Allegory of Love and A Preface, Lewis had demonstrated his method on individual traditions and single works. In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama he attempts something far more ambitious: applying it to an entire century of literary production.

Written as a volume in a larger series, the Oxford History of English Literature, the final product proved massive—nearly 700 pages. It was a torture to write but thankfully a pleasure to read, or even just read in, not to mention fascinating. Lewis opens with an argument that’s far more common today but novel in his own time: That Renaissance humanists slandered their medieval forebears by characterizing them as perpetuating the so-called Dark Ages. And modern readers are forced into the humanists’ scheme because our educational system and its concepts are inherited from them—evidenced by the simple fact that we refer to the “medieval” at all. It’s a Renaissance coinage.

Beyond the praiseworthy effort of preserving ancient texts, the humanists actually did more harm than we recognize, principally by codifying their prejudice as good taste and intellectual rigor. Constraining their vision with this set of arbitrary blinders, they proceeded to narrow the options available to writers, leading to what Lewis polemically refers to as the “Drab Age” of prose and verse. “Perhaps every new learning makes room for itself by creating a new ignorance,” he says. “Man’s power of attention seems to be limited; one nail drives out another.”

These Drab Age writers followed the humanists’ conventions about proper style, but mostly produced—as the name suggests—flatfooted, lifeless poetry. And philosophy? Lewis regards humanist philosophy as “a Philistine movement.” It’s not until poets and other writers began to shake off the humanists’ strictures that we get the Golden Age writing of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare (whose sonnets “are the very heart of the Golden Age, the highest and purest achievement of the Golden way of writing”).

Lewis argues that the Golden Age poets succeeded where the Drab Age writers failed precisely because they dropped the blinders and drew upon the full tradition of the classical and medieval past. As a non-scholar and mere dabbler, I can’t judge Lewis’s argument. But it resonates precisely because his overall project resonates: When we judge a period by modern standards—in this case the humanists concocting a novel set of criteria by which they denigrated the medievals—we tend to misunderstand and mischaracterize more than we realize.

Studies in Words (1960)

If recovering a lost world is the goal, language is the first obstacle. To inhabit medieval and Renaissance literature requires understanding the words its authors used. And we don’t. What linguists call false friends (words whose meaning we think we grasp but don’t) abound. “If we read an old poem with insufficient regard for change in the overtones, and even the dictionary meanings, of words since its date . . . then of course we do not read the poem the old writer intended,” says Lewis.

Linguist John McWhorter has made most of a career off his observation that words are always on the move. Studies in Words is Lewis’s attempt to wrangle such commonplace terms as nature, sad, wit, free, sense, and simple, plus several others, along with their foreign counterparts, by delving into each word’s etymological and literary backstory, showing how their meaning and valence have wandered around over the centuries.

“When a word has several meanings historical circumstances often make one of them dominant during a particular period,” says Lewis, and that dominant sense comes most readily to mind when we read it—regardless of the meaning intended by an author and some distant remove. “Whenever we meet the word, our natural impulse will be to give it that sense. When this operation results in nonsense, of course, we see our mistake and try over again. But if it makes tolerable sense our tendency is to go merrily on. We are often deceived.” For words that regularly trip us up, he supplies the term “the dangerous sense.”

This is exactly what’s behind McWhorter’s controversial recommendation that we “update” Shakespeare so the Bard’s intended meaning can be communicated in words that map closer to our dominant sense today. Failing that suggestion, one could always read Lewis’s Studies in Words instead.

An Experiment in Criticism (1961)

Partway through this decades-long project, Lewis paused to ask the questions his work had been assuming an answer to all along: Why does any of this matter? What makes one way of reading better than another? What is good reading in the first place?

The standard answer points not to reading but to supposedly good books—and their counterpart, the bad ones, which are to be avoided. That’s what the humanists did with the medievals; that’s what T.S. Eliot did with Milton. But Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism flips the typical approach to literary evaluation on its head. Rather than starting with some Platonic ideal of the “right books,” and then sorting readers by their allegiance to this canon—sheep on one hand, goats on the other—Lewis says we should start working from the other direction, with how people actually engage with the books they read. After all, so his argument runs, it’s easier to define a good reader than a good book.

