Writer's Diary
2/7/27
We are co-manufacturers of pseudo-events and live in a constant state of over-sensation and excitation.
In a way, Instagram has turned everyone into their own celebrity, documenting everything they do, followed by a press corpse themselves. Manufacturing pseudo-events.
I love the real winter, the deep freeze winter. Chunks of ice in the East River, in the Hudson. Snow in the parks. I love the way it transforms indoor space. It makes gatherings intimate and more cozy.
We have to understand that winter is a great filter. It shows us who good hosts are, who can self-regulate and plan for the future, who can slow down, who can brave the cold.
It feels like this year’s Super Bowl is the last functional American sporting event ever—before the sludge of Polmarket and Kalshi creeps over professional sports for good, and before every event, every moment of every game is marketized (before the last vestigial element of aestheticized athleticism with honor for the sake of honor and courage, the last connection to chivalry and war, shrinks away).
Daniel J. Boorstin writes in his book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, “Two centuries ago when a great man appeared, people looked for God’s purpose in him. Today we look for his press agent. Shakespeare and the familiar lines divided great men into three classes: those who were great, those who achieved greatness, and those who had greatness thrust upon them. It never occurred to him to mention those who hired public relations experts and press secretaries to make themselves look great.”
How am I, as a writer, I wonder, supposed to keep up? To compete with the Super Bowl and the Epstein files, with trending TikTok dances and with product shills on Instagram, with peptides, influencers, and Manosphere podcasters on X? What am I doing here? Why are you reading me while I write me? Are we cynics or intellectuals or both?
I have two brains now—Internet brain and book brain. Brain one and brain two. And the more brain one takes over, the harder it is for brain two to start up, the harder it is for brain to power up and read the book or write the book.
It has not been particularly hard to be right about macroscopic events of the 21st century.1 It was not hard to see that the pandemic was a hysterical apparition, that Trump was a great deal more practical than his deranged critics would let on, that Kamala’s momentum was fake and that she would lose, that tariffs would not crash the economy, and more recently that Zohran would not bring about a socialist utopia (to name just a few obvious examples off the top of my head from the last six years).
With the pseudo-event, a current thing, a right opinion, an emphatic pseudo-truth—it’s been a safe bet to take the other side.