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Atlantic
24-06-2025
- General
- Atlantic
The Real Reason Men Should Read Fiction
There's always something going on with men. They can't make friends; they're very lonely; they're 'losing' to women; they listen to Andrew Tate. And, we are told, they do not read. Over the past few years, multiple articles have observed the so-called decline of the male reader, whose tastes once made best sellers of swaggering authors including Philip Roth, John Updike, and David Foster Wallace, and whose disappearance from the contemporary literary scene is troubling. 'If you care about the health of our society—especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster—the decline and fall of literary men should worry you,' David J. Morris wrote in The New York Times. The argument that society's problems can be traced to the fading prominence of Infinite Jest on dorm-room bookcases feels like a stretch; so does the underlying evidence. The source of such laments seems to be a widely circulated (but poorly sourced) factoid showing that men account for only 20 percent of the North American fiction market—an alarming number that invites all sorts of unchecked speculation. (For example: Does this mean that men who do read mostly stick to nonfiction—history books, self-help guides, manuals on improving one's business? Is the modern male reader statistically likely to be a walking LinkedIn post?) The 80/20 split is probably overblown, as Vox 's Constance O'Grady found in a recent investigation of the oft-cited statistic. But there is some proof that women consume fiction at a higher rate than men. (O'Grady cites a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts survey finding that 50 percent of American women had read a novel or short story in the past year, compared with 33 percent of men—still a divide, though not as extreme.) All sorts of explanations for this have been floated: Publishing is overwhelmingly staffed by women, who might be more likely to acquire and market books that appeal to women; the attention economy has drawn men to other forms of entertainment, such as podcasts and video games; nobody reads much right now—the median American consumes just five books a year—and men are just canaries in this coal mine. The last point, in particular, prompts fiction defenders to explain why this is a bad thing. Arguments about why one should read tend to emphasize some positive outcome, as though a book is a public good and you are its beneficiary. 'Reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one's emotional I.Q.,' Morris noted in his Times op-ed, implying that reading will change men for the better. Perhaps they could appear more sexually desirable to certain prospective romantic partners (according to the filmmaker John Waters), or consider spiritual mysteries that can't be neatly captured by numbers and facts alone, or strengthen their empathy muscles and become less polarized citizens. But as someone who belongs strongly in that fifth (or perhaps much more) of the male population that reads fiction, I can say that I'm usually not thinking about what I stand to learn. Rather, I'm aware of what is happening to me right now —and that affirmative thrill is the reason I can't seem to stop accumulating new books to read, even though I could use the space in my apartment for something else. The concept of reading as an empathy machine—to borrow a phrase that originated with the late movie critic Roger Ebert —is appealingly idealistic. Stories that burrow into characters' trains of thought can capture true interiority in a way that film or nonfiction cannot. For a similar reason, personal essays are more likely to go viral than an academic paper about the same subject, because reality is more engaging as a described experience than as a series of logically arranged details. When I read Elena Ferrante 's My Brilliant Friend, I tunnel through space and time into 1950s working-class Naples. When I read Don DeLillo 's Libra, I can feel the particulars of Lee Harvey Oswald's life. I believe this makes me more empathetic, and I enjoy believing that it does; it's flattering to think I am becoming a better person by reading a book, even if it's obviously not always true (I know some veteran readers who are truly awful people). But empathy is a bit too touchy-feely as a consistent motivation—at least for me. Sometimes I'm in a standoffish mood and don't particularly want to feel; men don't have a monopoly on misanthropy, but I'd argue that we're the more churlish gender—and the one more expected, and therefore allowed, to shake a stick and bark 'Stay away from me.' So many books (thrillers about burly ex-military cops, literary novels with creepy narrators) are more interesting precisely because their protagonists are nearly impossible to identify with. For example, the Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor's novel Paradais is partly about a teenage gardener in a gated community who befriends an off-putting loner with a monstrous plan