Katherine Hu | The Atlantic

Watching Opera on a Jumbotron

2025-02-20T11:00:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium. My mom and I picked our way to the front over sparsely filled plastic seats—the bleachers had a hollowed-out, cheerless feel—and settled in for the show, where a simulcast of Turandot played across a 1.2-million-pound jumbotron more familiar with instant replays and fan-cam footage. It was a spectacularly underwhelming experience.

Most opera fans aren’t exactly awed by the beauty of the broadcast version, but the practice is still worthwhile, particularly as a way to increase accessibility to the art form (and, frankly, to keep it alive). Televising opera was first proved possible on the small screen in the 1940s—before that, it was broadcast to loyal audiences over the radio—and continues today through the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD and Live at Home programs, which stream performances to movie theaters and living rooms, respectively. The New York opera house has approximately 650,000 yearly visitors, but Live in HD opera streams reached nearly 1 million people last season. These programs hope to reach you even if you’re “on assignment in Antarctica.” It’s hard to argue with that.

But as persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it. In 1983, the critic Lloyd Schwartz opined about “Opera on Television” for The Atlantic, calling it “virtually a self-contradiction: the most grandiose, elaborate form of entertainment this side of the Ringling Brothers (not always this side, either) diminished by the most intimate, reductive medium of transmission.”

The Met telecast its first complete performance in 1948, collaborating with ABC to bring Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello to more than 1 million viewers. They brought the works: long-range shots, close-up shots (those front-row seats didn’t stand a chance!), and even the rare backstage moment. It was a success in many ways, but not enough to stop the critic John Crosby from noting that “the Metropolitan’s great roster contains some of the worst actors, and actresses on earth,” and that “by Hollywood standards,” the Met’s female performers “are not likely to drive Betty Grable out of the pin-up business.”

Crosby understood that live audiences were willing to “overlook these failings,” and he predicted that television audiences might do the same. But imperfections may be harder for modern TV audiences, with their expectations of cleanly edited, smoothly run perfection, to ignore. Live audiences, however, understand that the most important component of an opera is not the acting or the visual charm of the soloists—Maria Callas comes around only once a century—but the singing. The composer David Schiff mused in The Atlantic in 1999 about what keeps opera magical in the age of movies:

Opera combines storytelling and spectacle in ways that rarely achieve the state of fusion we take for granted at the movies. Only die-hard film fans go to a bad movie to catch a great cameo performance, but opera-lovers do the equivalent all the time, knowing that a few moments of vocal bliss are more important than an evening of credible acting or striking “production values.”

Seeing the seams is part of live performance’s charm—it asks the audience to actively participate in the suspension of reality, as opposed to having it ready-made for them. Broadcast opera retains some of that immediacy, but without the magic of a live performance, it’s harder to forgive its failings.

Watching the machinations of the orchestra down in the pit or waiting for the curtains to go up all serve to remind us that “we’re ‘at the opera,’” Schwartz wrote, “watching not only the work but an event, a document of a particular performance.” Knowing that you can experience a moment only once—and being unable to relive it—is a rarity in today’s world. Live opera reminds us that capturing also entails destroying, and that sometimes the ephemeral is meant to be just that.

AI Astrology Is Getting a Little Too Personal

2023-12-12T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 4:24 p.m. ET on December 12, 2023

The first thing I ask Banu Guler, the founder of the astrology app Co–Star, is whether she can read my chart. We swap phones to look at each other’s profile. After we put our devices aside, she scrawls my astrological chart from memory into her notebook, a circle bisected by various lines like an erratically cut pie. It’s not looking good. There’s a 90-degree square between my sun and my Mars, which is, she lowers her voice and chuckles, “rough.” Apparently, it’s the shape that represents “sad and temporary.”

Since its launch in 2017, Co–Star has contributed to a resurgence of Western astrology. The company claims that it’s home to 30 million registered accounts; a third-party analysis from data.ai shows that nearly 800,000 people use the app in a given month. Co–Star offers daily predictions about your life, arbitrary “Do” and “Don’t” lists that dictate how you should go about your day, and charts that tell you how compatible you are with your friends. Its language fluctuates between direct and vague, much of it coated in a candy shell of snark.

Earlier this year, the company introduced an “Ask the stars” chatbot that is best described as a modern Magic 8 Ball: You pay a small fee to type in questions about your life and receive direct answers in response, courtesy of artificial intelligence. (After a few free questions, $2.99 gets you five more.) “Welcome to the void,” the chatbot beckons when you pull the feature up. I asked it whether I’d met my soulmate. No, it told me. Are my friend and I drifting apart? Yes, it responded, giving shape to a nascent suspicion. What should I have for breakfast? Oatmeal. With the Moon opposite your natal Neptune, you are experiencing a conflict between your emotions and a desire for clarity. Eggs simply wouldn’t do.

As with any artificially intelligent program, Co–Star makes decisions according to its training data. In this case, the app claims that “every answer is based on Co–Star’s proprietary database of astrological interpretations, custom built over five years by poets, astrologers, and technologists.” It’s also, of course, informed by my personal astrological chart: my birthday, birth time, birth location. The answers can be odd, and they’re a far cry from having Banu Guler (or any other human) read your chart live, but they do feel personalized. The language is humanlike—it relies on models created by OpenAI, the same company behind ChatGPT—and the citation of both my astrological chart and NASA data lend the responses a peculiar authority. I can’t lie: They’re compelling.

This level of personalization is distinct—and unsettling. Astrology has long benefited from what is known as the Barnum effect, the tendency for people to believe that generic descriptions apply specifically to them. (Just think about horoscopes printed in a newspaper.) Co–Star’s adoption of generative AI allows the app to assert, more than before, that its advice is targeted directly at you as it tells you to find a new therapist or reveals that you have psychic abilities. The app takes on “a larger role than most divination experts would take,” Beth Singler, a digital-religions professor at the University of Zurich, says. When it directed me to take a break from my partner, Singler told me that “I can’t think of any [divination leaders] I’ve ever encountered who would give such a definitive answer.”

According to Guler, Co–Star has employed AI since the company was founded, when a more rudimentary technology spliced daily readings together from a pre-written text database. (She told me that Co-Star has been working with OpenAI for several years, though would not elaborate on the nature of the relationship.) Still, the arrival of “Ask the stars” is a prism into the complex ways that new advances in generative AI can seep into people’s spiritual and moral lives, even through the most mundane decisions. Although much has been said of the technology’s practical effects—whether it will come for our jobs or redefine warfare—it also might influence us in ways that are more intimate and much harder to quantify.

For many people, that influence should be easy enough to avoid. This is, after all, astrology. Not everyone occupies themselves with divination, and even among those who enjoy Western astrology, many don’t take it seriously. (For me, it’s a fun way to bond with friends, but I lost no sleep over Guler’s analysis of my life.) Some people do take it that seriously, though. In 2018, a Pew Research survey found that more than a quarter of Americans believe that the position of the stars and planets has power over people’s lives; the use of other systems of astrology in certain cultures to guide major life decisions is also far from new. Just as pertinently, AI has been working its way into a variety of spiritual practices. Religious leaders have written sermons with ChatGPT; AI avatars led a Mass in Germany.

Inviting AI into the more private, personal domains of our lives comes with its own set of risks. One might think people would be less trustful of advice that comes from a machine, but as Kathleen Creel, a professor who studies both philosophy and computer science at Northeastern University, explained to me, spirituality’s extremely subjective nature can make AI’s shortcomings and mistakes harder to identify. If an AI-powered search engine tells you, say, that no country in Africa has a name that begins with the letter K, its powers are instantly dubious. But imagine an AI chatbot that’s trained on your own preferences and habits telling you that exercising in the morning will set you up for success. Things are murkier if that success never arrives. Maybe you just need to wait longer. Maybe the problem is you.

Whenever people perceive AI as better, faster, and more efficient than humans, “our assumption of its superiority places it up in this godlike space,” Singler said. That assumption, she cautioned, “obscures all the humans in the machine.” AI chatbots summon clear, definite answers as if by magic, with little indication that the technology itself is made up of our own convictions, flaws, and biases fed into algorithms. Clear, definite answers have an obvious appeal, especially when the world feels unpredictable; over the first year of the pandemic, for instance, searches for birth chart and astrology reached a five-year high worldwide. In times of crisis, one has to wonder how willing some people might be to look to chatbots like Co–Star’s for guidance—to outsource decision making, however big or small.

[Read: America already has an AI underclass]

I asked Guler, over drinks near Co–Star’s headquarters in Manhattan, if she worried about the risk of a growing dependence on AI for life advice. Her answers were a bit like reading Co–Star itself, vague and specific in turn. She explained that the company doesn’t permit users to have ongoing conversations with the “Ask the stars” bot, unlike a number of other AI chatbots. The bot resets after each question, no follow-ups allowed, to try to prevent people from falling too far down the rabbit hole. Co–Star staffers also look at the percentage of people who screenshot particular types of answers and whether a user repeatedly asks versions of the same question, Guler told me, though she evaded the question of what they do with the information. Co–Star further claims that the chatbot rejects 20 percent of questions because of “potential risks”—queries about self-harm, for example.

