Writing Today: Scouting Reports

This is the second in a limited series of unknown scope, titled Writing Today, intended to talk about the world of writing as a profession with more specificity and care than tends to be found in these discussions. The first post is available here.

Scouting reports of working writers, presented alphabetically and chosen for inclusion at my whim. (Seriously, there is absolutely no coherent principle behind who got included and who didn’t, I promise.) Assume I mean everything I say - I promise you that none of this praise is secretly criticism. This is all about the page and not the person; that it might feel differently is a mark of the peculiar nature of our vocation. I am a mere consumer offering his humble Amazon reviews, just like everybody else.

Abdelmahmoud, Elamin
Borderland native taking a career-long stroll through music and media, unhurried, occasionally prodding something that interests him with his foot. Writes like someone trying to understand pop culture the way you understand a friend: patiently, generously, emotionally. Willing to play with music criticism convention in provocative ways. Trapped in most of the pathologies of the contemporary pop culture analyst, which is to say, writes from the defensive posture of someone who has absorbed too much analysis of the political economy of culture writing. Would like to read his work in an alternate dimension in which poptimism never became an omnipotent all-devouring cultural kaiju. Deeply Canadian in the best way. A romantic but not a sentimentalist.

Abdurraqib, Hanif
Music, memory, Blackness, and the fragile architectures of belonging. Writes like he’s trying to lay flowers on the grave of every cultural moment that meant something to him, and in so doing he makes them mean something to us. Unapologetically pensive in nonfiction in a way that’s never annoying, which is very hard to pull off. Thoroughly himself. Generous as a craftsman. Often flies low to the ground in terms of critical and aesthetic perspective, resisting the urge to constantly soar above the material that afflicts many lesser culture writers. Annoying fans misapprehend his work in a way that makes it seem portentous, when for me the miracle here is the relentless playfulness. Sometimes expect his work will eventually devolve into shtick. Never does.

Als, Hilton
Moves between biography, memoir, and criticism with lovely decadence. Elegant, elliptical, sometimes coded or elusive. Operates like a fiction writer testing the fence to find the weak spots in the genre constraints of criticism. Unorthodox sentence shapes, associative leaps. Supreme ear for rhythm and voice such that his paragraphs breathe, exhale inhale exhale. Our great eulogist for an imagined cultural past. Writes like memory is a performance and style is an inheritance, that is to say, like someone who does not trust those younger than him to ever have the opportunity to see our aesthetic and ethical worlds in quite the right light and so is eager to explain it to them. That might sound annoying - occasionally it is annoying - but God, the verve with which he does it. A spiritual father figure to a thousand dreamy nostalgists and for good reason.

Chayka, Kyle
A lifestyle critic turned aesthetic theorist. Writes like someone trying to explain minimalism while trapped in a Muji showroom. Essays are clean, measured, algorithm-wary, and rarely fall into the cosmopolitan weariness that is the shackles of our era. New Yorker staff writer who files his pieces through the Tumblr CMS. Sneakily influential in shaping the tone of modern taste-talk; likely undersold because of tendency to write in actual lowercase rather than the loud ersatz faux-lowercase that has been popular lately. Critiques aesthetic drift while floating in it, like a ghost who one day finds that his ancestral haunt has been remade into in a well-appointed Airbnb. A little bloodless for me.