to sexually assault his wealthy neighbor—gripping characters, but not exactly sympathetic ones. Instead, it's how Melchor tells her story—in a dense, logorrheic style that piles on sensory details and intrusive thoughts—that makes Paradais so effective. In one representative passage, Polo, the gardener, attempts to blend in at a children's birthday party as his attention wanders from the women in attendance ('their hair straight and inert, as neat and lifeless as wigs') to their bland husbands ('just as ridiculous in their pink polos and pastel shirts') and unruly offspring (who 'screeched and launched themselves at the juddering bouncy castle like raving lunatics'). As Polo thinks and thinks and thinks, Melchor refuses to separate his observations with periods; the misanthropic remarks accumulate at the speed of thought, communicating the depth of his distaste with dizzying urgency. The intensity of this style feels more compelling than it would if Melchor had written, 'He looked around and realized he hated these rich people.' I do not need to feel the exact feelings of a doltish, unfulfilled Mexican teenager who will eventually play a role in a heinous crime. But I can recognize the singularity of his experience, and the specific way in which Melchor renders this experience. I am not attempting to understand Polo, but I am following along at the pace of his perception, and my awareness of how Melchor has manipulated reality into something feverish and all-consuming makes me think of moments when I've also experienced events at the same pitch. This is not empathy, per se, but an escape from my own consciousness and surroundings—something I need, from time to time. Conversations by men about men are self-selecting by nature; surely millions of men live their life every day without caring about what other people are saying about them. But a real demographic of men is besieged, every day, by a corner of the media universe—the so-called manosphere—that dictates where they should be spending their attention. You have possibly encountered a video of one of these manosphere men, sitting in front of a microphone, stridently theorizing about how a dude should be. Men should strive to stand out, they often say. They should broadcast their opinions, judge other people, stand up for their gender—as though investing a single man with enough authority could fix everything. Many of these outspoken personalities advocate for men to throw off society's flattening influence, but they tend to make starkly similar points in starkly similar ways. Beyond the intellectual reservations they raise, I find them deeply boring. Contrary to their rebellious posturing, there is nothing more conformist than adhering to a stranger's standards of how you should behave. Literature, meanwhile, allows me to occupy a place that is totally for myself, and unaccountable to other people's expectations. The author Percival Everett is fond of noting that he considers reading to be a subversive act. 'No one can control what minds do when reading; it is entirely private,' he once said. This, to me, is the best argument for why a man should read, and why he should seek new mental frontiers beyond the accumulation of information. Reality is linear, but reading skips backwards and forward, allowing me to consider the world from a removed vantage point. Instead of feeling squeezed by my earthly existence and my own bodily limits, I leap into other minds and perspectives—not just those of men, but also those of women and nonhumans—and consider those expectations. I am reminded that everyone is unexceptional and everyone is exceptional. Facts can sometimes tell us this about humanity, but fiction does this best of all. It is seductive, too, to keep things to yourself. To incubate your own thoughts and ideas without having to express and justify them in real time as you might when talking with other people. Too much isolation can lead someone askew—ask the Unabomber—but this kind of solitary contemplation offers a retreat from social pressures. I have often felt powerless, or lonely; these are, in the end, just conditions of being alive. (They are certainly not gendered or tied to any particular demographic trend.) But fiction can remind you that you exist along a continuum of human experiences, and that your own everyday ennui is less of a dead end and more of a data point. Yes, men could use more empathy; they would also benefit from a heightened sense of perspective. Too often, 'man time' is described as putting on a football game or picking up a fishing rod—retreating into some kind of brainless entertainment that is occasionally punctuated by moments of joy. Freedom can certainly be found in the physical world; Everett is also an avid fisherman. But if you can't go outside at the moment, or if you can't stand staring at another screen? Well, pick up a novel. It may shock you, the worlds you end up exploring—and the feelings you will stir up from nothing at all. You will find it easier to walk through life, ready for what comes next.