Beyond safeguards built into Co–Star’s operation, Guler attempted a grander defense—one that, frankly, seemed nonsensical. She argued that the quality of the astrology delivered by the AI should, in and of itself, be a protection against overdependence. “The aspiration is that when Co–Star content actually hits, which is how we call it internally, it slaps you. You pause and, like, you can’t continue consuming,” she said. “Like, nobody’s addicted to Tolstoy.” She seemed to pick up on my skepticism. “The question isn’t how do we prevent dependency, which I think is a solvable but not terribly interesting question,” she continued, “but more like how do we make every sentence hit? Like, really hit?” I nodded while she took a pull from her vape.

As Guler and I parted, I thought of the people I had seen lined up at a large metal box the size of a vending machine that Co–Star had been using to market its new feature. The machine was installed in a magazine shop in Manhattan over the summer and has since taken up residence in Los Angeles, running the same software as “Ask the stars” but with preprogrammed questions. On the Wednesday evening that I stopped by to see it, 10 people were lined up—a tight fit for the back corner of a bodega. After querying the machine, I looped back to the end of the line in the hopes of waiting out the crowd so that I could have it all to myself.

I asked the man behind me whether he wanted to go first. He explained that he’d just gone but had asked the wrong question and wanted to try again; he was curious about whether he’d be able to get a new job in the same industry, or if he should try a new career entirely. I noticed the gentle wringing of his hands and decided to give him his space. As I walked out of the store, I looked back at him, a lone figure plugging questions into the void.

This article previously misstated Kathleen Creel’s academic specialty.

How to Thrive in a Dying World

2023-10-05T13:37:00-04:00

The opening pages of C Pam Zhang’s second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, imagine a planet facing crisis after crisis—an extension of our own. Climate change has devastated the land: the Earth is covered in smog; crops have withered; countries are caving to famine. Zhang joins a number of other writers who have recently used their work to ask how to live in a dying world. But her curiosity is more pointed: She seems to be asking how we might still find pleasure amid collapse—and whether it’s moral to do so when so many are just trying to survive.

The novel’s narrator is an unnamed 29-year-old American chef working in England who finds herself trapped when the U.S. closes its borders as smog spreads and geopolitical tensions rise. On the same day that she receives notice that her late mother’s apartment in Los Angeles has burned down in a riot, her boss cuts pesto from the restaurant’s menu because there’s no more basil, “not even the powdered kind.” Zhang splices the two events together in the same breath, suggesting that for the chef, they are equally significant. She pays lip service to the famine’s severity in Southeast Asia and the Americas, and debates over which superpower is most to blame. But what she really seems to mourn is the disappearance of peridot grapes and buttery mangoes and “the bitter green of endive.”

Even catastrophe, we’re reminded, is bookended by the needs of the present, interrupted by the cravings of one’s palate. Throughout, Zhang, who wrote the novel after her first transformative post-pandemic meal at a restaurant, employs food as a stand-in for gratification (at one point, her central character refers to strawberries “as yielding as a woman’s inner thigh”).

[Read: ‘I’ve seen several giants die on my land’]

Finally, after being asked to cook with gritty, gray mung-protein flour, the narrator quits: “In the dimness of that refrigerated room I could no longer see a future for the halibut dish without pesto.” Because she can no longer take her beloved ingredients or sunlight or clean air for granted, she decides to allow herself to want “recklessly, immorally” by taking a job as a private chef in a gated European mountaintop community of the ultra-wealthy. Her new employer and his enigmatic daughter, Aida, a scientist who runs the community’s biodiversity labs, are trying to preserve the richness of the Earth for the stomachs of the few, resurrecting Berkshire pigs and engineering tender heirloom grains. When she arrives at the Italian-French border, the narrator learns that the place is called Terra di latte e miele—“the land of milk and honey”—and that her role is to prepare elaborate meals for investors.

By imagining the planet stretched to near destruction, Zhang poses complex questions about self-interest. She asks the reader to consider how meaningful individual behavior actually is when the environment continues to decay, regardless of whether one tries to do the right thing. The chef, after becoming unmoored by the loss of her mother’s home, accepts the twisted, transactional arrangement of her job on the mountain, as well as the comfort and bounty it affords her; life’s difficulties have already begun to erode her appetite for morality. She prepares trial runs of elaborate meals, discarding pounds of pommes dauphine and pouring out gallons of steaming Armagnac, even as she thinks about starving children. When her employer asks her to pretend to be his missing wife at the dinners he hosts to fund the mountain, she agrees—in exchange for more money. As she thinks at one point, “What … is fairness in a world that fears there is never enough, in which one need always scrapes against another?”

And so the chef decides to embrace the privileges of her life on the mountain, falling in love with Aida in the process. Even as she becomes more and more powerless—her employer demands that she maintain her body-mass index within a certain range and remain silent at dinners—she realizes that all she can secure is her own sensual pleasure. As the chef and Aida become romantically intertwined and begin to spend each night together, she decides to say yes: “to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and the tender behind the knee, to that join at the legs where she softened, dimpled, begged me to bite.”

In these depictions, Zhang’s writing skates between prose and poetry, balancing the haziness of emotion with the grounding of detail. In some instances, the heaviness of her sentences can tip a passage out of balance or make the story harder to follow. But it is deeply refreshing to see plot intentionally cast in a supporting role, accentuating the primacy of feeling:

Three years, can you imagine, gray days and gray nights, no lovers no family no feasts no flights no fruit no meat and suddenly this largesse of freckles down her torso, this churning, spilling free … Against a still-dark sky, this emergent landscape of her body. Lunar dunes, slick valleys, her throat a shifting topography.

In allowing her narrator to abandon herself to desire, Zhang seems to be arguing that pleasure is an essential part of life—and of survival. Our desire is what makes us human; we don’t cease wanting just because it is selfish or futile. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the chef’s relationship with Aida. As the two become entangled, the chef grows less concerned about the hypocrisies she witnesses on the mountaintop.

When depicting these tensions, the novel can feel preachy, distracting from Zhang’s otherwise mesmerizing prose. Aida, for instance, hosts a hunting party during which the investors kill off a species of chimp that she has decided is not worth preserving. The chef berates Aida; she is shocked by this cruel display, given how protective Aida is of the animals in her labs. In response, Aida spits back, “Please. As if you never ate tuna, or used plastics, or flew on planes when gas was artificially cheap. Every person on this planet had a hand in killing the chimps.”

But despite some of the novel’s unsubtle moments, it is impossible, in most instances, to decipher the narrator’s moral stance—and, more important, how the reader should feel about her. Toward the end of the book, she decides to give up her spot on the mountain after Aida hits a child with her car while they’re driving back from Milan. When Aida’s father pays off the child’s family, Aida’s limp complacency breaks something in the chef’s mind: “I wanted her guts to twist, her stomach to revolt.”

[Read: The lie at the heart of the Western]

The chef’s decision to leave and renounce her relationship with Aida, however, stands in contrast with how fondly she remembers her time on the mountain in the final pages of the book. Here, Zhang resists devolving into an overwrought critique of climate disaster and individual greed—a restraint that feels in line with her previous work. How Much of These Hills Is Gold, her debut novel, similarly features a female narrator who prioritizes her own interests—in her case, financial stability, beaded white shoes, a beautiful home. The power of Zhang’s work is that she cares more about her characters’ motivations and yearnings than about evaluating their actions as right or wrong. The ethical ambiguities of the book are paralleled by the narrator’s murky recollection of Aida’s face: “plastered up again and again till it became smooth and strange, a cipher without any meaning.”

Zhang’s second novel is a bold encouragement to dwell within our desires, even if we ultimately decide that the consequences do not justify the pursuit. Her message is an addendum to the two stark words—“she wants”—that ended her first novel. Now she seems to be saying: She wants so that she may live.

Sara Freeman on How Marriages Implode

2023-06-27T07:00:00-04:00

“The Posting” is a new story by Sara Freeman. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Freeman and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your short story, “The Posting,” a family spends a year in West Berlin while the father is away on a reporting assignment. The narrative is set against the backdrop of German reunification, but focuses on the quotidian experiences of a family. Tell us about this contrast.

Sara Freeman: The story, rather than being a direct expression of a historical moment, is about the impressionistic way history might register in the individual or familial psyche. The child narrator is in flux; the family is in flux; the place is in flux. The interaction between these three elements is the territory of this story.

Within the story, Frankie, the narrator, has taken on the role of family journalist: While the father reports on major world events, the child reports on the family’s innermost workings. This meant, as the writer, staying true to the child’s perspective and seeing the world at her eye line. Frankie’s reporting is sensory, emotional, built on her keen observation of the day-to-day. But since the narration is retrospective, this day-to-day takes on, with over two decades of remove, something like historical significance.

Hu: One afternoon at a public pool, the mother befriends a young couple named Frank and Sabine. A sudden and surprising intimacy develops between Sabine and the mother. What motivates Sabine’s side of this friendship?

Freeman: I hope that this story provides the opportunity for multiple readings of all the relationships within it. There is certainly one reading in which Sabine is interested in taking advantage of this family’s naiveté. Perhaps she is using them for their relative wealth and benefiting from their momentary vulnerability. There’s a second reading in which the mother’s quiet charisma attracts the attention of a younger woman and a real friendship occurs. Finally, there’s an even more banal possibility: Sabine is a student who is outgoing and bored one summer day. She meets a Canadian woman at a public pool and seeks an opportunity of momentary distraction. In this reading, the sense of threat is simply a projection on the part of the narrator and her brother. These children, far from home, separated from their father, are primed to see danger in the most innocent of situations.

Hu: “The Posting” is narrated by the daughter, looking back on the story as an adult. There are moments where her innocence still peeks through to color her memories. Did you ever consider telling it from a younger point in her life?

