Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • The Disappearing Novel and the Culture That Forgot How to Read

    The Disappearing Novel and the Culture That Forgot How to Read

    In his New York Times column “When Novels Mattered,” David Brooks laments the slow vanishing of the novelist as a public figure. Once, the release of a new novel—especially by the likes of Saul Bellow or Toni Morrison—was a cultural event. Now it barely causes a ripple.

    The novel no longer commands attention. The digital age has crushed the reader’s patience, fractured our attention span, and flooded our minds with the shallow stimuli of TikTok, endless texts, and algorithmic rabbit holes. Where once we waited for a new Roth novel with the same anticipation reserved today for a Marvel sequel, we now swipe past literature as if it were spam.

    For Brooks, this is not just a loss—it’s a tragedy. The decline of the novel signals something deeper: a society losing its capacity for moral complexity, nuance, and emotional depth. The great literary writers, he argues, once served as our secular prophets, our social conscience. They told the truth—harsh, beautiful, layered. They gave us characters who were flawed, human, and real—not two-dimensional avatars chasing dopamine hits on social media.

    One of Brooks’ most compelling insights is that this decline is not simply the result of technological distraction, but of cultural timidity. Great literature, he reminds us, requires audacity. The ability to speak outside the safe lanes. To challenge the dominant orthodoxy. And today, particularly among the liberal elite, that audacity is wilting. Brooks argues that young people, especially on college campuses, whisper their opinions in fear. The social cost of independent thinking has grown too high.

    Interestingly, Brooks—who has recently skewered the excesses of the political right—spares them from scrutiny here. His focus is firmly on the left, on the performative virtue and self-censorship that, while well-meaning, suffocates creative risk. In this climate, it’s easier to be righteous than original. Virtue signaling may win you applause online, but it doesn’t lead to great art.

    Yet the most persuasive moment in the essay arrives late, when Brooks describes the collective psychic damage of the last decade. “Our interior lives,” he writes, “are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith.” That line lands hard. It names something many of us feel: that we are living in a Bosch-like hellscape of noise, cruelty, and absurdity—a fever dream of moral exhaustion.

    Brooks doesn’t say this, but I will: perhaps literature isn’t dead, just stunned. In shock. In digestion. Maybe we can’t write the great novels of this era because we haven’t fully metabolized the era itself. The story hasn’t ended, and we’re still trying to make sense of the firestorm.

    Is the novel dead? I doubt it. It’s sleeping off the chaos. There are still serious novelists out there—unhyped, uncelebrated—doing the slow, unsexy work. One who deserves more recognition is Sigrid Nunez, whose clear, intimate prose hits as hard as anything in Bellow’s canon.

    The talent remains. The novels are still being written. What’s missing is the cultural infrastructure that once elevated them to necessity. We don’t need more influencers—we need readers with stamina. We need a culture willing to wrestle with meaning again.

  • Joyface and the Gooseberry Lie

    Joyface and the Gooseberry Lie

    In the short story “Gooseberries,” Chekhov builds a quiet indictment of false contentment. The story opens with Ivan Ivanich, a veterinarian, and his friend Bourkin, the schoolmaster, soaked from rain and flushed from vigorous exercise. There’s a rugged, life-affirming joy in their discomfort—an honest happiness born from movement, exposure, and the humbling vastness of the natural world.

    This raw joy stands in mocking contrast to Ivan’s brother, Nikolai, a man who has spent years grinding away at bureaucratic tedium, nursing a fantasy of rural bliss. His goal? To retreat to the country and become a minor land baron, surrounded by gooseberry bushes and sycophantic peasants. Ivan, ever the clear-eyed cynic, knows this is no pastoral ideal—it’s a death wish in disguise. He describes his brother’s dream as “six feet of land,” a nod not to acreage, but to a coffin.

    Drenched and weary, Ivan and Bourkin seek shelter with their friend Aliokhin at his mill. There, Chekhov offers fleeting pleasures: the warmth of hospitality, the intimacy of shared conversation, the sensual revival of a hot bath. These are the real joys of life—ephemeral, yes, but earned and communal.

    And then the story pivots. Ivan launches into his monologue about Nikolai, who finally escaped the city by marrying (and then outliving) an “ugly old widow,” purely to fund his pastoral delusion. The transaction is grotesque in its coldness—he’s not marrying for love but for the deed to a fantasy. When the widow dies, he buys his estate, plants twenty gooseberry bushes, and gorges himself in bloated isolation.

