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At times, the length of Edie and Marie’s friendship, a full half of their lives—the entirety, so far, of both of their adulthoods—at times it felt that knowing someone this intimately and for such a critical duration had been and may continue to be the main event of Marie’s life. Being in love and later being married had been more urgent, more time-consuming, and in some ways more intimate, but nothing had felt more central and reliable than the conversation that had been happening between the two of them, and, at least until recently, with K. This long witnessing, on even ground—unlike the angled perspective between parent and child or the concave mirror of marriage—had created an unwritten record within each of them about how the other had or had not changed, an archive of actions and habits that became more detailed and more critical with every passing year.

Marie had met K and Edie when she was 17, just shy of 18, gawkish and awkward and closeted, freshman year, still a child in her newly adult body. K and Edie, who’d spent their whole childhoods together, adopted her into their friendship as if they’d been looking for her all this time, and many years ago, though Marie could hardly stand to recall this now, K had told her that she, on her 24th birthday, was 

, a statement she would have been unable to accept from anyone else, not from a girlfriend, not from her own family, and when K’s sister used this exact phrase in her vows to Marie on their wedding day, unaware of what it echoed, Marie had blushed. She knew it was a lie.

As a girlfriend she hadn’t been easy to love, and as a wife she knew she still wouldn’t be easy to love. Marie was melancholic, indecisive, and anxious. She had insomnia so strong it was often contagious, and when she did sleep she hogged the blankets. She couldn’t cook, barely cleaned, and had a regular habit of getting drawn into long conversations with neighbors and colleagues when she should have been on her way home for dinner or carrying out an errand she promised she’d do or meeting her wife somewhere on the rare nights they went out. Above all she knew she wanted too much from romantic love, held it to impossible standards, wanted it to totally redeem her, somehow, effortlessly and constantly. But Marie did believe that she was good at friendship, easy in it, never asking anything unreasonable of the platonic, always relaxing into the human texture, the natural ebbing and flowing of her bonds with K and Edie. She gave herself up without tension into friendship, respected her friends enough to allow them to change her.

It was Edie who had, one day toward the end of their third year in college, said to Marie,

. And she didn’t have to say more than that. Marie knew exactly what Edie meant, yet it was only in hearing Edie make this observation about this change that Marie suddenly knew and felt it to be true—that tenacious streak of self-hatred, that ambiguous but inescapable sense of being a failure, the stiffened way she’d been occupying her body—for years it had been lifting but had lifted almost entirely the moment that Edie said this—

—or at least the first layer of it had lifted, and Marie knew the only reason this change had been possible was the way she’d been absorbed into K and Edie’s world—they, the pair of friends who’d come to college together, platonic prom dates, everyone said they’d be together in the end, those kind of friends. Even as children they knew they were already together in the end—it was already the end, and they were already together. K and Edie’s relationship seemed to be the most radical and rare thing to Marie—a true marriage, a marriage without marriage—and for years she’d thought herself ancillary to the two of them, a role she felt at home in, an additional person, a spare, a friendly ghost, until it was clear, all at once in the August she turned 21, that she was, a shock to herself, no less essential, just a newer element, the obvious third point of the triangle.

The three of them had lived in a crooked and cheap little apartment for a time during and after college, the soft and uncomplicated years before jobs and partners and graduate school and travel had peeled them apart, and though each of those transitions had seemed final or potentially final, none had yet proven so. The moves to other cities or other apartments in the same city seemed to signal the end of an era and the likelihood that it would never be quite like this again, that they’d never live together again, that the nature of this family was once again changing. But relationships that had seemed permanent had ruptured, jobs were lost, new moves were needed, and graduations ended in nothing but a more advanced state of the confusion that had led to grad school in the first place, and it was then that one of them always returned to one or the other or both of them, hovering for a few weeks or months in a guest room, changing their lives once more with the assurance that their conversation and their jointly held archive and their shared support may actually be the most stable thing in their lives, and though other aspects of adulthood may peak or crash, this thing between the three of them would change shape but never reach a conclusion.

It was clear that K and Edie were the axis of her life, though it seemed real adults were supposed to forge that kind of centrality elsewhere.

In fact, the possibility of a diminished potency in her relationships with K and Edie had been the only fear Marie could not even bring herself to confess to her wife in the months before the arrival of the twins. All the other fears—the medical and mortal fears, the fears of their marriage getting filleted by two babies, the financial and logistical fears, the fear of failure—they had all seemed more dismissible than the worry she felt that she might lose her friends. It was clear that K and Edie were the axis of her life, though it seemed real adults were supposed to forge that kind of centrality elsewhere.

Marie’s wife had always been certain that bearing and raising children was a central if not the sole purpose of her life, a certainty that was sometimes unsettling in its unquestioned steadiness, but Marie also knew her wife’s certainty would be the lighthouse of their family life, the velocity that kept the whole thing aloft.

Then the twins came. They had been manageably unruly, without any major or lasting problems in their behavior or health or temperament, and Marie’s transformation into a parent had not (as she had silently feared) ended her friendships with K or Edie, and it had even, in some ways, enriched them. Edie would occasionally obtain permission from her partner to visit Marie and the twins for a weekend, and she naturally became a child around the children, getting on the floor with them, inventing absurd games. When Edie looked up at Marie from the twins’ angle, each saw new dimensions in the other.

Alone with the twins, noticing how intensely they surveilled Marie from their car seats and high chairs, how they seemed to forget nothing and catalogued everything about their parents—words used in passing, momentary flickers of emotion, loose promises made then broken—Marie had often thought of and longed for the softer ways her friends had watched her, how different it was from the nonstop, existential intensity of those two little sets of eyes. Marie’s wife did not, she knew, share this irritation at being watched so closely all the time, and it was possible, Marie thought, that her wife’s innate impulse toward birth and child-raising had really been about this, all along—the desire to be witnessed with such life-or-death intensity, for her children to create hyperrealistic and micro-detailed portraits of their mother, and to live beneath them for the rest of their lives. Knowing this, knowing that these people who did not yet exist could be created and would in turn create this portrait of her—was this what Marie’s wife envisioned as she walked with determination and authority into a sperm bank, mercilessly studied the options, and made her choice without hesitation?