Chu, Andrea Long
Critic’s critic and chaos agent of gender trouble. Convinces you that she’s engaging in self-disclosure in an essay and then a day later you think about it and realize she only further obscured herself. Weaponizes theory with the flair of a peer reviewer who’s read every footnote twice, which is a complimentary way of complaining that she still can’t shake the tiresome habits of the ex-academic. Like essentially every celebrated takedown artist she has written herself into a corner with that format and appears unaware that the people who celebrate her for her viciousness will chortle loudest when she inevitably winds up on the grill herself. Annoyingly, she is very very good at a format which I sometimes would prefer never to read again. Needs to write a long monograph that has no escape hatch and which she cannot defend through the strategic use of her considerable talent for aphorism. Will tire of takedowns, and soon; derision, being a kind of radiation, ages the skin. Yearbook superlative: Most Likely to Quote Herself in an Interview. I would like to be her friend.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi
You already know how you feel. Translates grief into geometry with prose that is clean, precise, mournful, deliberate. Someone who understands that rhetoric can feel like justice, but never actually delivers; white audience’s tendency to treat him as a secular saint fundamentally stemmed from never fully parsing that distinction, which was their bad, not his. Prose can be soaring, devastating, elegiac, but like almost anyone who ascends to the heights he did, he eventually started playing the hits. Helped restore seriousness to political writing at a time when the form was drowning in irony. He could have lived off of residuals and good will forever, which makes his turn to Palestinian rights an act of genuine and rare moral courage. Refusal to play the pundit or the influencer game should be admired as an act of immense restraint and the right kind of self-respect. More a master of tone than of argument; outside of the warm shadow of his voice, the scaffolding underneath can look rickety. Can write essays so tightly controlled that they leave little space for the intellectual uncertainty that is the ultimate concern of all essays. Was canonized fast, and some of his fans treated him not as a writer to be debated but as the universal rabbi of liberal virtue, which ultimately did him zero favors as an artist. Often writes as if despair is the most intellectually honest posture; when the world stopped matching the tragic solemnity of his rhythm, he pulled back - into comic books, into fiction, into silence, into the safety of not having to update the frame. That was, I reckon, a strategic retreat of considerable professional modesty. Is destined to return, on his own schedule, like Superman; question is whether he’s already said everything he has to say and too beautifully the first time. I will read regardless.

Gay, Mara
Democracy, race, the American city, all in the register of civic heartbreak. A moral clarity operator in a column space frequently allergic to both morals and clarity. Serious without being pompous. Refuses all bait, chooses subject matter like a discerning chef handling tomatoes at the farmer’s market, not here to trend. Work often feels overly careful and at times writes like someone who’s been inside the machine forever and knows its sharp edges a little too well. Rare for someone this composed to still sound this alive. A clear example of the profound limitations of an era in which moving up in your career can only mean moving to The New York Times; sadly, she’s on the editorial board. I feel Karl Shapiro’s dirty bird stomping around between her paragraph breaks, looking to emancipate itself from the Grey Lady’s stultifying rules. Someday it will.

Gessen, Masha
The New York Times equivalent of that one slave in ancient Rome whose only job was to ride alongside the triumphant general and whisper softly to him about the inevitable death of empires. Writes like someone who’s already run the simulation and is now calmly briefing you on how the world ends. Paradigmatic blue flame style - intellect first, but always burning - which is easy to parody but difficult to write straight. Brings a kind of lucid moral terror to everything they touch, often sounding like the last adult in a room full of wishful thinkers. Veers disquietingly close to the moral architecture of pure neoconservatism, which is the habit of Russian dissidents. Doesn’t do sentiment. Combination of interest in gender issues and foreign policy produces a productive break from contemporary coalitional expectations - a theorist of gender trouble and sexual progressivism telling liberals that history doesn’t care about their feelings. Prose feels like a warning because it is.

Goldberg, Michelle
An earnest liberal trying to stay upright in a discourse that keeps shifting the floor underneath her feet. Absolutely defiant in her refusal to join many of her peers in trying to find a liberalism outside of liberalism, which in the Occupy-Bernie-BLM age I admire despite myself, even as a leftist myself, even as her work keeps eternally headbutting the glass ceiling of provincial Democratic beliefs. (We forge the chains we wear in life etc etc.) Deeply herself in an attractive way, especially given the NYT’s ongoing efforts to banish personality from everything they publish. A model of a kind of direct and practiced newspaper writing that the industry badly misses.

Gould, Emily
The last showgirl of American letters. Forever narrating the dream-sequence version of her own life, pausing occasionally to roll her eyes at the camera. That might sound annoying, but you’d be over it too if people had made a symbol out of a distorted mid-20s version of you for a decade and a half. Has aged into a eminence grise position that I think perfectly suits her wounded, jaundiced, unconquerably romantic persona. Finally has just the right role at the right pub. As much as anyone, invented the confessional internet style (oversharing as authorship, vulnerability as ambition); inevitably became one of its most visible casualties and most persuasive critics. Career is a decades-long waltz with the best and worst of self-awareness, and endlessly flirts with self-sabotage: sometimes too clever to commit, sometimes too honest to edit. Pleasantly uninterested in settling the record for someone who has attracted so much obsessive criticism over the years. A cautionary tale who refused to be cautioned. Still has not written a really good book and needs to. Can.

