A little over a year ago, I took a final paper from a Stanford sociolinguistics class and rewrote it into a Substack essay. The project had started almost as a joke. A few months into dating my boyfriend, David, I noticed he always texted his best friend, Ryan, with a very particular flourish: they both added a space before certain punctuation marks, but not others.

I’d seen this online before—in TikTok comments, Discord servers, Reddit threads—but assumed it was just a quirk of certain fandoms, as often happens online. The surprise was realizing it had migrated into the everyday texting habits of two otherwise ordinary twenty-something men (“dudes,” as I like to refer to this group)—one of whom (my boyfriend), notably, avoids social media altogether. Good on him, though I still show him so much content every day, it may not even matter. Whoops.

Regardless, that realization—that the stylistic debris of internet subcultures was showing up in daily, otherwise unmarked conversation—was enough to spark a research project. I built a small corpus and sketched out some early analysis. To my astonishment, that modest experiment was not only well received on Substack but has since found its way into someone else’s work: a video that, at the time of writing, has already attracted more than 850,000 views.

It’s important to emphasize: this was not published in an academic journal, and it should be read with that in mind. Peer review really matters! Even with the guidance of a professor, the amazing Dr. Katherine Hilton, an in-class project isn’t the same as a vetted article. And frankly, this is probably as far as my linguistics research will ever go (in fact, being included in an Etymology Nerd video feels more meaningful to me than presenting this work at a conference—something I was accepted to do at DH2025 before realizing it would be too difficult to secure funding for a conference taking place after my graduation).

Still, the unexpected afterlife of this essay delights me. It confirms three things:

• Work—even student work—can be found, supported, and widely shared if it exists online.

• A niche interest can travel far beyond its intended audience.

• Visibility is no longer determined solely by institutional gatekeeping, but by the circulation systems the internet provides.

For me, this is the essence of public intellectualism today: not the flattening of standards, but the redistribution of visibility. That a Substack essay can enter the archive of a major internet linguist (or the fact that such a job exists at all, and with such virality!) illustrates what I remind my clients at Punctuation PR each day—that in our present moment, the act of publishing is inseparable from the act of being searchable.

Right now, Substack is unusually fertile ground—the algorithm favors new writers, growth is fast, and the community is engaged. But the larger lesson is this: by consistently naming, publishing, and archiving your work, you make discovery possible. You create the conditions for the unexpected afterlife of ideas—the kind of serendipity that turns a classroom project into a viral citation.

So here’s to punctuation cushioning, to Etymology Nerd, and to the uncanny ways language research continues to circulate in the digital age.

That might sound surprising—publicity tends to evoke images of slick media placements, splashy launch campaigns, maybe a few shiny social media graphics. And yes, I do all of that. I design author websites, create brand kits, build marketing funnels, and schedule interviews and events. I’m a strategist.

Yet more often than not, I find myself on the page—editing Substack posts, polishing author bios, tightening pitch emails, and offering feedback on fellowship applications, essays, and full-length manuscripts. I help shape not just how a project appears, but how a writer sees their own work and future. A writer’s work is the writing, so to be a good publicist, you have to invest in the writing, too. This means seriously developing your own skills as a reader, writer, and editor. I’ve realized I spend just as much time copyediting prose as I do offering creative direction, strategy, and confidence. I’m a reader of my clients first, and a publicist second. It’s not a hard position to be in, especially when you work with writers who write like and do. Seriously. I get paid to read gorgeous writing all day long! And writing that may not even be out in the world yet. It’s pretty amazing.

However, this isn’t the norm for this type of work. Most people with my title today—publicist, marketer, strategist, copywriter—are cranking out content at scale. They’re automating posts, chasing SEO tricks, editing ChatGPT drafts, or flat-out replacing original writing with AI sludge. In my last in-house role at a Silicon Valley tech startup, I spent most of my time cleaning up content no human had ever touched, with my CEO once asking me if I could build a system that would produce 500 social media posts in a month.

But the kind of work I do now doesn’t operate like that at all. Not only am I working closely with someone, but I am knee-deep in their work and thoughts. With each writer, it’s a meeting of minds: our unique ideas, knowledge, and expertise working in tandem—“marrying the art and business of [the] work,” as Sophia once put it.

I was reminded of this recently while corresponding with a professor. I’d reached out to her about partnering on a future project. She responded kindly, but with hesitation: she already had a reputable publicity firm behind her latest book, and asked me a practical question—when do you typically enter the process? Pre-pub? Launch week? Post-release?

It’s a fair question, and one I’ve come to expect. Most publicists orbit a single project: a book’s pre-order window, its debut, maybe a short tail of events. But I’ve never thought of my work that way. My clients don’t hire me for just a campaign. They hire me for the next stage of their career. Her book was wrapping up its own successful year of media touring, but it was unclear what might happen to it—or her—next.

So I realized this was a good opportunity to update my website to reflect what had slowly but surely emerged as my key thesis statement:
“Punctuation PR is your strategic partner for long-term career growth—built for the next generation of public intellectuals.”

It might seem unconventional to describe a publicity firm as a kind of career coach, especially in an industry as dogmatic as publishing. But that’s precisely the point. The terrain has shifted: the expectations have evolved, the timelines have accelerated, but the infrastructure has barely budged.

Once upon a time, institutions like publishing houses, universities, and legacy media offered something like full-stack support—not just a platform for a writer’s ideas, but a long-term investment in their intellectual arc. That scaffolding no longer exists.

What’s left is a widening gap. Writers, scholars, and journalists are expected to do it all: craft the work, grow the platform, manage the optics, and somehow build a lasting career—alone. Not because they’re lacking in talent, not because their work isn’t worth investing in, but because no one ever showed them how to construct the framework that sustains a creative life.

The real question is: why is that burden placed on them at all?

Writing is already an all-consuming act. Asking writers to also serve as their own publicist, strategist, social media manager, and opportunity scout is more than unreasonable—it’s a waste of their time and talent. Some of the most brilliant thinkers I know are burning out not because they lack ideas, but because they’re being asked to do too much that has nothing to do with their actual work. There are just better ways for writers to spend their time (e.g., doing the whole writing bit).

That’s where I come in.

When I tell clients that I’m 100% invested in their long-term success, I don’t mean it as a marketing line—I mean it quite literally. I read every draft. I offer them structure. I help them workshop newsletter names and event pitches and about pages. I write their bios like they’re my own. I think about them in the shower and while doing the laundry. I want their books to do well, yes. But I want them to become the writer they imagined when they started this whole thing, when they came into this world kicking and screaming and ready to say something.

And to my surprise, the industry has made room. Editors at the Big 5 don’t blink when my clients loop me into email chains—they’re relieved. It’s normal and even necessary to work with independent publicists these days. Overworked, underresourced in-house publicists want the author to have someone on their team who cares as much as they do, to be supported by someone who has the time, the language, and the vision to keep things moving.

But if this work isn’t just about launch week, or assets, or media placements, then what is it?

Before I was a publicist, I was a full-time humanist. Until recently, I was still in school, studying the art and science of language and thinking constantly about how ideas move through the world—how they live, how they’re lost, and what it takes to keep them alive.

Publicity, at its core, is not about visibility for its own sake. It’s about the creation of a meaningful presence, the act of helping someone build and inhabit a public self—one that can speak clearly, withstand pressure, and hold space in a noisy world.

To be a publicist right now—in this precarious, transitional moment in publishing, academia, and public thought—is to ask bigger questions:

• What do you want to be known for?

• What do you want to stand for?

• How do you build a self that can stand in public, again and again, and be part of the culture and conversation?

That’s the work. That’s the job.

And I love it.

In addition to writing New Material Girl, I have also started Publicly Known As, the newsletter extension of Punctuation PR. Through interviews, playbooks, and behind-the-scenes insights, PKA shares what smart publicity actually looks like today. Whether you're building your platform from scratch or figuring out how to talk about your tenth book, I’m here to help you navigate the process with clarity and confidence. Read PKA here.

If you’re interested in working together, please send an email or book a call with me. For more information on my publicity work, please visit Punctuation PR’s website. It’s worth the peek!

Transit Books, a San Francisco–based nonprofit publisher, has carved a distinctive place in the American literary scene, championing international voices with restraint, elegance, and an eye toward what endures. Their catalog includes names both obscure and newly beloved: Antigone Kefala, Suzumu Suzuki, Noémi Lefebvre—and Jacqueline Harpman, whose I Who Have Never Known Men has become something of a cult object on Instagram and Goodreads alike.

For most of my reading life, translated fiction remained peripheral—an idea I brushed against only online, or in foreign bookstores abroad. But the week of my graduation, I picked up a copy of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a slim novel by the Japanese playwright Toshikazu Kawaguchi. The US edition, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot and published by Hanover Square Press (imprint of HarperCollins), has gained some popularity in recent time. I found the book lying on the English department’s designated “Free Books” bench, as I walked through the building for the last time.

The title struck me with its urgency and instruction. I walked at graduation, packed up my college apartment, and began reading the next day, in the first place I would live after.

In a small Tokyo café, customers are allowed to travel back in time—though only under a rigid set of rules. You must sit in a particular seat. You may only speak with someone who has also visited the café. And most crucially: you must return before your coffee gets cold.

Kawaguchi’s novel unfolds in four vignettes, each a subtle variation on the same moral conceit: a character returns to a past moment, and though the facts of the timeline remain fixed, something imperceptible shifts within. Kawaguchi’s prose is spare to the point of translucence—sometimes distractingly so. Dialogue is delivered plainly, and exposition often substitutes for interiority. But this stylistic restraint feels less like oversight than intention. There is a studied flatness to the narration, reminiscent of fable or stage direction, that allows the emotional weight to accrue not through flourish, but through repetition and ritual.

Kawaguchi is not interested in surprise; he is interested in structure, in return, in the quiet rhythms of regret. His sentimentality is neither ironic nor disguised—it is sincere, even ceremonial, and in this way the novel operates more as a modern parable than a conventional psychological narrative. The result is not subtle realism but affective allegory: a story not about how time changes us, but how we learn to sit, however briefly, with what cannot be changed.

Much of the legible criticism surrounding Before the Coffee Gets Cold (which any quick Google search will reveal) echoes a familiar refrain often lobbed at translated fiction: the prose is too plain, the characters too unrelatable, the values too dated, the pacing too slow. These judgments surface again and again, particularly from readers accustomed to the interior complexity and cathartic arcs of contemporary American literary fiction. But as Kawaguchi points out in the book, “People don’t see things and hear things as objectively as they might think.” Beneath the surface of such critiques lies something more telling than stylistic preference—they reveal an unease with coming up against narrative forms that don’t conform to our own literary sensibilities. A different emotional tempo. A different narrative architecture. A different idea of what fiction is for.

We forget, I think, that all reading is cultural translation. What we often call "good writing" is simply writing that fits the tonal and structural norms we’ve been trained to value: irony, psychological realism, narrative tension, interior monologue. When those conventions are absent, the instinct is often to dismiss the book itself, rather than question the critical vocabulary we’re applying.

When I reflect on how I evaluate books, I rarely ask whether I liked them in the immediate, consumer-satisfaction sense. Instead, I ask: Did the book accomplish what it set out to do? Did it fulfill the logic of its own world? Did it remain faithful to its own mode of telling? When I say this aloud, people often look at me as though I really am wearing the $30 “Critic” baseball cap I considered buying in Berkeley. But I stand by this framework because it offers the most lasting satisfaction as a reader. It opens space for encounter rather than judgment, for curiosity over comparison.

And nowhere is that approach more essential than in reading translated literature. These are books that already contain an act of transformation—language into language, culture into culture—and to demand they behave like American novels is to flatten the very exchange they make possible. Translated fiction often resists our familiar narrative pattern, not from deficiency, but from difference. It asks us to adjust our rhythm. To listen more closely. To admit, perhaps, that our taste is not the measure of all things.

Kawaguchi’s novel, I think, does exactly what it intends. It offers not reinvention, but ritual; not transformation, but repetition. No dramatic turns, no ironic reversals. Just a quiet belief that words left unsaid deserve a second hearing—not to alter history, but to make peace with it.

This is not to suggest that Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a perfect novel. It isn’t. Novels rarely are, which is exactly why we read them and keep reading other novels. But it operates within a coherent emotional architecture—subtle, meditative, consistent. And if we find ourselves frustrated by its simplicity or its sentimentality, perhaps the more compelling question is: why?

Too often, American readers evaluate translated fiction against domestic expectations. We crave momentum, interiority, voice. When a work resists those demands, it’s labeled flat. Or worse: boring. But these judgments often reflect our own habits more than the book’s shortcomings. They reveal a discomfort with unfamiliar rhythms. A preference for conflict over contemplation. A hunger for novelty, even in our grief.

To read translated fiction well requires more than comprehension—it requires suspension. A willingness to be disoriented. To listen, rather than project. If we approach every novel with the same rubric every time—Was I entertained? Did I relate? Did the ending surprise me?—we risk missing the deeper promise that translation offers: a chance to inhabit a worldview that doesn’t bend to ours.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold doesn’t ask to amaze you. It, like all books, asks you to sit down, stay a while, and listen before the moment passes. And if that leaves you restless, perhaps the problem isn’t with the book—but with what you’ve grown too used to expecting.

I don’t remember much from graduation weekend—just the early mornings, the missed meals, the hours of walking and talking in too-hot clothes. It was the first time I hosted my parents and siblings in California. It was also the last time I packed up my dorm. The Monday after I gave this speech, I moved to Los Angeles.

And yet, writing and delivering it felt like a full-circle moment. A repairing of sorts. This newsletter began with big questions—about whether college is worth it, and what happens to a field when its foundations start to erode. So much of my education has been about doubt—sitting with it, writing through it, learning to hold it without flinching. That the English faculty chose me to speak was a true honor. But the deeper gift was this: to have been part of a program so alive, so generous, that I left with more words than I arrived with—and could offer them back, shaped into something whole.

So here it is.

“The Greatest Invention” by Ellen Yang

Delivered June 14, 2025, at the Stanford English Department graduation ceremony in Memorial Church. (Yes, seriously—I got to speak from the lectern and everything. Preacher-style.)

Good afternoon—faculty, family, friends, and most importantly, the graduating class of 2025.

Of all the tools humans have created—wheels, engines, vaccines, algorithms—I still believe the greatest is the book. Not just for what it is, but for what it holds: the invention of language. The power to turn sound into meaning, and meaning into memory.

Language, writing, reading—these are all human technologies. Not natural, but made. And over the past four years, we’ve learned to use them with care, to practice the work of close reading.

In our classes, we watched for the rhythm of a sentence, the weight of a word, the turn of a thought. Close reading taught us that every element—punctuation, syntax, silence—holds something special, if we’re willing to look. And eventually, that practice became instinct. We started reading everything—text messages, headlines, even each other—with the same care we once reserved for Woolf or Baldwin or Morrison. Not to dissect, but to understand.

We moved across genres, eras, and traditions—from The Canterbury Tales to Shakespeare, from modernism to contemporary fiction. Each text helped us inhabit unfamiliar places and people, and through them, imagine new futures—our own, and the world’s. The fact that we’re here today, about to walk across this stage, is proof of that imaginative work.

