Extremely generous piece, Lincoln, thanks. My hope is that people who are serious about trying to become writers really ingest this instead of taking the easier route and writing it all off and continuing to lay blame at the feet of more simplistic theories.
Thank you so much for this. I never can understand the argument that "the best writers of fiction had a large mainstream audience and now they don't." Um, Colson Whitehead? Jennifer Egan? George Saunders and Elena Ferrante (as you mention in your own social media post)? Most lately, Percival Everett? Every generation seems to see their resident talent as either inferior or underappreciated. I once heard/read (and can't verify) that Saul Bellow said there were 30,000 serious readers in the U.S. If Christian Lorentzen is right and there are now 20,000, given the competition from the Internet and social media, that's not the most enormous slide. This is not to say that things aren't different now--it's always different. But let's stop the Brooksian generalizing. And your columns help with that.
I miss gatekeepers if we're being honest. We live in a world without them. Where storytelling has become marketing and where curation is what an influencer might do for you for a small price. And we end up with the tyranny of choice. That, if anything, is what gatekeepers protect us from. Alas. I'll go tilt at windmills now....(insert photo from Simpsons of Mr. Simpson screaming at some youngs).
I was once a magazine editor (in paper!), a gatekeeper. We decided what you needed to know every month, with virtually no input from readers. We were hired for our knowledge and judgment as well as technical editing chops and writing skill. There were some major pluses AND major minuses. We did our best but we screwed it up sometimes.
Now flash forward. The Internet. Social media. Google. It is 2018 and I am writing headlines for online stories the get pumped out daily. We write headlines for them using the exact same words that Google Analytics tells us people are using to search for information. When they search that string of words, up pops my article (we hope)
The quality of the piece is judged by how many "eyes" have seen them per month. It must be in the millions to work. Profitability (and my position) is driven by ad sales and licensing, not subscription. Sometimes we make factual errors but there is no provision in the editorial process for correcting them, so often it does not get done.
Sometimes the grammar of the search string/headline is wrong, and a marketing person asks if it's okay to run the headline with the mistake.
It’s called The Full Bleed. I should have mentioned that. You can find it at Magazeum.co. Or under “magazeum” wherever you listen to podcasts. I’ll stop the “marketing content” now.
In way, that's basically what I'm saying! It's big tech algorithms, corporate publishing, addictive apps, and so on that's to blame for the state of things.
I think you're both eluding to how we've swapped human gatekeepers, for digital gatekeepers? Rather than removed them.
Traditionally a Human expert could elevate you. Now, "popularity" elevates you.
The gatekeeping changed from future potential or current quality to the authors current audience.
As capitalist optimisation creeps further in we will see more Audience Authors who pivot what they write about and the platforms they write on... elevating audience as their north star.
> That number is of “serious and consistent” readers, and so the accuracy would depends on your definitions of serious and consistent. People who buy at least 20 literary titles a year? 10? 2? I don’t know.
Part of the problem might be that, when it comes to those "serious literary readers," you're not just competing against this year's releases—you're competing against generations. Those literary readers might read twenty books per year, but they're not reading twenty _new_ books per year. They're reading books from different centuries: Jane Austen this week, Cormac McCarthy the next. It's not because there aren't great books being published in 2025—clearly, there are—but that they don't trust discovery mechanisms and so they tend to take their recommendations from close friends who are also over forty (I say this being 42.)
That footnote 8 is fascinating to me. I seem to remember Richard Ford grumbling 20 years ago that there were only about 60,000 readers of serious fiction left. If so, that decline is faster than the cigarette market!
I deleted a longer paragraph I had about this, but I do think 20k is too low. It certainly depends on what you mean by serious, but when I had BookScan access I remember that short story collections by big literary authors like Lorrie Moore and George Saunders would sell about 40-50k. (Picking story collections because those rarely break out of literary world circles.) That's just print and surely many literary readers don't like those individual authors or only read novels. So I assume the total number of people who are paying attention to the literary world is more than 60k.
Either way though, it ain't a million+ plus people!
Another excellent essay, thanks. But I want to say it with green, so I'm subscribing and I'm going to buy your book and read it.
Just a quick reflection on your comment that once upon a time, "fiction" was just that. There wasn't yet a micro-genre-ing of everything. There was Book of the Month Club, you know? Like there was the Columbia Record Club.
