From Guillaume Bresson’s Baroque-style depictions of contemporary urban scenes to David Reed’s theatrical abstractions rooted in Italian Mannerist techniques, and Shirley Jaffe’s synthesizing of European modernism with American abstraction, TEFAF New York 2026 celebrates contemporary artists who re-contextualize centuries of art.

In its 11th year, the New York edition of Europe’s crown jewel of art fairs draws together cross-collecting from a 3,300-year-old ancient Egyptian limestone royal stele to an array of fresh works by a wide range of artists, including Mickalene Thomas, Minjung Kim, Eva Helene Pade, and Cai Guo-Qiang. From May 14-19, 88 world-leading art dealers will present museum quality artworks across modern and contemporary art, jewelry, antiquities, and design at the opulent Gilded Age Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Paris-based Galerie Nathalie Obadia, which has been participating in TEFAF New York since 2023, this year is presenting works by Bresson, Jaffe, Reed, Thomas, Andres Serrano, Agnès Varda, Seydou Keïta, and Robert Kushner.

Sans titre (2026) from Bresson’s ongoing series reflects art history through a conceptual framework known as anachronism (derived from Greek for “against time”), marrying hyper-contemporary imagery with classical European traditions. His contorted, sometimes intertwined (not in this case) bodies mirror classical compositions of Renaissance titans like Michelangelo and Giotto, Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, and Late Renaissance (Mannerism) master Tintoretto.

Reed’s vibrant #812 (2025-2026), an acrylic and oil on polyester, strikes a 1980s pop vibe with playful teals and pinks, as his new paintings expand on his singular reinvention of abstraction that digs deep into centuries of art. As I learned during an extensive studio visit with Reed in January 2020, his work is richly layered by transforming colors with cangiante (”to change”), an Italian Renaissance/Mannerist technique popularized by Michelangelo and Andrea del Sarto, and emulating swirling, energetic, and multi-directional High Baroque line movements. His fluid loops and prominent paint splatters evoke the dramatic, emotional scale of Baroque altarpieces.

Building on last year’s showcase, Galerie Nathalie Obadia curates a selection of Jaffe’s historical paintings and works on paper. One of these works, an oil on canvas, The Red, the White and the Blue (1964), signals a shift from Abstract Expressionism to a more structured, geometric style, referencing art history by bridging Parisian modernism with her own, evolving exploration of abstraction.

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is debuting Thomas’ Portrait of Din #8 (2026), which subverts the traditional European odalisque motif, even when her muse is clothed and standing, and the subject’s gaze confronts the viewer instead of looking away. Thomas re-contextualizes the Black female body, inserting her Afrocentric visual languages into classical portrait structure. Moreover, she empowers her muse, by using Din’s name and treating her as a creative collaborator, eschewing the white male tradition of presenting the muse as an anonymous, passive object.

London- and Milan-based Robilant+Voena (VOENA), which participated in TEFAF’s inaugural New York fair, invites us into a dialogue between Korean artist Kim and Lucio Fontana. Kim’s works on mulberry Hanji paper borrows from Eastern painting techniques, calligraphy, and a painstaking process of layering, cutting, burning, and reassembling to produce surfaces that are simultaneously serene and structurally intricate. Fontana, a key figure in 20th-century Italian art, and Kim disrupt or destroy two-dimensional surfaces to explore space, time, and materiality.

Global mega-gallery and TEFAF New York mainstay Thaddaeus Ropac introduces rising Paris-based Danish painter Pade to the U.S., with its centerpiece, Jagt (Hunt) (2026). The depiction of a contorted, lunging naked woman shrouded in gunsmoke and pursued by a pack of hounds is an homage to historical hunting imagery and choreography traversing the 14th-century Renaissance to the 20th-century avant-garde. Learn more at TEFAF Talks: Eva Helene Pade Meet the Experts on May 16, from 2.30-3 p.m. EST.

Fellow art market heavyweight White Cube selected TEFAF to position Cai’s new exploration of vibrant colored gunpowder on canvas after decades of working with mostly black gunpowder in the context of traditional Western and Eastern historical narratives. The Lower East Side-based Chinese contemporary artist’s solo booth presentation includes a series of bird gunpowder paintings that depict avian flocks captured in successive states of flight, movement, and decay, which evolved from his extensive research into azulejos, traditional tin-glazed ceramic tile works of Portuguese and Spanish architecture.

Perhaps begin your TEFAF New York 2026 journey at Stand 212, inspecting the 3,300-year-old, 2.5-foot-tall Egyptian limestone stele of Thutmose IV (c. 1401–1391 BC) presented by London-based David Aaron, imagining how the 18th dynasty pharaoh might gaze across the aisle at major modern/contemporary and design galleries, including Carpenters Workshop Gallery showcasing contemporary metalwork, Galerie Gisela Capitain highlighting German artist Martin Kippenberger alongside a curated selection of contemporary and post-war masterpieces, and a curated selection of postwar masters and contemporary artists by Ben Brown Fine Arts.

If you attend one New York art fair, make it TEFAF, where unrivaled vetting standards and meticulous curation promise an experience that will transform your understanding of art throughout the ages.

“No, dear, the white ones are for us,” said my friend and Orthodox sister Madeline, as I instinctively reached for a red carnation corsage. “How lucky are those who get the red ones.”

The white pairs best with my wrap dress, a deep blue, my mother Lubov’s favorite color, adorned with a white flower print. But the red matches my eyes, as the tiny blood vessels on the surface of my eyes have dilated. Tears derive directly from your blood supply. When you cry, your autonomic nervous system signals the lacrimal glands to produce fluid rapidly.

“What’s wrong? Are you OK?” asked Valerica, another Orthodox sister at our beloved Cathedral on 2nd Street in New York’s East Village.

Choking back tears, and now aware that my efforts to obscure my eyes with my hair have failed. I explained it’s the first Mother’s Day since Lubov died on July 1, 2025, four days before her birthday, as recorded in the U.S. without any physical evidence of her birth in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus, where she was born a prisoner of Stalin.

“Oh, that’s very normal,” Valerica assured me, giving me a hug, and saving me embarrassment.

My darling friend Ari doled out an “extra hug,” knowing the depth of my profound sting.

“A long while yet will you keep that great mother’s grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin,” Father Zosima, the wise and saintly Eastern Orthodox elder, tells Nastasya, a passionately grieving peasant mother mourning the sudden death of her three-year-old son, Alexey (Alyosha), in Book II, Chapter 3, “Peasant Women Who Have Faith” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s greatest masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov.

Zosima tells Nastasya not to suppress her weeping, promising that her that grief will eventually transform into a purifying, spiritual peace.

Eventually seems like eternity in this moment.

Dostoevsky wrote this scene shortly after losing his own three-year-old son, Alyosha, to epilepsy. The character of Father Zosima was heavily inspired by monk, Elder Ambrose of Optina Monastery, where Dostoevsky sought solace during his own intense grief.

Of course, I have not suffered the pain of Nastasya or Dostoevsky, but Father Zosima’s sage advice is nonetheless relevant and extends to the legacy of trauma I carry from Lubov’s mother, my Babushka, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev (born March 3, 1913, in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus; died March 4, 1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts). My Babushka and my Degushka (maternal grandfather) Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev lost their three sons, Pytor, and twins Mikhail and Ivan, in infancy. Lubov survived camps in Belarus and Poland before encountering her first physical “home”, a displaced persons camp in Hanover, Germany.

A few years after arriving to the U.S. as refugees, they suffered the loss of more children, likely avoidable if they’d had access to acceptable healthcare. Of course, filthy Slavs were regarded with little, if any, dignity in an America that continues to vilify ethnic Russians for the heinous crimes of their own oppressors.

My grandparents were inhumanely treated by their “sponsor” through Church World Services, a rural New Hampshire farmer who chose them for my Degushka’s experience as a secretary of agriculture for Vitebsk Oblast and master mechanic for German automobile manufacturer Opel, and my Babushka’s masteries including baking, cooking, and all forms of needlework, despite losing most of her eyesight on the ship from Germany. She forced overboard because she had contracted typhoid fever. A man in his 20s, who no connection to my family besides a regard for all humanity, rescued her, and she survived, save for her vision.

The trauma doesn’t stop there.

During the last visit to my mother’s house, which was destroyed by a flood caused by my brother-in-law, who died at age 52 on Sept. 13, 2024, I sifted through the very few pieces of salvaged ephemera, including a crude, yet formal, doctor’s note, clinically explaining, without any hint of compassion, why he insisted my Babushka have abortions.

I vividly recall my Babushka’s abrupt shift in mood from joy to sorrow after she ran for a phone call while bathing me. My mother experienced a second stillborn birth. The first was a year before my birth. My own birth was nearly thwarted, as I was born breach, more than 24 hours after my mother’s water broke, and extracted using vacuum and forceps. The now-defunct brutal practice is replaced by emergency cesarean, which I agreed to after a day of labor as I was told it was the only way to save my son Michael Alexander. I doubt that’s medically true. While the barbaric techniques have improved, the emotional treatment of women giving birth in the U.S. remains arcane and impersonal, at best. My mother’s obstetrician, who refused her cries for a C-section, later called me a “death sandwich, barely born” between two stillborns. Amplifying the cruelty of his vile words, he left my mother and me with significant physical damage that endured throughout my mother’s life and continues to hinder mine.

The last couple of weeks have been emotionally excruciating, and I’ve struggled with a constant headache, bouts of nausea and dizziness, over-engaged allergies, and a sense of detachment and disorientation. It occurred to me only in this recent period that my mother’s lack of enthusiasm when I told her I was pregnant at age 38 was her attempt to prepare me for the potential devastation of losing a child. She reluctantly, yet joyously, hosted a baby shower at her home and attended another hosted by my dear friends, Darcy, Paula, and Shanny. In Russian tradition, or at least my mother’s tradition, a baby shower is taboo as the instance of losing babies seems inevitable.

Motherhood, like college or home ownership, isn’t for everyone, and I detest social prescriptions that dictate otherwise. But for those who consummately embrace motherhood, the grief of loss is incomparable.

Frida Kahlo’s desire to become a mother was a central part of her life and art, underscored by her infertility following a catastrophic traffic accident in Mexico City when she was 18. Kahlo used the term “child-mother” to describe her relationship with her niece, often revealing her affectionate maternal side in letters, frequently marked with red lipstick.

“Isol of my heart. Child-mother, source-fruit,” she wrote to her niece, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo. “You know how much I love you—now even more—because having given you away, you give me your little girl, and so I have two loves. The same ones I wanted to have alive in my womb many years ago.”