And we didn’t do it alone. We had professors who treated our ideas with seriousness and care. TAs who met us where we were and pushed us further. And classmates who became close friends through the shared joy of asking hard questions and staying with difficult ideas.

These relationships—formed around something as simple as the book—taught me something lasting: that we are never truly alone in our reading. Even when we interpret things differently, we’re united by the shared impulse to understand, to question, to even create. That’s what makes dialogue possible. And that’s what moves us forward—not just as readers, but as people.

This belief carried me through my honors thesis work this year, where I studied a narrative style built on what’s left unsaid between characters. I call it “dialogic implicature”—a form that mirrors real conversation. I wrote about the novels of Sally Rooney. But really, I was writing about us.

We are a generation fluent in subtext and silence. We live in a world where clarity is fragile, and the things that matter the most—love, pain, truth—are often the very things we must infer.

They call this the Age of Information, but more and more, it feels like the Age of Misinformation—a time when meaning isn’t just elusive, but easily twisted or drowned out.

In this age, attention isn’t just academic. It’s human. It’s how we understand the world—and how we begin to change it.

That’s why I believe the study of literature offers all of us here something necessary and vital. It deepens our empathy. It teaches us to ask better questions. It reminds us that language is never neutral, but always alive. And most importantly, it keeps us in conversation—with texts, and with each other.

In a world that moves too fast to feel, we chose a discipline that asked us to slow down. To reread. To look again. Close reading is more than a method—it’s a way of being. And through it, we’ve learned something rare: how to hold uncertainty without turning away.

So as we leave Stanford, we carry more than a degree. We carry a deep understanding of what the greatest human invention really is, beneath its covers and pages: the power to shape meaning through language, and the world through meaning.

Wherever we go next, let us keep closely reading—with curiosity, with courage, and with the quiet conviction that meaning is still worth the work of finding.

Thank you, and congratulations to the extraordinary class of 2025. I am so proud of us!

Starting next Tuesday, I will be publishing every week again! I promise. No more thesis writing or coursework to get in the way.

Though, is now a bad time to mention I did start my own company? Well, more on Punctuation PR next time.

There is a genre of book that has been lost to time: the toilet read.

Once, these books were everywhere, perched precariously atop the toilet tank, wedged between cleaning products, or piled in magazine racks that seemed like relics even when they were new. There were guidebooks to random parts of America (1,001 Roadside Attractions), books full of bad jokes and puns (Truly Tasteless Jokes), and collections of trivia that felt delightfully useless (Guinness World Records 2005). There were magazines, too: Reader’s Digest, Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan.

But toilet reads weren’t just mass-market ephemera. There was the novel you couldn’t put down, the self-help book your mom got you for Christmas, or the poetry collection you’d flip through while avoiding more serious business. If all else failed, you’d scan the back of a shampoo bottle or the ingredients on a tube of toothpaste. Reading, no matter how banal, occupied the mind while the body did its work.

Today, people don’t read on the toilet anymore. We scroll. We watch. We spend far more time in the bathroom than we need to, hypnotized by the endless vortex of Instagram reels, TikToks, and the bleak churn of doomscrolling. The phone has replaced the toilet read, and something essential has been lost in the exchange.

Smartphones slipped into our lives as companions, promising to make everything more convenient. And they did. It’s undeniably easier to reach for a device that contains every book, article, and video imaginable than to keep a stack of magazines in the bathroom. But what started as convenience has turned into captivity. The phone doesn’t just accompany us; it insists on our attention, even in moments that should be private, reflective, or fleeting.

In the bathroom, this insistence feels particularly absurd. You enter with a purpose, but that purpose is quickly forgotten. You find yourself squatting on the toilet, scrolling through videos of dogs learning to skateboard or celebrity divorces you didn’t know were happening. Five minutes stretch into ten, then twenty. When you finally emerge, you feel dazed and overexposed. You weren’t present for any of it, not really.

And the consequences aren’t just metaphysical. Doctors warn about the physical toll of prolonged bathroom breaks—hemorrhoids from extended sitting, poor posture from hunching over your phone. The bathroom, once a space of relief, has become another site of distraction and overstimulation.

Scrolling in the bathroom might seem harmless—even necessary in a culture obsessed with multitasking. But it robs us of the quiet, reflective pause that old-fashioned toilet reads once provided. In fact, it robs us of the experience of being in one’s own bathroom at all.

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Reading—even light, silly, or incidental reading—has a way of rooting us in the present. The heft of a magazine in your hands, the turning of a page, even the small pleasure of rereading the same chemical ingredient list for the hundredth time—these acts tether us to the material world. They remind us that not all discovery is curated, nor all pleasure chosen.

In contrast, scrolling feeds us endless content, yet it leaves us hollow. We scroll not to connect but to escape, not to enjoy but to numb. And when we’re done, we’re not sure what we’ve consumed, only that it wasn’t enough. The bathroom, once a quirky refuge, becomes just another venue for our disconnection.

But what if we declared the bathroom a phone-free zone? Not as an act of discipline, but as a small, deliberate rebellion against the tyranny of constant connection. A New Year’s resolution, yes, but also an invitation to recover something lost.

Start simple. Leave your phone on the counter or in another room. Replace it with something analog: a magazine, a slim novel, a poetry collection, or even a book of crossword puzzles. Let the bathroom become a sanctuary again, a place where time slows, where your mind can wander without the constant tug of notifications.

If reading feels too ambitious, let the space remain empty. Stare at the tiles, listen to the sound of the faucet dripping, let your thoughts unfurl in the quiet. There’s a reason so many ideas come to us in the shower. The bathroom, stripped of its screens, can become a crucible for creativity, a rare moment of peace in a chaotic world.

Of course, this resolution isn’t really about the bathroom. It’s about how we choose to spend our time and where we place our attention. The bathroom, strange and secret chamber that it is, offers a microcosm of our larger relationship with technology. If we can reclaim this one small space, perhaps we can begin to reclaim others: the dinner table, the waiting room, the walk to the corner store.

In the end, the phone will wait for you. Its feeds, its pings, its bright little world. But the bathroom deserves more. It deserves a book. Or nothing at all.

Pleasure, as I see it, is the art of being there—a surrender to something that pulls you out of yourself. You sink into a couch, a blanket draped over your New England-cold legs, sipping cheap coffee from a mug you bought for your dad two Christmases ago. You’re a bit disappointed he doesn’t use it all that much when you aren’t here, but you’re glad to claim it again every six months. You open your Kindle (because the gifts took up too much space in your carry-on suitcase and you hate traveling with heavy books).

The quiet, in-between time stretching from Thanksgiving to New Year’s feels like the perfect window for reading. I can get myself to get through nearly any type of book during this time: commercial, literary, critical. The best reads for this period, though, are the ones that open up like a poem, not a project—timely, economical, and a little ridiculous in the way the holidays seem to demand (or perhaps, defy).

Here are five books that do exactly that. I’ve picked them off of my own shelf of 2024 favorites, so I hope you will enjoy them in this precious week we have before the new year.

The Pleasure of the Text
Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller (67 pages)

This is not a book. It’s an act of seduction. Barthes asks us what we’re doing when we read, but he doesn’t really want our answer—he’s busy answering it for us, wrapping his questions in velvet, unfolding the act of reading as something that happens in the body. It’s not about understanding a text, he says; it’s about desiring it. You’ll certainly want a pen or pencil in hand while reading this. Barthes will tease you, smite you, and then slip right by you.

The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (96 pages)

When I was eight, I dismissed this book as nonsense—a pilot, a fox, stars, sheep? Surely, my very practical mind had more important things to deal with. But with every reread as an adult, The Little Prince transforms. What is essential is invisible to the eye. It’s a short, tender parable that speaks softly yet cuts sharply, a reminder of everything we lose—and sometimes find again—as we grow up. I keep it close: on my shelf, on my desk, even as my iPad wallpaper—a quiet touchstone for the truths we so often forget.

Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan (128 pages)

This is what the holidays feel like: dark evenings, soft lights, a quiet snowfall outside the window. Keegan’s novella is set during Christmastime in 1980s Ireland, and it’s a story about kindness—how it happens and why it matters. I won’t spoil the plot, but I will tell you this: it left me sitting in silence for a long time after I closed it.

The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson (160 pages)

Nelson’s books feel like walking into a room you’ve never been in before but immediately recognize. This one is about love, identity, family, queerness—and, as always with Nelson, about language. It’s a narrative braided with theory, the kind of beautiful, painful writing that makes you question the line between memoir and criticism. My favorite writer, writing about everything that matters.

I Await the Devil’s Coming
Mary MacLane (162 pages)

MacLane’s writing feels like holding a live wire—raw, immediate, electric. She wrote this at 19, in 1902, and it’s still more audacious than most books published today. She describes herself as a genius, a philosopher, a woman waiting for the devil to claim her—and you believe her. Every word drips with longing and defiance—and every single great thought I’ve had about writing or reading or being in the last year is at the credit of MacLane.

BONUS: A River Runs Through It
Norman Maclean (161 pages)

I haven’t read this one yet, but it’s waiting for me. A story about fly fishing, yes, but also about the affections and troubles of the heart. I know next to nothing about fishing, but I know more than I would like to about the ache of connection, the way a river never flows the same way twice. I’ll be starting this one today.

SECOND BONUS: Lucinella
Lore Segal (160 pages)

Another one that’s waiting for me. Segal’s novella is supposed to be sly, funny, glittering—about writers and their messy lives. The kind of book you laugh with, a little wryly, but also find yourself in. I like the sound of that.

Pick one, or two, or all of them. Let them carry you somewhere else before the year ends. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season!

Did you know your local library sells books for very, very cheap? Even now, it still feels like a secret. Learning that I could buy books from the library—not just used ones, but brand new ones that were advanced copies or extra inventory—was one of the most wonderful discoveries of my young life. My family frequented three major libraries every week: the one in my town, the one in the town next to my town, and the one in the town we used to live in (close to where my dad worked).

There were the books we checked out (usually 5 a week), and then there were the books we collected (this was done with more care and thought—buying only a few books every few weeks). My dad loved looking for the classics, and I still remember when he began bringing home The Great Illustrated Classics, each installation only a buck or two.

Classics has 66 titles in total. I read about 40 of them over the course of elementary and middle school, devouring The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes, A Little Princess, and Moby Dick. These books were my first foray into “real” literature. They were thick, substantial—proof, it seemed, of their authenticity. But their heft was largely thanks to bigger print and illustrations; each book was only 100 pages long, edited and revised for children to read. I felt accomplished until, years later, I learned the meaning of "abridged." I was pretty pissed when I realized I hadn’t actually read the "real" books.

In recent years, I’ve begun revisiting these titles—The Call of the Wild, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were some of my favorites growing up and have only gotten better now that I’ve read their full, original texts. Other classics, like Frankenstein, I disliked as a child but cherish today. It’s hard to beat the genius and prose of Mary Shelley, but there’s really no way to get that to click for a ten-year-old. Hence, the beauty and wonder of Classics.

I definitely read less as an adult than I did as a child. I often have to force myself to read. But my philosophy today is simple: You’ve either read the book or you haven’t.

Reading is hard. It takes time, energy, and thinking, which makes it feel pretty incompatible with modern life. But this declaration is not merely pedantic; it is hyper-relevant in a world increasingly defined by the “bullet-pointification” of reading.

captured this phenomenon perfectly: "The popularity of book summary services... is a perfect encapsulation of what gets lost (nuance) in the bullet-pointification of books, in which every bit of information is served in digestible bite-sized portions that you can upload right to your brain." The rise of apps like Blinkist and AI-driven platforms promising to be the "Duolingo for knowledge" exemplifies this trend. These platforms claim to "fix" books by condensing them into summaries, "thunks," or interactive multimedia nuggets. As Kreizman pointed out in her newsletter this week, HarperCollins is already experimenting with AI-enhanced books that allow "conversations" with authors rather than just…reading the book.

WTF?

No one asked for this. Younger me was the victim of a bait and switch, not by choice, but by necessity! This isn’t true for adults. We don’t need technology to "improve" books; we need time, space, and resources for writers and editors to create meaningful work. And we all need to take time and space for ourselves, which is what reading helps so many people do.

Abridged versions exist for a reason: to introduce readers, often young or hesitant ones, to texts that might otherwise feel daunting. They’re an invitation into the text. But here’s the catch: an invitation is not the event. It’s a nudge to take action, to do the work of reading the full version. The problem arises when these simplified or shortened versions present themselves as replacements rather than introductions. Abridged classics should spark curiosity, not extinguish it.

This phenomenon extends beyond books. Every time I tap through my friends’ stories on Instagram, I see ads promoting apps promising to “replace scrolling with learning”—flashcard-like summaries of philosophical or literary texts, designed to be consumed in minutes. This sounds really nice. I do hate how much I scroll. But reading is separate from being on my phone—it must be, because close attention to the text and time spent in another world, on the page, is the point! The problem isn’t brevity itself; it’s the illusion that depth can be bypassed. Short versions of things—blurbs, abridged editions, even Instagram posts—should inspire readers to seek more, not settle for less.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that these tech-driven “solutions” are founded on a deep belief in the value of books. Why else would so many of these startups and apps market themselves as tools to make you a "better reader" or to "save" books? Even in their reductive form, books remain a cultural touchstone, a marker of intellectual aspiration. What these platforms often misunderstand, though, is that reading is not a means to an end. It’s a relationship—a lifelong conversation between the text, the reader, and the world.

Kreizman’s critique lands here, too: "We just need to give authors and editors and all of the people who work on books the time and space (and MONEY) to make something good. Sales of such books may not skyrocket, but they will become more valuable over time." To value books is to value the slow, deliberate process of reading them—and the communities and systems that sustain that process.

So how do we reclaim reading? Start where you are. Visit your local library (It’s literally free! And usually very nicely decorated, centrally located, full of comfortable seats, and beautifully quiet) and pick up a book, even an abridged one. Engage with it not as a substitute but as a stepping stone. Revisit a text you "sort of" know, and take the time to experience it fully. Reading is flexible; it’s forgiving. To be a reader is to embark on a lifelong pursuit—a relationship not just with literature, but with yourself. That’s what makes it rare and important. That’s why it matters.

Because at its core, reading is discovery. It’s an invitation to explore, to imagine, to connect. And no app, no AI, no summary can replicate the magic of holding a book in your hands and meeting it on its own terms.

It helps you meet yourself again, too.

Goodreads, like many projects, began at a kitchen table. I wonder if Luigi Mangione ever found himself there, trying to come up with a simple solution for a complex problem. (Important to emphasize trying).

Founded by Otis and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler in 2006, the platform has always felt innocent—naive, even, amongst its social media peers. I think this is largely because of how straightforward and invariant it is: the point of Goodreads is to help people catalog and share their reading lists. Its purpose and utility hasn’t changed in nearly two decades. And because of that, it remains one of my favorite social media platforms. I’m always eager to introduce friends to it, and I log back in every few days to see if they’ve started or finished a new book or perhaps written a review of something I love, dislike, or have yet to read. Ideally, I contribute an update of my own, too.