During the years Marie had helped raise the twins, feeding them and ferrying them around and tucking them in and waking up with them once more, she felt that though there was so much humbling clarity in these daily acts, the one-directional devotion of parenting also felt a little demented and compulsive—similar to the way, at the height of her smoking, she’d sometimes realize she was inhaling from a cigarette she had no memory of lighting, like there was a ghost inside of her that smoked without her awareness—like there was a ghost inside of her that went through the actions of parenting without her conscious participation. But she was good at it, she was told. Everyone said so.

Now that her marriage and relationship with the twins and her friendship with K had been severed in the course of a single afternoon, Marie’s relationship with Edie was the most long-lasting thing in her life—Edie, Jesus, fucked up, feral, and precious as she is—and Marie is coming close to crying now, though she’s smiling, watching Edie still talking about her exploits, remembering how Edie has always been able to give the best advice but never to take it, and how irritated Marie has always been by Edie’s tendency to disappear for months on end, then show up as if she’d been there all along.

Marie is still watching her friend recount the details of some small orgy, distantly registering the facts of the event, but mainly she is just watching Edie’s face, the wild gaze of someone newly introduced or reintroduced to the world. It’s in that faint glimmer in her skin, in her eyes, her gestures, and of course her overblown word choice, her breathless way of speaking, the way she fidgets the fray on her shorts, curling her legs unnaturally in her chair, as if she isn’t used to being alive, as if the life in her is constantly at risk of spilling out, rushing out everywhere and into everything.

and Marie says she doesn’t know, that she’s just out of it, but Edie asks again, 

Edie sits up, alert and formal as she recites an answer that seems rehearsed, how sexuality was one of the most beautiful and simple ways for a person to leave their mind and interact with the subconscious, or how sex was one of the few ways to exist directly as a body, as an animal, as a mortal and dying thing, and how sex also brought your awareness out of yourself and into the consciousness of another and how essential that was—but when Edie reaches the point in her response about the Paraclete, the soul, salvation, Marie pours another glass of mezcal and tilts it back quickly.

But she had no self-awareness sometimes, and it was true that what Edie had been through was terrible, and it was true that it was good for her now to be finding pleasure in something, regardless of how frivolous, but Edie’s recently past problems and their subsequent solutions all seemed so small right now, while Marie’s problems were ongoing, they were serious and inescapable and quite frankly they were tragic, and perhaps the most tragic problem was that she could no longer have a reasonable relationship with the twins, and maybe even worse than that she was beginning to feel that the twins were never really hers in the first place, as they had never been genetically hers—the product only of her wife’s body and the anonymous substance from the sperm bank—and though the genetics of the twins had never seemed consequential in the years she had lived with and raised them, her lack of genetic claim and her lack of domestic responsibility now amounted to the fact that though she’d once had children, she now no longer had children, and perhaps they didn’t even miss her, didn’t need her, that she had perhaps always been something like a nanny in their life, removable, extraneous, easy to send away. It had become difficult to even say the word “my” before the word “children.” 

What K saw. That you were seeing someone else.

Seeing is a weird word for it, isn’t it? Seeing—I can see you right now. I’ve seen a lot of people.

I do know what you mean. It just happens not to be a particularly simple situation, and no one knows that because no one asked me anything. K didn’t ask me anything. My wife didn’t ask me anything. You didn’t even call.

Brenda was house-sitting and tickets were cheap.

So you went to Greece for a month. Great.

It’s just that—you’re the sort of person that goes to Greece for a month, and I’m the kind of person who lives here.

But Marie doesn’t know where to start, especially with someone who felt that sex with someone she barely even knew was or even could be something sacred when, in Marie’s life, sex had mainly been something that brought people into her life or sent people out, the beginnings and endings of things.

How to tell it? She wants to tell Edie the truth, but she doesn’t trust herself to know it.

Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles. 

, Marie says, but already she was getting things wrong. It hadn’t seemed like a friendship; it had seemed, for reasons Marie could not completely discern, like a game, a series of challenges from this woman, Helena, a parent she’d met at day-care pickup years ago now, a mother with whom she’d exchanged numbers on the pretext that their kids might want to hang out, even though they could both tell that their kids didn’t like each other, a fact made painfully clear on that one playdate a week later that ended with Helena’s kid pushing one of the twins over and the other twin retaliating by taking a handful from the sandbox and forcing it into his mouth. 

, Helena said, and Marie just felt her head nodding. 

Anyway, this woman is married, and anyway, this woman is straight, and anyway, it’s nothing

, and the next time they saw each other didn’t happen until nine months later, a text from a name she’d nearly forgotten, a slow day at work anyway, an excuse to go downtown for lunch. That evening, when Marie’s wife asked her how her day had been, Marie had simply not mentioned her lunch with Helena. She didn’t tell her about how Helena had launched immediately into the most intimate conversation Marie had ever had with anyone she didn’t actually, technically, know—Helena had been thinking about the nature of desire and power and men and women and how the reasons she had gotten married just ten years ago now already seemed so retro and regrettable, almost unmentionable, but she did believe in sticking it out, in sticking around even when it seemed doomed, when it seemed like she may never again feel 

real sexual pleasure with another human body, 

 What had even been the purpose of sexual pleasure in the first place? 

she asked, undercutting the urgency with which she had just uttered the phrase “real sexual pleasure with another human body,” and Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles, but still, lately she spent a lot of time thinking about how being in a couple seemed entirely at odds with being in a family and how it might be better if all the women just took all the children away from the men and raised them collectively, without the men, men who seemed only to get in the way, men who seemed so often to be no different than children, just larger. 

Oh, but I don’t really mean it, I do love my husband, what am I even saying, he’s a good father, a great father

 And Marie had tried to reassure her that this all seemed to be normal in a long marriage, the irritation at the edges of it, though Marie did not, at least not consciously, feel any of that irritation in her own long marriage.

, she said to Helena, an observation that seemed to calm Helena, a little, but Marie also noticed the tragic little tick in Helena’s voice when she asked and rapidly answered two questions she’d pushed together into a single line:

 But you’re married right to a woman right? 

