The cherry orchard that survives in Chekhov’s play of the same name is not the one that we are greeted to within its first pages. We are greeted in a land of mystique, one where color and business and the Earth thrive as one. It is the Ranevskaya family’s prized possession, and rightfully so.

For without the orchard, the land on which they have made their livelihood, the land under which their reputation thrives, the Ranevskayas are another family in community around them. They are not the community themselves. Remove it and the structure collapses, revealing what was always true: they are ordinary people who happened to inherit something extraordinary

Wealth has a way of narrowing vision even as it expands possibility. Even in the broadest of fields, the largest of communities, we are unable to see past our own reflection. It was only a matter of time before the Ranevskayas stood in their beloved orchard unable to see the world reshaping itself around them. They are cherry blossoms mistaking themselves for the tree. Beautiful, beloved, and already falling.

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If you look at a traditional portrait of Urania, one of the nine Greek muses, she’s looking at the stars. Stretching her hands towards the heavens, as if in a motion to bind the two, to see if someone would reach out from the other side.

The distance between ourselves and the unknown is intimidating. It’s not often that we feel the comfort, the strength to reach out as Urania did.

One night while drifting away, a sailor became lost at sea, the vengeful, unforgiving gods preventing any light from illuminating his path. It was only until he pleaded out to the muses, to Urania, that a single star pierced the skyline, bringing him home.

The music world’s latest sensation, Iona Bielby, had something similar to tell me: “Whenever you feel creatively stuck, you just have to look for the stars around you.”

Having hosted her Stargazer podcast and YouTube series for over a year now, Bielby is ready to move on from the innovative set and format she’s built – chatting with popular London musicians while laying in a homemade fort – and on to the stars themselves. The choosing to be still when everything around you insists on acceleration. The act of lying on your back, of letting your eyes adjust to darkness, of waiting for meteors that may or may not appear.

Stars simply don’t care about your schedule, your deadlines, your five-year plan. They don’t care about the traditional music rollout, the overly-polished, corporate finished campaigns that flood our streets. They exist without purpose. They burn bright, simply because that’s what stars do.

At first glance, Stargazer is a welcoming space – “sweet and gentle”, as Bielby calls it. But inside the gentleness, the warmth, is something holding much more than the weight of its two guests. There’s a “real distaste for modern day artist promo cycles” expressed through the show, she insists, challenging everything traditional you may think about music journalism. You may pause a little too soon. You may leave lighter. You may even leave haunted.

The migration from fabric caves and Internet echo chambers to celestial amphitheaters will change the frequency of everything. Out there, surrounded by light, by everything, by nothing, words will learn new gravities and music will find new ways to lean into its impact. Compared to where it started, to the moment you’ve first entered Bielby’s space, the conversation can end as a constellation; scattered points of brightness, of art, of humanity that only make sense from a distance.

The stardust won’t blind you. Reach out and try it yourself.

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The suspicion that what once felt like choice was, in fact, predetermined is inevitable. Careers that may have felt predetermined. Cities that may have felt structured to make you fail, to make you feel as if everyone else – those you loved, you’ve wanted to love – were on a different playing field than you.

It can also make it easy to forget what you want.

This is part of the reason why Kelsey Clarke is neither a writer nor an artist nor an actress nor an aspiring therapist. When I spoke with her recently regarding her recent Substack success and her work, she shared this sentiment. When you try to do twenty different things, it is hard to keep your hand in all of the cookie jars and come up with the treat you desire.

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As with many creatives, Clarke chose the route of culture and money and surviving in misstructured cities for the larger portion of her young adulthood. Working in international relations and consulting before choosing her passion, it felt like the suspicion had manifested itself. One decision followed another until the shape of a life appeared without ever being chosen.

She has a name for it now – the streamlined dream – a way of moving through the world where life slowly narrows itself into something easier to carry, easier to explain, like a room that rearranges itself each night. By morning, you no longer remember where anything used to be.

However, it is not a streamlined dream to want to connect with others around you. It is not a streamlined dream to want to talk to your neighbor, to want someone to ask how your day’s been or how it will be or what your dream is. And yet, these are the desires that remain when everything else is stripped away. Small and inconvenient and difficult to quantify and thus so, so hard to ignore.

If you are to be a writer, your work begins with admitting that these small desires are not distractions from a life, but the material of it. That attention is not something you arrive at, but something you practice, again and again, until it begins to resemble meaning.

The protagonists of Krasznahorkai’s Satantango are nothing more than Hungarians wandering for purpose in their poverty-stricken town. They circle the same roads, follow the same rumors, and gather around the same hope that someone, someday, is coming to save them.

Still, there is something to keep them motivated on these rainy, gloomy winter days. Enough for them to know that they can control their environment, that they have the autonomy to persevere as a community. You have more agency than you believe, Clarke told me, as if she was speaking to the villagers themselves, enough to push them towards action and appreciation for the life around them.

Enough, perhaps, for her to hold multiple selves at once and thrive. A writer, an artist, an actress, a therapist. Lives that had moved through cities, through villages, through versions of herself that never fully disappeared. Something, somewhere, has not been lost.

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During the intro to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, the unnamed narrator takes her place at a film screening. We don’t know where it is, how many people were there, or even what film it was. The director of the film begins by discussing the evening, followed by their theory of “pure cinema” – what it means to produce film at the highest level.

Pure cinema, according to the director, wasn’t an intricate theory of parts and indigestible terms provided by decades of theory and critique. It was the “interplay of light and dark, expressed as a kind of rhythm, over time.” The highest form of cinema, the grandest display of the art form was simply the notion of light and dark, expressed over time.