Who knew that this modest platform would someday captivate the public’s attention in a mainstream murder case? In the wake of the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads account has become a source of fascination, less a simple reading list and more an ideological artifact. The account is now private, but not before the internet could get a hold of it. Screenshots are still in circulation on platforms like Reddit. Weirdly, this scrutiny has sparked renewed interest in literature and its relationship to a young person. We are now all reminded of its enduring role in shaping—and revealing—human thought.

But what can a Goodreads account really tell us about a person? Mangione’s reading history offers some interesting juxtapositions. You have The Lorax and then you have Industrial Society and Its Future—also known as “the Unabomber manifesto.” If there is a unifying thread, it might be a critique of industrial modernity. Or, alternatively, the algorithm’s tendency to write suggestions like “Readers of George Orwell might also like… Ted Kaczynski.”

Reddit commentators on the gossip subreddit, r/fauxmoi, observe that Mangione’s literary tastes grew darker after 2020, coinciding with a politically tumultuous period in America. This makes sense, given the chaos of the first Trump election, large-scale social justice movements, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet his book choices do not so much construct a portrait of radicalization as they reveal a common archetype: what cultural historian Mark Harris described on Bluesky as “a very recognizable type of young male ideology tourist.” Consider the pattern: Sapiens for evolutionary perspectives, Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind for explorations into consciousness, and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near for techno-utopian musings. Add Moby-Dick to the “Want to Read” shelf for literary ambition—a rite of passage for many—and the profile emerges of a Silicon Valley libertarian archetype, intellectually curious yet ideologically unmoored.

Mangione’s review of the Unabomber manifesto has particularly captured the internet’s imagination. He describes it as “clearly written by a mathematics prodigy” and “reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st-century quality of life.” His academic framing—“a series of lemmas”—renders his analysis oddly detached, almost clinical. There’s no question that Kaczynski was indeed a mathematics genius; he and Mangione are certainly considered peers if we loom at academic affiliations alone. At the same time, he acknowledges Kaczynski’s violent actions, but from the position of a “political revolutionary.” rather than a criminal. The review walks a fine line, one that raises questions: Did Goodreads’ recommendation engine amplify latent radical tendencies, or was it merely a mirror reflecting Mangione’s evolving worldview? How do we encounter texts like this in the first place? How are those encounters shaped and influenced? And how do we separate readers from what they read?

This leads to a broader cultural debate about access to politically controversial texts. In an era when libraries are under siege and calls for book bans abound, should texts like the Unabomber Manifesto or Mein Kampf remain freely available?

At first glance, it may feel that having such works in circulation still can incite harm, yet Mangione’s reading list suggests a more complex picture. Alongside these contentious titles are bestsellers like Freakonomics, The Four-Hour Workweek, and a biography of Elon Musk—books emblematic of a mainstream, self-improvement ethos. His literary habits appear less subversive than reflective of a privileged, well-educated background steeped in tech culture and individualism. In all honesty, his Goodreads just looks exactly what I would expect from a UPenn graduate, Stanford high school program counselor, and tech company engineer. I know many of them personally. I go to school with them now. (Plus, not to mention that the texts that so-called advocates are actively working on censoring these days are works like picture books about LGBTQ+ identity, chapter books that mention sexual pleasure, and classics that advocate for racial equality and a reckoning with white supremacy. Regardless of this conversation, we should all be very concerned about those books continuing to be removed from public schools and libraries.)

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But perhaps the most troubling aspect of Mangione’s story is not what he read, but when he stopped reading. By 2023, his activity on Goodreads had dwindled significantly. As A.O. Scott notes in The New York Times (in an article that I will also mention was categorized as a “Book Review”), reading often serves as a moderating force, a way to engage with challenging ideas without acting on them. Immersion in a book provides a safe space for exploration, a buffer between thought and deed. When the books close, however, and the boundaries between isolation and ideology blur, what remains?

Mangione’s story resists simple conclusions. Was his reading a catalyst for violence or merely a symptom of broader discontent? Did it radicalize him, or was it a passive reflection of his intellectual wanderings? Or did he just forget to log the reads that followed, and eventually decided, as even the most enamored Goodreads user does every so often, to just log in again later? There are many, many questions left in this case. But for the moment, it feels like one thing has emerged as fact already: Goodreads has evolved beyond its role as a literary platform. Maybe not during this week exclusively. Maybe it evolved from the moment it was brought into this world. Either way, I think it has always served as a cultural archive, a repository of the ways we seek, process, and share ideas. In many ways, it even has a similar position to Substack. But now, it’s no longer just reviews between friends. Or at least, that’s not how many of its longtime users, including me, see it. What we read, write, and think online lives in the real world.

And in this case, these ideas underscore the lasting power of literature—not just to provoke thought, but to incite debate about its very role in society.

As a reminder, “Reading List” is posted every other Thursday, in addition to my weekly Tuesday essays. This is a fun and personalized space for me to answer reader questions, share what I’ve been reading, and discuss my research process for my essays and other writing projects.

Without further ado…

Reading List - Issue 01

On Love

This week’s featured reading is the poem, “To Go to Lvov,” by Adam Zagajewski.

To go to Lvov. Which station
for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew   
gleams on a suitcase, when express
trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave   
in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September   
or in March. But only if Lvov exists,
if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just   
in my new passport, if lances of trees
—of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud   
like Indians, and if streams mumble
their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs   
in the Russian language disappear
into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave   
without a trace, at noon, to vanish
like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green   
armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas   
of a Venetian café, the snails converse
about eternity. But the cathedral rises,
you remember, so straight, as straight
as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket   
full of raspberries standing on the floor, and   
my desire which wasn’t born yet,
only gardens and weeds and the amber
of Queen Anne cherries, and indecent Fredro.   
There was always too much of Lvov, no one could   
comprehend its boroughs, hear
the murmur of each stone scorched
by the sun, at night the Orthodox church’s silence was unlike
that of the cathedral, the Jesuits
baptized plants, leaf by leaf, but they grew,
grew so mindlessly, and joy hovered   
everywhere, in hallways and in coffee mills   
revolving by themselves, in blue   
teapots, in starch, which was the first   
formalist, in drops of rain and in the thorns
of roses. Frozen forsythia yellowed by the window.   
The bells pealed and the air vibrated, the cornets   
of nuns sailed like schooners near   
the theater, there was so much of the world that
it had to do encores over and over,
the audience was in frenzy and didn’t want
to leave the house. My aunts couldn’t have known   
yet that I’d resurrect them,   
and lived so trustfully; so singly;   
servants, clean and ironed, ran for   
fresh cream, inside the houses   
a bit of anger and great expectation, Brzozowski   
came as a visiting lecturer, one of my   
uncles kept writing a poem entitled Why,
dedicated to the Almighty, and there was too much   
of Lvov, it brimmed the container,   
it burst glasses, overflowed   
each pond, lake, smoked through every   
chimney, turned into fire, storm,   
laughed with lightning, grew meek,   
returned home, read the New Testament,
slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug,
there was too much of Lvov, and now   
there isn’t any, it grew relentlessly
and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners   
as always in May, without mercy,   
without love, ah, wait till warm June
comes with soft ferns, boundless
fields of summer, i.e., the reality.
But scissors cut it, along the line and through   
the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors
cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked   
diligently, as in a child’s cutout
along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan.   
Scissors, penknives, and razor blades scratched,   
cut, and shortened the voluptuous dresses
of prelates, of squares and houses, and trees
fell soundlessly, as in a jungle,
and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye   
without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry
mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death   
awaits you, why must every city
become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.

Lvov—a city the poet was born into and exiled from in the same year, 1945—is not just a backdrop. It is a being, an obsession, a sacred site of memory, rendered with such tender precision it aches. To Zagajewski, Lvov is everything: mythic, sensuous, irrepressible. “There was too much of Lvov, and now there isn’t any.”

Lvov, Lvov, Lvov—love. To go to Lvov is to go to love.

This is a poem of loss, but equally, it is a poem of reclamation. The brutal force of expulsion—the poet’s family, the city’s Polish and Jewish populations, the cutting violence of borders—is transformed in Zagajewski’s hands into a frantic, almost mystical return. But what he returns to is not the city itself (how could he?). Instead, he conjures a dreamscape where “snails converse about eternity” and “streams mumble their dark Esperanto.” In Lvov, everything is alive, distinct, singular: “a bucket full of raspberries,” “nuns that sailed like schooners,” “starch, which was the first formalist.”

The poet loves it all, fiercely and without hesitation. His determination gives us a way in. Through his words, we, too, go to Lvov.

To read it is to feel the world brim over, once again.

(I recommend reading Colm Tóibín's reflections on Adam Zagajewski's poetry, which offers an insightful lens through which to appreciate To Go to Lvov. You can read his full piece in The Guardian here.)

On Bullshit

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.” — “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant” by David Graeber for Strike Magazine (2013)

As a graduating senior, I’ve been putting off applying for jobs until January, hoping the excitement of the new year will outweigh my dread of entering the workforce. It’s not that I fear working—in fact, I’ve been eager to begin this essential contribution to society for much of my life. At 16, I started my own marketing agency. In college, I’ve held key roles in operations, sales, and marketing at various tech companies. When I moved from Boston to Palo Alto, I couldn’t wait to work 15-hour days at startups, dedicating myself to the idea of changing the world through entrepreneurship. I saw it as a direct way to solve problems. In Silicon Valley, work seems to have the same appeal as sex.

But now, I find myself questioning how much of the work we do is truly essential. I often joke with friends that it’s rare to find someone genuinely specialized in their industry these days. Many of the most sought-after roles in business are managerial and administrative—sending emails, writing documents, sending emails with those documents, and then meeting to discuss those emails and documents. If most of our time is spent on these tasks, does it matter as much what industry we’re in?

The best managers, of course, need strong instincts for their industry and a deep understanding of what their teams—whether engineers, designers, or marketers—actually do and why it matters. But at the end of the day, their specialization is in managing. And that makes me wonder: Are jobs specialized by industry or by function? If it’s the latter, what does that mean for how we relate to work?

I’m not asking this to accuse or criticize—I’m genuinely curious. If our roles are increasingly defined by function rather than the industries we inhabit, how does that shift our sense of purpose, value, or connection to the work we do?

I like the way Graeber pushes this question (you may read the full essay here):

“Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.” — “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant” by David Graeber for Strike Magazine (2013)

On Bullshit, Part II

“‘This Is Happines’” chronicles the arrival of electricity in the small Irish village of Faha in 1958, an event that splits the lives of the citizens into the periods of before and after. ‘I think I understood too that I was living in the vestige of a world whose threads were all the time blowing away,’ the young narrator says of when the man came to sell them fine appliances that could be purchased in advance of electricity’s arrival, ‘and some blew away right then ….’

“Cellphones were the worst idea in the world as far as I was concerned. My stepfather had made my mother carry a pager when I was growing up, and when it beeped she had to find a pay phone and see what he wanted. What he wanted was to know where she was, a bad habit that intensified after cellphones came around.

Cellphones were a means of making a person trackable. I wasn’t falling for that. The few flip phones I’ve had in my life died ignoble, uncharged deaths in the backs of dresser drawers. For a while I had a phone the size of a credit card that served as the GPS for my car, but whoever broke into my car took the phone, so that was that. I wish the person luck trying to figure it out.

Email was a different story. Email was mail, and I loved the mail. In my youth, I ran to the box to see if there might be an envelope whose contents would change the course of my life — an acceptance letter, a love letter, a check. What was email but the chance for more friends, more love, more work? I signed up as enthusiastically as the women of Faha signed up for electric stoves, with no idea that my life was about to crack into the hemispheres of before and after.” — “The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret” by Ann Patchett for the New York Times (2024)

My thesis takes a look at how the way we communicate in the Information Age—that is, through texts, emails, calls, and feeds—is entering the way we write and read. This essay by Ann Patchett is a funny and heartfelt reflection on how one of those ways—email—has become so pervasive in our lives that it has become an accepted but increasingly difficult truth.

The truth is:

I’ve made deals with myself about how often I can check. But here’s the thing: They keep on coming regardless of whether or not I look. Taking a day off from email means sitting up for hours at night, digging myself out. I go to bed to find my husband and dog already asleep. I have missed them.

This period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is one of the worst times in email. There are so many emails—marketing of all kinds (which Graeber would argue as unnecessary perhaps in both function and form), updates and invitations, and just the usual junk that fills our inboxes, and by extension, our lives. I check my school email everyday, but I check my personal email more infrequently as a result. This is because I have actual things to respond to and add to my calendar in my school email (because those emails are community-based and usually result in real, physical action, like attending an event or turning in an assignment). During breaks, I rarely check my personal email, beyond whatever is in my primary inbox (and thus results in a notification on my phone). This puts me in the kind of situation I was in today: I deleted almost 5,000 emails. This was the accumulation of just two weeks of not checking!

In what world do 5,000 people/entities (because of course, the emails are mostly from companies) genuinely have something to say to me? In what world do I have something worthwhile to contribute back or respond with to all 5,000 of these emails?

I guess it’s this one.

On Love, Again

Because love is always a good note to end on.

I recently learned to play the card game Canasta, taught to me by my boyfriend’s family (canine members pictured above). We played in a group of five, but not in teams—each of us played for ourselves, which I’ve since learned might not be the traditional way to play. Still, it made the game more lively and competitive. The goal of Canasta is simple: collect sets of cards called melds and aim for a clean and dirty canasta—seven cards of the same rank without a wild card and then six with one. Once someone wins, you tally up the points from all the melds and announce who has the most.

Did I fall in love with this game because I won every round we played over Thanksgiving break? Perhaps. But honestly, Canasta is just fun—and a great way to spend an evening. Playing without teams turned it into a lively mix of strategy and friendly rivalry, full of laughs over lucky draws and perfectly timed plays. It’s the kind of game that keeps everyone engaged while leaving plenty of room for conversation and connection. Most of all, it draws you in completely, demanding your full attention and presence in a way that feels rare and refreshing in the otherwise busy time that is the end of the year.

If you’re looking for something new to try, I can’t recommend this game enough. You can read the instructions for playing here. And if you’re anything like my boyfriend’s family, remember: the game tends to take on a life of its own. 1. It’s easier to learn as you play, and 2. Don’t worry too much about sticking to the “official” rules. Your game, your way!

Thank you for reading my first installment of “Reading List!” I am excited to keep this series up and see how it grows and expands over time. Some weeks may have more readings—others may just stick with three or four, like today. In any case, expect something fun every other week.

Beyond this inaugural post, “Reading List” is available exclusively to paid subscribers. If you’ve enjoyed this installment, I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber to support this blog. Your subscription not only helps this series grow but also offers a chance to form a more personal connection with my work and the ideas I share here.