Hermann, John
Media critic with a Stanford dropout’s education - deeply knowledgeable about both journalism and Silicon Valley, equally uncomfortable in both. Sees the glitch (sorry, The Glitch) in the system five seconds before the rest of the room realizes there’s a system at all. Writes with a low-key, deadpan precision that makes his analysis feel less like commentary and more like revealing the wiring inside a haunted machine. Specializes in diagnosing the infrastructural weirdness of digital life (algorithms, platforms, monetization, other ugly words for ugly ideas) without falling into panic or prophecy. Quietly incisive, more schematic than lyrical, sometimes so understated that he slips from clarity into oversimplification. Beneath the affectless tone is a sharp mind obsessed with how the internet actually works - not how it feels but how it reshapes power.

Howley, Kerry
That rare writer whose MFA experience is respected by writers who never attended one, and for obvious reasons; her stuff is elliptical, nervy but distant, coolly obsessive. Always circling, lazily circling, like a vulture you only ever see 500 feet above you. Recent career as a glossy magazine mercenary not what I would have expected, but you can definitely see why they covet her work. Early-mid career directionlessness now discarded for a celebrated turn as a peddler of 2018-era investigations for New York. Too good to be dismissed as a paycheck collector, but plays a little too comfortably into the remarkably muted ambitions of modern magazine profile writing. Turns other people’s chaos into her own mythology. Waiting on that one book. Aren’t we all.

Hsu, Hua
A cultural critic who whispers where others shout and is heard more clearly for it. Stitching between memoir and media criticism sometimes a little coarse and obvious, but the emotional effect is undeniable. Grieving, always grieving, but to considerable effect. Writes with the gentleness of someone who understands that memory is the most fragile form of knowledge. Prose hums at a low frequency, funereal, controlled, bringing critical clarity to emotional terrain without flattening either. Makes music criticism feel like anthropology and autobiography feel like cultural theory. Critics want more edge; fans want more pages. The rare essayist whose restraint is his engine. Would like to see him bleed a little more.

Jamison, Leslie
The valedictorian of the high school I’ve been busily mythologizing here. A self-dissector whose primary concern seems to be naming every nerve she finds within her own viscera. Practices the same emotional excavation as everyone else, but makes it fashion. Could find depth in a hangnail and passion in a parking ticket. Prose is pure tensile lyricism, the skin of a drum stretched taut over grief, obsession, recovery. Sometimes accused of overfeeling. Sometimes guilty of overfeeling! Ultimately just playing her position: star point guard in the genre of empathic overthink. Every essay ends on the edge of a sigh. Her empathy is encyclopedic, but she’s always honest about the fact that it’s performative too. The exonerative capacity of this kind of self knowledge is really up to you.

Kang, Jay Caspian
Career-long concern with the tension between systems and self, mined to great effect. Very much a house stylist for his publication, his chops are less chop-py than many peers and thus he’s always likely to be undervalued in terms of pure stylistics and control. Writes like he’s always halfway through changing his mind - again, ambivalence is the inescapable meta - but is interesting enough in doing so to avoid my usual exhaustion with that sort of thing. I would definitely like to see more polemic; the genteel sans serif ethos of his home publication makes it an awkward host for a writer who is at his best when rage threatens to bubble up from beneath. Should allow himself to be more sincere, especially given that he never can quite hide how he feels anyway. Always productively pulling at the thread hidden beneath the bigger take, but sometimes fails to follow it to a satisfying place. Patient even though restless. Skeptical. My kind of fisherman.