Freeman: The story came to me this way, as a retrospective narration, with a 35-year-old woman recalling her impressions and feelings as an 11-year-old girl moving abroad for the first time. There is certainly a reason—psychological or circumstantial in nature—for this woman to revisit this important phase in her life at this precise moment, and yet, this explanation stays off the page. This internal necessity creates a sense of narrative tension beyond the immediate events of the story.

I was also thinking of writers I admire greatly, such as Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, who in their stories create a kind of durational consciousness, a layered sense of self shaped in the gaps between event and retelling. Without this added dimension of analysis, of adult interpretation, the writing of this story would have been far less interesting to me, and ultimately less interesting to the reader.

Hu: Your story has a lovely sense of atmosphere, a verisimilitude that accrues through detail. How much of the events were drawn from your own life?

Freeman: On the one hand, this is very autobiographical: My father, like Frankie’s, was a foreign correspondent in the 1990s in Berlin, and my family moved there for his posting. On the other hand, the characters themselves, the family dynamics, and what transpires with the young German couple, are decidedly fictional. And yet, many of Frankie’s feelings were mine. Just like Frankie, those couple of years I spent in Berlin were foundational to my sense of self. My impressions of that time have remained, decades later, extremely vivid, and it was a pleasure to pour some of them into this story. I don’t know if I would have become a writer without this early move, without this terrifying sense both of my smallness in the face of an exponentially enlarged world and the electrifying experience of separateness and subjectivity that this confrontation granted me.

Hu: The mother begins to act out, and her behavior changes as a result of her friendship with Sabine—not paying the train fare on a dare, drinking multiple beers. Are these changes a reemergence of who she truly is or a deviation from it?

Freeman: That’s an interesting question, and one that suggests that there is a “true” self to deviate from or return to. Throughout “The Posting,” Frankie contends with her mother’s unknowability. She observes her mother’s every gesture, every change in mood, and yet in some ways her mother, by the end, remains a mystery. I do think that there’s a kind of myopia born out of familial intimacy. Just as seeing oneself clearly is a life’s labor, so, too, is discerning one’s parents, one’s siblings.

What we do know is that Frankie’s mother met her father when she was 19. In marrying him, she foreclosed many other experiences such as completing her studies, or having a social and romantic life that one might expect of a woman in her 20s. And so her time in Berlin, and encounter with Sabine in particular, become the occasion for her to explore these submerged parts of herself—whether unearthed from before or yet to be experienced.

Hu: Philip, the son, grows to resent his mother for her attachment to the couple, and successfully tries to end the friendship. But later, when his mother divorces his father, Philip blames everyone in the family but her. Why?

Freeman: Philip’s resentment is part of a general adolescent acting out in the wake of his family’s rupture. He blames those who are closest at hand—his father and sister. Implied in the story is a proximity, maybe even an overidentification, between mother and son, which persists even when the family is physically broken up and she is out of the picture.

He is, in some ways, the most conservative of all the characters. He wants his family as they were before the move: the old life, old school, old neighbors. He feels the beginning of the end more acutely than anyone else, and acts out this presentiment through small but meaningful acts of rebellion throughout the story. In Berlin, in his father’s absence, he takes on the role of “father” by watching out for their expenses and warding off the “bad influence” of Sabine and Frank. When his mother leaves, perhaps he feels a need to lash out at his remaining family to maintain his fantasy of how their family once was.

Hu: The narrator describes the year in Berlin as an interwar period for their family. Do you imagine that their marriage was doomed from the start?

Freeman: This points back to whether we believe in a fixed self, in the inevitability built into each character’s tragic flaw. In this reading of the self, I suppose one could argue that contained in every marriage is the possibility of its implosion, the DNA of its demise. And yet, Frankie also admits to sensing a complicity between her parents, one that she and her brother are fundamentally excluded from. There are closed doors in this story that no amount of retrospection can open. I, for one, can certainly picture a version of this story in which the family stays together; yet I’m not sure this would represent a happier ending.

Hu: What new projects are you working on at the moment?

Freeman: I’m currently circling a few projects: a couple of short stories, and a very early draft of a novel. I say circling because I’m at the stage in all of these projects when I haven’t quite committed to them, haven’t quite found my way into them. I tend to spend a lot of time on the dock before diving into the water.

The Influencer Economy Is Warping the American Dream

2023-04-18T18:43:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Professional influencing—put simply, making a living from creating and sharing content about one’s personal life—can seem like a bizarre career choice. In some ways it is. But taking the influencer economy seriously can help us better understand how the contours of the “American dream” are shifting for a new generation.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Love and Hate

Fifty-four percent of young Americans would become an influencer if given the chance. This statistic, from a 2019 Morning Consult report, has made the rounds and been profusely ridiculed by people online. But if you look a little deeper, this desire reflects a deep economic pessimism on the part of Gen Z. A 2022 survey found that 23 percent of the generation never expects to retire, while 59 percent does not own or expect to own a home in their lifetime, numbers that were higher than for any other generation surveyed. Gen Z was also more likely to work multiple jobs and do independent work, despite many of them wanting more permanent roles.

We haven’t yet seen how Gen Z’s financial prospects will shake out. But homeownership and retirement are much more distant goals than they were a few decades ago. Although Gen Z could make a financial comeback, like Millennials have, their current uncertainty is shaping how they approach traditional work norms, and how they might transform the labor system as they age further into the workforce.

Influencing, in the context of inflation and mass layoffs, can appear to be the new American dream for Gen Z. Watching someone film their own life and make a disproportionate amount of money from doing so, without being beholden to anyone, seems like an appealing way to avoid financial uncertainty. The payoff can be life-changing. Seeing the rise of successful influencers (or even your high-school friend who decided to start regularly posting on TikTok), you might be easily convinced that if you keep posting videos, follow other creators, and engage with your viewers, you, too, could pull in $20,000 for a single Instagram post.

But the dream is deceptive. Influencing may appear to be a different type of labor—or not be labor at all—but it still falls into the same traps as traditional work. Not everyone succeeds, for one. As Alice Marwick, an associate communication professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains, most discussions around influencers focus on mega influencers (commonly defined as those with more than 1 million followers): the kind who can live in luxury based solely on their content. “But that’s the tiniest tip of the pyramid,” Marwick told me. “Beneath them, there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are trying to do the same thing, but not succeeding.” For those people, she explains, it’s one of many stressful careers with long hours and no guarantee of success.

Although influencing is certainly a privileged form of labor, it is work. The social-media economy, whether society takes it seriously or not, is a crucial part of broader systems of American capital. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany recently wrote, creators have become vital assets for social-media companies and advertisers, but they generally lack worker protections, despite having similar concerns as more traditional workers. As Kaitlyn explains, creators are concerned about pay transparency, discussing unionization, and even starting to strike when they feel they are being taken advantage of or discriminated against. Despite their freedom from an employer, they are also reliant on platforms and institutions that they may not agree with. As I wrote yesterday, some influencers have become skeptical of social-media platforms and their effects on people’s mental health, but will typically only go so far as to discuss these concerns on those same platforms—which are, unfortunately, the foundation of their livelihood.

Influencing also puts concerns about class in America into stark relief. Even for young Americans who don’t want to become an influencer, odds are that they at least follow one. Content can be merely a form of entertainment, but it’s also possible that the act of watching someone else vlog their beautiful, comfortable life is rooted in a deeper belief that you may never attain what they have. Instead of improving our own lives, we continue to watch, as their subscriber numbers grow and their houses get larger, and our circumstances remain the same.

Influencers occupy a space between traditional and nontraditional paths to success, between an alternative to 9-to-5 American capitalism and an embodiment of it. As Marwick explained to me, a number of people enjoy lifestyle vlogs because “if you have a really difficult life, sometimes you just want to sit and watch someone do something in a pretty house.” It’s a way to remove yourself from the stress of day-to-day life, or even long-term thoughts about your economic stability. But at the same time, Marwick notes, many viewers are holding on to “very real class resentment that is based on very real issues, and that can rear its head at any time.” Influencers are hated and loved for the same reasons—a double-edged sword of the worst kind.

Related:

Today’s News

Fox News agreed to settle for $787.5 million in the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems.
A Moscow court upheld the detention of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested during a reporting trip to Russia last month.
Today is the deadline to submit individual tax returns in the United States.

Evening Read

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Wikimedia

A History of Humanity in Which Humans Are Secondary

By Katherine J. Wu

Most accounts of humanity’s origins, and our evolution since, have understandably put Homo sapiens center stage. It was our ingenuity, our tools, our cultural savvy that enabled our species to survive long past others—that allowed wars to be won, religions to blossom, and empires to rise and expand while others crumbled and fell. But despite what the schoolbooks tell us, humans might not be the main protagonists in our own history. As Jonathan Kennedy argues in his new book, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, the microscopic agents behind our deadliest infectious diseases should be taking center stage instead. Germs and pestilence—and not merely the people who bore them—have shaped inflection point after inflection point in our species’ timeline, from our first major successful foray out of Africa to the rise of Christianity, to even the United States’ bloody bid for independence.

Read the full article.

Even Influencers Are Scared of the Internet

2023-04-17T07:30:00-04:00

My longest parasocial relationship, with a popular beauty influencer named Jenn Im, is going eight years strong. I discovered her in a vlog titled “Meet My Boyfriend” and have, along with more than 3 million other subscribers, kept up with what she eats in a day and her monthly beauty favorites ever since. Her videos have become a salve for my brain, allowing me to relax by watching someone else’s productive, aesthetic life.