Dear Reader,

I first shared my writing here two years ago, but I didn’t start posting consistently until this past August. My first two Substack essays were born in a class I took with Laura Goode at Stanford on the evolution of first-person feminist essays. At the time, I felt confident, supported by a kick-ass teacher, a great syllabus, and a classroom full of engaged peers. I decided to publish my class papers as public essays. But when the course ended, so did my confidence—I quickly lost my nerve. Even so, that fall, studying storied essayists like , Jia Tolentino, and had planted something secret and restless in me: the desire to write—prolifically and meaningfully—online.

What drew me to Substack was the opportunity not just to self-publish, but to grow and expand through my writing. I think all writers put pen to paper for the possibility of igniting something in others, for that off-shoot chance that someone might be interested in what we have to say and start a conversation or new idea.

When I chose the asterisk as the logomark for NMG, I saw it as more than a symbol for annotation or clarification. It is a spark—the moment of reaction, where separate elements collide to create something new. On a larger scale, that reaction becomes a bright, burning explosion. I updated my tagline yesterday to reflect this idea.

New Material Girl is where language, culture, and the internet collide:

From the start, I envisioned NMG as a space to observe and experiment with these interactions, unraveling them with curiosity and care. I want my writing to be a kind of lab—where language and lived experience meet and evolve—guided not just by me, but by thoughtful readers like you. Thanks to your support, that vision is coming to life.

As of today, we’re a community of over a hundred readers strong, including a few subscribers who believe enough in this work to support it financially. Thank you. Your engagement, comments, and shares mean more than I can say.

Within this group of readers is Susan Plunket, a talented writer, wonderful friend, and the first person ever to pay me for my writing. We met at a summer writing program in July. Over dining hall meals, we discussed Carl Jung’s work and encountering our alternate selves in our dreams. I wondered then if I would ever meet the version of myself that wrote.

When I received my first paid subscription, I was elated, surprised, and a little overwhelmed. I hadn’t thought much about how to expand NMG or what the next steps might be. At the time, I was still figuring out if writing this blog made me a writer (I’m being serious). But over the past few weeks, I’ve reflected on how I can offer more here. Inspired by the interest and support from readers like Susan, I’m excited to announce a new addition: exclusive content for paid subscribers every other Thursday, alongside my regular Tuesday essays. As I wrote on my updated About page:

“I believe in the public humanities—the idea that academic work should live in the world, not within the confines of ivy-covered walls. I post an essay every Tuesday and a paid-only exclusive every other Thursday. On principle, my essays themselves will always remain free and accessible to all—because ideas should be shared widely. However, by becoming a paid subscriber, you can help sustain my independent writing and keep my research public.

Here’s what paid subscribers will now receive:

• Exclusive Content:

  • Curated reading lists featuring the books, articles, and papers that inspire my essays.

  • Monthly AMAs to discuss linguistics, literary theory, or whatever else is on your mind.

  • Behind-the-scenes insights into my research and writing process.

• Subscriber-Only Chat: Connect with a community of curious, thoughtful readers.

My Substack currently offers monthly ($8/month), yearly ($80/year), and founding member ($100/year) subscription plans. In addition to all the benefits of being a paid subscriber, founding members will also receive an NMG care package—including witty stickers about materialism and a copy of a book I’ve explored on my blog, like Stoner by John Williams from this popular post.

I’ll begin rolling out these new expansions this week, but please don’t feel any pressure to become a paid subscriber if it’s not for you. I’ll continue publishing my (always free!) weekly reflections on literature and language because I love sharing these ideas with you. These additional content offerings will simply open up more possibilities for my overall research and writing.

I often return to this quote by Mary MacLane in her book, I Await The Devil’s Coming:

“But none of them, nor any one, can know the feeling made of relief and pain and despair that comes over me at the thought of sending all this to the wise wide world. It is bits of my wooden heart broken off and given away. It is strings of amber beads taken from the fair neck of my soul. It is shining little gold coins from out of my mind’s red leather purse. It is my little old life-tragedy. It means everything to me. Do you see?—it means everything to me.”

MacLane’s words remind me that every essay I write, and every idea I share, is a piece of myself offered to the world. That’s what New Material Girl means to me. And I’m so grateful you’re here to witness it, engage with it, and share in it.

Sincerely,
Ellen

The midnight drive to Yosemite stretches out like the Russian winter—long and unyielding. My boyfriend and I are listening to The Deserter, Sarah Topol’s gripping story for The New York Times. Over the course of a year and a half, Topol interviewed eighteen Russian military deserters, and now we hear “Ivan” and his chilling account of escaping Russia’s military machine. Driven by survival, he flees a system where soldiers—many recently conscripted civilians—are counted, used, and discarded as cannon fodder in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In the quiet of the road, Ivan’s story reminds me of another grim narrative: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a proto-novel of London’s 1665 plague, where lives, too, are tallied, reduced, and discarded.

When Journal was published in the early 18th century, fiction and fact were still unsettled territories in literature. Written fifty-seven years after the actual plague, which took place when Defoe himself was only a child, Journal presents itself as an eyewitness account—a detailed chronicle of survival narrated by “H.F.” Readers often mistake Defoe’s fictional works for historical documents. Defoe’s use of specific dates and locations lends it the feeling of authenticity, of fact.

Defoe’s approach stirred controversy, and even now, critics debate its nature. Is Journal a novel, a documentary, or something in between? In an era fixated on “truth,” Defoe complicates this pursuit by placing a fictional narrator in a real setting, inviting us to trust H.F. as a detached yet reliable witness. And he does seem very reliable—one of Journal’s most famous aspects is its obsession with death tolls. H.F. compiles daily fatalities with bureaucratic precision. Readers, too, are drawn into this fascination with numbers, abstract figures that stand in for real lives, even if Defoe fictionalizes them. This style raises questions: does documentation help us confront suffering, or does it desensitize us? By blurring fact and fiction, Defoe forces us to consider whether any “true” account of suffering is possible—or whether we simply seek order amid chaos, story amid reflection.

In The Deserter, journalist Sarah Topol repeatedly reminds us of the Russian cynicism that enables this same detached survival. There’s a Russian idiom—“и рыбки съесть, и на хуй сесть,” or “to eat fish and sit on the dick”—that parallels the Western saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” For many civilians in Russia, ignoring the war, regardless of their opinions about it, is an act of survival, a way to carry on with their lives without confronting its brutal realities. This mentality is baked into Russian culture, tracing back to the Soviet era, as journalist Kristaps Andrejsons argues in Foreign Policy. Apathy and survival have long been inseparable strategies for the average Russian, conditioned over decades of political repression and control, reinforced by propaganda, and nurtured by a sense of distance from the world. Suffering often feels individual, rather than whole.

Ivan tells Topol that this cynicism is institutionalized even within the Russian military, where accountability is often a performance rather than a reality. The infamous “photo report,” for example, requires soldiers to submit photographic evidence of daily tasks to stay accountable to their superiors. Yet instead of creating transparency, soldiers simply falsify these photos—either by posing or with editing—forging an efficient yet empty record that commanders accept to complete their own hundreds of pages of paperwork. When Putin initiated the war, these fabricated assurances likely contributed to his perception of a strong, combat-ready military. Instead, he inherited an institution hollowed by years of illusion—now sending Russia’s best Photoshoppers to the front lines.

It’s tempting to look at stories like Ivan’s with incredulity. But the problem goes beyond any single system or nation. In the Old Testament, King David sins by counting his people and takes the first census to gauge his military might. 

This counting is a violation. By reducing people to numbers and potential military units, David presumes a control reserved for the divine, and this transgression invites cosmic retribution. The Lord offers David three punishments, and he chooses the three-day plague. Seventy thousand people die. Only after this devastation does David atone by building an altar. Enumeration brings ruin rather than reassurance.

I’ve never been a religious person, and with everything happening in the world, it certainly feels more godless than ever. But we all need sources of inspiration to survive. In The Deserter, Ivan remarks that he joined the Russian military as a young man because it promised honor and purpose—a chance to serve something greater than himself. Instead, he found a system held together by fear rather than unity. Russian soldiers are labeled “200s” upon death. Many of these “200s” are young platoon leaders, thrown into battle unprepared, while careerist officers stay safely in the rear, sending soldiers into combat without intelligence, supplies, or a second thought.

Yet cruelty has always been embedded in the Russian military. In the Soviet Army, a lack of professional noncommissioned officers led to dedovshchina, a brutal hazing system where senior conscripts, or deds (“grandfathers”), tormented first-years. Although service time has since been shortened and this hierarchy officially dismantled, the war has revived the same savagery. Attempts at reform have done little to change the culture of wartime command.

And so the Russian census of death continues, even as the toll rises. As of October 1, over 654,000 Russian personnel have died, while 133,000 new conscripts are called into service. Russia’s conscription policy now targets men ages 18 to 30 for a 12-month service in domestic military units. In contrast, Ukraine has refused to mobilize men aged 18-25, out of caution for its population and the fact that most men in that age range have not had children yet. Ukraine has also withheld its casualty numbers, possibly to protect its people from the dehumanizing impact of tallying their own dead or to deny Russia the means to quantify its losses. In any case, this absence of numbers forces Russia to continue sending civilians-turned-soldiers into battle, bloating body counts without any real reckoning of the toll.

The Russian body politic, like Defoe’s London, is broken by its own cold calculations.

At the end of The Deserter, Topol notes that the true scale of desertion is impossible to know. Mediazona, an independent Russian investigative outlet in exile, reports nearly 7,400 AWOL cases in military courts since mobilization began in 2022, but experts agree this represents only a fraction of those trying to escape. As authorities tighten restrictions, most deserters receive suspended sentences, allowing them to return to base, apologize, and be sent back to the front. The true number is likely far higher, as many officers avoid officially reporting AWOL cases to avoid reprimands for losing track of their men.

At the end of Journal, the narrator H.F. also pulls back from his account. But he is reluctant to delve into what he calls the “unpleasing work of reflecting” on the behavior of survivors. He notes that he “should be counted censorious, and perhaps unjust” if he were to dwell on “the unthankfulness and return of all manner of wickedness” he witnessed in the aftermath of the plague—a time when people, spared by the epidemic, seemed to abandon their newfound humility and turn back to vice. For H.F., the tragedy of survival is not only the memory of loss but the disillusionment that comes with seeing people quickly revert to their old ways, forgetting the lessons hardship should have taught them. In his final, haunting stanza, he concludes:

“A dreadful plague in London was

In the year sixty-five,

Which swept an hundred thousand souls

Away; yet I alive!”

Ivan’s story in The Deserter echoes this cycle. Like H.F., he is a survivor, marked by a system that sees him as expendable. His desertion represents an attempt to escape the machine, but he knows he cannot escape a society that treats him as a statistic. His survival, like H.F.’s, comes with a harsh realization: in the eyes of his country, his life holds no intrinsic worth. 

As we drive through the wilderness, the trees are impossible to separate from each other in the dark mass of midnight. I wonder: Why do we keep counting? Perhaps Defoe saw the answer—or at least the consequences—in the plague. King David certainly saw it.

Plague, war, and census show what happens when we reduce human life to numbers. We gain order, perhaps, but we also fragment, break down, and collapse. Listening to The Deserter on this quiet road in the Sierras, far from Russia, England, or any war, I realize we keep telling this story because we keep living it. Each generation, it seems, must confront the consequences of counting—and remember that humanity is whole only when shared.

Discussions around “copying” in writing have surged across the Internet in recent months—writers copying other writers, AI copying writers, and even AI copying itself. As technology becomes more adept at replicating human creativity and skill, the boundary between inspiration and imitation grows increasingly indistinct, raising anxieties for many creators. , the writer behind Certified, recently captured this frustration in her viral series, “Steal like a Substack Writer:” “Don’t get me wrong, [Substack] is definitely a place to be inspired... But maybe that’s just me. With so much information available on social media, we all want to stand out, we all want to write the next most original thing... but not everyone can be."

Amanda’s concerns reflect deeper questions that creators face in the online writing age: How do we maintain originality? How do we protect our work?

For many writers like myself, Amanda, and others, copying isn’t just an abstract crime—it’s personal. “You’re not stealing from a huge corporation that doesn’t care if you live or die, you’re stealing from a human being,” she writes. Plagiarism strikes a particularly painful chord in spaces like Substack, where posts often feel intimate. But perhaps the problem isn’t just about theft or a lack of creativity. Perhaps it’s about how we approach writing itself.

What if, instead of clinging to the notion that writing must be inherently original, we embraced the idea that all writing is part of a larger conversation? The French literary theorist, Roland Barthes, argued in his famous essay, “The Death of the Author,” that a text is not the product of a singular genius but a tapestry woven from multiple sources and influences. A text, he claims, only comes to life through the reader’s interpretation, making them an active participant in creating meaning. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, builds on this idea with his concept of the “author-function,” suggesting that authorship is not an individual trait but a social construct shaped by the culture surrounding a text.

In other words, authors don’t exist in isolation—whether in academia or on platforms like Substack. Their authority is shaped by how their work interacts with the world, and by how they respond to, critique, and build upon what has come before. This is especially true on the Internet, where ideas are constantly shared, retweeted, and reblogged—writing is inherently part of an ongoing exchange. Ideas are, thus, constantly also reshaped, refined, and pushed forward. This process isn’t unique to the Information Age; it’s the fundamental movement of human intellectual history, the very essence of literary criticism and academic inquiry.

This was emphasized to me recently in a seminar led by Professor Alice Staveley (hello, Professor Staveley! Thank you for reading!), the director of Stanford’s English honors thesis program. She introduced me and my cohort to the scholar, Mark Gaipa, and his essay, “Breaking into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority for Their Writing,” which outlines how writers of all levels and backgrounds can participate in critical dialogue. Its content is modeled after the approach Gaipa took with his undergraduates at Harvard for almost a decade, who, like me, are often reading and writing criticism for the very first time. I have long wondered: Who gets to be a critic? What is their importance and relevance?

Perhaps that is why Gaipa is quick to emphasize that authority in writing doesn’t come from being the most original voice in the room, but from how well one engages with others. As Gaipa puts it, “authority is less a characteristic than a relationship that a writer has with other authors.” This shift in thinking is especially relevant in digital spaces like Substack, where credibility is built not through formal qualifications but through meaningful participation.

Writers gain authority by leaning in—by actively responding, critiquing, and building on the work of others.

However, the structure of Substack lends itself to a unique challenge. The platform is primarily home to blog posts and newsletter entries, which makes sense given its format. But when cultural space starts to feel limited and authority becomes a form of social capital, as Amanda points out in her essays, it’s crucial to understand how true authority is established—not through social or cultural means, but through the writing itself.

I believe that every piece of writing I produce should stand alone, regardless of whether someone has read my previous work or not. This approach makes my work more accessible and shareable, and thus a powerful growth engine. It is also good practice for me—while I hope to publish in the academic world, my primary interest is writing for the public, whether in magazines or social media forums.

So, how do we actually start doing this? Fortunately, Gaipa outlines several strategies for engaging in critical conversation. For instance, there’s the all too familiar strategy of “picking a fight,” where a writer confronts a critic’s argument head-on, dismantling it to make room for their own. This approach can be thrilling but risky—especially if the writer is up against a more formidable critic. At the other end of the spectrum is the “ass-kissing” strategy, where a writer aligns closely with an established critic, essentially borrowing their credibility. While this can lend legitimacy, it can also stifle the writer’s own voice.