Consider the latter. Lewis points out that books—even prized examples—slip in and out of fashion. Milton didn’t change; the culture did. Suddenly it signals bad taste to say you enjoy him, esteem him, whatever. Even if we assume there’s a real, transcendent canon to which we might appeal (there isn’t), taste and popularity sway back and forth across the line like an inebriated driver during a 2 a.m. sobriety check.

But what if we’re focused on the wrong element in the equation? Lewis draws a distinction between the unliterary and the literary. The unliterary “use” a book; the literary “receive” it. You can already see how this ties into the argument he’s been making in his prior books.

For unliterary readers, books are a last resort—something to pick up when there’s nothing better to do, a source of information, or escapist wish-fulfillment, consumed once and never revisited. The unliterary reader imposes his subjectivity on the book and stays in control of the experience.

For literary readers, on the other hand, books are essential. They return to them, surrender to the author’s vision, and often find themselves transformed by the encounter. The literary reader surrenders their subjectivity and hands the steering wheel to the author, usually coming back from the experience enlarged. That’s primarily why the literary read at all, says Lewis. We’re not killing time. We’re not mining for takeaways. “My own eyes are not enough for me,” he says, “I will see through those of others.”

Based on this distinction, Lewis defines a “good” book as one that rewards and sustains the kind of immersive experience literary readers want. By that definition anything might be fair game, provided it’s artfully constructed and masterfully executed—even, as Lewis suggests, science fiction. And a bad book? It’s one that unliterary people might well love, but literary people can’t stand. (Dan Brown, you still writing?)

This approach reframes the whole Milton controversy. Eliot’s problem wasn’t with Paradise Lost in itself. He was measuring the poem against the modern literary fashion he advocated, not receiving it for what it is. I could say more about this book, and hopefully will someday; Eliot was, for instance, far from unliterary. But Lewis says that the literary are the most susceptible to—no big surprise—literary fads, which leads them to confidently misjudge work they don’t actually understand.

The Discarded Image (1964)

Seeing through the eyes of others requires more than literary willingness to surrender to an author’s vision. As the prior books demonstrate, it requires entering into the world of the author with enough knowledge to navigate the terrain without stubbing our toes and twisting our ankles—at least no more than necessary. In The Discarded Image, Lewis hands us a compass.

Lewis positions it as a survey of medieval and Renaissance literature, but in many ways it is an introduction to the medieval mind, which he conceives as a complete worldview (or what philosopher Charles Taylor would call a “social imaginary”) that harmonized the diverse philosophies, poetry, histories, homilies, and satires inherited from Christian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, and barbarian sources.

Lewis rummages through the classical and early medieval sources—for instance, Lucan, Cicero, and Apuleius for the former and Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Macrobius for the latter. From there he launches into a wide-ranging exploration of medieval literature focused on its authors’ unique understanding of the natural world, the celestial world, history, the soul, human physiology, and education.

As with all of Lewis’s work, he’s delightfully opinionated; he calls Isidore’s Etymologies “a work of very mediocre intelligence.” But he’s also willing to take the medieval world on its own terms. Sometimes there’s little good to say about it. Plenty of medieval literature, says Lewis, suffers from “sheer, unabashed, prolonged dullness.” But it also serves up Dante, Malory, and Chaucer.

Returning to the primary theme of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, Lewis says the medievals could produce Dante, Malory, and Chaucer—and many, many others—in part because they were free of the “pseudo-classical” burdens later imposed by the humanists.

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966)

With the medieval worldview reconstructed, Lewis turns to particular authors and works. This posthumous collection, edited by Lewis’s secretary Walter Hooper, picks up the thread of The Discarded Image and invites readers to dive into the past and its presuppositions. At the outset, Lewis compares reading old literature to traveling to a foreign country. You can do it as a mere visitor—or you can go deeper.

You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature you can go beyond the first impression that a poem makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period, you can then re-enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives; now perhaps seeing that the associations you gave to the old words were false, but the real implications were different from what you supposed, that what you thought strange was then ordinary and that what seemed to you ordinary was then strange.

Unlike The Discarded Image, which mostly focuses on the features of the medieval worldview, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature emphasizes particular authors and their works: Dante’s Comedy, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Tasso’s Gerusalemme and Furioso, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Layamon’s Brut, a 16,000-line epic tracing British mythic history from its founding through King Arthur.