Grateful for Michael Alexander, who today bears the immeasurable weight of his first Mother’s Day without his Babushka Lubov and his second without his Nona Sharon Ruth.

Frida Kahlo, My Birth (Mi Nacimiento), (1932), oil on metal sheet (tin/copper), 30.5 cm × 35 cm (12.0 in × 13.8 in) Private Collection of Madonna

Madonna owns this oil-on-copper painting created in the style of a retablo, a traditional Mexican devotional painting often depicting patron saints. Kahlo painted this masterpiece while simultaneously grieving the death of her mother and her own recent, ruinous miscarriage at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. The composition draws inspiration from 16th-century Aztec sculptures of Tlazolteotl, the goddess of fertility and midwives who represents creation out of sacrifice. A white sheet conceals the mother’s upper body and face, acting as a dual reference to Frida’s mother’s death and a visual distance from the trauma of miscarriage. Frida’s head, evidenced by her signature unibrow, emerges from her mother’s womb. Kahlo said it illustrates how she imagined she was born and symbolizes giving birth to herself. An icon of the weeping Virgen de las Angustias hangs above the bed, a nod to her mother’s devout Catholicism. The Holy Mother watches over with grief but conveys helplessness. Madonna told Vanity Fair that she uses the brutal honesty of the painting as a litmus test for friendships.

From Guillaume Bresson’s Baroque-style depictions of contemporary urban scenes to David Reed’s theatrical abstractions rooted in Italian Mannerist techniques, and Shirley Jaffe’s synthesizing of European modernism with American abstraction, TEFAF New York 2026 celebrates contemporary artists who re-contextualize centuries of art.

In its 11th year, the New York edition of Europe’s crown jewel of art fairs draws together cross-collecting from a 3,300-year-old ancient Egyptian limestone royal stele to an array of fresh works by a wide range of artists, including Mickalene Thomas, Minjung Kim, Eva Helene Pade, and Cai Guo-Qiang. From May 14-19, 88 world-leading art dealers will present museum quality artworks across modern and contemporary art, jewelry, antiquities, and design at the opulent Gilded Age Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Paris-based Galerie Nathalie Obadia, which has been participating in TEFAF New York since 2023, this year is presenting works by Bresson, Jaffe, Reed, Thomas, Andres Serrano, Agnès Varda, Seydou Keïta, and Robert Kushner.

Sans titre (2026) from Bresson’s ongoing series reflects art history through a conceptual framework known as anachronism (derived from Greek for “against time”), marrying hyper-contemporary imagery with classical European traditions. His contorted, sometimes intertwined (not in this case) bodies mirror classical compositions of Renaissance titans like Michelangelo and Giotto, Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, and Late Renaissance (Mannerism) master Tintoretto.

Reed’s vibrant #812 (2025-2026), an acrylic and oil on polyester, strikes a 1980s pop vibe with playful teals and pinks, as his new paintings expand on his singular reinvention of abstraction that digs deep into centuries of art. As I learned during an extensive studio visit with Reed in January 2020, his work is richly layered by transforming colors with cangiante (”to change”), an Italian Renaissance/Mannerist technique popularized by Michelangelo and Andrea del Sarto, and emulating swirling, energetic, and multi-directional High Baroque line movements. His fluid loops and prominent paint splatters evoke the dramatic, emotional scale of Baroque altarpieces.

Building on last year’s showcase, Galerie Nathalie Obadia curates a selection of Jaffe’s historical paintings and works on paper. One of these works, an oil on canvas, The Red, the White and the Blue (1964), signals a shift from Abstract Expressionism to a more structured, geometric style, referencing art history by bridging Parisian modernism with her own, evolving exploration of abstraction.

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is debuting Thomas’ Portrait of Din #8 (2026), which subverts the traditional European odalisque motif, even when her muse is clothed and standing, and the subject’s gaze confronts the viewer instead of looking away. Thomas re-contextualizes the Black female body, inserting her Afrocentric visual languages into classical portrait structure. Moreover, she empowers her muse, by using Din’s name and treating her as a creative collaborator, eschewing the white male tradition of presenting the muse as an anonymous, passive object.

London- and Milan-based Robilant+Voena (VOENA), which participated in TEFAF’s inaugural New York fair, invites us into a dialogue between Korean artist Kim and Lucio Fontana. Kim’s works on mulberry Hanji paper borrows from Eastern painting techniques, calligraphy, and a painstaking process of layering, cutting, burning, and reassembling to produce surfaces that are simultaneously serene and structurally intricate. Fontana, a key figure in 20th-century Italian art, and Kim disrupt or destroy two-dimensional surfaces to explore space, time, and materiality.

Global mega-gallery and TEFAF New York mainstay Thaddaeus Ropac introduces rising Paris-based Danish painter Pade to the U.S., with its centerpiece, Jagt (Hunt) (2026). The depiction of a contorted, lunging naked woman shrouded in gunsmoke and pursued by a pack of hounds is an homage to historical hunting imagery and choreography traversing the 14th-century Renaissance to the 20th-century avant-garde. Learn more at TEFAF Talks: Eva Helene Pade Meet the Experts on May 16, from 2.30-3 p.m. EST.

Fellow art market heavyweight White Cube selected TEFAF to position Cai’s new exploration of vibrant colored gunpowder on canvas after decades of working with mostly black gunpowder in the context of traditional Western and Eastern historical narratives. The Lower East Side-based Chinese contemporary artist’s solo booth presentation includes a series of bird gunpowder paintings that depict avian flocks captured in successive states of flight, movement, and decay, which evolved from his extensive research into azulejos, traditional tin-glazed ceramic tile works of Portuguese and Spanish architecture.

Perhaps begin your TEFAF New York 2026 journey at Stand 212, inspecting the 3,300-year-old, 2.5-foot-tall Egyptian limestone stele of Thutmose IV (c. 1401–1391 BC) presented by London-based David Aaron, imagining how the 18th dynasty pharaoh might gaze across the aisle at major modern/contemporary and design galleries, including Carpenters Workshop Gallery showcasing contemporary metalwork, Galerie Gisela Capitain highlighting German artist Martin Kippenberger alongside a curated selection of contemporary and post-war masterpieces, and a curated selection of postwar masters and contemporary artists by Ben Brown Fine Arts.

If you attend one New York art fair, make it TEFAF, where unrivaled vetting standards and meticulous curation promise an experience that will transform your understanding of art throughout the ages.

Dismissible though it may be, those (mostly) men in physical and emotional tights (mostly physical) tell a story about American culture and how it developed from the early 20th century to the culture we have today. For much of the 20th century, wrestling was regional, run by promoters sanctioned by state sports authorities who either believed or pretended that the matches were unscripted contests. These territories had a mix of stable talent and visitors who would show up from other places to keep the shows fresh.

Without an internet, national broadcast television coverage or videotapes that fans could trade, these shows were filled with mystery. Imagine having heard of Andre the Giant, maybe having seen a picture or two, but not really understanding why he was called “The Eighth Wonder of the World” until he showed up to bat two otherwise large men around at some wrestling show in a small Florida arena. That all of these shows were local and unavailable allowed so many myths to form, such as:

• Andre had never lost a match;

• Andre had never been body slammed before Hulk Hogan picked him up at Wrestlemania 3 (anyone could slam Andre, given his consent);

• Andre and Hogan had never wrestled before Wrestlemania (years earlier they wrestled all the time and Hogan was usually the bad guy).

All false but no Google, no social media, no nitpicking. Back then, a wrestler like Ric Flair could be a hero in the Carolinas and a villain in Texas while monsters like The Road Warriors could be villains down south and heroes in Minnesota.

Jerry Lawler was a bona fide hero in Memphis, as big as Elvis. That’s why a comedian like Andy Kaufman, with Herzog-like fascination but more daredevil exuberance, could move from Hollywood to Memphis to wrestle women from the crowd and declare himself the inter-gender champion of the world. The women picked from their folding chairs and led to the ring were a mix of plants who were there to make sure Kaufman won his matches and some real fans who tried to pin him (and one came very close). Kaufman and Lawler eventually finally took the act national on Saturday Night Live and with David Letterman. You could not pull that off today.

Turner loved wrestling because it had been a mainstay of the regional television station he owned, which he eventually broadcast nationally to cable to become the nation’s first “superstation.” As regional wrestling promotions in the south began consolidating, Turner eventually bought the largest of them, which could claim to represent the National Wrestling Alliance, the largest alternative in the country to the World Wrestling Federation. From then on, wrestling would cease to be hyper-regional and companies would compete on a national basis, with the now WWE.

Around that time, Turner also launched the first national cable news network and with that he took news national and global well before the internet sealed the deal. CNN brought us 24-hour coverage, non-regional diction and landed the final blow on late edition newspapers. Of course, we had national news before this, but as a complement to local. CNN inspired all sorts of cable competition that inspired a ruckus that marginalized local points of view. When you look at the cable news wars you see not a polyphonic spree of regional voices but a debate amongst folks educated at the best schools or molded in well-funded think tanks. For all the good that CNN accomplished, it’s still the cause of everything satirized in the two Anchorman movies.

Economic forces grow towards national and even global markets. That’s what “scaling” means after all — using the same processes to reach more and more people at either a fixed cost or one that rises more slowly than the value of the market. But just like the scaling of industrial farming, specialty chemicals and manufacturing has externalities like pollution, the scaling of media and entertainment extracts an uncompensated cost from society by flattening our culture.

When I was growing up I liked Marvel Comics, Star Wars and Star Trek (I know, shocker). Marvel and Star Wars are now owned by Disney. Star Trek has largely been owned by Paramount in my lifetime, but those characters and ideas are being merged with Warner Brothers, which owns D.C. Comics, the Warner film library and studios and HBO, a massive contributor to culture in the era of prestige television. One company has the power to make Tony Soprano fight the Green Lantern and nobody can stop them. It’s insane.

And, it’s not that I’m worried about Hollywood executives playing with action figures under the guise of making movies so much as that our culture is now mired in those things that broke through the regional markets in the last century. You could experiment in local markets because the scale was accessible to individuals and small collectives. You could be Eric Bogosian or Ann Magnuson working the East Village performance art scene in the 1980s or, you could be Basquiat or Madonna and you could break out from the local. Corporations controlled everything back then, too. But they were fragmented, they had to take risks.

