February 23, 2026 Arts & Culture What’s So Funny About Infinite Jest? By Lora Kelley Photograph by Slashme, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Standing beside a shelf of bestsellers with some friends at McNally Jackson Seaport in downtown Manhattan, Meg Charlton, a writer, recalled the time a man sat down next to her at a café, pulled out a copy of Infinite Jest, and opened it to page one. Her friends laughed—there was something humorous about the image, its sincerity and its hope—though, as her public defender husband, Alec Miran, mused a moment later, “How else do you start?” How does one start Infinite Jest? In the year 2026, thirty years after its initial release, the book is a distinctive cultural object. It has been memed to oblivion, its author eulogized and criticized and transformed into an enormous posthumous celebrity. Infinite Jest has a reputation for being brilliant, transcendent, transformative, genius. But it’s also thought to be tricky, long, confusing, pretentious, unfashionably male, and embarrassing to read on the subway. “There’s that horrible joke: ‘If you go to a guy’s house and he has a copy of Infinite Jest, don’t fuck him,’ ” Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, told me. “I profoundly disagree with that,” she added, laughing. To the contrary, she said, she finds the book quite “seductive.” David Foster Wallace meant for the novel to pull readers in; he wanted, among other things, for people to like it. He said a few months after Infinite Jest came out that “a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work,” and that he feared that people would find his new book gratuitously difficult. What Wallace can’t have intended or predicted, prescient as he was, is that in the 2010s the novel would crest into a sort of synecdoche for youthful chauvinism, a signifier so potent that it would threaten to overtake the book itself. Readers now seem eager to leave behind its “litbro” baggage, an artifact of the Twitter and Bernie Bro era, and to engage with this complicated, pleasurable novel on its own terms. People, my reporting suggests, are ready to be normal about Infinite Jest. Read More
February 19, 2026 On Technology Looking at Attention By D. Graham Burnett Robbie Cooper’s Immersion Project (2013). The English artist-photographer Robbie Cooper became semifamous in 2008 with the widespread online release of a roughly three-and-a-half-minute video titled Immersion. It still lives on the internet and is unlikely ever to go away. The short film consists of a set of sequential cuts, all similarly framed and ranging from six to fifteen seconds, of kids playing various video games. Sometimes, one sees only a single player. In others, the player is accompanied by one or more friends, who appear only to be looking on at the action; they are not “playing.” Across all the shots, the only sound is that of the game itself—together with whatever yawps and comments the humans add in the throes of their gaming. What made the whole thing go viral (-ish; 2008 was a long time ago—the iPhone had only just come out, and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube were all still in their infancy) was the uncanny intimacy of the camera: one watched the kids playing the games through the screen at which they were looking. The intensity of their searching gazes, the strained grimaces or unsettling complacency, the lip-biting trance-field of total absorption—all this is directed at you, directly. It is shot from the point of view of the screen itself. Read More
February 18, 2026 Unfinished Reading at Random with Virginia Woolf By Frances Lindemann Georg-Johann, random pixels, colored by Polyominoe, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. “Let us try then to recapture some actual experience, which seems to have a connection with the experience of reading these old books; to spring from poetry; to be interfused with the same emotion,” Virginia Woolf writes in one of many fragmentary drafts of her final book, a history of English literature whose working titles included “Reading at Random.” It was to be nothing less than her own philosophy of reading. More than mere absorption of the written word, reading, for Woolf, was an active expression of the mind and a mode of “actual experience.” At the time of her death in March 1941, Woolf had begun work on only two chapters of the book, titled “Anon” and “The Reader.” The New York Public Library’s Berg Collection holds the full archive of “Reading at Random,” including multiple manuscript and typescript drafts of each chapter, as well as Woolf’s initial reading notes. The project is little-known and hardly legible, composed as it is of disintegrating notebooks and unbound pages, the letters jumbled, the margins mottled with penciled and penned notes, the versos soiled, the edges crinkled, the handwriting spidery. To make any sense of the matter, the reader must squint her eyes and relax her mind and allow the words to occasionally, here and there, flower into meaning. Read More
