Writing Today: The Essay, 2010s v 2020
one man's idiosyncratic view
This is the first post in Writing Today, a limited series on the aesthetics, culture, and business of writing as a profession, with an emphasis on then and now. I’ll post one a week for as long as this is an interesting exercise for me.
For awhile I’ve wanted to take a step back and talk about the evolution of writing as a profession over the course of my own career, so I’m inaugurating this series. I’m gonna approach the topic from a few different directions; today, I’ll describe how shortform argumentative nonfiction of the type that I often write - the essay, if you’ll allow for a little wiggle - has evolved in the last several decades. I find that there’s a lot of mooning on about how these forms change in a way typically defined by a lot of imprecision and vague language, so I’m going to try and avoid that pitfall here. Specific things have happened and I’m going to make specific claims about them, and this will necessarily entail the possibility of being wrong in a way that’s avoided when you stay pleasantly vague. But at least you’ll find that I have concrete ideas about what’s changed and why.
From 10,000 feet, the past decade and a half has seen a modest but clear transformation in the subject matter, style, and structure of high-profile essays. As is always the case, this has been driven by the interplay of media economics, trends in education, communication technology, popular culture, conceptions of identity, and literary fashion. The first of those is always the most influential and the least fun to talk about, and it’s particularly a bummer to talk about now, as the industry that publishes essays professionally is not in good shape. But then, that’s been true my entire career, and we survive. I’ve just never been a fan of the fatalism that often attends these conversations, and I think “The Death of [Abstraction]” is a crutch for lazy writers. Either way, this piece is mostly going to be about other kinds of changes, genre changes and style changes and evolving fashions in voice and subject matter and so on. Still, the underlying economics will certainly find ways to insert itself into this analysis.
All of this is merely mi opinión profesional. There are exceptions, there are caveats, there are countertrends, and some people will reject my whole schema, but then that’s the fun of this kind of exercise.
Subject Matter: From Confession to Curation
2010s
Identity issues, broadly defined, became dominant interests in the essay in the 2010s; I understand that this is a loaded statement that waves at topics we’re all tired of, but I must report the facts. Exploration of race, gender, sexuality, and intersectionality became central, often focused on personal narrative as a way to illuminate systemic issues. Young writers looking to break in were presented with clear incentives to inject demographic identity markers into their work as a way to be taken seriously, which unsurprisingly created its own kind of ghettos. (See, for example, the “stinky lunch” discourse among Asian writers.) There were obvious career benefits to focusing on identity, particularly in a way congruent with social justice fads, which brought us the era of 10 billion essays of the type “here’s why that movie/show/book/celebrity you love is racist.” Identity politics provided a crucial foundation for the basic intellectual infrastructure of this era, which was deriving the general from the individual. Speaking of….
The personal essay boom took over the business, both in terms of those essays themselves and a vast meta-discursive consideration of what they meant. These were essays in which the author recounted some intimate details of their lives, often prurient or trauma-related, in a way meant to convey broader ideas about How We Live Now. Defined most obviously by 2008’s “Emily Gould - EXPOSED,” which was also an object lesson in the price someone could pay for this kind of writing. Published primarily by women and primarily in women’s media and popularized especially by trendy sites like xoJane, The Toast, Rookie…. (That all three of these publications are defunct is… symbolic.) As in many elements of 2010s media, Jezebel had a particularly profound influence on the personal essay boom. Every other essay that went viral had a “it happened to me” quality, and given the realities of selling writing in the marketplace of attention, there was a constant ratcheting up of the insanity of the narratives told, such as in the infamous “Sometimes I Fuck My Dad” essay in Jezebel in 2015. Critiqued in 2017 to immense influence on her peers by Jia Tolentino. (You’ll never guess the connection between those last two sentences!) Regularly and accurately derided as exploitative, though they really only lost steam as a result of audience exhaustion and a dearth of new crazy scenarios. There are only so many “I Fucked [Person I Really Shouldn’t Have Fucked]” essays to be written.
