Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: a technology for digesting history.
Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.
A Genre for Our Time
In the late 1960s, the writer Norman Mailer developed a new genre: a blend of the novel, memoir and reporting that he thought was uniquely suited for the political chaos of that decade: “the novel as history, history as novel.”
We have similar chaos today, and people yearn for such a genre.
The Novel Will Make a Comeback, says David Brooks: “We have lived, for at least the past decade, in a time of immense public controversy. Our interior lives are being battered by the shock waves of public events. … I would love to read big novels capturing these psychological and spiritual storms.”
The Novel Will Survive AI, says Tara Isabella Burton: “Both the experience of reading a novel, and the subject matter of the novels that are, I think, the best at being novels, are ultimately about the mystery of the individual human being.”
The Novel Can Heal Internet Brainrot. Katy Carl: “The old-school novel is still the human technology best suited to heal minds that have been strip-mined for data and ‘engagement,’ click-farmed to within an inch of their lives. Novels ask for, and reward, a particular way of paying attention.”
TV Tempts the Novelist. Writes Lisa Borst: “ … the surest way to make money from novels is to write with television in mind — and this is a paradox to which novels themselves are increasingly attuned.”
Read More Westerns! So writes Naomi Kanakia: “These are stories about a man who is alive during a time of political and religious tumult — a time when old myths have become unsatisfactory.”
Substack Will Help the Novel
So concludes Owen Yingling, after an exhaustive study of reading trends from the last century: “I don’t think magazines with short stories are ever coming back. The situation in academia will likely not improve. But I do suspect Substack will play a role in broadening norms and making it easier to write literary fiction.”
The Substack Novel. Several prominent Substackers have recently published novels, like Ross Barkan (Glass Century), Joe Pistell (Major Arcana) and Noah Kumin (Stop All the Clocks).
The Indie Scene. The indie literary imprint Slant Books recently launched a Substack: Close Reading.
Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack? asked Peter C. Baker of the New Yorker back in May.
What to Read
In 1968, Mailer published Armies of the Night, a fictionalized account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. In his review, the famous critic Alfred Kazin wrote: “Mailer’s intuition in this book is that the times demand a new form. He has found it.”
Who is dramatizing the history of our time? Who is looking for new forms? Several writers who’ve appeared on Wisdom of Crowds have been hard at work …
Missionaries by Phil Klay. A novel about globalization and war. Phil appeared on Wisdom of Crowds last year.
Muscle Man by Jordan Castro. A novel about a frustrated professor drowning in masculinity discourse. Jordan appeared last year on the pod, and will return this week!
The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda. A novel about love, society and who we are behind our internet handles, by the playwright and Wisdom of Crowds contributor.
Here in Avalon by Tara Isabella Burton. A cautionary tale about dwelling too long inside virtual worlds, by another Wisdom of Crowds contributor.
Lambing Season, by August Lamm. The off-the-grid writer’s first novel is about “sudden, unexpected physical limits.” She appeared on our podcast last month.
Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi. A blend of memoir and imagination, a tale of history shifting under your feet, from a philosopher-turned-writer who hasn’t appeared on Wisdom of Crowds yet, but will come on the podcast in November.
What else should we be reading? What other novelists should come on the pod? Tell us in the comments below!
From the Crowd
Does thinking about death help you live a better life? On free speech, who is worse: MAGA or Woke? How could the Democrats win again?
Memento Mori. Friend of Wisdom of Crowds Haroon Moghul responds to Stephen G. Adubato’s essay about funerals:
… At one end of this cavern, which was light only by a shaft of sunlight in one corner, there was a tunnel that was designed so that a person might lie down in it, mimicking death. The spiritually inclined would come and spend hours, sometimes weeks, mostly in this space, lying on their backs, in utter darkness; the guide told us we must not close our eyes, but imagine we are dead, and now with God, as all else has fallen away […]
False Equivalence. Responding to Christine Emba’s Tuesday Note, Schmendrick recalls the worse cancellations of the Woke era:
No, I’m sorry, canceling people for celebrating an out-and-out political assassination is not in any way or shape similar to the left’s ideological purges in 2020 for such things as (1) correctly pronouncing a Chinese filler word in a Chinese language class, because it happened to be homophonic with the n-word [Prof. Greg Patton], (2) asking why black people, qua black, should be given special treatment on academic exams [Prof. Gordon Klein], (3) liking Donald Trump’s tweets [Therese Nielsen], (4) saying that rioting was counterproductive to Democrat’s electoral chances [David Shor], (5) showing the 1965 Othello film, which included blackface, as part of a film class [Prof. Bright Shang], or (6) having a father who said the n-word once in 1984, seven years before you were born (Conor Daly).
A Path for the Dems. Riffing off our latest podcast, Michael D. Purzycki tries to find a way through:
[…] If our national madness is going to end, or even subside, we need a lengthy period of dominance by a sane, responsible party. Right now, only the Democrats can fit that bill. Democrats need to win consecutive big majorities at the federal level for at least a decade — narrow victories like 2020 will not do. They need to win back a lot of the cultural conservatives they’ve lost over the last decade. Welcome back pro-lifers, gun control skeptics, people freaked out by drag queens and youth gender transition, people who don’t care about climate change, and people who want less immigration. They can do this even as the party as a whole is pro-choice, pro-gun control, supportive of trans adults, balanced on energy policy (Obama was right — all of the above), and in favor of a far more humane immigration policy than Trump’s (though one that still deports illegal immigrants, and hopefully punishes employers who hire them). […]
See you next week!
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I am currently reading M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati, and I don't think that I've ever seen this format before in historical novels. It's a mix of fictional, contemporary documents, shifting perspectives, short chapters but spanning over 700 pages!
Thanks for the shoutout! We're excited to be here!