February 17, 2026 Diaries No Sugar: A Diary of Deprivation By Tanya Bush Photograph courtesy of the author. Sunday, December 7, 2025 My husband says sugar is in everything, pointing to the bread on our counter, the jar of nut butter, the smear of spicy mayo on the side of my bowl of take-out tuna rice. He presents these facts as if they are revelations. I decide the rules of my sugar fast will be looser and therefore possible to stick to. So, no dessert. No honey, no maple syrup. Dates would be cheating. Nothing that could be described as architected solely for pleasure. I ingest over 1,500 grams of sugar a week by virtue of my job as a baker. I spoon custards and eat scraps; I lick my fingers when they’re sticky. I used to order dessert before dinner, but lately I’ve lost my sweet tooth, a gradual erosion: I brought an apple galette to a housewarming and couldn’t manage a single bite. At work, I don’t bother to taste as much as I should. I forget to add salt, and a cook gives me side-eye. I wonder if a week without sugar will rearouse my desire. Maybe if I interrupt my intake, I’ll like my job again. Like quitting one form of nicotine to replace it with another. Monday, December 8 Opened the restaurant alone at 6 A.M., lumbering in my puffy coat down to the basement. Brioche buns laid out to proof, toffee glaze coaxed into a bowl. A bottle of lemon curd snatched from the lowboy. Ordinarily, I squeeze some onto the back of my hand, dart my tongue into it to make sure it hasn’t turned overnight. I sniff it instead, but curd doesn’t smell particularly bad if it’s gone off, so I don’t trust myself. I swish it around in my mouth and then spit it into the trash can. I remember someone telling me about a sober sommelier. This feels much less dignified, gloop caught in the back of my throat. The same problem arises with the chai-orange whip that accompanies the hand pie. I take a different tack: Nora arrives, and she becomes my mouth so it’s right as rain for service. A cruller fries too flat. I put it on a plate for family-meal scrounging instead of eating it. I start on a batch of cinnamon roll filling and pop a Cool Mint Zyn, 6 mg. 8:15 A.M. Sharp and sweet. Maybe it’ll impede my reflex to lick up dribbles. People think bakers passively follow recipes, but we taste just as much as cooks do. Jesús takes the raspberry juice left over from my granita and adds oat milk and honey; he holds out the Vitamix. I tell him I’m not eating sugar, and he nods at me like I’ve told him I’m sick. Around noon, Ella and Ham come in for a meeting. I’m expected to present them with dessert, and I do. I parade out all my offerings, and they look surprised when I don’t bother with a plate for myself. I tell them I’m not eating sugar and discover being on a weird diet cleanse is an efficient way to avoid substantive conversation. Giving up a food group is familiar and innocuous, and copping to it gives the illusion of disclosure without real vulnerability: I’m burned out and don’t have the energy to be doing this extra gig. Ella tells me she’s considering an all-meat diet for a week instead of questioning my lackadaisical attitude. I house an omelet with broiled tomatoes and toast at the end of my shift. Dessert doesn’t cross my mind the entire day until my husband wants to watch TV while eating ice cream. Tuesday, December 9 I wonder if it’s possible that sugar is responsible for my glumness. I wake up in high spirits, which strikes me as noteworthy! Would be nice to pin it all on a single enemy. Sugar leads to inflammation; inflammation is the source of all ails, et cetera. Francesca, my best friend and an ER doctor, is always saying that mental clarity comes from detoxing. Without a product engineered for pleasure, I will, supposedly, rediscover dopamine in the mundane: An apple will taste achingly sweet. My skin will be brighter, tighter; my mind uninhibited. When I saw Dr. Edwards this year, she first asked about my nicotine consumption (cigarettes → vape → Zyn), then about my eating habits. I told her I am committed to a well-balanced diet, which is a lie. Much of what I eat is free food from PR dinners and fistfuls of streusel at work. Oatmeal for breakfast, ordinarily drowned in maple syrup or light brown sugar because, after beginning the day by opening Instagram, I am hungry for dopamine. The oatmeal is gruel without it, the peanut butter (no added sugar) tacky in my mouth. Computer work because the restaurant is closed. When I’m not baking but everyone else is commuting to the office, I feel guilty and out of sync with the world. I refresh my email constantly. A message confirms my attendance to a well-known baker’s cookie swap at an ice cream shop in the West Village. What cookies will I be making? the PR rep asks. Another is a last-minute invitation to a tasting later this week, “rooted in the long-standing holiday custom of gathering family and friends around a bountiful table of thirteen desserts. We hope you’ll join us!” I do not respond. Wednesday, December 10 Zyn on the walk to work. The bodega was out of Cool Mint, and I remembered someone saying the coffee version tastes like a Werther’s. It does. I think about Deb, who works as a book editor and spends her days reading drafts in their