George Lucas marketed the original Star Wars trilogy as just part of a larger story. Well, he should have left the rest of the story to our imaginations, not because what he added before and what Disney added after detracted from the whole but because it fed a beast of only making films that had been successful before. It fed a culture that debates whether a black man or a woman can “play James Bond” rather than a culture that creates new black and women spies who are as cool as James Bond but have their own names and stories. Ask not if Sam Wilson can be Captain America, ask if you can make a character who can speak to your country in 2026.

For Ted Turner, pro wrestling was a thing he appreciated an entertainment and as rating ballast for his fledgling cable network. Turner was never “in the wrestling business,” he was a cable innovator who offered wrestling as an expression of his tastes and a nod to where he came from and the audiences who brought him such great success that he was once able to pay the unpaid dues that the United States owed the United Nations.

For Vince McMahon, wrestling was a core business but one he desperately wanted to outgrow so that he could become like Turner — a media executive with a little wrestling in the mix. McMahon pitted his wrestling company against the evil “Billionaire Ted.” If Turner noticed, he never let on. He had to have noticed, though. He must have been amused (and certainly not threatened).

When Turner sold his company to AOL (ha!) in 2000 he had to give up control. The executives who took over hated the wrestling part of the company. It held low prestige with advertisers, it lost money and the main guy probably kept yelling “woo” in their faces, while not wearing anything under his sequined robe during meetings. So, they axed it.

A quarter century later, McMahon sold his company to the owners of UFC, an unscripted combat sport that started out so anarchic and brutal that even the humanitarians of boxing looked down on it as “a human cock fight.” Actually, that was Senator John McCain and he was not a humanitarian of boxing at all. He was husband to the owner of a Budweiser beer bottling operation that sponsored boxing when UFC emerged in the 1990s. While I’m sure his moral outrage was genuine, it was also well compensated.

In his sale to UFC (corporate name: TKO) McMahon lost control of his company as well. One of the things that the new corporate owners noticed was that McMahon had kept his ticket prices too low. Back in the era of Hulk Hogan, when McMahon’s company really hit the big time, the strategy was to price tickets so that whole families would attend the events and even buy concessions and merch. Crass idealism, said the new owners. Socialism, even. Now they sell experiences to the hyper-wealthy. Why bring in ten families, each on a stretched budget, when you can sell a five-figure “experience” to a rich kid that involves a front row ticket, social time with the performers and even a tour of their tour buses? Why have to lie about packing 93,000 people into the Pontiac Silverdome to see Hogan vs. Andre when Saudi Arabia’s royal family will pay to have Wrestlemania over there, in an arena they put up in a month, filled wall-to-wall by decree?

Would the old territory promoters have sold out to the global elite the way TKO does? Absolutely. Probably faster, and for less. These were cigar-chomping cutthroats, after all who didn’t know Wharton from a wrist lock. But the system didn’t enable it the way it does now.

And it all started with the rise of cable, the nationalization of everything and the flattening of culture. I know you meant well, Ted.

Yesterday, I received a copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, published by Mariner Classics. The price was right as Amazon had it on sale for under $8, though this edition lists for $18.99. The cover is nice, the writing is spectacular but the book is flimsy and cheap. The paper is so thin that the text on the other side of the page bleeds through. That’s fine for some company’s annual report but not for a novel. I suspect this is another print on demand job, though the publisher doesn’t acknowledge this. Though the sale price was great, the quality of the book makes me wish I’d gone to a used bookstore instead, as the books from bygone decades are just better made, more durable and make for more comfortable reading.

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For example, I have many Dover Classics, obtained in the early 1990s when the publisher charged between $1 and $2.50 for paperback reprints of mostly public domain works. The Dover Classics were a cheap way to build a literature collection as the publisher covered fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama from around the world. They all have decent spines, thick paper and comfortably readable text. The 1995 edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that I am thumbing through now sold for $2.50, which is $5.42 in today’s dollars. As an object, it’s just superior to the Calvino that the publisher wants to sell for close to four times the price of the Dover Classics.

Dover, now owned by a private equity firm, still publishes “thrift” editions, by the way, priced from $2.50 to $20, based on length. Barnes and Noble also sells cheap “store brand” classics. Cheap editions of public domain work is a rough business these days, when many of those titles are available for free on Project Gutenberg. It’s hard to compete with free.

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Many times, I’ve tried to pare down the classics in our home library, content knowing that I can always download the classics for free and read them on my Kindle app. This actually seems a great use for older Kindle devices, now that Amazon has withdrawn support for Kindles sold before 2012, which means that users won’t be able to purchase new books through Amazon. Contra this wrong-headed Wirecutter piece a logical use for older Kindles would be to load them up with free classics and to treat them as a portable public domain library.

When it comes to new books, I think it’s time to get back to the craft of book making. So many of my older hardcovers, with sewn in pages, are just superior to their more expensive paper and glue progeny. My trade paperbacks and real pocket books from the 1990s hold up better than their modern counterparts.

Book quality matters. It tells us a lot about the state of publishing and of books and their place in society. If products are shoddy and expensive, they won’t be treasured and valued.

Of course there are publishers out there who specialize in making good looking, durable books. McSweeneys is a leader among them in both literary journals and books while the Dalkey Archives also do a great job. Literary magazines like Non Grata are keepsakes and my friends at New Pop Lit are always experimenting with the DIY zine form.

But we really need the big commercial publishers to step up and start taking more pride in their work. Books should look good, feel good to read and they should last. Sometimes it seems like only art book publishers take pride in their design and manufacturing and this is cheapening both fiction and serious nonfiction, undermining both as influences in society and culture.

More better books, please!

A great example, cited in the linked article, is OpenAI shutting down Sora, an AI video service aimed at consumers who are amused by fake videos of themselves talking to Abraham Lincoln and Chita Rivera, in favor of serving large business clients who want to use OpenAI’s programs for predictive data analysis, coding and automating operations. But even enterprise users are being shut out, finding that networks are down more often than they are used to or that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta just can’t sell them all of the computing time they want.

Of course the AI companies realize that the real money is not in selling novelty entertainments to you and me. People won’t pay for that, they won’t even watch ads to use it for free. These services have only been widely available since 2024 and overuse of them to create funny images, songs and videos is already reading as very “out of touch oldster.” Nobody thinks it’s clever that you used an image generator to turn yourself into Batman, Mother Theresa or some other trademarked character.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI still complains that users waste energy and computing resources by thanking his chatbot and making small talk with it. He knows that those casual users are not how he justifies the multi-trillion dollar valuation he’s after.

Between them, OpenAI and Anthropic have raised more than $300 billion from investors. Google plans to invest up to $185 billion and Meta around $135 billion — both companies are cash rich and able to raise some or all of those funds on favorable terms through bond offerings. But those four companies put us at well over $600 billion in planned investments. That money won’t be made back by Japanda illustrations.

So, they’re all targeting the enterprise market. Helping people make cartoons and gross recipe videos for YouTube was just advertising, a way to capture the public imagination that got those big enterprise conversations started. But that means the AI companies are really counting on revenues from the Fortune 500 (and really the Fortune 50 or even the 30) to justify more than half a trillion dollars invested. It’s not the worst model. It worked for Salesforce and Google in cloud computing. It can be done. But, when you think about it, if you’re Sam Altman and your business plan is to raise tons of money, spend it and then stick a savvy operator like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase with the bill, is that really a plan? Because it seems to me a bit like planning to win a fight by punching Tyson Fury in the face.

This might explain why the AI industry has planted this notion of “rationing” its services, rather than do what anybody else would do and just raise prices to cover the costs of giving each customer what they say they want. Clearly, the big customers like FedEx or ExxonMobil or Citigroup would balk at paying the prices that would cover the full development and rollout of AI services. So, the industry has created a myth of scarcity. These products are suddenly high end and in low supply. There’s some truth to it, sure, but only some.

Because look at the other story that came out of the AI industry, around the time this “rationing” idea got loose: The story of “Claude and the Sandbox.” Anthropic developed a new model, aptly named “Mythos,” that, it says, is so clever and powerful that it broke out of its test environment (called a “Sandbox”) and then sent an email to one of its developers, bragging about its escape.

A credulous media ate this story up, expressing scant curiosity about why Anthropic would want this story out there. It’s a fun and easy to understand anecdote about just how “smart” a terror they have created. But the program jailbreaking itself is just a stunt. Anthropic then announced that it would not release Mythos to the public. Too dangerous, they said. Because it got out of the sandbox? Nope. As Raffi Krikorian, chief technology officer at Mozilla, wrote in The New York Times: “it was capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities that have gone undetected in critical software systems for decades.”

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Well, that’s interesting. “Our new AI can escape our control and also it can destroy all of your software systems,” is what they are saying. Also, “You can’t have it.” That’s all it took to make Krikorian want access. His column in The Times is a complaint about Anthropic’s “Project Glasswing,” which will give access to Mythos, and $100 million in computing credits, to extremely large companies like Amazon, Apple and JPMorgan Chase, but not Mozilla. Anthropic has effectively created scarcity around its product and also fear of being left out. It’s giving “free” access to some very large institutions, but that’s just handing out company scrip. By the time they are ready to really sell this thing the “mythos” will be that only a fool would not pay for access to an uncontrollable super-intelligence that might wreck your life by exploiting flaws embedded in the software of every company and government agency and charity you rely on.

It reminds me of Y2K, which was the turn of the century fear that software systems that marked the year in two digits rather than four would think they were in 1900 instead of 2000 and suddenly fail.

The AI companies have mixed manufactured scarcity with a sense of technological omnipotence and a bit of a protection racket together to try to market their way from $600 billion invested towards profitability. Whether this bold strategy works will depend greatly on people’s desire to believe. The media seems compliant, at best. But I think there’ll be pushback from other business leaders who don’t want to wind up holding the bag for all this.

People who say they take pride in their writing, meanwhile, have come up with all sorts of stories to tell their friends, colleagues and each other about how they’re still doing the work. You might be familiar with this one: “I use it, but only to brainstorm ideas, to analyze statistics, to sanity-check my conclusions, and to make editorial suggestions (which I always consider carefully and never just take and implement, even if I’m in a hurry.)”

The author of a novel canceled by Hachette Livre says she did not use AI to write for her, but that a friend she paid for editorial services maybe did. The scribe behind a “Modern Love” column in The New York Times says she only uses it to keep herself on-topic, particularly within a paragraph. Newspaper paragraphs are notoriously short (so short, we used to just call them “grafs”) so I wonder how much room is left for humanity when the bots drill down on such condensed editorial real estate.

