The schtickless wonder!

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Last Thursday, because for some reason I decided to go to my office in Manhattan’s Financial District, I found myself waiting on line for lunch at Sam’s Falafel, in Zucotti Park. I’d been there several times before, but that day felt different, and not just because the locust trees were adorned with amber fairy lights. There were a few professional-looking men and women ahead of me, not Wall Street types but either city employees or those who work in the broader world of municipal government and operations. And they seemed… happy? Cheerful? Optimistic?

As they chatted with one another, and with Sam, the falafel man, who had a Zohran Mamdani poster on his cart, they bubbled with an energy I hadn’t witnessed¹ since, well, the early Obama years. As I listened to them banter, it sounded like there were rumors Mamdani himself might come through the plaza later, and I felt myself caught up in the excitement. Would I — uncharacteristically — request a selfie? Would I address him as “dude,” my instinctive go-to? What would you tell Mr. Cardamom?

Still, it was a little too cold to linger, so I brought my falafel platter ($11) back to the dark and lonely office, where I wondered: Why, in these Trying! essays, don’t I write more often about what’s going on now, like right now? I’m certainly paying attention to every little thing that happens in this city, in this country, and on this planet, yet I rarely directly comment on any of it in the moment. Of the last couple dozen essays, only one — Thomas Pynchon and me — had anything resembling a news hook; instead, I’ve been writing about bad sandwiches, the aurochs, the nature of bullshit, and cartoons. Maybe you, {{first_name|dear reader}}, don’t even think about such things. But I got my journalistic training in a realm where the news value mattered immensely. My articles always had to answer the question “Why now?” But why now do I so often sidestep that question?

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When I started this newsletter, I wanted it to be an act of rebellion. For two decades, I’d written by the rules of the industry that shaped me: strong ledes and clever kickers, news hooks and nut grafs, brand promises and actionable intelligence. And while I appreciate the value of each of those tools, I also found them limiting — they make writing formulaic, mostly for better but also for ill. The best pieces I wrote and the best pieces I read broke out of those formulaic constraints; their storytelling and ideas made those workaday tropes unnecessary. I wasn’t sure if I’d be writing great articles, but I wanted to see what I could do if I put tradition to the side.

At the same time, I was keenly aware of what that might cost me. By embarking on a literary project that rejected engagement — with the reader, with the news of the day, with the digital tricks marketers use to reel in customers — I was courting obscurity. Everyone always wants to read a brilliant takedown of the president’s latest war crime, or a novel interpretation of the New York City mayoral race, or a prediction of how the Supreme Court will upend another fundamental institution of American life. For the last decade, this is what much of the Internet has been built on. It gets the clicks. And there’s nothing wrong with that: We are all living through times we are frantically trying to make sense of, and these takes, hot off the griddle, let us imagine, sometimes even correctly, that we have a handle on things. What that leaves less space for, then, is, say, a meditation on the connections and disconnections between writing and reality or what it means to run 10 miles. You might be interested, you might want to read that, but right now? Eh, maybe later. I knew that going in, and I can live with it now, a year later.

Still, though, I believe in engagement with the issues of the day. I read the news incessantly, so that I can understand the forces shaping my world (even if there’s little I can do about them), and I think it’s important to at least attempt this, if only so we have outrageous links to share with our group chats. I have a few friends and acquaintances (as I’m sure you do, too) who, disgusted with the consistently apocalyptic turn of events in recent years, have sworn off the news entirely. As a citizen, as someone who cares what happens to this country and this planet, I find this to be a grave dereliction of duty. Closing your eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears, and yelling “Na-na-na-na-na” does not help improve the shit situation we’re in. I understand the necessity of occasional escape, but a news vacation needs to end eventually. You do not have unlimited PTO from reality.

Wait, but then is Trying! itself an escape? Are my thoughts on striped shirts, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and shame just delightful breaks from the unending parade of calamity that would otherwise occupy your computer screen? By declining to attack the fascists head on, day after day, in transcendent and, uh, inspiring prose, am I letting them win, or letting you let them win?

Fuck, I hope not. Maybe I’m just rationalizing, but there’s two ways to think about this. One is that the fascists want you to be thinking about them all the time. They want to monopolize your attention, to transform you into obsessive reactors who leap at rage bait, so that you will have nothing else in your life but your anger and your opposition. So to allow yourself a break, a divergence into chicken breasts or philosophical pop, is to remind yourself that the enemy does not own your attention. Most of it, maybe even like 98% of it, but not all! Whatever’s left over is yours to do with as you will — this is your life. And living well is not just revenge but revolution³.

The other side of this is that I want every single Trying! essay to make you think. If you’ve made it this far, then I probably don’t have to poke you too hard to get the old gray matter rumbling. But still that’s my goal — to push you to think in new and, I hope, surprising ways about your life and our world. Again, this is anathema to the fascists. They want only acceptance, uncritical and, ideally, tinged with fear. (Often, they mistake this for love.) When faced with real questions, probing and unrelenting, they wither and retreat into sarcasm and abuse. I’m thinking especially of Charlie Kirk, who because I don’t do news hooks I’ve waited months to assail — only to now find him too dim, loathsome, and insincere to spend more than a sentence on.

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect an essay on, say, why I wear women’s clothing to inspire a mass uprising. But I’m not aiming for that sort of glory. My work is minor key. And every little shift in your thinking, every moment you can manage to come to a different conclusion than the one They would have you make, is the kind of subtle triumph that I relish, even if I never hear about it. One day, when enough of us have trained our minds to ponder through and past the lies, subtlety will go out the window. And I will be there to, humbly but not really, take a bit of the credit.

Till then, when I do bump into New York City’s new mayor, whether at Sam’s Falafel or (idk) kayaking on the Gowanus Canal², I know now what I’ll tell him as I hand him a signed copy of this newsletter’s book. It’s what I often inscribe on the first pages, quoting one of the galaxy’s greatest philosophers: “Remember this: Try.” He might not need that reminder now, as his enthusiastic support surges, but in a year or two, when the twin forces of capital and political inertia are sabotaging his agenda, I’d like to imagine him cracking open the book — perhaps he keeps it next to an armchair or, more likely, toilet-adjacent — and seeing those words, or maybe reading about Charles Bukowski, and realizing what he already knew, what we all already know: that though failure is a given, there is never anything else to do but to try, and try, and try. 🪨🪨🪨