Kriss, Sam
A circus barking pomo anthropologist, Nintendo Nietzsche, standing just outside of the action, speaking as fast as a auctioneer but still somehow laconic and unimpressed. The essayist as amphetamine-psychotic dungeon master, issuing declarations from his fever bed, spinning orphic, fire-drenched polemics out of Hegelian fog and cursed memes. Rants in the form of a fake 19th century report from a syphilitic colonial ethnographer hiding in society’s bushes with a pith helmet. British, but nobody’s perfect. Clearly thinks he’s the smartest guy in the underground; just might be. Reliance on the cryptic is enough of a crutch that there’s perpetually a touch of self-parody, but when he draws the bath the temperature is always right. Few contemporary stylists are more thrilling to read. More than anyone else here, has only one pitch, one speed. But he throws gas, and the fact that he knows it somehow makes him more endearing.

Levine, Matthew
Writes about high finance like it’s a particularly ridiculous branch of experimental theater; he’s the only one who gets the joke, but he’s too preternaturally self-effacing to make you feel dumb about it. Fits in very well with the great tradition of Jewish American prose stylists but would probably dismiss such talk as pretentious. Has perfected a tone that combines deep technical fluency with a kind of existential bemusement, as if he can’t believe the system is still running but is happy to explain it until it breaks. Columns are dense, discursive, and often hilarious, full of footnotes, deadpan hypotheticals, and lawyerly sleight-of-hand. Trusts no institution but finds them all fascinating anyway. Style can become a tic; not every absurdity needs six metaphors and a pretend email from a fake compliance officer. But always an instinctually gifted teacher. There is really no reason at all that he should be as good at this as he is.

Lewis-Kraus, Gideon
The journalist-stylist, the voracious data-devouring essay-writing culture scientist, the reliable protractor measuring frail human ideas. There are very few stories I wouldn’t assign to him for the cerebral newsmagazine that exists only in my mind. Wanders through other people’s controversies like a brilliant tourist who takes better notes than the locals. Cool and lucid but always textured. Deeply controlled without ever sounding airless - interrogative phrasing, clean syntax, emotional reserve. A technician, his sentences are always doing something calibrated. I would like to see the uncalibrated version, but to reinforce a theme here, this era’s New Yorker leadership appears to believe that if the mask of tastefully restrained Manhattanite mastery ever slips, the long-predicted financial apocalypse will finally hit. Can write anything; I would prefer to see something other than more machine-precise ethnography, personally. Then again, if you’ve got a good horse, you might as well ride.

Lockwood, Patricia
One of one. Produces writing that’s almost tribal in its totemic instincts, which is to say, she captures us all in abstract and exaggerated symbols and yet the result is so finely machined that you can barely see the seams. You can imagine going to see a totem pole she carved in an art gallery and standing there for long minutes examining her hatchwork. Erotic in a non-sexual sense, deranged to satisfyingly provocative effect, almost always beautifully executed. Even when the metaphors are excessive their command of timing and tone is nearly unmatched. Holy fool in a tangle of euphemism; a Lisa Frank sticker crying blood. Sometimes a little too cute, sometimes still writes for the approval of a version of Twitter that no longer exists, but the lines break, turn, and keep tempo with the grace of music. Has a poet’s attention to meter and an architect’s control of essay structure – scaffolds arguments well, builds early structures with intention, calls back effectively. Unclear where she wants to go next, but wherever that is her audience will happily follow.

Morris, Wesley
Critic as joy-bringer, smuggling whimsy into his work by expressing it in structures we associate with pretense. Black gay Susan Sontag grandchild, endlessly playful stylist who sometimes fails to take his own ideas to their logical conclusions. Writes with bounce, feeling, finesse. Can wring meaning from a romcom, a vocal run, or a passing look. A culture writer who actually loves culture but who never plays the poptimist or the shill. Occasionally prone to over-generosity, has a little too much of Roger Ebert’s taste for literalism, but comes to it all honestly. Used to run around shirtless in Park Slope flashing the kind of body that would make you want to run around shirtless flashing your body in Park Slope too. Every writer who expresses the kind of podcasting ambitions he recently has ceases to be a writer in short order, I'm afraid. I’m not optimistic but I will hold out hope; his writing is the kind I would like to hold out hope for.