First-person narratives were used as not just adjunct to but effectively as replacement for moral or political arguments, blending memoir with cultural critique. That is to say, the personal essay was not necessarily political and political writing was not necessarily in the personal essay form, but the overlap between them grew as the genre did, aided by sweeping changes in progressive culture. The rise of social justice politics as the default idiom of American liberalism, and the swift replacement of the previously-dominant wonk center-left voice, helped create the conditions where this kind of work could flourish; social justice discourse privileges personal experience over more formal types of inquiry and treats testimonial as an inherently revolutionary act, adding a touch of radical chic to a genre with lots of essays with titles like “I Found a Tamagotchi in My Pussy.”
“Writing your trauma” transcended genre or publication; at the peak of this phenomenon, shortform nonfiction had become primarily a vehicle for affective identification, that is, a way of establishing shared feelings between people rather than an intellectual exercise in persuasion. This was different, not necessarily worse - no one ever said that the essay has to live in the head and not the heart - but it did lead to a lot of squishy writing that proceeded from the assumption that the emotions that provoked an essay was what mattered, rather than the writing itself. I know it sounds like I’m saying that the personal essay was girl’s stuff, but I’m not making any value judgements, and anyway enough dirt has already been shoveled onto this grave. Besides, this era largely was girl’s stuff, and I would argue that as much as the personal essay boom has been dissected and parodied over the years, the fact that a genre that consistently showcased the voices of women became the singular obsession of the industry ultimately represented a real kind of progress. Women claimed the essay space in the same way they have now claimed publishing and book culture: they wanted it more than men did.
In general, the 2010s continued a trend in shortform nonfiction that has been gathering steam for a half-century now - the rise of the self as the ultimate subject matter of every essay.
2020s
Social justice cultural writing is still very common but less dominant and is written at a less absurd register; that “I Was Taught to Be Proud of My Tight Asian Pussy” essay probably doesn't get published in 2025, even in that venue. The fever, to some degree, has broken.
Tropes from the 2010s endure in ironized and pre-mocked forms. The personal essay still gets published, the confessional mode hasn’t vanished, but it’s more strategic and meta-discursive, more likely to exist in dialogue with past personal essays and an audience that knows enough to see them as low-rent. That is to say, personal essays are now written through the prism of a perceived distrust of the personal essay form, injecting authorial distance into a genre that has traditionally been quite earnest. Contemporary personal essay redolent of high-2010s Jezebel are still distinct from those of that era in their tendency to contain internal caveats about how the author is familiar with the problems with the genre, thank you.
Meanwhile, after flourishing as an inescapable trope across genres and mediums at the turn of the decade, there’s finally some communal exhaustion with the trauma narrative, voiced to great effect in Parul Seghal’s 2021 New Yorker essay “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.” (There is something to be said about the fact that these trends in women’s media appear in less-prestigious publications like the old women’s sites but are then critiqued in high-prestige places like The New Yorker, but I’m not the person to write that essay.) Trauma remains inescapable, but savvy writers now embed their trauma talk in layers of self-knowing discourse. See, for the ultimate example, Jamie Hood’s recent Trauma Plot: A Life, which is an interesting and maddening wander through a maze of too much self knowledge - a book, but one very much in communication with the essay as a social practice.
The previous points towards a broader phenomenon, the inescapable presence of self-defensive meta-awareness within the essay format. With Millennial earnestness starting to give way to Gen Z omni-wariness, the insistence that the essay writer has preemptively absorbed the coming critiques of the essay becomes a standard move. I should note that Millennials were also greeted onto the scene with accusations of being cloaked in irony and knowingness, but there are core differences in Millennial and Gen Z approaches to irony (roughly, self-deprecatory vs self-defensive) which I may write about someday. Probably not tho.