Jenn, however, has complicated things by adding an unexpected topic to her repertoire: the dangers of social media. She recently spoke about disengaging from it for her well-being; she also posted an Instagram Story about the risks of ChatGPT and, in none other than a YouTube video, recommended Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, a seminal piece of media critique from 1985 that denounces television’s reduction of life to entertainment. (Her other book recommendations included Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, and Recapture the Rapture, by Jamie Wheal.)

Social-media platforms are “preying on your insecurities; they’re preying on your temptations,” Jenn explained to me in an interview that shifted our parasocial connection, at least for an hour, to a mere relationship. “And, you know, I do play a role in this.” Jenn makes money through aspirational advertising, after all—a familiar part of any influencer’s job. “This is how I pay my bills; this is how I support my family,” she said. “But that’s only a small portion of it.”

I first noticed Jenn’s social-media critiques in a video Q&A, where she discussed parasocial relationships. The video is exceptionally aesthetic. Jenn is dressed to the nines in her California kitchen, wearing a pair of diamond knocker earrings from 8 Other Reasons; she fluidly carries out an Estée Lauder ad in a Parachute robe before the first two minutes are over. She’s pro–parasocial relationships, she explains to the camera, but only if we remain aware that we’re in one. “This relationship does not replace existing friendships, existing relationships,” she emphasizes. “This is all supplementary. Like, it should be in addition to your life, not a replacement.” I sat there watching her talk about parasocial relationships while absorbing the irony of being in one with her.

[Read: The influencer industry is having an existential crisis]

Lifestyle vlogs romanticize the most mundane parts of daily existence in a way that can feel nonsensical to the uninitiated. People record themselves grocery shopping and brushing their teeth, but aesthetically, with soothing background music and voice-overs of the influencer’s thoughts. Watching someone else live their life is easier than living my own, and it gives me ideas on how to optimize my existence. But the more aware I become of the scaffolding beneath the facade, the more disoriented I feel.

The open acknowledgment of social media’s inner workings, with content creators exposing the foundations of their content within the content itself, is what Alice Marwick, an associate communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described to me as “meta-content.” Meta-content can be overt, such as the vlogger Casey Neistat wondering, in a vlog, if vlogging your life prevents you from being fully present in it; Meghan Markle explaining, in a selfie-style video for the Harry & Meghan docuseries, why she and Prince Harry recorded so many videos amid a family breakup; or the YouTuber Jackie Aina noting, in a video about YouTube burnout, that making videos is fundamentally about getting views. But meta-content can also be subtle: a vlogger walking across the frame before running back to get the camera. Or influencers vlogging themselves editing the very video you’re watching, in a moment of space-time distortion.

Viewers don’t seem to care. We keep watching, fully accepting the performance. Perhaps that’s because the rise of meta-content promises a way to grasp authenticity by acknowledging artifice; especially in a moment when artifice is easier to create than ever before, audiences want to know what’s “real” and what isn’t. As Susan Murray, a media-studies professor at NYU, explains, “The idea of a space where you can trust no sources, there’s no place to sort of land, everything is put into question, is a very unsettling, unsatisfying way to live.” So we continue to search for, as Murray observes, the “agreed-upon things, our basic understandings of what’s real, what’s true.” But when the content we watch becomes self-aware and even self-critical, it raises the question of whether we can truly escape the machinations of social media. Maybe when we stare directly into the abyss, we begin to enjoy its company.

Digital authenticity—which Marwick noted is “culturally constructed” to begin with—has shifted over the years. On Tumblr and early Instagram circa 2014, curated perfection was the preferred way to exist online—an image of the back of a girl’s head, for instance, with bouncy ringlets and a robin’s-egg-blue bow. The next few years brought the no-makeup selfie and the confessional, long-form Instagram caption to the fore, indicating a desire to accomplish authenticity through transparency and introspection. Those genres were eventually questioned too: Cultural critics began to argue that being online is always a performance and thus inherently a fabrication. In her 2019 book, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino described how online spaces, unlike physical ones, lack a backstage where performance can be suspended. “Online,” she writes, “your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.” Online scams of this period, such as Fyre Festival and the Caroline Calloway moment, relied on the social-media presentations of doctored realities. If everything is fake anyway, why bother with the truth?

Then came BeReal, a social app that sends users once-a-day push notifications to take simultaneous front- and back-camera photos without filters or captions. It was positioned as a counter to online inauthenticity, but as R. E. Hawley wrote, “The difference between BeReal and the social-media giants isn’t the former’s relationship to truth but the size and scale of its deceptions.” BeReal users still angle their camera and wait to take their daily photo at an aesthetic time of day. The snapshots merely remind us how impossible it is to stop performing online.

It can be difficult, in this context, to imagine how much further the frontiers of our digital world can stretch. Jenn’s concern over the future of the internet stems, in part, from motherhood. She recently had a son, Lennon (whose first birthday party I watched on YouTube), and worries about the digital world he’s going to inherit. Back in the age of MySpace, she had her own internet friends and would sneak out to parking lots at 1 a.m. to meet them in real life: “I think this was when technology was really used as a tool to connect us.” Now, she explained, it’s beginning to ensnare us. Posting content online is no longer a means to an end so much as the end itself.

[Read: ‘Scar girl’ is a sign that the internet is broken]

I asked Jenn if she ever worried about discussing the risks of social media, given her position as an influencer. She told me that, to the contrary, this is exactly what motivates her: “I can’t change the world, but if I can affect my sphere of reach, then I’m going to try and do that.” But it’s not that simple. Meta-content reminds us that a performance of authenticity is still a performance. The artifice of the internet stays, even when we fold it in upon itself. It’s easy to think of our online self as just one of the many versions of us—who we are at work is not the same as who we are with our parents or friends. But the online version can be edited in ways that the others can’t.

Audiences, likely familiar with posting on social media themselves, recognize these constructions. There are times where I look at the tiny digital version of myself on Instagram that looks and acts like me but remains a bit too polished—an uncanny valley between me and myself. “There’s still a question and interrogation of what’s real at the base, but [audiences are] more willing to accept … distortions or performance” than they were in the past, Murray says.

We used to view influencers’ lives as aspirational, a reality that we could reach toward. Now both sides acknowledge that they’re part of a perfect product that the viewer understands is unattainable and the influencer acknowledges is not fully real.

A few weeks after our call, Jenn put up a vlog. I watched a clip of our interview in it, a different angle of our Zoom call than I had experienced. “As you saw, we just had an extremely long conversation about social media, parasocial relationships, and the future,” she says in the clip, later adding, “I forgot to say this to her in the interview, but I truly think that my videos are less about me and more of a reflection of where you are currently … You are kind of reflecting on your own life and seeing what resonates [with] you, and you’re discarding what doesn’t. And I think that’s what’s beautiful about it.”

As I watched a video of her being interviewed by me for the article on meta-content you’re reading on this very page, I found that this sentiment rang true. Watching Jenn’s wedding video made me seriously consider marriage as a choice I would one day make; watching and bookmarking her newborn-essentials video made me feel more prepared for the daunting task of pregnancy (despite having no plans to undertake it anytime soon).

But meta-content is fundamentally a compromise. Recognizing the delusion of the internet doesn’t alter our course within it so much as remind us how trapped we truly are—and how we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Mona Simpson on the Dissonance Between Reality and Memory

2023-03-10T07:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Read Mona Simpson’s new short story “Second Life.”

“Second Life” is a new story by Mona Simpson, adapted from her forthcoming novel, Commitment. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Simpson and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your short story “Second Life,” a young man named Donnie ends up in rehab, at the same hospital where his mother has been staying for some time. At one point, Donnie wonders if he is “marked.” Do the lives of our parents inevitably shape our own?

Mona Simpson: I think we’d all agree the answer is yes, but people react to their parents’ lives in different ways, both consciously and unconsciously. Certain mental illnesses are associated with specific gene expressions, so there are literal “biomarkers”—an article in Science in 2019 reported findings directly linking 10 genes to schizophrenia, with names like GRIN2A and SP4. But Donnie is using the word marked in the biblical sense.

Hu: The hospital is a very particular setting—closed and confined, yet animated by the hope of returning to the world beyond. Why did you choose to set the story there?

Simpson: This story, and this book, are about people who are separated from those they love and feel they are living in two worlds. Donnie is living in the same place with his mother for the first time in years. That’s important to him. But Donnie’s unit is also animated by the hope of returning to the world, unlike other units, like his mother’s, that see less mobility. The case workers integrate his unit with the outside community through the gym and 12-step meetings in churches.

Hu: Even as his mother fades, Donnie insists on remembering her at her best. Is there a point at which the dissonance between reality and memory becomes too strong? When we choose to freeze the person we love in a certain time of their life, do we sacrifice the truth of who they are?

Simpson: Is there an absolute truth about who someone is? I’m not sure. After reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, I try not to overvalue endings. Maybe a person is everyone she’s ever been, not just who she is at the present moment. With those we love, we see overlays of their best selves. That’s probably what accounts for the reunion syndrome, when people we haven’t set eyes on for years look decades older than our friends do.

Hu: “Second Life” is adapted from your forthcoming novel, Commitment. How does the story fit in thematically with the novel more broadly?

Simpson: Donnie is the youngest of his mother’s three children, and his story comes last in the book. He has the simplest relationship with her, and, in some ways, the closest. As the youngest of the three siblings, he’s a bit protected, but also spent less time with his mother before she went away. He was also most able to accept Julie, his mother’s friend, who steps in to help.