In popular music, there was a similar situation to "fiction was just fiction," which I witnessed because I am as as old as dirt. NYC was my backyard. In any given hour of programming on WABC (AM!) in the NYC market, you could hear the Jackson 5, Elton John, The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Tony Orlando and Dawn, ad infinitum. If I liked the song, I could take my $1 allowance and buy the 45 record, which of course my brothers would then smash the next time I pissed them off. Record sales paid the artists. Mostly.
There was no conspiracy to suppress other artists to make room for "highbrow" music, was there? Except that they may not have conformed to what the gatekeepers considered potential hits--as it is in books. (I'm sure lots of people here could offer far more insight.)
As you say about books, ***top 10 music hits were popular because people liked listenign to them.***
Then other marketing and distribution influences came in. Okay, I'm not smart enough to say much else.
"the big publishers spend significant time and money recruiting authors from the fan fic and self-publishing worlds" Well I don't know about that Lincoln. Unless you go viral, an extreme unlikelihood, the self-published will be ignored.
It's really funny to read these hot takes as a bookseller. I am usually just happy people are reading. I am glad you point out the many, many 'literary' novelists working successfully today in this piece. Do I wish more people came in the shop and asked me for weird, challenging, literary gems? Sure. But I don't judge people for wanting a comforting "popular" read.
I listen to the least challenging music available. Whatever is melodic and popular--that is what I like. I know there is "better" music out there but I don't care. I don't go to music to be challenged. I think the same can be true for readers. Everyone chooses their challenging art mediums differently, or maybe they don't want a challenge at all, and honestly that's fine.
All the various dudes who have written these "death of the novel/novelist" pieces remind me of the customer who asked me if I was smart enough to answer his question, or the guy who came into the shop not long ago asking for The Prince, and I said "Little or Regular?" And he replied with "I assure you, it isn't little." And everything just went downhill from there.
Sorry for the ramble.....and thank you for this amusing and well-informed rebuttal to the BS.
I find that point underbaked. Because honestly what is audacity in 2025 when Donald Trump is president and the world’s richest man has an AI bot that self-identifies as MechaHitler? I don’t mean that snarkily. I think the kind of literature that felt audacious simply wouldn’t feel that way today given what we all see on the daily news. (I also think the kind of audacity he means is enabled by cultural status that artists of any stripe just don’t hold now. Even rock stars don’t cause the kind of uproar they could pre-internet.)
I'd be happy to hear some counterpoints, but what is audacious art of any kind today? The only works of art that come to mind as feeling "audacious" are perhaps only conceptually audacious. Something like the Rehearsal? Maybe Twin Peaks Season 3. Maybe My Struggle or Ducks Newburyport count, in a way? But that's a different kind of audacity...
There's a cyclical nature to what shocks us or what alarms us. Like that Sabrina Carter album cover that made the Discourse rounds recently. Coming from someone who used to watch TRL and 106 in Park in the early 2000s, that album cover seemed so sexually tame compared to what I regularly saw on TV at 4 in the afternoon!
Like Ducks Newburyport. Is that audacious? Maybe, in a way, but it feels very self-consciously reaching back to books published nearly exactly a century earlier, with even the blue cover meant to culturally remind the reader of Joyce's little blue book.
It's hard to know what would count as audacious now. And maybe embracing the cyclical nature of culture is an important avenue for risk taking. But we could even argue that something as banal as a non-comic book movie becomes audacious, now.
Retreat isn't the right word for it, but I do think that literature, at least, has sort of seen the limits stretched about as much as they can go, in terms of form, style, and graphical presentation. Where do you go next, after a century of artists pushing and pulling and tearing at the edges? One answer seems to be that you bring modernism and postmodernism into genre fiction, but even that's sort of old hat by now. I mean, SCREAM came out thirty years ago!
So I don't know but I think I'd like to see it. I'd like to see something wholly new, that's not rehashing the 1920s or 1960s but in a new coat.
From the reader & MFA student seat where I perch, it does indeed feel that our 'IRL-stranger-than-fiction' vibe has pushed thematic or character-driven audacity offstage, so now we're noticing experiments in structure, form ... concept. And that might not touch as many readers, or touch them as deeply, which is the real shame, IMHO.