Marie paused as if she needed to remember whether she was married (right?) to a woman (right?), then she said, as if reading the phrase, 

. The lunch went on, both of them increasingly tense, overly aware of their own breath and each other’s every gesture, and at times Marie thought she was doing something wrong just by being there (though she couldn’t identify what, exactly, was wrong with it), and at other times she thought she was being presumptuous to assume anything indecent about this lunch of salade niçoise and chenin blanc with Helena, whose intentions, personal history, desires, middle name, fantasies, and current mental health status were all still to be, soon, discovered.

A month passed before they met again, a duration of time that made Marie feel that perhaps deciding not to mention the existence of this lunch with Helena to her wife (or even the existence of Helena) had been absolutely fine, as there was nothing to mention, and Marie accepted the spontaneous invitation for a coffee and a walk—

—thinking that she would, of course, tell her wife about Helena afterward, but the morning coffee spiraled into a long walk through a cemetery and a discussion of the purpose of sexual fantasy in general and the contents of their fantasies in specific, a conversation so frequently punctuated with 

 that shame itself was even worn away and nothing was taboo any longer. They touched only once that day—as they parted Marie had tried to use the vaguely formal contactless bow she’d gotten away with last time, but Helena went in for the European cheek-kiss and missed, landing on Marie’s neck, wrecking Marie’s composure for a fraction of a second, a fraction that Helena had recognized and taken in, and from that day onward their meetings became more frequent and passed with greater intensity, in stranger and stranger locations in order not to be observed, the secrecy of an affair but without any of the traditional forms of contact—without actual sex, for instance, without so much as a kiss. It was like a nineteenth-century courtship, but with conversations that verged on the pornographic; brief, one-hour meetings and occasional phone calls during which they divulged secrets, asked questions that neither had ever asked anyone, and, eventually, each woman dared the other to fuck their spouses with special assignments—positions to use, words to say, and images to imagine. But they never touched each other—not like that—not physically, and because of that lack of contact Marie began to think of her time with Helena as time she was spending alone, or time she was doing something like therapy, or as time she was reading a book, a book called Helena, a book with whom she was on speaking terms. And maybe it could have gone on like that even much longer than their three years, with many extended breaks, which they each filled with remorse, swearing the whole thing off, laughing at it privately, then giving in again, sending a quick text, meeting up immediately to continue this erotic game. Then there was the day they each confessed that this was insane, it had been years, and all their discussions and dares and disclosures had to stop—

, Marie said, and though she wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that, Helena agreed, and from there they went straight to a hotel, texted lies about work to their spouses, and stayed in that hotel until it was time to go home and tuck their children into bed. ♦

by Catherine Lacey. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels 

, which is out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

ser-martin

Rule of Threes

The literary takedown is enjoying a renaissance. Every time a new high-profile hitjob leaks, the terminally online literati stop working altogether and join the pile-on—dragging the overrated author or the overzealous critic, sometimes both. What’s the function of this ritual? Have we, as the 

 Joe Bernstein has suggested, transitioned from an era of “tedious structural critique” to one of “petty hatred”? To get to the bottom of this new culture of hostility, 

 Contributing Editor Leon Dische Becker convened a showdown between two author-critics who have been on both sides of the violence: Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor. These two merry combatants have written and received tough reviews, and even sent a couple strays at each other over the years—one reason we invited a trained clinical therapist, fellow author and 

contributor hannah baer, to moderate. The packed crowd at 

 was expecting blood. Instead, they got a punchy, funny, and oddly sexy conversation about the sadomasochistic turn in contemporary criticism, writers who “top from the bottom,” and the murky line between a justified pan and a hysterical hit job.

hannah baer

How would you explain an extremely negative book review to a child?

Lauren Oyler

If you wanted to cultivate an appreciation of literature in a child, you would explain that if you become a writer when you grow up, part of your job will be to publish your work. That means people will get to read it and come up with their own opinion. In an ideal world, these people would publish their opinions in a respectful, collegial way. (You wouldn't say collegial to a child.) But sometimes people get really mad about books because they care a lot about them. It doesn't always mean that the book is bad, or that your mommy, the author, is bad.

Brandon Taylor

I'd say that if you're asked to review a book, you're signing up to tell the truth about your experience. Sometimes you have a bad time and you have to tell the truth about that. I’ve never written a bad review out of some desire to file someone down a peg. It's like, "Do you want to review this?" "Yes." And then over the course of reading it, you find that, oh, you don't like it very much, but you've already signed the contract. So what do you do?

You could also use the bad review as a lesson in the importance of intellectual honesty and bravery, and not being afraid of how you'll be received. If you write a book that is negatively reviewed, you should be able to take it.

When I started writing reviews, people would say, "oh, you cannot write a takedown. You'll ruin your career. Everyone will hate you. Then when your book comes out, people will say bad things about it. You have to be nice." And I find that to be a shallow way of thinking about literary culture.

The first time I wrote a big flashy takedown, I was 24 years old, and I remember a few of the writers who said nasty things about me online were older than me, around the age I am now. Those people had children at the time. It is sort of uncouth, I think, to participate in the social media ecosystem past a certain age.

When you're writing a negative review, to what extent do you think about the feelings of the author? Do you think there's an element of sadism in extremely negative criticism?

I don’t think much about their feelings. When I’m reviewing a book, I'm more focused on understanding it for myself. I’m trying to put my own feelings on trial: what is my reaction, and why? I want the author to feel that I took their work very, very seriously, that I read it carefully, even if they feel harrowed by what I’ve written.

Sometimes when you're in the middle of writing a review that's going really badly, you become aware of moments where the rhetoric has gotten a little hot. In those moments, I ask if it’s necessary for the review itself, or if I should try to scale down, and that's true in any essay writing I do.

Why would you try and scale down a hot sentence in a normal essay?

Well, because I'm Protestant. Sometimes when I feel that I’m killing it, I try to put [myself] on trial, so I don’t get carried away.

Ah, so that’s the problem. Let's move away from BDSM and towards Protestantism. If I'm reviewing, I don't think about the author’s feelings. I don't want them to feel bad. I honestly would prefer it if they didn't read it, and I’d recommend that they don’t. But of course, everybody does. When I’m reading a bad book, I often feel like the author hasn't tried hard enough, that they don’t care enough.

So much of literary criticism is based on an overwhelming feeling of deep care for literature. I think it's really good that I care so much. I'm a hero.