    Ivan visits and is appalled. His brother, the red dog, and the cook—all puffed and pampered—look like livestock awaiting slaughter. They have the physicality of pigs and the spirituality of corpses. Nikolai dotes on his gooseberries with religious fervor, insisting on his happiness. But Ivan sees through it. This isn’t happiness—it’s Joyface, a self-inflicted psychosis, a desperate mask slapped over a hollow life.

    What horrifies Ivan is not merely his brother’s delusion, but its implication: that many of the world’s so-called happy people are just as corrupt, just as morally dead. These are the bloated rich, insulated from suffering, convinced of their own virtue while causing quiet devastation to the world around them.

    To witness such delusion is to lose faith in people altogether. Ivan begins to spiral into misanthropy, seeing humanity not as a noble species, but a swarm of narcissists chasing comfort, stroking their chimeras, and calling it joy.

  • If Cormac McCarthy Wrote a Movie Treatment for The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” 

    If Cormac McCarthy Wrote a Movie Treatment for The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” 

    FADE IN:

    A road. It winds through the wastes like a serpent that forgot its own name. Cracked earth on either side. Fence posts like grave markers. Vultures in the sky, circling nothing in particular, just keeping warm. A man walks it. His boots are flayed open. His eyes are sunburned. His soul is a blister dragging itself behind him.

    His name is Lyle. Or maybe Thomas. The script never says. Doesn’t matter. He’s every man who ever wrote a love letter in blood and mailed it into the void.

    He is looking for her. She has no name, just a shape in the distance, a memory braided from perfume and last words. She left him. Maybe twice. Maybe more. He kept the door open. She never knocked.

    The road has been long. Winding. Bleak. It led him through dead towns and ghost motels. Once he stayed in a place where the concierge was a buzzard and the minibar held only regret.

    He speaks not. The road speaks for him. It says:

    Every fool must follow something. You picked hope. Bad draw.

    Flashbacks flicker: A woman, face soft as moonlight, eyes like unpaid debt. She tells him she’s leaving. He says he’ll wait. She laughs. That’s the last thing she gives him. Her laughter. Acid-bright and final.

    Along the road he meets others—pilgrims of delusion.

    One man rides a shopping cart filled with old love songs on cassette.

    One woman sews wedding dresses for brides that never were.

    One child sells maps to places that no longer exist.

    They all walk. They all believe the road leads somewhere. It don’t.

    Eventually, Lyle comes upon a house at the end of the road. It is the house. Her house. Or what’s left of it. The windows are boarded. The door is gone. Inside, just dust, a broken phonograph, and a bird trapped in the chimney, fluttering against the soot.

    He kneels.

    Not to pray. To listen.

    There’s no music. No answer. Only wind. And the bird’s soft thump, thump, thump.

    He lies down. The road curls around him like a noose.

    FADE TO BLACK.

    The final line scrolls in silence:

    Love didn’t leave. It just stopped answering the door.

  • If Cormac McCarthy Wrote a Movie Treatment for the Bee Gees’ “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)”

    If Cormac McCarthy Wrote a Movie Treatment for the Bee Gees’ “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)”

    MOVIE TREATMENT: Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)

    FADE IN:

    Dust plains. Endless. Cattle skeletons sun-bleached and smiling in the dirt. A wind hisses through creosote like it knows a secret. A man rides into this ruin on a horse too tired to live and too dumb to die. His name is Merle. Once a singer. Once a lover. Now a shadow in spurs.

    He carries a guitar with one string and a heart torn open like a blister.

    He is looking for Fanny.

    Fanny of the laugh that could undo a priest. Fanny of the hips that made men renounce geography. Fanny who told him to be strong and then walked out with a mule-skinner named Dutch who wore cologne and shot rattlesnakes for fun.

    She left Merle in the middle of a love song.

    Now Merle drags that song across the desert like a broken leg.

    The locals say Fanny dances at The Rusted Mirage, a bar built on an old mine shaft. It sits at the edge of a dead lake where the water’s gone but the longing remains. Inside, broken men drink varnish and pray to forgotten gods. There’s a jukebox that plays nothing but Bee Gees covers sung by a toothless man in a gold suit. Fanny’s silhouette haunts the stage, flanked by two coyotes who think they’re her backup dancers.

    Merle stumbles in like a man arriving at his own funeral. He sees her. She sees him. Silence falls like a noose.

    He says

    Fanny. Be tender.