The most obvious subject matter trend in our current decade, to me, is the rise of the crisis and collapse narrative as inescapable genre. See, for example, David Wallace-Wells at The New York Times, who sells catastrophism to a cohort of people who eagerly buy. We’re certainly seeing more frequent engagement with themes of collapse (the inaccessibility of the old American dream of home ownership is a constant) and systemic crisis (climate change, political instability, pandemics) and their psychological and social fallout. The role of Covid-19 is obvious here, but this work is part of a lineage of essays that boomed in the 2010s in response to the financial crisis and the Trump era. What’s changed is the prominence of the crisis and collapse narrative and in particular its placement in the stuffiest of periodicals - a crisis and collapse essay that might have been published in The New Inquiry in the early 2010s can now be published without fanfare in The New York Times. The term “the anthropocene” figured prominently here for awhile but recently seems to have become deprecated as cliche.
Writers increasingly perform curatorial intelligence, that is, treating the essay as a space to showcase valuable artistic or intellectual work rather than seeing the essay as an artistic and intellectual object itself. Reflects the late-social-media obsession with deploying various community-approved references as a substitute for having a personality. Choosing subject matter for your writing (whether TikTok trends, celebrity meltdowns, and niche internet phenomena or something much more self-consciously deep) becomes a proxy for the aesthetic power and analytical depth that the essay was once meant to cultivate in and of and through itself. On the plus side, this turn reflects the way younger people interact with the world now. On the minus side, it’s terribly said that this is the way younger people interact with the world now, isn’t it?
There’s a shift toward conceptual essays, if you’ll forgive that uselessly vague term: the idea essay, often abstract or thematic, that starts with a word or phenomenon (“vibes,” “vulnerability,” “prestige”) and builds outward. Where many essay writers have long assumed that the point of the medium is to collapse analysis into a finer and finer point, like moving to a sharper and sharper tipped pen while drawing a map, these conceptual essays derive power from an uninhibited embrace of sweeping claims, the joy of imprecision, of swinging a can of spray paint around. “Are we living through a vibe shift?” is a quintessential essay topic for the 2020s; it ascribes oracular power to a purposefully vague term and allows for a binary yes/no answer to a question that depends on the necessary squishiness of the object of analysis. This might sound harsh but in fact a lot of these essays are great fun, and there’s a real value to young writers being fearless about dealing in high-level abstraction. What else is the essay for, if not making grand pronouncements about unruly ideas? I dig it.
So a widespread belief that the human whole could be understood through the meticulous (and overwrought) examination of its various experiential parts gave way to an ironizing of that idea, but essayists could not quite leave behind the obsession with the self. (We have built a maze that always leads back to ourselves, after all.) From bleeding on the page to diagnosing cultural microtrends, one might say, the notion of the self as the sum of one’s traumas giving way to the self as the sum of one’s consumptive choices. Both constitute a type of bad faith in the French existentialist sense, the denial of individual agency; the former insists that the individual is the sum of their (traumatic) experiences while the latter hides the individual’s agency in cultural consumption which in turn is shamelessly derived from looking at what one’s peers like. On the plus side, the political experiences of this half-decade have produced an appropriately jaundiced view of change, not a plus because I want people to give up but because we must first be ruthless with ourselves before we can build the new world.
Style: From Feeling to Framing
2010s
Appropriate to the personal essay era, the dominant style of the 2010s was confessional, a matter of letting the reader in on a secret, one that was usually perceived to be embarrassing for the writer. Being embarrassing was a good shortcut to appearing authentic.
Relatedly, writers often aimed for a diaristic tone - casual, immediate, blog-adjacent. Intimacy with the reader was the stylistic goal, an eroding of the barriers between the essayist and the audience. Many careers were successfully launched by making readers feel like they had been let into the writer’s journal, or their bedroom. (Sleepover style, not sexually.) There was no more reliable path to an established career - though not, I’m afraid, to prestige, which is a whole other thing - than making a set of committed readers believe that you had invited them into an intimate relationship through your willingness to show them your vulnerable side. Yes, this is parasociality, if you’ve been looking for that word.