It's often a question of purpose. Is literary criticism journalism? Is it meant to explain the books that exist, and what they’re about? Or is it a service, which is to say, a recommendation engine? As a critic, your allegiance is more to the literary public than to the individual author. If we're talking about sadism in a BDSM context, usually the object is getting something out of it. There are probably lots of public figures and authors who humiliate themselves in public on purpose. Maybe from that perspective, I'm cracking the whip in a sexy way, but it's not my goal.

Is there a masochism to appearing in public in general, and in a way where you might elicit a harsh negative reaction?

1000%. I call it the engagement plantation, where people post rage bait—intentionally annoying things—because they know they'll become a subject of discourse. There are people who get off on that. Some people genuinely think that’s what it means to be a public intellectual—a person who is constantly starting a conversation.

I would prefer everybody to love me and agree with me. I'm not one of these free-speech warriors; I would just prefer that books be better. 

You don't tweet anymore, but I do think you have posted saucy things for that purpose. Is that incorrect?

I'm deactivated as of right now, but I have 30 days to change my mind. What happens is I take a lot of Benadryl.

I never really feel honest when I'm like, “Oh, it's good that people are talking about this. I've generated discussion.” I would prefer everybody to love me and agree with me. I don't say things just to say them. I'm not one of these free-speech warriors; I would just prefer that books be better.

It does feel tacky to be talking so much about social media, because there's supposed to be a division between it and literary publications. But actually so much of this takedown culture is about getting attention.

There's a slightly different feeling from someone writing a studied, thoughtful criticism of your work. I'm thinking about Sartre's five-volume diss track against Flaubert. It's hundreds and hundreds of pages of fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. And it's kind of amazing, versus a Twitter pile-on, which has an obviously different feeling. A thoughtful critique can be kind of loving, or devotional even.

You think LeninLuvr69 is doing something different from Sartre? Have you read that 

, which inaugurated an anti-takedown culture in literature? She’s writing 20 years ago about exactly the problems we consider a result of social media: the kind of gleeful wagon, circling and identifying a common enemy out of thin air. And then the cycle moves on.

She was saying there's a vitriolic type of long-winded negative criticism that is fundamentally focused on the author's career and not on the book. And yet, sometimes you do have to justify the presence of a negative review by explaining why the person you're talking about is important or worthy of discussion. You have to say, "so-and-so is a 

 writer praised by the X and Z,” because otherwise it's like, 

why are you talking about this random woman in the LRB for 5,000 words?

 But on social media, people are projecting weird identities onto everyone all the time.

Yeah, there’s a lot of projection. You could have written a perfectly studied negative review and published it, and people would still act as though you've just walked into the author’s house and killed them and all their pets. I think there's this presupposition that if you write a negative review, you're doing it for a whole host of careerist or antisocial reasons and not because you just didn't like the book. 

, and I thought maybe five people would read it because it came out a bit late. But people cared quite a lot, and they had a lot of thoughts about why I had written it. They called it my "attempted takedown of Rachel Kushner." But I wasn’t trying to write a takedown of anybody or anything. I just didn't like the book. Had I gone into it with some desire to destroy one of my literary forebears, then it would've felt very cathartic to have written that review. But it was actually really miserable. I felt like I had Lyme disease for two weeks.

Because people were coming for you, for coming for her?

Writing the review was miserable, but what came after was really miserable, too. I'm curious if this happens to you, Lauren, but I had people sliding into my DMs being like, "That was a very brave thing to have written." And I was like, "Was it?"

I actually thought that review was quite sexist.

Yeah. Sometimes you refer to the works of women as “little”—you did this to me as well—and I thought it was quite offensive for you to say, about this well-published woman in her fifties, "Use your human mind!” I think that's why everybody got mad about it.

I think that's a fair read of the text. I can't disagree with your feelings about the review. I mean, the phrase “use your human mind” is a phrase that I use. There were parts of that book that felt deeply silly to me. I would've used that phrase with a dude, but I didn't review a dude. Weirdly enough, I very seldom get asked to review men.

Well, this is related to a question I was kind of thinking about, which is about punching up or down. I'm curious how power dynamics in terms of fame, visibility, and identity play into the choices you make about who to critique.

It's all about perceptions of fame, which is connected to perceptions of wealth. You’re making these tedious market calculations in your mind about other reviews they’ve received. And there are some people who I choose not to review, because I don't think they can psychologically handle it.

There’s a writer who may have a book coming out in the next 18 months or so, which I was asked to review. She’s in my range of career success but I don’t like her work. Every time I read something she’s written, every word indicates a profound paucity of imagination and a bitterness about the world. The worldview expressed in her stuff indicates that she’s not psychologically capable of receiving this review from me.

Yes, and I do think that is a strategy. It’s been quite trendy, I think, certainly during the Trump era, for authors to place themselves (or avatars of themselves) in their fiction as victims. It's a defensive shield so that you can't be criticized because so many bad things have happened to you. To return to BDSM, people are “topping from the bottom.” It creates a sense that you’re hurting them by writing a negative review, even though you write a book because you want it to be read.

I would've gone with “victim complex,” but “topping from the moral bottom” is so astute.

People are hungry for the overthrow of old regimes. They feel there's been an excess of politeness, and that violence is always honest.

Do you guys have personal favorite takedowns written by other people?

I mean, mine's sort of boring, which is that 

. Someone once accused me of thinking I was the Renata Adler of looking at your phone. I was like, "What's bad about that? She's awesome."

Somebody implied that I thought I was Andrea Long Chu and said, "more like Andrea Short Nipple.” But my favorite takedown is that Patricia Lockwood review of Updike, 

. It made me see Updike differently. Your reviews, Lauren, are really funny to read. They're often really scathing. But I also feel like I see books differently after I read your thoughts about them.

Thank you. I'm having a bit of a joker moment as of late. When I’ve written reviews, I’ve always held back from being too mean or cruel. But since my book came out, people have said such nasty things about me that I would’ve considered beyond the realm of serious literary criticism. I could have been nastier, but maybe it's just not in my nature. Maybe I'm actually really nice.

Things have gotten really nasty, and they've gotten really personal. When I'm writing a review, even if it's negative, I try to keep it quite textual rather than supposing what's going on in the author’s life. In some of the reviews I've read lately, there have been a lot of assumptions about the author's intention or their psychology.