    She says

    Boy you shoulda thought of that when you threw my birthday pie in the fire.

    He says

    That was an accident.

    She says

    So was my affection.

    They duel. Not with pistols. With ballads. His sorrowful wail versus her falsetto fury. The bartender cries. A dog howls. Someone overdoses on sassafras in the corner.

    By dawn, Merle lies collapsed. Empty. She kisses him once—on the temple, like a burial rite. Then disappears into the jukebox, leaving behind only a boa made of scorpion tails and crushed velvet.

    FADE OUT.

    A narrator, gravel-voiced and full of scorn, speaks:

    Love’s a fever dream. Some wake up cured. Some never wake at all.

  • If Cormac McCarthy Wrote a Movie Treatment for Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis”

    If Cormac McCarthy Wrote a Movie Treatment for Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis”

    FADE IN:

    A bone-white desert stretches out beneath a black vault of stars. The dunes are still as sacrificial altars. Somewhere out there, beneath the coyote moon and the ruined tower of Orion, rides a woman of indeterminate age and infinite mischief. She wears a sun hat like a halo. Her sandals leave no prints.

    The camel she rides is named Jeremiah. He does not speak but regards the world with the mournful gaze of a beast who has seen empires fall and lovers lie. His saddle is adorned with silver conches, turquoise fringe, and a little brass bell that tolls only for the damned.

    She comes upon a man.

    He is shirtless, jawline like a blade. Smokes roll-your-owns and speaks in aphorisms. Former bluesman turned snake-oil preacher turned fugitive for a crime he may or may not have committed in Santa Fe, where the sheriff’s daughter still dreams of him and leaves milk out for the scorpions.

    She says

    Midnight at the oasis

    He says

    There’s no such thing as time in this country. Only heat and forgetting.

    They drink wine from a dented canteen and roast cactus blossoms on a fire made of mesquite and ancient regret. The camel chews cud. The stars wheel. A frog laughs somewhere.

    The woman suggests they slip off to a sand dune real soon. Her voice, soft as velvet, carries across the salt-swept wind like prophecy or seduction or both. The man, being a fool or a poet (but never both at once), accepts.

    The desert is watching. It has watched worse.

    They make love like two fugitives hiding from God, beneath constellations older than grammar. Their bodies steam in the moonlight. A lizard judges them and scuttles away.

    At dawn, they are pursued. By whom? Perhaps the woman’s husband. Perhaps bounty hunters. Perhaps just Time, wearing spurs and humming a Carter Family tune. The chase is unspoken but certain.

    The camel refuses to run.

    The woman kisses the man once more and vanishes into a dust devil. Gone. Or maybe never there to begin with.

    The man will ride Jeremiah to the nearest roadhouse and order three fingers of mezcal. He will never again look at the moon without suspicion.

    FADE TO BLACK.

  • The Phantom in the Mirror: On Becoming an NPC

    The Phantom in the Mirror: On Becoming an NPC

    The Non-Player Character—or NPC—was born in the pixelated void of video games. It is a placeholder. A background hum. A digital ghost whose job is to stand in a market, repeat a scripted line, or walk in endless circles without complaint. The NPC has no hunger for freedom, no dreams of becoming more. It exists in the half-life of interactivity—a cardboard cutout propped up by code. It’s “there,” but not there. You see it. Then you forget it. And that, in essence, is the horror.

    Somewhere along the way, the term slipped out of the screen and into real life. “NPC” became shorthand for a human who seems hollowed out—emotionally neutralized, culturally sedated, and spiritually declawed. Not stupid. Not evil. Just disengaged. The light behind the eyes? Gone dim. What was once an ironic jab at background characters is now a chilling metaphor for people who’ve surrendered to the most generic, algorithm-approved version of themselves.

    What’s grimly poetic is that NPCs in video games are often controlled by artificial intelligence. And so, too, are many modern humans—nudged by dopamine, entranced by endless scrolls, soothed by the hypnotic rhythms of consumption. The Roman formula of bread and circuses has merely been rebranded. Netflix. DoorDash. TikTok. It’s all the same anesthetic. As therapist Phil Stutz would say, we’re stuck in the “lower channel”—an emotional basement filled with numbing comforts and artificial highs.

    And yet, here’s the twist: even the brilliant can become NPCs. The anxious. The depressed. The overworked. The soul-sick. Sometimes the smartest people are the most vulnerable to emotional collapse and digital retreat. They don’t become NPCs because they’re shallow. They become NPCs because they’re hurting.