And what does the native perspective reveal about these writers? These medieval writers didn’t work as moderns do. They both slavishly followed the original material they worked with and cavalierly altered it to suit their needs. What’s more, they were working with the hodgepodge leftovers of Rome’s slow demise, the persistence and development of local traditions, and other literary odds and ends. They tried reworking this heterogeneous, self-contradictory pile into a harmonious whole.

It was apparently difficult to believe that anything in the books—so costly, fetched from so far, so old, often so lovely to the eye and hand, was just plumb wrong. No; if Seneca and St Paul disagreed with one another, and both with Cicero, and all these with Boethius, there must be some explanation which would harmonize them. . . . It is out of this that the medieval picture of the universe is evolved: a chance collection of materials, an inability to say ‘Bosh’, a temper systematic to the point of morbidity, great mental powers, unwearied patience, and a robust delight in their work. All these factors led them to produce the greatest, most complex, specimen of syncretism or harmonization which, perhaps, the world has ever known. They tidied up the universe.

And so the originality and inventiveness of Dante, Malory, and the rest is in part an attempt to use the familiar in unfamiliar ways. But we miss what they were doing if we’re unfamiliar with what to them was commonplace. That’s the cost of being a tourist rather than a native. And it’s what Lewis spent his academic career trying to remedy—work that carried on even after his death.

Selected Literary Essays (1969)

The final book I’ll mention? Another posthumous collection, again chosen by Hooper, gathering essays spanning Lewis’s entire career, from the 1930s through the early 1960s. Where most of the books I’ve covered so far emphasize the period Lewis knew best as a scholar, Selected Literary Essays ranges all over—covering such authors as Shakespeare, Bunyan, Austen, Kipling, Scott, Shelley, not to mention four-letter words, Freudian literary criticism, and high- and low-brow culture.

His treatment of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—a book I do not enjoy in the slightest—is an example of his critical method in action. Lewis admits to finding Bunyan’s theology “somewhat repellent” and says a couple of passages “will not prevent drowsiness.” But by and large it is, in Lewis’s estimation, a ripping good read. Stylistically, the book is rich. Bunyan displays “a perfect, natural ear, a great sensibility for the idiom and cadence of popular speech. . . .” But many people stumble over its pages because, he says, they no longer understand how allegory works. In keeping with everything we’ve seen thus far, he suggests readers “mov[e] always into the book, not out of it. . . .”

I don’t know if Hooper intended it this way, but the collection serves as a coda to a long and productive career, showcasing Lewis’s critical method across periods and genres with a consistency that confirms the unity of his scholarly project. Whether writing about a medieval allegory or a modern novel, the underlying commitment is the same one he demonstrated in The Allegory of Love at the beginning: venture into the work, inhabit its world, and only then presume to judge.

For Lewis, the point was never antiquarian. He wasn’t trying to turn modern readers into medievalists. He was trying to free us from the tyranny of our own moment—the assumption that how we see things now is how things have always been. When we do that, we fail to understand how things really were, and we also fail to understand how we came to be how we are. Reading old books and reading them well is the cure for what he dubbed “chronological snobbery.”

And that’s the eventual answer to the question about Studies in Words. What was it? A window not so much into the past but into understanding itself. To read well is to escape the prison of the present, even our own mind, and inhabit another consciousness. The unliterary? They probably regard it as an eccentric, unproductive way to pass the day. But the literary? They recognize it as one of the most important—and rewarding—things a human being can do.

Postscript. If Miller’s Book Review 📚 has a patron saint, it might as well be Lewis. I’ve written a fair bit about him and his work: his career-long tiff with T.S. Eliot and how they became friends near the end of Lewis’s life; Eliot’s kindness after the death of Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman; the arduous process of writing English Lit in the 16th Century; Lewis’s friendship with Tolkien; Lewis’s fame before the Narnia phenomenon; his reliance on eastern sources in the Narnian universe; a review of Lewis’s greatest novel—greatest book!—Till We Have Faces; accounting for Lewis’s ongoing fame and the afterlife of one book in particular, The Abolition of Man; and more. Hit the site search for Lewis and range at will.

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