least legible forms. Her job is to make a manuscript into something the rest of us consume. By the time it’s on sale, she’s moved on. She barely has time to read for pleasure anymore. I never really eat my own desserts in their finished state either, just the components. I remember how I used to sit in front of the oven window watching butter and flour swell and brown and shatter. How does the rough puff puff? Anna once told me that when she watches movies she can see only the choices, the camera, the angle, the coloration. When I eat dessert at a restaurant, all I can taste is what’s wrong. I go to my friend Rosa’s for dinner. Ordinarily I pride myself on having no restrictions, on being easy. This time when she asks me if I’m avoiding anything, I feel embarrassed. I say refined sugar, not the whole story but close enough. I’m the one who should be bringing dessert. I feel like less of a guest without it. I make up for it with two bottles of wine. Sausages first, plump and served with cabbage. It turns out there is dessert, because she is a chef and likes a constraint: honey-roasted apples with almonds and cheese. I take two bites because I don’t want to be rude, even though I promised to relinquish honey. I feel so extraordinarily guilty to be cheating so early in the week that I can barely taste it. Her boyfriend joins us for a drink and opens a Zyn tin, which makes me less embarrassed to put in my own small pillow of nicotine. Thursday, December 11 The cookie swap is held at an ice cream shop in the Village. A sign on the wall reads: “We strongly recommend tasting it all.” All day I was supposed to make cookies, but I just couldn’t do it. I am tired and sticky and covered in flour grime. I don’t want to make something ostensibly for pleasure after a full day of baking for work. I arrive empty-handed. The spread is spectacular, mango and tonka bean Linzer cookies, shortbread freckled with sesame seeds, graham crackers festooned with icing. I see everyone I’ve ever met in the food world, clutching their tins to their chests. None of them know I’m not eating sugar. That’s part of the problem I’m having. There is no moral audience, no witness. My dad is on Ozempic but manages to outeat it. He plows through an entire buffet but tells everyone he knows that it’s working—he’s down 0.6 pounds. I recognize myself in him. Maybe deprivation is compelling only insofar as it sets up a release. I don’t know what to do with myself. I wonder if everyone around me can feel my anxiety emanating off me. I pocket a rainbow cookie on my way out because it’s like five pastries in one: cookie, cake, chocolate, jam, marzipan. I cram it into my mouth before I can convince myself otherwise, reasoning that I have already failed once, so why not? The cookie doesn’t have much flavor, but the apricot layer is bright and tart, and the chocolate melts pleasingly onto my tongue. Briefly, I am enveloped in the sweetness. I imagine my eyes like a cartoon, popping out of my skull in glorious rapture. Friday, December 12 A whitehead on my upper lip, which I blame on my indiscretion. Later, 2nd Ave Deli with my grandmother. Our ritual is Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry and a chocolate rugelach post-pastrami. She plans her week around this. She brings her glucose monitor. When I tell her that I have been abstaining from sweets, she asks me if we should take my blood sugar. I drop a bead of red blood onto the machine before we eat. Eighty-three, the monitor reads. Thirteen points lower than my baseline. “Wonderful,” she says. Saturday, December 13 Up early again, but I slept deeply. Opening at the restaurant, then straight to Red Hook for a holiday market where Cake Zine has a table. I made roasted-pecan oat scones as a marketing tactic but did not taste them. People start lining up almost immediately. “I smelled them across the room,” they say. A woman takes a bite and closes her eyes. I watch her mouth work. I watch crumbs collect in the folds of her scarf. Someone asks if I have a gluten-free version. Another comes back to the table to tell me it’s the best scone he’s ever had. I say “independent food magazine” over and over. By the early afternoon, I realize I am starving. I am alone at the table, and the card reader keeps disconnecting from the Wi-Fi. There are still a few scones left, burnished brown. Usually I wouldn’t be tempted—I rarely want to eat the things I make—but I am hungry, and I haven’t been following my own rules anyway. I take small bites from the bottom first, avoiding the lacquered maple glaze. It looks like a mouse has been gnawing at it. The scone is heartier than I remember. My stomach makes an audible yowl. After a while, I take a piece of the doming top and flip it upside down like sushi so the sugar hits my tongue first, dissolving fast. Nothing really happened this week. I didn’t feel my mind clear up. I don’t feel foggier. I don’t feel newly reunited with sugar or absolved of wanting it. I finish the rest of the scone in a few bites. Tanya Bush is a writer and a baker. Her narrative cookbook, Will This Make You Happy, is forthcoming from Chronicle next month.