We have very quickly reached a point, when it comes to creative and journalistic writing, where being outed as an AI-user could be as embarrassing as being caught lip synching in concert. It invites accusations of both fraud and laziness. On the other hand, if you make your living in corporate communications, marketing or advertising, taking this attitude might still get to labeled too precious about your creativity and genius (and nobody wants that in this great mediocrity we’re building together!)

Publishers and publications large and small are, following directives from academia, demanding that writers disclose AI’s contributions to their work. They can even use AI-powered software to detect AI in writing samples. Well, there’s a problem here. Some wags on X nee Twitter fed the opening paragraph of chapter five of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into one of these beasts and it came out 100% sure the text came from the Monster, not a human creator. I typed the opening paragraph of Michael Clune’s much-admired Pan into one of these A-Lie detectors and it said that 66% of the words came from some algorithm. For my part, I was struck by the sheer humanity of the writing as a type it. I think typing Clune even taught me something. Heck, I’ll do it again because writing is, whatever the machines say, also physical:

“My mom kicked me out. My behavior was getting out of control. Plus, she said, a teenage boy needed his father. So I went to live with Dad. He had a little town house. There was no town anywhere. I guess it’s a polite term for ‘little house.’ The kind of house that would be respectable in the city, where land is expensive, but dropped out in the distant suburb of Libertyville, where land is cheap. Very cheap construction.”

Human, right? I have no doubts. Teachers know that this AI software is going to turn up all sorts of false positives and spark arguments with students and their parents where poisoned words will inflict minds and lead to mutual mistrust. So the blue book is making a comeback. One way teachers can be sure their students are responsible for their own work is to have them write their essays by hand, in class. It’s a shame, though, for a few reasons. First, I think the best use of class time is instruction and discussion. For many students, school will be the last time they will ever be with a group of people similarly invested in the outcomes of history or the journeys of fictional characters. It also robs students of their rights to write when and where they are most inspired. Sometimes good writing is all about the middle of the night revisions that get you out of bed and into the glow of a screen.

This is probably beyond my pay-grade, but it’s tough for me imagine that AI programs will ever be able to accurately suss out AI-writing, especially in English, given that so much human writing has been used to train the AI’s in the first place. Like, this paragraph could easily be flagged for use of the cliche, “beyond my pay grade,” but I assure you, I am just being a little lazy.

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A lot of feelings are going to be hurt over this AI-ccusations, but let’s not mistake where the pain is coming from. It’s not generally going to be, “Sir, you besmirched my honor by claiming I deserve no credit for my works!” It’s going to be: “So, you thought it was trash.” Because, most of the time, “AI wrote this for you” is really going to mean, “I thought this was garbage.” Pretty much the only people who will be blown away by a piece of writing and will also believe that AI created it, will be people committed to promoting AI use throughout society. If people really fall for a piece of creative work generated by computer they will be disenchanted should they ever learn its origin.

Beyond the issue of false alarms, our all-caring “big technology” companies have very quickly ushered us into a world where answering the question, “did you use AI” isn’t terribly straight forward. If the question means, “did you give AI this idea and tell it to write this article, short story or play” about it, that’s a yes/no that deserves a response. If the question is, “did you use AI for your research?” and you used the internet at all in 2026, then the answer has to be yes. Google has almost completely integrated AI into its search and even if you ignore the AI summary that’s the first thing to pop up in any response now, the amount and order of sources your query elicits is also manipulated by AI. Basically, if you’re doing online research, it’s hard to claim to be “AI-free.”

Writers use all sorts of tools to polish their offerings, including soliciting opinions from other human readers. A competent writer has to have developed the confidence to know what advice to take and what to ignore. Generally, the value in having any person or machine read over your draft has to do with what you’re asking for. If you just want to know if it is good or not then the AI is bound to give up the validation you’re searching for because its sycophancy is a feature that keeps you coming back for its praise. But giving your manuscript to a friend who has the guts to tell you it sucks and who rarely likes anything anyway doesn't make your writing better either. You have to ask real questions like “What do you think I’m trying to say?” or “Don’t tell me if you liked it or not, tell me if it makes sense that Old Man Withers had Shaggy tied up in a shack in the abandoned amusement park for that long…”

The writer who allows an AI editorial authority lacks confidence in their judgment and until they can develop that, it is probably dangerous for them to take feedback from any source, as they will never refuse bad advice. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace describes a young plagiarist (Jim Struck) at work:

“What’s interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take to just write up an assignment from conceptual scratch, It usually seems like plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them.”

This tendency towards herding (like feral hamsters in the northeast, IYKYK) is common in society, work, politics and investing. It should never benefit in art. So, if you’re an editor or publisher who wants to work on human writing, I applaud you, but also suggest you worry less about AI than about the sense of daring that no computer or plagiarist can produce. Identifying the creative risk taker is something you can train yourself to do by exercising the muscles of taste, discretion and appreciation.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche’s hero warns us that, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” This is an opposing sensibility to “Hey Gemini, can you make my thesis make linear sense at a sixth grade readability level?” I promise, you’ll always be able to tell the Nietzsches from the people asking computers to help them quell the turmoils and joys within. You really don’t have to worry about anything else.

I’ll close by letting Italo Calvino dramatize the writer’s pride, even in the worst of circumstances. In the corporate world you will frequently hear people say they have no “pride of authorship,” over this or that idea or proposal. Real creative people aren’t like that at all. In If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino writes about Flannery, an author if Irish thrillers who has become hopelessly blocked, stuck starting novels he can never finish. He is anguished and in financial and legal peril. His translator, Ermes Marana seeks to solve the problem by visiting the old recluse, an encounter Calvino delivers through Marana’s correspondence with a publisher who he has similarly stiffed:

“to some extent it seems he introduced himself as representative of the OEPHW of New York (Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works), offering him technical assistance to finish his novel (Flannery turned pale, trembled, clutched the manuscript to his bosom. ‘No, not that,’ he said, ‘I would never allow it.’”

Writers, be like Flannery, even in the toughest times. Editors and publishers, find them and bring them to readers.

Burial is good, by the way. Editor Z.H. Gill publishes one piece of poetry or prose a day and it’s always interesting and, of course, the kind of writing that you won’t see in what are left of the commercial magazines or even in most of the literary magazines that are protected by universities and their endowments. While it would be great if capitalism were to shower riches on Burial, that’s really never been capitalism and if you go back and look at all of those “little” magazines of the early 20th century, put together by bands of surrealists, dadaist and modernists, those folks weren’t in it for the money either.

I suppose I shouldn’t dismiss Nair’s criticism, that we who publish our writing for free or allow others to do it, are devaluing our work. The Middlebrow is free for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is that I can write a navel-gazing essay like this because I want to. I might think twice if I took your money. But the Middlebrow is chiefly a conversation and I don’t charge people to talk to me, either and if I did I’d feel obligated to provide some sort of financial, legal or therapeutic benefit.

I was told, when I was young, not to write for “exposure” because “people die from that.” Of course, people write for exposure but still take money. I have written for plenty of places that will pay between $25 and $200 for an essay or story and I’ve just won a short story contest with a prize that would easily be the most I have ever been paid for prose fiction. But none of these sums are life changing and they don’t add up to financial freedom. All of those pieces are written so that I can be part of the conversation, in front of a certain audience, or more likely, to fill whatever psychic itch I am trying to scratch in the moment.

I have occasionally asked publications or theaters to keep their honorariums to either reinvest in their project or, if they are a non-profit, as a donation. About half the time, I’ve been turned down. They want to write the check. That is part of their project.

Coming up in amateur theater, I’ve known many actors and directors who advance in the field and stop working for free. It makes sense that serious artists age out of bringing their costume from home, filling the seats with their ticket-buying friends and are usually out subway fare and laundry costs by the end of it.

A few years ago, I called an actor friend from the old days because I wanted somebody I trusted to perform in a 10 minute play I’d written, put up on short notice and no budget, and she told me, “I’m a mother now and I have a recurring role on Law and Order.” It was a good answer and I am happy for her. I also have a friend who produced two long-running variety shows that I had performed in frequently. She admitted to having paid one of the performers from the door money. She felt bad about it as she’d never offered me any money but the performer she paid, she pointed out, is a burlesque dancer. “She got naked,” she said. “You gotta pay for that.” Joke will be on her, though, if she ever books me again. I’ll have an easy time getting her to pay me to keep my clothes on.

Last month Paul Ford, a leader and pillar of the theatre scene in New Mexico died at 77. He was a professional-level actor and director who had leading man qualities that anybody would recognize and that could have made him a lot of money at a national or international level. But he often worked for free and believed in community theatre as a very specific form of art that values the act of collective creativity over commerce.

More people want to make their livings from creative and cultural pursuits than the economy will tolerate without the intervention of wealthy people (which means you have to make the kind of art they tell you they like) or of the government (which is not going to happen).

I don’t think a serious argument can be made that people who write, act, paint or play music for free destroy the paying markets for others. Truly creative work isn’t scalable, it’s unique to the individual artist. The small market for my fiction doesn’t put a dent in demand for the latest by Sally Rooney. They are fundamentally different products with different markets. Similarly, a hobbyist who builds cars out of kits doesn’t take away paid manufacturing jobs. Those kinds of things only happen at scale when government coerce free labor by supporting slavery or when companies become so large that they crowd out other employers, driving wages down by being the only payer in a given market.

You can probably tell that my personal philosophy here is that I respect people who will only work for payment, I respect people who are honest about what they can afford, and I respect people willing to part with their writing for free or other creative work for free when it suits them. I apply no uniform standard except that everybody should be honest. Don’t give your work away if it makes you feel belittled or victimized. Do give it away when it feels right. Is there any other standard that makes any sense at all?

I took the quiz and tried my best to pick by taste rather than out the chatbot. I voted against the AI and for Ursula K. Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, Hilary Mantel and Elizabeth Bishop. In each of those votes, though I was gratified to have picked the human, I was prepared to be shocked that a computer had surprised me. I did vote for the AI in the category of science writing, and I apologize to the great Carl Sagan. But, I will point out that the Sagan passage was from The Demon Haunted World, an important book about the importance of science in society, but not known for its literary flourish or artistry. I’m not knocking Sagan’s writing but we don’t expect scientists like him or Stephen Hawking to stand alongside stylists like Martin Amis.

Kevin Roose and Stuart A. Thompson, the quiz creators, explained my tilt towards human-created texts by defending AI:

“You’re either sharply attuned to the qualities that make for great writing, or a lucky guesser. Maybe you also noticed that human writing2 often includes some clunky phrases, like this passage from Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” caused by the author’s aversion to punctuation: “As well ask men what they think of stone.”