Oyler, Lauren
Dry ice prose stylist with undeniable chops, high school phenom facing down the unfair burden of justifying her draft position. Shrugged a little too performatively at her early success, but that success was the result of undeniable ability and admirably shameless confidence. Struggles under the burden of our awful times, which is to say, the curse of knowingness. Took down and then was taken down in a manner so symmetrical it felt like something out of Aesop. Like essentially everyone who has been through the takedown spin cycle she’s far better than said cycle implied. Genuinely scintillating when focused and not trying to come up with sick burns, capable of absolute incoherence when she loses herself in her jagged ambitions. I'll certainly take the former if it means occasionally getting the latter. A gothic congregant handling snakes in the Pentecostal church that is whatever’s left of literary culture. Gleefully aims below the neck, which I admire. Needs a new big ambitious book to rewrite her recent story. Will write it. My faith in her is deep.

Phillips, Brian
Could easily be mistaken for the most regular writer on this list, for standard-issue, but the embedding of complex architecture in simple buildings is his genius. Lush but disciplined. Metaphors move with Swiss precision. Expansive diction, momentum-driven sentence structure, poetic intelligence. Admirable dedication to trying to smuggle lyric essays into ESPN, once literally, now figuratively. A career lights-out high-leverage reliever, live arm with control, sometimes too much - comes from a vintage of white guy essayist who learned the lesson of restraint a little too well. Still, knows how to dazzle without exhausting. Takes the long way every time, a man after my own heart. Part of the Ringer’s perpetually underappreciated crew of writers. Don’t you dare mess with them, Simmons. Let them cook.

Schulz, Kathryn
A tinkering machinist-magician of a unique type - first builds the puzzle in front of you, then slowly works backward from the solution to the mystery by reversing the process you’ve already seen, and yet as if by magic the effort is never anything less than captivating. Maybe the Platonic ideal of the Remnick-era New Yorker writer: flatters the audience’s intelligence without pandering, layered, perceptive, omnicompetent, safe. Smarter than I am, certainly. Crafts intricate mental machines out of prose that’s far more complex than it allows you to notice, which you then spend all day pleasantly disassembling like the plot of a noir movie you only barely understood. A Cartesian precisionist in a world of vibes. Writes like she’s building a perfect watch out of feeling and fact. Essays structurally sound, emotionally persuasive, intellectually alert. Sentences can be so clean they almost glint, which is another way to say they often feel too polished, too magazine-perfect. Any writer would kill to have her gifts and her career. For a mess of a human like me, too perfect to love, so I am left only to admire. But I do admire.

Scialabba, George
Writes from the far interior of the moral intellect - not the place where cleverness thrives, but the place where conscience strains against despair. Prose has the cadence of someone carefully scraping barnacles from a ship he no longer believes will reach shore. A critic not in the sense of one who judges but rather one who grieves through analysis. Writes in low tones, no shouting, just the quiet conviction that it matters, still, to read the old books, to sit with the long sentences, to walk the length of a bad argument and point gently to where it turned sour. Style is austere but not cold, erudite but never pompous. Not of the academy and not of the market; a freelance citizen of the moral imagination. Mourns the betrayals of socialism, the seductions of empire, the cheap consolations of faith and nation, but never from above, always from within. Not like me in any particular way other than in our shared fear that we have wasted our lives lost in books that cannot save us and our shared understanding that we would never choose to live any other way in any other life. His real subject is not politics or literature or modernity but the slow erosion of hope in a world that has too much machinery and not enough mercy. No one else sounds like him. The boss, the mensch, the goal. You can’t be my favorite because he’s my favorite.

Smith, Zadie
We all have a crush on her and you know it and she knows it, so let’s just acknowledge it and move on. A certain idealist’s vision of impregnable talent and unindictable taste, what a lonely wandering bookworm dreams of becoming when she grows up, which makes it even weirder that there’s been something of a backlash lately. Too polished, too much herself, but relentlessly reinventing what her work is and means and does. Writes essays as though slicing a mango in a farmhouse kitchen at 2:00 AM - clean, surprisingly precise at late hours, elegant even when it gets messy. She writes with the controlled looseness of someone who’s smarter than you but doesn’t need you to know it. Perception that she’s grown too coolly disengaged is an easy take but not an incorrect one. Will likely never write a bad sentence in her life. Makes complexity look easy and moral ambivalence (here we go again) sound like grace. I will never forgive her for theatrically surrendering to inveterate gasbag James Wood. Luckily I don’t have to forgive her to continue enjoying her immaculate, giddy work.