    There are, perhaps, two species of NPCs. One is blissfully unaware—sleepwalking through life without a second thought. The other is terrifying: self-aware, but immobilized. The mind remains active, but the body slouches in the chair, feeding on stale memories and reruns of past selves. Think of Lot’s Wife, gazing back at a past she couldn’t let go. She wasn’t punished arbitrarily; she was frozen in time—literally—a statue of salt and sorrow. The original NPC.

    Middle age is particularly fertile ground for NPC-ism. Nostalgia becomes narcotic. We mythologize our former selves—thinner, bolder, brighter—and shrink in the shadow of our own legend. Why live in the present, when the past is easier to romanticize and the future is too much work? Just ask Neddy Merrill from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” paddling from pool to pool in a daze, believing in a youth long gone, burning every real connection he had on the altar of delusion. An NPC in swim trunks.

    Today, we’re incentivized to become NPCs. Social media trains us like lab rats, handing out dopamine pellets in the form of likes, follows, and artificial intimacy. The real world—messy, unfiltered, full of awkward silences and genuine risk—is rejected for the smoother contours of algorithmic approval. Our souls are curated, our emotions trimmed to fit the timeline.

    The NPC, then, is not a throwaway gag. It’s a portrait of the modern condition. A spirit trapped in a basement, scrolling for meaning, addicted to memory, afraid of action. A being slowly turning into vapor, still breathing but no longer alive.

    And the true terror? Sometimes I feel it in myself. That quiet moment when I trade meaning for ease, purpose for distraction, vitality for sedation. That’s when I hear the whisper: You’re becoming one of them. That’s when I feel the NPC, not on my screen, but inside my skin.

  • The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    I’m working my way through The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s latest collection of personal essays. Now in her mid-fifties, Daum is unapologetically single and childless by design, having long ago decided that marriage and parenting weren’t roles she could convincingly—or willingly—perform. Much of her work is a dispatch from the front lines of solitude. And she’s damn good at it.

    What Daum does better than most is forge an instant intimacy with her reader. Her essays feel like front porch conversations at dusk—no performance, no agenda, just two adults quietly deconstructing the wreckage of modern life. Her voice evokes the same soulful, offhand brilliance I admire in Sigrid Nunez’s novels: smart without pretense, vulnerable without begging.

    But by the halfway mark, the essays begin to blur. There’s a tonal and thematic sameness that settles in—like the ambient hum of a refrigerator you only notice when it stops. The introspective loop tightens. The sharp lens that once turned mundane moments into epiphanies starts to feel like someone narrating their week out loud after too many days alone.

    There’s the grief over dead dogs. The endless parsing of domestic minutiae. The architectural dream house that never quite materializes. And those fragmented, overstimulated city-life encounters that feel less like essays and more like repurposed Substack entries. It’s not that these topics lack merit—it’s that, in aggregate, they start to feel like what happens when no one interrupts you for too long.

    Now, I say this as a card-carrying member of the Navel-Gazers Guild. I recognize the signs. I know the thrill of dissecting one’s inner weather systems for an imaginary audience. So I don’t say this to judge Daum, but to observe that the limitations of a fully interior life—however self-aware—do begin to show.

    Still, dismissing Daum’s collection as mere navel-gazing would be both lazy and wrong. Her prose is laced with hard-earned wisdom and an acid wit that’s as refreshing as it is unsparing. When she hits, she hits hard—and truthfully. And that, more than novelty or plot, is why I keep turning the pages.

  • Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    In her essay “Same Life, Higher Rent,” Meghan Daum compares her life in 1997 to her life in 2017 and reaches a deflating, oddly liberating conclusion: nothing has changed. At 47 and freshly divorced, she’s more or less the same person she was at 27. Still single. Still chasing deadlines. Still drinking coffee, poking at takeout sushi, and trying to keep multiple Word docs open on her MacBook while ignoring the siren song of Twitter and low-stakes Amazon purchases.

    There is one glaring difference: her rent has skyrocketed and her cognitive bandwidth has shriveled. She estimates she’s lost 70% of her brainpower to the Digital Distraction Era. So yes—same life, dumber brain, higher rent. It’s a Nabokovian joke with a Billy Collins twist: Picnic, Lightning, but with Seamless orders and browser tabs.