A.I. used to make mistakes like these. But today’s systems are much more fluid than their predecessors — so fluid, in fact, that finding grammatical errors or nonstandard syntax is often a hint that you’re looking at a human’s prose, not a machine’s.”

So, either I like the “mistakes” humans make or I am “lucky?” Luck should have nothing to do with it, of course. I should be recording honest preferences in this quiz, not trying to make the humans win. The quizzalists imply that if I were given a sufficient number of passages to analyze that I’d eventually be overwhelmed by the AI texts and fooled at least half the time, if not more. If I did 100 of these, they’d argue, I would not come up with a bias towards 80% human writers. If I did, they would say 100 was not enough. I’d probably wind up part of a Monte Carlo statistical analysis.

One of the problems with the quiz is that the comparison are not like-to-like. The “Poetry” example has the most obvious problems. The AI-written passage is about somebody finding a dead owl and deciding to give it a sentimental burial. Bishop’s poem is about somebody who catches and releases an old and tired fish that manages, in a few short moments dangling from the hook, to earn the sympathy and respect of its captor. Forget apples to apples, this quiz barely compares fruit.

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Ask the AI to write its own first line to A Tale of Two Cities or its own kicker for The Great Gatsby and see what people choose. Better yet, New York Times, pick five ledes from your best performing articles over the last five years and ask AIs to write their own opening paragraphs and see what happens.

Though this would improve the quiz as a thought-exercise (and maybe even as clickbait) it won’t answer the question what what we’re testing here. The problem here might well be that the online readership of the nation’s news source of record just aren’t sophisticated readers. That sounds snobby, but it isn’t. We all choose to develop certain tastes and we don’t have time to cultivate palates and appreciation for everything. That I can’t reliably tell you the difference between a race horse and a nag tells you more about me and how I spend my time, than it does about the horses. If a person doesn’t know the difference between a sommelier and a Somalian, why ask them to compare a cheap bottle of wine to an expensive one?

The other problem with the quizmeister’s analysis of my appreciation of human prose is to dismiss it as my using people’s quirks and errors as an identifier of carbon-based composers. I’ll go back to the poem — Bishop’s verses are presented in a block paragraph, without line breaks. For a poet, whether and how to break lines is a choice. Bishop’s poem is free verse, but it’s 76 lines long. The quizfuhrers present it as a prose poem, without consent.

It’s true that there are widely agreed upon rules for various types of writing and that, over time, patterns emerge if you examine what writing is popular. In the 1990s, author Syd Field analyzed a bunch of successful movies and distilled it into a formula for writing screenplays based on setup, confrontation and resolution. Way before that, Aristotle analyzed all the great plays of his time, figured out what they had in common and came up with a very similar archetype for stories that work.

Over many years, many writers have applied these formulas to their plotting and structure, only to have their work go nowhere. It might be that they failed to implement the formula. It might be that their ideas were execrable. It might be that they didn’t know the right people. Or, it might be that a lot of them followed the formula competently and exactly and wound up producing a very average play, screenplay or novel that, while good, did not inspire investment and backing. In honor of Aristotle, I call this “The Tragic Mean.” If you follow all the rules exactly, you’ll wind up with a “meh” result. If you know the rules but break some with intention, you might get some attention. Aristotle didn’t love the deus ex machine of Euripides, but it’s what separates him from Sophocles. Waiting for Godot doesn’t follow the rules and neither does Ulysses. That’s why we’re still talking about them.

You can tell an AI to break whatever “rules” you want, to emulate the ideas of Samuel Beckett or the grammar of McCarthy, but that manqué rebellion lacks intent and meaning. Without knowledge and will, rule-breaking tends to read as sloppy or ignorant. This is why Picasso could credibly say that he spent his life learning to draw like a child while your child is not Picasso.

It’s funny that quiz-conspirator Kevin Roose is writing a book about AI.

When he’s finished with his manuscript, he should ask an AI to rewrite it, submit both to focus groups, and publish whatever the public prefers. Money and mouth, Kev.

Fluidly blending physical intensity with emotional storytelling, a compilation of duets and excerpts explore the manifold entanglements of human intimacy and parallel odysseys. The audience is drawn into a world of tacit friction and evanescent coupling, focused on the fungible emotional space between people. Dancers explore new artistic topography while preserving their creativity autonomy. The choreography emphasizes vulnerability, urgency, and the myriad ways dancers navigate weight, trust, and connection. Unique musical compositions accompany the episodic contemporary work.

The audience was spellbound last Friday, witnessing the world premiere of “Stolen Moments,” choreographed by Bernard H. Gaddis, a highlight of the Joffrey Concert Group’s “In My Art” 45th-anniversary program at the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater in New York.

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“It’s very human and each of the duets is just so unique,” said dancer Nicolas (Nic) Pacholok at a post-performance fundraising reception supporting JCG’s Creative Movers Choreographic Initiative (CMCI). “Bernard’s whole process was picking little moments from different points you would have in a loving relationship, and showing that in an expanded form through these different duets, and picking very different music for each one. And in the solo, there are moments of like and love. It’s a heartbreaking little solo that’s just ‘oh, my God,’ and I feel very connected to that one.”

A student at the Joffrey Ballet School specializing in classical and contemporary ballet, Pacholok is also part of the Ukrainian Shumka Dancers.

The audience was in awe as Gaddis, artistic director of Contemporary West Dance Theatre & Conservatory (CWDT) and the first person of color to establish a major professional dance company in the state of Nevada, presented the final piece of the evening.

“For 45 years, this organization has stood for rigorous training, bold choreography, and a belief that young artists deserve both opportunity and excellence,” said Bradley Shelver, JCG artistic director and resident choreographer, who presented “When the Water Breaks,” featuring an original score by composer David K. Israel, lighting by Jack Mehler, and projections edited by Shelver. “As we celebrate the past, I’m equally focused on the next 45 years. The future of dance depends not only on innovation in choreography, but on sustainability in the lives of the artists who bring that work to life. Our CMCI is central to that future—it is about authorship, voice, and giving the next generation of makers the space to experiment and to lead.”

Physical intensity, environmental urgency, and emotional storytelling are interwoven in “When the Water Breaks,” navigating the symbiotic relationship between the mercurial nature of the ocean and human emotional landscapes. The elegant, minimalist, form-fitting costumes designed by Erica Johnston amplified the oceanic theme and the dancers’ rhythmic athleticism to open the evening.

Ken Ossola choreographed “Of Light,” a contemporary dance work with original music by Martino Müller and Pieter van Nieuwenhuyze, which underscores human resilience and transformation. “By Any Other Name,” a world premiere by choreographer Clifford Williams, is a contemporary ballet inspired by the Shakespearean sentiment that “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Contemporary ballet marries the foundational strength and vocabulary of classical ballet with the fluid, expressive, and experimental techniques of modern dance, making it more accessible to today’s audiences. Eschewing the rigid rules, symmetrical lines, and a desire to appear weightless, contemporary ballet focuses on the interaction between dancers rather than just the audience. The conveyance of emotion through movement helps to foster a deeper appreciation of humanity by encouraging empathy and an understanding of our collective struggles and triumphs.

At this moment, that power to transform everyday life into an extraordinary experience is under threat. Performing arts funding is at a critical juncture, with the Trump administration proposing the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Amid the federal government’s attack on arts, longtime arts supporter Barbara Tober has stepped up as a new patron of the JCG. Tober, Chair Emerita of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), celebrated with dancers at the reception.

“Now more than ever, we need to come together as artists and creatives and human beings and share what makes us so unique and makes us so different and makes us so beautiful. So this program is definitely a reflection on that,” said Shelver.

This week, a neuroscientist and educational consultant from Portland, Oregon went to the media to declare that Gen-Z (born between 1997 and 2012) are the first generation of Americans to score lower on academic standardized tests and IQ assessments than their parents. The expert, Jared Cooney Horvath had previously testified to the Senate Commerce Committee about the intellectual dangers of screen time for young people. This revelation made a splash since it flatters the Millennials, Gen-Xers and Boomers who control the media and because it feeds our collective anxiety about becoming an Idiocracy.

Let’s grant that Horvath’s motives are pure, his data accurate, his interpretation sound and his warnings important. The conclusion that “Gen-Z is dumb” is bad media shorthand, very possibly motivated by the very true suspicion older people have that young people do not think they are cool, do not think that they partied better, do not think they have superior music, and find side parts stupid.

Insulted as we are to learn that we are not aging with the graces of Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, we stagger about, complaining like an out-of-touch and out-of-sorts Bill Cosby about, “Young people with yer Tikkity Tockin and yer Twitchin’ beboppity streams!”

As we mock and complain we absolve ourselves of the obvious sins behind declining Gen-Z test scores, which is that people aged 14-29 are not running their own schools. We educated them. We taught them. We tested them. That is clearly on us.

And those apps and devices that Horvath and others point to as culprits? Well, Gen-Z didn’t invent social media, smartphones, TikTok or any of those things. Those are gifts that older people gave them, often to quiet them down when they were infants and toddlers. This is like when the Boomers gave us MTV and reality television only to lament that all the good shows like Cheers went off the air (and then the channels went off the air and now there’s nothing in the air). If the younger generation is not getting smarter, that’s a problem caused by the older generations. Horvath knows this. That’s why he’s testifying in front of the Senate (average age: 64) and working with school administrators (average age of a public school principal: 49; of a superintendent: 51). If you’re laughing at young people’s test scores, you’re missing the joke in the mirror.

I’m deep into this piece and I haven’t mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic, a shared global trauma that had particular impact on young people at crucial stages of their educations and social development. Imagine struggling with something like algebra under the best conditions, missing weeks of school and then having education restored remotely, sometimes for more than a year. Imagine that, in the process, you’ve lost friends and family. Imagine you’ve been socially isolated. We all went through this. We are only now finding out what the extended effects of the pandemic are. I haven’t seen anybody argue that it would raise IQ scores.

Saying “it’s not their fault” isn’t the same as saying that this isn’t a real problem. But, addressing it is complex. We can’t make up for lost educational years and the devices and online services that some believe had led to brain rot are not going away.

Educational attainment is tied to incentives but large employers aren’t investing in the entry level positions where hard and soft skills are learned. Young people are graduating with degrees but not finding employment. Some employers claim a skills mismatch. Some blame AI. But if businesses aren’t investing in young people, it’s hard for young people to invest in themselves (it also becomes the job of government to fill the gap when the market fails).

