Magazines are curatorial projects, filtering and contextualizing culture through the personal tastes of their assembled editors and writers. Lorentzen told me that people tend to think of the work of editors “in terms of quality control”—fixing copy errors and trimming sentences. In fact, he added, “They’re more valuable in terms of creative generation and the thinking through of ideas.” The loss of Bookforum’s lightly worn seriousness, its nurturing of personal style, and its tolerance for polemic leaves behind a more staid literary life. Panovka told me, “It’s a really bleak landscape, with things folding every five seconds. But it’s also a great time to start a magazine.” She added, “It’s always a terrible time; it’s always a great time.”
Recording my dreams brought patterns into focus. Twice in one week, I dreamed of doors: In one, I was crouched behind a door, hiding from an old high school classmate who was trying to enter, straining to peer down at me through a small glass window. Just a few nights later, I dreamed that I was inside a house with a glass door that I had locked to prevent a former boss from entering. Finding that she couldn’t get in, she turned away, hurt and confused. But suddenly the situation reversed itself. I was the one trying to get inside the house, and it was my boss — whom I could see through the same glass door — who was locking me out.
AI will require a more subtle application of these principles. By and large, anthropomorphism and anthropofabulation distract us from seeing AI as it actually is. As AI grows more intelligent, and our understanding of it deepens, our relationship to it will necessarily change. By 2050, the world may need a Jane Goodall for robots. But for now, projecting humanity onto technology obscures more than it reveals.
But there is something else. Context disappears inside of an airport. Often, I am confused when I navigate my way through an airport; even when it is associated with the city that I live in, it is still not on my everyday commute. The architecture of the contemporary airport is so specific and yet so alien, so wholly and completely an architecture of borders, that even to step inside of one renders a person immediately unfamiliar, especially to themselves.
Every mom has her own individual insecurities and perceived shortcomings. What’s truly universal is the need to be kinder to ourselves and other moms. As she wraps up, Grose encourages readers to stop trying to live up to some fanciful, preposterous standard, and instead channel that energy into fixing the structural problems that hurt so many families. We need to be screaming on the outside to achieve a more practical ideal: paid leave and affordable, quality child care for all.