The question makes me think about how much of what was "audacious" in my childhood would just feel tame today. Like Bjork wearing a swan dress to the Academy Awards was a shocking thing. Now, wacky outfits are just expected at e.g. the Met Gala. You kind of need norms to push against to be audacious, and we're pretty beyond norms these days...
And being beyond norms feels <too many adjectives 😳> because norms are both how we collectively protect ourselves from the worst we might do AND how we do the worst harm to each other. I celebrate the dismantling of many social norms from my childhood, yet I mourn the destruction of norms that hold us accountable for respecting science, and civil discourse.
And in fiction, I like to transgress, so ‘beyond norms’ is disheartening.
He really seemed to be borrowing from Tom Wolfe, who was arguing for the large-scale realist novel against the experimental and lyrical. Maybe one can argue that there is more of a hesitation now about reaching for a Dickensian breadth of palette for reasons visible in Bonfire of the Vanities—the presumption. Call it wokeness but one can also say perhaps that we are properly more cautious now about claiming insight into everyone’s experience.
Yes. Big publishing does nurture audacity. It also nurtures comfortable pablum. As Lincoln pointed out in this piece, it nurtures pretty much everything it thinks will sell, and audacity still sells. I challenge anyone to go into a bookshop and, I don't know, pick a book off the new fiction shelf and see how many you think are audacious. Nope, it's not most of them, but it's a bigger percentage than you think.
Publish doesn’t equal nurture, necessarily. When debut novels and the follow up don’t find their audiences, their authors are unlikely to be granted more time. By now this is a known fact, and there goes being audacious or experimental in the first place
You're not wrong about that. I mirrored the word you chose, nurture, when perhaps I should have challenged it. I don't really think "publishing" as a big nameless money-making entity nurtures anyone. I think if you are lucky as an author, you find a publishing employee here or there who might nurture you. But the industry itself is never going to nurture anything but the ability to make a dollar and keep itself going.
"The books that you’ll love—the kind that will inspire you and move you—are being published somewhere today" Probably true, but how many books are published by the sources you mention? I think the proposition to work hard and find the book I'll love is naive.
I suppose I can't know anyone else's standards, but I would say it is normally a matter of finding a trusty "curator" or two to follow. For traditional publishing, that might just be an imprint/publisher that puts out the kind of books you like. E.g., I enjoy most books I read from Coffee House, New Directions, Transit, and some other small presses. In self-publishing, that might be a reviewer or Substacker you trust. From there, doesn't take too much time to read a description or some sample pages and see if you like them.
Often when I talk to people who say they don't like contemporary fiction they'll admit they basically haven't read any contemporary books since college. Or maybe they've tried a couple hyped bestsellers. They often aren't putting much work in at all, it seems.
Thank you for writing this, Lincoln. The other day I was reading a different article on a subject I'm interested in and was startled by the amount of poor reasoning. Then I checked the byline. David Brooks. Of course. Reading your clearly reasoned essays is a balm, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness. I wonder if, just as processed food manufacturers perfected the combination of salt, fat, and sugar and so shifted the contemporary diet, entertainment providers and technologies have similarly fine-tuned strategies for manufacturing visceral appeal and so changed our collective tendencies to consume challenging art in all media.
I recently tried to join a local bookclub. Most of the books they pick are outright terrible dribble so I stopped going. Instead I stay home and read the classics from the BCEs to the 1980s, on the rare occasion something new. I agree with your premise that it is the culture at large. I'm crossing my fingers that the culture will eventually shift to better quality all around. There are gems out there, I wish it were easier to find them.
Thank you for having a smart, nuanced and well researched take on this exhausting and never ending discourse. Every time it does the rounds on social media I want to roll my eyes.
Extremely generous piece, Lincoln, thanks. My hope is that people who are serious about trying to become writers really ingest this instead of taking the easier route and writing it all off and continuing to lay blame at the feet of more simplistic theories.
Thank you!
Thank you so much for this. I never can understand the argument that "the best writers of fiction had a large mainstream audience and now they don't." Um, Colson Whitehead? Jennifer Egan? George Saunders and Elena Ferrante (as you mention in your own social media post)? Most lately, Percival Everett? Every generation seems to see their resident talent as either inferior or underappreciated. I once heard/read (and can't verify) that Saul Bellow said there were 30,000 serious readers in the U.S. If Christian Lorentzen is right and there are now 20,000, given the competition from the Internet and social media, that's not the most enormous slide. This is not to say that things aren't different now--it's always different. But let's stop the Brooksian generalizing. And your columns help with that.