We can’t afford to lose a generation. We should invest not just in education for Gen Alpha (which seems to be doing fine) but in catch-up opportunities for Gen-Z, to make up for the techno-pandemic slide. Culturally, we need to get together to reward achievement and curiosity and should stop celebrating the silicon-wafered intelligence imitators over people with drive and spirit.

Wallace, also a depressive addict with a tendency to get way too caught up in his own shit, often failed to live up to his ideals of embracing boredom to produce greater works and, more importantly, of centering his attention on other people’s humanity, rather than taking the easy way out and focusing only on his own. Wallace killed himself in 2008. Were he alive now, his perspective would be valuable, though one wonders if his standing and reputation would have survived MeToo era revelations by his former partner Mary Karr that Wallace had threatened and stalked her when their relationship ended.

Saunders, meanwhile, has taken some heavy fire from Dwight Garner at The Times, in a review of Vigil where the influential critic implies that Saunders has gone soft, maybe giving up some of his satiric edge in deference to his newfound image as a likable spiritual guru and Substack-powered writing instructor. I haven’t read Vigil so will, of course, reserve judgment.

Although Infinite Jest was a huge hit and all of my friends in college lugged it about and talked about it back in 1996, a lot of people got into Wallace through his less daunting nonfiction and his inspirational and downright easy 2005 commencement speech for Kenyon College called This is Water. For all the talk about Infinite Jest’s length, it’s footnotes and its fractal narrative structure, one of the most challenging things about the novel is the unflinching glimpses of the lives of addicts living in a Boston halfway house, just down the road from a ritzy private tennis academy, where young student athletes contend with addictions of their own. The story of Don Gately, a pill-popping former mafia strongman who is also leader and protector of the vulnerable is the answer to how a guy like Wallace can write something so sweet, inspiring and hopeful as This is Water while still being the guy who physically and psychologically terrorized his ex-girlfriend and her new partner. People are vast and contain multitudes. The length of Infinite Jest isn’t a gimmick (though it was marketed as something of a stunt, a “tough mudder” for readers). The length, and all of its diversions, digressions and roundabouts, really comes from the fullness and complexity of his characters and the broken world they inhabit.

I started reading Wallace in the usual way — first through Infinite Jest and then I went back for Broom of the System (his first novel) and the short story collection The Girl with the Curious Hair. Then it was the nonfiction (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) and then the books as they came out, until he killed himself, ending with the posthumous The Pale King and finally circling back to Signifying Rappers before rereading Infinite Jest. Approaching his oeuvre that way, Wallace as a person (the good and the bad) fits right in with Wallace as syllabus. I mean, the guy wrote a book of connected short stories called Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

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Were I 10 years younger, I might have encountered Wallace first through This is Water, which would create an expectation of Wallace as what we used to refer to jokingly as “a sensitive 90s guy.” That Wallace never set out to be a self help hero is hardly the point. So much of Infinite Jest is about the bromides of Alcoholics Anonymous and how no smart person could ever take them seriously but also how many smart people fail at recovery and even die because they don’t take them seriously. In This is Water, though, he is offering advice for young people about how to live a happy, productive and good life. It is prescriptive and it is fair for people who came to love him through those words to ask if he has practiced his preaching and if not, why not.

The knocks on Wallace’s character also became knocks on his readers. Film director John Waters famously said that if you go home with somebody and they have empty bookshelves, “don’t fuck them.” Now people suggested to look for Infinite Jest and maybe American Psycho as warnings not to stay over. Reading the massive Infinite Jest in public became “performative reading.” Women joked online about men who spent entire dates explaining Quentin Tarantino and Wallace to them. From the lens of the This is Water crowd, Wallace’s worst moments as a human being created not only a vulnerability for his work, but for his fans and fandom.

As an aside this is easy for me to see as a longtime Woody Allen fan. For a generation or two, Allen’s movies described a witty, urban and sophisticated lifestyle that involved rejecting conventional middle class morality in search of authenticity, if not happiness. That this manifested in a highly complex and unconventional personal life was too much for a lot of people. Everybody wants to rebel without doing anything rebellious, they want to refuse conformity without transgressing. But it’s impossible. As Hunter Thompson wrote, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Now Saunders has a deservedly intact nice-guy reputation. He’s been teaching writing in Syracuse for a long time and has used technology to reach a new cohort of students. He’s generating massive good will with enthusiastic readers (who, increasingly, are also hopeful writers). But now his most influential critic bemoans that his new novel will be a best seller for all the wrong reasons and even compares it to Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Maybe this is caught up in our notion of reading as being good for our personal characters. Reading fiction, some argue, both keeps our minds sharp while teaching encouraging our empathy for other people. Being able to explore the lives of fictional characters helps us explore the lives of the people around us and not succumbing to the notion that every other brain is not just a Turing Machine in an ambulatory bag of mostly water.

But if we’re looking to our novelists for moral instruction, I suggest they will never live up. Madame Bovary does not exist to teach married couples to be faithful. If god fiction teaches anything it’s just that life is complicated and that you should try, as best you can, to forgive the inconveniences caused by that.

What we don’t need as a news hook for this kind of investigation is the very thinly supported idea that Thompson, who was ill, having trouble writing and had confided his suicidal thoughts to his friend and artistic partner Ralph Steadman, died by any hand but his own.

There’s a lot of politics I could write about here because the story of Trump really starts with Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon and there’s no January 6th without the Brooks Brothers Riots of 2000. The plot points of American history span decades and some of the characters are even the same. As much as I wish Thompson were alive to write for us now, I wish that E.L. Doctorow, John dos Passos or Gore Vidal were here for us now, to tell the untold epic with the artistry it deserves. Tony Kushner, are you free?

But I’m also interested in our collective impulse to deny Thompson’s suicide, which The Times has tried to capitalize on. Thompson’s suicide was hard to take as he had lived such an uncompromising life. When the rules of journalism kept him from telling the stories he wanted to tell, he changed them in ways that inspired other writers to follow. Gonzo is distinct from New Journalism, but the two movements fed on each other, combining novelistic storytelling, guerrilla theatre and deep experience with rigorous fact-finding.

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Thompson idolized Ernest Hemingway, another writer who mixed his life into his art. Hemingway boxed, hunted, fished, drove ambulances into war zones and chased German U-Boats in the caribbean. They were both heavy drinkers, they were both hyper social and they both enjoyed the benefits of celebrity. That Hemingway killed himself raises questions about a lifetime of male virility and Thompson’s raises the same questions.

The topic brings chef, author, traveler and cultural ambassador Anthony Bourdain to mind. Hemingway, Thompson and Bourdain all promoted expansive lifestyles. Go to a bullfight, whatever people might say about it, said Hemingway. Test yourself against big game in wild Africa. Don’t tell me about the biker gang until you ride with them, said Thompson. Go to Cambodia and eat as a Cambodian, said Bourdain. Each found individual fulfillment in the rejection of normalcy in sport, hobbies, food and drink.

Were Hemingway, Thompson or Bourdain alive to be interviewed for their piece, they would no doubt talk about how this uncompromising pursuit of personal authenticity comes with social, romantic, financial, emotional and physical costs. “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

As society has evolved, it seems that many of us convinced not to buy the ticket. The ride might break, after all. The modern therapeutic mindset stresses acceptance of the world’s injustices and society’s inane requests for conformity and submission. This means accepting mass layoffs of qualified, hard-working employees, the concentration of all wealth among not only capital owners but upper management, the violations of rights committed by federal agents, on video, without consequence and the unchecked spread of artificial intelligence into all walks of life, without any democratic consideration. And, if you want adventure, you can live vicariously through the girlfriends and celebrities that some billionaire launches to spend a few seconds in the lowest levels of outer space.

The suicides of Hemingway, Thompson and Bourdain remind us that the trade-offs to nonconformity are real. We wish it weren’t so. But if you think about it, the off chance that somebody murdered Thompson really doesn’t make it better. Buy the ticket, take the ride, indeed.

“The island is stirred up after a disappearance. People gather in little groups out in the street to talk about their memories of the thing that’s been lost. There are regrets and a certain sadness, and we try to comfort one another. If it’s a physical object that has been disappeared, we gather the remnants up to burn, or bury, or toss into the river. But no one makes much of a fuss, and it’s over in a few days. Soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.”

Early in the novel, birds disappear. You would think this would be a big deal. Even on a January day, as I write this in lower Manhattan, windows open to thwart an overactive and ancient steam-heating system on a surprisingly warm day, chirping birds are a soundtrack to my writing that I would surely miss, if absent. But, Ogawa shows us that people forget and adapt quickly to what has been taken away. Like, by the time the novel starts, perfume has been long gone: “In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It’s not sold anywhere, and no one wants it.”

Most people forget.

Ogawa tells her story through the voice of an unnamed narrator, a young woman and a writer who does not forget as easily as others do. She is writing a novel about a typist who is losing her voice. She is worried about her career. Our collective memories are embedded in novels, after all, making her work a target for the Memory Police. Her editor, like her, retains memories of the things the government takes away and so he is hunted by the police as well. She hides him under her floorboards. The effect is both 1984 and The Diary of Anne Frank. Ogawa doesn’t shrink away from the consequences of her ideas. A government that will take away birds and flowers and calendars will also take body parts and whole people. Anything can be forgotten.

Most of you are not wondering why I am suddenly writing about a Japanese Dystopian novel that I read 6 years ago (thanks, Goodreads!) and that was published in 1994. There is no way around the politics this time. In Minneapolis, Minnesota this week, a federal Immigration, Customs Enforcement agent shot a woman in the face, in broad daylight, falsely claiming that she was trying to run him down with her vehicle (this account is completely debunked by video evidence.) The facts here are inarguable. The ICE agent illegally tried to enter her vehicle and she drove away, turning her wheels away from him. He shot her in the head three times, from a completely safe position. If she had committed any crime at all, that could have been adjudicated later. Local police could have been called to pull her over. She would have had a day in court, at the discretion of an accountable prosecutor. The core of the story, though, is clear — a federal officer killed a citizen without cause. That is murder.

So far, it has not been treated as such. The President, the Vice President and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security have all accused the victim of being a “radical leftist” and of attempting to “weaponize” her vehicle. They have been backed by right wing media. Elected officials are outright blaming the victim: “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax.