I don't find it fun to read. I like gossip, but no one ever has real intel. They’re just like, "she thinks she's better than everyone else." There was better gossip in high school.

I will say that it's quite difficult to review essay collections or nonfiction that use personal elements without it becoming ad hominem, because those personal stories become the content of the text. It's not something you’ve assumed about the author—they've told you.

In the era of autofiction, this differentiation becomes more challenging, because people are jamming their subjectivities more closely into their writing. But it's interesting to hear that both of you are invested in holding that line to some extent.

Yeah, but where is the line? With autofiction, the tendency is often to slide into assuming all of it's true when it obviously isn’t. Memoirists will call it a cop out because you can hide behind non-truth claims. But I don't know why there's anything wrong with that. To quote David Shields, there is a general reality hunger, and it is a bit gossipy. People want the novel to be true so that they can learn the prurient details of the author’s sex life.

I refer to those moments in auto-fiction as “Google traps,” where the reader puts the book down to Google if something is real. I have no patience for them. But sometimes that feels like a work’s organizing force. It's meant to deceive more than it's meant to deepen.

There's also a dilemma around people writing because they care about writing, versus if they just want attention. It seems like part of that Google trapification is about maximizing that attention.

hannah baer is a writer and therapist based in New York. Lauren Oyler is a critic and the author, most recently, of 

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels 

mus-french-typewriter

I'd Like to Report a Murder

 In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

For centuries, these words about how God made the heavens and the earth—you probably know them better in English—were accessible only via those who claimed to speak for Him. Painstakingly copied by monks in the most beautiful lettering, the scripture of the Catholic Church spread across Western Europe in Latin, a language not understood or read by the masses in thrall to Rome’s power. It wasn’t until the 1440s, when the Gutenberg press allowed for the spread of translated and mass-printed copies of the bible, that the Vatican’s grasp loosened enough for God’s words to fall into people’s own hands.

The printing press’s advent set off a revolution of mass communication, one that arguably enabled those wanting to demystify Christianity to post and spread their own beliefs. In 1517, the story goes, Maarten Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Though it remains unclear whether nails or church doors were actually involved, Luther’s ideas were reprinted, translated, and spread throughout Germany and Europe, their publication retroactively heralded as the birth of the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s words diminished the power of the Catholic church, while solidifying the power technology has over us. 

The Mariënburg chapel in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, was built at the cusp of this Printing Revolution in 1431. Nearly 500 years later, the Dutch semiconductor company, Philips, opened its first factory a mere stone's throw away. For six weeks late last year, the chapel housed 

, an experimental exhibit on the birth of a technology that, half a millennium after the printing press, set off another revolution of mass communication: the microchip. 

A former Catholic chapel may seem like an odd place for a microchip exhibit. Religion and science tend to be positioned at opposite ends of the human experience: one pointing towards a higher meaning of life, the other to its earthly realities. Yet both are born of our desire to make sense of what exists beyond us and what resonates within.

Curated by Florian van Zandwijk and Martijn van Boven of 

a non-profit collaboration between NXP and the 

 department at ArtEZ School for the Arts, the 

 exhibit sought to bring the history of microchips to life through a multifocal lens, using never-before-seen archival documents, stories of former Philips/NXP employees, and contemporary works of art. Returning to the physical place where Philips/NXP helped birth the international semiconductor industry, the exhibit invited visitors to contemplate how a technology that can seem invisible became integral to nearly every social process in contemporary life, penetrating the very fabric of society—from geopolitics to art and aesthetics, to how we understand our very selves.

In this holy space, the microchip’s history and meaning were recontextualized, widening the lens to include a more philosophical exploration rather than a mere technological one. 

We invent things then we invent meaning, then we forget we invented anything at all. The new thing becomes the rule, and the rule becomes law.

After all, over the span of roughly five decades, the microchip has reached its smallest physical iteration yet, while attaining an undeniable omnipresence. It is a testament to the fact that the miniscule and expansive can exist in the same space, one begging to be opened up and explored through the lens of human wonder.

The exhibit opened by unearthing, as it were, the technology’s most basic element: sand. To be precise, an incredibly quartz-rich sand found in only a few places. One of which is the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

Closed off to outsiders by gates, guards, and protocols, endless miles of sandy white mines etch serpentine lines through the sides of the Appalachian Mountains. The quartz-rich sand mined here is what integrated circuits and semiconductors are made from. On a big screen near the exhibit’s entrance, a YouTube video titled “

One of America's Most Significant Mines - Unimin - Spruce Pine NC

” played on loop. In a heavy Carolinian accent, local enthusiast Tony Lee Glenn offered a rhapsodic digital tour of the mines, stringing together Google Maps satellite images, heavily zoomed-in videos shot during his lunch breaks, and screen recordings of the mining company’s website.

“I don’t want to overstate this,” Glenn began before divulging a slew of facts, “but I just want people to understand, this is like a crazy cool mine.” He went on to talk about the microchip-making process, his father’s years at the mineral research lab, and his own stint crushing barrels from Spruce Pine during college. Using technologies ultimately made possible by that mine—satellites, computers, the Internet—Glenn virtually brought visitors from the Dutch chapel’s exhibit to his hometown 4000 miles away, offering a birds’ eye view of the microchip’s place of birth.

In highly sterilized laboratories, the mined sand goes through a 

. First, it is refined and melted into 99.9999% pure silicon ingots, which are then sliced into paper thin wafers. These wafers are polished, cleaned, covered in a thin layer of nonconducting silicon dioxide and photoresist, printed with ultraviolet light through various patterned plates or “masks,” and then etched into ever smaller rectangular segments that form the basis of the chips they will become.

Pulled apart into disparate elements and displayed under a glass case—a heap of sand; ragged chunks of silicon; masks in hot pink and deep blue; wafers the size of a human hand; chips the size of phalanges adorned with copper, gold, and silver—this intricate process yields a wide range of relics. Each forms an essential section of what is now a nearly invisible and mysterious source of immense power, yet appears strangely sterile and ordinary by itself: a piece of jewelry, a silver plate, a scoop from a sandbox. It is through a process of technological 

 that these disparate parts attain relevance. After all, a robe is just a robe, a toe simply a toe, until it's understood to hold the power to bring us closer to the divine.

 was never to subscribe saintly powers to the microchip, but rather to strip some of its established power away. Returning to the beginning serves to demystify the now: to re-establish the microchip as a physical object created by human hands, not a mysterious and unworldly thing that connects us to the cloud. 