Hu: Donnie and his mother both embrace strict routines as a part of their recovery, and even end up “loving” them. Is stability an underappreciated form of freedom for them both?

Simpson: Many people find structure to be soothing and nourishing and thrive with a regulated schedule. Some artists’ programs fix schedules with the regularity of a boot camp: Breakfast is served at the same time every day before the artists go off for a day of work. Dinner is served at the same time too. No distinction is made for weekends. And for many, this regimen works. People are astounded by how much they get done.

In a 2009 essay called “The Lost Virtues of the Asylum,” Oliver Sacks writes about the salutary effects that “order and predictability” had on patients in mental hospitals. These hospitals provided “control and protection for patients, both from their own (perhaps suicidal or homicidal) impulses and from the ridicule, isolation, aggression, or abuse so often visited upon them in the outside world.” Sacks remembered “how some patients, no longer violently psychotic or on locked wards, might wander tranquilly around the grounds, or … could be found reading quietly in the hospital library or looking at newspapers or magazines in the dayrooms.”

Hu: After Ida receives a clipped phone call from her daughter for her 91st birthday, she tells Donnie that she wasn’t a good mother. It’s a particularly resonant moment. How does Donnie define a “good mother”?

Simpson: I’m not sure he does. He finds Ida’s admission startling and thinks she’s probably being too hard on herself. He isn’t especially critical of anyone but himself, and sometimes Walter. Donnie considers his mother to have been a good mother. He considers Julie to have been a good mother to him too.

Hu: The end of the story is hauntingly beautiful—Donnie realizes that his mother has chosen a “second life” for him, living on even though she does not want to. Whom do you imagine Donnie’s second life will be lived for?

Simpson: I imagine Donnie’s life will be lived for and with the people closest to him. One wouldn’t know, really, from reading this excerpt, but Donnie will have a love story too—one that surprised me. He’ll remain close to his sister and his brother and he’ll discover work that’s fun and easy for him, but what will be central will be the small family that becomes his own.

Hu: What projects are you working on?

Simpson: I’m working on a short book in two parts, about people helping other people: the limits, the frustrations, the ironies, the inadequacies, and the consequences.

Ben Okri on Manipulating Reality

2023-02-15T06:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Read Ben Okri’s new short story “The Third Law of Magic.”

“The Third Law of Magic” is a new story by Ben Okri. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Okri and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your short story “The Third Law of Magic,” an artist sells snowballs at a market. We get a clear view into his motivations for the show, which take on a philosophical weight as they accrue. When do you choose to focus on your character’s thoughts instead of their actions?

Ben Okri: Part of the story’s tension is precisely in the contrast between the character’s exteriority and interiority. You think you see one kind of person, but when his inner world is expressed, that limited perception explodes.

Interiority is most powerful when it moves with the dynamics of the story. This is another way of saying that perhaps, in a story like this, there are three levels of stories going on. One is the overt story, the quest for a new art form to express that which is almost impossible to express. The second is the story of the journey through the city and the way the city reveals the potential of the quest. The third level of narration is internal.

There is a story going on inside all the time that’s different from the story going on outside. I am fascinated by that. The inner story drives the outer, and the outer story fuels the inner. But all the stories are part of the overarching one in a symphonic way.

Hu: The story evokes a piece of performance art by David Hammons known as Bliz-aard Ball Sale, an event that has since faded but lives on in stories. How does your reimagining play into Hammons’s original mythmaking?

Okri: One aspect of David Hammons’s genius is the generation of mythic fractals. His art encompasses aesthetics, race, politics, magic, dislocation, and identity, among others, but even more so it creates rumors, gossip, tales, and exaggerations in the minds of his audience.

An artist’s work does not always tend towards myth; a work can be great and yet not generate much mythology. But Hammons specializes in the secret art of mythmaking. Isn’t generating myth a higher kind of aesthetics? Bliz-aard Ball Sale is the audacious act of making art out of ephemerality, disappearance, rumor, and the posthumous existence of that which was not widely experienced when it existed. It is the gift of Houdini.

I am fascinated by the way life distills into myth. For me, writing is an act of resurrection and magic. It too brings back to life that which few people noticed. It too raises from the dead. Its greatest realm is not the world but the vast kingdom of the human mind. But this story is not a reenactment of Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale, but a dream woven around it, the way Charlie Parker might take a theme and wander off into his own world, giving us two gifts in one: the fragrance of the original, and a spare, enchanted reverie.

Hu: The pure, unadulterated wonder of the young boy when he sees the snowballs is one of my favorite parts of the story. You describe it in such vivid detail. Do we tend to complicate innocence, or is it inherently complex?

Okri: I am glad that moment moves you. It was important to the story that it was the boy who grasped, without thought, without undue complexity or critical analysis, the wonder of the work. That is exactly what art at its purest is meant to do, to stop our breathing and our thinking. It ought to cut through all the emotional baggage, all the neurosis, all the overthinking and reach right into the spirit to awaken us to something that transcends what can be expressed in words.

Innocence is much more complex than it seems. It is why brilliant people can do things which are the fruits of tremendous thought but which, when experienced, appear to have the incomparable genius of childhood itself. It was once said that all great things are, at heart, simple. There are two kinds of innocence: innocence of spirit and the innocence of wisdom. I am not sure which of the two is more complex.

Hu: In putting a price on snow and scouring the city’s waste, the artist exposes contradictions in capitalism and consumer culture. These contradictions hint at larger questions about how value is ascribed in society. Is there an alternative means for us to derive and create value?

Okri: There has to be an alternative way for us to derive and create value. If not, we as a species are irredeemably doomed. If value can only come from the ever-escalating arms race of competing demands, if it can only come from money, then this exposes its fundamental contradictions. Value ought to be related to being and consciousness. In real terms, the sight of one’s child in a moment of unique happiness ought to be greater in value than a fur coat. The joy one feels in the presence of the one we love ought to be greater in value than a new car.

This is not to say that the car and the coat are without value. But then what value can one place on that which we pay so little attention to, which we forget to celebrate—the sheer invisibility of one’s good health or one’s sanity or the safety and well-being of one’s family? Civilization has to move towards the higher value of consciousness, of being. Otherwise we are in grave danger of commodifying the priceless while conferring unnatural value on the worthless.

The time will come when we will value peace more than gold, when we will value the happiness of the many over the ecstasy of the few. Our society will only ever be as great as what we value. We have to reevaluate before it is too late, before we start unknowingly worshipping death.

Hu: How does “The Third Law of Magic” fit into your work more broadly?

Okri: It continues my interest in what constitutes reality. This has always characterized my work. I have always felt that if we have a proper grasp of what reality is, we will better know what to do with this tremendous gift of life, this infinite energy compressed into a mortal frame. I think all literature at its best tries to do that.

Reality is all we have to work with, but we don’t really know what it is. The truth about reality is that its subdividable aspects can yield results which can be faithfully replicated while we remain completely in the dark about its other aspects or the whole itself. This is odd, for it gives us the illusion of control, when in fact what we have is merely the control of contingent conditions. Therefore, much of our confidence is provisional. One can be wrong and yet some things we do seem to work. One can be right and yet some things that we do appear not to work. Often it is a matter of perspective, of time, of truths concealed from us.

This paradox of reality is at the core of a novel of mine called Astonishing the Gods. In The Freedom Artist, reality can be manufactured for a people to such a degree that it invades their own realities. In The Last Gift of the Master Artists, the realities of a whole people are about to be altered by the white wind, but the dreams of the master artists continue to endure. This short story places the law of magic within the realm of the real, and hints that the ultimate magic is reality itself, the most unknowable magic of them all.

Hu: What distortion of reality have you been most intrigued by recently?

Okri: The most outrageous distortion of reality that I have witnessed recently is where an event that took place before the world’s gaze has, slowly—with suggestions, with counter-theories, with insinuations of secret forces at work—been made to look as if it wasn’t the very thing the world actually witnessed. It took the dogged collation of recorded facts, eyewitness statements under oath, and visual evidence to slowly reestablish to the world what it originally witnessed.

This is a very strange thing to experience in one’s lifetime—where powerful forces can make you doubt what you experienced. It makes one feel that if they can do that, they can do anything. It all comes down to manipulating reality and how reality is then perceived. We need to advance the art of decoding reality and interpreting what power does to reality, if we are to protect our freedoms and our future.

Hu: You work in a range of media, and your writing takes many shapes. What projects are you working on?

Okri: My next book is a suite of stories, essays, and poems around the theme of climate change called Tiger Work. It gathers all my writings on the subject. Both strength and beauty of spirit are required to draw attention to the specter hanging over us, one that we live with as if it weren’t there. We carry on each day as we did the day before, but each day we bring nearer the conditions we fear. A radical act of mass consciousness is needed to awaken us to the tremendous responsibilities of the moment.

My novel, Dangerous Love, was published yesterday. In September, Other Press will also be publishing a play of mine set in ancient Egypt called Changing Destiny. I am additionally working on a book of essays, a new play, and a short novel about resisting tyranny, texts that I hope to thread with the wonder of being here on Earth.

Elaine Hsieh Chou on the Ethics of ‘Trauma Porn’

2023-01-30T15:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Read Elaine Hsieh Chou’s new short story “Background.”