February 13, 2026 Triptych How to Be THAT GIRL When You Feel Dead Inside By Emmeline Clein “Slim-thick” mannequins. Photograph courtesy of the author. 1. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (1994) My mother is a strong proponent of batting your eyelashes in sticky situations; her mother preferred a strong drink and a withering gaze. Like hers, mine harbors vices and makes convenient excuses for abruptly leaving rooms. Evidence of sudden flight and ruthless pleasure-seeking accrues; she leaves a trail of chewed Nicorette all over her house and hides the metallic sleeves in the side pockets of car doors. She flirted her way out of quitting smoking during pregnancy in a Manhattan OB-GYN’s office in 1994, the year Adam Phillips published a collection of essays called On Flirtation that would change my life, or at least the way I tell my life story. Flirting, it turns out, is not the acquired skill that the teen magazines wanted me to think it is, but rather an orientation toward desire, rigor, and deferral; it requires both the conviction to remain unconvinced and a skepticism about narrative cohesion. I first read On Flirtation in a fit of severe insomnia, on a stunning and astoundingly uncomfortable couch in my flirtiest friend’s apartment. He flirts with the truth—though, to be fair, he currently claims to be in recovery from pathological fabulism—but is also known to flirt with chaos, credit card debt, and discipline. To Phillips, a flirt is a charming rebel, drolly doubting our culture’s cherished, constricting notion of the “good life” as a linear project of becoming one’s “true” self, which usually means a spouse, parent, and worker. Read More
February 12, 2026 History The Ur-“Conspiracy”: History of a Pseudoconcept By Barrett Brown Theophilus Schweighardt, The Temple of the Rose Cross, 1618, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Over a period of several years in the early seventeenth century, there appeared in Western Europe three manifestos laying out the history of the theretofore unheard-of Rosicrucian order, whose secret directorate was said to employ powerful magical-scientific techniques in service to sociopolitical reform. This naturally led to quite a bit of public speculation, which gradually abated in the absence of further pronouncements; within a few generations the only parties ascribing any significance to the incident tended to be dubious characters claiming to be Rosicrucians themselves, rarely with much to show for it. Thus, as a result of its gradual association with cranks, the Rosicrucian story developed a kind of inoculation against serious scrutiny. It wasn’t until the sixties that the British historian Dame Frances A. Yates breached the actual nature and extent of the thought movement that informed both the manifestos and its audience. In her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, she demonstrates that the texts were written as anti-Hapsburg, proreformist propaganda drawing on doctrines associated with the sixteenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon, and that this was understood by commentators on both sides; that the surreal “alchemical wedding” described therein references the 1613 marriage of England’s Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V of the Palatinate, widely heralded as the linchpin of a proto-Protestant alliance capable of establishing such reform by force; that the broader proposals were indeed taken seriously by scholars, not as scripture but rather as a set of visionary policy proposals dressed in metaphor, akin to Bacon’s The New Atlantis; and that enthusiasts such as Elias Ashmole would directly implement those proposals by founding the Royal Society, establishing the primacy of science. Rather than being a footnote to premodern folly, the Rosicrucian affair turns out to sit at the narrative center of the modern world. Read More