The prose style of the 2010s essay was often affect-driven, by which I mean emotional transparency, lyricism, flourishes of vulnerability. Emotional availability was baked into the voice of many of the most popular essayists of the era; the cool analytical distance of a Joan Didion had been fully sublimated into the just-the-two-of-us conspiratorial voice, including among many essayists who sincerely believed that they were working in the tradition of Didion. (You know I never would have guessed, in 2000, that Didion would become the dominantly name-checked inspiration and Susan Sontag rapidly receding into the mists of history… I digress.)
Emphasis on voice over argument - that is to say, a line’s cadence mattered more than its logic, an essay’s capacity for seduction was more marketable than its capacity for persuasion. We were in an era that was skeptical of thinking as a deracinated project of analysis, and not for no reason.
There were constant attempts to inculcate intimacy through confession - I’ll draw you into an emotional world that you’ll register as similar to your own and in so doing disarm whatever hostility you might have towards me. I will show you fear
in a handful of dustin an essay about sharting on the 5 train.
2020s
The dominant stylistic movement is towards the cool, meta-aware, and slightly ironic, although we’re still working relative to the 2010s baseline. I am aware that every successive generation is accused of being overly ironic, but I can only call them as I see them. I invite you again to write your own essay, this time about the naive omni-ironizing of Gen X turning to the irony-as-gateway-to-sentiment of Millennials to irony as retreat among Gen Z.
In another obvious reaction to the rise and fall of the personal essay, 2020 writers tend to prefer the posture of the observer, not the participant. That which was once considered too personal for public consumption and was then thrust into light in a thousand personal essays has been, to a degree, pushed back into the closet, not out of fear of scandalizing the community but out of ordinary modesty. I think? I hope. Not that I don’t love a good “we tried anal and I pooped all over my boyfriend’s dick” essay, mind you, but there’s something to be said for an era of greater personal reticence. You may write your own essay placing this claim in ironic conversation with the era of OnlyFans and kids dying from the Eating Rat Poison TikTok Challenge.
Rhetorical detachment is prized, even in pieces about identity or trauma, often using academic registers, digital irony, or affectless tone as a hedge. Whereas trauma was once generally regarded as a mainline to the feeling heart, now we see a dedication to maintaining an affective distance from the very pain that you are currently arguing defines you. This has the dual advantage of rendering the recent past as an embarrassing relic and maintaining the Zoomer addiction to personal impregnability.
The dominant register is exhaustion. Affective flatness, burnout, and overwhelmed affect have become signature tones. Writers now perform ambivalence rather than epiphany.
Increased use of academic or para-academic jargon (especially from affect theory, critical race theory, queer theory, etc.) even in general-interest essays. Theory-laden language was already in vogue among your New Inquiries and n+1s in the prior generation, but tended to be “marked” in that sense - you wouldn’t have pitched Buzzfeed such an essay in its heyday. This may seem a bit asynchronous given that we’re been living through the post-woke vibe shift, supposedly, but I actually find that the partial retreat from explicit social justice politics has led to an increase in theory talk; the archetypal 2010s essay about, say, “misogynoir” would attempt to utilize the term in the most approachable way possible in order to make it appear like something all decent people say. (Instead of, you know, a tiny unrepresentative fringe.) The diminishing prominence of social justice lecturing in essays has paradoxically opened space for theory used for other purposes.
From intimacy to ironic distance; from oversharing to over-framing. From the generation that brought you whimsical videos lip-syncing to Phoenix songs on rooftops to a generation that was paying way too much attention to that shit on their smartphones when they were like 7 years old and “died of cringe.” The essay as barbaric yawp to the essay as instrument of omni-skepticism. Etc.