The criterion of judgment for this highest form of cinema in the present day is certainly different than Smith’s idea in Swing Time, a competition flooded by inflated accolades and awards almost too overwhelming to keep count of. Vertical short forms have flooded talent markets. Short and indie films are far too expensive to be widely made. And modern day feature films are far too competitive, far too complex to keep up with its characters nonetheless its reputations.

The novel moves from here at a remarkable pace, following the narrator and her friend’s development as titular swing dancers. One is a poet; gliding, elegant, making music of her own with her feet. The other is a politician; ungraceful, straightforward, struggling to balance her movements with her thoughts.

One is black and white; the other is filled with color. It is only together that they embody the director’s theory better than any screen could: the interplay of light and dark, rhythm expressed across years instead of minutes. Pure cinema happens in the space between two bodies learning to trust each other’s weight, in the way feet find rhythm that hands and hearts will follow, in the slow accumulation of touch and adjustment until two separate people move as one organism, their friendship written first in muscle and bone before it ever reaches language.

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If you were at the center of the world, could you stand the attention?

Could you stand the eyeballs of everyone you passed gravitating towards you? Could you stand the pressure the world brings with it, the expectations and the demands?

In Spike Lee’s He Got Game, Jesus Shuttleworth is a profoundly popular high-school basketball prospect. His game is undeniable, but neither is the pressure he consistently takes on: from colleges, from agents, from opponents, from the media.

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But clouding over every decision he makes, every person he talks or doesn’t talk to, is a loved one. A loved one that has not been a part of his life for a while, but has loomed over his personality. A loved one who made his fair share of bad decisions in the past yet still wanted to determine his family’s future. It was his father, Jake, and he had just gotten released from prison.

At the center of the world, and at the center of this film, is a person trying to distinguish between who loves them and who simply cares for them. Between a person who is there for them now and a person who will be there for them later.

When you’re the center of the world, relationships that should be unconditional can become conditional. The people closest to you stop asking what you want and start telling you what you’re capable of, as if potential is the same thing as obligation, as if being good at something means you owe it to everyone to become great in exactly the way they’ve imagined.

At the climax of the film, Jesus does what he does best, only this time with his father. One-on-one, the terms brutally simple: if Jake wins, Jesus goes to his father’s desired school, and if Jesus wins, Jake returns to prison and they never speak again. Winning something may mean someone loses everything.

As people, we make our most consequential decisions not in moments of clarity but in the murky territory where love and obligation become indistinguishable. But we are not the center of the world. We may not carry the attention of millions, of thousands, but we do carry the attention of tens of those in our lives.

Jesus wins and his father, to his dismay, is sent back to prison. He earns the right to walk away clean, and the terms are clear — he never has to see Jake again, never has to carry the weight of his father’s mistakes or desperate need for redemption.

And then Jesus chooses his father’s school anyway. The game gave him freedom, but freedom wasn’t enough. The game gave him attention, but attention wasn’t enough. The heaviest weight that he carried, the catalyst for his decision, was not the eyes of millions. It was the knowledge that someone he loved was still waiting to see if he would choose them over himself

At the center of the world, or at the center of just ten people’s worlds, the question remains the same: when the person you love needs something from you that costs everything, can you stand the attention of knowing they’re watching, waiting, hoping you’ll choose them despite every reason not to.

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At the turn of the 20th century, philosopher Henri Bergson risked his career, reputation, and entire field of study to discuss a widely ignored human phenomenon: laughter. To take comedy seriously – a field known solely by clowns, by jesters, by proletariats – was to admit something fundamental about human nature, he argued, to look past the limits one could impose on their communities. Comedians were simply exposing the moment when the script slips.

What Bergson couldn’t have accounted for, however, were comedians raised in a raucous Philadelphia culture. Nor comedians that were triplets. Nor comedians working in abysmal economies, fired from their jobs only to be offered the same one back at a lower wage.

Caroline Timoney, LA-based comedian, however, can account for these specifics. In fact, she lives them.

Growing up with multiple siblings always comes with certainties, and competition is one of them. For Timoney, that competition led to artistry. Being creative, someone who brought something into the world, was what separated her from her siblings, she told me recently. It’s easy to see why; she talks timidly, but with energy, letting her facial expressions do most of the talking while the words arrive a beat later.

Her latest monthly stand-up show, Babe Stopppp, feels almost like an extension of these instincts. The quick pacing, the ability to recognize the shape of a joke and the audience’s reaction before even publishing it. Years of posting viral short-form comedy on TikTok trained a kind of reflex: noticing the strange rhythm of a moment and delivering it before the audience has time to do something else. Editing, she admits, has never been her favorite part of the process anyway. The joke either lands or it doesn’t.

Comedy, however, rarely begins with certainty. It rarely begins with the feeling of knowing what you’re going to say, when you’re going to say it, and exactly how you’re going to get there.

And it is never comfortable.

More often, it begins somewhere embarrassingly small. A failed job. A bad rule. A conversation you weren’t supposed to be a part of in the first place.

During her time at Georgetown, Timoney studied political science, the kind of major that prepares you for very serious conversations about very serious things. The campus was full of them — future diplomats, future policy advisors, future people who spoke neatly about the world. The contrast between her passion and her studies was hard to ignore.

