This is why the multiverse is an immensely appealing device in fiction, but also why it’s ultimately unsatisfactory as a means of narrative self-exploration. The multiverse is too multi. Human beings can’t accommodate notions like infinity, and moreover, our lives don’t hinge on endless possibilities, but rather on starker binaries like Frost’s splitting roads. Our regrets are small, in the grand scheme of things, and any attempt to extend our regrets into cosmic proportions tilts the realm of human meaning somewhere bewilderingly distant from what we understand.
I sat cross-legged on the port side of the ship, a few feet away from the captain’s helm, flanked by a thicket of Moby-Dick zealots who would remain here for the next 25 hours in an attempt to consume the full scope of the novel in one uninterrupted reading session. Each of them brandished their own bespoke copy of the novel, representing a century’s worth of differing editions—some dense and pocket Bible–like, some paperback and battered, others regal and elegiac with golden bindings, all cracked open to Page 1. The first speaker took the lectern at noon after the strike of eight bells. “Call me Ishmael,” the famous opening words, sent a ripple of applause through the room.
Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.
If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.
I'd seen the word on social media. Mid. The show was mid. The song was mid. The rapper was mid. So many shows, songs, rappers, and more are unknown to me, trees in the now-bewildering wilderness of pop culture that the young navigate effortlessly.
But I rapidly deduced that mid is not good. Mid is mediocre. Middle of the road. Meh. And then I realized—I am mid.
An equally remarkable panorama of American life, this new novel invites the reader to sink into a deep, demanding, constantly wrong-footing story of millennial lives misdirected and decisions catastrophically made. It is American storytelling at its best. While The Nix tackled America’s lost legacy of 1960s radicalism, Wellness zeroes in on a smaller, more intimate canvas, while still tackling a few big questions. What is truth? What is love? And therefore, inevitably, what is true love?
The second full-length poetry collection from Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon seeks to explore the dualities present within the poet’s experience of motherhood. If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears employs a variety of poetic techniques to build the collection: shifting between prose poetry, sestina, ekphrasis and erasure to consider its subjects.
In her debut poetry collection, Theophanies, Sarah Ghazal Ali presents a stirring examination of faith, womanhood, and cultural inheritance through lyric poems that reimagine female figures and stories from the Islamic tradition. Published by Alice James Books in 2024, Theophanies blends confessional verse, mythology, and spiritual realism to convey a contemporary Muslim woman’s complex relationship with her religion and its patriarchal legacy. What violence, cruelty, and historical misogyny have we not read in texts preserved for holiness?
Much has been written about the many alarming political impacts of recommendation algorithms. But less focus has been given to the dulling effect that algorithms have had on culture, perhaps because there are no elections at stake when Netflix keeps recommending cozy British murder mysteries. But as Chayka writes in “Filterworld,” the days or months or years caught in the undertow of that gentle stream of algorithmic recommendations are “not limited to digital experiences on our screens.” The colorless efficiency that used to exclusively identify Silicon Valley artifacts has seeped into everything we consume, whether music or television or fashion, in an effort to make that consumption as continuous as possible. Trained on data sets whose size is nearly unquantifiable and whose provenance is often dubious, algorithms offer us more of what we — and thousands of others just like us — have already expressed some interest in. For the sleepwalkers of Filterword, past is present and future, too.
In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka says he never would have fallen in love with Coltrane's song if he'd heard it on Spotify. He says he doubts Spotify's algorithm would even suggest it, because the song is so long. And that, even if it did, he wouldn't have learned anything about Coltrane as an artist, because the Spotify interface doesn't provide the same context that an indie radio DJ does, sharing details between songs. The person behind the song choice, he argues, made his budding interest in Coltrane possible in a way modern recommendation systems cannot.