There's a whole bunch of writers chasing the flavor of the month, including those you cite. They are Endorsers. Where are the detractors?
I miss gatekeepers if we're being honest. We live in a world without them. Where storytelling has become marketing and where curation is what an influencer might do for you for a small price. And we end up with the tyranny of choice. That, if anything, is what gatekeepers protect us from. Alas. I'll go tilt at windmills now....(insert photo from Simpsons of Mr. Simpson screaming at some youngs).
Arjun, I hear you buddy.
I was once a magazine editor (in paper!), a gatekeeper. We decided what you needed to know every month, with virtually no input from readers. We were hired for our knowledge and judgment as well as technical editing chops and writing skill. There were some major pluses AND major minuses. We did our best but we screwed it up sometimes.
Now flash forward. The Internet. Social media. Google. It is 2018 and I am writing headlines for online stories the get pumped out daily. We write headlines for them using the exact same words that Google Analytics tells us people are using to search for information. When they search that string of words, up pops my article (we hope)
The quality of the piece is judged by how many "eyes" have seen them per month. It must be in the millions to work. Profitability (and my position) is driven by ad sales and licensing, not subscription. Sometimes we make factual errors but there is no provision in the editorial process for correcting them, so often it does not get done.
Sometimes the grammar of the search string/headline is wrong, and a marketing person asks if it's okay to run the headline with the mistake.
This is how sausage is made!
I, too, have been a magazine editor! I hear you! I even have a podcast about the “future of magazines and the magazines of the future.”
I'll check it out brother!
It’s called The Full Bleed. I should have mentioned that. You can find it at Magazeum.co. Or under “magazeum” wherever you listen to podcasts. I’ll stop the “marketing content” now.
Well at least you guys need us. If we don't crank out the article, you have to : )
I think any discussion about what is wrong with ANYTHING today should start with feral late-stage capitalism.
In way, that's basically what I'm saying! It's big tech algorithms, corporate publishing, addictive apps, and so on that's to blame for the state of things.
I think you're both eluding to how we've swapped human gatekeepers, for digital gatekeepers? Rather than removed them.
Traditionally a Human expert could elevate you. Now, "popularity" elevates you.
The gatekeeping changed from future potential or current quality to the authors current audience.
As capitalist optimisation creeps further in we will see more Audience Authors who pivot what they write about and the platforms they write on... elevating audience as their north star.
> That number is of “serious and consistent” readers, and so the accuracy would depends on your definitions of serious and consistent. People who buy at least 20 literary titles a year? 10? 2? I don’t know.
Part of the problem might be that, when it comes to those "serious literary readers," you're not just competing against this year's releases—you're competing against generations. Those literary readers might read twenty books per year, but they're not reading twenty _new_ books per year. They're reading books from different centuries: Jane Austen this week, Cormac McCarthy the next. It's not because there aren't great books being published in 2025—clearly, there are—but that they don't trust discovery mechanisms and so they tend to take their recommendations from close friends who are also over forty (I say this being 42.)
That footnote 8 is fascinating to me. I seem to remember Richard Ford grumbling 20 years ago that there were only about 60,000 readers of serious fiction left. If so, that decline is faster than the cigarette market!
I deleted a longer paragraph I had about this, but I do think 20k is too low. It certainly depends on what you mean by serious, but when I had BookScan access I remember that short story collections by big literary authors like Lorrie Moore and George Saunders would sell about 40-50k. (Picking story collections because those rarely break out of literary world circles.) That's just print and surely many literary readers don't like those individual authors or only read novels. So I assume the total number of people who are paying attention to the literary world is more than 60k.
Either way though, it ain't a million+ plus people!
However many it is, I for one enjoyed your commentary
Another excellent essay, thanks. But I want to say it with green, so I'm subscribing and I'm going to buy your book and read it.
Just a quick reflection on your comment that once upon a time, "fiction" was just that. There wasn't yet a micro-genre-ing of everything. There was Book of the Month Club, you know? Like there was the Columbia Record Club.
