Recent

Hiring squad
Baffler
A report from the HR Technology Conference about the tools companies use to surveil, sort, and profit from people who need jobs.

My Proust, your Proust
Times Literary Supplement
A review of Elisa Gabbert’s Any Person is the Only Self.

An ABC of life
Times Literary Supplement
A review of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries.

Poets in the machine
Longreads
An essay on why the literary world still holds online writing at arm’s length.

Beware the digital whiteboard
Wired
A short argument about a workplace scourge.

The art of work
Baffler
An essay on the difficulty of balancing art-making and job-having.

Favorite

Tale spin
Real Life
An essay about why it always feels like storytelling is over.

Seen by
Real Life
An essay about what happens when you can see who sees you online.

Head in the cloud
Baffler
A review-essay on Maël Renouard’s internet memoir, Fragments of an Infinite Memory.

Easy answers
Real Life
An essay on the experience of not-knowing and the effects of overriding it with search engines.

Look who’s talking
Real Life
An essay on the language of interfaces and what “clarity” can conceal.

What almost everyone gets wrong about the Midwest
Washington Post
A review of Phil Christman’s book-length essay, Midwest Futures.

Rapture of the shallows
Times Literary Supplement
A review-essay on Eve Babitz, whose work I also discussed on an episode of the TLS podcast.

Personal stories of the exodus from Christianity
Washington Post
A review of Empty the Pews, a collection of essays by people who abandoned right-wing Christianity.

Nuance, humanity, blackness
Times Literary Supplement
A review of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s essay collection, Thick.

Busy doing nothing
Baffler
A review-essay on resisting productivity, featuring Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing and Melissa Gregg’s Counterproductive.

How should an advice column be?
Point
An essay on recent attempts to make literature out of advice.

Ban en banlieue
Full Stop
A review-essay on Bhanu Kapil’s hybrid book Ban en Banlieue and the question of what a “hybrid book” is.

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