It is exactly this human touch that has become so painfully absent over time. The artist Ingrid Burrington, in her essay titled, "

," contemplated this dynamic: “For all the alchemy and labor that make iPhones appear untouched by human hands, at the end of the day all digital devices are just a bunch of slowly accumulated rocks, refined with chemicals and petroleum.”

The microchip’s physical origins are replete with traces of human touch, even human failure. In the chapel, shining silicon ingots, cast in the desired state of 99.99999% perfection, lay side by side with off-cast versions fading from futuristically smooth to amusingly grotesque. Awash in ridges and fault lines, they cast oily rainbows off of their ragged surface. There is beauty in these mistakes, in missteps made in the search of perfection. But in a process aimed at erasing human faultlines, errors fall to the wayside, are discarded and ultimately erased. They are sacrificed for the sake of creating instruments that in form and function are as predictable as they are “pure.”

A large part of Stichting Link’s collection is sourced from items deemed by former Philips employees to be too interesting, too special, too visually appealing for the trash can. Instead, they took this detritus home, displayed it in their living rooms as art, or simply kept it safe, sensing its value might be reconsidered at a later date. Looking at these pieces now, taken from employees’ homes and now lovingly displayed in the exhibit, they take on the quality of mid-century Dutch art. Framed and elegantly layered in order of size, a collection of wafers becomes an original Bauhaus; plastic sheets or “masks” in magenta, teal, yellow, and blue used to map out different layers to etch on silicon wafers become a technicolor Mondriaan; and a black-and-white blueprint of a semiconductor from the 1960s becomes a satellite view of the stream-lined modernist architecture by 

It is no coincidence that the Catholic Church constructed lavish buildings and filled them to the brim with gold, jewels, stained glass, sculptures, and paintings, and that the Protestant Revolution initiated a wave of iconoclasm intent to destroy it all. Art can bridge time and space by actualizing the invisible. The Sistine Chapel was meant to return Rome and the Catholic Church to its former glory in 1482. Its ceilings, 60 feet over the chapel’s floor, continue to cast their spell over 25,000 daily visitors who are perhaps less impressed by Michelangelo’s art than by the knowledge that man created it. 

Artistic genius ultimately manifests in the fallible human body, one that bends and strains to reach the farthest edge of the mind’s imagination. Michelangelo, who refused to paint lying down, spent four years straining his head and hands on a curved scaffolding of his own making to paint the chapel’s ceiling. He later recounted the experience, writing “my haunches are grinding into my guts. My spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.” 

I recalled these words while standing before a 5.6 x 16 foot construction drawing in 

, which depicted a segment of a 100 Hz television 'Octoplus' microchip from 1982. The drawing was made by Harry Veendrick and Leo Pfennings with felt tip pens, colored and graphite pencils, and pressure-sensitive tape.

In a nearby black-and-white picture, Veendrick and Pfennings knelt on top of the unfinished drawing. A cigarette lighter and a pack of fresh tobacco lay next to a 1960s coffee thermos, its circular stains still darkly dotted across the squiggly pencil lines and numbers on the actual sheet, forever indicating where new connections should be made and circuits placed, some half erased or scratched out, recalculated or corrected. 

Hung at the center of the Mariënburg chapel, in the exact spot where the pulpit would have been, the paper became a stained glass window, a religious tapestry, that intuitively pulled the gaze up to its figurative and literal magnificence. Only an eighth of the full design, it is a testament to the human labor behind the microchip’s development. It is also, most likely, the last item of its kind. This fragility underlines how, before the microchip was a thing made of sand and metal—pressed and polished, etched and cut—it was a thought, an idea. It was then shaped, sharpened and patented in the U.S., in 1959, by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyse, two engineers in Texas who dubbed their invention the 

miniaturized electronic and silicon-based integrated circuit

Kilby and Noyse’s idea quickly spread and found fertile ground on foreign shores, including in the Netherlands, with Philips. Founded in 1891 by Frederik and his son Gerard Philips, the Philips company set out "to manufacture light bulbs and other electro-technical articles, as well as to trade therein," as it noted in a local gazette. Sixty years later, its midcentury owners suspected this new electro-technical article could offer Philips a shiny future, and they opened their first semiconductor factory in Nijmegen in 1953. But as potent ideas also always do, they also required people and labor to become reality.

 (2023), artist Alina Lupu took black-and-white photographs from the Philips archive and allowed visitors to connect to the people who first made the microchip personally, placing the ones that spoke to them most onto a temporary wall.

Aside from an obvious tale of technological development, these photographs also tell the story of the social and professional advancement that the microchip made possible. Philips offered its employees a generous pension plan. The plant hired hundreds of women, who weaved the chips’ delicate metal connections with nimble hands. Employees were offered in-house training and education, allowing young working class employees to expand their knowledge and climb the corporate ladder. Even before it took over the world, the microchip changed people’s lives.

But as the microchip grew physically smaller, its business grew bigger, with jobs increasingly automated, and many of these people literally disappeared from the picture.

In Lupu’s work, smiling office workers at parties and picnics mingling with their bosses—or rows of women streaming out of the factory or sitting behind long white tables—seamlessly bleed into close-cropped images of disembodied gloved hands directing metal constructions, or masked faces staring into black screens, until all that is left are abstract pictures of machinery.

Lenses that could trace lines and mistakes at microscopic levels replaced fallible human sight. Pixels replaced pencils, simulations replaced sketches. Female fingers that once knit metal wires together were replaced by robotic ones. Progress equates replacement, until all that remains is the memory.

“In the beginning there was nothing,” an elderly Dutch man recalls. Weaved together by artist Oscar van Leest in the audio installation 

Tot 1 GHz kan ik horen (I can hear up to 1 GHz) 

(2023), the recollections of eight former Philips employees who helped develop the microchip tell the story of the technology’s early years. Despite experiencing the moments they describe decades ago, their voices still contain the boyish enthusiasm with which they began their jobs as 19 and 20-year-olds in the 1950s and ’60s. “You could do anything you could think of and pull anything off the shelves that you wanted,” one remembers, his amazement still tingeing his words. Another admits to taking items home so that he could keep tinkering: “I’d still be working on things on Sunday, 2 am in the morning. I was completely possessed.”