In popular music, there was a similar situation to "fiction was just fiction," which I witnessed because I am as as old as dirt. NYC was my backyard. In any given hour of programming on WABC (AM!) in the NYC market, you could hear the Jackson 5, Elton John, The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Tony Orlando and Dawn, ad infinitum. If I liked the song, I could take my $1 allowance and buy the 45 record, which of course my brothers would then smash the next time I pissed them off. Record sales paid the artists. Mostly.
There was no conspiracy to suppress other artists to make room for "highbrow" music, was there? Except that they may not have conformed to what the gatekeepers considered potential hits--as it is in books. (I'm sure lots of people here could offer far more insight.)
As you say about books, ***top 10 music hits were popular because people liked listenign to them.***
Then other marketing and distribution influences came in. Okay, I'm not smart enough to say much else.
Thank you for very consistently keeping it real.
Here’s a paywall free link to the Times article
https://archive.ph/cMLNo
"the big publishers spend significant time and money recruiting authors from the fan fic and self-publishing worlds" Well I don't know about that Lincoln. Unless you go viral, an extreme unlikelihood, the self-published will be ignored.
Agree. My point is that the publishers will poach whatever they think will make them money not that or is based on merit.
It's really funny to read these hot takes as a bookseller. I am usually just happy people are reading. I am glad you point out the many, many 'literary' novelists working successfully today in this piece. Do I wish more people came in the shop and asked me for weird, challenging, literary gems? Sure. But I don't judge people for wanting a comforting "popular" read.
I listen to the least challenging music available. Whatever is melodic and popular--that is what I like. I know there is "better" music out there but I don't care. I don't go to music to be challenged. I think the same can be true for readers. Everyone chooses their challenging art mediums differently, or maybe they don't want a challenge at all, and honestly that's fine.
All the various dudes who have written these "death of the novel/novelist" pieces remind me of the customer who asked me if I was smart enough to answer his question, or the guy who came into the shop not long ago asking for The Prince, and I said "Little or Regular?" And he replied with "I assure you, it isn't little." And everything just went downhill from there.
Sorry for the ramble.....and thank you for this amusing and well-informed rebuttal to the BS.
I appreciated your ramble very much and if you were to write a Substack if bookseller’s woes and triumphs, this reader would follow right along.
I don’t think it was that bad, although tough to swallow DB lecturing us about conformity. I would focus on his main point about audacity.
Does big publishing nurture audacity?
I find that point underbaked. Because honestly what is audacity in 2025 when Donald Trump is president and the world’s richest man has an AI bot that self-identifies as MechaHitler? I don’t mean that snarkily. I think the kind of literature that felt audacious simply wouldn’t feel that way today given what we all see on the daily news. (I also think the kind of audacity he means is enabled by cultural status that artists of any stripe just don’t hold now. Even rock stars don’t cause the kind of uproar they could pre-internet.)
I'd be happy to hear some counterpoints, but what is audacious art of any kind today? The only works of art that come to mind as feeling "audacious" are perhaps only conceptually audacious. Something like the Rehearsal? Maybe Twin Peaks Season 3. Maybe My Struggle or Ducks Newburyport count, in a way? But that's a different kind of audacity...
I do think this is an interesting questions.
There's a cyclical nature to what shocks us or what alarms us. Like that Sabrina Carter album cover that made the Discourse rounds recently. Coming from someone who used to watch TRL and 106 in Park in the early 2000s, that album cover seemed so sexually tame compared to what I regularly saw on TV at 4 in the afternoon!
Like Ducks Newburyport. Is that audacious? Maybe, in a way, but it feels very self-consciously reaching back to books published nearly exactly a century earlier, with even the blue cover meant to culturally remind the reader of Joyce's little blue book.
It's hard to know what would count as audacious now. And maybe embracing the cyclical nature of culture is an important avenue for risk taking. But we could even argue that something as banal as a non-comic book movie becomes audacious, now.
Retreat isn't the right word for it, but I do think that literature, at least, has sort of seen the limits stretched about as much as they can go, in terms of form, style, and graphical presentation. Where do you go next, after a century of artists pushing and pulling and tearing at the edges? One answer seems to be that you bring modernism and postmodernism into genre fiction, but even that's sort of old hat by now. I mean, SCREAM came out thirty years ago!
So I don't know but I think I'd like to see it. I'd like to see something wholly new, that's not rehashing the 1920s or 1960s but in a new coat.