Perhaps more than her Georgetown peers, Timoney knows that the moment someone begins taking themselves too seriously, the joke has already started writing itself. It’s the same instinct Bergson was chasing a century earlier, though he pursued it in the most serious way possible: by standing at a lectern and delivering lectures about laughter. Ten years after Laughter’s publication, he would speak at the University of Birmingham:

“But he who is sure, absolutely sure, of having produced a work which will endure and live, cares no more for praise and feels above glory, because he is a creator, because he knows it, because the joy he feels is the joy of a god.”

The joy that we feel, that Timoney feels, when we make someone laugh is not one of isolation. It is not one of clowns or of jesters or of overly forward government students. It may, for a moment at least, feel a little like being a god.

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If you drive down 95 enough, the states will stand out just as much as you thought they would blend in with one another. I have a friend and he once confided in me that he had never been all the way down the coast, but it didn’t matter. If you made it far enough, there was enough information to generalize.

There is a lot of attention placed these days on famous actors, influencers, musicians, and the press tours they embark on for their latest projects. All of the stunts that are performed, the climbing on top of the Vegas Sphere, the ads run in local newspapers cosplaying everyday life from the outside. From Los Angeles to Atlanta to Dubai, it is never enough to settle along the Interstate, to remain in one spot for the duration of the tour.

The concept of the road trip is almost entirely and uniquely American, and this sudden lack of attention span and inability to sit still has led to its renaissance. Nearly 2 billion people plan to take a road trip at some point throughout the year, hoping to make their mark on the country’s best destinations.

My friend is about to take their first road trip, and there is a sense of awe nearly identical to that surrounding glamorous publicity tours. He is making his debut to the country and the country is making his debut to him. There are a lot of questions that could be asked of him: What are you looking forward to most? Where do you think your favorite spot will be?

The country, though, will not ask questions of him. It will assume who he is, where he came from, and where he is off to. It will offer him only what it offers everyone—a version of itself that may or may not resemble what he imagined, a truth that exists regardless of whether he’s ready to see it. What he’ll find along those interstates is a country in the middle of asking itself what it wants to be.

The weather will be great, I have been told, for most of his trip. I am nothing but eager and excited. However, it is raining a lot where I am in Los Angeles these days, and I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing.

Clint Eastwood’s 2004 film Million Dollar Baby opens with blood. An up-and-coming fighter, resting in his corner, with a gift from his opponent: a newly-busted eye.

The narrator proclaims that Frankie, Eastwood’s character, was already “the best cut man in the game.” He was a man who’d had blood on his hands for years. Not necessarily his own, but those he was caring towards, those he had been gifted the opportunity to patch up, repair, make anew for another day, another round.

It is not with blood, however, that Frankie patches up the protagonist, Maggie, and shapes her into a championship-level fighter. Before her prized fight, the climax of the film, she barely even gets hit. It’s a remarkable feat, watching a stubbornly misogynistic Frankie coach a Rocky Balboa-esque Maggie to a title fight without even having to tend to her wounds.

Thus, it’s a shaky surprise to both the characters and the viewer when Maggie breaks her spine in her pursuit of the title–knocking her out, shipping her back home, and rendering her unable to walk for the rest of her life. Frankie, not only a stubbornly misogynistic man, but also a stubbornly repressed man, is left with the unbearable weight that the process of euthanasia holds.

Films, and people, pride themselves on the Herculean ending. Regardless of how improbable the task seems, we don’t want, but need to believe that our beloved protagonists will succeed. It’s the most remarkable feat of storytelling, how cognitive dissonance vanishes in the face of hope. Disregard the fact that the hero is a talking bear, the alternative is too crushing to bear.

Maggie wants to die. The film makes no secret of that. Why, then, is it so unfathomable to us that she does?

There’s a certain kind of vulnerability that comes with touching someone’s blood. In being the “cut man”, whether literally or figuratively. Holding someone’s blood means you are not holding them, the person, the character, the living, but rather the essence of them, the function, the whole, the dying.

It is so unfathomable to us that Maggie inevitably dies in the way that we are held culpable for such a death. In the way that we provoked, supported, pushed her to take this life’s path. In the way that we have seen her blood but have refused to touch it.

The film does not close with blood in the same sense that it opened with. It closes with the blood of realizing a dream without living it out in its entirety, without reaping its rewards, its realities. The blood of sleepwalking through life and shaking yourself awake just moments after.

The blood of the reality of touching someone else’s.

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It was 100 years ago to the day, and yet people were struggling. Japan had just elected a new leader. The world around it had suffered from coups, from militant governments, from the wake of the travesty it had brought upon itself. Parisians struggled to balance the weight of their citizens with the value of foreigners that had so desperately fought to live there.

It was 200 years ago to the day, and yet people were struggling in different ways. The Era of Good Feelings had just come to a halt, dividing the nation into two staunchly different political sects. The Presidential election had been disputed by thousands of people, causing even more disarray in a fractioned state. Pedro I was abdicated as King of Portugal, ushering in an era marked by scandal, authoritarianism, and distrust.

It was 2,000 years ago to the day, and yet people were conquered. The world was predominantly ruled by one empire. The average life expectancy was nearly 35 years, with child and infant mortality leading the way. Summers were amongst the coldest on Earth, the rains wiping out nearly any progress that the Mediterranean farmers had made.

It was 4.5 billion years ago, before memory, before history, before anyone was around to feel the weight of either. Time, as it was, would come to keep two sets of records.

It was 2,000 years ago to the day. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was being copied and shared across the Roman world. Scholars in Alexandria were preserving texts that would carry human knowledge through the darkness ahead. Remarkably, glassblowing had just been invented, transforming sand into transparency.