But despite their immediate recognition of the microchip’s potential, none of these men realized this technology would revolutionize the world. They weren’t driven by a desire to be remembered as pioneers, or to change the future. What kept them going was the sheer joy of creating, learning, and expanding on what was considered possible.

Contemplating how the microchip had evolved since his career’s start, one of them even confessed that he cannot fathom how the microchip has evolved over time. The processes he helped design had become so complex, and advanced so rapidly, that not even his hands or mind—present at the microchip’s creation—could continue to grasp them.

It was in 1965 that Gordon Moore, the co-founder of the Fairchild Semiconductor laboratory and of Intel, observed that technological advancement and capitalism together seemed to generate a doubling of an integrated circuit’s transistors every two years, while the cost of those circuits halved in that same timespan. And sure enough: 16 Bit became 32 bit became 64 bit became 128 bit, and the observation of one man became the market’s expectation, which became known as Moore’s Law.

The microchips that run our computers and phones today are the size of a fingernail; the billions of transistors that cover their surfaces are smaller than a blood cell or a 

. And companies continue to reach towards the limits of Moore’s law, creating technologies to go even smaller, even faster. The question of how small we can go has come to overshadow other questions, such as how we got here in the first place, and at what gains and costs.

Creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, no matter how small that coin becomes.

A Dutch company named ASM International, now ASML, joined with Philips in 1983 to take on microchips’ growing market and to realize the capital and technology required to produce ever-smaller semiconductors. By then, Philips’ headquarters had moved to the Dutch city of Eindhoven. ASML’s first employees worked begrudgingly from wooden barracks next to Philips’ offices. Today its tens of thousands of employees, from all over the world, go to work each day at ASML’s sprawling headquarters, close to where those wooden barracks stood, and 45 miles from where the first Dutch microchip builders began their enterprise.

As microchips decreased in size and multiplied in their potential at immense speeds, the production process sped along with it. Along with dreams of what the microchip could do—and the money that could be made—all scales turned global. Production quickly outgrew the initial factories’ boundaries, as well as the cities and countries in which they stood. The microchip’s future was debated in new languages, in offices and boardrooms across the world. It brought nations together and split them apart, as the origin of the microchip became less compelling than what it promised to bring.

Microchips brought us color television, portable calculators, computers, hearing aids, mobile phones, GPS, video games. They launched rockets into space and missiles into homes. They enabled wars, coups, and genocides that now pass swiftly beneath our fingers with the same ease, the same strokes, the same format as updates on the weather or a note from a loved one.

Today’s battles for the future of microchips, we’re often told, pit the U.S. against China. But as a crucial player in their manufacture, ASML still wields great power in this race, using extreme ultraviolet light to fashion circuitry on nanoscale. Like the microchip itself, the company’s power is more felt than seen. But the history of the microchip, which continues to run through the Netherlands in key ways, remains a human one. 

By returning to that history’s beginning, we’re reminded that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, no matter how small that coin becomes. Moments that alter our present tend to silently disappear in the future’s shadow. They hide in the folds of eras that precede and succeed them, growing increasingly out of focus, ultimately assigned to the wrong person or date. As technology seeps silently into ever-more corners of our lives, it blends in with what we deem natural. We connect ourselves to machines to disconnect from reality, or alternately to record it, share it, and make sense of it.

The closer we are intertwined with the microchip, the less we attempt to understand it. And while its applications expand beyond our general comprehension, we shape our fear of uncertainty into dystopian imaginings of the future, in which microchips are involuntarily implanted into our bloodstreams or its technology gains unprecedented control over us.

Sometimes, we must return to the start—the sands we rose from—to regain our sense of control. After all, everything we create contains a human scale, one that allows us to connect with our surroundings, both visible and invisible. In revisiting the microchip’s origin, we peel back its layers to find patterns of meaning, beauty, play, connection, construction, destruction, and dreams. We discover our own humanity. Returning to the beginning of things takes us from the cloudy heavens back to earth, letting us watch the seed curl back into what it once was—materialized potential, small enough to fit in a human palm.♦

 is a journalist from the Netherlands, with a penchant for stories on niche communities, odd histories, and small-town idealism.

ser-hybryda

The Pluralities of Scale

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Look at Marshall Allen—the slight, bespectacled fireball with gray hair and kind eyes, his arms stretched to the sky. Look at him saunter across the stage, saxophone in mouth, blasting air through the brass. Look at how he’s transformed by the music, and how the audience is transformed by him. See how they marvel at his artistry, his godliness, his 

. Marshall is 101 years old, and he still harbors the inferno of years past—when, as an integral member of Sun Ra’s ever-changing Arkestra, his urgent wails bolstered the chaos of the bandleader’s arrangements. And here he stands, albeit a little gingerly, his steps more calculated. That smile still radiates, his heart full.

Hear him now. Hear that squeal, the explosion, the anarchy. Listen to how the wind swaddles the band, how the space opens and lets the soul and the funk come through. While Marshall is what some purists would consider avant-garde, I’ve never seen him that way. He’s what freedom looks like, what it sounds like, what can happen when the confinements of jazz are eschewed for greater experimentation. By definition, Marshall is a jazz musician, but he’s never seemed preoccupied with the genre, nor with any notion of what he’s supposed to be. Whether alongside Sun Ra or at the helm of his own band, Marshall has never seemed to care what you called the music—space jazz, cosmic jazz, or whatever—as long as you felt the liberation emanate from it. Because immortality resides on the other side of this courage, it’s people like Marshall and Sun Ra whose work lives forever, despite the confusion their melodies may cause at first listening. That we’re talking about this music now is the mark of its legacy.

He’s what freedom looks like, what it sounds like, what can happen when the confinements of jazz are eschewed for greater experimentation. 

In February, at the age of 100, Marshall released his solo debut album, 

, a stark shift from the vast cutting-edge ethos of his Sun Ra work. Across seven tracks, Marshall and his band—a wide-ranging ensemble featuring several Arkestra mainstays and a standout cameo from Neneh Cherry—opt for straight-ahead serenity over pronounced nonconformity. Abstraction gives way, here, for something more traditional in scope. Where Sun Ra sought liberation through space travel, and believed that Black people would only ever be free on Saturn, 

 feels like what we’d play once the mission is completed. It’s the sound of rest and restoration, of finding joy in the quiet moments. It’s also an overdue appreciation for one of the most faithful stewards of Sun Ra’s mission, whose own voice—more subdued than his mentor, yet no less inquisitive—has come to the fore, right on time, at the start of his 11th decade on Earth.