From the reader & MFA student seat where I perch, it does indeed feel that our 'IRL-stranger-than-fiction' vibe has pushed thematic or character-driven audacity offstage, so now we're noticing experiments in structure, form ... concept. And that might not touch as many readers, or touch them as deeply, which is the real shame, IMHO.
The question makes me think about how much of what was "audacious" in my childhood would just feel tame today. Like Bjork wearing a swan dress to the Academy Awards was a shocking thing. Now, wacky outfits are just expected at e.g. the Met Gala. You kind of need norms to push against to be audacious, and we're pretty beyond norms these days...
And being beyond norms feels <too many adjectives 😳> because norms are both how we collectively protect ourselves from the worst we might do AND how we do the worst harm to each other. I celebrate the dismantling of many social norms from my childhood, yet I mourn the destruction of norms that hold us accountable for respecting science, and civil discourse.
And in fiction, I like to transgress, so ‘beyond norms’ is disheartening.
He really seemed to be borrowing from Tom Wolfe, who was arguing for the large-scale realist novel against the experimental and lyrical. Maybe one can argue that there is more of a hesitation now about reaching for a Dickensian breadth of palette for reasons visible in Bonfire of the Vanities—the presumption. Call it wokeness but one can also say perhaps that we are properly more cautious now about claiming insight into everyone’s experience.
Yes. Big publishing does nurture audacity. It also nurtures comfortable pablum. As Lincoln pointed out in this piece, it nurtures pretty much everything it thinks will sell, and audacity still sells. I challenge anyone to go into a bookshop and, I don't know, pick a book off the new fiction shelf and see how many you think are audacious. Nope, it's not most of them, but it's a bigger percentage than you think.
Publish doesn’t equal nurture, necessarily. When debut novels and the follow up don’t find their audiences, their authors are unlikely to be granted more time. By now this is a known fact, and there goes being audacious or experimental in the first place
You're not wrong about that. I mirrored the word you chose, nurture, when perhaps I should have challenged it. I don't really think "publishing" as a big nameless money-making entity nurtures anyone. I think if you are lucky as an author, you find a publishing employee here or there who might nurture you. But the industry itself is never going to nurture anything but the ability to make a dollar and keep itself going.
"The books that you’ll love—the kind that will inspire you and move you—are being published somewhere today" Probably true, but how many books are published by the sources you mention? I think the proposition to work hard and find the book I'll love is naive.
I suppose I can't know anyone else's standards, but I would say it is normally a matter of finding a trusty "curator" or two to follow. For traditional publishing, that might just be an imprint/publisher that puts out the kind of books you like. E.g., I enjoy most books I read from Coffee House, New Directions, Transit, and some other small presses. In self-publishing, that might be a reviewer or Substacker you trust. From there, doesn't take too much time to read a description or some sample pages and see if you like them.
Often when I talk to people who say they don't like contemporary fiction they'll admit they basically haven't read any contemporary books since college. Or maybe they've tried a couple hyped bestsellers. They often aren't putting much work in at all, it seems.
If you don’t have a good indie bookstore near you, I’d recommend finding one you like and following it online.
Thank you for writing this, Lincoln. The other day I was reading a different article on a subject I'm interested in and was startled by the amount of poor reasoning. Then I checked the byline. David Brooks. Of course. Reading your clearly reasoned essays is a balm, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness. I wonder if, just as processed food manufacturers perfected the combination of salt, fat, and sugar and so shifted the contemporary diet, entertainment providers and technologies have similarly fine-tuned strategies for manufacturing visceral appeal and so changed our collective tendencies to consume challenging art in all media.
It's an insider's game, always has been. Even Hem glad-handed every insider he could find. He wasn't dumb
Not gonna lie, I really thought was this a line from Philip Marlowe and even Googled it. 😅
Another excellent, informative post, Lincoln. Say what you will about the tenets of capitalism, but you provide lots of value for your paid readers!
I recently tried to join a local bookclub. Most of the books they pick are outright terrible dribble so I stopped going. Instead I stay home and read the classics from the BCEs to the 1980s, on the rare occasion something new. I agree with your premise that it is the culture at large. I'm crossing my fingers that the culture will eventually shift to better quality all around. There are gems out there, I wish it were easier to find them.
Thank you for having a smart, nuanced and well researched take on this exhausting and never ending discourse. Every time it does the rounds on social media I want to roll my eyes.