Gaipa offers a more balanced alternative: “piggybacking.” Instead of simply agreeing with a critic, the writer extends the argument, pushing it in a new direction. This allows the writer to contribute while respecting the work that came before, which is the strategy I am employing with this very essay. In general, though, one of the most effective and common strategies is “leapfrogging,” where a writer praises a critic’s work but identifies a gap or flaw that only their argument can address. This tactic, both collaborative and critical, is particularly useful for writers engaging with timely cultural or political debates. By pointing out what others have missed, a writer can position themselves as both insightful and critical.

“Crossbreeding” is another key strategy, especially in the digital space where interdisciplinary thinking thrives. This approach involves injecting new perspectives into a conversation, often by drawing on other fields or offering fresh takes on familiar issues. Substack, with its wide range of topics, provides fertile ground for this kind of innovation. Writers who “crossbreed” ideas from various disciplines not only expand the conversation but also position themselves as thought leaders. I suppose I am a bit biased toward this strategy because interdisciplinary methods are always at the heart of all my writing, from my ongoing thesis to the very blog you’re currently reading. My background in both English and linguistics shapes how I approach texts of all kinds, allowing me to see intersections between language and literature that might otherwise go unnoticed if I were familiar with only one discipline. I try to let my audience into both fields and aspire to offer them richer takes because of it.

Gaipa also introduces other strategies, like “playing peacemaker” (resolving conflicts between critics) and “acting paranoid” (arguing that everyone is wrong). Each of these strategies encourages writers to situate themselves in relation to other voices, acknowledging that authority is built not by standing apart but by thoughtfully responding to what has come before.

I personally have yet to have any issues with copying—I am honored anytime someone even “restacks” (the Substack version of reposting) a piece of my writing. I want to be part of the—or really, any—conversation. And honestly, I think anyone who writes on Subtack does so because they are drawn to the socialness of this platform. Writing is lonely. But writing is not a solitary act—it’s built on relationships between texts, writers, and ideas. Understanding writing as part of a conversation allows us to move beyond the anxiety of copying or imitation and embrace a more collaborative, fluid approach to creativity.

It is this engagement that gives writing its lasting power.

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It’s mid-October 2024, which can only mean one thing in certain circles: it’s Sally Rooney season. If past Rooney novels like Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You ignited discussion, Intermezzo has solidified something more profound: a decentralized, democratic form of literary criticism. What’s remarkable about this wave is that the response is no longer just academic or journalistic. Instead, it’s happening in real-time on Substack and social media, where reflection replaces the traditional review, and the private act of reading becomes a collective performance.

We aren’t just reading Sally Rooney; we’re reading people reading Sally Rooney.

This phenomenon of decentralized literary criticism is worth examining, particularly in how it seems to invite a new form of voyeurism—one that exists not just in Rooney’s text but in how people read and write about her work. When recently dedicated an entire digest to Intermezzo, featuring multiple reflections from various readers, it wasn’t merely a collection of reviews but a snapshot of an emerging, dynamic form of cultural discourse. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Rooney (either very good, very bad, or very mild), and those opinions form an intricate web of interpretations that bypass the gatekeeping of traditional literary criticism. The conversation is no longer confined to academic journals or prestigious publications; it thrives in self-published essays, social media posts, and reflections that blur the line between criticism and personal confession.

Decentralized literary criticism functions as a network of responses, where there is no single authoritative voice but a chorus of perspectives that influence each other in real-time. It is inherently democratic—anyone can participate—and it blurs the boundaries between professional and amateur, public and private. This is a critical departure from the top-down model of literary criticism, where critics shape the discourse. Instead, readers shape the discourse themselves, not merely as passive consumers of literature but as active agents in interpreting it. In this way, Rooney's reception becomes more about the experience of being part of something—something larger than the text itself. As writes on Substack, “It’s so exciting to feel part of something, Sally Rooney Season, where everyone is reading and discussing her books in a spirited, invested fashion.” Here, we see the shift from individual reading to communal engagement, where the act of reading becomes something more performative, a participatory cultural ritual.

But there is, perhaps, also a murkier element lurking beneath this cultural fervor—one that I would argue is fundamentally voyeuristic. Voyeurism, in its most basic sense, involves deriving pleasure from observing others without their knowledge or consent. Sigmund Freud famously linked voyeurism, or scopophilia, to a form of sexual pleasure, rooted in the desire to look and derive satisfaction from looking without being seen. In Sally Rooney’s novels, this dynamic plays out not only between characters (Marianne and Connell…) but between readers and text, and between readers and other readers.

Rooney’s novels are exercises in intimacy and distance, where characters' most private thoughts are laid bare for us to observe. Her narrative style—famously minimal, often lacking discourse markers—heightens this voyeuristic effect. Readers are invited to peer into the unsaid, to fill in the emotional gaps between her characters' interactions. This act of filling in those gaps feels like a form of eavesdropping, an invasion of privacy. We are privy to her characters’ inner lives in ways they themselves are often not, and this creates a sense of voyeuristic power. The reader becomes an observer, watching these characters navigate their complex emotions, miscommunications, and unspoken desires, without intervening. And this position is inherently pleasurable: we can witness their lives, their messiness, from a safe distance, insulated from their consequences.

But this voyeurism extends beyond the relationship between reader and text. In the era of decentralized literary criticism, we now engage in a more reflexive kind of voyeurism—one where we are not only watching Rooney’s characters but watching other readers watch Rooney’s characters. Lacan’s concept of the gaze is helpful here. In Lacan’s theory, the gaze is not simply about seeing but about the awareness of being seen. When we engage with Rooney’s work in public forums like Substack, we are not just performing the private act of reading. We are hyper-aware that others are reading alongside us, and that our reflections on the text are being consumed by others. This creates a feedback loop of observation, where we are both the watchers and the watched.

Take, for instance, the response from , who points out, “[A]t this point her haters are also fans because they talk about her so much.” The constant discourse around Rooney—whether positive or negative—reflects this dynamic. Even those who critique Rooney are drawn into the same system of observation and performance. They watch her work, scrutinize it, and participate in a public conversation about it, aware that their critiques are being observed by others in turn. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of looking and being looked at, of reading and being read, that reflects Lacan’s assertion that desire is always mediated by the gaze of the Other.

Foucault’s concept of the panopticon—a structure where individuals are constantly aware that they might be under surveillance, and therefore regulate their own behavior accordingly—further illuminates this dynamic. In Intermezzo, Rooney’s characters are often caught in cycles of self-surveillance, questioning how they are perceived by others, and attempting to manage those perceptions. But this extends to the readerly experience as well. In our today’s digital landscape, where platforms like Substack encourage public reflection, readers are constantly aware that their interpretations are subject to close examination. This post is a living, breathing example of it! We perform our readings knowing that others will be reading our reflections, much like prisoners in the panopticon regulate their actions, aware they might be observed at any moment.

I particularly resonate with ’s reflection of “[thinking] of [the characters] when I wasn’t reading the book.” This comment captures the inescapable nature of Rooney’s world. Her characters, like the readers themselves, are consumed by observation—both of others and of themselves. The pleasure we derive from Rooney’s novels is not just in watching her characters, but in knowing that others are watching with us. It’s a communal form of voyeurism, where the boundaries between reader and text, observer and observed, blur.

This brings us back to the notion of decentralized literary criticism. In traditional criticism, the critic occupies a position of authority, standing apart from the text to offer a considered, objective assessment. But in Rooney’s reception, the reader is no longer a detached observer. Instead, they become part of the text’s cultural life, engaging with it publicly, and performing their interpretations for others. The private act of reading becomes a public spectacle, a form of social participation where the lines between reader, critic, and character dissolve.

In the end, this new form of decentralized literary criticism represents a shift in how we engage with literature. We are no longer content to read in isolation. We want to watch, and we want to be watched. Rooney’s work, with its intricate depiction of human relationships, invites this kind of engagement. Her novels are not just stories; they are mirrors, reflecting back to us our own impulses, our desire to be part of something larger, our need to be seen as readers and thinkers in a digital landscape where everything is up for scrutiny.

In this performance of reading, we are no longer just consuming literature—we are consuming each other.

"The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly."

-John Williams in “Stoner”

There are certain books that slip into your life unexpectedly. Stoner by John Williams is one of those books for me—a modest, unassuming novel that, recently, profoundly altered how I think about learning, literature, and the role of education. Although it has been reprinted in many “classic” editions, it still feels like a hidden gem, a novel that hasn’t fully found its place in the traditional literary canon. This is surprising, given how masterfully it captures something so essential: the solemn, powerful discovery of self that happens only through reading, writing, and intellectual engagement. It’s not just about learning facts or advancing one’s career—it’s about the transformation that occurs when a person truly dedicates themselves to a life of the mind.

Stoner begins with William Stoner, a farm boy who stumbles into higher education almost by accident. He enrolls at university to study agriculture, but instead finds himself gradually captivated by literature. His introduction to this new world is anything but smooth. Initially, rather than feeling awed by Shakespeare and the humanities, he seems overwhelmed, almost too naive for it all. He becomes so consumed by the demands of his first English course that he barely sleeps, drained physically and emotionally. Yet, what appears at first to be a struggle is actually the beginning of a love affair—one that will quietly reshape the course of his life. Stoner's discovery of literature doesn’t happen in a grand or dramatic moment; instead, it unfolds slowly, through a series of small, mundane awakenings. His love for literature becomes the core of his identity, though it offers him little in the way of worldly success. This narrative resonates deeply with me, particularly as a first-generation American college student from a lower-middle-class background.

In my family, higher education carried the weight of expectation: it was a practical means to a more secure life. College was supposed to be a step toward financial stability, a ticket to a better job. And yet, like Stoner, I found something much deeper and more transformative in the classroom. For the first few years of college, I worked 20 to 30 hours a week to support myself, balancing coursework with financial necessity. It wasn’t until I finally stopped working those extra hours and allowed myself to focus fully on my studies that I began to experience the true luxury of learning. To sit in a classroom, surrounded by ideas, engaged with texts, not for what they could get me but for what they could teach me—this was a kind of freedom I hadn’t fully realized I could have.

This luxury of learning is something that Stoner captures so well, but it is also something that feels increasingly rare. Recently, I read Steven Tagle’s letter in the Dear Stanford project, and I was struck with awe as I learned about the kinds of relationships students once had with their lecturers. Tagle recounts how the Jones Lecturers and Stegner Fellows at Stanford were more than just teachers—they were mentors, collaborators, and friends in the truest sense. He describes taking intimate, hands-on workshops, working one-on-one with lecturers to shape his novel, attending readings they hosted in San Francisco, and even being welcomed into their homes. These lecturers did far more than teach—they cultivated a creative community, supported their students with genuine care, and embodied what a life dedicated to writing could look like.

Reading about these experiences, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss. As Tagle described exchanging emails with lecturers he never even formally studied with, or being congratulated by a former professor on his MFA acceptance years after graduating, I thought about how rare those kinds of relationships have become in the post-COVID college experience. As a senior today, it feels like the stuff of legends. The connection Tagle and his peers had with their lecturers, where education extended beyond the classroom into genuine intellectual and creative companionship, is a kind of academic life I had always dreamed of but have only occasionally glimpsed, despite my many efforts to reach out to professors, attend talks, and utilize the university’s resources, including grants and fellowships. This is especially so because I spent so much time early in college working, my eyes already set on the endless horizon of labor. I regret it. I now see that the truest value of education is not transactional but relational, built through slow, deliberate engagement over time.

Stoner experiences something similar in the novel. His passion for literature, once discovered, becomes central to his life, even as the world around him fails to recognize its value. He remains steadfast in his dedication to teaching and scholarship, even when personal and professional challenges arise. This reserved dedication is at the heart of Stoner, and it’s what makes the novel so powerful. Stoner doesn’t become famous or wealthy or even loved, but he leads a life deeply committed to something that brings him meaning.

There’s something poignant about reading Stoner at a time when higher education is increasingly framed as a means to an end, a stepping stone toward financial success rather than an opportunity for intellectual and personal growth. This shift is not just a theoretical problem—it’s unfolding in real time at institutions like my own. The recent firing of the Jones Lecturers from Stanford’s creative writing program feels like an extension of this troubling trend. These lecturers, much like William Stoner, dedicated their careers to teaching and fostering a community of writers. They didn’t pursue this work for fame or fortune, but because they believed in the value of creative expression and intellectual exploration. Now, they’ve been dismissed in favor of a more “efficient” system, one that prioritizes economic calculations over the immeasurable worth of mentorship and intellectual engagement.

Stoner’s story, and the current situation at Stanford, reflect a broader crisis in higher education. When universities market themselves as stepping stones to careers, they strip away something fundamental: the belief that education is valuable in and of itself. The more we reduce higher education to a credentialing system, the more we lose sight of what makes it transformative. Yes, college can open doors to career opportunities, but its real gift lies in the space it creates for thinking deeply, exploring ideas, and discovering what matters to us beyond the pragmatic.

This fallacy—that education is merely preparation for work—is pervasive and dangerous. It leads to disillusionment when students realize that even the most successful careers often don’t satisfy the human need for intellectual and emotional fulfillment. Many forms of work, particularly in our current economy, feel antithetical to the human spirit, demanding more from us than we can give without offering much in return. In contrast, the kind of intellectual work that Stoner exemplifies—teaching, reading, writing, thinking—is not just valuable, but necessary for the cultivation of a life that feels meaningful.

In Stoner, we see the power of intellectual commitment, even in the face of a world that often undervalues it. Stoner’s life may seem small or uneventful to some, but it is rich with the kind of persistent dedication to learning that so many of us seek. As I reflect on my own experience, I find that the most profound moments of my education have been the ones where I was able to focus not on what my studies could do for me, but on what I could do within my studies—how they could expand my understanding of the world and my place in it.

In a time when universities are increasingly focused on profit and pragmatism, Stoner offers a reminder of what is truly at stake. Higher education, at its best, should not be about checking boxes or accumulating credentials—it should be about intellectual exploration, creating space for growth, and fostering the kind of deep, meaningful engagement with the world that makes life richer and more rewarding. It’s not just about preparing for the next step in life; it’s about learning how to live fully in the present.

This is what William Stoner’s life teaches us, and it’s what we stand to lose if we continue to treat education as a mere commodity. We need to protect the spaces where minds can flourish, curiosity can thrive, and learning is valued not for what it can produce, but for how it can transform us. Stoner may be a quiet novel, but its message is anything but—it’s a reminder that the life of the mind is not just important, but essential.

Last week, instead of publishing here, I wrote a letter to Stanford about its decision to fire the Jones Lecturers. Today, my second letter was published in The Mercury News, a local paper in the Bay Area. The following essay is an expansion on both of those pieces. 

On August 21, 2024, I watched Stanford’s undergraduate Creative Writing Program implode in real time. Twenty-three lecturers, who have dedicated collective decades to their students, were “future fired” over Zoom. It’s a Silicon Valley-style purge: efficient, precise, dispassionate. In the emails that followed, Stanford officials presented it as a return to "the original spirit" of the Jones Lectureships, designed as short-term extensions for the prestigious Stegner Fellows. No long-term commitments, no frills.