Structure: From Linear Narrative to Associative Grafting
Then:
You saw a lot of what I’d call an epiphanic structure. Many essays followed a recognizable arc - beginning in confusion or pain, moving through anecdote, and ending with a tidy insight or realization. Essay writers liked to present the basic narrative arc of an essay as being one of gradual revelation, of the writer moving from ignorance to understanding, often of the self-acceptance variety. Editors, for their part, loved that shit, often seeming to reward nothing else. Very much congruent with a generation that came to see self-help and moral progress as coterminous.
Essays often followed a memoir-argument fusion structure: anecdote to expansion to lesson. You had access to an experience, that experience is like the experience of others because of reasons, you had therefore learned something invaluable, and you were thus empowered to speak ex cathedra on the subject matter. I was raised poor and thus have transcendent insight on the classism of Sex & the City; I am that girl who found the Tamagotchi in her pussy and now I can tell you all about bodily autonomy; I was molested as a child and thus my thoughts on MeToo are not subject to critique. This is another point of leverage that empowered the vision of the essay writer as essentially immune to criticism, as personal experience was seen as so powerful that emotional anecdote trumped all other ways to know.
This was the heyday of viral optimization. Sentences were sculpted for Twitter; headlines were intentionally misleading to provoke a first wave of anger and then to inspire a second wave of writers grousing about how writers don’t get to write their own headlines. Punchy, self-contained lines were designed to be screen-shotted and quote-tweeted. “This.” became not just a goal unto itself but an absolute obsession among a profession of people not exactly known for their reserves of natural self-confidence. The 2010s was truly the era of Twitter, for essayists, following the blog years of the 2000s and now the Musk-Twitter wilderness of cacophonic centerlessness. (2010s Twitter is never coming back, you guys.)
In the best cases, the tension between personal story and universal insight was mined for productive purposes, with the author’s awareness of this tension giving them an opportunity to look at the stitching between the particular and the universal. In the worst cases, the former was simply assumed to imply the latter, with the author’s perspective backstopped by the social justice turn and its obsession with standpoint theory.
Strong arcs, climactic turns, and “the takeaway” were structural expectations. For all of the ways that the turn from paper to digital changed things, particularly the increasingly irrelevance of word count, the most celebrated essays still tended to be the most classical in terms of narrative structure, kind of a Save the Cat ideology lying beneath a form that was assumed to have been permanently altered by blogs and social media. This famous Peter Suderman Slate essay was beloved at the time for its genuine cleverness but also hit too close to home, for some, given how formulaic writing on digital-first publications had become.
2020s:
There’s a lot more structural inventiveness now than there was, which can be chalked up in part to the rise of the crowdfunded newsletter and its terrible freedom; I am not a triumphalist about such things, but you simply cannot read The New York Times and then spend a day surfing around Substack and conclude that the former is doing anything interesting with form at all. Financial desperation has proved the mother of formal invention.
Specifically, structure these days is more likely to be modular or fragmented, driven by the sense that coherence - of narrative, of identity, of truth - is elusive, maybe even dishonest. Writers increasingly abandon traditional essay architecture (setup, conflict, resolution) in favor of modular, discontinuous, or braided forms that allow for recursion, self-negation, and open-endedness. Modular = interchangeable parts over the Platonic whole, discontinuous = uninterested in moment to moment coherence, braided = made up of interlocking but discrete strands that in the right hands will weave themselves together into an argumentative tapestry. All motivated by the fear of conclusion.
Many essays proceed associatively: starting with one object (e.g. a meme, a scent, a celebrity) and pinging outward toward cultural or historical detritus.
Whether due to invention or laziness, adherence to traditional form has weakened even further. The listicle format has made a comeback and the “idea collage” is increasingly common. (Call me Charlie Kaufman.)
Collective & systemic framing has asserted itself into many more types of essay, and by more essayists, than was once common. A decade marked by a massively-influential (if politically minor) embrace of socialism has helped make systemic thinking a prized attribute. The personal is still political, but less in an individual-identity-performance way and more in a “how systems shape interiority” way. This is pretty much an entirely positive development.