Marshall was born May 25, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky and started playing clarinet at the age of 10. During World War II, he enlisted in the Army, and while stationed in Paris with the 92nd Infantry (also known as the Buffalo Soldiers), he played alto sax and clarinet in the 17th Division Army Special Service Band. Once the war ended, Marshall stayed in Paris and studied clarinet with Ulysse Delécluse at the renowned Paris Conservatory, then toured with the saxophonist James Moody before returning to the United States in 1951, settling in Chicago. There, after a few years “jamming around” the city, as he 

 Jazzwise, he met Sun Ra in 1957. He still remembers being transformed by the musician’s 

album. “The stuff they were doing, I’d never heard that before,” he said. “It was far out and [had] different kinds of melodies. So, I went back and asked the guy I bought the record off, ‘Where’s this band? This is a real band!’” The Arkestra rehearsed six blocks away from where Marshall was living at the time. He heard them practicing, came back with his saxophone, and became a regular fixture in rehearsals.

Sun Ra officially brought Marshall into the band in 1958 to join the equally formidable John Gilmore and Pat Patrick in the horn section. Three years later, the Arkestra moved to New York and became part of the city’s underground avant-garde jazz scene. Perhaps influenced by the area’s free-spirited creative mindset, the group’s music got more experimental, and Marshall responded in kind: his playing grew more aggressive and far out, which—along with June Tyson’s emotive vocals and Sun Ra’s high-wire experimentation on piano and synthesizer—further pushed the band’s sound into the deep space they coveted. The Arkestra moved to Philadelphia in 1968, the group’s base until Sun Ra’s passing in 1993. Gilmore took over as bandleader following Sun Ra’s transition. Marshall took it over in 1995 after Gilmore’s death and has led the band ever since. With Marshall at the helm, the Arkestra has maintained the festivity of its founder. When watching them perform, a strong sense of family emerges. The live show is a grand spectacle, complete with flashy robes and ornate headgear, and the music feels big and orchestral. It’s all quite theatrical; walking away, you’re not fully sure what you just saw—but you can’t shake the vibrations you feel.

As a willing steward of Sun Ra’s legacy, Marshall has maintained the fire of its leader, keeping the music edgy and exploratory while putting his own mark on it. On 2020’s 

, the first Sun Ra Arkestra album in 20 years, songs like “Satellites Are Spinning” and “Unmask the Batman” honored the band’s founder with modern flourishes meant to exemplify Marshall’s wide-ranging ear. He peppered these and other tracks with electronic bleeps and bloops that recalled what Sun Ra did with the synthesizer long ago. When heard with 2020s ears and sensibility, 

 sits alongside the music of Flying Lotus, the noted L.A.-based experimental producer, though Sun Ra and Marshall clearly influenced his sound. Based on his recent affiliations—with the bassist Luke Stewart, the percussionist Carlos Niño, and fellow saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, among other younger iconoclasts—it’s clear that Marshall is still searching for new inspiration and partners to board the spaceship. Like Marshall, each of these artists create music not fully aligned with any particular genre. Sure, you can call it jazz, but even within jazz’s broad expanse and evolution, it’s tough to classify these purveyors as anything other than radical. Just like Marshall did in the ’60s and beyond, these artists create with audacity, perhaps knowing that the bravery of their art will last generations (assuming they consider such forecasts). They all make the kind of work you’ll talk about years later, after the critics have finally come around to the brilliance that was always there. When I listen to Luke, Carlos and Immanuel, I hear Sun Ra, which means I hear Marshall.

The live show is a grand spectacle, complete with flashy robes and ornate headgear, and the music feels big and orchestral. It’s all quite theatrical; walking away, you’re not fully sure what you just saw—but you can’t shake the vibrations you feel.

 and everything Marshall does in the studio, the record to turn to for an indicator of what the artist does on stage, where he’s most at home, is 

Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons Live in Philadelphia

, a collection of live sets from the past two years at the venue Solar Myth. For almost 90 minutes, Marshall’s Ghost Horizons ensemble wades through several iterations of jazz, surging over post-bop and swing, drifting through ambient and meditative styles. On “Seductive Fantasy,” for instance, the band leaps into a sharp double-time beat that breaks down and reassembles at the urging of Marshall’s fiery horn blasts, as if prodding the crew to dig deeper and go 

. The next song, “Back to You,” is a contemplative drone: Between the sedative bass loop, indiscernible vocals, sporadic sax and glitchy electronics, it almost doesn’t sound like a Marshall Allen cut, at least not in the way we’d expect. His songs usually have a bounce to them; in a good way, “Back to You” feels fresh and progressive, like something from a sci-fi film or heavy steel floating through the cosmos.

Songs like “Stay Lifted” and “Square the Circle” almost border on rock territory; the former a drum-heavy jaunt with echoed trumpet effects, the latter an ascendant house arrangement that could sit alongside Floating Points or golden era Radiohead on a playlist. I also love “Warn Them” when the mood calls for it: Over staggered drums and what sounds like a playing card stuck in bicycle rims, the song lands defiantly. It sounds dark and agitated, writhing in mud and content there. Blame my ear if I’m speaking out of turn, but I can’t remember Marshall or Sun Ra sounding this dour before, even as they lamented nuclear war or pleaded with listeners to wise up before it was too late. “Warn Them” is blues of a different kind: vocally angry, it’s the type of song you play when you need to lean into anguish. Even as we navigate our collective angst, Marshall’s art balances radiance and shadows, his dexterity showing us the way to stay optimistic. I’m taken by his faith in the craft. Because while Marshall Allen isn’t an eye-popping name in mainstream circles, his work and his intent are acclaimed by those making cornerstone music. His legacy is ensured. And yet here he is still trying to create a new world, knowing the voyage is paramount. Whether or not you come along is on you, but Marshall’s taking off. ♦

Marcus J. Moore is a music journalist, editor, event curator, professor, and author of

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