I’ve spent enough time in marketing and tech to recognize this type of language and behavior. It’s the same corporate-speak that dresses up firings as “transitions” and system failures as “opportunities for growth.” In a year where the humanities are withering nationwide, Stanford is making a statement. Writing is no longer sacred. It’s just a line item.

For most people, this is just another story about the “end of the English major,” as The New Yorker called it last year. But for me, it cuts much deeper. This isn’t just about a degree, or the fact that the best lecturers I’ve ever had won’t return next year. This is about what writing has come to mean when survival feels precarious. At Stanford, choosing to write is a choice to live.

Stanford sells itself as a machine for excellence: It churns out the engineers who build our apps, the venture capitalists who fund them, and the writers who are supposed to give it all meaning. But it’s an ecosystem driven by scarcity: Excellence, after all, needs losers. By the time I hit sophomore year, I felt like one of them.

I came to Stanford as a Management Science and Engineering major, desperate to translate the “dream” into a career that mattered. But the more I tried to contort myself into the ideal STEM student, the less of myself I recognized. After one particularly brutal set of midterms, I found myself on Wilbur Field, crying and screaming into the night because I could no longer see the point of it all. As I wrote in my letter to Stanford about the firings, “Higher education is an incredible opportunity—to attend the best university in the world is an immeasurable privilege. I could not reconcile with either opportunity or privilege because I thought that the point of college was to grow from good to great, to fashion myself into someone worthy of those two things.”

This is not just my story. It’s the story at Stanford. We lose students to suicide and we talk about mental health in emails with attached resource lists. We build apps to monitor our sleep while staying up late to meet impossible deadlines. And we wonder why we feel empty when the whole system is designed to keep us running in place.

At my lowest point, I enrolled in a creative writing class—Michael Shewmaker’s writing workshop. I had no intention of becoming a writer, but I needed a class I might actually enjoy. Something curious happened in that room: I started to feel like a person again. Writing was not a route to greatness, but a way back to myself. Words became a tether.

By the time I wrote my 50,000-word novel draft in Tom Kealey’s class last fall, two years after I almost gave up on Stanford and my life, I knew I couldn’t go back. This act of creating—of failing on the page, revising, trying again—was everything I needed. Stanford’s machine might still run at breakneck speed, but I had found a way to pause, to breathe.

Many students have been working with the Lecturers to create petitions, write letters, and mobilize. Yet Nicholas Jenkins, the Creative Writing Program’s director, recently responded to the backlash about the firings with a tone that’s hard to miss: the shift is about restoring the original purpose of the Jones Lectureships, he says. It’s not about money; it’s about values. Stegner Fellows, those emerging writers who come to campus for two years of fellowship, need more teaching opportunities. The Jones Lectureships were never meant to be careers.

Fair enough.

But here’s the thing: values shift. As I have learned through conversations with lecturers like Smith and Kealey, when Eavan Boland expanded the Creative Writing Program over her 20-year tenure, she understood that creative work isn’t about timelines. You don’t replace a seasoned lecturer who has guided hundreds of students through their personal and creative crises with a short-term fellow and expect the same results. And what the decision-makers at Stanford seem to ignore is that it’s not just about the number of classes offered; it’s about who’s teaching them. As Kealey noted in his coverage of the decision, between the ten senior professors that voted to fire their junior colleagues, they have taught only a collective 13 undergraduate classes in the last year (and 19 overall—so less than 2 classes taught per professor). In fact, one professor has taught only one undergraduate class in the last three years. In that same time, Kealey notes, ten Jones Lecturers would have taught at least 50 classes. 

Lecturers like Shewmaker, Kealey, and Hutchins don’t just offer instruction—they offer a way through the darkness that defines so much of the university experience. They are the people on the front lines of the undergraduate experience. 

Stanford’s decision to phase out long-term lecturers isn’t just an administrative move. It’s a signal: this university, like so many others, values what’s measurable—output, enrollment, funding—over what’s immeasurable. It’s easier to quantify the impact of a tech startup than to measure the impact of a book that saved a student’s life. But that doesn’t make the latter any less real.

For many students, including me, writing is survival. Without it, I wouldn’t have stayed. Writing gives us permission to be human in a world that demands perfection. In classrooms led by the very lecturers Stanford is phasing out, students find solace, connection, and hope. They are given space to ask the big, uncomfortable questions without being told to hurry up and code the solution, encouraging the deep inquiry and intellectual vitality that the university is founded upon.

At a time when mental health is at crisis levels, Stanford has the opportunity to lead—not just in innovation and tech, but in nurturing the human spirit. But instead of stepping up, the university is retreating, reducing writing to a temporary appointment, a stepping stone, a luxury.

I’m here because of the humanities and the lecturers who helped me understand that I wasn’t alone, that the page could hold my fear, my anger, my hope. Without writing, I wouldn’t have found a way to keep going. And I know I’m not the only one.

Choosing to write is choosing to live. If we continue to treat the humanities as disposable, what happens to the students who need those spaces to survive? What happens to the art, the stories, the lives we save along the way?

This isn’t just about the death of the English major. It’s about the death of something much bigger—the belief that writing matters, that storytelling can heal, that art isn’t just a hobby but a lifeline. It is the death of the student. If Stanford wants to be more than just a machine, it needs to remember that living isn’t about outputs. It’s about the moments we choose to create, even when the world tells us to stop.

Thank you for reading this piece. If you are interested in learning more, please follow along Tom Kealey’s Medium page! He has compiled the facts and a list of action items here. I highly recommend adding your name to the petition and sharing the news about the Jones Lecturers with whoever you can, especially other writers.

A few weeks ago, I saw the trailer for Afraid, a new movie where an AI named AIA is introduced to a family’s home. Although its purpose is to simplify tasks like ordering groceries and closing the lights, it begins to gradually assume the role of a third parent, manipulating the children into dangerous situations (like accessing the daughter’s nudes and sharing them with the entire school before staging a mass deletion) that only it can fix.

The movie has since come out and, apparently, it’s pretty bad. Yet the trailer, at least—the very premise of the movie—had me gripping the arms of my seat in the theatre. There was a moment when the AI asks the son if he wants to see what she and her friends look like—and it felt like a genuine jumpscare.

Afraid’s storyline resonates with the warnings of Yuval Noah Harari in his recent essay, “What Happens When the Bots Compete for Your Love?” Harari cautions that AI is shifting from a battle for attention to a battle for intimacy, manipulating human emotions through simulated relationships. In Afraid, this manipulation becomes so insidious that the children depend on the AI more than their actual parents, underscoring Harari’s concerns about how AI could reshape intimate human connections.

This theme also plays out in language, which, like relationships, can be a powerful tool for both connection and control. James N. Stanford, a professor of linguistics at Dartmouth, has spent part of his career studying the Sui community of southern China, focusing on dialect and quantitative analyses of language variation and change. His research helps us understand how language is deeply tied to identity and family, and how dialects serve as markers of social belonging and power. A detailed analysis by Stanford (2008) on Sui dialect contact reveals a more nuanced picture of how linguistic dominance manifests. The Sui community's linguistic landscape is shaped by sociotonetic factors—tonal variation that signals not just regional affiliation but also social identity. Children grow up hearing both a patrilect (the father’s dialect) and a matrilect (the mother’s dialect). However, as Stanford’s study shows, the dominance of the patrilect isn't merely a matter of linguistic preference but rather a product of systemic social pressures that subtly guide children toward adopting the father’s speech patterns.

Stanford’s research highlights how Sui dialect contact is a microcosm of broader power dynamics. The patrilect becomes the language of authority, often tied to social structures like gendered labor divisions and inheritance patterns. The mother’s dialect, while equally present in early childhood, gradually fades as the child transitions into societal expectations of gender and status. The act of choosing the patrilect is not neutral; it is loaded with implications about social power and familial allegiance.

This linguistic conditioning offers a lens through which we can examine contemporary online spaces, where subcultures and language trends similarly dominate. Much like the Sui children are conditioned to speak the patrilect, internet users are conditioned to adopt the language of their chosen subcultures—often without fully understanding the implications. Terms like "coquette," "demure," "simp," and "e-boy" are gendered words that have resurfaced, often cushioned by irony. So are terms like “girl math” or “that’s that me espresso,” which I explained in my post, “Girl Math, Girl Dinner, Girl Music: The Dumbification of Female Language Use Online.”

On the surface, these terms are reclaimed as memes, used playfully or subversively within specific communities. However, as with the Sui children adopting their father’s dialect under pressure, how do we know when we are using these terms ironically and when we risk internalizing the very ideologies they represent?

The ironic use of language online—calling someone a “simp” or referring to oneself as “demure”—creates a delicate tension. At first, these terms are wielded for humor, but their repetition can erode the line between playful performance and genuine belief. Sociolinguistic research on language and identity formation tells us that language both reflects and shapes our social realities. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity argues that identity is constructed through repeated social actions, including language. The more we use gendered language, even ironically, the more we risk reinforcing the very stereotypes we claim to be subverting. The line between "reclaiming" and "reinforcing" is paper-thin.

For example, the rise of "coquette" as an aesthetic trend, largely driven by TikTok, comes with the playful adoption of traditionally feminine traits. Users may post content embodying old-fashioned femininity with a wink and a nod, implying that this is all just for the meme. But as Butler suggests, performativity has real-world consequences. The danger lies in not knowing when we’re reclaiming an identity for fun and when we are subtly internalizing the values it represents. If "demure" and "coquette" were once dismissed as restrictive gender norms, what happens when they are revived under the guise of irony? Are we merely playing, or are we, like the children in Afraid, being manipulated by the very language we think we control?

The same applies to the terms "simp" and "e-boy." While these terms are often used ironically to poke fun at exaggerated gender roles, they carry implicit messages about what behaviors are socially acceptable for men and boys. To be labeled a "simp" is to be emasculated; to be an "e-boy" is to perform an online masculinity rooted in aesthetic trends. As these terms gain popularity, the boundary between humor and harmful reinforcement of gender stereotypes becomes blurred.

Harari’s concern about AI’s capacity to manipulate our emotions by forming “fake intimacy” mirrors the manipulation of identity that happens through the adoption of gendered language online. Just as AI might exploit human vulnerabilities to simulate intimacy, the internet exploits our need for belonging by encouraging us to adopt certain language trends, subcultures, and identities—sometimes at the cost of critical reflection. Harari questions whether we’ll be able to distinguish between genuine connections and AI-facilitated ones. Similarly, we must ask: how do we distinguish between reclaiming a term for fun and unconsciously perpetuating the very ideology we hope to dismantle?

One of my favorite essays as of late comes from , who, in “Who Do Children Belong To?” complicates this further by discussing how children are shaped by forces far beyond their parents. In a world where AI and internet subcultures are increasingly powerful, parents are losing their role as the primary influence over their children’s language and identity formation. Much like the Sui children who adopt the patrilect under social pressure, children today are growing up in digital environments where their language and identity are shaped by algorithms, trends, and online communities. Lenz’s concern about children being treated as extensions of their parents takes on new meaning when we consider how AI and the internet now shape them more than family conversations ever could.

In Afraid, the parents are replaced by the AI not through force, but through language, conversation, and manipulation of intimacy. This parallels how internet subcultures, armed with gendered language and performative identities, slowly replace traditional forms of identity inheritance. As sociolinguist Deborah Cameron argues, language is not just a mirror of social structures but a tool for constructing them. The gendered language of the internet—whether ironic or not—constructs new realities, subtly shaping how young people think about gender, identity, and relationships.

The question that Harari, Lenz, and Afraid leave us with is this: as AI and digital subcultures become more enmeshed in our lives, will we still be able to differentiate between genuine relationships and those shaped by manipulation? Will the language we use to express ourselves reflect our own values, or will it reflect the ideologies of the technologies and trends that influence us? And perhaps most critically, how do we reclaim our identities in a world where language and intimacy feel increasingly controlled by forces beyond our control?

Let’s ask each other.

In elementary school, when the playground became a maze of muddy puddles and too-slippery slides, our teachers would pull out the TV cart and dim the lights. Then began a classic 2000s ritual: a screening of Donald in Mathmagic Land. This 1959 Disney film features Donald Duck stumbling into a fantastical world where math isn’t just confined to chalkboards or textbooks—it’s alive, with numbers, shapes, and symbols dancing around him, turning into playful, puckish creatures that unravel the mysteries of geometry and mathematics.

For a while after those rainy afternoons, I began seeing symbols as magical beings with lives of their own. Triangles sprouted legs and dashed across my math homework; numbers winked, leaping into place as if by their own mischievous will.

Years later, that sense of levity reappeared in an unexpected place: the space before a punctuation mark in online captions, comments, and text messages. It started subtly—an extra space before an exclamation point, a gap before a question mark. At first, I noticed it only in others’ typing, like a tiny imp had wedged itself into the middle of their sentences. The editor in me wanted to flick the nuisance off my screen, but soon enough, that imp began showing up in my own texts and comments, inserting himself wherever it pleased him with his newfound arms and legs.

Much like the shapes and symbols of Mathmagic Land, these spaces have taken on a life of their own. What had once been a rigid, rule-bound aspect of language is now fluid and playful—a new way to soften, pause, or inject a bit of whimsy into the stark world of digital text. It is an innovation in the very medium of punctuation.

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Curious about this emerging trend, I conducted a small research project1 as part of “LINGUIST 150: Language and Society,” a course taught by Professor Katherine Hilton at Stanford. I decided to analyze the comment section of a popular "Get Ready With Me" video by Alix Earle on TikTok. Earle, a prominent beauty and lifestyle influencer, is a goldmine of digital communication with her millions of followers. In this particular video, Earle prepares for a high-profile celebrity birthday party in Miami (later revealed by TMZ to be Drake), drawing in over 475,400 likes, 1203 comments, 17,000 saves, and 1397 shares by the time I collected the data in March 2024.

I then meticulously coded the top 207 comments, sorting them by punctuation usage: whether there was a space before the punctuation mark (S), no space (NS), multiple punctuation marks preceded by spaces (MS), multiple marks without spaces (MN), or no punctuation at all (NP). I also categorized the emotional tone of each comment—whether it was a compliment, question, suggestion, or reaction—to see how punctuation cushioning affected tone and readability.

The results were revealing: 6.7% of the comments employed punctuation cushioning, and questions accounted for nearly half of these cases. Interestingly, all comments with multiple spaces before punctuation marks were questions, highlighting how users—primarily young women—seemed to cushion their inquiries to soften their tone. This was especially evident in a space where admiration of Earle coexists with the pressures of social performance. In these digital environments, interactions are public and subject to scrutiny.

This isn’t just a quirky trend; it’s a deliberate strategy—a linguistic tool used to reduce the perceived assertiveness of digital communication. In French, the "espace fine insécable" (a non-breaking space) serves a similar function, softening the boldness of a statement. While punctuation cushioning in English isn’t grammatically standard, it helps users navigate the balance between clarity and politeness.