Irish Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Zuckerberg saying AI will cure loneliness is like big tobacco suggesting cigarettes can treat cancer
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1996, on the publication of his novel Infinite Jest, the late writer David Foster Wallace voiced some ideas about technology that seem increasingly prescient with every year that passes. He began by talking about television, which was one of the major subjects of his work, representing as it did a nexus of many of its central themes: technology, addiction, pleasure, loneliness and the all-consuming presence of corporations in contemporary American life. Wallace, who struggled with substance abuse throughout his life, often spoke of television as his original addiction. (Infinite Jest, which itself seems to be increasing in relevance, partly centres around a piece of film, known as 'the Entertainment', that is so endlessly compelling that its viewers forego all human contact and bodily sustenance in order to never stop watching it. They eventually die of starvation and neglect.) READ MORE Television was powerfully seductive, he said, because it answered some basic human social needs – for company, for entertainment, for stimulation, for talk – without requiring anything of the viewer in return. There was none of the risk, none of the potential for unpleasantness or awkwardness or pain, inherent in human relationships. This was why it was so seductive, and also why it led, after long periods of watching, to feelings of profound emptiness. And then, unprompted, he began to talk about the internet, a technology which in 1996 was still in a prelapsarian state of dial-up innocence – no social media, no YouTube , no Google even – but with whose darker potentials Wallace had long been preoccupied. 'The technology,' he said, 'is just gonna get better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.' Alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but who want our money. It would be hard to identify a darker premonition of our own time or a more unsettlingly accurate one. The average American has fewer than three friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, like 15 friends — Mark Zuckerberg I thought of Wallace last week, and of this remark in particular, when I heard Mark Zuckerberg , whose company Meta is investing tens of billions of US dollars in developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology, speaking on a podcast about his vision for the near future. Having touched on the way people will use AI for internet search, and for information processing tasks, he addresses what seems likely to be the primary use for the technology in Meta's case, given the company's foundation in monetising human interactions and its recent movement toward more passive content-consumption. 'I think as the personalisation loop kicks in, and the AI gets to know you better and better, I think that will be really compelling,' he said. 'There's this stat that I always think is crazy, which is that the average American has fewer than three friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, like 15 friends.' The reality, he said, is that people don't feel the kind of connection to the world that they would like, and they are more alone than they would like. The implication here – and the implication of all that investment in AI – is that this technology, with its personalisation loops and its improving ability to pass for a human intelligence, will answer that need. It barely needs to be pointed out here that Zuckerberg – who does not love you, and who wants your money – is as responsible as anyone on earth for the increased atomisation of technologically advanced western societies, for the swelling tide of loneliness and isolation he himself invokes. (I'm guessing that America is, if not exactly a special case, an outlier in terms of the friendship statistics he's talking about. We Irish – and Europeans more generally – are by no means immune to these trends, but I think it's fair to say we have a healthier social environment than work-obsessed Americans.) That Zuckerberg is now addressing himself to that problem and that the solution he is proposing is, in effect, chatbots – well, it's like a tobacco company addressing the problem of smoking-related illness and death by suggesting that people smoke more. Idea that a cure for these ills might be found in technology designed to replace the need for other humans is troubling, absurd Like almost everyone I know, I use Zuckerberg's products. I haven't used Facebook in years – has anyone? – but I do use Instagram . One aspect that's become unignorable about the experience of using Instagram in recent years is that though you probably joined it to see photos of your friends, and to interact with them, that's not really what it's for any more. Instagram, largely in response to the transformative success of TikTok , has become a place where you consume content, most importantly advertising. You can still interact with your friends there, of course, but you are almost certainly doing it less and less, as their posts – to the extent that your friends are even still posting – are overwhelmed by influencer content, personally targeted advertisements and random AI slop. It has become a place, in other words, where you are alone with images on a screen. It has become a more addictive, and generally more toxic, form of television. It has become 'the Entertainment'. It is inarguably true that the internet and social media have – along with all the other baleful and related effects like the erosion of social trust, the cultivation of conspiracy theories, the growth of political extremism – made people more lonely and isolated. The idea that a cure for these ills might be found in an even more sophisticated technology, one designed to replace the need for other humans, is as troubling as it is absurd. Machine lovers, machine therapists, machine friends. The cure is the disease itself. It's a solution that can only lead to a deeper emptiness, and to a lonelier and less human world.