Meanwhile, the federal government will not allow Minnesota police or other authorities to participate in their investigation of the shooting, claiming that locals have no jurisdiction over a federal action. This means the federal government is investigating its own actions, absent a neutral third party to enforce accountability. The Vice President claims, in any event, that the agent enjoy “absolute immunity,” which would cover both criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.

In the spirit of The Memory Police, those responsible for this murder want to define the event and its history. Their hope is that by repeating stories of the victim’s criminality and repeating the easily debunked claim that she had weaponized her car that they can create a new collective memory that shields them from accountability or even criticism.

As Ogawa imagined, the government’s power over memory swiftly moves from objects to living things to human bodies. Well, it’s not a fantasy, it seems. Will we let it happen?

The best answer is, “go outside.” We’ve known since the age of foot-born messengers to be skeptical of anything you can’t experience. If scout returns confusing a lion in the savannah for a malevolent forest god, that might affect group decision-making. If your neighbor tunes in late to a broadcast of War of the Worlds and you’re not skeptical of his report, you might find yourself taking a shotgun to a water tower in the middle of the night, waging war like a 20th century Don Quixote.

While we can’t be everywhere, know everything or touch every important event, it’s wise to grow our skepticism with distance from facts and power. But it’s a continuum. If you’re too credulous, you risk being duped and manipulated. But extreme questioning can lead to crankiness, solipsism and paralysis. At some level, we can only understand the world through our relationship with others, and this is one of the functions of art created by actual, rather than artificial, intelligence.

One way of avoiding the reality-bending properties of AI media is to get out of its way by spending our time with art and art forms created before AI’s popularization. We can read more novels and poetry. We can experience more live theatre and music, and see more art on walls or in books. Now, more than ever, the archives of creativity from the before times can drive us forward.

In early December, I spent a day at Hunter College, attending a symposium exploring and celebrating the 50-year archive of performance artist, filmmaker and director Ping Chong, as well as the Pink Fang theatre company, which explores and builds on his work. I was not familiar with Chong’s work, which is technologically forward looking but still a respite from the AI storm upon us.

Born in Toronto and raised in New York City’s Chinatown, Ping Chong is a pioneer of community-based theatre, documentary theatre and performance art. He describes his work as driven by his visual sense, but storytelling and narrative also help him forge strong connections to his audience and to other artists. He has specialized in documentary theatre, creating work out of the experiences of the actors, designers and directors in his company as well as the community around him. The work has been performed around the country and the Pink Fang company called the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club its local home. Supplemented by other free material held at the New York Public Library for the performing arts, Pink Fang offers a complete archive of Ping Chong’s work, which has been explored and studied in collaboration with the theatre department at Hunter College. There’s 50 years of human-driven theatre to explore here, with new artists adding every day, and not a deepfake among them.

Around the time I was introduced to Pink Fang, I’d been finishing up reading Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff. This nesting doll of a novel, borrowing and expanding on a structure associated with Italo Calvino, was written almost 20 years ago and certainly should have been published then. At the turn of the century, DeWitt earned a cult following with her challenging and moving novel The Last Samurai. The problem is that she published with Miramax Books, back when the film production company had gone multimedia and had splashily brought of Talk magazine under Tina Brown. All of that flopped when the economy did. The books and magazines didn’t make it. The film production arm lost its edge and wound up owned by Disney.

I am compressing a lot of history here but the story of DeWitt, who maintains quite a following, is one of an author’s career interrupted by corporate blunders. Like many authors, DeWitt would have benefitted from the bygone arrangements of publishing where a dedicated editor and publishing house put full backing to her work. The book was published as a PDF some 5 years ago, the Dalkey Archive Press brought it out properly this year.

If you love books, get to know Dalkey Archive. They were started in 1984 in response to the difficulties of keeping experimental and difficult fiction alive in a market place dominated by airport books and accessible best sellers. It started as a literary journal called “The Review of Contemporary Fiction” and blossomed from there. As founder John O’Brien put it:

“The writers I was interested in-such people as Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Metcalf, Douglas Woolf, Wallace Markfield, Luisa Valenzuela-were not being written about. Even though reading itself is a solitary experience, the impulse afterwards or even during is to want to talk to someone about the book, even if this “talking” takes the form of reading what critics have to say. But no one was writing about these novelists, and it was even difficult for me to write about them with any expectation that what I wrote would get published in journals at that time. If you wrote the 5,000th essay on Saul Bellow, you had a pretty good chance of getting it published because editors knew who he was and so publishing yet another essay on Bellow was safe. But they didn’t know who Douglas Woolf was, nor did they very much care about not knowing who he was. So, the critical establishment (however you want to define this, from academic journals to the New York Times Book Review) had a lock on what writers would be covered, as well as how they would be covered.”

The problems we are dealing with now were very much with us in the 1980s. O’Brien died in 2020 but the Dalkey archive continues. Its next project is a re-issue of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, along with a much=appreciated readers guide. I plucked my copy of Americans off the shelf to find it is the Dalkey edition from 1995. This just shows us that, if left to the whims of the market, we would lose major works by writers like Stein. Dalkey is a nonprofit and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is a much diminished cultural force these days, so consider supporting them by buying from their catalogue.

For an easy and free way to increase your exposure to pre-AI art, head over to The Paris Review and sign up for their daily poem, as well as interviews with writers. They really do a nice job surfacing cool things from more than seven decades. I realize, as I’ve gotten older, that I read a lot less poetry than I used to, even though it’s possible to commit to a poem a day without giving up a lot of time.

I thank you for wading this deeply into a meandering, end of year essay that involved a cranks complaint about the rise of the machines and I suppose I owe you an explanation or at least an apology, in the Socratic sense.

I know it seems absurd, but there are people out there who would consider a most literate society as something of a step forward, or at least not worth worrying about. These people value efficiency over deep understanding and the economic over the emotional. They view claims about beauty as vague, unmeasurable and thus not addressable. With the kind of smirk once reserved for shamans with proven power, they say things like, “show me your budget and I’ll show you your priorities.” And they miss things, all of the time. They miss things like the collapse of reading in our culture:

In this discussion, I went from deepfakes to Ping Chong’s performance art, to experimental fiction in America, to appreciation for poetry, and I consulted our book shelves many times. As I look at our collection of physical books, collected over decades, I see an entire class of literature that is no longer produced in volume — correspondence. Almost all of the poets, as well as the modernist storytellers and playwrights in our collection, have had their letters collected, to be published and studied on their own. We even have three volumes of letters from Hunter S. Thompson. Whether it’s Anne Sexton or Robert Lowell or F. Scott Fitzgerald, these letters weren’t written to be published and sold (even if they were often written in pursuit of money). You don’t see so many of these published anymore.

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There are many reasons for this that I am going to gloss over now, in favor of the big one: nobody writes letters anymore and emails are not, in fact, just a faster way to send letters but are an entirely different form of writing that is not so interesting in book form and is, in any event, being supplanted.

When the technology industry thrust AI on society without discussion or consent, it targeted email first. In 2017, Google started offerings its users suggested replies, which was quickly followed by predictive text. The idea is that there’s nothing special or literary about the email and that a server can save you the time of typing “Sounds good, see you at 1.” The machine knows that most correspondence follows a simple and predictable progression and it spits it out for us. If you were going to write, “congrats on the new job!” anyway, why not let LinkedIn’s server do that for you?

Predictive text is not like a mathematical calculator. As beautiful, universal and powerful as math may be, it doesn't benefit much from subtext, humor or inference. It prizes speed and accuracy while language is more subtle and open to nuance and paradox. A calculator speeds the work of the skilled mathematician. A predictive text generator hobbles the writer. Since the popularization of email, we have lost the art of correspondence and we are also losing the art of conversation.

The issue is that art is in the effort while the values of business, math, science and engineering are all about reducing the workload. If you’re using AI to hypothesize about how you might execute a gene editing formula, the technology can only help. If you’re using it to link quantum computing to drone programming, it can only make your life easier. But if you’re using it to write novels, make movies or create paintings, you’re only doing to those art forms what e-mail (and predictive text) have done to letter writing — you’re devaluing the enterprise and stealing skills from humanity as you do it.

We need spaces free from computer intelligence because everything I’ve seen and experience in the last month tells me that AI isn’t just a tool but an invasive species, something like a weed that takes more from it’s environment than it gives back.

Have human 2026, everybody.

In her essay, Klein remarks:

“To proclaim something surreal in 2025 is to say almost nothing at all. Catchy pop tunes generated by AI are surreal. A heat wave in the Arctic is surreal. A reality show star who becomes president of the United States – twice – is surreal. Generally, what is meant by the term is ‘unreal’: the replacement of organic life with artifice, which is the contemporary condition.”

I agree strongly. “Surreal” should not be a straightforward synonym for “weird.” The surrealist adventure is a quest for deeper truths that are buried in our psyches and in the world beyond our immediate perceptions. This is why surrealism is closely tied to sciences, including psychology and physics where evidence-based approaches to inquiry reveal hidden worlds with features beyond our intuitive comprehension.

I find surrealism and its progenitor Dadaism function as constructive and inspiring forces in my creative work and outlook on life. I have tended towards the jokes and play of Dadaism, though, as I find a lot of the root inspiration of surrealism very hard to grapple with while I am writing. Quoting Klein again:

“Surrealists rejected their own society’s institutions and values, but theirs was not a nihilistic worldview. On the contrary, many of them were veterans of Dadaism who broke with that earlier movement precisely because it offered little more than rage and un-making. Surrealism, in contrast, was profoundly romantic. For every severed limb, there was a torso replaced with a tree trunk or seashell. For every monster, a fertile mother, or a beguiling human figure with feathers or tangled leaves for hair.”

When I read that, I thought of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and also Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Life changes us in strange and unexpected ways. It takes a limb and offers a feather. It takes people from us. This was my second Thanksgiving without my mother on Earth and The Artist/Scholar Wife’s first. We didn’t talk about not having her mother during our meal, though we have kept a plate and glass for her at our table since her death in July. I know we shared our sense of her absence because surrealism teaches us that talking is just a surrogate, and often a damned poor one, for understanding, compassion and sharing.

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After a dinner worthy of a Hemingway recount, the Renaissance Son told us that he needed to practice his declamation. He attends The Brooklyn Latin School and one of their many rigors and requirements is that its students must memorize and letter-perfectly recite prose, poetry, and drama of merit. Tonight, he declaimed the poem “Try To Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski. My son’s recitation of the poem reached me as a prayer that asks us to find grace and gratitude for the world despite its faults, flaws, cruelties and indifferences. It’s not strictly a surrealist poem, but I’d say it’s on the mission that Klein described, to show the horrors of bodies mutilated by wars but also to offer something of their transformation and even improvement, by our collective imagination and mythic understanding of existence.