It was 200 years ago to the day. Felix Mendelssohn had just completed the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French inventor, captured the very first photograph, one that still survives to this day. The Last of the Mohicans, a monumental snapshot of American history, was first published and distributed to the Philadelphian masses.

It was 100 years ago to the day. The United Kingdom general strike began promptly, urging the government to act on behalf of its laborers. Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to successfully swim the distance from France to England, crossing the channel herself. Winnie the Pooh made its debut before charming millions of households and children across the globe.

It is today, some 2,000 years later. And there is nothing to look forward to but tomorrow.

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He’d played for them way back when, he said. Back in younger, spry days. How’d you end up here?

You ever see my face on a baseball card?

What Jimmy Piersall, the all-illusive cook, won’t tell you is that he signed his first professional contract at 18, making his debut just two years later. That two years after that, he had become the team’s starting center fielder and set the Red Sox club record for hits in a nine-inning game (six!).

And that by the time he was twenty-three years old, he was in a mental hospital.

This, by all metrics of American stigmatism, is where the story is supposed to end. This is where the hero falls and is doomed to spend the rest of his life in darkness, remembered as nothing more than a has-been or wasted talent.

In 1952, America did not have a language for what was happening to Jimmy Piersall. Baseball, in all of its supposed complexities, was not a game of vocabulary. It was a game of bodily injuries, of speed, of skill, of the innate human skill to put the ball in play. The mind was never in play. The mind was supposed to stay out of the way and let the body do what bodies do.

There is not much more to say about Pearsall’s story during this time of his life. We know that Danvers, Massachusetts was his home. We know that bipolar disorder was the classification given to his thoughts, his actions. We know that he was placed in a straightjacket and parts of his memory were erased.

This is the part of the story that gets condensed into one paragraph. The part deemed too uncomfortable for the mythology, the precursor for what is to come. It’s the often-written rule of American heroism: you can break, but only if you come back stronger.

Jimmy Pearsall was yet another entry into the book of American mythology. In 1955, he published an op-ed with sportswriter Al Hirshberg titled “They Called Me Crazy–And I Was.” Later that year, the pair published “Fear Strikes Out,” an even more personal account of his struggles. And two years later, Anthony Perkins would play him in the film adaptation of the same name.

The line between spectacle and suffering, between patient and celebrity had been blurred on his own fruition. We stand in the bleachers watching lives unfold like innings, cheering the dramatic plays, leaving during the quiet stretches. How quickly we forget that beneath every uniform is a body trying to make it home.

There is no sense of “bad” that people are uncomfortable with. It is the same reason why evil is considered such a redeemable quality. Once people become comfortable with something taboo enough to be considered “bad”, it is no longer taboo. It is no longer “bad” if and only if they can understand its motivations.

It is the reason why almost 30 years after Barry Bonds set the homerun record, baseball fans and non-fans alike still sympathize with his steroid usage. It was common for his time, they will say, there were others using as well. Not one analyst will bring up the greatest-of-all-time discussion without mentioning Barry Bonds–despite being recognized internationally as someone who very openly broke the rules of the game. What was once scandalous becomes, with time and understanding, merely complicated.

There is no better way to describe it than a national disillusionment of sorts. For heroes we can celebrate without qualification. For villains we can condemn without empathy. For stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends, rather than the ongoing, unresolved nature of actual human experience.

After his playing days ended, Piersall moved to the broadcast booth. First with the Rangers, then alongside the iconic Harry Caray with the White Sox. The very qualities that had once marked him as unstable—his impulsivity, his candor, his refusal to filter—were so swiftly rebranded as refreshing honesty, as color commentary. The same behavior that had been deemed symptomatic was now celebrated as personality.

The world never quite understood that Piersall’s greatest achievement was never athletic at all. It was surviving in a world that had no language for what he was experiencing, that preferred silence to truth, that wanted its heroes simple and its villains simpler still.

In fact, as Jimmy said, it was a blessing to have such an ending, “the best break [he] ever got was getting fired by the White Sox back in 1983.”

~~

Fear Strikes Out describes Jimmy in three declarative statements:

“Jimmy, who fell in love with the same all-consuming energy that he lived.”

“Jimmy, who faced the teenage problem of a boy whose father drove him to the edge of desperation.”

“Jimmy, who balanced on the ragged edge of rage and violence, twisted and trapped by a world he never made.”

How easy it is to reduce a life to poetry. To capture a human being in amber phrases that sound profound but miss the breathing, bleeding reality.

It is so easy, in fact, that we just fell victim a few pages ago. Jimmy who made sandwiches. Jimmy who remembered to call on birthdays. Jimmy who cried at unexpected moments for reasons he couldn’t articulate. Jimmy who fought his teammates. Jimmy who took his medication every morning for fifty years.

This is what gets lost in our desire for memorable phrases, for stories that read nice. The messy humanity. The contradictions. The fact that we are all, at different moments, heroes and villains in our own narratives. We will never meet professional baseball players in our lives, and some of us have never even played the game. It is both heroic and villainous that we have made a spectacle of them. We are both the heroes and the villains of their stories.

As I said earlier, it’s not easy to watch something die. The stadiums where Piersall played have been replaced with palaces of gambling. The lithium he took has been supplanted by newer medications with different mechanisms. The language around mental illness has evolved from “nervous breakdown” to something more representative.

Jimmy Piersall did not die a comfortable death. His death was not celebrated as much as a stigma breakthrough as much as a stigma validator – he was the MLB’s crazy guy that became famous through Hollywood success.

Jimmy Pearsall did not die a comfortable death. He died consumed.