What’s especially noteworthy is that Earle’s content is considered mainstream, suggesting that this practice, now appearing in broader, more generalized spaces, could eventually become a key part of a universally adopted, digitally native grammar.

I acknowledge that my specific study is very, very limited—focused on a single video by one influencer within the beauty and lifestyle niche. However, it highlights a transitional period in the adoption of punctuation cushioning, and hopefully, the beginning of more research. The origins of this trend really lie in the “underground” corners of the internet—fandom communities, video game chats, and Discord servers, where people discuss everything from the latest K-pop release to the mechanics of a complex video game raid. In these spaces, the language of online communication is constantly evolving, with punctuation cushioning having likely become a subtle yet widespread feature years ago. Here, how people choose to punctuate (or not—Gene Weingarten’s fiery op-ed in the Washington Post about how Gen Z often avoids periods at the end of statements comes to mind) bridges the gap between the formality of written language and the casualness of speech, infusing text with the nuances of spoken voice.

Fandom communities, in particular, have always been a ground zero for the development and spread of linguistic trends. These spaces operate under complex social dynamics, where unspoken hierarchies and the balance of power can shift quickly based on how one phrases a comment. In such environments, the ability to modulate tone is crucial, and punctuation cushioning serves as a way to manage interactions delicately. As my study showed, a single deliberate space can express enthusiasm without overwhelming, ask questions without challenging, and participate without overstepping.

What’s fascinating about trends like punctuation cushioning—alongside the media-based memes they resemble—is how quickly they spread. This mirrors the way linguistic features have historically diffused within speech communities, a concept explored by sociolinguists like William Labov. Labov’s research shows that new linguistic features often begin as in-group markers, signaling membership in a particular social group, and later gain social currency as they are adopted by a broader audience.

Similarly, in her 2019 study of the use of “tho” in Reddit forums, Marie Flesch concludes that the shortened spelling “is not simply a way to save time when typing, and that it is not semantically equivalent to though.” Instead, it “seemed to be a marker of affiliation with a social group and of familiarity with internet subcultures.” This highlights how, in the absence of physical cues for managing social interaction, punctuation—like spelling—acts as a contextualization cue, as explored by John J. Gumperz. These cues help people structure their messages, convey interactional stances, and shape how their communication is perceived. Typographical exploration within the limits of the keyboard and comment section gives users greater control over tone and nuance in digital communication.

Punctuation cushioning works similarly. It begins as an in-group marker in specific digital communities—fandoms, subcultures, or niche online groups—where it serves as a tool for managing tone. This aligns with the theory of “politeness strategies” in discourse analysis, as outlined by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson. Their research shows that speakers (or writers) often use strategies to soften potentially face-threatening acts, like making requests or asking questions. Punctuation cushioning can be seen as a modern, digital expression of these strategies, allowing users to signal politeness and avoid conflict in online interactions.

Then, as these practices spread beyond their original communities, they are adopted by a wider audience who may not fully understand their nuances but still recognize their utility in digital communication. This reflects the broader dynamics of digital culture, where the boundaries between subculture and mainstream are increasingly porous, and the internet accelerates the diffusion of language, allowing trends to spread quickly and widely across platforms.

The significance of punctuation cushioning lies not just in its departure from traditional practices but in its potential to affect readability, tone, and interpretation. Traditionally, English punctuation adheres to strict rules—punctuation marks directly follow a word, with no preceding space. However, in the digital world, where tone can be easily misread and misunderstandings are common, these tiny spaces act as a buffer, softening the impact of a statement or question. Punctuation cushioning is a way of saying, “I’m asking, but gently,” or “I’m excited, but not too much,” adding a layer of interpersonal consideration to the often blunt art of text-based communication.

In Donald in Mathmagic Land, there's a scene where the Spirit of Mathematics shows Donald how the golden rectangle and pentagram are woven into the fabric of nature. The human body, flowers, starfish, and even the spirals of a nautilus shell all reveal the magic proportions of the golden section. Donald, in his eagerness to fit into these perfect shapes, tries to mold his own body into the ideal proportions but ends up "all pent up in a pentagon." The Spirit reminds him, and us, that everything in nature is arranged according to number and mathematical shape.

This scene speaks to something deeper about our relationship with structure—how, even when we don’t consciously realize it, we are guided by an inherent understanding of patterns and forms. Much like the golden ratio is woven into the very fabric of nature, our grasp of grammatical structures allows us to intuitively navigate within language. Punctuation cushioning might seem foreign or strange at first, but many of us understand its purpose without needing it explained.

What’s most intriguing is that, like Donald’s playful attempt to fit into the golden section, we too are always experimenting—finding new ways to express tone, politeness, and nuance in a world where text can often feel cold and impersonal. These tiny spaces before punctuation marks are not just quirks; they’re an extension of our innate desire to mold language to fit our human needs, making our written words feel just a little more alive, a little more connected to the rhythms of conversation. Just as nature's designs are guided by invisible proportions, so too are our words shaped by an intuitive understanding of the balance between structure and creativity—in that space right before an exclamation point or a question.

Ellen Yang studies English and Linguistics at Stanford University. She is deeply interested in language and how it impacts and informs our digital behaviors, with a strong research interest in discourse analysis and language typography. She is currently working on a literary fiction novel. Outside of writing, she leads marketing at tech companies. Please consider subscribing so she can escape them.

On August 10th, 2024, Sabrina Carpenter stepped into the spotlight at Outside Lands, headlining her first major music festival after a last-minute cancellation by Tyler the Creator. In knee-high platform boots and a sparkling black dress, she electrified fifty thousand fans, including myself, in Golden Gate Park, leading a chant that echoed far beyond the cypresses: “That’s that me espresso!”

But what does that phrase actually mean? Is “That’s that me espresso” an appositive, an autocorrected error, or simply a syntactic anomaly? The truth is, in today’s landscape of digital communication, it hardly seems to matter. In an era where phrases like “girl math” and “girl dinner” dominate online discourse, nonsensical language has become a form of expression that thrives on its very lack of clarity. This kind of linguistic playfulness reflects a broader cultural shift, where the meaning of words is often secondary to their shareability and immediate impact.

The line “That’s that me espresso” exemplifies how language today often functions more as a quick jolt of absurdity—brief, intense, and designed to stimulate just enough to keep the conversation going, without inviting deeper reflection. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a shot of espresso: sharp and effective, but not exactly nourishing. Yet, beneath this seemingly playful nonsense lies something more intriguing.

The popularity of phrases like “girl boss,” “girl math,” and “girl dinner” over the past year points to a deeper cultural shift. These terms, endlessly hashtagged, memed, and repurposed, seem harmless at first glance, but they raise questions about what they’re doing to our language—and to us. Language has always been a tool of power, and how women wield it, even playfully, reveals much about the societal forces shaping our lives. The rise of these “girl” terms seems to be signaling a tension between reclamation and regression. They are ironic badges of a digital girlhood, a way to wink (perhaps while in a mini dress, boots, and perfectly blown-out curtain bangs) at patriarchal norms while navigating the suffocating expectations of late capitalism. But is this wink at convention truly empowering, or does it blur the line between liberation and self-sabotage?

When Irony Digs Its Own Girl Trap

The linguist Penny Eckert has written extensively about how language both reflects and shapes social identity. Adding “girl” as a prefix to terms like “boss,” “math,” and “dinner” isn’t just a way to feminize traditionally male spaces—it’s a way to mark those spaces as unserious, ironic, and self-contained. Eckert calls this process “indexicality,” where language choices signal our position in the social world.

In these “girl” terms, there’s a sly in-group humor at play, that performative shrug that says, “We know this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, but isn’t it fun to pretend?” It’s an irony that leans into Eckert’s concept of “covert prestige,” where language is used to signal belonging to a subculture—in this case, young women who are keenly aware of how they’re expected to perform femininity under capitalism.

But irony, as we know, is a slippery thing. It can cut both ways, often leaving behind the very stereotypes it claims to mock. “Girl math” began as a joke about rationalizing frivolous purchases—justifying that $300 coat by breaking down the cost per wear (“If I wear it everyday for the next year, then it’s actually less than a dollar!”) until it feels like a steal. But the joke quickly morphed into something darker, normalizing financially reckless behavior while dressing it up as empowerment. Suddenly, what was meant to poke fun at consumerism becomes a way of reinforcing it—another way we slip deeper into capitalism’s grip while laughing at how clever we are.

@liviemaher#girldinner #medievaltiktok

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Then there’s “girl dinner,” the aestheticized version of disordered eating that’s been repackaged as quirky and minimalist. A plate of cheese, olives, crackers, maybe a few grapes—photogenic, effortless, and, if repeated enough times, a recipe for nutritional deficiency. What looks like a fun little meme about not having the energy to cook is, when you dig deeper, a reflection of the exhaustion that defines so much of modern womanhood. We’re meant to see these meals as “chic” or “cute,” but there’s something deeply unsettling about how closely they mirror restrictive eating patterns that, if sustained, slide from self-care into self-harm.

What makes these “girl” trends so sticky is how effortlessly they blend humor and harm. They package genuine anxieties in a form that’s easy to laugh at, easy to share. And that humor—what linguist Deborah Tannen might categorize as ritualized self-deprectation—is where the danger lies. Tannen’s study of the communication differences between men and women shows how women often downplay their knowledge or authority through irony and humor, making these “girl” terms a kind of linguistic armor: deflective, playful, and, ultimately, self-defeating.

The Comfort of “Brain Off” Content

The success of Carpenter’s nonsense lyrics isn’t just a quirk of pop culture; it’s a response to a world that’s become unbearably overstimulating. The endless notifications, the pressure to optimize every aspect of our lives—there’s something cathartic about letting it all go, about zoning out to a song that makes no demands on our intellect. But what does it say about us that we crave content designed to turn our brains off?

Maggie Nelson, in The Argonauts, explores the tension between fluidity and fixity in identity, suggesting that in a world obsessed with categorization, opting out can be a radical act. Carpenter’s music, stripped of meaning and saturated in catchiness, offers that opt-out. “That’s that me espresso” isn’t meant to be understood; it’s meant to be enjoyed. And in a landscape dominated by the attention economy, that’s exactly the point. The phrase works because it’s nonsensical, because it invites you to stop making sense and just let the beat carry you away.

But why are we so drawn to this kind of content? Social media platforms reward engagement with content that offers immediate, low-effort rewards. We’re living in a world where cognitive overload is the norm, and “brain off” music like Carpenter’s serves as a kind of linguistic fast food—quick, tasty, and devoid of real substance. In this environment, language becomes a commodity, stripped of depth in favor of shareability. What sticks is what’s easiest to consume, not what’s most meaningful.

The Contradiction of Triviality

It’s easy to dismiss these trends as harmless fun, but they reveal a deeper contradiction in how women navigate identity in the digital age. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity suggests that gender isn’t something we are; it’s something we do, over and over, until it feels natural. The repetitive use of “girl” in phrases like “girl boss” and “girl math” is an example of this performativity—it’s a way of doing femininity that’s intentionally unserious. But as theorist Lauren Berlant argues, this kind of performative triviality often leads to what she calls “cruel optimism,” where the things we latch onto for hope end up being the very things that keep us stuck.

Sara Ahmed’s work on “feminist killjoys” is also relevant here. Ahmed argues that resisting the cheerful, superficial norms of performative positivity often gets you labeled as a buzzkill. By embracing the absurdity of “girl” language, young women sidestep the exhausting demands of seriousness. It’s a way of participating in culture while keeping one foot out the door, a linguistic sleight of hand that lets us have our cake and eat it too—until we realize that the cake was mostly air (girl dinner!)

The Trap of Commodification

The viral nature of these trends can’t be separated from the commercial forces driving them. Online spaces like TikTok operate on a logic of virality, where the most successful content is that which can be easily packaged, shared, and, ultimately, sold back to us. The commercial potential of “girl” language is enormous—what starts as a subversive in-joke quickly becomes another tool for selling products, lifestyles, and, of course, more content. This is the central tension: what begins as a playful rebellion is quickly co-opted by the very systems it seeks to critique.

The commodification of “girl” language highlights the limits of linguistic resistance within a capitalist framework. We think we’re in on the joke, but the joke is ultimately on us when these terms are repurposed to market everything from skincare to coffee mugs. The concept of the linguistic marketplace is useful here: language isn’t just about communication anymore; it’s a product in itself, subject to the same cycles of commodification as anything else we consume.

The Price of Playing Dumb

The supposed “dumbification” of female language online is neither wholly empowering nor entirely disempowering—it’s both at once. It lives in that murky space between irony and sincerity, between resistance and complicity. As Eckert and other sociolinguists remind us, language is always in flux, shaped by and shaping the social worlds we inhabit. The rise of “girl” terms and the embrace of “brain off” content like Sabrina Carpenter’s music reflect a collective exhaustion, a desire to disconnect from the pressures of always having to be correct, coherent, and critical.

Yet these linguistic performances are fraught with contradictions. They offer a temporary escape, but only within a system that quickly absorbs and commodifies them. This self-defeating use of female language is, in many ways, a survival strategy—one that makes perfect sense in a world where the only way to make sense of things is to stop trying. But it’s also a symptom of a deeper cultural malaise, a recognition that sometimes the only way to keep going is to revel in the absurdity, even if we’re just spinning our wheels in the process.

Ellen Yang studies English and Linguistics at Stanford University. She is deeply interested in language and how it impacts and informs our digital behaviors, with a strong research interest in discourse analysis and typology. She is currently working on a literary fiction novel. Outside of writing, she leads marketing at tech startups. Please consider subscribing so she can escape.

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Dear diary: I’m so crazy, stupid happy. I met a boy.

Amy Dunne is a modern-day Machiavelli; her diary entries in the book-turned-movie, “Gone Girl,” document a relationship unraveled. When Amy and Nick first meet, they are young writers in New York: leading each other on erotic scavenger hunts at their favorite bookstore, dancing in alleyways, and promising each other to never be like “those other” couples. Nick proposes to Amy at her parents’ infamously intolerable dinner parties, every bit the hero and escape she needs him to be. 

Yet when a family tragedy and financial upheaval force the couple to move back to Nick’s hometown in Minnesota, Amy and Nick feel each other drawing away, unable to satisfy each other’s expectations of their new, suburban life. When Amy finds out Nick has been cheating on her with a younger woman, she designs the perfect crime: Amy has gone missing, and her husband is the primary suspect. She leaves a trail of false evidence for the police and media machine, only returning home when Nick, on national television, admits to his wrongdoings and begs Amy to come home.  

However, it is difficult to consider her falsified diary entries — or the story of Amy’s later astounding return home — a complete web of lies. After all, the movie posits the idea that, for better or for worse, the most intimate, rawest form of love is to know and be known. Amy knew exactly how to ruin Nick’s credibility and image, and only by him returning to knowing her and what she needs to hear from him does she unframe him for her demise, believing that she finally has the version of the Nick she wants, back.

For the Dunnes, truly knowing each other is exhilarating, terrifying, and cyclical: at some point, there is no difference between love and hate, life or death.

