The title of this post is a) the name of my new band, and b) a borrowing from Sam Kriss’s new piece at Harpers.

Kriss is becoming the Hunter Thompson of his era—a deeply gonzo long-form journalist, sending back tales of encounters with zeitgeist characters so incredible that it’s very hard to tell whether they’re fictionalised, and if so how much.

Kriss’s unashamed mixing of the modes when writing on his own turf only serves to emphasise this fuzziness when he writes elsewhere, and I dare say that’s the way he likes it. Much as it once did with Thompson—before he descended into cocaine self-parody—the reputation is opening more doors than it’s closing, which is itself a mark of the times.

I think the “agentic” Silicon Valley manchildren in this piece are probably pretty much true to life, but I will freely admit that’s because their depictions serve to confirm my prejudices and concerns.

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Meanwhile Lincoln Michel, in an aside at the start of a piece about the terrible fiction produced by people who write fiction without feeling they need to ever read any, coins a term we never knew we needed, and likely wish we didn’t.

Did you perhaps dare to suggest publicly that there are basic competencies and efforts required in order for people to get good at a thing, and then find someone on the internet accusing you of being an elitist for effectively precluding a hypothetical person with multiple intersecting economic, sociopolitical and psychological challenges from participating in that thing?

Congratulations—you’ve just been straw-knighted.

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I’m having one of those days when you hammer away at the keyboard for hours, and every paragraph that comes out seems worse and less pertinent to the project at hand than the one that you typed before; it’s like trying to plow a concrete field with a toy tractor. I’m going to give it another hour, in the hope that procrastination by blogging might have shaken something loose in the gearbox, but I think this might be one of those days where you have to retreat from the field knowing only that you showed up and took the shelling.