In 1963, just eight years after his return to major league baseball, he hit his 100th career homerun. He dropped his bat, looked towards the dugout, and slowly, definitively started to run the bases backwards, trying to balance himself while wondering if this time maybe – just maybe – someone would see him.

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There’s a folder on someone’s phone right now – perhaps yours – titled ‘inspiration’ or ‘goals’ or just ‘maybe,’ and it’s full of other people’s mornings. Other people’s bookshelves. Other people’s explanations for the mysteries of our day-to-day life.

It is both fascinating and disappointing to think of these images as our modern-day idols. To think that such obsessions can lead to psychological torment and relationship trauma and self-hate. They may not take physical, spiritual form as they used to, but idols are ever-present in digital life – entire economies built around singular celebrity figures. The singularity of our beliefs, our worship, our imitation of such figures is at once astonishing and self-evident.

As Amanda Montell puts it:

“After all, how inefficient would it be to need all week to appraise a potential mentor, or to assemble a whole panel of perfectly qualified specialists – one for career insights, one for creative inspiration, another for fashion advice? To choose a sole role model for everything, based on hasty but overall sound generalizations, is simply a superior use of one’s tight psychological budget.”

To see the flaws in idolizing a sole figure in your life, whether it be a social media megastar or a sleeper-businessman laying around in billions of dollars, is evident. We are immediately confronted with generalizations and biases that lead to entirely warped perceptions not only of the idol, but of the qualities we are trying to mimic of them.

However, if I were to become a social media megastar, a wide variety of idols, of role models come to mind for inspiration and visualization: a talent manager for my career insights, a chronically online student for trend pulse-checking, an agent for brand partnerships, an unemployed neighbor for camera work – the list of experts, or prospective, help grows on and on. The resources available to one who can free themselves from this individuality is seemingly evergrowing.

But it is not efficient. The early bird who siphons between one worm for nourishment, another for taste, and another for its proximity to its nest, is no longer considered a catchy anecdote.

Children have developed this optimization for seemingly random aspects of life in its most primal form – they’ll eat only the center of the sandwich. Not because the crust tastes bad but because they’ve decided, before the grand age of six, that the middle is the best part so why waste time on anything else? They’ll learn and they’ll grow and they’ll change, we think, but what if they don’t? The point is that the middle tastes good and they like it and that, we think, is enough.

Only a tolerance for inefficiency, a return to the instinct that knew eating the middle was, indeed, not enough, a channeling of that early bird who has developed a system for three wildly different worms can define one’s character in an overoptimized world. Those who can read without needing the summaries, those who can work without a third or fourth sense of stimulation, those who can drive simply with two hands instead of the primal urge to just use one.

Some mornings are just mornings, the ones we use to sift through other people’s folders, their images, our idolatry, yes, but they are just mornings. Slow and particular and belonging to no one but the person living inside them. And the worm, if it comes, comes.

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There’s an old Kafka parable about a man who spends his life waiting at the gate of Law, the gatekeeper preventing him from moving further, where he understands he will be met with more gatekeepers and obstacles themselves. It is only until the man ages, time drifting away from himself, that the gatekeeper reveals to him that the gate has been open the whole time–he was simply never able to take the first step.

I like to think that there is an alternate version of this story. One where the man realizes the opening in the gate and steps through, before being met with the second gatekeeper. The second gatekeeper keeps him for a year before allowing him through to the third, who does the same until the fourth, and so on until the man finds himself returning to the bliss of the first story, choosing to sit outside until an inner peace is found.

Or, a third version. The man steps up to the gate and asks the gatekeeper why, if he is the only one waiting, he can’t be let through immediately. The gatekeeper claims that he has been instructed not to let anyone inside the law at this moment, and to do so would mean a sure end to his career and wellbeing. The man can hear footsteps on the other side, perhaps from residents, from laborers, he assumes. He struts forward, pushing open the gate itself, only to find that the footsteps were not residents of the law, but the gatekeepers themselves, waiting there as if to expect – and promptly reject – the man’s arrival.

As I put these together, however, it became evident that whether the man waits, advances step by step, or forces his way through makes no difference as to his outcome. Kafkaesque writing is defined by patience, obedience, and a growing defiance against an existential world. But the limits we confront in modern life are often less about the things we touch, the money we count than the architecture of the world we inhabit. For what barred the man was not the particular gatekeeper or the order of gates, but the inescapable structure of the Law itself.

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Throughout the course of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is rarely one voice. There is rarely a thread onto which the reader can hang, following its thoughts and crafting the narrative, the perfectly satisfying conclusion that we all desire. The voices, the characters, the locations themselves all merge into a unified, distinct, epitome of the story’s message, regardless of the novel’s narrator, regardless of the events themselves.

Everything, we can say, is subjective.

Upon its release in the early 19th century, such subjectivity was not celebrated. The complexity of the novel’s characters and interpretations was treated as an objective failure. “A tissue of disgusting and horrible absurdity”, the novel was often dismissed as nothing more than as “improbable and overstrained.” Reading alone was deemed insufficient; without maker’s knowledge, without proximity to the act of creation itself, the novel’s ambition was mistaken for excess.

When writing such criticism, or even partaking in everyday conversation, it can be remarkably easy to form an opinion. To shape your thoughts in such a way that an opinion is king, far removed from the outstanding evidence that presents itself to you. An opinion that can criticize or support is less nuanced than we think.

However, it is far more complacent to do such, to form an opinion, when criticizing something. To write a criticism, by definition, is to claim “the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.” It is a posture that assumes distance is clarity, that judgment is insight.

