The New York Times capitulates and finally admits that we were right about androgenic fiction

Overton oscillations and the opening of the aesthetic Overton window

There’s an incredible opening monologue in the film Michael Clayton where a corporate lawyer has a manic episode that leads him into a moral epiphany about who he is and what he is doing:

This idea of an organism “whose sole function is to excrete the poison — the ammo — the defoliant — necessary for even larger and more dangerous organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity” is, in my view, an excellent summation of the institution of the New York Times.

Because this blog is primarily literary, I won’t rehash the classic Chomskyite critique of institutions like the NYT as consent-manufacturing factories for a litany of imperial massacres and various other evils. More generally, I think the correct mental model for the institution is some syncretic combination of Chomsky’s analysis of MSM/prestige-media as an expression of corporate oligarchical power combined with the complementary thesis from the right (Yarvin’s model of The Cathedral and the “media-run state”).

In any event, both of these models eventually converge on the function of the machine, which is essentially a form of reality-weaving, i.e. of narrative management.

For a contemporary account of how egregious an institution like this is, I’d encourage you to skim this site, which is dedicated to the NYT’s whitewashing of what Amnesty international has now classified as an ongoing genocide.

And now, for the coup de grâce, I’m going to complain about a far less morally and politically significant example—a guest essay about my favorite topic in the entire universe: the decline of men in literary fiction.

Until about five minutes ago, if you were to ask a top-line literary figure whether or not there was a problem with male representation in the written arts, you’d get an answer like this:¹

Ross Barkan

:
There’s been internet discourse of late around the state of literature when it comes to the young male (heterosexual, in particular) perspective. Some have argued, in newer American novels, masculinity (toxicity, warts, and all) is disappearing. Do you agree? Disagree? Why do you think young men read less fiction than young women?

Tony Tulathimutte:
I don’t think it's disappearing at all. Plenty of recent books and stories are centrally about heterosexual masculinity in one form or another.

Recently, the NYT has dropped an unusual guest-piece that few of us expected.

Read this dogshit here (don’t pay for it, though).

You know you’re getting another absolute banger from the NYT when the central argument starts stress-testing the very concept of ad nauseam:

But if you care about the health of our society — especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster — the decline and fall of literary men should worry you.

In a short, poorly argued and even more poorly-thought-out piece, the author name-drops Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, and Donald Trump and essentially frames their appeal as secondary to the decline of men in literary fiction.

The solution?

Can we guess the solution?

The fortunes of men and women are intertwined. This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Why, it’s to read more books by women!

I have to admit how impressed I am by this. You can see how hard the guy’s working just to tell some basic truth about the world. It’s like watching a pretzel fold itself a second time into some kind of bizarre Escherian fractal.

On some level, you have to feel for the over-socialized, Acceptable Literary Man. Imagine the level of mind-killing necessary for an author who cannot even walk himself to his own conclusion without first negating it.

This is the type of thing that, in isolation, would read like a hilarious parody if not for the ongoing context of something like Gaza.

That this piece is so wedded to transparently superficial liberal pieties like hand-wringing over the terrible dangers of someone like Joe Rogan as the same paper actively facilitates the mass murder of children is one of those gargantually obscene examples of Liberal moral posturing that could only ever take place in an information ecosystem where the power of narrative management so eclipses any semblance of moral proportion or responsibility that it can only be described as a human tote-bag performing auto-fellatio.

Astute commentators agree: men are allowed to write literary fiction

As much as possible, I try to avoid writing about Trump on this blog: not because I have any intrinsic aversion to the topic, but because I have very little to say about the topic that hasn’t already been done to death.² It’s important to strive for originality.

What’s more interesting is revisiting this idea of the much-panned “vibe shift” from many months ago, which now coincides with his electoral victory. A lot of people are in the phase of victory laps and the eternal summer.

The idea is basically that the zeitgeist—ever evolving, ever changing—has (permanently?) shifted rightward, expanding the Aesthetic Overton Window, particularly in light of generally-looser moderation policies on Twitter and an anecdotal decline in the threat of progressive cultural cancellation.

Broadly, there’s two broad possibilities for the future:

This meme is a bit crass, but it’s directionally correct.

1. We are in a macro-historical super-trend where leading-edge secular progressive morality (and its aforementioned contradictions) has hit a “local top” in our domestic culture. It’ll take a little beating for 1-2 years (until the midterms), then resume its upward trajectory, perhaps if Trump’s tariffs/deportations backfire and create economic (and then cultural) blowback.

2. We are already be over the “macro top” and headed in a more rightward direction where American military and power dispenses with the universalist moral foundation of human-rights axioms and becomes more nakedly transactional, ethnonationalist, & primacist. This filters down into elite cultural institutions, like publishing, and permanently shifts literary culture away from strict adherence to leading-edge secular progressive morality.

Instead of (1) or (2) happening, I think what we’ll see instead is a more pronounced fracturing of elite literary culture: i.e., we will get both.

Traditional publishing houses will remain niche players, locked in to their existing state of psychodemographic class capture. These institutions will continue to experience a relative cultural decline as they bleed a sort of vital energy.

Simultaneously, outsider literary institutions will grow in parallel and make gains in the elite wordcel sphere. Seizing on the opportunity of a wider Aesthetic Overton Window within the general culture writ large, they’ll make incremental but nonetheless substantive progress in forming a literary counter-elite. You’ll see right-wing publishing houses like Passage Press advance mindshare for top-shelf fiction authors like sci-fi writer

Zero HP Lovecraft

and the minimalist

Delicious Tacos

.

Between these two poles, in my view, we will see something of a New Wave: an orthogonal exploration that takes the newly opened spaces of aesthetic possibility, but moves in a direction that isn’t plainly red, blue, or even purple-coded (“enlightened centrism as a bit”). For relevant examples, I think of mags like Mars Review of Books or

Sam Kahn

&

Ross Barkan

’s upcoming project; outlets that seem to deliberately aim toward the syncretic.

It’s an exciting time, and these next 1-2 years will be a decisive inflection point.

May you live in interesting times—and read interesting books.

1. It’s important for me to qualify that my critique of Tony’s response does not extend into a critique of his geopolitics. Like many established literary ficiton authors, he has been vocal about Gaza on his Twitter account—I’d be remiss to ignore that here.

2. At some point, I may write an extended digression about the implications of Trump for Asian-Americans in the era of heightened great power competition, but my thoughts are still preliminary. If you’re looking for good geopolitical analysis on his foreign policy and its likely implications, I’d suggest the excellent

Un-Diplomatic

Substack.