“Background” is a new story by Elaine Hsieh Chou. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Chou and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your short story “Background,” an estranged father works as an extra in the hopes of encountering his daughter, a renowned director, on one of her sets. It’s a grand forum for reconciliation. What inspired this setting?

Elaine Hsieh Chou: I’ve been doing some background acting since 2019. It started as a way to make ends meet when I was in between jobs, but I grew to really love being on set. I’ve met people from all different walks of life and have had some pretty fun experiences (like transforming into a zombie in the dead of night!).

“Background” was inspired by a two-day set I was on of all-Asian extras. There were over 70 of us. We were all playing one ethnicity (Japanese), and all the scenes were actually “set” in Japan. What I found interesting was how we were such a varied mix, from all different ethnicities and social backgrounds: multi-generation Americans, first-generation immigrants, even hard-core conservatives, like the person who loudly declared on the bus, “Trump has done more for this country than Obama ever did.” But when you watch our scenes in the show, you would never know it. Because the principal actors were from Japan, audiences assume that this entire portion of the show was filmed there. Through what Gene calls “movie magic,” our differences were erased.

Hu: The blank spaces are a fascinating aspect of the story and force us to engage with the text in a unique way. My mind manages to fill some of them in quite easily, but others are more difficult. What is their significance, especially in a story about anti-Asian violence?

Chou: When I was first drafting the story, something about writing out all those scene breakdowns felt jarring. When I tried using blank spaces in certain spots, they clicked into place. And with the use of NDAs on sets, which I had to sign for the aforementioned show, it made sense. The blank spaces also bring to mind erasure poems—what’s not there says as much as what’s there. As this formal choice relates to anti-Asian violence, I think it was a way for me to mitigate writing out those beats because it would be painful to do so, especially because the ending of the shoot is already violent in its own right.

Hu: Athena is estranged from her father by choice, but you’ve decided to tell the story from Gene’s perspective. How did this narrative decision inform the way the story unfolds? Was it always told so closely from Gene’s perspective?

Chou: In my early notes for the story, I considered writing a story about a single father with a daughter who wants to be an actress. Then I jumped to writing from the perspective of a background actor, because I had that firsthand experience. I thought the director could be controversial: an Asian director who writes a satirical film about anti-Asian hate that casts Asian actors to be the victims of anti-Asian hate, but I wasn’t sure who the director’s character really was. Then, in the fall of 2021, I just started writing and new paths opened up. I trusted those instincts and followed where the story led me: The father is estranged from his daughter and she is the director. The film she directs is different from the one I had originally imagined, but some of those early themes stayed.

Hu: The film set is eerily realistic, yet it’s not reality. An extra, for instance, argues that being directed to act as a victim of anti-Asian violence on a fake subway set is still anti-Asian violence. How do you perceive the relationship between reality and our depictions of it? Is it always a challenge to depict a violent act without the risk of perpetuating it?

Chou: This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and in recent years, there’s been more discussion of “trauma porn” and who it really exists for. If you are retraumatizing the very audience a piece of media is supposedly for, can it really be for them? Do any of us, after a hard day’s work of existing in the world, want to unwind by watching or reading something that makes us feel ill? And when this happens, does it automatically make the media in question for “educational purposes,” which is lightly coded for educating a white American public? Where is the line between making an audience feel seen and turning their pain into shock value?

As for violent depictions being violent in and of themselves, several years ago I read that Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) includes a continuous nine-minute rape scene. I fixated on how Monica Bellucci might have felt while filming it. Even though I have never seen the film and do not plan to, that has always stuck with me. I also recently learned that, before the widespread use of body doubles, many child actors had to act in kissing or sex scenes with adults much older than them. Brooke Shields was 12 years old when she played a sex worker in Pretty Baby (1978), opposite a man more than double her age; she also had nude scenes in the film.

Hu: Gene and Athena both have novel ways of simplifying morality—the points system, for instance. Given their difficult relationship, and the trials of their respective lives, are these morality tallies simple attempts at being good? Or is something greater at play?

Chou: Rather than attempts at being good, I think Gene and Athena both struggle with navigating life in a healthy and non-chaotic way—for Gene, because of his alcoholism, and for Athena, because of growing up with an alcoholic father. As Gene’s character came into focus, I realized that the good-day-, bad-day-bagel system is so deeply tied to his own personal recovery program because he has not (yet) been able to regularly attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It’s also low-stakes enough for him to commit to. For Athena, she has had to formulate a very rigid vision of right and wrong from a young age, and took pride in the fact that she could commit to this vision, unlike her parents. That self-righteousness has followed her into adulthood.

Hu: The story ends with Gene volunteering to be the extra who is violently attacked, with Athena watching him from behind the camera. As readers, we’ve been watching Gene closely, and are able to imagine him more directly through her eyes. Will this scene satisfy Athena’s desire for control?

Chou: I don’t know if Athena is focusing on a desire for control here; I think she recognizes that Gene wants to punish himself so he can finally forgive himself and move on from how he treated her as a child. He wants to quite literally right the wrongs of the past—which of course, none of us can do without a time machine. So when this situation presents itself, Gene grabs it as a last-chance opportunity. And Athena lets him. Gene’s IMDb credit is framed as Athena’s gift to him, but the real gift might be this last scene. To withhold the “punishment” he craves would only be further punishment.

Hu: What other projects are you working on?

Chou: I’m working on adapting my debut novel, Disorientation, into a film with my co-writer, the incredible April Shih. There are some other TV projects I’m working on, too, that I’m very excited about. I’m also editing my forthcoming short-story collection, Where Are You Really From, which will feature “Background” and different genres of storytelling: satire, remixed fairy tales and Chinese mythology, soft sci-fi, and horror-inspired stories. I love how short fiction is a space for exploration and play, and I can’t wait to share these stories.

An Asian American Grief

2023-01-24T17:57:08-05:00

On Sunday, I had my first Lunar New Year celebration in New York City’s Chinatown. At one point, after I had released my confetti popper and my friend had left, I stood in a park, alone in the crowd. I dug the tips of my black boots into the piles of festive red and pink paper shreds, fake flower petals, and tiny imitation $100 bills on the ground. And then I inhaled, holding the breath in my lungs for a few extra seconds before releasing it back into the cold air. The festivities were a precious moment of joy in what has otherwise been a difficult few years for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. We needed this, I thought.

Then, sitting on a bench adorned with purple silly string, I found out about the Saturday-night mass shooting at a dance studio in Monterey Park, a majority-Asian city in California. I knew that the popping sounds around me were firecrackers and not gunshots. But I couldn’t help thinking that Lunar New Year festivities would be an easy target, that no one would even register the first shot. I sealed the thought into the part of my brain where I store memories of violent attacks on Asian people in America—vivid enough to feel, numb enough to stay sane. My parents asked me, over a video call, if I had seen the news.

By the time I returned home, I knew that the suspect was male and Asian. The complexity of the narrative didn’t alter my grief. It’s not the first time that we’ve seen attacks like this within our communities. Last year, a Taiwanese man loyal to mainland China allegedly attacked a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, California; handwritten notes denouncing the island’s pursuit of independence were found in his car. Last night, only two days after the Monterey Park attacks, an Asian man was arrested in Half Moon Bay suspected of shooting seven people dead, some of whom are also reportedly Asian.

Such incidents might fall through the gaps of societal understanding. After Michelle Go and Atlanta and Christina Yuna Lee and Vicha Ratanapakdee and all the elders who have been set on fire or kicked in broad daylight, some might assume that violence against Asians in America is typically related to racism. But regardless of an attacker’s motive, the trauma of violence remains. Lives have been senselessly lost. And in the same way that past attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have helped form an invisible, pervasive dread, the attacks of the past few days will continue to affect many of us, compounding our fear and raising the risk of future copycat shootings. Research conducted in 2014 and 2015 showed that high-profile mass shootings, with four or more deaths, have a significant likelihood of sparking more shootings. Shortly after the Monterey Park attack, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna announced that someone had called one of the hospitals where victims were being treated “to say something along the lines that they ‘want to go and finish the job.’”

There is also the heinous fact that in the Monterey Park shooting, at least 11 people were killed in a place that was supposed to be safe for them—what has been called America’s first suburban Chinatown. Monterey Park is the place that elected America’s first Chinese American female mayor, in the 1980s. It’s where Asian American residents defeated resolutions to make English the city’s official language and to enable the police to assist immigration authorities in finding undocumented residents. Four Asian Americans currently sit on Monterey Park’s five-member city council. The activist and Rice University Ph.D. student Bianca Mabute-Louie called it a place of “gorgeous unassimilability.” I think of this small oasis in a country that often asks immigrants to exist as a shell of themselves. I think of all the work emails I’ve edited for my parents, the way my mother’s personality expands in the freedom of her native tongue, the Zumba class where she gathers with other Asians. My parents wonder if they would be safer in Taiwan, where they grew up. I feel guilty for holding them here, an American-born daughter who is determined to stay.

[Read: I went to Taiwan to say goodbye]

There was a moment yesterday when I broke down at work. I sobbed, grieving because of the trauma that Asians and Pacific Islanders in America have absorbed and tucked away these past three years, the way so many daily walks have become heavier. The way stories of violence have layered upon others until it’s difficult for me to recall which individual in which city in which way. I thought of how quickly I have normalized the grotesque—standing in front of the subway beams when a train arrives so that I have something to grab onto if pushed; casually ignoring men who roll their eyes up and down my body and call me “China girl.” Too many marginalized people feel this: the notion that violence is the foundation of the home that we fearfully inhabit.