Upon its founding in January 2025, nearly one year ago to the day, The Metropolitan Review has been anything but orthodox criticism. Claiming to host “serious, entertaining criticism that doesn’t pull any punches”, the journal is less about hard-nosed Pauline Kael-esque than it is their secondary mission: “reinvigorating high culture.” Less about arriving at conclusions than about staying with difficulty long enough for something meaningful to emerge.

When I spoke with , one of TMR’s film critics, it became very evident that there was to be no objectivity in any of his writings – past, present, or future. There was to be no objectivity in the experience of watching films as a whole, in the mood you bring into the theater, the histories you carry with you, the private expectations you never realize you’re holding.

An American living in London, what Jennings keeps returning to in his work, and in our conversation, is maker’s knowledge: the concept that one only knows that they can make, that they can do. He was never meant to be a critic in the formal sense – no lineage, no theoretical spine, no appetite for verdicts. Criticism becomes a byproduct of attention rather than an ambition – a natural byproduct. The result of sitting with a project for long enough, of speculating without confronting those with opinions.

In this way, opinion is not the destination but the residue. Jennings is less interested in having one than in earning it, in allowing it to emerge only after attention has done its work. An opinion formed too quickly collapses complexity; one formed slowly begins to resemble understanding. His criticism does not aim to persuade so much as to linger, to hold space long enough for the contours of a work to show themselves. When enough of these partial views accumulate – when no single voice is allowed to dominate – something else begins to take shape.

A novel like Frankenstein, assembled from testimonies that never quite agree, from voices speaking past one another, each convinced they are closest to the truth, may have taken shape from criticism as such. Victor speaks from ambition, the Creature from aftermath, Walton from awe. Perspective laid atop perspective until something recognizable forms, not agreement nor certainty. But enough perspective, as Jennings says, to understand what was made, and what it cost, without needing it named.

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In a game of everyday life, it is simply not enough to be. It is simply not enough to embrace the results of the game, to be reactive amidst a mindset that demands hunger and motion.

At least, that’s how Katsushika Hokusai felt – at 73 years old, nonetheless. Having spent his life as the prolific artist behind one of the world’s most famous paintings, it was only at this age that he began to blossom. “To fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish” was his achievement in his 70s, only just starting to see the way a fish bends through water, the way a bird lifts its body into the sky not with ease but with effort.

And still, it wasn’t enough.

There is something further, stronger, lying beneath our feet unseen but shaking as if to push us forward. It is the latest prospect showing up to the gym despite his trainer cancelling. It is Calvino’s reader, who, in the face of the love of his life, still can’t draw his mind away from the pages he’s yet to finish. It is Hokusai, painting, searching for the beauty of a moment he hadn’t witnessed, mad with the ache of almost.

Let us never forget the story of Chuang-Tzu. An expert craftsman during the Warring States period, the king asked him to draw a crab, to which he responded the task necessitated “five years, a country house, and twelve servants.” After those five were completed, he said, another five were needed. And thus, after ten years of waiting, the king demanded his crab, for which Chuang-Tzu picked up his brush and “with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.”

We may be waiting for our crab, but there is no doubt it will be perfect. For the cities are stars and the people are the moon, so what better way to admire them.

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It is not often that one is able to find writers in which criticism is not a fantasy. In which the world they ideate, the world they inspire to create through their imagery, through their characters, is a tangible one.

Science fiction and fantasy (SFF) are not realist genres. The intricate act of creating fictional worlds with creative physical properties, of developing languages, systems, cultures that could never exist within ours is self-contradictory. Lynn D. Jung, author of Bloomsbury’s upcoming SFF novel Mothsblood, is not a realist by this definition as well.

And yet, nothing in Mothsblood feels imaginary.

The thread that runs through Jung’s work is not about a fantasy. It is about the world working exactly how it was supposed to. It is about the rumors of alchemy that swirled throughout the Middle Ages in Europe coming to light as knowledge. It is about science as life, and life as science.

After then-up-and-coming novelist Italo Calvino submitted his second short story collection, The Crow, to his publisher, he wrote about his conflicting desires towards the genres he desired:

“My problem today is how to escape from the limits of these books, from this definition of me as a writer of adventures, fairy-tales, and fun, in which I can’t express myself or realize myself to the full.”

It is simple to see that Calvino’s classical frustration was not with fantasy itself, but with how quickly imagination is mistaken for excess. A persistent cultural logic: the further a work strays from realism, the less seriously it should be taken. Speculation is framed as indulgence, while realism is granted authority — as if the world, as it exists, were already coherent enough to explain itself.

Jung’s worlds, by contrast, are constructed from a careful observation of what actually exists: the hierarchies, the inequities. The small, subconscious contingencies that can make a system function or fail. The worlds of SFF writing can only feel tangible when it is built from the same textures and rules that govern our own: the way education gates opportunity, the weight of tradition, the legacies that shape what a student can see or touch.

Knowledge is not neutral, and cannot be flattened into aesthetics. In Mothsblood, magic and science are not opposites but strata. Folk magic, considered informal and illegitimate, occupies the low ground; alchemy and institutionalized knowledge, credentialed and expensive, sits above it. Both originate from the same impulse to understand the world, yet only one is allowed to call itself serious. This hierarchy is not incidental; it is simply her infrastructure.

Jung might insist on science when you speak to her. She may insist that her work is about knowledge, about the gatekeeping of society. She may discuss the inequities we are plagued with when she discusses her upcoming novel or her often sporadic writing process.

And yet, it might just be magic.