    Like her earlier essay “The Broken-In World,” Daum doesn’t frame divorce as failure but as an act of radical return. Not regression—recognition. The performance is over. She’s stopped cosplaying as someone else’s version of a wife. The single life isn’t a punishment or a holding pattern—it’s her set point. The gravitational center she was orbiting all along.

    Coordinating a calendar with another adult, she admits, feels like a hostage negotiation. She loves living alone. She loves eating whatever she wants, whenever she wants, without anyone asking if they should defrost chicken. She can travel at the drop of a hat without shoving someone else’s life off balance. She’s not anti-love. She just refuses to bulldoze her rhythms for the sake of joint Costco runs.

    Post-divorce, she’s dated—kind, smart, well-meaning men—but none of them stood a chance against the one lover she can’t quit: solitude. She rarely goes on second dates. She doesn’t need romantic sabotage. She’s got peace and a dog. Who needs more?

    And let’s be clear: this position wasn’t won in a raffle. She fought for it. Marriage, divorce, reinvention. She earned this life through blood, paperwork, and self-inventory. She’s not about to crawl back into the foxhole of emotional compromise.

    Reading Daum, I’m reminded of a perfectly-cut line from Rodney Dangerfield: “You’re born a certain way and that’s it. You don’t change.” I think about that more than I should. At 63, I’m not all that different than I was at six. Moody, brooding one day. Goofy and loud the next. There’s a streak of isolato in me too. My family tolerates it. They let me take naps and skip amusement park trips that sound like air-conditioned nightmares.

    I’m probably not a perfect husband. But we make it work—me and this life. Me and my Daum-ian disposition. The marriage lasts, not because I’ve changed, but because we’ve all made our peace with who I am. And who I’ve always been.

  • Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

    Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

    In The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s 2016 essay “The Broken-In World” explores divorce with the same dry clarity one might use to describe cleaning out a fridge: inevitable, necessary, and oddly liberating. At 45, Daum finds herself in the middle of an amicable divorce—the kind without cheating, bruises, or courtroom melodrama. No one threw a lamp. No one stole the dog. Instead, it was just the slow, steady rot of benign neglect. Quirks once considered “charming” metastasized into full-blown repulsions. “Irreconcilable differences,” she concludes, isn’t a cop-out. It’s a dignified admission that entropy won.

    She discovers, to her great relief, that she is significantly less insane living alone. No more haggling over dinner, toothpaste caps, or passive-aggressive silences. Just peace. Divorce, in Daum’s telling, isn’t some tragic unraveling—it’s a grown-up’s fire extinguisher to a low-grade house fire of misery. It’s not weakness. It’s not moral collapse. It’s maturity, quietly slipping the ring off and stepping into air.

    Post-divorce, Daum moves to New York, joins the unofficial cult of the self-rescued, and discovers a radical truth: brokenness is the baseline. Normalcy is a myth. Everyone’s dragging a dented suitcase through life. Divorce just makes it public.

    Her real epiphany, however, isn’t just about divorce—it’s about the overinflated value of marriage itself. To Daum, marriage never felt like the final level of the video game, no Holy Grail behind velvet ropes. Monogamy had already given her a sneak preview. The ceremony, the legal bind—it was all anti-climax. If marriage is the gold standard, Daum suggests, then maybe we need a new currency.

    As a married person reading her work, you’re invited—no, cornered—into imagining a counterlife. The one where you’re single. I thought of the comedian and podcaster (soon to retire) Marc Maron: early sixties, unmarried, encircled by cats, vinyl, artisan boots, and a galaxy of fellow eccentrics. His life is cluttered, creative, obsessive. He has no wife, but he has a world.

    Daum’s point: we will find connection. If not through spouses and children, then through podcasts, group chats, improv classes, dogs, or elaborate hobbies that consume our evenings and fill the fridge of our loneliness with something edible. Marriage isn’t the only valid architecture for a life, and singleness isn’t a synonym for solitude. The real issue is connection. Not how we find it—but that we must.

    Now in her fifties, Daum is single, scraping by with podcast revenue and teaching gigs. No financial safety net. No partner to split the rent or cover her if she breaks a hip. But what she does have is agency. A voice. Essays that hum with intelligence and self-awareness. She doesn’t glamorize her choice. She doesn’t hold it above yours. She simply claims it as hers—and owns the wreckage and wisdom that came with it.

    She’s not superior. She’s just no longer married. And for her, that is enough.

  • Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Before the Internet turned my brain into a beige slush of browser tabs and dopamine spikes, I used to read like a man possessed. In the early ’90s, I’d lounge by the pool of my Southern California apartment, sun-blasted and half-glossed with SPF 8, reading books with a kind of sacred monastic intensity. A. Alvarez’s The Savage God. Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther. James Twitchell’s Carnival Culture. James Hillman and Michael Ventura’s rant against the therapy-industrial complex–We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse. Sometimes I’d interrupt the intellectual ecstasy to spritz my freshly tanned abs with water—because I was still vain, just literate.

    Reading back then was as natural as breathing. As Joshua Rothman points out in his New Yorker essay, “What’s Happening to Reading?”, there was a time when the written word was not merely consumed—it was inhaled. Books were companions. Anchors. Entire weekends were structured around chapters. But now? Reading is another tab, sandwiched between the news, a TikTok video of a dog on a skateboard, and an unopened Instacart order.

    Rothman nails the diagnosis. Reading used to be linear, immersive, and embodied—your hands on a book, your mind in a world. Now we shuttle between eBooks, PDFs, Reddit threads, and Kindle highlights like neurotic bees skimming data nectar. A “reading session” might include swiping through 200-word essays while eating a Hot Pocket and half-watching a documentary about narco penguins on Netflix. Our attention is fractured, our engagement ritualized but hollow. And yes, the statistics back it up: the percentage of Americans who read at least one book a year dropped from 55% to 48%. Not a cliff, but a slow, sad slide.

    Some argue it’s not worth panicking over—a mere 7% drop. I disagree. As a college instructor, I’ve seen the change up close. Students don’t read long-form books anymore. Assign Frederick Douglass and half the class will disappear into thin air—or worse, generate AI versions of Douglass quotes that never existed. Assign a “safe” book and they might skim the Wikipedia entry. We’ve entered an age where the bar for literacy is whether someone has read more than one captioned infographic per week.

    Rothman tries to be diplomatic. He argues that we’re not consuming less—we’re just consuming differently. Podcasts, YouTube explainers, TikTok essayists—this is the new literacy. And fine. I live in that world, too. I mainline political podcasts like they’re anti-anxiety meds. Most books, especially in the nonfiction space, do feel like padded TED Talks that should have stayed 4,000 words long. The first chapter dazzles; the next nine are a remix of the thesis until you feel gaslit into thinking you’re the problem.

    But now the reading apocalypse has a new beast in the basement: AI.

    We’ve entered the uncanny phase where the reader might be an algorithm, the author might be synthetic, and the glowing recommendation comes not from your friend but from a language model tuned to your neuroses. AI is now both the reader and the reviewer, compressing thousand-page tomes into bullet points so we can decide whether to fake-read them for a book club we no longer attend.

    Picture this: you’re a podcaster interviewing the author of a 600-page brick of a book. You’ve read the first 20 pages, tops. You ask your AI: “Give me a 5-page summary and 10 questions that make me sound like a tortured genius.” Boom—you’re suddenly a better interviewer than if you’d actually read the book. AI becomes your memory, your ghostwriter, your stand-in intelligence. And with every assist, your own reading muscles atrophy. You become fit only for blurbs and bar graphs.

    Or take this scenario: you’re a novelist. You’ve published 12 books. Eleven flopped. One became a cult hit. Your publisher, desperate for cash, wants six sequels. AI can generate them faster, better, and without your creative hand-wringing. You’re offered $5 million. Do you let the machine ghostwrite your legacy, or do you die on the sword of authenticity? Before you answer, consider how often we already outsource our thinking to tools. Consider how often you’ve read about a book rather than the book itself.

    Even the notion of a “writer” is dissolving. When I was in writing classes, names like Updike, Oates, Carver, and Roth loomed large—literary athletes who brawled on live television and feuded in magazines. Writers were gladiators of thought. Now they’re functionally obsolete in the eyes of the market, replaced by a system that values speed, virality, and AI-optimized titles.

    Soon, we won’t pick books. AI will pick them for us. It will scan our history, cross-reference our moods, and deliver pre-chewed summaries tailored to our emotional allergies. It will tell us what to read, what to think about it, and which hot takes to regurgitate over brunch. We’ll become readers in name only—participants in a kind of literary cosplay, where the act of reading is performed but never truly inhabited.

    Rothman’s essay is elegant, insightful, and wrong in one key respect: it shouldn’t be titled What’s Happening to Reading? It should be called What’s Happening to Reading, Writing, and the Human Mind? Because the page is still there—but the reader might not be.