Yet every time the violence happens, we grieve anew. We try, in our own time, to make sense of senselessness. But first, grief demands to be felt. Without qualifiers, without the comfort of clarity. May we all find peace in the new year.

I Went to Taiwan to Say Goodbye

2022-12-18T07:00:00-05:00

It wasn’t a great time to visit Taiwan. Nancy Pelosi’s layover in Taipei in early August had heightened tensions with China, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine had people asking whether Taiwan faced a similar threat.

My father and I scrolled through news—of aggressive Chinese military drills and endless U.S. delegations—and debated whether it was safe to go. But when weighed against a hypothetical, the reality of my grandmother’s cancer won out. She was refusing chemotherapy. We left in September; better to be early than late.

Upon landing, I found the Taiwan of my childhood summers largely unchanged. I felt silly for expecting otherwise. Almost everything was as I remembered—my grandmother’s 13th-floor apartment near Taipei’s bustling Shilin Night Market; the department store where my father’s family had run a small leather-goods shop; that one stall with gua bao, fluffy white buns stuffed with tender pork belly, and the owner who gets bossier each time I see her. The only hint of tumult was a copy of the Taipei Times in the snack aisle of a convenience store with the headline “China Unlikely to Invade Taiwan Soon.”

The media had described the atmosphere as “defiant” but, to me, it just felt normal. At More Fine, an optical shop in the central district of Gongguan where my parents and I always get our glasses, my father asked the owner why everyone seemed so calm. “It’s numbness,” he called from the back of the shop. “What else is there to do?”

[From the December 2022 issue: Taiwan prepares to be invaded]

As I headed over to my grandmother’s apartment, I mulled over the shop owner’s words. I felt similarly numb, frustrated by all the unfeeling analysis of the country where my extended family lives, where my parents grew up—and where my grandmother is dying of cancer. Pundits picked over Taiwan’s history and prospects, often with no personal stake in the matter. To watch a place so familiar to me be reduced to foreign-affairs talking points was disorienting: “the most dangerous place on Earth”; “a progressive, thriving democracy”; “safe until at least 2027.” I was angry that we had to think about this at all, that the burdens of living and dying were not enough.

With my grandmother, though, the present was all that mattered. I sat by her side, rubbing her back as I listened to her life story, which I was determined to record before I left. I placed my phone on my knee as I yelled questions into her ear. Her hearing is poor, but her memory is surprisingly clear.

She remembers, for instance, the two other Taiwanese women who were in love with my grandfather. They had all worked in the homes of U.S. soldiers based in Tianmu during the 1950s. The prettiest of her competitors, she told me, had rosy skin and brilliant dancing skills.

But my grandfather, a cook, pursued my grandmother, a shy housekeeper. “I was the most pitiful, but I was diligent and good,” she said. She noted his neatly made bed and the books on his desk; he was a man who wanted to rebuild, who was hardworking and well mannered. He began sending her braised pigs’ feet from a local stall, later bringing her scallops and other delicacies that she had never tried before. “They were delicious!” she said with a mischievous chuckle.

But she had also read the loneliness in his shoulders. Before they married, he told her about his wife and two young children lost to him on the mainland. They were one of many families separated in the chaos of the Communist takeover in 1949, when he became stranded in Taiwan. The Nationalists swiftly enacted a no-contact policy with China that would last for decades, its bans on travel and mail communication cleaving families in two. My grandmother—a benshengren born in Taiwan marrying a waishengren from China—accepted it all, including the photo of his other family that he kept in his wallet. “When I was little and I didn’t understand,” my mother once told me, “I’d sneak my photo into his wallet too.”

He proved a dedicated husband and father to their five children. As soon as he finished work, he headed back to their small apartment, which she scrubbed clean and decorated with flowers. “Our home was the prettiest, the cleanest,” she boasted. “While the kids did their homework, he would sit with them, sharpening their pencils by hand.” They rarely fought. She credits him with giving her a happy life—one that she, as an adopted child treated poorly by her family, could not have imagined for herself. “I was the most blessed,” she kept repeating to me. “Life with your grandfather was blessed.”

One thing that my grandmother didn’t bring up—but that my mother had told me about years earlier—was the trip my grandfather made to see his first wife and daughter in 1985. (His son had died by then.) The women had traveled from northeastern China to Hong Kong, where my grandfather’s brother lived; my grandfather met them there.

My grandmother packed sweaters and mangoes and money that they couldn’t spare into my grandfather’s suitcase for his week-long trip. He’d had a stroke, and was unable to walk without a cane. “It was an impossible trip,” my mother said. “But he made it happen.”

A week after returning to Taiwan, my grandfather died. When I asked my grandmother how his visit to Hong Kong had made her feel, she told me that he had gone to see his brother. When I asked again, she changed the subject.

I flew home on my grandmother’s 87th birthday. Before I left, she patted me on the arm and told me not to worry. “Your uncle and aunts will take care of me, as will all of your cousins,” she said. I thanked her, and told her to bao zhong, take care.

[Anne Applebaum: China’s war against Taiwan has already started]

But I do worry—about how the cancer will bloom, about whether normal life in Taiwan will continue. I think of how my grandmother has to rock her weight between the dining chairs to reach the kitchen, how she wouldn’t be able to escape if war broke out. And I wish, perhaps uselessly, for a world that would care about Taiwan even if it weren’t a beacon of democracy in Asia or an essential producer of semiconductors or a pawn in a great-power play. A world that could peer into the warm glow of my grandmother’s apartment—my aunts laughing as my nephews scramble over the couches and pull funny faces, all of us finally together. I wish that could be enough.

This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “I Went to Taiwan to Say Goodbye.”

What Do Children Owe Their Parents?

2022-11-18T11:12:54-05:00

Our first relationship in life is usually with a parent. This early experience sets the blueprint for how we approach people for the rest of our lives—the traits we value, our tolerance for vulnerability, and the walls we build up.

But parent-child dynamics are more complicated than people are willing to admit, especially parents. And when they’re a burden, they’re often one that a child shoulders alone, as the actor Jennette McCurdy did. In her memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, McCurdy discusses her mother’s abuse, but the book is about a more complex question, Nina Li Coomes points out: “what, if anything, a child owes a caregiver who mistreats them.”

Most family conflict is more mundane than McCurdy’s. But the question of what children owe their parents as they build their own life is broadly applicable. Heavy, a memoir by Kiese Laymon, explores Laymon’s relationships with his body and mother, and his desire, as Isaac Fitzgerald argues, “to communicate something to his parent and find common ground.” For Lynne Tillman, however, reconciliation was less appealing. In Mothercare, she writes begrudgingly about caring for her elderly mother—who, when Tillman won the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship, said, “If I had wanted to be, I would have been a better writer than you.” But when Tillman “insists she feels nothing for her mother,” Judith Shulevitz writes, “we suspect the opposite, that she can’t tolerate a longing she perceives as unrequited.”

Fiction can offer a more forgiving terrain for navigating childhood. In Win Me Something, by Kyle Lucia Wu, the protagonist resents being abandoned by her divorced parents and their new families. She reminds us that “the narratives we tell ourselves can be just as maladaptive as they are self-protective,” Ruth Madievsky explains. And through his novels Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, Douglas Stuart mirrors his own experience. His protagonists care for mothers struggling with alcohol addiction, like he did, Claire Jarvis writes. Both Shuggie and Mungo have mothers who “don’t love their children unreservedly, though they expect unreserved love.” It’s yet another example of how parents—with their Herculean expectations and potential to uplift or destroy—can define how one sees relationships for a lifetime.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

Getty; The Atlantic

Don’t judge I’m Glad My Mom Died by its title

“When McCurdy draws on her child voice, the reader instinctively takes the position of the discerning adult to see both the wrongness of the situation and the flawed, desperate love young McCurdy has for her mother.”

📚 I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy

Chris Killip / Magnum Photos

Have a difficult childhood? These writers did too.

“The neglected or endangered child—the orphan, the vagrant, the waif—is a character with deep roots in the Western canon. ”

📚 Heavy, by Kiese Laymon
📚 Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn

Raymond Depardon / Magnum

‘Everything about this boy was about his mother’

“But Shuggie and Mungo are different from their elder siblings; when their mothers reach out to them in intoxicated longing, they reach back. Curled around their mothers’ drunken forms, they are small, human hymns to the false rhetoric of some types of maternal love.”

📚 Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart
📚 Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart

Yannick Schuette / Connected Archives

Six books that show no one can hurt you like a sibling

“Yet the unique feeling of sharing parents, or of growing up together, makes this relationship unlike any other. For many of us, our links with our siblings will be the longest of our lives.”

📚 Win Me Something, by Kyle Lucia Wu
📚 If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

Paul Fusco / Magnum

The problem with mothers and daughters

“The evening before my mother slipped into the fugue state she was in until she died, I said goodnight with my usual “I love you, Mom.” “But do you?” she murmured. “Of course I do,” I said, automatically. And that was that, her one invitation to have that conversation, declined.”

📚 Mothercare, by Lynne Tillman

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Katherine Hu. The book she’s currently reading is Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar.

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Oliver Munday on Expression and Transgression

2022-10-15T07:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: Read Oliver Munday’s new short story “Getting Up.”

“Getting Up” is a new story by Oliver Munday, an associate creative director for The Atlantic. To mark the story’s publication, Munday and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your story, “Getting Up,” a father, Haiden, struggles with losing his identity to parenthood. He begins to rediscover his sense of purpose by returning to an activity of his youth—graffiti. What drew you to this art form?