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Very few people in life can say they’ve had disciples. They’ve had people follow their every step, every breath, every moment that felt like just a piece of history to them.

When Peter first met Jesus, he was not a disciple. When Stilgar was first introduced to Paul Atreides, he was not a disciple.

When Zilu first approached Confucius in the 6th century BC, he was not a disciple. A disciple would not have been magnificently dressed, “extravagantly rude to the Master” despite his relative innocence.

There was only one way in which he could respond to his inferior: “To say that you know when you know it and to say that you do not know something when you do not know something when you do not know it – this is true knowing.”

Writing is its own form of discipleship. Each piece an approach toward something just beyond reach. Each profile an attempt to translate another person’s light into a language that can only be found in this space.

There are some exciting profiles in the pipeline for this newsletter, including but not limited to more bestselling authors, Grammy-nominated musicians, and niche fashion commentators. There are even more creative projects to come, ranging from just ten words to over 20,000.

I don’t know where any of it leads. I don’t know which piece will resonate. I don’t know which words I will put on the page next. What’s being built here isn’t a destination but a clearing. A space where ideas can breathe without needing to resolve. Like water finding its level. Like disciples gathering not because they understand but because they recognize in each other the same hunger to understand.

The path reveals itself by walking.

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When Colonel J.L.A. Linard composed a statement for French counsels in 1918, he hadn’t exactly expected support from the black community.

The whole purpose of the Great War, he claimed, was to keep the population from “spoiling” black citizens, to keep them from coming in contact with the French, who he feared would empower them to their own individuality. “But we French are not in our province if we undertake to discuss what some people call ‘prejudice’,” Linard wrote. “American opinion is unanimous on the ‘color question’ and does not admit of any discussion.”

It was as a result of this discussion, however, that only a few years prior, a bill authorizing an African-American National Guard regiment was signed into law by New York Governor William Sulzer, creating the 15th New York Regiment — better known as the “Harlem Hellfighters”.

And for James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle, a couple of orchestra musicians from Harlem, it was a no-brainer. If they were ever going to be equal to white folk, they thought, then the war was the time to prove it.

Yet when his commanding officer asked Europe to put together an official band for the regiment, it may have been an even easier decision. And thus, with $10,000 in funding from large corporations such as U.S. Steel and American Can Company, Europe was able to put together an astoundingly large forty-four piece band.

It came to be the most successful band not only in the U.S. Army, but in the history of the American military.

“The music poured in at their ears and ran down their heels,” journalist Irvin S. Cobb wrote, “and instead of marching they literally danced their way along….Certainly it is the best [band] I have heard in Europe during the war.”

As much as the music had insulated them, however, the horrors of the war were inevitable for the Hellfighters. They remained segregated from white soldiers. They received no resources from support groups. They faced unfathomable horrors, including the infamous Henry Johnson single defeating a German raid with nothing more than a bolo knife.

And Europe wasn’t immune. In the summer of 1918, Europe found himself under heavy machine gun fire from German troops, leading him to inhale large amounts of poison gas — and sending him straight to the field hospital.

When Sissle went to visit his old friend, however, it was nothing but energy. It was nothing but music:

“...instead of him telling us how seriously he was gassed, as we had expected, or how his physical condition was, the first thing that he spoke up and said was: ‘Gee, I am glad to see you boys! Sissle, here’s a wonderful idea for a song that just came to me, in fact, it was [from the] experience that I had last night during the bombardment that nearly knocked me out.’”

The song that Europe composed – “On Patrol In No Man’s Land” – was an instant hit, playing not only to over 50,000 listeners in France, but an additional audience in the States, both impressed by the efforts Europe was making overseas. On the Hellfighters’ return home from France, they were greeted in Harlem with a sprawling parade, supported by not only Black Americans, but White Americans as well, impressed with the “diplomacy” of Europe’s music. “[They] practically owned the city,” as one reporter commented.

“We won France by playing music which was ours and not a pale imitation of others,” Europe stated on his return, “and if we are to develop in America we must develop along our own lines.”

“A racial musical characteristic” of the time, Europe and his band were met with praise wherever they traveled, a testament not only of the growing jazz and Renaissance movement in Harlem, but of battles they spent on both the racial and battle fronts.

The music, beginning with “On Patrol”, became immensely popular in the States, and suddenly became sympathetic to the cause of “spoiling” African-Americans, as Linard put it.

In a time when black Americans felt more safe in foreign countries than in their own neighborhoods, it was Europe who provided solace, not through his words, but through his music. Europe was the “living open sesame” to the Black communities across the country, raising them from labor jobs to their true potential as musicians, as activists, as storytellers.

It’s not to say that Europe was the “savior” of his times. It would take tens of years, thousands of dollars, and millions of lives to cement the legacy that Europe laid for his community, the legacy that remains buried under modern prejudice. But even if they hadn’t made the progress they wanted, the small steps, as Zeno would say, had been taken, the groundwork laid for a generation of citizens, of storytellers, of champions to come.

“We had conquered Paris.”

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is a secret.

If you know of him, you are bound to love him. You are bound to fall into the world of asynchronous, weaved fiction, into the characters that we have not heard of before, and likely never will again.

If you don’t, however, he is nothing but a name.

Author of the debut novel the big T and a prolific short story writer, Clancy has never been one for secrets in his writing. It is vulnerable, touching, a study of the characters that are all at once both himself and nothing. A pseudonymous writer in the age of identities and profiles, it is hard to cast a blind eye towards Clancy’s work and the thousands of followers he’s amassed in his wake.