New York Times
07-04-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
This Week in Mets: Good vibes carrying over in solid start
'You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.' — 'Infinite Jest,' David Foster Wallace Six months later, the vibes feel the same at Citi Field. Although momentum in baseball should be as fickle as tomorrow's starting pitcher, the New York Mets have managed to maintain it with their fan base through a difficult playoff loss, through the winter and into a new regular season, as seen in a three-game sweep of the Toronto Blue Jays. Advertisement Sunday's 2-1 victory polished off a sweep that revealed the length of New York's contributor list. The heroes included Hayden Senger, whose leadoff walk in the third sparked New York's two-run inning, and Max Kranick, who got the biggest out of the game with the bases loaded in the fifth. (Kranick replaced David Peterson, who had pitched well before a sudden feeling of nausea struck him in the inning.) Jesse Winker and Huascar Brazobán came through on Saturday. Friday was more of what you'd expect, the offensive attack spearheaded by Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto, Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo. They did it in front of the most fans Citi Field has ever drawn through three games: 121,771. That's a stark contrast to last year, when the team set new lows for attendance at the ballpark. The opening series attendance this weekend was more than 25,000 clear of last year. 'The fans really showed up,' said Nimmo, who exhorted the fans to come out more late last season during a pennant race. 'I'm so happy to see that, and I want to see it continue throughout this season. We fed off their enthusiasm.' 'It lived up to the hype,' said reliever A.J. Minter, who visited often with Atlanta earlier in his career. 'It's good to be on this side of the fans now.' The Mets have rewarded that faith early. Throughout this encouraging 6-3 start to the season, the Mets have been carried less by their lineup than by the depth of their bullpen. It tossed 4 1/3 scoreless frames on Sunday, from Kranick through Reed Garrett and AJ Minter — looking his sharpest yet — to Edwin Díaz. That's pretty much been par for the course. The pen averages just under four innings per game with a sparkling 1.29 ERA. 'The numbers speak for themselves,' Nimmo said. 'They've been a huge reason for our success early.' Is that sustainable? Of course not. Is it banked in the standings in a division and a playoff race that may once again come down to the final day? You bet. Advertisement 'At some point, starters will go deeper into games,' manager Carlos Mendoza said. Of course, the last few years have shown the Mets both the benefits and limitations of a good start. A 35-17 start in 2022 wasn't enough to put away Atlanta in the division race. A 22-33 start last season didn't bury them themselves. This is nine games. The Pirates were 7-2 at this point last season. 'It's a long year, man,' Mendoza said. 'We've got to stay the course and stick to our process.' The Mets swept the Blue Jays and have won five of six. They're 6-3. The Marlins were rained out Sunday in Atlanta, where they had split the first two games. Miami is 5-4. The Athletics could not finish off a sweep of the Rockies at Coors Field, dropping the finale Sunday. The A's host the Padres for three games through Wednesday before welcoming the Mets. Philadelphia/Kansas City/Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas is 4-6. v. Miami RHP Kodai Senga (0-1, 3.60 ERA) v. TBD* RHP Clay Holmes (0-1, 2.89) v. RHP Connor Gillispie (0-1, 3.60) RHP Tylor Megill (2-0, 0.87) v. RHP Max Meyer (0-1, 3.09) at Sacramento RHP Griffin Canning (0-1, 2.79) v. LHP J.P. Sears (1-1, 3.46) LHP David Peterson (1-0, 2.53) v. RHP Joey Estes RHP Kodai Senga v. RHP Luis Severino (0-1, 3.75) * Sandy Alcántara is heading to the paternity list, so Miami will use a spot starter on Monday. Perhaps you wondered, like I did, why a Mets team that has emphasized playing more of its Saturday games in the afternoon played a Saturday night game on the first weekend of April (when it was 45 degrees outside). Well, once the Mets selected to play their home opener on Friday rather than Thursday, opting to give themselves a day off before the series rather than within it, they needed protection in case that game was rained out (as it had been each of the last two seasons). Had Friday been rained out, the Mets would have scheduled a split day-night doubleheader for Saturday. That way, everyone who paid extra for the home opener would still go to the first home game that day, and everyone who bought tickets to the Saturday game wouldn't have had to change plans. Advertisement Red = 60-day IL Orange = 15-day IL Blue = 10-day IL Triple-A: Syracuse at Lehigh Valley (Philadelphia) Double-A: Binghamton v. Hartford (Colorado) High-A: Brooklyn v. Hudson Valley (New York, AL) Low-A: St. Lucie at Lakeland (Detroit) When I sat down to read 'Infinite Jest' a second time, I told myself that this time, I'd really get into the nitty-gritty of the plot. I wanted to know what actually happened in this book rather than just enjoying everything about the writing. And then I was like 200 pages in and very confused again, so I decided to just enjoy everything about the writing. With 1 1/3 scoreless innings Sunday, Max Kranick extended his season-opening scoreless streak to seven innings, one out behind teammate Huascar Brazobán. The franchise record for scoreless innings to begin a season is 21, and it's held by three pitchers. Two are starters Jerry Koosman (1968) and Tom Seaver (1972). Who is the reliever, who accomplished the feat for a division winner? (I'll reply to the correct answer in the comments.) (Top photo of Juan Soto: Al Bello / Getty Images)