From arc to spiral, is how I would put it. Does that make sense? The arc, the symbol of clarity, resolution, and moral closure. The spiral, the symbol of repetition, depth, and disorientation. Teleological 2010s political essays (we are marching to racial Zion) to 2020s political essays that are, if not entirely anti-teleological, then at least exhausted by the notion of progress. Maybe the arc of history bends towards justice, but post-2020 “racial reckoning,” post MeToo backlash, post social justice fatigue, the essayist no longer sees themselves as someone who can take part in that bending. From moral progression to aesthetic accumulation, for lack of anything better to do with an essay.
I can’t really think of where to put this next bit so I’ll awkwardly weld it on here.
Era-Straddling: The Rise of the “Smart Essay”
The media economy of the 2010s rewarded a rise in the essayist-as-intellectual brand. The essay grew less and less defined by internal coherence and clear boundaries around its own intellectual project and more a matter of a career-long stream of consciousness in which every new missive is meant to be read in comparison to each that came before it. The influence of the blog era is obvious here; the financial rewards of being not a craftsperson of individual baubles but a kind of human subscription service are obvious too. This approach is not at all unique to the past two decades, but it has become so ubiquitous that it has reached the point where much of the audience is unaware of a different possible approach.
These brand-writers often specialize in what I will artlessly call the smart essay. This is not really a genre but rather a mode, which is the kind of thing I say when I’m about to engage in the kind of imprecision I bash in others. And yet the smart essay is a thing - specifically, it’s a version of the form in which the predominant market value lies in its tendency to convince the audience first that the essayist is unusually smart and second that the essay has helped them as readers become unusually smart. It’s an attraction to the signaling power of the idea rather than to the accuracy, wisdom, or moral value of the idea; it’s the feeling of that which is superficially all a matter of thinking. All essays are meant to inspire feelings as well as advance ideas, and many great examples of the artform have the habit of making the reader feel uniquely intellectually inspired. The distinction with the smart essay is that it works back to front, puts cart before horse, puts sizzle before steak, puts hat before cattle, by elevating achieving that state of shared cleverness before the generation and explanation of genuinely smart ideas as such.
These essays often favor summary & framing over deep critique. Think “Here’s What’s Going On With This Phenomenon” rather than “Here’s a New Way to Understand It.” The much-mocked but deeply influential mission of OG Vox.com, its quest to “explain the news” for a audience it assumed to be ill-informed and slow, is a good example. Explaining the news is not an ethos, for a publication, but rather a means of instrumentalizing that exact affective state of coming to see oneself as part of an elect few that gets it, thanks to the efforts of the essayist. (That this was achieved at Vox through a “Time for Adults” condescension is just one of those things.) Vox.com-ism seeped into a ton of fancy publications in the later 2010s, thanks in no small part to the perceived financial advantages of playing to the pretensions of the dullest possible denominator. This approach was in that sense cynical in both directions at once, though I can forgive the founders for riding a gimmick in what was an already-flagging all-digital publishing industry.
There’s a flattening of expertise into “good takes,” and a narrowing of stakes into discourse rather than theory or lived experience. Ideas increasingly reference only ideas, despite the best intention of many writers.
These essays are “smart,” again, in that they flatter a certain modern conception of the life of the mind that suggests that the only real progress is progress towards greater and greater curiosity, which is a privilege of those who write in an era where we have already invented fertilizer and vaccines but which is still better than several alternative approaches to the essay. I am thinking of two prominent people at the two fanciest publications here but I will save my powder for a future post.
