Writer's Diary
Scrolling and monitoring the situation (monitoring the mood and behavior of the giant global nervous system: a kind of constant future prediction that is literalized by sites like Kashi and Polymarket)—has replaced reading, which is less about predicting the future and more about understanding the past. Prediction has replaced interpretation.
The hardest part of War and Peace to read is not Prince Andrei’s death, but Natasha’s betrayal of Prince Andrei with Anatole.
It’s interesting to watch an essay in Compact have more impact and generate more discourse than anything in The Drift or n+1 or New Left Review has had in the last five years, and other magazines like them. The reasons for this are twofold and rather simple. One, most importantly, heterodox magazines don’t treat conceptual and political problems as settled. And two, they don’t make writers write in the house style of the Ivy League or Ivy League graduate school graduates. There’s more, in the deep sense of the word, unevenness in these places—and that’s good. Unevenness generates debate, conversation, discourse—not in a purely gratuitous sense, but in the consequential sense of reopening aspects of public and political life for discussion and re-evaluation.
XMAS DISCOUNT https://matthewgasda.substack.com/c4194114