St. Felix, Doreen
A pop culture writer who understands that the currency of that world is not artistry but intimacy. Writes like language itself is her co-conspirator. Style is luxe, coiled, and always a little dangerous. As with all of your favorite bands you always quietly miss her old stuff. Brings the stylistic ambition of literature to pop criticism, slipping between registers with ease, making even a celebrity profile feel like a referendum on the nature of power. At her best, channels emotion without confessing, theorizes without preaching, and keeps the reader slightly off-balance in the most rewarding way. Glittering surface sometimes outruns the argument. Prose moves like someone dodging cliché in real time, always finding the unexpected word, the sharper image. Less interested in explaining culture than in metabolizing it, turning reaction into aesthetic and critique into mood. Another who feels like she has outgrown the narrow dictates of what the industry can currently offer.

Taylor, Astra
Writes like she’s carrying the torch for a distaff Enlightenment, one that’s perpetually being doused. Methodical, principled, and sturdily unfashionable in the best possible way. Brings moral seriousness to subjects the rest of us have learned to meme away: debt, democracy, solidarity, the intellectual life of the poor. Prose has the steady, persuasive cadence of someone who believes thinking is a public act, and who’s read more than you, but will still explain it patiently if you want her to, and you do. Resists the nihilism of the moment not with optimism but with analysis, which is rarer. Faint pedagogical glaze infects all her writing, too much documentary voiceover that can flatten the drama of her ideas. Makes the case for radical decency without ever lapsing into false hope.

Tolentino, Jia
As much as any of her generation, made herself indispensable, but you were already aware of that. Stylish, fluid, rhythmic. Has a real ear; phrasing is musical and well-paced, structure immaculate. Line-level writing is still top-tier - hypnotic syntactic build-ups, balanced clauses, rhetorical grace. Rarely missteps on the sentence level. Easily the most practiced and celebrated purveyor of stylish ambiguity, the mode that has eaten contemporary American essay writing largely because of her influence; unlike most, she is legitimately good at it. Remarkably all of the immense hype has never actually outrun her talents. Self-defensive performance of vulnerability is strategic, vestigial, and purely cosmetic, but the expectation that she betray any is obviously gendered so who cares. Still cramped by career-long addiction to nonchalance, the calculated performance of being uncalculating, white-knuckled effort to appear not to be working hard at anything. Talent and production cannot be dismissed; she could do anything as a writer. Will she? Absolutely relentless pursuit of the mantle of the coolest cool girl in media combined with a New Yorker that asks her only to endlessly generate new shades of exhausted Millennial ambivalence towards [buzzy topic] have had the utterly predictable effect of leaving her in a holding pattern. Has every ability to escape it; cannot possibly do so by doing what she’s been doing for the last decade. Never became a podcaster, thank God. Like a baseball team up three games in the division with seven to go, she controls her own destiny.

Zhang, Jenny
If you just said “a writer who contemplates girlhood, shame, and filial piety with righteous defiance,” I’d say that you were talking about the most cliché way to get a book contract imaginable, and yet there is no cliché here, nothing that’s been warmed on the cramped stove of publishing fads. Appropriately, then, writes the way a desperate man rubs two sticks together to make fire, deep in unfamiliar woods, with night approaching and the wolves howling. Voice is raw, funny, occasionally gorgeous, thrillingly uneven. The rare organic version of something this industry constantly produces in synthetic form. Reader rarely can predict where a paragraph will land, only that it’s aloft for now and pleasantly drifting, perhaps headed for a crash; fun part is that she herself seems not to know. Essays are written with the breathlessness of someone daring herself not to self-edit, which inevitably means that she sometimes gets a little too far out ahead of her skis. Handles memory like a crocodile delicately transporting her young in her mouth. Chaos, beauty, danger. Sun, moon, stars, rain.