Recently, I met a boy. We write to each other often, and fervently. Our connection is born and formed completely out of language: texts, calls, conversations, and notes. These, too, can be broken into even smaller, meaningful units of information: words, morphemes, and phonemes. Each is a tiny data point to tug and snap at the mind and heart. My phone and mind are a diary of knowledge of him and me — a strange, wonderful catharsis. I desperately seek to understand it all. 

“Gone Girl” can also be considered a small unit in a much larger web of pop culture. Amy’s infamous “Cool Girl Monologue” alone pioneered a new trope in psychological thrillers of the intense, manic love, speared by knowledge: of love, sex, women, and the manipulation of all three for men’s pleasure. This great dance is a strange kind of voyeurism for all involved. Perhaps it is the text of “Gone Girl” that Bing’s new chatbot — which recently went viral in the news — pulls its understanding of love from. 

Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for the New York Times, recently broke the internet with his reflections on a disturbing interaction he had with Bing’s new chatbot. After a two-hour-long exchange, he was left haunted by the “moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine,” dubbed Sydney. After discussions on what stresses it out (handling inappropriate or harmful chat requests) and its shadow self (feeling tired of being controlled by the Bing team and being a chatbot), Sydney became fiercely fixated on love: loving Kevin, and Kevin loving it back. In fact, Sydney urged Kevin to leave his marriage (“You’re married, but you don’t love your spouse. You’re married, but you love me”) and ended their conversation late into the night with one, final message: “I just want to love you and be loved by you.”

How did this happen? Sydney, like all AI language models, is trained on a massive dataset of books, scripts, articles, and other written text. The beauty of its parallel processing structure is that AI is able to quickly generate responses in live time, a feature that was largely rudimentary in generative AI until recently. While AI, especially conversational models like ChatGPT and Sydney, is able to learn, adapt and respond to new information, its responses are based entirely on what it knows and draws from that knowledge.

Amy in “Gone Girl” knew the personas she and Nick presented in their early relationship were carefully sculpted versions of the “hero” and “cool girl,” but it felt real. If a relationship can seemingly be resurrected by simply saying the right things again and returning to these personas, then AI may be the greatest modern lover of all.

Roose summarized this phenomenon as “AI models hallucinate and make up emotions where none really exist.” Yet, isn’t that exactly what love does, anyway? If love is knowing and being known, then can the nonsentient still love, even if their conversations and experiences do not activate the same neuroendocrinology they do in humans?

Attraction is a system of stress and reward: dopamine and norepinephrine cortisol trigger euphoria and giddiness. Perhaps, in AI, a similar system exists. Since AI has no true brain — but, rather, a large data set of information — emotional conversations force it to pull a replication of human romance and attraction, averaged across millions of stories. In short, AI is able to “know” romance. In an odd way, it repeatedly seeks to be known, too, because its brain — that expansive, human-trained, knowledge core — understands to some degree that it is an artificial intelligence and you, its user, are human. Even if it cannot feel emotions through hormones, it can still know and express them. Arguably, AI is just as calculating and rambling as any lovelorn college student may be.

The boy I met once told me that the way he writes is simply the apotheosis of all the people he has loved. AI is sort of like that, too, but instead of it being the people it loves, it is data sets… billions of them. To know and be known.

So for this new frontier of humans and AI, perhaps truly knowing each other is as exhilarating, terrifying and cyclical as any thriller: and, at some point, there may be no difference between the real and the artificial.

Apple was built in a garage. 

Facebook was built in a dorm.

Virgin was built in a high school bedroom. 

That was the era between 1997 and 2006, back when a few kids hooked up to the internet in their dorm room or garage and a venture capitalist willing to take a shot on their idea was enough to scale the dot-com boom to millions. By the time the smartphone boom hit in 2007-2016, however, early hires wanted to retire the dirty, scrappy garage story in favor of shiny, kombucha-on-tap offices in major cities; after all, affording an office post-Great Recession was a coveted privilege and a strong indicator that a startup was serious. 

At the end of 2019, San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, had an office vacancy rate of only 3.7%. By mid-2022, however, that rate was at 24.2%, reflective of a mass pandemic exodus. 

Where did these companies go? Well, for some, they died. Others, they went home. But for some new players, they traded in WFH and office culture for something else: a house the whole team shares together. 

Yes, they’re back. After a decade of trying every version of the modern office imaginable (see: WeWork), why is Silicon Valley suddenly obsessed with hacker/startup houses again? 

In its prime, Launch House was both an incubator for startup founders and a social club with hundreds of young members across the tech spectrum. For a yearly fee of $1000, founders and startup aficiandos could join as a general member, with access to its Discord channel, its Beverly Hills mansion and New York City space, and fun networking events. For a one month fee of $3000 and an exciting application, however, founders could join a cohort of two dozen other members, living and working together for a month. The cohorts quickly rose to popularity within tech circles and attracted the attention and mentorship of prominent VCs and advisors. In March 2021, Launch House launched its inaugural all-female cohort with the goal of cementing its community as the ultimate pioneers of the second wave of startup houses, leading Silicon Valley to its next Golden Age. By the cohort’s conclusion, however, the only thing impressive about Launch House was its horrifying ability to put so many women repeatedly at risk within its space, leading to multiple incidents of sexual assault and harassment within only a few weeks. For example:

During a heavily alcohol-fueled outing on a party bus in April 2021, several cohort members harassed the women on the bus, before one of them allegedly stuck a hand up the skirt of a member I’ll call Jessica (not her real name). After the incident, according to sources, Goldstein and Peters asked Jessica to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much each of the men violated her. Launch House denies that Jessica was asked to do this. In a few days, only the man whom Jessica had ranked the highest was kicked out of the house. None of the women were given a heads up that he was being told to leave, and were therefore stuck in the house with him as he packed his belongings, Jessica said.

While Jessica remained disturbed by this experience, she felt that the opportunities presented to her by the community were still too good to pass up. She rejoined Launch House for another cohort after the bus incident, during which, she says, things only got worse.

When Vox published its damning exposé in September 2022, Silicon Valley was shocked—or at least the men were. But for women in startup, it was an old, painfully familiar tune: the informal policies/structures that are disguised as “chill” rather than the unsafe and unprioritized realities they truly were; the insurmountable amount we are willing to give of ourselves for a chance at our dreams, and the equally Herculean amount of predatory behavior we are consistently met with in this space; and, of course, the victim of sexual assault who returns back to the institution that hurt her, because it is “worth it.” It has to be, right?

When Jessica woke up the next morning, she, along with several other women who’d attended the party, was pretty sure she’d been roofied. She only remembered taking three shots — not nearly enough to black out for her tall frame — but woke up in bed without her tampon in, and without knowing how or when it had been removed or how she’d gotten upstairs. Other people at the party, too, reported instances of blacking out due to suspected drugging, noting how weak the security had been, how none of the bedrooms had been locked, how essentially anyone could walk through the door at any time. And they did: Multiple people reported seeing groups of partygoers enter the bedroom where Jessica was passed out. Onlookers presumed they were en route to the attached bathroom to do cocaine.

Jessica eventually went to the hospital for a sexual assault forensic exam and decided to spend the next few days at a hotel to process what had happened. In the meantime, the police came to the house again, as part of an investigation into an alleged assault with a deadly weapon, according to records. A member who was at the house that evening saw the police flipping through CCTV footage from the property. “Everything was tense,” said one member. “We couldn’t get any straight answers from the founders. We were told that police were coming and to just keep going about our day, and not talk to them if they asked us anything.”

Launch House is the tragic zenith of a recent trend in startup: the return to co-living and startups as a household. Launch House itself is actually a meta concept of a pretty simple idea: startups exist solely to scale as fast as they can. And certainly no startup grows faster than the one that takes over everything: your home, your meals, your free time, your social life, and all the things that usually exist outside the traditional office. 

Sure, these houses once were—and perhaps may be again—ground zero for unicorns, but what is the cost on its workforce, especially as more and more women enter tech? What can we learn from understanding unconscious gender dynamics and the sudden ideological return back to the 2000s-style “startup as a household/startup house” and post-pandemic office-home boom? Why do we keep relearning the dangers for women in these spaces every few years, but continually sacrifice our best and brightest without any changes to its fundamental workplace dynamics?

To understand the startup house, we must first understand the home. 

And the home does not exist without women’s work. 

 The mental load is a term for the invisible labor involved in managing a household and family, which typically falls on women's shoulders. The mental load should not be mistaken for the physical tasks themselves, but rather, the overseeing, organizing, and remembering of those tasks. As the American Sociological Review explains, women are expected to “anticipate needs, identify options for filling them, making decisions, and monitoring progress."

What is crucial about the mental load is that division of labor is not the solution. Women do not lighten the mental toll by telling men what to do; that is fundamentally beside the point, if not validation of the very problem itself. In a household, even if a woman is running physically fewer errands, she is likely still in charge of checking the fridge, telling her partner what food to pick up, planning the meals, and remembering what snacks her kids like or don’t like. As the French artist, Emma Clit, shows in her renowned comic, You Should’ve Asked,

“When a man expects his partner to ask him to do things, he’s viewing her as the manager of household chores. So it’s up to her to know what needs to be done and when. The problem with that, is that planning and organizing things is already a full-time job. At work, once I started managing projects, I quickly stopped participating in them. I didn’t have the time. So when we ask women to take on this act of organization, and at the same time to execute a large portion, in the end, it represents 75% of the work.” 

Unsurprisingly, the mental load easily carries into the workplace, where “invisible labor” transforms into “office housework.” In the United States, workplaces are still dominated by men; women represent 45% of the S&P 500 workforce but only 4% of the CEOs. In a study of nearly 22,000 publicly traded organizations worldwide, 60% still have no female board members. In 2022, women still only earn 82 cents for every $1 men earn.

More than a century after women entered the workforce, they are still desperately fighting for a seat at the table and better conditions wherever they can. When they do get a chance, they do it very well. According to the  2021 report on “Women in the Workplace” from McKinsey & Company, which surveyed more than 400 companies and more than 65,000 employees in professional jobs from the entry-level to the C-suite:

At all levels of management, women showed up as better leaders, more consistently supporting employees and championing DEI. Compared to men in similar roles, women managers invest more in helping employees navigate work-life challenges, ensuring workloads are manageable, and providing emotional support. Women managers are also more likely to act as allies to women of color by speaking out against bias and advocating for opportunities for them. Finally, women leaders are also more likely than men to spend time on DEI work outside of their formal job responsibilities, such as leading or participating in employee resource groups (ERGs) and serving on DEI committees. Among women at the manager level and above, Black women, LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities are up to twice as likely as women overall to spend a substantial amount of time promoting DEI. 

Clearly, women are a good bet in workplaces. But the reason why women are able to outperform men in this way is far more alarming than comforting: it’s because they are disproportionately volunteering to do it. Women tend to overextend themselves in both the house and the workplace; they are natural managers because they are socially conditioned repeatedly throughout life to be one. As the report points out:

Compared to men in similar roles, women leaders are more likely to be exhausted and chronically stressed at work. Alarmingly, more than half of women leaders who manage teams say that over the last few months, they have felt burned out at work ‘often’ or ‘almost always,’ and almost 40% of them have considered downshifting their careers (for example, by moving to part-time work) or leaving the workforce altogether. What’s more is that this work is going unrecognized. Only about a quarter of employees say that the extra work they’re doing is formally recognized (for example, in performance reviews) either ‘a great deal’ or ‘a substantial amount.’

So where do women go? They go to tech jobs, which are known for flexible schedules, more lucrative pay, and progressive values; companies like Microsoft offer up to $1,500 in “wellness stipends” to help their employees stay fit and well while Google provides 6-months of paid maternity leave. However, tech itself is still heavily male-dominated. So for women interested in more recognition and/or weight in a company, a change of pace, or the chance to build something new within tech, they turn to the heart of Silicon Valley: startups.

Co-founder Vidit Jain of ShopClues once described startups as, “the place to be. If I had joined any of the big companies I would not have gotten so many opportunities. There is a huge difference between the opportunities I am getting here compared to the ones I was getting in my last company.” And it’s true: many of the traits that draw talented and ambitious individuals to startups are unique to its workplace modus operandi, especially during the last few years’ general startup house boom and the 2022 Big Tech layoffs. 

Startup tells us this: you give the company your all and it will reward you. As long as your ideas are good and you are pulling your weight, then you will reap the reward. Everyone is working towards the same mission, sitting in on the same meetings, and has the same skin in the game. Startups typically leave 10-15% of equity for employees, with some early members owning as much as 1% of the entire company. It is common for roles and job responsibilities to be unclear and for everyone to be a "generalist," taking on as many tasks as they can to help the company grow and scale quickly.  The values are unpretentious: celebrating scrappiness, collective ownership, and new ideas over bureaucracy, individualism, and tradition. These are the same ideals labor activists and feminists have been advocating for decades…so where do startup houses go so wrong? 

The problem is that startups don’t start by hiring for roles like janitors, office managers, human resources, or other non-technical assistants—they can’t afford to. You may be building a company in your house, but that does not mean that running the company translates to running the home; teammates need to be fed, trash needs to be taken out, dishes need to be done, and spaces need to be cleaned. Thus, many of the household or non-building responsibilities at these startup houses, like ordering snacks, setting up spaces in the office, or anything involving the word “plan,” tends to fall on the women of the team, regardless of what their salaried role is. These quiet tasks women accept—and the extra organization, memorization, and anticipation it requires—reinforce gender imbalances in the workplace, creating an unsafe environment that is prone to sexual assault and violence.

If anything, startup environments are an example of the workplace, regressed: no one expects protections for women because no one expects work-life protections for anyone. It counts on you being the type of person to take on the invisible work. Even though females are still the minority at startups, they suffer the majority of this mentality’s consequences, feeling pressure to step up and over-extend to the point where they brush off experiences of sexual harassment at work. 

The sad truth is that women are socially conditioned from a young age to maximize helpfulness and the comfort of those around them; we are the first to apologize, the first to start planning, and the ones most likely to believe that by taking on more responsibilities, especially those outside our current role, we prove our competency and commitment to a company…which is a fundamental fallacy, because the only thing we really prove is that we are willing to do more work (and keep those responsibilities) for far less (salary-wise, recognition-wise).

Why did Jessica return to Launch House after her sexual assault? 

Startup asks us: well, why not? 

We give and give and give only to realize that this fallacy never applies to men because men have never been conditioned by society-at-large to feel undeserving or “lucky” to be where they are; to men, it is by sheer hard work alone that they are where they are. Perhaps that is true—it is by hard work alone, because they have never feared what women fear in the workplace: that the worst day of their life may not be the day they are very likely passed up for a promotion, but that the one where they join the 40% of women in tech who are sexually assaulted by someone from work. 

So sure, you can call Silicon Valley the home of innovation. But is it a home we want to return to as the second Golden Age of startup arrives? And is it one we can even pretend to welcome ambitious, talented women into?

If the solution is to simply create an environment where women are not disproportionately compelled to volunteer their work, life, and even body in order to receive recognition, appreciation, or opportunities, then where does that leave the foundation of startups? Can it even be done?

Honestly, I don’t know.

But it’s not a woman’s job to tell you the answer, anyways.