The Constraints That Brought Us Here
These shifts are largely reactive, that is, rational and self-interested responses to changes in the business that were the product of the inchoate demands of the vast shaggy animal that was the industry hivemind. Put less clumsily, as social media made preexisting social and professional pressures on writers working in media more explicit and more obvious, individuals laboring under those pressures were more and more transparently affected by them, constituting a rational response to what were fundamentally irrational influences of mass psychology. The 2010s style was a logical response to a set of pressures created by the fundamental illogic of peer behavior as operationalized on Twitter. The 2020s, meanwhile, are defined by a collapse in any sense of basic economic logic within the industry; nobody is particularly confident that any approach will work and people who are already established are just hoping their own personal crowdfunded newsletter escape pod has the juice to reach exit velocity. We are all holding on by our rapidly-numbing fingertips to a rickety vehicle that once looked like it was making a beeline for The Future.
Economic pressures: In the early 2010s, outlets wanted writers to cultivate their own voice, choose SEO-ready topics, and write pieces that could go viral in paragraph form; by the late 2010s, outlets wanted more conformity to house style, Facebook-ready topics, and pieces that could go viral in headline-and-art form; now, in the 2020s, nobody knows what they want and publishing trends are essentially determined by echoes of editorial meetings within the bowels of the New York Times. The NYT, meanwhile, has collapsed into a norm of absolutely brutal overediting that drains every piece of any individual character whatsoever, thanks in large measure to ambitious young editors who are more dedicated to demonstrating how hard they worked on a piece than they are in the quality of the piece itself.
Social pressures: Though largely forgotten now, in the early Twitter celebrity days (say 2008-2012) the incentive actually was to become “the main character,” because there was no point in protecting a reputation that no one knew existed; by the mid-2010s, the communal wisdom was to do anything possible to avoid being the main character, because the power of the network within the industry and ever-more-exacting social justice norms meant that you really could be erased from the business if you made a wrong move. The risks of getting “called out” made personal essays more coded and less raw. For example, the infamous GOOD essay about the writer using violent sex to work through their feelings about what they saw in the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake - an essay which presented Haitians in a comically exoticized and backgrounded way - was published in 2011 but would never have been written or published in 2016. I choose that essay because it’s an example of where more reticence would have been a good idea but as you are aware I mostly think the culture of political inoffensiveness that settled in from the mid 2010s onward was a bad thing. We ended up in this weird place where everyone was publishing “My Boss Makes Me Pre-Chew Her Salad For Her!” shock essays but where actual political content was neutered and sterile.
Platform pressures: Substack and Twitter have rewarded thought leaders and flattened stylistic distinctions. Everyone who writes professionally now just is a brand, even those of us who hate that idea. This is not a new condition, but the newsletter world erases any place where we might hide away from this reality. The only meaningful unit of writing and the point of all of this - that is, the word - struggles to survive.
From the naively personal to the dubiously structural; from hoping to get published in a cool money-burning NYC-based literary journal to hoping to get published anyplace where the checks clear; from an expansive world of digital-only pubs and legacy media to the present quest to attain permanent ronin status as a crowdfunded newsletter writer…. From essays that explain and resolve to essays that unfold and return, from moral theatrics to performative exhaustion, from naive certainty to professional confusion. But always, always, deeper into the notion of the essay as an exploration of the self.
Pardon the inevitable overlap and repetition in the categories above. To come later in this series, I’ll name a lot of names of essays and essayists, discuss who has been influential and why, heap some praise, and talk some good shit. I’m also planning a piece about how Gawker and the Ringer are symbolic of the 2010 and the 2020 eras of digital-only media. I have a few other ideas too. Feel free to drop some requests in the comments. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
I wish these trends would stop affecting genre fiction.
I just want to read a normal sci-fi fantasy book again.
As a child of the 80s and 90s who grew up on Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, I'd call this era of essay writing (roughly 2012-present) the Apology Tour. Everyone is so damn apologetic and self-effacing, trying to preemptively defuse criticism, whether it's a personal/confessional essay or an analytical one, or both. Apologies are pro-social, I guess; didn't all our kindergarten teachers tell us that? But while apologizing may make one the bigger man, it doesn't make the better writer. I can't remember when I last read an essay in a major publication that gave the "wow" reaction I used to get all the time.