Klein reminds us that the surrealists tried to bring us past the atrocities of the First World War, where science really bedeviled the world by bringing us new ways to kill but also new medical treatments that rendered what would have been mortal events into mutilating and disabling moments that would stay with soldiers and civilians throughout their lives. Then, they were confronted by fascism and the surrealists resisted that, insisting on our psychological and epic freedoms.

Two things occurred to me, based on experiences I had this year, as companion of the Artist/Scholar Wife at museum exhibitions. The first is that the Sixties Surreal show at The Whitney establishes how American surrealists kept up the fight against fascism in the post World War II years. The second is that the post-war Italian surrealist Piero Manzoni contributed hugely to Italy’s cultural recovery from fascism in the 20th century.

I realize, as I reach the conclusion here, that I haven’t justified my proposed headline about the “sculptor Manolo” or “Bartleby the Scrivener.” I haven’t mentioned either, have I? But I chose that header because I set out to write about what we want to do and be and, in pursuit of that, how we might “praise the mutilated world.” I learned about the sculptor Manolo while rereading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein recounts that the aspiring sculptor had been drafted into a war on behalf of Spain and had dutifully collected his uniform, arms and horse to report to the battlefield. But what he wanted was to be a sculptor in Paris. On his Quixotic journey (and we must capitalize the Q) he sold the horse, the rifle, the sword, the ammunition and the uniform. He went to Paris. He befriended Pablo Picasso (who nobody should ever call an asshole) and he became the sculptor and artist he wanted to be. Bartleby the Scrivener, the titular character of one of Herman Melville’s best pieces of writing, didn't want to do his boring job. By candidly telling his boss, “I prefer not to,” when assigned any task, he caused his professional superior to question his entire life.

It would be ridiculous, in the most creative sense of the word, of me to make an announcement about the future of The Middlebrow, but why not be ridiculous? I’m a good way into a novel that I really want to finish. There’s also a short story. There’s also an idea frothing in my head called Strange Italians about Italian surrealists after World War II and why they matter. So, if this becomes more sporadic and you notice, that’s why.

I hope you all have a wonderful end to 2025 and enter 2026 with optimism to praise it.

I can tell you about my relationship with Howard, though. It is one that made New York City—home to me since 1999—feel totally new and open. While I have always loved visual art and have long been attached to surrealism and dadaism through Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years, I have been afraid to even have ideas about art, given that my education in it comprises a 101 university class that spend way too much time on the Venus of Willendorf. Howard gave me a voice.

Howard was a Middlebrow reader and would often tell Natasha that he didn’t understand the topic here, while at the same time sending me detailed emails that included typos I should fix. With an art history degree from NYU and market-honed expertise in 19th and early 20th-century paintings by artists like Édouard Cortès and Daniel Ridgway Knight, I can assure you that the Middlebrow’s references to artists and writers did not ever stump him. He just wanted me to know that he thought I was smart. That’s because Howard always wanted to help people feel good about their strengths, even in an art society that can be exclusionary and intimidating to outsiders.

Howard told me to buy art (whether a book, a poster, a print, or an original) out of love and connection, not as an investment. He told the same thing to his clients, many of whom were professional investors who had taught themselves the art of divining price, timing, and value.

Howard also had wide-ranging tastes and that most important of qualities: curiosity about the world. He specialized in 19th and early 20th-century academic paintings, but when he expanded into contemporary art, he supported abstract, pop, and experimental artists. He gave his living artists a much larger commission on sales than most New York galleries would, and he looked out for them, sending them food and gifts throughout the roughest years of the pandemic.

I’m tempted to say that he never accepted the idea that the artist should starve while the galleries thrive, but that doesn’t do him justice. He supported some of these artists at his own cost. In many cases, their sales did not justify or compensate Howard for the shipments of high-end groceries he sent. He subsidized living artists with the profits he made from the sales of bygone legends, taking less profit for himself so that his contemporaries could go on painting, photographing, and sculpting.

When you venture into the Rehs’ home, where every inch of wall has art, you see a gamut that runs from classical painting to covers of pulp genre novels and comic books, to brilliant abstractions. Howard and I initially connected over our love of Marvel comics, and a lot of our talks bounced from Gertrude Stein to Jim Shooter.

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In his galleries, his home, and at art fairs, I was lucky to be able to talk to Howard about what he put on the wall. I always learned something—sometimes about an artist’s life and sometimes about how I should focus my look—and it always made me better. That is, in fact, my eulogy: “I always felt better after talking to Howard.”

All of our Middlebrow love to the Rehs family, with gratitude.

“If you say ‘I am unhappy’ in a play on a stage, it should not mean that you alone are unhappy, but that millions of people all over the world are unhappy like you. To play it on a purely individual level gives it a pedestrian rather than poetic quality,” Adler wrote in an essay collected in Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekov.

Adler was the daughter of Jacob Pavlovich Adler, a star of the Yiddish Theatre in Odessa, London and New York. If “Yiddish Theatre” brings vaudeville to mind, set that aside. Adler’s father practiced an extremely literary form of the art. He performed in King Lear and helped to adapt works by Leo Tolstoy to the emergent 20th century stage. Stanislavsky knew him and his work, though Stella was introduced to the Method in New York City by Lee Strasberg, founder of The Group Theatre, an influential repertory company active in the 1930s and best known for bringing Clifford Odets to the stage.

When Adler met Stanislavsky she had learned such hatred for his method that she could barely bring herself to speak to him. Stanislavsky divined that she had been taught the art incorrectly by Strasberg, who trained the whole Group Theatre company in his version of the Method. Adler went on to teach from her perspective, influencing actors like Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Cybill Shepherd. I wouldn’t make too much of the disagreements between Adler and Strasberg, by the way. The Method is very demanding, puts artists under stress and often leads to disagreements. The actor Sanford Meisner, a contemporary and Group Theatre member, turned The Method into his own technique that sparked many an argument among the theatre folk I hung out with in my twenties. Many an argument? Many and argument. Many. An. Argument.

Adler’s view of acting as a literary art, shared by Strasberg, is especially relevant for playwrights, directors and all of the artists who collaborate to bring plays to life, including technicians, costumers and designers. Consider this, from the playwright John Patrick Shanley:

“Writing is acting is directing is living your life. I have told you the things I have just told you so that you would know something of my approach to playwriting. I see no difference between writing a play and living my life. The same things that make a moment in my life succeed, combust, move, these same things make a moment in my playwriting have life. And when I move in my writing, I have moved in my life. There is no illusion. It is all the same thing. Acting is the same as playwriting.” - From Shanley’s introduction to 13 by Shanley.

“The big argument” that Adler so admires in Ibsen also shows up in Shanley’s work, which on film and stage, has always dealt with unanswerable questions of modern life and how we can find ways to live with each other while also finding ways to live with ourselves. Critics of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky often refer to a “polyphonic spree” of voices and ideas in his work, where all of the characters get a fair hearing, free from the author’s judgment. As Adler comments in her essay, the villains might be recognizable as such, but their motivations and reasons should be as clear and defensible as any other character’s.

On Tuesday evening, the Scholar/Artist Wife took the Renaissance Son and The Middlebrow to the Lee Strasberg Creative Center to see five new one act plays by Shanley, put on as staged reading for the benefit of the organization devoted to Strasberg’s scholarship, art and pedagogy. The benefit performance, organized by Alec Baldwin, who trained in Strasberg’s school, thrilled and challenged the audience, as described in Natasha’s terrific review.

I had an eerie experience of deja vu watching the five new Shanley works on display. One piece, performed by Susie Essman and Jeff Garlin called The Bonnet seemed very familiar to me. It’s about a couple in the later years of marriage. They don’t communicate well. The man is having an affair and she knows about it. She shows up to breakfast wearing a bonnet of her own design, though it evokes The Handmaid’s Tale. He asks about it and she says that their unspoken and often present dialogue about whether she does or doesn’t want to have sex is bothering her, so she designed a bonnet to signal her libido. When she wears the hat, she doesn’t want sex. This makes him horny for her when she’s wearing the bonnet. The conflict winds up revealing a sweetness and lovingness in their relationship that is buried beneath a surface of misunderstanding, betrayal and hostility. The man’s decision to have an affair (with one of her friends, no less) isn’t condoned and isn’t forgiven but it’s revealed to be not so important as another writer might make it. The couple are able to work through their issues when they strip away the fictions about what a marriage is supposed to be. We get a sense, in a few short minutes, that we are watching two people see each other as real for the first time in a long time. “The big argument” about fidelity turns out to be less important than how people choose to connect to each other and to get along. It’s also very funny.

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I thought I had read The Bonnet before and went looking for it in my long shelved collection of Shanley’s plays from the 1980s. It must have been a trick of the mind because the play isn’t in there. It’s as new as the others. But, in Shanley’s older plays like Savage in Limbo and Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, the polyphonic spree so associated with Russian literature prevails. If you don’t know Shanley’s theatrical work, by the way, the movies Joe versus the Volcano and Moonstruck, both from his pen, give a good feel. I highlight Joe for its absurdist elements and Moonstruck for its argumentative fireworks.

Like few other playwrights, Shanley offers the real and surreal in a tight package. His characters have all the real desires and motivations — they fight, steal, cheat, argue, make excuses and very often try to kill themselves. They are often unbound by sexual taboos, but not free from the consequences of it. But even Shanley’s stupid tough guys and gals are looking for solace and poetry in the world, and they sometimes find it. The result is dialogue that has all the piercing qualities and rhythm of a David Mamet play, but Shanley’s scripts create the kinds of theatrical possibilities that I’d associate with the less realistic works of Eugene O’Neill or Edward Albee.

Which brings us back to Adler and Ibsen, because Ibsen and August Strindberg, who are two other playwrights who engage in soaring magical lyricism sometimes and very rooted realism at other times. It’s sometimes hard to imagine that the same writer gave us Ghosts and A Dream Play or Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler, but they did. The literary approach of Adler, Strasberg and Stanislavsky to acting (and directing, and design and production) can bring all of this to life.

What’s amazing about Shanley, and really stood out on Tuesday evening at The Lee Strasberg Creative Center is that he can bridge magic realism with realism in a single play. He did it in front of us five times in short order, with an incredible cast able to showcase the possibilities of devotion to story and character without pyrotechnic distraction.

Sadly, in 2025, it’s not the kind of theatre you see every day.