Latest
April 20, 2026
A Blank Generation
Noelle Bodick
The late Habermas, theorizing the public sphere, rendered the coffeehouses of the past as discursive hubs, places of free exchange, with every caffeine-head a constitutionalist of sorts. It was a nicely situated ideal, pulled from the annals of eighteenth-century English history — all that yak and verbal sparring hemming in the dull, unimaginative control of autocrats and bureaucrats at large. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele convened a “little senate” at...
April 20, 2026
The Return to Orality
Megan Marz
Everywhere we read that we are illiterate. On Substack, Abundance coauthor Derek Thompson laments the “handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality,” a “return” to the world as it was before the invention of writing enabled us to hold ideas at a distance and pin them down. He fears that this power of abstraction — which opened the way for science, philosophy, and much more —...
April 20, 2026
Alone Together
Sam Adler-Bell
Being a podcaster is a bit embarrassing. It’s much easier than writing (my intended career) but much better paid. The term itself is dweeby — sounding at once outdated and newfangled — and impossible to say unsheepishly. I think every podcaster who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice (pace Janet Malcolm) knows that what he does is a benign grift, not sordid enough to inspire shame...
April 20, 2026
A Post-Political Fantasy
Ege Yumuşak
“To the extent that the Academe remembers its ancient origins, it must know that it was founded by the polis’s most determined and most influential opponent,” Hannah Arendt wrote, referring to Plato, in “Truth and Politics.” Originally appearing in the pages of The New Yorker in 1967, the essay was perhaps one of the most-assigned texts in university classrooms at the height of liberal panic over the so-called post-truth age. ...
April 20, 2026
A Confederacy of Haters
Sarah Brouillette
Here is a story about the public sphere. Hundreds of years ago, a class of newly wealthy people used a burgeoning print culture to bolster their anti-monarchical claims to a larger role in public affairs. The capitalism that generated their wealth immiserated many more, who formed a variety of proletarianized counter-publics. Not seeing their interests represented in the bourgeois public sphere, these people attacked its protocols of reason and decorum....
April 20, 2026
The Judgment of the Masses
Madeleine Baker
“Cultures unfortunately can be swept by craziness,” Noam Chomsky wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in December 2018, in response to one of many missives from his friend complaining of mistreatment at the hands of a sensationalist media. “Nazism for example. Or the Great Awakening.” A few weeks earlier, Chomsky had advised Epstein not to reply to the “disgusting” smears against him. “To 99% of people, who will never look into the...
April 20, 2026
Directing the Herd
Edward Ongweso Jr
Long before academics and pundits began mourning the loss of the Habermasian public sphere, Walter Lippmann, America’s dean of journalism, questioned whether such a sphere had ever existed. Writing in the 1910s and 1920s, Lippmann argued that the very notion of a civic society capable of understanding and advocating for the common good was a fantasy. The public was a “phantom” and society a “bewildered herd,” with individuals too trapped...
April 20, 2026
Thousands of Voices
Ismail Ibrahim
The world is full of forces that want you to believe the physical world is a problem to overcome — food delivery apps, cul-de-sac developers, automobile manufacturers, vitamin-hawking podcasters. Always the drive toward greater convenience, more atomization, a sense of security so total we forget the vulnerability of our flesh. But there’s also always the nagging proof that we’re interconnected. A virus, say. Six years ago, we stayed inside for...
April 17, 2026
Roman-Flood | Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Diabolic Realism
Max Norman
If you made it through the 3,600 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Min kamp, in the Norwegian), its conclusion could only inspire mixed feelings. Book Six — also known as “the Hitler one” due to its three hundred pages on the life of the dictator whose manifesto gave Knausgaard his title — records the precise moment (7:07 a.m., on September 2, 2011) that Karl Ove brought it to...
April 15, 2026
Devochka | Fiction
Caroline Porter
My friend Ryan had stolen a virtual reality headset from the GameStop where he worked. He’d been using it for a week to alternately play a rhythm game called Beat Saber and jack off. I’m just out here living my best life, he texted me when I asked him what he was up to. This was followed by a clown emoji, then one of a guy in sunglasses. He was...