Clancy’s work treats memory not as material but as method. It assumes distortion as a given, not a failure. Events are rearranged, invented, abandoned; what remains intact is the sensation they leave behind. His fiction does not ask to be believed so much as it asks to be inhabited. By removing factual obligation, the writing sharpens its emotional accuracy, allowing intimacy to occur without confession. In this way, authorship becomes diffuse — shared between writer, reader, and whatever version of the past each brings with them.

It’s fitting, then, that Clancy’s life away from the page is almost aggressively ordinary. He resists the mythology of the writer-as-outsider, the titles that have defined generations of authors and labeled them as spectacles rather than creators. His days are shaped by routines that could belong to anyone: work, exercise, long walks with his dog, shared dinners, quiet evenings negotiated carefully with love rather than ambition. Writing happens in the margins – between obligations, beside a sleeping cat, in the hour before rest.

It is not announced to the people around him.

Writing does not mean you are the outsider, but to Clancy Steadwell, it means you are the work. It means that you do not insist upon yourself. It means you do not demand to be known. It means that you understand that intimacy is not built through exposure, but through trust. Through the careful construction of feeling, through the allowance of ambiguity. Through the grace of letting a reader decide what belongs to them.

For that’s exactly who Clancy is.

Both himself at once and nothing at all.

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There’s a town in Emile Zola’s Germinal which houses all of the novel’s miners. Themselves, their families, their friends, their ancestors, all living door-to-door with one another. All privacy invaded for the sake of proximity.

All residents of this town wake up at the same time. They all get ready at the same time, brew their watered-down coffee at the same time, and head to work at the same time.

Their days look awfully similar to cultural critic, writer, and essayist ’s. Having retired after a career in personal finance (though not without its forays into blogging), Joad enjoys his days of monotony. Wake up, brew coffee, light a cigar, and watch the smoke ripple through layers of the Nebraska air, lining both his eyes and mind before dropping the grandkids off at school.

Joad’s work, which has amassed thousands of followers across platforms, lives within this monotony. It thrives within the routines, the rituals of a country he finds hard to describe. A country he finds has learned from its mistakes, but refuses to move on. A country that has failed not only himself, but his children, his grandchildren, his family for generations to come.

Writers often romanticize isolation. It’s hard to tell when that point begins, when isolation shifts from a burden to a gift, from a suffering to a character trait. What Joad understands about isolation, what he lives through isolation, is different: that solitude is not an aesthetic but a vantage point. A place from which the country’s patterns become visible — cyclical, predictable, and, in their own brutal way, intentional. America learns quickly; it simply chooses not to change. The refusal, too, has its rhythm.

All residents of Zola’s town suffer inhumane working conditions, insufferable leadership, and exploitation at the hand of extra coal, of an extra dollar. What makes that town remarkable is not its misery but its repetition — the sense that every life is built from the same motions, the same debts, the same small hopes pinned to a payday that never quite arrives. The miners live in rows of identical houses, rise at identical hours, descend into identical tunnels. Their lives are separate only in name; in practice, they move as a single organism shaped entirely by forces above them.

Joad’s essays move through these realities without dramatizing them. He reports from the vantage point of someone who has lived among the people he writes for, someone who still answers emails from readers choosing between groceries and prescriptions.

And it’s from this vantage point — clear-eyed, unadorned, unhurried — that his routines make sense. The simplicity is not retreat but calibration, a way to stay close to the world he chronicles. A day measured in small rituals creates the quiet necessary to see what the country refuses to look at directly.

Coffee, cigars, grandkids, whiskey, work.

Small, indefinite, almost stubborn routines that refuse to fade away with time.

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There’s a moment in Carson Lund’s baseball film Eephus where a player hits a booming, no-doubt home run off the opposing team’s star pitcher. He runs the bases and no one watches. The crack of the bat echoes into silence. Leaves snap, the field’s background music ruminates, and the uncomfortably hard dirt crunches under his feet.

The film goes on as such. For seemingly hours, the game moves on and on, the score consistently tied or close-enough-to-tie, and they play until the sun no longer presides over them, resorting to nothing but spirits and a conglomerate of headlights to illuminate the field.

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing,” Algernon says in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Eephus is proof of that. It is not the activity, the stress of playing the game that is emphasized, but the devotion to emptiness, the faith required to find meaning in such a stillness. It is an anticipation only some are built for.

The film’s stillness is not unfamiliar, however. A nation in turmoil knows how to think about this kind of anticipation, how it lives in the body like a held breath. The waiting that happens not because we’re expecting something specific, but because we are unsure of what is to come next. Because we are too scared of the future to disvalue the present.

Yes, we are escaping, but we do not desire to escape. We do not want to run away from our lives, from what we’ve built and held and loved.

But we cannot ignore the weight of staying, the exhaustion that comes from remaining present when presence feels unbearable. And still, we stay. Not because we’re brave, but because we’ve learned how to hold our breath for long stretches. Because sometimes survival isn’t about running—it’s about standing still and naming every shadow as it passes, even the ones that look like someone we used to be.

The margins of our lives are thin, and the rituals we wedge into them—grief, memory, joy in small doses—are heavy. Eventually, they’ll stop fitting in the cracks. They’ll demand space of their own, refusing to be carried quietly any longer

We are all carrying around some version of that empty field, that space where the game continues past its natural end because ending would mean returning to a world that asks us to be smaller than we are. The home run that no one watched still happened. The death that no one talked about still occurred. The love that was never spoken still lives in the space between two people, too close to touch each other, who learned that some things are too sacred to survive being named.

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