Oliver Munday: I, very much like Haiden, used to write graffiti as a kid. The simple answer is that graffiti infuses art and expression with transgression. The danger inherent to the act is addictive. It’s sexy and exciting. Coming up with a unique tag can be thrilling, because you’re hinting at an alter ego through its signature and leaving traces of it everywhere—an alter ego that could be anyone. There’s a romantic mystery to it all—going out under the cover of darkness to make your mark on the world. Needless to say, as an overeager teenager, when a true sense of danger set in, I abandoned all hope of becoming infamous. I was too cloistered for that level of risk.

Hu: The central tension of the story is this desire to maintain a sense of self, even as you start to build a family. Is this possible? Will Haiden eventually succeed?

Munday: It’s not impossible, but it’s not at all easy. Parenting requires so much selflessness, especially with young kids, that it can often feel claustrophobic. Everything around you shrinks. It’s easy to lose touch with interests, and they can simply fall away, making it hard to maintain the parts of your character that comprise your individuality. But there’s also a sense of nobility in pouring yourself into your role as a parent—which can be life affirming, inspiring, and humblingly thankless. A negotiation has to happen in order to balance these inner multitudes. This is what Haiden starts to understand. I think he realizes, at some point, that in order to show his daughter, Carter, the world as he sees it, he needs to get reacquainted with the part of himself that he’s lost touch with. It’s important for him, and ultimately not selfish. She deserves to know.

Hu: The story opens with a stretch of dialogue where Haiden is being woken up by his young daughter. Dialogue dominates throughout, and in scenes with Haiden’s neighbor, Tony, seems to reflect the protagonist’s inner monologue. When is dialogue more useful than narrative?

Munday: Dialogue is always action. Speech lets readers watch characters assert themselves. Sometimes these assertions are at odds or in conflict with the narrative surrounding them, and that friction can be important. Dialogue allows for surprise, humor, and human messiness. In the case of this story, dialogue was most useful when building the father-daughter relationship. The bluntness of children’s speech can often be revealing, and hilarious. When my daughter, Lilly, was just 2, she started calling me Pizza Boy.

Hu: Writing is not your only creative outlet; you also design and illustrate here at The Atlantic. For those who haven’t already noticed, you also did the art for this short story. Tell me about how you approached that process.

Munday: Writing is a newer outlet for me. The process of writing and editing this story was actually much more labor intensive and creatively demanding than the art was. This meant that for once, I could take a load off when it came to the visuals and be my own kindest critic. What was so satisfying about the process was that the act of making the art became an extension of the story. I used spray paint to make both pieces and made a mess in my apartment. My daughter was around for some of it too. I wanted to deface something, to capture some of the texture—both literal and metaphorical—of graffiti. It was important to me from the beginning that the art for the story be physical; it allowed me to more fully inhabit the fictional world.

Hu: I found myself immersed in the physicality of the story—the shaking of the spray-paint cans, Carter’s toy coin in Haiden’s palm, even the way the marker from Carter’s drawing board is described. How did you envision the physicality resonating with the reader?

Munday: I’m glad you felt that way. Images were the first aspect of writing that I latched onto. It’s no coincidence: I think visually—I’m a visual learner—and this informs the way I move through the world, the way I understand it. As a reader, too, I’m always struck by precise visual descriptions. They take on weight and become grounding. To evoke a sense of touch and feeling is a visceral way to make a connection.

To be a parent is to come into contact again with the wonder of experiencing objects in the world for the first time. Haiden is close enough to this phase of life through Carter that his own sense of wonder has been restored a bit. She helps him see the texture of the world. My daughter, Lilly, did the same for me.

Hu: After his first graffiti escapade, Haiden discovers that his tag looks less impressive in the morning light. His dissatisfaction with his job and marriage offers us a character who “feels pathetic” and, by the end of the story, is just beginning to find his way. How do you keep readers invested in a character with uncertain belief in his own story?

Munday: As a person, I’m racked with uncertainty. This is a relatable-enough quality, but I think my own brand of it involves more than a little self-pity and some indulgence too. I have a close friend who is often bracingly honest, and he has called me out for this. The more I consider it, though, the more I understand that my self-loathing and sustained despondency both act as a convenient way to justify inaction. That pattern can negatively affect the people around you, which I think is very true in Haiden’s case with regard to his wife, Hannah. It becomes a burden for her. The grit required to change, to evolve, to act, is hard won. But it is necessary. Haiden is only beginning to understand this. That we are capable of transfiguring our pain and sadness into beauty makes writing—and all art—thrilling. I hope readers recognize the possibility in this idea, and the truth that few things are ever fixed.

Hu: What new projects are you working on?

Munday: I’m currently elaborating on the themes in “Getting Up,” working on a collection of stories that approach fatherhood, as a subject, from many differing angles. It’s something I continue to wish I could find more of in fiction—fatherhood as a central concern. I’m also working on some design and memoir writing, along with actually designing from time to time. It’s my day job, after all.

Madhuri Vijay on Cruelty as Righteousness

2022-09-28T08:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: Read Madhuri Vijay’s new short story “Hill Station.”

“Hill Station” is a new story by Madhuri Vijay. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Vijay and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: Your short story “Hill Station” features an unhappy marriage where both parents have surrendered to their middle-aged fate. The detached tone of the story appears to echo their discontent. Why did you tell the story in this way?

Madhuri Vijay: The tone, in this case, evolved naturally. And while I don’t think an anesthetized syntax is necessary when writing about depressed or lonely people (just look at the morbid glee of [Ottessa] Moshfegh’s narrators, or the filthy exuberance of [Philip Roth’s] Portnoy), it did seem appropriate to keep the prose severely controlled for this story, and also to deny it some of the usual narrative release valves: humor, extended dialogue, long flights of description. This allowed me to exaggerate the pressure under which the family exists, even during moments of ostensible leisure.

Hu: At the core of the narrative is an unfulfilled mother. She’s described as lacking “the hot urgency of maternal love.” The Far Field, your 2019 debut novel, similarly centers on a mother who hides her inner complexity. What draws you to this type of character, and to the mother-daughter relationship?

Vijay: I don’t think I’m particularly drawn to the mother-daughter relationship. I do, however, think that mothers and daughters often embody the kinds of turmoil to which I am attracted, and which can be summed up in a handful of subjects: obligation, resentment, pity, the flimsy nature of the self, and, above all, cruelty. I’m fascinated by cruelty in all its various guises—cruelty as negligence, as sadism, as self-protection, as misguided kindness, as accident, and, increasingly, as righteousness. But I’m perfectly happy to write about these subjects using whatever is at hand.

Hu: This story is set near Bangalore, where you were born and raised. How do you choose which lines to blur between reality and fiction? Is there a risk in borrowing from your own lived experience?

Vijay: For the most part, the story takes place in Kodaikanal, a hill station about 500 kilometers south of where I grew up. I visited Kodaikanal a few times as a child, but apart from a vague sense of setting, I haven’t borrowed much from those visits. As for blurring lines: I confess I don’t see the business of writing in those terms, as a mere balancing act between the true and the untrue. No writer’s mind is so perfectly bifurcated, with Reality confined to one side, Fiction to the other, and a line down the middle that she must decide how and when to cross. The same is true for me. I regard my life and my experiences as sources of material, as skewed and untrustworthy as any document in a library. They are to be used only insofar as the work demands, and then with as much care and linguistic rigor as possible. As for the risks, they are the same as they’ve ever been. On the page: writing badly. In life: pissing people off. Perhaps one day I’ll regret saying this, but I’m far more afraid of the former than the latter.

Hu: Two animal motifs are woven throughout the story: the sweet white rabbit, and murderous tigers of various stripes. How do these animals function in the story? When choosing motifs, how do you avoid clichés while heightening their symbolic value?

Vijay: One always hopes to avoid cliché, but it’s never a certainty. One of the ways to sidestep it is to upend the values with which these symbols are normally associated. Rabbits and tigers would seem to point to the age-old confrontation between innocence and danger, but in this story they are tied to wholly different notions.

Hu: You’ve spoken about fiction being an “imperfect medium” that allows us to honor the “nuance and complexity” of the world. What, to you, is the purpose of your fiction? How does that relate to the purpose of fiction more broadly?

Vijay: I’m mortified to have ever said something so pompous, so let me replace it with something equally pompous but, I hope, less trite. I find it odd how easily some writers talk about the purpose of their work, how quick they are, in interviews and on social media, to emphasize the social or political utility of their fiction. Far more honest to my mind is Zadie Smith’s sheepish admission: Writing? It’s something to do. For me, it’s something to do, but, occasionally, it’s a bit more than that. Like all forms of art, writing is an act that, in its purest state, serves no discernible agenda—neither social justice, nor the battle against climate change, nor self-improvement, nor representing one’s community. (It can be strong-armed into serving any or all of these, but the art that results is necessarily mutilated.) On the very best days, writing is, simply, itself: self-contained, guileless, full of play. And for that reason, it is sublime.

Please don’t mistake me. Sublimity is not my natural state. Like most writers, I’m riddled with envy, self-reproach, and an outsize quota of bitterness. All I’m saying is that if I declare, here and now, that my writing is for something, some identifiable social purpose, bounded and finite, then I will lose the possibility—fleeting and faint and elusive as it already is—of knowing that sublimity from time to time. And I’m simply not willing to take that risk. My work would be the poorer for it, and in the end so would I.